“Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.” V. Nabokov, [0]
I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.
Nabokov is the proof that being a genius writer doesn't always imply having good taste. For example, see his opinion on Henry James, Faulkner or Camus.
The man wrote what he wanted to read and hated everything else.
I think that in general some artists are this way and that makes what they produce different from anyone else. Jonathan Blow for example is snobby and hates a lot of stuff, but his intense and specific ideas about the way games should be has led to some very interesting and thoughtful work
I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Raskolnikov’s misadventures are not ‘fun’ but as a psychological exploration of guilt (or lack thereof), it was very interesting.
I like Notes from the Underground and his other short stories (like the Double) even more.
Not by a long shot. War and peace is the classic long read, but outside of Russian literature you also get authors like Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
Also, depending on your tastes, Charlotte Bronte and other similar period writers were equally bland or significant.
A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
This criticism is all the more poignant given that it comes from Nabokov. He is one of the few authors for whose works the Russian and English versions are almost equivalent; he was bilingual and did the translation himself.
> But it’s worth recognizing that you like a translation of D
Probably he just lucked out, and all his translators are geniuses. Tho this would be a more remarkable skill, than just being a literary genius..
BTW I usually like derivative works, in every arts.
If a translator makes changes, and she is only right 60% of the time, that's still a net positive. I encourage every translator to make changes, if they think they can make the text better.
Dostoevsky is funny, but his humour is very subtle and can be easily lost in translation. And being funny and dark are not mutually exclusive things, there is a whole genre of tragicomedies, after all
All the “Amazon classics” have audible included which can make it go quickly. The dinner table conversation with a host which had consumption was quite amusing. Agree on darkness.
Something wrong with the way Dostoyevsky wrote them, according to someone who died in 1977.
I had to look up what "soulful" even means because I see it used so infrequently: "expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling" — while I cannot guess what would appeal to someone who would hire a sex worker as that isn't my thing in the first place, nor can I guess to the lived lives of those who so work, what I can say is that "observing someone being openly sad" doesn't pattern match my ideal for a fun time either when reading or when getting off, even though that is an entirely sympathetic and believable personality trait for a character who is a sex worker.
Especially believable in the case of characters that Dostoyevsky, who died in 1881, would have written about — not only because of the stereotype that Russia is even more grim than Country/Blues paints the USA, but also because while things like chloroform for childbirth pain relief had been used by Queen Victoria this was only in 1853 for the first use on the 8th child, but still advised against it for the 9th child in 1857*; or that likewise "it's a good idea to wash your hands between autopsies and assisting midwifes in childbirth" was only even noticed (and not immediately well received) in 1847.
* including by religious figures even though she was the head of the church
I don't think that is at all obvious from OP's comment. Reading "But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment" the straightforward interpretation is that the writer doesn't like when a prostitute is represented as soulful.
If the problem is not the soulful prostitutes per se, but something more specific that makes it cliche, I think the quoted phrase could have expressed that better.
One cannot write without tropes, and not only because the attempt itself is such a trope.
That doesn't mean one cannot find Flanderization to be annoying, not even a decade (at least) before the character after which that TV Tropes entry was named, was created.
as the article says, it's "most extreme" with respect to its size compared to the surrounding waves: "the Ucluelet wave was nearly three times the size of its peers."
i find such logic hard to understand: UK was part of the EU, hence the open labour market. That's the whole point of EU. What did they find unfair exactly -- that Nigeria was not part of the EU? Or that countries can agree to have an open labour market?
Long before the UK joined the EU it was a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and had close relationships to countries that once were part of the Empire. Before the EU, most UK immigration came from Commonwealth countries. Freedom of movement allowed easy immigration from Europe and greater restrictions on Commonwealth immigration. People from those countries believe that the UK has prior obligations to members of the Commonwealth, and that it should prioritize those obligations (and often that privileging EU immigration is racist.) You can see the post-Brexit shift to previous obligations with the easing of immigration rules for Hong Kong citizens.
Voters felt levels of immigration in general were too high and leading to strained public services. EU law forbids restrictions on intra-EU immigration, so the only legal path to making voters happier was to heavily restrict immigration from everywhere else. It didn't work: the numbers from the EU were far too high to be offset via such a tactic, but it was at least something.
The numbers are still viewed as being too high though post-lockdowns who knows what will happen. But the limits can at least now be spread around all countries equally, and people can be prioritised based on e.g. demand for their skills. This was previously forbidden.
advertising is the primary driver for clickbait and emotion-driven content. it enables The Daily Mail, it results in youtube's algorithm hell, it's why facebook exists. 'clicks = money' is bad for mental health. as long as wikipedia et al are free, give me subscription-based web all day.
Good point, but I think headline writers that don't need clicks for advertising money would still write headlines that make people click - the popularity of a writer or article is one measure of success.
yes but amplification matters -- there's been at least one study which measured the clickbaity-ness of headliness of paid vs ad-based news sites and the difference was sth like an order of magnitude. i'll see if i can find the link.
This is unreal. Shitty software sending people to prison without anyone in the process considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight.
Yeah, this is the part I'm having trouble understanding. A few people, sure. But all these postal workers committing fraud, with many insisting there must be something wrong with the software? How did this not get discovered before they were all convicted and sentenced?
And according to the article, the full number may actually be something like 900 people.
>Campaigners believe that as many as 900 operators, often known as subpostmasters, may have been prosecuted and convicted between 2000 and 2014.
How do you make this mistake almost 1000 times over 14 years before someone suspects the system data may not be quite right? Also, even if you do completely believe the data, how can you convict them all without additional supporting evidence, like new purchases that don't seem to fit their salary, suspicious bank transactions or balances, records of unusual system access or them actually manipulating data, etc.
It pains a very bad picture of the Post Office, including:
- an expert witness from Fujitsu, who developed the system, "had been aware of at least two bugs which had affected Horizon Online[...], but had failed to say anything about them or about any Horizon issues in his statements";
- POL arranged a number of conference calls to discuss problems with the system; "instruction was then given that those emails and minutes should be, and have been, destroyed";
- "there was a culture, amongst at least some in positions of responsibility within POL, of seeking to avoid legal obligations when fulfilment of those obligations would be inconvenient and/or costly"
Further, once a number of convictions had been secured, the Post Office then used those convictions in later trials as evidence that the Horizon system was robust and reliable.
All in all, a prima facie criminal conspiracy by the Post Office.
There must be two source of independent evidence for someone to be convicted of a crime. I'll be interested to see (if there's genuinely no corroborating evidence beyond the computer records) how many prosecutions went ahead north of the border.
Given this appeal took place in England (and not in the Supreme Court), it was all English verdicts which were overturned as I understand.
The requirement for corroboration in such a situation would probably be met by having someone "speak to" the digital evidence and audit trail.
For example, if you have CCTV evidence, the CCTV is one piece of evidence, and it would be corroborated by a witness statement of the victim identifying them from the CCTV.
Corroboration is an important and useful safeguard, but I don't think it would necessarily have outright prevented this. Perhaps it would - maybe it would have raised the bar on scrutiny of the evidence, by there being a general higher expectation?
Hmn possibly. I suppose I am interested to see if there is a practical difference because there's some debate about whether corroboration is a good thing to have or not, when you can have one piece of evidence (like DNA evidence) which is very high certainty.
I'd expect there was prosecutions north of the border seeing as the post office is UK-wide so be good to see how they went.
>>considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight
I mean, I don't think anyone assumed they suddenly and inexplicably became thieves, just that the fancy new software finally caught people who have been scamming the post office for years. Obviously the software was completely wrong and it's criminal what happened to those people.
yes, this reasoning does make sense. but given the human cost it should only make sense if there's a significant prior: in most of these cases there was no previous evidence whatsoever, just a new system, and boom, thieves.
I think the core point here is how imbalanced this process was: postal system builds a new accounting program that shows money is missing. these people were convicted solely on the evidence that software said so, there was no burden on them to show that the money was actually missing. I mean, hard for me to grasp how is that possible. anyone can write a program that shows something. how is this sufficient proof to send people to prison? does it not need to touch some objective reality at some point?
Yeah I mean if your brand new software discovered that a retail shop was suddenly missing £50k/month in income, surely you'd do full inventory to confirm £50k worth of goods is actually missing. No idea how you would do that in a post office, but I guess take an inventory of stamps and any other services sold?
This would normally be the role of a forensic accountant.
My suspicion is that the Post Office wanted to do this "at scale" and "automate", and just assumed blindly their own records were accurate, because well... They must be!
Had they actually tried to investigate these as one by one offences, you'd gather evidence of individuals concerned making huge cash transactions to buy expensive cars and holidays. And when you didn't find any evidence of this unexplained enrichment (as there wasn't any), your investigator would point this out, and you'd realise you didn't have a case.
Similarly a photograph of the subpostmaster getting into their outright-owned Lamborghini would have been useful evidence there. The absence of any of the evidence of this enrichment seems absent throughout. Let alone the detailed forensic accounting to determine what was actually taken. I suspect the issue was they simply didn't have any way to tell what should have been there, other than what the defective horizon system said... They were trying to run at national scale, without enough ground truth information to validate their assumptions and detect the issue.
I agree. My first thought on hearing this was that they'd look at the priors and realize there had to be a mistake.
My second thought was that most accounting departments I've worked with actually wouldn't do that, would blame fraud, and then would congratulate themselves at how much better they've gotten at detecting it!
This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility.
At least when my wife hit that in the Shanghai/Pudong airport (residue from a heart scan, not cancer) they resolved it in a few minutes of talking.
On the other hand, I think Shanghai didn't check well enough--there was one simple test they could have done but didn't: Hand held geiger counter, see what's hot. Body equally hot, baggage not hot, it's medical.
They implemented the system without even thinking of the false positives. Eventually they added that to the procedures, but they harassed quite a few people before that happened. Cancer patients on top of that, many of whom were probably half dead already.
It seems to me that's an awful lot of stupid on their part.
Patient claims medical--call the facility and ask if they should be hot.
However, having read about their stupidity I would be inclined to get a card from the facility even if I didn't expect to be going anywhere with radiation scanners. (My wife had a card--which was sitting at home in the pocket of the jacket she had planned to wear. She changed her mind on flight day and didn't think about the card until she tripped the scanner. Note that she probably had an easier time of it than a typical tourist would have as she speaks Mandarin at native level.)
Could I ask the source for these numbers? I've been trying to find some production numbers for popular synths (including submodels, e.g. all Minimoog or Prophet 5 versions combined etc), but haven't really found anything properly sourced/cited.
> American gun culture has little to do with this case. Cops behave like this because behind door number one there could be a guy with an assault rifle ready to take them down
i'm struggling to understand this -- are you saying there is no link between 'American gun culture' and the probability of 'there could be a guy with an assault rifle ready to take them down'? in what other 1st world country would the said probability be even close?
I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.
[0] https://lithub.com/on-dostoevskys-199th-birthday-heres-nabok...
[1] Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/lectures-on-rus...
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