One of the most surprising cultural eruptions of recent years has to be poker’s arrival as a television sport. Talk about strange bedfellows: poker, when you play it right, is slow; TV is all about speed. In fact, impatient TV producers have favoured the fastest variant of poker and tweaked the rules to make it even faster. But is something being lost in all this acceleration? Victoria Coren, an English journalist and poker aficionado, thinks so. In an article published last year, she laments the way the need for speed is warping her favourite game. Here is her take on it (I don’t understand half the jargon either, by the way): “When a tournament is moving quickly, you have to gamble. In many cases, a re-raise before the flop would put a player all in. There isn’t time to let the cards tell a story, to try “feeler bets” for information, or make a good fold: you just can’t afford to leave chips behind. So, on TV, you often see people gambling in a way that negates much of poker’s thoughtfulness and sophistication – the speed favours luck over skill.” Yet there may be a backlash brewing. Coren writes about the emergence of “slow tournaments” that allocate a full day per game and give the best players the time to strut their stuff.
Category: Miscellaneous
Slow news
There is nothing a news editor likes less than a slow news day. But maybe that’s exactly what the rest of us need a little more of. In her column in the London Times, Caitlin Moran recently called for a Slow News Movement. By that she means that daily bulletins should clear more space for less dramatic, but more upbeat, news stories: “Something to wean us off bad News Burgers and on to the far more beneficial fruit salad of cheerfulness.” Moran then suggests that the Slow News advocate seek out someone with whom to share the happy tidings. I think she may be stretching the definition of Slow a little here but that’s hardly the end of the world. I for one would definitely welcome less doom and gloom on the evening news.
The party of Slow?
Yesterday I had lunch with the director of the Quality of Life Challenge, a new policy unit attached to the UK Conservative Party. David Cameron, the party’s young leader, has shaken up the polticial landscape not just by changing his hair-style every few days (which he has done) but by stressing the importance of things that never used to register on the Tory radar: the environment, communities, leaving the office in time to be with your children. Can you imagine Margaret Thatcher, a woman who once boasted that her kids only ever fell ill on weekends, talking along these lines? The Quality of Life Challenge is looking for ways to phrase the Cameron message in a way that will win over the Conservative grassroots. The director of the Quality of Life Challenge is exploring how the Slow message might be brought into play. I’m not sure how far this will go, or if Cameron can really move the Conservative party into line with his rhetoric, but it seems to me a good sign that even British Tories are now interested in the Slow revolution. The tectonic plates are shifting….
Pasternak redux
I have been emailing Naomi Stadlen, author of What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing, to arrange an interview for my next book. This morning she sent along a splendid quote from Boris Pasternak, the Nobel-winning poet and novelist (think Doctor Zhivago). Amid the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917, someone told Pasternak that it was crucial in such times to react quickly and shoot (literally) from the hip. His answer was short and to the point: “In an epoch of speed one must think slowly.” A sentiment worth pondering today.
What is a slow city?
I’ve just arrived in Lisbon to give a talk to a group of business people. My hotel is in the Bairro Alto, the old quarter where narrow, cobbled streets trickle live rivulets of water down the hill to the sea. It is hard to get anywhere in a hurry, and you wouldn’t want to anyway because the architecture is so beautiful. It’s all a million miles from so much of North America, where the roads are laid out so that cars can hurtle through, and the functional, disposable buildings offer nothing to arrest the eye or make you want to linger. When it comes to slowing down, Europeans, with their wonderful, old cities, definitely have an advantage…Now I’d better hurry up and rehearse my speech….
Slow Big Brother
Argentina is one of the countries where In Praise of Slow has made a big splash. In the last few months I’ve twice been to Buenos Aires (my home in the early 1990s) to do television, radio and other interviews. In fact, I even sang a little ditty from the old days on national TV – long story . Anyway, a few moments ago my publisher sent me a photo from the latest incarnation of Big Brother Argentina. It shows two contestants. One is a bkini-clad bottle-blonde smoking a cigarette – very Buenos Aires. The other is a dashing young man with long curly hair – also very Buenos Aires. The guy is clutching a Spanish copy of In Praise of Slow. I’m not a big fan of Big Brother in any language but somehow this photo makes my day. I won’t dwell too long on why that is. But here’s a thought: Is life in a Big Brother house an example of good slow or bad slow?
Cutting corners?
I’ve just heard from a psychiatrist in Poland. He has a plan to set up a network of small urban refuges where people can escape the hurly burly of city life and reconnect with their inner tortoise. There will be a quiet space to relax, recharge and reflect. There will also be consultants on hand to measure stress levels and give advice on how to live more slowly. These venues will be called Slow Corners. Someone in Norway is working on a similar idea. Certainly I can see a role for little oases of slowness in big cities. I was in London’s Oxford Circus filming a segment for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) a couple of days ago. The idea was for me to stand still while the crowds swarmed around me. The place was an ant-hill – pedestrians racing hither and thither, barging past each other, cars and buses lunging through red lights. The closest thing I could find to an ubran refuge was Starbucks, and it wasn’t a refuge at all. It was jammed with customers jostling to get their caffeine fix. Two men almost came to blows over who was first in the queue. And all of this to a pounding soundtrack by the Arctic Monkeys. I was almost relieved to get back out into the mania of Oxford Circus.
The backlash begins?
The other day as we were driving through a neighbourhood not far from our home in south London I saw a young man walking along the pavement wearing a T-shirt that caught my eye. It was baggy and white, and the black lettering across the chest screamed: Slow Sucks. My wife and I had a good laugh, but I wanted to know more so I leaned out of the car and tried to engage the man in conversation at the traffic lights – not exactly normal behaviour in London. He must have thought I was a freak, or a debt collector, because he put his head down and started speed-walking in the other direction. Who was the mysterious Slow-baiter? Where did he get that T-shirt? If anyone can shed any light on this, do drop me a line…
Slow Mandarin
I don’t speak the language, but I am told there is a word in Mandarin, “kuai-huo, ” that means “cheerful” or “thrilled.” It is made up of two characters whose literal meaning is “fast living.” When In Praise came out in Taiwan last year, the publisher coined a new word for the title: “man-huo,” which means “slow living.” Apparently, “man-huo” has now entered the Taiwanese vernacular, with people using it as shorthand to describe a better way of doing pretty much everything.
Maybe I’ll try it out on the waitresses at our local dim sum restaurant in London. Sometimes they could do with putting on the brakes a little….
From the beach in Bahia
I lived in Brazil long ago, and even then felt a strong pull to visit Bahia. Spicy food, colonial architecture, colourful folkloric dress, music everywhere – my kind of place. The Bahian people are also famous for being friendly, relaxed and unhurried – for being the slowest people in Brazil, in other words. At the moment, I’m at Praia do Forte, an eco-resort in Bahia, telling a gathering of Brazilian CIOs why they need to slow down. Maybe it’s the warm wind blowing in from the sea, maybe it’s the steady stream of caipirinhas, or maybe it’s something in the Bahian air, but they seem to like the idea.