...There could be snakes in here

the male feminist paradox

2012-02-20T09:50:00.014-08:00

"We're told over and over that any action that doesn't involve men is radicalism, is separatism, is fringe. For credibility, for legitimacy, for mainstream appeal, we need men... in order to achieve our goal of liberation, we have to have a greater influence in the world, a louder voice. They tell us, and it seems to make sense, that we need men to model good behavior for boys, since boys won't listen to us, and so our movement must go out of its way to court men for their credibility."
- Male Feminists are Unicorns

"Men's relation to feminism is an impossible one ... the point after all is that this is a matter for women, that it is their voices and actions that must determine the change and redefinition ... my desire to be a subject there too in feminism - to be a feminist - is then only the last feint in the long history of their colonization."
- Stephen Heath

Allow me to mansplain mansplaining: Patronising explanation by some man to some women of something the women know fine well about already - if not better than he ever could know. Also ill-founded contradiction of their views. (see also gaslighting.)

Allow me to mansplain the Male-feminist Paradox: "If you're not part of the solution to sexism, you're a part of the problem - and sometimes even then." (Since society at large grants men a certain status and at least negative freedom. All men are voluntarily or involuntarily oppressive, and lots are voluntarily. A small number want to work against this influence.) But can I do feminism?

[Disclosure: am man, am cis, am breeder]

Is it possible to be male and feminist?

1. Sure! We'll use our privilege against Privilege!

"I'm pretty good at thinking, and I'm ok at speaking; how may I be of service? Let's see - one of the more insidious expressions of sexism is the credibility gap between a man and a woman presenting the same information; let's close the gap using the gap." Can it be so simple?

Well. Self-identifying as a feminist is too easily a means of ducking male privilege without really changing your mode ("fauxminism"). I'd add that self-identifying as a "pro-feminist" is too easily a means of ducking obligations of social justice.

It is maddening to be aware of the power relations that surround you, soaking every thing anyone does. You can't but be changed.

A few prominent examples (insofar as any deviant is really 'prominent'):

John Stoltenberg, m-f emeritus (Dworkin would hardly have put up with him otherwise)

Paul Kivel, right-on educator, though loud.

Robert Jensen, a journalist who's energetically seen the light, or at least a light.

the "3 Michaels" of male academic gender, Kimmel, Flood and Messner. (bizarrely, there's a fourth prominent Michael, Kaufman. Colonisers.)

and (more sensational and egotised) David Futrelle.

...some disgraced ones

"Good man" Hugo Schwyzer, recently banned from one large feminist community for his past (which reflects badly on everyone).

Kyle Paine.

2. No.

"First, what the fuck is up with men calling themselves feminists? I don’t call myself a feminist, because it’s not my call whether I am or not. It’s women’s call ... Making a big melodramatic display of tagging oneself with the “feminist” label seems like transparent male cookie-seeking at best, and cover for some seriously nefarious wackaloon shit at worst..."
- Physioprof

Well, that's the most macho way of putting it possible, but yes. If I were challenged on my use of 'feminist', could I insist, however politely, that my power-position does not necessarily disqualify me? That an 'us' and 'them' dialectic set up by segregating by gender can only make things worse? Seems dubious.

Arguments:

- "Feminism is a movement developed by and for women, voice for the voiceless."

- "Men can never really understand what it is like to be a woman (extra premise: & this is necessary to feminism)."

- "Must not rely on men to make feminism credible, because this reinforces shitty discourses."

- "If conceded, men might eventually dominate the movement (& dilute it)."

- "There are too many cases of abuse by 'allies'. It is an unworthy risk"

- "We're not segregating by gender; we're segregating by unjust power."

I'm not convinced that tact and empathy can't compete with shared experience. But the point stands:

3. You tell me.

It isn't up to me if men can can or can't be, and if I am or amn't one. Anyway I don't need the membership to support it, and the support is anyway the point.

Are male feminists needed?

Notwithstanding the point in the opening quote (that very-long-term progress against gender will be a matter of changing parenting and male role models): it's outwith my jurisdiction.

(The bigger utopian picture, where the liberation of all genders follows from the final dissipation of the patriarchy is accordingly everyone's business. What might have been called 'feminism-masculism'. Except we seem to have let the word "masculism" slip away to the anti-feminists; derp.)

What would it take to be a male feminist?

"This process of changing a mental framework — of "feeling like shit" — is something everyone from a privileged group has to deal with in order to work honestly and effectively with a less-privileged group. It's difficult, and it's probably the reason more progressive men aren't feminists — because becoming a feminist man means giving up the idea that you're one of the good guys, and recognizing that male privilege affects everyone, good guy or not."
- Anna North

If it is possible, some criteria suggest themselves:

a. Self-aware: Admits his privilege, and tries to limit it. (e.g. doesn't interrupt, doesn't mansplain, gives the women in his life their due autonomy & voice.)

b. Media-aware: Boycotts media that objectify and degrade women. (to counter the line, "Sure I’m a feminist; I love women!") Perhaps this could shift to "criticises media he sees that..." since you shouldn't simply shun controversy - e.g. watching The Help to analyse its treatment of race for yourself.

c. Socially aware: Is aware that many institutions he's tied into oppress women...

d. Active: ...and works to change or protest them. Most importantly, calls out sexism by men in his personal life. Problematise!

e. Feedbacked: When acting, makes sure he's reflecting women's lived experience.

f. Able to listen: Does not lead except by invitation. (This 'follower' status will rankle with many. So what? Sit down, please. Also jars with a certain intellectual tradition which is keen on impersonality.)

g. Knows the mens can wait. Doesn't insist on equal time for men’s issues in feminist spaces. ("Feminist men need to understand that their liberation from standards of masculinity goes hand in hand with smashing patriarchal social structures." - Megan Milanese)

h. Seeks understanding: i.e. has read more than bitty blogged basics of feminism. (Does this seem arbitrary, and pretentious? Well, it ain't the former: unless he respects the movement enough to listen to the ideas and react to their often deeply unsettling challenges, he can't be. The goal is understanding, and it ties in with (e).)

i. Promoter: Encourages women in his life to defy gender roles, at expense of own prestige/control. (This conflicts with criterion (a) when you're faced, as I often am, with unfeminist or post-feminist women. Do we have a right to reject liberation?)

j. Untagged. Is not a self-promoter, not a white knight. "Self-naming and self-identified labels mean nothing. There must be substance to the label they identify with, substance to who they claim to be." - Lucky Nickel

k. Takes care.

Is this so strict as to be alienating? ok kewl.

*****************************************************************

A more frivolous question:

Do I get to wear my ^ t-shirt? I've had more encounters and challenges about gender, good and bad, wearing this tee than all others combined. It genuinely does jolt people to see the word i) worn proudly and ii) on a man (even if on my effeminate frame). But it could also be seen as the egotistical, self-honorific thing.

*************************************

Am I just whining? Is the above itself colonisation, a cry of "wat about the mens?!" (or 'boo hoo hoo, damned if I don't, damned if I do')?

Well no. First, cos I hope that that objection entails feminist spaces should not be hijacked - not that we shouldn't speak about men in general.

But also because paradox need only be occasion for pain if you are possessed by your need to make the world make sense. Incoherency is destructive because it offends a very common view in intellectual aesthetics (i.e. metaphilosophy, a.k.a. spirituality), not because it is intolerable or nihilistic in itself. I don't suffer from Platonism, much, anymore, so I will sit myself down in this paradox, and wait.

baby baroque

2012-02-19T07:53:00.001-08:00

My baby brother, now 6, has a surprising grasp of English. (This is more surprising to me because it means he's left behind the awful Nickleodeon American accent of 2010 and 2011's bastard blend of American and Glaswegian.) He now sounds like a very skilled foreigner. Some choice cuts:

- [after running around and vigorously helping us move boxes] "I found that fun!"

- [after reporting being mooned on the playground] "I wouldn't have thought that a girl woulda done that." (that's an abstract past negative subjunctive ffs! Almost remarkable enough to outweigh my being sad at his gender indoctrination.)

- [seeing Gaelic for the first time, being told that Gaelic (text in which covers my brother's wall) has been a tiny preservationist's language for 120 years now] "That was a time before me. And you. And daddy. And gran. And gran's gran!"

- [during a lull] "I like it when you are here."

On the order of rank in intellectual labour

2012-02-17T15:37:00.002-08:00

Magritte (1936), 'The Philosopher's Lamp'

"...not every critic is a genius, but every genius is born a critic..."
- Lessing

"Anyone who calls themselves a philosopher is a bit of an arse."
- Bob Plant

What you get called, as a cultural processor, is not an incidental tag. I've tried to sense out the hierarchy of terms, our snobby job descriptions of wordy people. (This is not to endorse that hierarchy.) The formal question I'm after could be: 'how much cultural capital is attributed by the title?' This is clear when we keep the activity constant and note the change in Distinction:

Take two media examples, "writer" and "author". "Writer" is completely unregulated - a guy who drools out one piece for his student newspaper is one, and so is Antonio Gramsci. "Author" is reputedly the broader category (and legally I suppose it is), but it's got a pretty clear ring of positive evaluation - of authority. But it's also pretty loosely regulated.

Two ideas examples: "thinker" and "philosopher". "Philosopher" is only uncontroversial when it is used as a job description - for that woman in teaching in that university department. Demarcation is difficult, because the field is a wilful fucking mess, but also because there really is an element of congraulation in calling someone a philosopher. Despite my disowning the following in general, I still don't want to allow just anyone to claim the title (e.g. Ayn Rand).

(Ones which often get used pejoratively are italicised:)

Media people: blogger < journalist < columnist < reviewer < pundit < creative < screenwriter < writer < editor < essayist < author/novelist/poet/playwright < person of letters < artist.

Ideas people: student < guru < writer < researcher < academic < analyst < author/... < thinker < expert < scientist < lecturer < intellectual < scholar < visionary < theorist < professor < philosopher < genius.

LIMITATIONS OF THE ABOVE

- You probably disagree (and there's not much we can do about that).

- It's rarely a simple matter of rank. Obviously we don't always have relative esteem in mind; obviously context is the determiner of meaning in basically all contexts; obviously there are loads of screenwriters with far more cultural capital than loads of playwrights; obviously the following assumes all other things remaining equal (an assumption which is never true).

- Nonetheless: in media, I think the ones from "essayist" on are honorific terms.

- And in ideas, the ones from "scholar" on. (Admittedly "theorist" gets applied to a heap of empty bullshitters - but what doesn't?)

- I've left out the real pejoratives - e.g. sophist, e.g. hack - because we soon get into Content going down that road - to nihilist and to yellow journalism.

- I've also left out trying to give the complex hierarchy across "academics" - anthropologist < linguist < physicist... (!)

- Are "novelist", "poet" and "playwright" really equivalent? Since theatre is rare and metropolitan nowadays, you could view playwrights as a little more Authorial and Classy, as happened whenever Pinter talked about large things.

- And "artist" is maybe not much of an honorific in most circles.

- The terms also don't exclude each other (e.g. Gramsci was a philosopher but also a theorist of intellectuals).

****************************************************

Why care about all this cultural-conservative nonsense, though? Why not just revaluate these values, hold the people relevant to our lives - our webcomic artists, our bloggers, our tv satirists, and our youtubists - over the older thoroughbreds?

Well, cause Year Zero cultural revolution is usually needless, and perhaps impossible, and anyway vitiating. There's lots to learn, kids! Those things that are or will be new under the sun are not revealed by setting fire to the ones already sunkissed, at length, by the world.

come, see my inconspicuous consumption (songs about products)

2012-02-07T07:56:00.001-08:00

"The Believer: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?

Slavoj Žižek: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics attacked me, 'how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company?' I said, 'with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system'."

"We only rap about things we like. I'll mention Cheetos because I like them, but if I didn't they wouldn't be in our songs."
- Damon Dash

Product is everywhere, an integral part of life and chat. Product placement is still repugnant - see Polanski's BMW nonsense for a painful example - and the ethics of advertising are indeed deeply murky. But the brainwash theory of advertising - as put forward by Baudrillard and Naomi Klein and Fight Club and swallowed by many like me - is based on a muddled view of commerce and of human nature. Moreover, it has proved endlessly exploitable by the corporate forces it demonises. So let's put aside for a moment whether deception is inherent to the commercial sphere, and whether our minds are polluted by hypersexual hypercommercial saturation.

People like things, and should admit this to themselves (even if it's not the only sort of thing they like). When musicians eschew this massive bit of contemporary life, they lose something. Products are at very least the most concrete particulars of lyrics. Perhaps the worst thing about the MOR lyrics of (e.g.) James Morrison is not that they are clichéd, but the dumb airless abstraction of them.

Anyway, this list is not songs written for ads, nor ones used in ads, nor even anti-adverts (e.g. This Note's For You by Neil Young; "Don't make another Rickenbacker" by the Dressmakers; "Deathcafé" by Oi Polloi). It is bands using products to express themselves, not the other way round. The choice is not one between being a venal shill or a chaste Marxist.

1. My Adidas - Run DMC
(song of the joy of ownership - a real, if transitory, thing)

Obviously synecdoches are generally acceptable: see the use of 'vaseline' for all waxy lubes (and so also for gay sex); 'valium' and 'prozac' for all psychiatrics (and so also for modern alienation); etc.

2. Rum and Coca-Cola - Andrews Sisters
(Back then they wouldn't pay you anyway. Note that Jack Daniels is of course shorthand for being krazy.)

3. Shop Vac - Jonathan Coulton
(it's easy to avoid product-placement nausea if you set it amidst enough pathos)

4. Golden Boy - Mountain Goats
(also if you pick an obscure product. This song is product as apotheosis.)

5. Whiteness thy name is Meltonian - Half Man Half Biscuit
(and also if you are absurd about it. HMHB are the kings of artfully concrete lyrics: e.g. one song ending with the baffling chorus "Sturmey-Archer Campagnolo", x9)

6. Driver Education - Indigo Girls
(if products quickly make you dated, they also let you evoke an era)

see also 6'. Village Green Preservation Society - Kinks
(childhood products as institution; capital killed by new capital.)

7. Drink Nike - Future of the Left
(Can be used to communicate a character's culture (here, elderly alienation). see also)

8. Mercedes Benz - Janis Joplin

(compare The Jeep Song by Dresden Dolls: few more perfect expressions of that thing where you nervily see an ex in utterly specific objects)

9. Kodachrome - Paul Simon
(nerds too are safe)

10. Little Red Corvette - Prince
(In line with the long tradition of driving-as-sex songs. Cadillacs in particular seem to get free rein from all sorts of bands.)

11. Wearing My Rolex - Wiley
(the key to a good product song is to invest objects with meaning without losing yourself. And to 'bubble' (< bubble bath = laugh.) see also.)

12. Can It All Be So Simple - Raekwon
(the fledgling rapper uses posh drink and flash to expand his sense of self)

12'. Pass the Courvoisier Part Two - Busta Rhymes
(the established rapper does placements without much hypocrisy - since most never much pretend to be any more than a clotheshorse lashed to its cultural present.)

11''. All I Need - Jay-Z
(or he'll have his own shit to plug anyway)

12. Diet Mountain Dew - Lana Del Rey
(like MCs, postmodern pop divas carry their consumerism lightly)

13. Wallet - Regina Spektor
(she wants to describe this stranger tersely: and somehow the material trace can suggest his spirit!)

14. In McDonalds - Burial
(Just like old feelings spurred by an unwelcome meeting in a public place, Aaliyah's vocal, out of nowhere)

"A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable."
- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Rating the C20th

2012-02-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

Ray Johnstone (2010), "Francis Bacon - Icon of the C20th"

Recently asked friends what their favourite decade of the twentieth century is. Answers are varied and cannot fail to say things about us.

Noughties (1900-1909)

RH: The first one. Cos still optimism.

SS: Early 1900s e.g: 1900-1910!!! The wild west was still vaguely wild but on the wind down!!!

HW: 1903-1913. Few will pick 90s - we're too burned by hindsight.

Teens

CK1: Sassoon, Owen, Thomas, Rosenberg. Death of Enlightenment scientism.

Twenties

RM: I had a dream once I was brass player in 1920s-type town with trams. I was in a café when I suddenly felt a strong pull to run. So I ran outside - the light fell softly and air was pleasantly cool. I saw a streetcar pull away in front of me and felt an immense melancholy as a result. I fell on my knees and cried, a trumpet in my hands. Based on this I would go 20s.

AS: 20s! What style, no? Class was not dead.

AK: Jazz Age.

JC: 20s. Why?
Me: I think it's a nice, indirect way of saying something large about ourselves.
JC: ok.

Thirties

PC: Different decades connotate different cultural events, and since I wasn't there for most of them, one culture is as good as another. 1930s says I: I picture 1930s Britain as Bernard Shaw trying to finish a play, but this bloody neighbour Mr Huxley is tripping balls and playing the same record over and over again. In the street below Orwell rummages in the pockets of a grubby overcoat, certain he had money for a box of matches to light his last limp cigarette as it dangles from his lips. (or maybe it didn't happen like that)

JH: 30s. Witters in full flow, good trains, everything presumably was like the early scenes in the film Iris.

Forties (!)

MB: Most historically interesting. Most technologically important etc.

Fifties

CK2: 1950s. well cool tech and rock n roll. Computers, Everest, Little Richard.

Sixties

No one. (The backlash in full force!)

Seventies

CW: Tough i'd say 70s i guess.
Me: Stagflation, Pol Pot and prog rock?
CW: Lax health and safety rules!

Eighties

RM: 80s
Me: Controversial. Is the style epitomised in Drive really enough to compensate for the ideology epitomised in Wall Street?
RM: Yes. Plus the best and worst ever music. The distance between peak and trough is important.

Nineties

AM: 90s: calm before the storm.

MM: 90s cos it was the only one I actually experienced.

LH: Everyone's gonna say 60s, but I'm not! [This thought was apparently universal] 1990s: the days of unrestricted wealth, naive optimism, when it was still okay to believe in multiculturalism, and China wasn't scary yet.

PJ: Tough call. I'd say the fight is pretty much between the 90s and the roaring 20s. (:

Most of the selections were eC20th. What does this say about us? People seem to have taken the question to be one of style or tone, and not history, politics, or even music (since we do not listen to swing or blues as a rule, and yet). We are nostalgic and a little historically conscious (since you don't passively see much of the period, or even the aesthetic, except in certain genres of films).

As for me, I think the strongest overall case (not of style) belongs to the noughties:

Sheer optimism:

they thought they were going to finish science;

only one big war (didn't they think the great Alliances made them impossible?);

thought they would create a perfect language and spread it universally;

technology punched society in the mind a dozen times: (the first powered flight, first film, first affordable portable camera, first united telecoms, first radio broadcasts, Ford Model-T, Einstein, Freud, washing machine, suffrage in Finland...)

Culture ain't so stellar; Mahler being the pop star of choice.

inklings of modernism tho

miscellany three

2012-02-02T06:13:00.000-08:00

1, Is the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet deteriorating? (Yes.)

Is the divergence between actual content and the automated link-spider adsites, the thriving apocrypha trade, the articulate nonsense, the inarticulate rage, and the endless incestuous copy-paste regurgitated spam accelerating? ...

One day we may need state provision of mythbusting, meme-history, and quotation-sourcing: The Ministry of Snopes. ("An Enema for the Bottom Half of the internet since 2021.")

(And that's before accounting for the operation of the iron law of trolldom: )

*********************************************************

2, Several women I have known have eventually told me, more or less sternly, "Let's not talk philosophy."

An awkward position, surely - for what else is there?

*****************************************************

3, Was aggressively asked the other day if I thought that being a vegan makes me better than other people. I thought about this for longer than he apparently would have liked.

What I can say is that I am superior to myself, before. We are too different on too many counts, and our measures are too incommensurate to make the glib comparisons of elitisms past mean much at all.

But actually the superiority (moral, environmental, spiritual) balances out to zero, I think, when we consider the aesthetic, commercial, social, and spiritual friction of it. (The spiritual tension comes from that risk that my reactionary interlocutor resented: the risk of setting oneself aside from people; and so disowning them; and so becoming one of those awful Kierkegaardian / Nietzschean atoms. But there's also e.g. the nagging consciousness that our world is built on pain. And, e.g. your lack of ease at friends' meals.) This does not, however, relativise our obligation away. The moral superiority remains pretty clear, and overrules, me.

**********************************************************

4, An absurd CV (skills which we do not view as skills)

- Can tell time
- Can tie shoes
- Can write (joined-up)
- Can withhold comment on social superiors.
- Can toilet.
- Act my age.
- Act my attributed gender.
- Know what foods I don't like.
- etc.

*********************************************************

5, A man called Grice once wrote down some rules he thought people do and should speak by:

a. Maxim of Quality: Truth
Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

b. Maxim of Quantity: Information
Be as informative as is required for current purposes. (No more or less.)

c. Maxim of Relation: Relevance
Don't go off-topic.

d. Maxim of Manner: Clarity
Avoid obscurity of expression, prolixity and ambiguity

To be fair to the man, he couldn't have seen trolls coming. But! We may be able to reconcile John Gabriel's theory of dickwaddery with Gricean conversational maxims. Though Trolls have shattered the above for the {internet} context indexical, we can save it with the following Overriding Gricean norm for {internet}:

0. Maxim of Suspicion: Consider all statements possibly insincere.

0*. Maxim of Selection: Do not feed the trolls.

And this is the only real evil of trolls: they force us to adopt the above defensive distrust. The internet is sans innocence.

****************************************************************

"Epistemology is the ethics of belief"
- Roderick Chisholm

"Epistemology is the ontology of knowing."
- Gustav Bergmann

I know which side I'm on.

*************************************************************

7, Realists are wrong but necessary.

****************************************************************

8, Entropy is Satan for secular people. It is the great Beast waiting at the end of all paths, jaws agape. One that we cannot even cross ourselves against. On this reading, thermodynamics is the real dismal science. "Every action is corruption, and every restoration contributes to degradation." (Peter Atkins)

But entropy is not a process; it is the product of all* processes, including everything people do. We increase entropy, smash up the place, a little, just by existing!

Those secularists still ridden by Plato will be broken by this news. (The ones that think that contingency is nihilism; that something must be eternal to be meaningful.) They will take no comfort from our agency; it will in fact sharpen the irony; entropy as not only the devil but original sin too.

**************************************************************

9, "Let's all embrace Elgin!"
- new ad campaign back home

*********************************************************

calmie doun: the Scotland question

2012-01-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

"The Ship Comes In"
JD Fergusson (1931)

Why independence? Why not independence? Who needs to prove what?

There's a lot of inertia in the current arrangement (dubbed "Ukania" by one sarcast) - and let's not forget that inertia is a species of fear. But either way we need arguments: the burden of proof is on everyone.

POINTS FOR INDEPENDENCE

Localism & subsidiarity. A simple civic principle: the less distant an authority is from its jurisdiction, the more informed it's likely to be, and the less arbitrary.

Civic nationalism (actual representative democracy). Centralization also leads to unconscionable things like the current situation, where one seat out of 59 is Tory, yet a Tory government have executive power.

"The devolved union is unfair on England." Ah, cunning. Here we to wade into muddy finance waters. It's not fanciful to say that tuition fee inequality, of all things, has stirred up the most popular dissent against the UK since Thatcherism. Less fashionably: Scots seem to get more stuff and the MPs vote twice / on some English matters. (Although note that on this last point the SNP are canny.)

National self-determination (sigh). The UN Charter, 1:1:2 reads: "The Purposes of the United Nations are...To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples..."

I'm actually not convinced by this where no genuine oppression exists. The world can keep fragmenting forever under the guidance of silly quasi-real divisions, and we'd be no better off - again, unless localism and legislative fairness increased by it.

POINTS AGAINST INDEPENDENCE

"Scots don't really want it." Ok, so polls are no way to live, and majorities are hard, but only 26-39% of respondents?

"Brits don't want it." "Well, so what if they don't?" you might say. But there's a mini-debate running at the moment about the "ground rules" of the referendum, % thresholds and so on. The decision affects the UK's future massively; it's not obvious that there oughtn't be some say.

"Parochialism will follow." Aye, it could well do. (See tourism point below.)

"Ethnocentrism will follow." Tribalism is indeed a bad reason to do anything. But the rancour is overstated: something like 8% of the population of Scotland are English, and yet overt racism is rare. But there's at least two forces counteracting - first, against racism, the relief of unhappily married grievance (among both Scots and English), but, secondly, also a process of distancing: a division writ in law. I don't know which force will win. And neither do you. Civic nationalism is the rule: the arguments are largely (surprisingly) economic.

"Scotland won't survive on its own." This isn't particularly credible, though Ireland is a cautionary tale.

"Scotland will be poorer on its own." Mibbe, mibbe no. The Barnett formula is relatively kind to Scotland. ("whit aboot the oil?")

1. Defence. Scotland has been economically military-industrial since the C18th; with the likely fall in the post-independence defence budget, that'll have to change. You cannot imagine the size of headache that'll be, since closing bases is the only thing highlanders really protest about.

2. Debt. If the UK total were split by per-capitas, we'd take home about minus £125bn. Moreover: oil economies don't get AAA credit rating, hiking borrowing costs. (Even Saudi Arabia is AA-.)

3. Deficit. See below.

4. Currency. Sterling, euro, or new quid? The options ain't good; with the first two, you lose control of monetary issue (and so gain a default risk); and with a new Scots pound you have to swallow a large gilt rate hike to get investors interested (which will compound the credit downgrade) and leads to either lower growth or an import price hike.

5. The key variable is of course oil, but there's no clear answer on that (see below). The lost annual oil revenues and the higher Barnett per-capita spending probably equalise out to zero.

"Tourism will have to intensify to make up. Scotland will caricature itself: even more Robertthebruceism, Walter Scottism, shortbreadtinny crap." Aye.

"There is no such thing as independence, in these global days." Ooh now you're talking. There isn't (thank god there isn't). SNP: "Independence in Europe". Scotland would integrate hard into Europe - twice the MEP seats, apparently (Scotland has 6 atm; Ireland is the same population and has 13) but god knows if that'd be enough, or what terms the EU would demand.

"Scotland is a post-imperial province; not a benighted, stateless colony." We should endorse the historical point here; Scotland is, on the grand scheme, an oppressor, not the victim many imagine. But why should the historical constrain it? Historical and cultural ties are no better a reason to stay than the tribalism is one to go.

"The Tories will rule England for a hundred years without Scots!" No they won't (though lots more years are likely). Besides; do you stand for democracy regardless of your personal disagreement or don't you?

CONTESTED

"It's Our Oil!": If there were as much oil as the upper estimate suggests, it might well be worth it. But we can't trust either the SNP's report nor the others' (for all that Salmond has been thinking about this for 40 years straight.)

Scotland's deficit(?) Each side stretches the figures unti they suit them - whether it's Holyrood smugly claiming a surplus (and prudence), or think-tanks claiming that the Scots deficit is actually £17 billion now, and would stay like that year on year. Well? Is it -1% or +12% ?

"Decentralised government is efficient." Eh, would be nice if this were true. But consider that regions will have to duplicate departments, thus losing some economies of scale. (I should stop talking - there's just not enough data.) And Holyrood is already relatively powerful, and has its own class of racketeering inefficient buggers.

GO GROW YOUR OWN KNOWLEDGE

The Scottish registry, which has proper demographic stats.

And a dedicated Glasgow Uni economic unit can't hurt.

Gerry Hassan is a balanced Independencist.

Bella Caledonia are mostly lefty civic nats.

Jim Murphy is not obviously a Unionist whip or shill.

And the Lib Dems (if you care) are nominally nice federalists.

What are you scared of, Scotland Office?

I actually haven't made my mind up; the swithering above is not feigned. Go spit at anyone who pretends it's simple, would you please?

like a Ruritanian Bob Dylan

2012-01-19T10:21:00.001-08:00

Careful, folk/rock singer/songwriters of the world: there is a spectre haunting you. If you're:

eminent back home;

or just the first big rock guy in your language;

vaguely political;

or lyrically pretentious;

or mischievous;

possessed of bad voice;

or accused of capturing a moment in your people's cultural history

then look out, my foreign friend - for you are sooner or later gonna catch a comparison to Dylan. In recent times the simile has become so wild and virulent that non-musicians must be careful also:

"Steve Jobs is right up there. He is, in many ways, the Bob Dylan of machines, he's the Elvis of the kind of hardware-software dialectic."
- Bono

1. "the English Bob Dylan"

Richard Thompson

Dylanesque Score: 6/10

or
Roy Harper

Dylanesque Score: 7/10

or even
Billy Bragg

Dylanesque Score: 5/10

1'. "British Bob" (the Scottish English Bob Dylan)

Donovan

Dylanesque Score: 8/10

1''. "The Welsh Dylan" - says the BBC
(though there's plenty of Dylans there already if you ask me)

Meic Stevens

Dylanesque Score: 6/10

2. "Like a Dutch Bob Dylan or somethin"

Boudewijn de Groot

Dylanesque Score: 7/10

or
Lucky Fonz III (says me)

Dylanesque Score: 7.5/10

3. "The Spirited Bob Dylan of Brazil" - says New York Times

Caetano Veloso

Dylanesque Score: 8/10
(in a Latin way, obv)

4. "Bob Dylan of South Africa" - says Dave Matthews

Vusi Mahlasela

Dylanesque Score: 5/10

4'. "Like a White South African Bob Dylan"

Gert Vlok Nel

Dylanesque Score: 6/10

5. "the Greek equivalent of Bob Dylan"

Dionysis Savvopoulos

Dylanesque Score: 8/10

or George Dalaras (blech)

Dylanesque Score: 3/10

6. "Like a Chinese Bob Dylan"

Cui Jian
(sounds more like the Zhongguoren David Byrne/Colin Hay, but never mind)

Dylanesque Score: 6/10

or
Yang Yi

7. "Iran's Bob Dylan" - says New York Times again

Mohsen Namjoo

Dylanesque Score: 6/10

8. "The Bob Dylan of Argentina" - says Alejandro Lerner

León Gieco

Dylanesque Score: 7/10

9. "Cuba's Bob Dylan" - New York Times again

Carlos Varela
(a sentimental shill, but so is Dylan)

Dylanesque Score: 6/10

10. "The Czech Bob Dylan" - says Boulder Weekly

Robert Křesťan

Bewildering:

Dylanesque Score: 8/10

also
Jaromír Nohavica

Dylanesque Score: 7/10

11. "Like the black Bob Dylan of Australia"

Kev Carmody

or
Archie Roach

5'. "The Bob Dylan of Australia"

Paul Kelly

Dylanesque Score: 7/10

(or there's always Nick Cave.)

12. "The Jamaican Bob Dylan"

Barry Brown

Dylanesque score: 5/10
(tho Jamaica was spilling over with this calibre of talent for a decade and a half; BB's equality among kings.)

13. "The Bob Dylan of Japan"

Yosui Inoue

Dylanesque score: 6/10

13'. "Okinawa's Bob Dylan or David Byrne"

Shoukichi Kina

Dylanesque score: 4/10
Win score: 9/10

15. Like a Chilean Bob Dylan

Victor Jara

Dylanesque score: (Got shot by government: more Dylan than Dylan.)

less epochally,
Chinoy

Dylanesque score: (a remarkably feminine) 8/10

16. "The Bob Dylan of East Germany"

Wolf Biermann

Dylanesque score: 7/10

17. Like an Inuit Bob Dylan

Willie Thrasher

Dylanesque score: 6/10

18. "The Russian Bob Dylan"

Boris Grebenshchikov

Dylanesque score: 7/10

18'. "Like the Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union"

Vladimir Visotsky

Dylanesque score: 5/10

19. "the Bob Dylan of Vietnam" - attrd. Joan Baez

Trịnh Công Sơn

Dylanesque score: 5/10

20. "The Bob Dylan of Rap" / "The Jay-Z of his day"

Jay-Z

Dylanesque score: ?

21. "like Bob Dylan if Bob Dylan could sing"

Dire Straits(!)

Dylanesque score: No.

***********************************************

Most of the above are too earnest by half - they'd be unable to do, say, this:

But a more glaring revisionist point is that the above are mostly loads more political than he.

"Bobby was not really a political person; he was thought of as being a political person, a man of the Left. And in a general way, he was, but not interested in the true nature of the Soviet Union or any of that crap. We thought he was hopelessly politically naïve. In retrospect, I think he may have been more politically sophisticated than we were."
— Dave Van Ronk

"Thirty-some years, whenever I go to a march, a sit-in, or a lie-in, or a be-in, or a jail-in, people say, “Is Bob coming?” I say, “He never comes, you moron. You know? When you gonna get it? Never did, probably never will.”"
— Joan Baez

froze

2012-01-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

Hear my firstworld woes!
o they strike heinous blows:
today my fridge froze my tomatoes.

on hearing that they'd froze, no-one proposed
aught but hiring Dada so and sos -
"those the better to compose (apropos tomato woes)".

To close: my cow howls and lows
and my bull won't doze
Cos the bastard fridge froze my tomatoes!

songs of disbelief

2012-01-12T11:25:00.001-08:00

The idea of indie music is well if not completely expressed in the feeling of discomfort with oneself (i.e. disbelief in yourself, or life). I'm not so keen on those songs at the moment. So, instead, songs of disbelief in other things.

I was looking for songs that used "belief" in (1) the technical sense of epistemic claim, but there's few, few. See #7 for another use - (1*) identity-defining opinion. Anyway, the only really common use is (2) the other incredulity - as in "I can't believe it!" - a sudden gaping inability to make sense of the world (that key symptom of love) rather than an assertion of falsehood. If you come to pass off "I can't believe you're gone" as lyrics then you've no doubt forgotten that it was "I can't believe I've found you", not so long before.

1. I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me - Billie Holiday

("You're telling ev'ryone I know / I'm on your mind each place you go ...
they can't believe that you're in love with me.")

Like much she did, this is dangerously ambiguous - subverts the titular pop cliché before it even was a pop cliché.)

2. Winter Wonderland - Animal Collective
("If you don't believe it's raining /I won't tell you that it's raining
Do you not believe it's raining just because it gets you down?
And if you don't believe in happiness / Then don't believe in happiness
Don't believe in happiness - but then you might be down
If you don't believe you're crying / Then don't believe you're crying
Do you not believe you're crying just because it gets you down?")

The boys approach subtlety via zany romping - on the crying dishonesty of beliefs.

3. Check It Out - Nicki Minaj
("I can't believe it, it's so amazing.
I can't believe it, this beat is banging.
I can't believe it, I can't believe it.")

Nothing other than a drugged-up loved-up entry to da club. (Where else is the Sublime to be found?)

4. The Great Beyond - REM
("I can't believe that I believed that I wished that you could see...")

5. Ghosts - Billie the Vision
("I don't believe in ghosts but there's a ghost under my bed.")

cf. Moore's Paradox

6. Turtles All The Way Down - Every Time I Die
("I can't believe I thought my thoughts meant anything.")

Ah what a pleasantly silly band.

7. God - John Lennon
("I don't believe in [lots of things].
I just believe in Yoko and me.")

Included as instance of the standard nasty usage of "belief" for only those beliefs which are magical constituents of your Real True Self.

8. Oh, Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison
("I don't believe you - you're not the truth.")

Moore's Paradox again, sort of. But perhaps it's better taken as illustration of the boring but absolutely primary point that truth is a feature of language and not of the world.

9. Into My Arms - Nick Cave
("I don't believe in an interventionist God.")

Get you. A little love ditty as stand-in for the full and perfect replacement of theology that is potential in phenomenology. Yeah.

10. In The Aeroplane - Neutral Milk Hotel
("Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all")

11. Oh My God - Ronson, etc.

I always think this song could be great - maybe if, say, Antony Hegarty took it on.

12. Don't You Want Me? - Human League
("You know I don't believe you when you say that you won't see me.")

Creep.

13. I Don't Want to See You - Camera Obscura

("I can't believe that I am writing this down /
and I can't believe that I've got you in a song /
I don't want to be a whining girl")

Tell it to that Human League.

14. Suicidal Thoughts - Biggie
("I can't believe suicide's on my fucking mind.")

The sole expression of many men? (drunk, 3am, to that one dude who probably won't call you gay.) Perhaps Biggie's disbelief is that he has feelings at all.

15. The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room - Flight of the Conchords
("I can't believe I'm sharing a kebab with the most beautiful girl I have ever seen with a kebab")

16. And We Thought That Nation-States Were A Bad Idea - Propagandhi
("I can't believe I'm gonna worry about this kind of shit.
What a stupid world. And it's beautiful. No regard for principle.
What a stupid world. (1) born (2) hired (3) disposed.")

17. I Can't Believe You Actually Died - Microphones

A beautiful sentence, that - as if to say "...What on earth do you think you're doing?"

i think you'll find it's pronounced natse

2012-01-02T09:20:00.001-08:00

"I think you get taught a set of rules and then you learn to abuse them – that’s part of what linguistic facility is. It’s about going beyond competence and understanding when you can violate conventions. We talk about rules but it really is more sensible to talk about conventions. The point is that these things will change."
- Henry Hitchings

One of the few things I'm anarchist about is language; or, properly speaking, prescriptivism in linguistics. (Another is scientific methodology.) There's no pettier a way to get me angry than correcting someone's speech from a purist high horse. This is not just because it's generally needless and unkind, but because it stems from a mistake about the nature of language: as fixed, or as logical, or as containing national essence, or as a top-down construction - when it is none of these things.

1. Claim: Language is for the communication of ideas.

1'. Consequence: Any utterance which passes the relevant idea along is successful language.

2. Norm: The success of an utterance is more important than the correctness of an utterance.

2^9. Mad norm: Successful language is 'correct' language. This goes for grammar, spelling, and especially pronunciation.

C. entailed Anarchism: Grammar is parasitic on usage. Linguistic change is not corruption, barbarism or solecism, but often enrichment by better correspondence to the rapid cultural world. The contrary mindset, prescriptivism, is both descriptively inadequate and an excuse for classism and tiny acts of sadism. The only restriction on language should be that it succeeds.

(This is stricter than it looks, since the opposite of purism - e.g. people using new slang to alienate others - is also proscribed. It doesn't entail the destruction of standards - just clips their claws.)

(vs 1'. The content of a speech-act is not so simply independent of form as you seem to assume. The idea that eventually gets communicated is inescapably shaped by the register, 'correctness', context of the utterance and by the identity of the speaker. Your 'anarchism' is all very well, but why don't you speak lolspeak?)

****************************************************

However, I'm a fool if I deny that value gets lost in the faster-than-the-speed-of-precedent manic social chatternova. (Such rowdy kids!) It's mostly some useful distinctions that get blurred and eroded. Some things now used as equivalent:

"Jealousy" (protective anger for something one possesses) v "Envy" (covetous anger for something one doesn't)

"Guilt" (moral pain, from own conscience) v "Shame" (social pain from being perceived to have wronged)

"Refute" (disprove) v "Reject" (disbelieve, deny)

"I do not believe that" (~belief, so doubt) v "I disbelieve that" (denial)

"Awesome": we've lost the complicated transcendental horror that this used to denote. And there's no word to replace it, since we've done the same grin-job on "sublime". And "bizarre".

Since these contain good ideas, don't I want to prescribe that they get used properly? Again: no, cuz that'd be neither right nor good.

LISTEN: "All Eternals Deck" (2011) by the Mountain Goats

2011-12-27T09:24:00.000-08:00

"Three, among new age people, necromancers, heretics and fanatics, is supposed to be a number with power. I don't believe in any of that, but it's fun to pretend that you do ... the thread of it, the shimmer, had this really bitching heavy metal appeal to me. So, there isn't a story or a theme that you can pin down, but I feel like [All Eternals Deck]'s about dark, netherworldly things and what it means to be obsessed with them."
- John Darnielle

"One may well sigh when one realises that it is nevertheless given to a few to draw the most profound insights, without any real effort, from the maelstrom of their own feelings, while we others have to grope our way restlessly to such insights through agonizing insecurity."
- Freud

There's a whole genre, "psychological realism", for novels which focus on the details of their characters' minds. Where self-narrative - most often, self-delusion - are more important than plot, truth, denouement: the "actual" events. But does anyone write psychological rock?

Well now yes. All Eternals Deck is just that, retaining even the perfectly tuned Gothic aesthetic that the later books tended to wallow in. (Note: 'psychedelic' rock is the opposite of what I'm looking for - it's a flight from ordinary inner life.) So AED isn't about how frickin cool tarot or black metal is, or how real ghosts are, or any of that: it's about the power of ideas over us. Also our perversity. (To be haunted is to not let a ghost go, and not as we usually say, the converse.)

"It's hard to tell gifts of the spirit from clever counterfeits."
- Darnielle's Cain

Talking of subjectivity like this - saying that things can be important even though untrue - has the character of magic. And IRL, there are always two sides to magic and supernaturalism - the Without (the conning magician or priest's knowledge of the trick) and Within (the mark's numinous awe). These songs are about within, with all the entailed nonsequiturs and vague fogs of feeling.

Each of AED's titles are three words long (i.e. one per bandmember), and there are thirteen! songs. I think each song's a different Goat: some reviewers noted that AED 'isn't a concept album' - but this is only true in the corrupted sense of "concept", where it means just "story album".

THREE LARGE THEMES OF AED I SEE

1. What it is to be subjective. Never mind if it's true - is it believed? How does it feel? (The fancy term for this could be "literary existential phenomenology".) Most often this is manifested here as being subjected, being the one things happen to. The motif that gives it away is the mask/face string.

2. What it is to be an anachronism. His characters are left behind by time ("Vampires", "Estate Sale"), youth , talent ("For Charles"), the Market ("Estate Sale"), the march of evolution ("Sourdoire"), and each other ("Age", "Prowl"). And apart from that, few of the songs keep to one period for imagery - there's medieval and primeval images thrown to Trans-Ams, Hollywood and .

3. What it is to survive. What keeps you going? Your past (Garland's Minnesota, Olduvai Gorge), or the thought of escaping it (Bronson's childhood, Garland's later childhood)? Every other song has a line about waking or resisting sleep - insomnia a perverse kind of 'surviving'. Follow the light, wait for the light, o light.

Let's call Darnielle's characters "Goats". (Fans are apparently "Capricorns" which is nice.) Very often he sings first-person as them, not himself. And a lot of them have the dramatic arc of Hamlet: on the outside, no arc at all; but, from within, it's a churning, morbid parabola, often followed by terrible action. In the end they are benighted by themselves, by sharp memories here symbolised by serpents and scorpions. Darnielle's great asset is his self-awareness - cos if you're self-aware you can do all kinds of things which irony usually forbids, like the simplest rhyme schemes and soothing stock melodies, without being unbearable.

"A 70s occult-scare movie where one of the scenes involves a couple of people visiting a storefront fortune teller, getting their cards read, and then trying to feel super-hopeful about what they hear when what they’re visibly actually feeling is dread."

- Darnielle

The liner notes tell a little story about the titular lost Depression-era tarot deck, and give us thirteen hazy tv-screen close-ups with ironic comments on supernaturalism for each song: their captions, taken from some How To Be A Psychic guide/sales catalogue, underscores the shuckster's side (Without) rather than the mark's side (Within) of occult games.

1. Damn these Vampires

(Liner text: "damn also their friends")
(Liner picture: Confusing - somebody singing or screaming)

Song of bad influences, being moved on or left behind.

One good trail leads us to a drug addiction tale (arteries, life spiralling down, vampires as dealers - or substances - or the friends that sustain the habit, begging, crawling), but I'm veering off from storytelling - some are best left in symbolist fogs.

Anyway: a wild life, genre-mashing: cowboys (the young, macho, self-dramatising) and vampires (the effect of that life. Burned-out cowboys after a couple years of this). The world changes without them (horses into trans-ams). One cowboy realises what is up. And doesn't recognise himself:

"let those glass doors open wide,
And in their surface
See two young, savage things
Barely worth remembering."

And suddenly anger and regret: "for what they've done to me". Tension between this sense of singular injustice and the "we" who he wants to "walk upright" with. Struggles to change. Dawn is his chance, though we know it might be the vampire's usual ashen fate he's crawling towards. (Analogous though unlikely is the Arctics' usage of 'vamp'.)

2. Birth of Serpents

(Liner text: "past life regression is your best vacation value")
(Liner pic: Three white roses, nested and complex. See top ^.)

Song of painful memories, of what images really are (doors).

Photos are hindsight. There's terrible pathos in the device that puts the past's direction as Down - it being a natural law of this Goat that he was always lower back then. We can't avoid a Biblical nod from the title - the implication being that developing the reel of film is to invite attack from painful memories, to uncover the "permanent bruises" - but there's a persistent hopefulness to it - the impression he's looking back ("down") at the serpents from a high haven. It's safe to call this a properly autobiographical one, the locations in the lyrics being JD's hometowns to date.

Wonderful line: "See that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest."

AED is overproduced in lots of places. He isn't used to bellowing neither.

3. Estate Sale Sign
(Liner text: "roughly equivalent to the Tower in standard tarot - avoid")
(Liner pic: Extreme closeup of a large black bird landing, feet first)

Song of cultural destruction.

Its extended metaphor is very metal: the couple as cult. And now the cult is selling up. ("The Crusades" were their honeymoon, I suppose.) The Goat's fury at the love lost is expressed in her listing the objectively valueless things that they had built their lives around, forgotten films and "trinkets". Also the incongruous chorus:

"And high above the water the eagle spots the fish /
Every martyr in this jungle is gonna get his wish."

The jerky, thrashy energy it's delivered with helps suggest secret dark intentions (against the ex?), once the sale is through.

4. Age of Kings
("raps under table: 'who from future time dost summon, I slumbering in memory,' etc ad lib")
(Pic: a 2 of Hearts)

Song of idealising a past love.

Not rose-tinting but gold-tinting. The scene is twice transformed: first, through the real effect of love on perception (making everything significant, everything exalted); but then also the vagaries of memory, smoothing edges and omitting negatives. Their relationship is a "lost age" to him, but, he thinks, attainable again ("sword sticks in the waiting stone still warm"). Blame is distributed between himself and the evil in the world's fog :

"Reach down to the moment when I should've said something true
Shadows and their sources, now stealing away with you"

(Note the repeat of track 2's down=past, up=future metaphor.)

5. Autopsy Garland
("check for something behind floral arrangement")
(Pic: Top-left quarter of a girl's face, her hair all big. She's probably smiling.)

Song of corruption for no clear reason.

Judy Garland reflecting - doing an "autopsy" - on her childhood. I don't know her story, and hadn't expected this crushing emotional portrait, "behind the floral arrangement" indeed! "Fat rich men love their twelve-year-olds": yikes. We see masks again, which I'm going to stretch for a reference to the adult actors: appearing as one thing on screen, but who "you don't wanna see" off camera if you're a kid surrounded by the excess and pressures of the top of the world. Song is also dominated by Wizard of Oz winks, as her life surely was.

"I consider all three of these figures [Bronson, Garland, Minelli] survivors in some way, and I’m very into survivors"
- JD

6. Beautiful Gas Mask
("a person known to you will make sudden contact")
(Pic: Fearsome skull-design gas-mask)

Song of wretches in love.

They're stumbling, blinded by both fog *and* blindfolds! But they "jump" anyway: take each other, though hidden from each other. (As usual.) JD uses a wonderful rise/fall string of imagery - a subset of the sleep/wake string running throughout the album. Awful hope in the mantra:

"Never sleep, remember to breathe deep
Never sleep, remember to breathe,
Breathe deep"

The falling doesn't go so well: they lose each other, find themselves in toxic surroundings. What do BGM's two settings, post-apocalypse and medieval, share? : A sense of being subject to the world. The gas mask is not the usual symbol of terror and stricture (nor an identity-obscuring persona like the other masks) but an odd agent of salvation - possibly love itself. There's another saviour, but their uncertainty re: them is total:

"Who will be there to catch us in his [hunting dog] jaws
When we arrive alive at last?"

"...Someone's coming to reward us, you wait and see.
(Or crush us both like fleas.)"

7. High Hawk Season
("everything eventually takes place on film")
(Pic: A child swimming underwater, inverse-mirrored)

Song of solidarity.

The images are scattered - vaguely biblical but also glorifying the idealism of youth. Friendly ghostly choir - one wonders what will happen to us at the end, when they stop singing with us. It can be read as a glorifying Within for the trashy pulp flick The Warriors ("Van Cordtland Park" gives it away).

"Who will rise, and who will sink?"

Alternatively: it can illustrate one idea of aesthetics: that things do not contain content; people contain content. As such, no one person determines a work's meaning. Each member of anything's audience sees a different work, because we attach unique meanings to it. ("It's hard to tell gifts of the spirit from clever counterfeits." And not only hard, but futile to.)

This album was released in March; the Occupy movement kicked off in September. But from where we stand, HHS can be seen to resonate with Occupy New York; that is, a new reading has opened up: the song is now larger than it was then. HHS deals in idealism, a NY park, graffiti, throngs, and Rising. (Also "frightened sheep" though.)

8. Prowl Great Cain
("expiation candles available in bulk; our most popular candle")
(Pic: a foreshortened arm, wrist bound in something strange and obscure)

Song of what follows for a traitor. (Meaningless freedom.)

This Goat names himself after the biblical Cain - having killed a brother, or one as close. His emotions are startling, ambivalent - "every now and then" he feels "guilty, but can't feel ashamed". Opening line serves to make Cain more repugnant to us (graverobber). He rationalises it as a military maneouvre ("I live to fight another day"). An Apocalypse Now reference gives us a sharper picture:

Kurtz: "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor…and surviving."

Goat 'Cain': "Like a caterpillar crawling out along the surface of the blade."

i.e. Trying to excise the moral part of himself. PGC's unusual because it treats the difficult survival of the abuser. Song ends with him waiting to see if he can escape the guilt, "the sickness", and getting demented.

9. Sourdoire Valley Song
("in a former incarnation you struggled but knew great joy")
(Pic: Two skulls, mirrored)

Song of the olden days, the birth of dignity.

Namedrops the French site of the earliest known Neanderthal burial and the African site of the earliest humans. Darnielle reconstructs an inner life for protohumans and links them to us. Their voice ends up as modern middle-aged Americans ("keep to ourselves mostly"). The Goat Hominid sees his line is going to end: the 'grass grows up to cover up the fire-pit and the forge'. His quiet acceptance of this is stunning. He cites Olduvai, "half the world away" (two million years ago) in impossible reminiscence, but also as if affirming evolution's motion.

The reference to "the old man" is an erudite nod to the fossils of nursed disabled humans that heavily indicate their compassion. (That the newer fossil was named 'Elvis' by researchers is one wonderful semiotic avenue that I refuse to take.)

10. Outer Scorpion Squadron
("most spirit guides instruct the novitiate to send any demonic spirit animals, trust the seeker")
(Pic: Two hands, held in the seance manner)

Song of inviting doom in.

One of his more beautiful settings for one of his more grotesque stories. The first half seems to describe a suicide-by-cop-by-scorpion; "raking the sands", provoking the dark bits of her past, the 'scorpion squadron', into destroying her. But then:

"Ghosts of my childhood stay with me, if you will.
Find a place where there's water, hold you under til you're still."

We then see that the Goat (Darnielle, or near enough to him) was really ambushing them, drowning them so he can get on.

11. For Charles Bronson
("the room filled suddenly with the sound of a passing train")
(Pic: Revolver with trigger fingered)

Song of pained macho aging ("Never let them see you're weak").

Introduced by Darnielle injecting himself for two seconds before flicking into the 'Goat, Bronson. It's an odd device, putting as it does those two faces together. The only subsurface point I can offer is that the liner note puts Bronson's "lucky break" (late-career starring role) into poetic context - the noise of the train a fleeting opportunity to fire the revolver without giving yourself away.

"A terrible example of a person with a gigantic chip on his shoulder, but made great by it. (Like everyone in the history of the world!)"
- JD

(Was tempted to read this as a paean to the British psycho in the hole. Anyone know if he was named after the American?)

12. Never Quite Free
("turn over crossing card; pause")
(Pic: distorted carousel horse)

Song of bruised renewal.

This isn't so terrible as a song, but it's terrible as a fact: the most positive song he's ever written is boring, neither tragic glory nor ironic inspiration. The drums are nauseating, too. (In the Life of the World to Come, where a number of Goats are dogmatically affirmative, it was their delusions that gave the songs literary legs.) He seems to flick between two 'Goats here - perhaps an abuse victim (Darnielle...) and the abuser. ("When you see me, you'll know")

"For those of us who are into horror, dread is a nice, sort of powerful feeling. It's not that you're afraid of something; you're riding that feeling. And that's what I think surviving stuff is about-- learning to ride stuff like waves instead of letting it crush you."
- JD

13: Liza Forever Minelli
("Re-scan everybody for disguises. Somebody's hiding something.")
(Pic: Palm tree, from nearby, you looking up)

Song of Hollywood at night: the isolation and imprisonment of fame.

There's a case for seeing the Goat here as Darnielle - by all accounts he loves Judy Garland deeply - this could be empathy with Minnelli, lying on the Boulevard pavement next to her or Garland's Walk of Fame tile, "your star next to my face". (Giving Ms Minnelli an inner life being a task no less daunting than his work on Homo heidelbergensis in track 9.)

Not that there's nothing to work with - in her shadow ("If you're gonna sit next to the dealer you get to bet blind"), with her misfortune ("The compasses I came into this world with never really worked so good"), and her predestination, showbiz ('never going to get away from this place').

But enough of that. "Anyone here mentions "Hotel California" dies before the first line clears his lips": think about the way we listen to him (or any band). We scream for one or two songs, shite hatchlings mindless with the need to be fed. This song - this map of this town I don't know dedicated to this person I don't respect who presumably went through a lot to gain the flat showbiz contentment that lies without - is not going to be screamed for.

Anyway, All Eternals Deck ends swaddled in memory looking ahead to the sun.

weaponized

2011-12-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

against nothingness we used bang.
against lifelessness we used rna.
against stasis we used predation.
against blind we used sense.
against sense we used mind.
against neanderthals we used braining.
against darkness we used each other.
against peace we used questions.
against angst we used questions.
against boredom we used questions.
against impotence we used questions.
against arrogance we used questions.
against questions we used god and fire.
against hunger we use life.
against women we use themselves.
against happiness we use ideals.
against diversity we use toxin.
against death we use soap.
against thought we use stuff.
against memory we use google.

nor custom stale her infinite variety

2011-12-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

I am a glutton for variety. This is cool, cos it means I can like speaking to all kinds of people, and speak passably to them about almost anything among the things they love.

But there is also a real, pressing possibility that it will rob me of my chances at both lasting happiness and a substantive contribution to Thought. (Via my inconstancy, familiarity-contempt, procrastination, and general enslavement to diminishing marginal return.)

what it is

2011-12-02T04:26:00.000-08:00

Was skimming an epistemology book; came to the Epilogue. These two pages suddenly jump the book into space. Author wrestles with a Cartesian demon called Krebs (German for 'cancer') and goes on to give a metaphor for the entire project of all academic philosophy, in the manner of Kafka:

"I know that there is no Krebs, but what if I were wrong? I am not, but I could be, but I am not, though I may be.

A wall has been built, and it is being built; we think it will continue to be built. No one knows exactly who started the wall, though many have helped. Nor does anyone know how far it reaches: it seems to go on and on forever. We think the builders are our principals.

The wall is to protect us from the invasion. Wall soldiers man the wall. Whenever a soldier is overcome by an invader, he must be replaced by a stronger soldier, & we are forever sending replacements. We have even sent soldiers to man the wall in the distant provinces. No one knows how strong the enemy forces are there. We need as many soldiers as we can get, but we want only those who are strong enough to repel an invader. It is possible that there is a man strong enough to repel an invader. We know if a man isn't strong enough if he is overcome by an invader. But if he is not, we don't know whether it is because he is strong enough, or good fortune has kept stronger invaders away. We have found a section of the wall where the invaders are too strong for anyone weaker than K. So we know that no man weaker than K will do there. For the time being we risk it: we judge that K is strong enough. Perhaps someday K may have to be replaced. Yes, we know that.

Meanwhile we stare at the long reaches of the wall and wonder."

- Paul Ziff, Epistemic Analysis

I like this because of its totalitarian melodrama. Though Ziff himself is a sturdy coherentist, the way he presents epistemology here casts postmodern shadows - "why do the invaders invade? who started this war? is the centre even worth defending? what would happen if the wall fell?" The wall, after all, is not Knowledge, Science or Virtue, but an ideology: that of orthodox Western philosophy. The little pastiche of academic prose towards the end is so tense that I don't know where the bottom to his irony is.

speak sense

2011-11-21T04:14:00.000-08:00

the time for talk is over:

the rising tide lifts all boats;
you can't fight the tide,
you're either with us or against us.

it takes one to know one;
he knows one,
so he was asking for it

no smoke without fire,
no fire without fuel
no fuel without sowing (you've made your bed now reap it.)

spare the rod and spoil the child;
fight fire with leopards
who won't change their spots (though the tiger has a chance)

when in Rome do as I say not as I do
because I say so
you have too much time on your hands (out, damned tock, out!)

all's fair in love and war,
no pain, no gain,
and the time for talk deemed over

On the Eve of All Hallow's Eve: A Parafactual Ghost Tour of Aberdeen

2011-10-26T07:13:00.001-07:00

[cowritten with Paul Crowe for Childreach International

Scene 1. St Machar Power Plant (St Machar Cathedral, Seaton).

Night. One figure stands bolt upright atwixt the churchyard gates. Another, hunched and demented, flits between the tombstones, prodding the earth at each grave with a technical device of some sort. He minces over to the crowd and grants them all a trinket, mumbling "Talismans! Talismans!"

[incredibly long beat]

G: Welcome, friends! Do you believe I have brought you to a place of the past?

[beat] - You are then mistaken, friends! You stand in the very heart of modern, postmodern, metamodern, patamodern Aberdeen! A power plant supplying the whole of Aberdeen with carbon-free electricity, all year round! The largest green power facility in Europe - the very soul of modernity! How, you ask? How?

Oh, I do so love your questions. A mere nine years ago I would have had to demur a true answer - we were so maligned, so grey market in those days - thanks to the moralists(!) But now, ascendent on the wings of Mr Salmond's imprimatur, I can tell you loudly, broadly and with upheld head.

Merely the brilliant - and patented - conjunction of two elementary phenomena! First; a law of electromagnetism - that is, that a wire moved through a magnetic field creates electrical current. Secondly; that other well-known law of nature, that when one severely irritates the dead, they turn in their grave. We simply wrap the corpse in copper - the coffin in magnets - stimulate their anathema, and - Presto! Free energy in limitless proportion to the incidence above of their antithesis below!

Take Mr Alexander Gatto. Died in 1926, dear me. But for the last nine years, he has been supplying in death what he never could in life; excitement and social utility! Mr Gatto, bless him, hated women. In 1978 we encouraged a certain lady to seize Britain, and Scotland, by the throat. Gatto has not yet stopped spinning from the shock of this; we project his momentum to run out sometime in 2030. We at Dynamic Desecration Ltd stop at nothing to give you the cheap, green, noiseless - and spiteful - energy you deserve. Our motto? Gradii et Contemptus: "Nuance and Contempt".

You can see one of our staff, Igor Stravinsky here testing levels. Igor was recently suspended from his Hate Team post for malpractice and excessive frottage, but we hope to reform him in time.

Sometimes the trends of world history provide more than enough - almost too much - hate juice. Take the case of Mr James Esslemont here, who abhorred knowledge in plebeians.

And Robert Beattie; a local novelist once called the Proust of the North! A fantastically conceited man, he gave a decent yield through the century merely from his prominence declining to nearly nil - but since just last year he's had a true Renaissance. Our dedicated Hate Team in California fixed a deal with no less a director than Michael Bay to produce two - and only two - films of Beattie's six-volume psychological realist opus, Whit's Adae Wi Malkie? Since the news broke, he alone can power the university campus.

We are by this stage so efficient that we require manned operation only once a week, on Sundays. You might have noted that our facility staff are somewhat old and dottled; I can only assure you that the mechanisms contained therein are well within even their understanding. This staffing decision has left the very most brilliant sadists to serve in our Hate Teams.

William Lawson; a man who hated... himself. In our early, penurious days we had to settle with buying up billboard space and flyering posters of his face - which produced, as you might imagine, a sparse yield indeed. But with the advent of the craze for Green energy, we have been able to afford cloning! Igor is the earliest viable clone of Mr Lawson, and given his freakish and disagreeable countenance and personality, we can well understand what it was that Lawson despised in himself. What is Daddy reading at the moment, Igor?

[Igor begins to hassle the Director, tugging at his sleeve and being hissed at in return]

[briskly] Samuel Broadbent hated fun;

[coming to an eroded, illegible stone] This gentleman...hated the neglect of churchyards;

Robert Westland - who as you can see, is buried here in wonderful fraternal company, with no fewer than five to the grave - hated his family.

I need not brag when recounting our research method, for it speaks for itself - a unique blend of arts and engineering, I think it fair to say! We scour local records, diaries and survivora looking for that special something in everyone's life that one will do anything to avoid. Recently we have begun to enlist the family of the recently deceased, who often tell me how therapeutic and cathartic it is to recount all the bigotries and neuroses of their dearly passed ones.

John Ross - oho! - a special pet project of ours. Mr Ross was the chief horticulturalist and architect of Union Terrace Gardens. Sir Ian Wood is head of our Hate Division.

Finally - WHAT IS IT IGOR!? AAH, GET AWAY - FREAK, YOU RUNT, YOU INORGANIC EXCRETA! [beating] Ahem; finally: one William Gatto, a Quaker and a rabid fool, who hated violence.

What of stability, you may ask? Is there any risk of "melt" "down"? Hardly! Even in the unlikely case that all our Hate Teams fail simultaneously, risking a critical loss of disdain - well, all these men hated gays.

Scene 2. The Battles, Mauled Piskies and Malt Whisky. (Tillydrone Road down to Wallace Tower).

[Group is overtaken and led by a newly upright authoritative Paul and sword.]

P: The Scot! A proud history of industriousness, academic zeal, and respect for the letter of the law - no? Yet - it wasn’t always like this. Before the modern Scot came, an ancestral Scotland was populated entirely by drunken, violent natives who cared nothing for their neighbours, the fundamental elements of civilisation or indeed theirselves. Unthinkable, I know. In this wild, raving age clans were in constant war. Hungry, hairy, sweaty-bollocked men would frequently set to offing one another. Some of the earliest recorded, which caused the greatest loss of life, were the Whisky Wars of 1203. The Glengarry Clan had begun selling whisky, claiming to have invented it. They were challenged by the O'Campbells, a clan of extremely Irish origin who counterclaimed its invention. The two groups set to a bitter war, in what might have been hisotry's first copyright settlement - had not a third clan, the Lamonts, passed through the sixteenth skirmish blind drunk. You see [motioning] in the days when every man had a sword on the hip, a dirk on the shin and a nasty hatpin inventory, a drunk could kill six men merely carelessly bending down.

[another]

We are passing on our right the new commemorative plaque to the Meat Cleaver Fuck Massacre of Tillie Dron Road... but let's not talk about that.

The most significant war of all took place in 1555 between the McMalcolms and the McDougals. Or, should I say, almost took place...

[P ducks behind a wall. G takes sword.]

G: WAAAAAAAAAAAGH! Dougal McDougal! Rise to the hour of your death!

[long beat. tries again]

G: McDougal! In the sight of god and in the name of the Queen-

Clansman: -King.

G: What? Och it hardly matters I can never keep up with the buggers- AND IN THE NAME OF THE MONARCH OF SCOTLAND, I am come to serve thee as thy bane!

[McDougal appears in his dressing gown, puts on his glasses, blinks blearily.

P: ...McMalcolm? Uh [yawn] what're ya doing howling at 6am?

G: As promised, McDougal, I and my mighty men are here to war.

P: To war?

G: To war! (It's an intransitive verb.)

P: Oh. Well, I'm sorry min, but there's a protocol to these sorts of things-

G: I KNOW THE BLOODY RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AWRIGHT! I sent the envoy last week. He had a crude drawing of you which he tore up in front of you and pissed on.

P: [pained sympathy] ...I never got it, min.

G: But...look [pulls out phone] ...Sent Lackeys folder...look! there!

P: [shaking head] I didna get it min. What network you on?

G: [crestfallen, petulant] House of Orange.

P: Ah. Their free envoys are often a bit shit, you know - gettin drunk, fallin in ditches and so on.

G: [sulking, highpitched] Nuh! Fuck this! Nuh! It's nae fair! I've got all my men ready and everything!

P: [conciliatory] How's about you go fuck up the McDonalds? They're just down the road...

G: WHAT KINDAE A WARLIKE CHIEFTAIN DYOU THINK I AM LIKE? Just picking fights for no reason? You and I are linked by oath of vengeance, son.

P: [beat. flailing] ...We need time to prepare!

G: Right. Ok: I'll count to a hundred. [turns back, counts]

P: [panic; idea] Wait! Wait wait wait! Wait: Why are you invading, again?

G: Ehhhhhhh...

Clansman in crowd: To distract your unruly clansmen from your incompetent rule!

G: [pensive] Oh. Aye, that's a good one. [riled] But no; not primarily that!

C: Cuz your castle's nicer'n oors!

C: Cuz we're Scots - the natural enemies of the Scots!

C: Cuz yoor sheep bully oor sheep!

C: Cuz we'll use yer blood tae wash the blood off oor swords!

C: Cuz we secretly fancy yous but canna express ony ither way!

G: [at this last] Fuck's sake speak for yourself, Calum! NO! We war with you...

[awkward beat]

G: ...Because the time for talk is over!

[Paul flees, G pursues, sword raised. They run around a bench, taunting.]

P: You crazy fuck! I mind you in school - ayeways were a loony cunt.

G: And you? You were the only bastard who wis a high-heid scoob and a loony cunt!

P: You ken what everybody said about you back then? That you were a psycho just like yer da.

G: Graaaaaaaaaaargh!!!

[McDougal runs on to Wallace Tower. McDougal hops the foot-high fence and preens, 'safe']

P: Ha! No one has ever scaled Castle McDougal!

G: Oh, you mean in the six whole years since you paid off the mortgage? Fucken dauntless!

P: At least some of us didna do oor whole thing on payday loans and dumbass credit cards!

G: CLASSISM? RIGHT! THAT'S IT! YOU DIE!

[throws sword point-first into grass. absurd slap fight over 'wall' ensues. Foiled.]

G: I MIND NOW! I know why you must die!

[a minute or so of inarticulate noises, subsiding to a loaded silence, each looking into middle distance in different directions.]

P: [quietly] ...dyou, uh...want to come back to mine, then?

[beat]

G: [as quietly] Yeah, awright.

[They walk, shyly arm in arm, around the side and away.]

Scene 3. Wallace Library (Wallace Tower).

[We return immediately, in media res of a Four Minute Warning siren as simulated by Gavin's falsetto. Paul is his historian again.]

P: It is 1954. Stalin had had indigestion all day. Understandably, the Foreign Office, like the Premier's intestines, was distressed. Reports from Moscow: a jagged bowel movement that led firstly to the execution of three world-class Russian poets, and secondly, for the only time in its history, the Four Minute Warning of an imminent nuclear attack went out over Britain. Here, in the then Wallace Library, a terrible decision was made.

[P picks up stack of books, runs around, darting between shelves, frantic and whimpering].

P2: COMMIES! FIRE! COMMIE FIRE! Which books? This? These? Should we be...representative? Or...save the greats?!

[continues until]

G: [accosting him with gravitas] STOP. This is yet a library, is it not?

P2: Head librarian! Head, I've been looking all over! The bunker is small, m'lord, too small for even half the reference section! What'll we do!? WHAT'LL-

[Head clubs assistant.]

G: Even as we begin to char, we will not forsake the lessons instilled in us by the Librariate and Informatory Service - or will we? Now go. I feel a soliloquoy coming on.

[Exit P. long beat]

G: What's in a name? Would a classic not-so-titled smell as Great? ...I think not. You lot have always worshipped power rather than beauty. What about their being "the best that has ever been thought and said"? Hardly. All the libraries in all the world contain little of what we have been, and we are bad enough at seeing quality that the most of it has no doubt eluded history, and us. The canon are merely the lucky masterpieces. For every Balzac and every Burns there are 70 men, their equals, left in the dust; the back-shop if they are lucky.

And given these books' failure to civilise us - given that the world will soon catch fire because our artists and idealists failed to persuade us, were not powerful enough, were not universal and true enough - well. These have had their chance. The only reason to keep them would be to remember which symbols did not work last time, and to remind us of who we wanted to be.

Assistant Librarian Grant!

P: [appearing] Yes!

G: Select every eightieth book at random from each shelf. Take those to the bunker.

P: Sir?!

G: Maybe next time they'll stop all this from getting this far.

[solemn beats. Process away from Wallace Tower. Long beat.]

P: Wait; wait, sir! It's going to be ok!

[beat]

P: I've got all the classics on my Kindle anyway!

[jazzhands, to fourth wall]

Scene 4. The wrong side of the Don. (Seaton Park).

[down the leafy slope to the Don.]

G: [toxically sweet]...Paul?
[beat]
G: Didn't we have some material written for this bit?

P: Oh! Right yeah. We have led you to a place drenched in tragedy to tell the tale of Annie Larkin and her infidelious lover, Lonnie Firkin. It went a little something like this:

G: That's not the story at all! It was a political assassination!

P: Jesus. Not this, Gavin! You promised you wouldn't-

G: Oh, so the fact she was a Rosicrucian had nothing to do with it, eh?

P: [turning to audience, blocking G] Annie had known no iota of human warmth in her brief life. Born an orphan into a nunnery known even among nunneries to be overdoing it a bit-

G: I do not deny she was an orphan - but to which absent parents, PAUL?

P: To wolves.

G: Annie Larkin was the first daughter of the Queen of France!

[escalation]

...

P: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

G: Observez, mon freres! The victors writing over all other histories! The truth-seeker denied, as ever!

P: IT'S A FUCKING GHOST TOUR NOT A LECTURE. BY DAVID ICKE.

G: You think that little of our audience?! You think they can't be both challenged and entertained?

P: [standing on the jetty by the river] Look! For FUCK'S SAKE LOOK - I'm Annie Larkin, right? Broken heart and fulsome belly; I will die by my own hand, because this life has lacked even promise of warmth.

G: [raging] Oo! Roleplay! I spose that makes me 'Lonnie Firkin' - "lacking heart and beery-bellied". And I'll kill you before you kill yourself because that's the kind! of guy! I am!

[On "am", G boots P into the Don, and turns immediately to address his audience.]

G: Lonnie Firkin was a fall guy, the Lee Harvey Oswald of the 18th Century.

[The water is two foot deep. P howls his dissent]

G: Annie Larkin was heiress to the thrones of Scotland, France, Nederlands and Germany (which admittedly existed only in secret at this point). She was killed.

[howling]

G: Nay: 'Annie Larkin' is a metaphor, Aesopian language for those of us in the Know. The Larkinians were a sect, the head of which's line stretches back to Christ and forward to L Ron Hubbard! it was here, in Seaton, that They tried to sever her holy line. I've personally excavated 400 bodies from the north bank.

P: [more howling from the water] They were the 400 noblemen who drowned trying to save her!

G: And the other 400 on the south?

P: They were the sentimental commoners who drowned themselves in hysterical grief!

G: 400 men an hour died for seventy days in the suppressed Battle of Holy Dark Seaton Fuck. The records show that the ghosts of Machiavelli and Grotius manifested over the battle and had a go at each other.

P: Scotland ran dry of sentimental noble Christian men! More imported themselves from Normandy to solve the supply issue!

G: The Don choked with coagulating blood all the way along its length. They failed; a baby survived and crawled off along the congealing river.

P: [crawling onto land, bellowing] The Don, choked from source to mouth with bodies, the bodies of every noble Christian man in Britain - 170,000 willingly throwing themselves on to the crush, the last of them drowning not in water but in human tweed; the crush washing ohsoslowly out to sea - a tumbling grotesque such has never been seen! AND GOD HIMSELF COMMITTED SUICIDE AT THE SIGHT OF IT!

[beat. End.]

Unused scenes

- The Cathedral of Birch. Or, the genuinely unsettling path out of Hillhead into Seaton.
- The path circling clockwise around Hillhead. Lover's loup genuinely does mean "suicidal heartbroken spot".
- The Train playpark in Seaton. Celebrating the death by train of Aberdeen 1861's least favourite little boy.
- The Brig of Balgownie.

prog

2011-10-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

Further to my utopian blurt: now, say I don't like to self-medicate - what are the other treatment options, Doctor?

Materialism - traditional politics. Global growth, Development, Reform. (Yes, but for what? The eradication of poverty? Good, but not enough. The end of alienated work? Yes, but not the end of only that.)

Materialism - traditional hedonism. (with current drugs and people: cheap, unsustainable; for lucky unreflective folk only.)

Asceticism - traditional religion. (It had its chance.)

Asceticism - traditional philosophy. (Has worked badly and for few.)

Aestheticism. (life as art if not life for art. See also Absurdism.)

Existentialism - as affirmative philosophical anarchism.

Mysticism. (Eh. It takes all kinds. See also Romanticism.)

Other-directedness - the ruthless pursuit of Truth.

Radical psychoanalysis. (Fuck knows if or how this would work. They don't seem to know, themselves.)

Radical politics. (The odds are not good, but then, neither is the world.)

Altruism. Personal-political, environmental, spiritual. The most common form, familial, is not really altruism at all. But it's something. ("I was not nothing, and did not do nothing.")

Option 0 (or 12, if you prefer) - biotechnology - is compatible with a lot of these. Unlike a lot of these though it's almost within reach, and is available to all regardless of intelligence or species.

Note that Nietzsche took options 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 - not being a man to let contradiction much impede him.

ad alienum

2011-10-25T04:27:00.001-07:00

Said the peasant to the priest: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto!"

Priest: "Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?"

I come from philosophy. In that house there's an old and warming idea - that it shouldn't matter who raises a point, because good arguing is nil ad hominem - it has "nothing directed to the person" who's arguing, but all instead to what they argue. This is a noble idea. Unfortunately some new ways of thinking raise fairly fatal problems for it.

- When we talk about Difference in the new way, ad hominem is important. When an argument is politicised (as indeed even the abstractest arguments are), it can matter who is saying what. Some philosophical topics draw on experiences which are not universal nor easily mentally simulated.

For instance: gender. It's not hard to see what's problematic about a man stomping around telling a group of women what feminism should be, no matter how sympathetic and well-informed the man is, or how hostile to feminism the women are. Part of male privilege is to be disproportionately valued in discourse. Part of feminism for the foreseeable future will be to make men qua men uncomfortable. I can handle that.

- And, from a very different skew (which funnily enough bends right round to meet up with the first point): let's talk Nietzsche. He and other supporters of "psychologism"-about-philosophy feel free to evaluate philosophies based on their philosopher rather than their truth. Questioning the motives and complexes of thinkers is valid for them because beliefs and arguments are embodied and situational things, always made by some flawed person for a reason. It's an anti-foundationalist thing, stupid. It's also great fun.

The nagging-child question "Well, why do you think that?" is invariably eventually plugged with an attitude, and not a "proper" justification. "Because I am inclined to it" is exactly what their ad hominem aspersions aim to get you to admit.

It's only in a world better than ours that ad hominem will really be inadmissible.

How Little Wisdom: maxims from economics

2011-10-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

"Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
- Axel Oxenstierna

"Did you ever think that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else."
- Lyndon B Johnson, supposedly

Some insights derived from economics. Together they form an open worldview nowhere near as sterile and dismal as that which the field is usually thought to instil. Note that few actual economists absorb these - but then, few have any philosophy at all, beyond the third-hand naive positivist-utilitarianism which stands in for a party-line in the Main Stream. There is humanity and honesty available in economics: so I cite the heterodox economics movement - those of us who think of people as people, economies as economies, and economics as one day becoming a real science.

1. It is hard to change people.

"All that moves us without violence, then, is persuasion, the realm of rhetoric."
- Deirdre McCloskey.

People change all the time, but trying to direct that change is notoriously technical and intensive work (see maxim 2). This is why some people say, mistakenly, that incentives are the core of economics: they're the easiest way to get folk to shift. (Take the environmental policy brouhaha - even when reasonable doubt is ruled out, we, the world, keep dumping. Appeals to reason have convinced only a very few of us to make significant changes. Hence, all the proposals involve increasing emission costs one way or other, and letting people reallocate around that.) Whether this is because we're hardwired for certain myopic behaviour by biology, habit or culture, or just because we're lazy and stubborn is besides the point up at this level of abstraction. Note that this maxim does not preclude social engineering, i.e. progressive politics. But along with #2, 3 & 7, it gives us an idea of the sheer effort and risk it will take.

Giant-ass thesis: Non-political factors are more powerful than political factors.
Countermanding thesis: But economics is only one of the non-political factors.

HETERODOX ECONOMICS BRAG: Too many economists just give in in the face of this. The remainder of us risk making what Adrian Leftwich calls the "technicist fallacy": the dubious assumption that all governance problems have a policy solution.

2. It always depends.

Economies are complex in the hardest sense: analysis takes place with such gross uncertainty and such limited experimentation that unconditional answers are usually dishonest. Certainly anyone forecasting economic trends is doing so out of quackery or theory-blinded ignorance. Admittedly the third thing you learn in basic ec is the phrase In ceteris paribus - "all things remaining equal" - i.e. "it doesn't depend!" - but at least that means they admit there's a problem. A further gaping gap in the old theories has been sighted (that modernism will eat itself and shit the future). Soon we'll get our chance to fail to fill it. I'm talking postmodern economics, a seemingly unlikely creature, but one which actually follows easily from good economics' obsession with contingency, (post-structuralist!), and anarchic nature of economies.

HETERODOX ECONOMICS BRAG: This is not to say that scepticism is a virtue in much of economics; regrettably it is not. (Excepting, of course, radical scepticism about moral or collective action, which they're mad for.)

3. Things fall apart, but sometimes they fall into place too.

The ghost of Kant gums up arguments on political economy: many people have a (vague) intuition that the amoral intentions trump any accidental good of markets: I have heard things like "capitalists don't care about social outcomes - all social outcomes determined by capitalists will be to their advantage". Well, yes, if they're doing their job and are lucky, it will. A less unreasonable question is whether it is only to their advantage. This mindset holds exploitation to be any case in which people are used as a means. (Stronger definition: the act of using labour without offering adequate compensation.) (Broader definition: any relationship of unequal benefit.) Under each of these definitions, every employer* is an exploiter, since they wouldn't employ you if they couldn't milk more value out. (*Every "rational" employer - see #4.)

"The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism."
— Joan Robinson

But I no longer think this inherently wrong: there is joy, capability and existential relief in job creation, regardless of what the employer intended. I refuse to use people - except that my participation in this economy and history have made that move for me. So my conception of what is moral is larger now: sadly aposteriori as well as tritely virtuous.

Consider this (if it makes you angry then you have the ghost of Kant in you) "the dastardly and amoral oil cartel OPEC have done more to slow global warming than all activist efforts combined." (The argument is that by distorting the oil price upwards for forty years, they made people economise and incentivised the development of cleaner energy. Shoddy discussion here. Entirely accidentally - a thing fallen in place.)

2+3. Protection is sometimes unsafe.

Moral judgments are one-step:

"People are poor? Oh. Give em money."

"People pollute? Oh. Make em stop."

"Landlords charge too much? So make em stop."

But the world is anything but one-step! The analysis of behaviour in terms of incentives - for all that it's often used for self-congratulatory cynicism - is at least capable of looking ahead, a little way beyond the second domino. Properly moral action demands it.

4. People aren't stupid

Huh?! Hold on, hold on: let me set up my easel and astrolabe.

a. I mean the assumption of economic rationality. This "rationality" is quite different from the real thing, note - it corresponds to the will to more stuff and the rarer derived will to efficiency.) The assumption has come under fire, being as it is a ridiculous caricature of human inner life. However. Traditionally there's two ways for theory to succeed: either it's true, or it'd be good if it was. Since rational choice is neither, it is rejected and despised.

The kicker comes when we consider the alternative assumption: that people are often irrational. How do we shape policy around this? What kind of road do we build? How do we design insurance schemes or benefits? It turns out that it is punishingly hard to do without: #4 is the behavioural version of Donald Davidson's principle of interpretative charity. Rational choice "theory", reconstructed this way, is not a substantive theory at all but a provisional methodological principle.
Now, the behavioural economists - actual scientists! - will inherit the earth one day soon. But policy prescription won't easily follow from their discoveries regarding our unpredictability and perversity, because while there's only one way to be economically rational*, there are thousands of ways to be irrational. (*This is not technically true. But how can rational choice can accomodate macro events like the 2008 disaster? Surely that really was just animal spirits - the lord of the flies set loose in stock exchanges? In part, yes. The good choicist's answer is to decouple rationality from efficiency; it is here that we can boot the neoclassicals for their intellectual malfeasance. Crises can thus be explained in terms of rational but revoltingly inefficient collective action problems, rather than mass hysteria.

""All models are wrong but some are useful."
— George Box

b. #4 also means that economists do not take false consciousness seriously. "Metapreferences" (i.e. our inescapable and omnipresent social conditioning) are invisible to them. This has a positive aspect: economists are able to respect people's choices in a flawed world. This is also a kind of courtesy: "You're prudent until proven otherwise". Unlike Marxism and the new economics of happiness, even the nastiest neoclassical theory does not presume that it knows better than you what is good for you. This presumption is not a dealbreaker for me, because ideology is too powerful and illiberal to ignore, but I recognise that calling people brainwashed has a cost.

HETERODOX ECONOMICS BRAG: Groundwork for an economics which includes metapreferences (and virtues other than shrewdness) is hot off the press.

5. Efficiency is humane.

Somewhere along the way rejecting the Victorian era's hypocritical bullshit, the idea arose that being efficient is inimical to some basic human will. (The will to piss about, perhaps.) This might be so, and is certainly agreeably Romantic. But as well as losing its social prominence, efficiency lost its moral connotation: the word "economy" originally meant good household management, "thrift" meant . This is a mistake: economy is ecological! And, in a world of scarcity, it can be deeply moral too. If you ain't using it, someone will; if you don't need it or particularly want it, don't use it; therefore thrift.

6. Sometimes there is no right answer.

""The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
— Friedrich von Hayek

Read normatively, this is a fairly common idea. Read epistemically - as causal nihilism - well, I'm just mad, lulled by inches to madness by the music of reason. (Which is fine.) Capitalism sucks. But it really probably sucks less than the other current options, and doesn't have to stifle future ones. Remember #3: it accidentally clothes and feeds us, it accidentally enables state spending on education and health and law. It accidentally created surplus time in which to think. For all else that it accidentally or callously does, do not deny this.

7. Most things fail.

(Even before considering De Beauvoir's more fatal sense.) So: things don't work: and worse, most fail silently, creating a false sense of security. This is the least mainstream insight, but watch its space.

Subjectification

2011-10-23T10:02:00.001-07:00

oh baby I love it when you talk rorty to me
and I love your
ample activism, your
heaving critique, your
insatiable reading, your
tight, pert logic, your
kinky perception, your
Fuck-me ambition, your
slender irritations, your
broad, child-bearing mind,
and yo' thighs.

LISTEN: "Mr Chainsaw" by Alkaline Trio

2011-10-21T04:52:00.001-07:00

"Found out recently that you are leaving -
'For good I hope', I softly tell my ceiling.
It's better now to be alive;
Sleeping is my 9 to 5;
I'm having nightmares all the time...
Of running out of words that rhyme."

"See also
Anguish
Anxiety
Anger
Existentialism
Alienation
Byronic hero
Kafkaesque
Weltschmerz
Fear of death
Virginity
Emo"

- Wikipedia

Emo had its day. The word seems to have disappeared - usage peaking in, what, 2006? This is partly because it has been enthusiastically assimilated into pop. (This is the fate of hypersuccessful memes - to become ordinary. It's one of two standards in yoof visual style, and a go-to in chart pop too.)

What little ideological content there was in it - commodified Gothic Romanticism, and also what a charitable cultural theorist might one day see as a kind of genderqueering - is gone and not missed, since it took its chauvinism, hypocritical conformity and soft nihilism with it. Some funny relics of the age: whenever my brother - echt punk! - was caught listening to Alkaline Trio, he would insist that they played "melodic hardcore". In them days in our house, even "pop-punk" was an insult.

Rock and its subset punk were youth musics. Emo, a subset of punk, trumped both of them on this score, being as it was the soundtrack to that portion of puberty in which happiness itself is rebelled against. A pretence to nihilism, sold in 3 minute packets - the first successful commodification of nihilism in history? (O course harsh music and slow films had been using nihilism for ages - but never catching quite this level of youth demand.) Morbid, violent drama for timid, repressed kids. It sold because it enabled petty catharsis - most of us know how profoundly comforting self-dramatisation and the embrace of misery can be.

But even now, when I think music's job is to ward off and castigate selfpity, I love this particular set of maudlin coke-addled Satanists. How easy our affections are, if you just catch us in a weak moment! (Or a weak five years.)

**************************************************

Alkaline Trio had several things to keep them ahead of the emo drudge queue:

Two distinctive singers: one soulful brat, Skiba and one baritone whiner, Andriano. Dan Andriano generally lands the more typically emo vocal themes - the bread-winning "beg that sky for lightning bolts" refrain.

An ear for a hook, lifted from the Misfits obviously, but also from 80s synth.

Some sense of their own ridiculousness (wit).

The marriage of melodrama and banality - "Fine time to fake a seizure, to feel your mouth on mine - you're saving me - I'D LOVE TO RUB YOUR BACK".

Drums are sometimes interesting in a nonpunk way.

Mostly had the sense to not slow down.

Selfconsciously primitive!

They don't always conjure up my mid-teens. But mostly - the uninspired inarticulacy, the afternoons on awful EA Games with Irn Bru and a pie, the directionless anger, and directionless lust. This is of course what it is supposed to conjure, or, in this song's case, exorcise.

*********************************************************

"Mr Chainsaw" is a prime cut of the goofy and affirmative 'Trio. The only critical note I can offer is that the "you" is the singer himself. And that I like it a lot.

"IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING WE'RE SINGING

ABOUT GROWING UP, ABOUT GIVING IN." x8

**************************************************

The horror film cliches and naff self-importance of emo encroached on their fourth album; the fifth is full of lethargy, empty piano and synth frill; and the sixth and seventh are more than ignorable. Alkaline Trio have reached the logical end of their self-homogenization - and may as well be Green Day wearing darker clothes. Sic transit vigor.

***********************************************

There aren't many covers - they're not that kind of band because we, their fans, were much too passive by nature for that.

The Kōans of Gottlob Frege

2011-10-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

It might seem an odd claim, but Emmanuel Levinas (Continental philosopher par excellence; and Jewish) and Gottlob Frege (Analytic philosopher par excellence; and anti-Semitic) have large things in common:

They are both hedgehogs - rotating, stretching and hammering their single peg into every hole presented to them. Levinas' peg is an Absurd kind of agápē; Frege's is the logical-componential bedrock of reality.

They are both wildly successful in tiny alleyways of the academic endeavour.

And most of all in that both of their systems feel dishonest, at first and maybe after. This is ironic, because their strategies are I think conceived in the spirit of truth. Frege is sometimes more of an accountant than a philosopher: his sneaky mathematical abstraction lets him bypass controversies... but led to the rise of Analysis and a sleek metaphysical minimalism which only recently ended its reign. Levinas' gnomic, logic-free Proclamations... are perfectly appropriate in his anti-ontology anti-phenomenology world, built as it is of neurotic and unimaginable love.

*************************************************

A kōan is a melodramatic tool of Zen Buddhism* by which a master presents an acolyte with an apparently nonsensical or paradoxical story and the acolyte has to go off and solve it. (A flash of prajna does the trick.) Frege uses existing words for very new and idiosyncratic philosophical purposes. Taken with his highly repetitive and recursive structure, this makes his system humorous if viewed aesthetically (i.e. in itself as writing) rather than looked 'through' to his meaning.

* Or at least our Hollywood version of it.

(NB: I know that the following are not strictly kōans; that's the joke. The essence of a kōan is that it is not logically analysable. And whatever else Frege is, he is that!)

1. Frege say: ALWAYS SEPARATE WITH SHARPNESS THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FROM THE LOGICAL.

2. Frege say: NEVER LOSE SIGHT OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CONCEPT AND OBJECT.

3. Frege say: NEVER ASK FOR THE MEANING OF A WORD IN ISOLATION, BUT ONLY IN THE CONTEXT OF A PROPOSITION.

4. But Frege also say: THE NOMINATUM OF THE SENTENCE IS A FUNCTION OF THE NOMINATA OF THE NAMES OCCURRING IN IT (!)

5. Frege say: FUNCTIONS ARE IDENTICAL IFF THEY HAVE THE SAME EXTENSION.

6. Frege say: NUMBERS ARE OBJECTS; NUMBER IS A SORTAL CONCEPT.

7. Frege say: A NUMBER IS AN OBJECT OF THE EXTENSION OF A CONCEPT OF A CONCEPT.

8. Frege say: CONCEPTS SHARE A NUMBER IFF THEIR OBJECTS ARE EQUINUMEROUS.

9. Frege say: EQUINUMEROSITY IS AN EQUIVALENCE RELATION.

10. Frege say: ABOUT THE INFINITE NUMBER ∞ SO DEFINED THERE IS NOTHING MYSTERIOUS OR WONDERFUL.

0. Frege say: ZERO IS THE EQUIVALENCE CLASS OF CONCEPTS LACKING OBJECTS IN EXTENSION.

I once quarreled with a friend about logic. I insisted then that logic was about nothing - that once it had been the study of winning arguments, but was now merely the hardest game in the world. This was unfair (though not untrue).

Some tasks of logic:

To discover supremely general truths, and bear our scepticism and hand-waving stoically.

To make an inventory of forms, and thereby see how low and far we can take thought and what shapes good thought can have.

To investigate necessity, particularly necessary interdependencies between claims, and thereby show us the hundred puppet-strings each thought has.

To try and give mathematics a seat; she's been standing all day.

To preserve what little truth we have; ferry it in sound containers, and cry over spilled value.

on Waking Life

2011-10-19T05:57:00.000-07:00

"Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."
- Santayana

I'm not going to say much about Waking Life here - it is what we might call a naked film: you will get philosophical content from it on your own. Nor do I particularly want to mark its visual style - 'rotoscoping' - because that’s not its main innovation. What I will say is that it is pretentious in the best sense and talks total crap in only three or four places. It is in one sense the most philosophical film ever, because it’s overwhelming, has no real plot, and definitely has no coherency: it is a cutup of a couple dozen talking heads with different worldviews. It is a visual and conceptual poem about how inscrutable and irrational life is on the inside; verse lifejackets thrown into oceanic gaps in our understanding. It moves fast enough for its flaws to be minor affronts, though it does feel long, being both heavy and unbearably light. I recommend dunking your head in the provided bucket if either of these get to you too much.

There's some nice postmodern devices to note - the main character is Wiley Wiggins from the same director’s Dazed and Confused, and a few other characters pop up, not least Linklater and the score's musicians themselves. People who saw Slacker might recognise the film's non-structure and focus on the radical underbelly on the world.

One of our esteemed members calls anything which contravenes his fairly strict commonsensist naturalism, 'Oogabooga' philosophy. Well, Waking Life is very much a matter of oogabooga, or existentialism as it is also known.

Two weeks ago somebody raised the idea of 'pseudophilosophy', and labelled Inception an instance of it. The short answer is that it's your fault if you find something unphilosophical. People contain philosophical ideas, not objects, or even situations. Whenever we derive an idea, it really would be best to remember that what’s happening is a successful projection, not some sort of extraction of mental ore. Obviously what the mitherer who insulted it meant was that Inception is pretentious in the worst sense, overambitious; it thinks it is philosophical but isn’t. This is backwards in my scheme.

Once again, with feeling:

"Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."
- Santayana

(From a wee talk given to Philsoc.)

Entrée Noûs: on being bioprogressive

2011-10-18T03:21:00.003-07:00

"How might a happiness drug... find itself described in the literature?

"Substance x induces severe, irreversible structural damage to neurotransmitter subsystem y. Its sequelae include mood-congruent cognitive delusions, treatment-resistant euphoria, and toxic affective psychosis."

Eeek! Needless to say, no responsible adult would mess around with a potent neurotoxin of this description."
- David Pearce

"The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet... Tumbling from the back of my tongue down to my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate. Technology with a human face."
- Don DeLillo's Jack Gladney

"You take pills to feel good, to live long, to think straight? Why on earth do you need this? Are your feelings of inadequacy so acute that you cannot get by like everyone else without chemical assistance? What kind of health freak are you? Isn't amateur psychopharmacology very likely to land you in a bad place?"

I respectfully deny all charges.

Claim: It is rational to do the best you can with what you have.

What I have is my nasty nature-borne self situated in a nasty late-capitalist world; the best I can do in general is to try to help; but the best I can do for myself is to see what is around me and to optimise. One interesting subset of that are substances which purport to improve cognition, mood, longevity, health without side effects.

Such claims are obviously not new. But psychopharmacology, as a formal field, is. Most of the harder stuff is very much available only through the grey market. As I see it, we are all born with an amineptine deficiency.

***************************************

Typology:

1. "Nootropics" from Greek νόος (noos, “mind”) and τροφή ("to feed") or τροπέω (“to turn”)
A drug that enhances (more often, is purported to enhance) learning or memory, possesses very few side effects and extremely low toxicity.

2. Existential stimulants.
(It's a new concept and there's no word yet: "moodfoods", "euthymics"; "biopsychiatrics", "miseriolytics".)

3. "Neuroprotectives"

& other longevity agents

4. The psychonaut's ship

But it's the potential of number 2 that really matters.

********************************************

The interesting part of all this is that there's more than economics at play here - more than my personal greed for power (or fear of impotence). What I'd call chemical activism is a kind of transhumanism - that old but resurgent intellectual movement concerned with the systematic surmounting of human limits and flaws. And that connects to the most dramatic moral project ever suggested: Abolitionism, or the scientific elimination of suffering.

Ooh, but haven't we heard, and dismissed, this before? Isn't suffering what gives life spice?

The Abolitionist's Hypothesis: Humans and many other vertebrates live for an intolerable part of their lives in states of abject stress, frustration and/or chronic melancholy. Even people who think they are happy don't know the meaning of the word, having been tuned for limited perception, affection, cognition, and so on.

The Abolitionist's Principle (Negative utilitarianism): If something can be done, something must be done.

David Pearce has done more for the chemical wing of transhumanism (the most immediate positive step) than anyone, by publicising and clarifying what evidence, philosophical backing, and options there are or may soon be. He and the diffused network of people of "BLTC" maintain a massive ring of philosophical and technical websites, which very often are the only reliable source of information on their subjects.

In a less cancer-wracked and cancer-crazed world, Erowid would win the Nobel for both Peace and Medicine.

***************************************************************************

Issues with nootropics and transhumanism in general

Evidential void. There is very little data on long-term effects for any of these substances. The subjective, self-administered, self-reported nature of the movement also leaves much wide open. Against nootropics: Against nutraceuticals: A 2008 meta-analysis. But, as satirised in the opening quote, we do not culturally back the enterprise, and so studies are lacking and will continue to be so. Prejudice reigns even amongst neurochemists. However, I reckon that in less metaphysical cases Pascal's wager actually can guide action. I am prepared to risk, first of all because in the long-run we are all dead, but also because it's about more than me.

Your kung fu is primitive. Compared to what? To what is hopefully to come? Absolutely: amineptine is to those things what Paracelsus is to Pauling. Compared to the current sluggish and strictly rationed MAO and GABA system, though?

I don't like the Abolitionist hypothesis. Yes, it's troublesome. Plausible and not ignorable, however. "Is life really that bad? Why don't more people show it, then?" The answer is practically unfalsifiable: because we repress it (because evolution, psychological bias and culture both press us in the direction of delusion or silence).

I don't like the Abolitionist principle. Well you wouldn't. There is of course more to this than utility - dignity, creativity, and self-determination, to name just three other branches of the Good. But again, Brave New World's vision is only one, and hardly a likely, outcome. What about the modern tyranny of positivity, the American-style coercion to superficial brightness? Isn't abolitionism just the extreme form of this? Can't I be unhappy if I bloody well want to be? No it isn't; sure, if you really want. Even given the powerful false consciousness we probably all inherit from gene and meme, consent would have to be a part of the project.

Argument from free-will, existentialism, idealism. These areas of science disturb a lot of people on quite a deep level. But chemical activism does not imply any specific metaphysics or ethics - neither I nor Pearce endorse functional or eliminative materialism, for instance. And I'm not really a utilitarian. The only commitment is to the data surrounding the effects of chemicals on minds, and to a strong ethics of suffering. Here's a nice general Declaration.

Argument from Bioconservatism or 'Authenticity'.

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools." - Herbert Spencer

A common modern prejudice is that "natural" means "good" - on this much both cynics and hippies agree. But half of what is good in the world stems from the denial of nature! (This much the world religions got right accidentally.) The approach to the mind and self implied above entails (some say) the replacement of life-lessons, rational self-esteem, and Stoicism with an unearned binge on wellbeing.

I think this objection is misguided, stemming from an irresponsible kind of humanism developed so as to cope with the world. (Again: Pearce's rebuttal to Huxley covers more ground than I ever could.) We used tools to engineer the current version of our selves. Tools carry risks, often large. But we may soon have a genetic tool to prevent depression ever occurring. Do you value your nasty rationalised worldview enough to oppose this?

Argument from Planet of the Apes/Frankenstein ("Playing god!") See previous point.

If this is the approach you take towards problems, you will never feel happy - and what's worse, you make yourself absurd. (As well as bioconservatives, a Buddhist might object this. Note that most Buddhists have been Abolitionists.) How's about I take both the Aesop's fable approach to life as well as this tentative, unlikely arch-Enlightenment supplement? The Buddhist idea that the only way to be free of suffering is to lack desire is nothing I can endorse - all the personal experience I have is that positivity boosts will, and engagement with the world.

Related: "Without suffering, there could be no art!" Aaaargh there's so much wrong with this.

1) Some transformatory art has indeed been made by deeply unhappy, broken people. But most sad people have been as inarticulate, narrow and unwise as everyone else. A tiny number have been among the best of us - but then imagine what they could have done without black days, and with energy and esteem behind them!

2) We fetishise romantic misery, and it is from this that misery art's significant place in the canon comes - not from anything intrinsically deep about it. Suffering is rarely noble. I think that those incandescent people who made theirs noble did so in spite of it. (NB: Happiness is also rarely noble. Lesson: nobility is rare.)

3) Consider the last time you were properly in a good mood: were you more or less full of interests, of projects? Did you have more or less time for others? I think it's much more likely that a happy population would display massively increased capacity for reception and creation.

4) More fundamentally: this objection places the value of art above the value of (good) life. This is a fantastically unempathic thing to do. Even if the end of suffering really did end art, I'd still go right ahead, because art's worth is for and from us, and if that worth could be given directly rather than milked from a ritualised rationalised conceptual game, then the loss of future beautiful things would be alright. But, again: there is no necessary conflict between abolitionism and other ideals, of imagination, individuality, or desire.
Argument from anti-Enlightenment concerns: People often seem to misread postmodern critiques of science as implying: "SO STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING". Which would be awful! (The actual implication is "BE AWARE OF WHAT YOU'RE DOING".) Why shouldn't postmodern science arise, given some opening of minds? Is your conception of science ahem essentially essentialist?

The naturalisation of class. Nootropics aren't very expensive, but they are an outlay which most folk's budgets cannot justify. However, the 10g package of amineptine (the cleanest euthymic available) I have is the most expensive thing I've ever bought. At an easily possible scale of mass use, we might make the rich actually 'better' than the poor for the first time in history. The simplest (and least politically tractable) solution to this is to offer it on the NHS to all adults. " (: "

Thought as athletics, therefore pills as dope. In academia, where the contemporary use is concentrated, there is an intuition of foul play in letting students drug themselves better. An analogy to doping in sport is used. This is silly. (But class concerns again should enter in to our calculations.)

Anti-utopianism. Scepticism about dramatic impersonal schemes is a vital part of any contemporary thinking person's head. But the dismissals that have come are rarely reasonable, and, in fact, the point at which utopianisms go awry is where they dismiss suffering and individual worth - something which Abolitionism is literally unable to do (unlike, admittedly, some other transhumanisms).

Does Big Pharma Really Need More Control Over Me? For all that is said about Big Pharma... well, half of it seems to be about right. But their malfeasance is not nearly reason enough to abandon hope of progress in spite of them through them.

Quacks: Aside from that, the nature of the product means there's vast potential for smaller-scale dishonesty and pseudoscience. But the real question is how much you'll allow your fear of being duped to rule you. Again: this is a place where Pascal's wager (asymmetrical gambles on unknowns) is worth taking. At the moment (thanks to the grey market limit on production and sale) it looks like many offers do turn out to be expensive scams.

Most mix badly with booze. Well, what is alcohol but a crude, tasty and socially-inscribed euthymic?

***********************************************************

My day

1. Correcting for veganism ("nutraceuticals")

0.1mg vitamin B12. (As well as stopping one from dying, there's some suggestion of it being somewhat neuroprotective.)

1g choline. (Another essential nutrient, but, as a kind of fat, it's unfashionable. Prevents racetam headaches, anecdotally.)

3g creatine. (Yup, the bodybuilder's nonsense. It's only vegists that get a distinct mental and affective boost off it, which suggests that this is a nutraceutical. But a weird one, because, well there's evidence that the deficiency is levelling...)

1g Omega-3 from linseed. (Take it for mood, rather than the ridiculous trumped-up IQ business of yesteryear.)

2. Old-school

Aerobic exercise. Not as much as I should, but 15mins a day flopping around on the floor. The benefits preclude indifference.

3. New school (actual pharmaceuticals)

2.4g piracetam,

5mg selegiline.

For days of alienating mental labour: 200mg modafinil.

Special treat: 100mg amineptine.

HAZARDS.

From section 1: negligable. Creatine makes work for the kidneys, but that's about it.

From section 2: I look silly and I sweat.

From section 3: Modafinil can cause rashes and arrhythmia; selegiline can cause anxiety and sleep problems; amineptine is a potent anti-depressant and could do all sorts of things, not least spontaneous orgasm. Add to all these a dose of generic risk from long-term use.

****************************************************

Where exactly does this become 'chemical activism'?

Well. As we saw, there are fierce cultural and religious brakes on biotechnology, not least mockery. Some of the brakes come from informed caution and are to be respected; many others are not.

Buying and promoting those primitive pills now available is also a tiny stimulus to future development and product.

Huxley's socially engineered hell is possible, but philosophical grounding could help preclude it. In the worst case besides that, our intellectual and economic labour will produce a temporary illusion of control, a period of looking foolishly technocratic, and perhaps nasty side-effects. To which my only reply is: do you have any idea how valuable a sense of control over our lives is?

the arts lie dreaming of the life to come

2011-10-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

"Knife-Edge also Standing Figure"

"...music shows its heterogenous nature and superior intrinsic virtue by its complete indifference to everything material in the plot; in consequence of this, it expresses the storm of the passions and the pathos of the feelings everywhere in the same way, and accompanies them in the same pomp of its tones, whether Agamemnon and Achilles, or the dissensions of an ordinary family furnish the material for the piece."

- Schopenhauer

"At some point you might have told yourself and others that you listened to the Backstreet Boys because it was funny. But in fact, you were enjoying it; it's just a different kind of enjoyment..."

- John Darnielle

I stopped formally studying English more than a year ago now; this should mean I never have to criticise anything that I don't feel intensely about ever again. For similar reasons I don't think I want to 'review' things anymore. I'd like to criticise instead.

Why this distinction? Because we're engaged in skirmishes in a war with the Observer, with the whole moribund practice of Reviewing. It's everywhere, having long usurped most public critical thought (since it looks like criticism but is less wanky). Bite-sized impersonality is the reviewer's format, because it makes the review seem objective, and thus worth reading.

To review is to tell someone if a thing is shit or not. To be critical is to investigate how something works, not necessarily to say that it does or doesn't.

And the former is not dialogue but autopsy! (Morticians - i.e. historians - are great, but they really should only work with things that have metaphysically died first - as no object when considered aesthetically ever will.)

I don't agree with Wilde when he says "all art is useless" - but he's on to something. Reviews are primarily functional and artless beasts. Their function is to provide a concise injection of perspective for those without the time or tools to form their own opinion: reviews are horse-betting tips for the 1000-albums-per-week derby that is modern music.

***************************************************

Premise 1: Value is mind-dependent.

Premise 2: Meaning is intersubjective (mind-dependent on a grand and dynamic scale).

Premise 3: Interpretations are second-order features of states of affairs. A pattern seen is a pattern present, regardless of author-intention: that's what interpretation is!

Premise 4: We produce meaning involuntarily, and project value onto every thing we contact.

Premise 5: But value is not just a matter of whim; we are given tastes in a similar way that we are given physical traits. (Though obviously it's much more dynamic and steerable.)

Conclusion (aesthetic falsificationism): You can't be "right" about cultural objects, but you can be wrong. You're "wrong" if your interpretation does not conform to the first-order features of em. ("Aesthetically senseless" might be better than "wrong".)

*************************************************

Putting on my Marxist hat for a moment: reviews prop up our conspicuous consumption of music: the much-mocked hipster attitude. They appeal to the social superstructure of music rather than the aesthetic base (by base I just mean actually listening to songs, rather than bands). We can't help judge each other on taste - but latterly we place too much on it, and in doing so we obscure the sounds to listen to the propositions. It's another instance of our poisonous dismissal of subjective things.

It's processes like these that create the weird neurotic character of modern music fandom: the "guilty pleasures", the canons of airless "Classics", and, above all, the great joyless indie-cred cult of authenticity, which I think all musical subcultures are guilty of. (...Maybe not house.)

"Don’t say the light show’s excellent -
it makes you smell of the laboratory instead of
a fan of the band..."
- Half Man Half Biscuit

(Note: Nobody totally escapes the cred game, nor anyway is it such a bad place to live. But remember that its handmaiden, the review, is not really a reaction to art at all. And I do so crave the chance to react.)

***************************************************************

What's wrong with reviewing in general is doubly wrong with the pop review. Modes of the pop review:

I: Autobiographize. Compare to their old albums, say that it's "not-as-good-as-the-last-one" (Crap contextualization)

II: List the tracks, assign them genres, trace their lineage. Say that the middle bit isn't any good. (Crap textualization)

III: Sophomore, "ooh, I once read something quite like this in class maybe they mean this concept". (Crap intellectualization)

IV: Identify what they were trying to do. Compare to paradigm songs, of the band in question or of bands who tried the same thing. Intentionalize. Pick representative details and paint the page with them, for god's sake. Pull out narrative if you see narrative. Include the personal, 1) cos all attention is personal and 2) to remind readers that all reviews are just readings and if you see it, it is present. (Actual analysis.)

Pop deserves better.

Robert Christgau, one of the more auteurish people talking about pop, is at least honest: his long-running archive of mini-reviews is called the "Consumer Guide", and he calls himself a "media professional" as well as "rock critic".

***********************************************************************

"In my head, a "proper critic" is an intellectually rigorous individual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their specialist subject and an admirably nerdy compulsion to dissect, compare and analyse each fresh offering in the field – not in a bid to mindlessly entertain the reader, but to further humankind's collective understanding of the arts."

- Charlie Brooker, denying that he is a critic.

There's something to that. But good criticism takes creative power and inner life as well as noble nerdishness.

******************************************************************

"I want someone younger than me to get foolish about pop again, to stop telling me all the things I could be listening to and start telling me why I SHOULDN’T listen to certain things. Reattach guilt to pop, reattach hierarchy, reattach shame, reattach style, remember that style is different from fashion, instead of just adding their void-voice to the general hey-if-you-enjoy-it-that’s-cool numbness of discussion. Stop fucking rehabilitating everything and start locking stuff up and out and AWAY. It will be out of reach for a reason. Pleasure forced to justify itself again."
-Neil Kulkarni

"Police mentalities will always try to impose correct readings, to align intentions with outcomes, couple imaginary causes with putative effects, but we always have a choice."
- Dave Hickey

Kulkarni calls this syndrome "critical sleepiness" - you might know it better as relativism. He's wrong, but in a very interesting way: he's wrong because cultural objects like pop songs, or nationality, or masculinity can have no single true analysis. But Kulkarni's right in that we shouldn't accept relativism as a muzzle on disagreement; the fact that contradictory interpretations stack (without needing to be sorted into "true" or "false") means that we absolutely can and should be opinionated! We can speak unqualifiedly about things we feel strongly about, because, no matter how violently we deride a thing, our reaction isn't really oppressing anyone secure in their own positive reaction to the object. Just because there's no right answer doesn't mean that all answers are as good as each other. We cannot change the fact that people enjoy Wagner (either Wagner). But why bother, politics aside?

(It does occur to me that this theory is not a good thing to put in the hands of the internet. Perspectivism is fine if you've patience and modesty, but...)

I intervene in what I read. You relate to one of the characters in Brothers Karamazov? No shit; you're in every text you will ever look at, because that's what reading, and consciousness is. The more 'present' you are (the more that its symbols resonate with the meanings in you), the more you will like it.

Corollary: No one has ever read the same book as anyone else, just commensurate ones. Come to that, no one has ever read the same book as themselves some time later.

Awesome corollary: anything can be critically engaged with. This is what Schopenhauer (opening quote) implied but could not say (being such a snob).

It's terrible that this transformatory, egalitarian way of seeing stuff has been presented in the maximally obscure manner that it has. What would they call it? "Postmodern hermeneutic-aesthetic perspectivism", perhaps. What should we call it? "Poptimism"

**********************************************************************

"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations."

- Oscar Wilde’s mouth

"Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."

- Aldous Huxley

These two remarks suggest a related piece of my sort of philosophy of life - what we might call spiritual empiricism. "What's art for?" Eh. The same as everything else.

*********************************************

Yeats says that "the arts lie dreaming of the life to come". But we shouldn't think that "dreaming of the life to come" is good in itself. (The Futurists and the Communists put paid to that.) Let's look at Art Nouveau trains:

Eurgh. The inherent menace of the style was most recently realised in some artsy computer games.

Plant Milk Review

2011-08-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

"a live cow makes a lion salivate, whereas a human just wants to say 'moo' and see if the cow responds.”
– Scott Adams

I've been building up sacrificing dairy in my head: I've been being meanminded. The main thing to say against it is "It takes some getting used to" - and what a contemptible wisp of an argument. (Could also say that the substitutes are twice as expensive, and hard to find, but this is Today and Here.)

All the supermarkets are stocking some bloody odd alternatives these days, even outlets that aren't indecently big. So, what criteria? Not "closeness to cowjuice". Not "nutrition", though vegists do need to think about that more than most.

"Alpro Sweetened"
Base: Soya
Costs: £1.09/L
Tastes: Guchh.
Is: High in protein. Apparently 5% of UK are allergic to soy.

"Alpro Unsweetened"
Base: Soya
Costs: £1.09/L
Tastes: Insipid but much better.
Is: High in protein.
(There's also this tiny carton of soya cream you can get which improves matters.)

"Rice Dream"
Base: Rice
Costs: £1.38/L
Tastes: Curious. Bit sweet. Easily acclimatise tho. I prefer the fortified one to the Organic shiz.
Is: Totally non-allergenic. If you're allergic to rice then you're fucked anyway.

"Sharbat bil Loz"
Base: Almonds
Costs: £1.30/L for ingredients, but requires preparation.
Tastes: Light and nutty.
Is: Authentically medieval Europe. Authentic Beijing. Authentic Iran.

"Oatly"
Base: Oats
Costs: £1.10/L
Tastes: Cowy, though the amount of fibre is tangible.
Is: Beta-glucan

"GOOD Hemp"
Base: Hemp.
Costs: £1.70/L
Tastes: Creamy but oily.
Is: Full of omega-3, which vegists find hard to get. As eco as it gets.

"Kara Dairy Free"
Base: Coconut
Costs: £1.29/L
Tastes: Good but plasticy aftertaste. Not very coconutty.
Is: Ok.

Horchata de Chufas
Base: Tigernut
Costs: £1/L ingredients, needs prep.
Tastes: Good. Slightly oily.
Is: Proteiny.

******************************************

So, not a bad run. Most of these are worth trying, except hemp. Almond milk is best, but you've to make it yourself. Ricemilk with soy cream mixed in is my drug of choice.

Next self-improvement: the slaying of Cheese, and fucking daunting it is too.

hoots min, i'm deid

2011-08-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

"It appears, then, that one must either accept patriotism in spite of its undesirable features or place oneself in the role of an outsider, whose claims about the national welfare have an uncertain status. The result for many is a chronic form of discomfort and a hope that the subject of patriotism can be kept out of political discussions".

- Stephen Nathanson

"[Post]modern national culture is the sum of all the interpretations of history by all the people living in the nation. "
- Michael Gardiner

"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."

- Alasdair Gray

My attempt to process Scottish culture in its entirety continues, taking in the canon, old shitey forgotten canons, a giant chunk of political philosophy, and a poke of Heideggerian shite. I'm reading about 200 pages a day, working as if not in the early days of a belting migraine. Carving my head into funny shapes:

First lesson: my sheer Scottish ignorance. I hadn't heard of Tom Nairn, James Hamilton, John Galt, Margaret Oliphant, William Dunbar, Tom Leonard, Willa Anderson, Angus Calder, Maurice Lindsay, Ethel Moorhead, Ossian, John McGrath - nor did I know Smollett and Carlyle were Scottish. I had dismissed the Scottish Enlightenment as hyped propaganda. I didn't understand Presbyterianism as a Scottish phenomenon. I hadn't read much with much sympathy at all.

Second lesson: Nationality is fucking complex. As a teen I did have a nasty theory of nationalism:

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

- HL Mencken

: that it was a crutch, an irrational and dangerous surrender of the self; that nationalists exaggerate difference in order to exclude others; that patriotism was directly related to racism and war; that Renton's soliloquoy was right-on; that Scotland's culture was debased and commercialised beyond repair; that a loud socialist universalism is the way instead. I've been slowly shedding this for five years now. It was grounded in foolishness, embarrassment, and an intolerant kind of tolerance.

Third lesson: Scots theory is actually interesting. The flyting-feuilleton air of it, if nothing else.

Distinctions to be emphasised:

Banal nationalism (local celebrities; whisky) v Formal nationalism (the anthem; haggis)
Nation ≠ Country ≠ People ≠ Culture ≠ Ethnie ≠ State's interests ≠ Cult of the Past

Ethnic nationalism ≠ Civic nationalism ≠ Instrumental nationalism ≠ ...

Essentialist nationalism: A belonging which depends on a priori things (shared ethnicity, language, geographical location).

a. ‘Romantic’ (racist) nationalism: Hereditary membership. Discussion of identity is moot – since everyone ‘truly’ [British] understands that growing up in [Britain] automatically provides you with your sense of self. Individuals are uncomplicated, unitary, with an unbroken connection with their origins.

Corollary: The ‘authenticity’ of individuals needs to be defended against change and foreign incursion.

b. State nationalism: If you agree with the government then you’re in. (Mussolini, Jacobins)

c. Pan-nationalism: Goal of unifying some Golden Age ethnic block. See (a)

d. Religious nationalism

e. Diaspora nationalism: Emigrant communities’ phantom bedrock. Imaginary.

Modernist nationalism: nation as a mentally constructed thing. An ‘imagined community’ binding varied people together. Necessarily dynamic (?)

a. Imperialism: Spread [Britishness]! Imagined community of citizens: supposedly values-based. Official nationalism: Elites tried to merge imagined-Britain with the wider empire. Isles extended over absurdly vast cultural space. Britishness as 'civilising' ideology.

b. Post-colonial nationalism: Resistance to cultural domination leads to movement for self-determination vs political domination. (Scotland has elements.)

c. Revolutionary nationalism: ‘Communism will take over a piece at a time.’

d. Civic / Liberal nationalism: Queer beastie. Constitutional statement about national identity; ethnic origin sidelined in favour of tolerance and equality. A voluntary identity. Nation goes on for 'democracy’s sake':

(1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (or so claims Schnapper)
(2) levels of trust required for democratic politics only attained among co-nationals (or so claims Miller)

(3) Deliberation requires perfect communication, possible only in a shared public culture (so says Barry)

(4) economic viability of specifically industrialized democracies requires one national culture (so claims Gellner)

Postmodern nationalism: There is no one Scottish worldview, no apriori conditions to be a Scot. There is a collective psyche, but it’s contradictory, hybrid and can't ever be wrapped up.

************************************************

"The rose of all the world is not for me.

I want for my part

Only the little white rose of Scotland

That smells sharp and sweet - and breaks the heart. "

- MacDiarmid

This is still not true of me, nor will it be. But I don't hate the sentiment anymore.

Socioeconomic Blues

2011-08-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

If anyone ever gives me a lecturing job I am well structuring my course reader around these.

1. Supply and Demand - Hives

2. The Day the Dollar Die - Peter Tosh
(Appeal to post-scarcity society, but I'll use it for exchange-rate theory)

3. Milkshake - Kelis
(erotic capital, I'm afraid)

4. How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? - Albert Reed

5. Capitalism - Oingo Boingo
(Talking Heads meets Milton Friedman. Well, somebody had to write it.)

6. Taxman - Beatles
(Whinge about progressive taxation. Groovy)

7. Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had - Muddy Waters
(Muddy misunderstands the virtual nature of money. Nevertheless, his very attitude drove the 2008 credit crunch: subprime defaults.

8. Career Opportunities - Clash
(Unskilled labour's mass alienation)

9. I Want It All - Queen
(maximising "rational" consumer - "move out of my way" - to me you have no way)

10. Government Cheese - Rainmakers

(neoconservative anthem. Ironically it was Reagan that launched the synecdoche they despise so much.)

11. Mercedes Benz - Janis Joplin
(the perverse equilibriumless nature of positional consumption.)

12. Soak up the Sun - Sheryl Crow
(Buddhist economics: the restraint of desire as happiness. Spiritual dimension of public goods.)

13. I'd Love to Change the World - Ten Years After
(To illustrate the received view: doomy sneering conservatism. Note weird homophobic verse.)

14. A Study in Economics - Allister
(Bizarre. I think this is what Green Day was always aiming for.)
"say goodbye to everything you think you know" (aye, like compassion and scientific method, when opening your microeconomics textbook)

15. Changes - Tupac
("we can never go nowhere unless we share with each other.")

16. Cut From the Cloth - Evens
(Cultural costs are always externalized)

17. Minimum Wage Is A Gateway Drug - Dillinger Four
(For friends who dropped out "to save up" for uni or for other life-changing soul-cementing things which they never got around to, and won't.)

Fringed

2011-08-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

I reviewed about a quarter of the shows I saw at the Edinburgh Festival. I would just link to the people I wrote them for, but their subediting crushes and banalises everything, so here we are. The deadlines were strict, so these were all pounded out in about ten mins. I'd recommend the exercise to anyone.

********************************************

Jumping Jesse Jones

One very short route to my heart is cheer in the face of adversity. There's a bucket of adversity facing Mr Jones, as he plays here all month: he plays alone, outside, in a big booze-branded box; half the audience face away, chatting; he also quietly competes with Chapel Street's traffic noise. Playing original acoustic blues, he throws in some slap-bass moves and clattery thrash. His voice is a sweet baritone, but undistinguished. Most of his songs work because, if you master a cliché, it will not offend the ear anymore. A Davy Graham reference - in this town - does him credit, as does a Gram Parsons intonation. His attitude is to Open a guitar-case in hope, and grin at whatever arrives.

4/5

Killing Bill Gates by Mechanical Tiger (Free)

Tim is a neurotic minor manager in Bill Gates' charity, scheming to murder him. The main gag is the absurd formality in which his cliched team (Nice Guy, Psycho, and Bitch) go about it. Unfortunately the other jokes are just pop namechecks - Fallout 3, Arnie, Plan B, Cheryl Cole - or limp meme hyperbole - violence to kittens and 'sucking cream from a rectum'. The stage is cramped, so the dialogue relies on stage whispers - characters constantly 'secretly' talking about someone three feet away. (It subverts this eventually, but even then it jars.) There's some ok choreography, some ok monologues, and a lot of naff porn jokes, but this both rushed and plodded its way to its ending.

2/5

The Life And Times Of Albert Lymes by Tin Shed Theatre Company (Free)

Hyperactive little one-man psychological comedy. Justin Cliffe offers us a dozen characters who all overbear poor Albert Lyme, a dull neurotic on a very bad day: we're endeared to Lyme because everyone else in his world is so much worse. It's part confession and part pantomime - we're carried along on Cliffe's rapid fire expression. He's indebted to Terry Jones most of all - in his screeching falsetto for women, his explosive gurning, and Lyme's bravura tics. Cliffe rolls well with a couple of mistakes and missed cues - again, moving too fast to linger on them. Some visual gags (a Scrabbleboard becomes a newspaper) and inserted plot holes are also charming. Full of life, but oppressive too.

3/5

Constantinople (Free)

Charming semi-historical absurdism from two New Zealanders in togas. They mime, pun and fantasise their way between a pair of characters each - Constantine and his DJ slave, or an insecure horse and his masseur. Their timing is endlessly impressive: several times they rebuild their tiny set in sync. The show jumps out of, and ends with They Might Be Giants' 'Istanbul', and shares its gleeful anachronism. The non-sequitur structure is mostly brilliant - the narrator is marked out from other characters only by his wearing a tie (made of newspaper, a sign, an asp, or a sheet). Their Conversion of Constantine (in the world's first disco, 'Studio LIV') is overlong, and Barnie Duncan's mediterranean accent is sometimes dodgy, but this is wonderful, unpretentious postmodern slapstick.

4/5

Traumatikon by Counter-Active

Traumatikon's programme namechecks eleven modernist Names, with Tadeusz Kantor the citation of honour. ("Kantorian" seems to mean repetitive, grotesque, and nonlinear.) It doesn't tell a story. Calling it 'experimental' wouldn't be quite right either, since they're trying to honour forty-year-old work. We follow a restaurant's large macabre cast through their various tics, non-dialogue, beery singalongs and transformations. Characters take it in turns to break through the absurd routine with some Great Change that gives them and us a short reprieve from all the passive horror: a 'queen' becomes Pablo Picasso; a mute is operated on and emerges as Frida Kahlo; a cheery girl channels the goddess Freya in apocalyptic wrath; eventually the grim restaurant itself suddenly becomes a Gorey circus. Traumatikon is cruel to beauty, but if you have patience, and the stomach for masses of irony and black, it's meaty. Meat that's going green.

4/5

Cutting the Cord by Flying Eye

Sachi Kimura begins her one-woman show by asking us to mill around onstage. Wrongfooted, we're captivated easily. This is the story of a Tokyo-girl in London - it's actually a composite built from several real migrants' stories. "Sachi" is a solid brick of goodwill, cute as a button - she draws on the walls and spies on us. Her (affected) accent is occasionally problematic, but the rough English is vital to the character: in one skit she rapidly improves it, ending with perfect Newcastlese. She's excellent on the harshness and hypocrisy of nationality and Immigration departments: of the UK Citizenship Test - "I am more Japanese here, but I must also be more British than the British". There's many tiny things executed well; the highlight is an extended metaphor where she, a hermit crab, is stuck between two shells and ostracised by the other crabs. Warming.

4/5

Hotel Medea by Zecora Ura Theatre/Para Active

Look at its price (£25, where £7 is the usual Fringe rate). Look at its length (5.6 hours); its start time (11:40pm). But there's more: you will be touched, you'll parade, won't be allowed to be just an audience. The leading lady will kiss you. The men will cross-dress and the women will drink neat gin. Zecora Ura harness the manifold powers of a late night - exertion endorphins; the emotional effects of sleeplessness; chants, and other crowd psychology. They build dreamlike things to replace the dreams we're missing; they will lull you back to childhood; they make absurdity comfortable; they end on the first and strongest narrative device: a real dawn. Hotel Medea blends rave, live documentary, satire, interactive tragedy, and hide and seek. There are hundreds of admirable details, since they use the entire Summerhall building, filling areas with dry ice, strongarming you between them. It is tender, shocking and indescribable. Go; lose sleep over this.

5/5

En Route To The Enormous Room by Bald Robin and Mince's Music

Reverent musical of ee cummings' war experiences, staged as a classic BBC radio drama - formal dress and all. To some extent this excuses Leo Robb's overacting (as historically accurate). In hindsight, Cummings' poetry has been demanding musical arrangement - Graham Robb's originals, sung quivering-quavering-timeless by Ailsa Mooney, are great and oddly genreless - neither swing nor cabaret nor dance. His medley of subverted patriotic ditties and 'Madame de la Mort' are particuarly powerful. Unfortunately, the plot and acting combine to make our heroes self-righteous. They tote bravado rather than bravery, even with racism and bellowing irrationality as villains. 'En Route' is noble but simplistic, and so is contained in its line: "I will not kiss your fucking flag!". [Was quite drunk when reviewing this one.]

3/5

Debbie Does My Dad by Bobbie Gordon

One-man autobiographical show about taboos and growing up liberal (with a pornstar father). Gordon has to stretch to fill the stage - for example his huskiness when he wants to sound profound, or his unconvincing character acting. The show originated in Gordon's beat poems, and it shows - that familiar spit, inimical to comedy; one's inadequacies swung like a bat. It's Langston Hughes without rhythm, Saul Williams without fire. The main issue though is that the piece uses a confessional format for a man with no sins to offer us. Most of the jokes earn only titters from the crowd, flat and ambiguous as they are. But his thoughts on parenting and gender are sophisticated, and the final skits are better, as Gordon loosens up, declares a new masculinity, and humps the air, into freedom.

3/5

Motortown by Exeter University Theatre Company

Danny is a British soldier returning home after a Tour, who suddenly spirals into psychotic freefall. James Dartford, in the leading role, is tense but not really intense, terrible but not really terrorising us enough. The remainder of the cast form a tribunal of scowling sexy things, facing him throughout. A depraved 'philosophical' gunsmith offers Danny a sick ideology: second-hand solipsism. The play climaxes with Danny kidnapping, torturing and murdering a teenager. No logic for the act is in view: the play is muddled, hinting at the brutality of training and war - "I've seen men with their skin all melted" - but failing to cement it. Danny's descent from ordinary aggression into outright ultraviolent ultrabigotry is incomprehensible, and doesn't ring true. Sparse but worthy.

3/5

Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tesco by Assembly

Pauline - once known as 'Paul' - is a bouncy and brittle woman looking after her hostile, ageing dad once a week. It's a long one-man (ahem) show about terrible ordinariness. To my surprise, Callow often fumbles his lines, particularly when impersonating her father. The effects of transphobia play out with all the cliches in place - Pauline lives constantly with the call to justify her self, and often anxiously assures us of her gender. The suffering of bigots, too, is touched on. She dances the pain away - here Callow really gives it some in heels. Two twists come very late, and give rise to the piece's only surprise, and only moment of pure affection. Every Tuesday is the same, and there is no warming reconciliation. Moral but poorly done.

2/5

Kev Orkian: The Guilty Pianist

Jongleurs staple ladles on an Eurasian accent and hams out some molto vivace piano medleys. Despite the title there's actually not much piano involved: the set's a series of cheap shots at immigrants, gays, the Swahili language, the women in the audience, and Essex - just like in the good old 1950s. His puncturing of classical airs - he falls asleep during 'Moonlight Sonata' - is charming. He manages to be both camp and blockish, impressively. The short show's only highlight is his comparative history of Western and "Armenian" dancing: the man can move. But otherwise this felt like a showcase for a cheap and nasty old revue. Aims for Dudley Moore but ends up an uncuddly boor.

1/5

World Stories From LA by Luna Caps Productions

Arrangement of five short plays sharing a theme in the price of beauty. The set begins with lowest melancholy and gains farce and life with each successive piece. Open on Poe's 'The Oval Mirror', in which an artist's wife is consumed by his representation; then Yukio Mishima's 'Hanjo', which parallels the Poe when the titular lead goes mad from longing, thereby becoming enormously beautiful to the sadist who takes her in. Third up, 'The Blonde' is an outrageous breath of a thing about Stockholm Syndrome and statistics; fourth, a Mexican folktale takes us on a bucolic trip through poverty and witchcraft and love; lastly, they improvise on Hovaness Toumanian's 'The Stupid Man' creating a pleasant shambles while subverting quest parables. The production is informal by necessity - hurrying through four stage changes and five character switches in 100mins, but mostly succeeds.

3/5

Dirt by Aireborne Theatre

Magic-realist fairytale telling of bereaved mother Ada's attempt to flee from grief ... and also the incursion of a kingdom of evil Worms. Said worms are the show's jesters and Greek chorus, singing charmingly villainous songs and driving events - like reanimating Ada's dead son as a toy for the Worm King. Laura Marston, as both the Worm Princess and Ada's mother, is properly impressive, craning and straining gymnastically to animate a series of animal puppets - weedling and self-promoting, she'd make a fine Mephistopheles. The ending is suddenly unsentimental, and completely bucks the story arc it had been following, jolting us loose into the venue foyer. Aireborne manage to pull off grisly cuteness better than anyone - and we've had a glut recently.

4/5

A Sentimental Journey through Bits of England

2011-08-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

"Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless,

To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,

To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,

Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys..."

- Walt Whitman

"It is an age so full of light, that there is scarce a country or corner in Europe whose beams are not crossed and interchanged with others. - Knowledge in most of its branches, and in most affairs, is like music in an Italian street, whereof those may partake who pay nothing. - But there is no nation under heaven abounding with more variety of learning, where the sciences may be more fitly woo’d, or more surely won, than here, - where art is encouraged, and will so soon rise high, - where Nature (take her altogether) has so little to answer for, - and, to close all, where there is more wit and variety of character to feed the mind with: - Where then, my dear countrymen, are you going?"
- Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

Day 1: Aberdeen to Carlisle.

For simplicity's sake I'm telling people that this is my first time in England. The truth:

1991: Visit to Greater London for a wedding. 2 days.
1996: Visit to York for nothing in particular. 3 days.
1999: Visit to Windermere for my gran's Mormon nonsense. 3 days.
2002: Through it on a bus to France. <1 day.
2004: Through it on a bus to France. <1 day.

So, actually, close enough. Into Carlisle about 7pm. Struck by the sheer amount of brick, especially in confectionary red-white-red-white pattern. Panic rises when the rain comes on: am hungry, alone, and have no idea how to get out of town. Rank my paranoias to pass time: fear of criminal folk (low); fear of sarcastic people (high); fear of illness from rain (med); fear for bike (med); fear for no campsite (critical). Eat in a truckstop, and meet George, a magnanimous gobshite who introduces hisself as a connoisseur of rucksacks, and offers a campsite in his garden within 30 seconds of meeting: "Life's too short to be horrible to people". Sleep in a hedge on an industrial estate instead, for some reason. Possibly manners.

Day 2: Carlisle to Patterdale

Give up trying to sleep at 4am and get on the A6. Leaving, I have Carlisle to myself, sharing only with the odd Stobart man. Scoot around the castle happily. Bike the 20mi to Penrith, get there by 7am, ffffuck. Do not feel remotely good - lurk in the sun, chilled and sick. Seem to eat and drink continuously. Struck by the casual fellowship of the unmotorised: hikers grimace at each other; cyclists always nod. Come upon the absurdly picturesque Patterdale, facing the unspeakably picturesque Ullswater. Every other house is a B&B. Climb two miles up a fucking mountain to reach the Arthurian, the sublime, the baffling YHA Helvellyn. It's empty and unlocked, so I helt out the recycling man:

TONY: I were a livestockman f' the Earl f' 54 years. ("yeus")
I: What changed?
TONY: Got bored.

Middle-aged hostel crowd are great - we all stink, and I trust them instinctly. Shower, pathetic with gratitude - only 28 hours since my last. Giddy with fatigue, I entertain at the dinner table. Honestly not really sure what I was saying to them.

Day 3: Helvellyn to Grasmere

Sit on a crop over the Ullswater all morning. Read Auden ('Paysage Moralise' impresses me into a deep funk). Meet more people - it's just that kind of place. Listen to Some Call It Godcore; perfect. Bike making an irritating noise - sit down to bodge it; it's miraculous that it was running at all; chain had pulled off the deraileur and was only going by cutting a groove into the guard. (Things fall apart, but sometimes they fall into place at the same time.) Up Birkbeck, harrrd. Feel great, have lunch at 1500 feet. Soon after, coming down "The Struggle" (too fast, too topheavy) crash pretty badly, using my skin as a brake.

If I should fall, think of this of me,
That there's some corner of Cumbria road
That is forever Gavin.

Man happens up the road a minute later and kindly offers first aid: through my teeth I fail to express how much this means to me. Limp to Ambleside, brakes on, then on a little further to Grasmere. Have earned my dopamine today. Inexplicably, the hostel has a copy of Jung's Archetypes, and some Sloterdijk in Dutch(!) While wrestling with Jung, eavesdrop on loud Australian girl: "Efter Glestonbury, yea, eeverything was all so 'ohmygod toomanypeople' so we weent to the Laykes...and thain during Paul Simon oi felt railly seack..."

Does everyone's tourism seem contemptible but our own?

Day 4: Grasmere to Kendal.

"The loveliest spot that man hath ever found."

- Wordsworth

Nah, Grasmere's nothing to Ullswater. (see how quickly we become worldly! J later mocks the fact that everybody he knows seems to profess a working knowledge of and affinity for the Lakes.) Sleep is difficult without elbowskin. Go see Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount. I actually gasp once let out of the former, bloody guided tour. Japanese people everywhere. I side with Hunt against Wordsworth: a poet who withdraws from humanity needs to justify herself, and WW has no grounds but beauty for his endless vacation.

Through Ambleside, lunch at the Priest Hole. Struggle the 4 miles to Windermere, and would've done without the wounds screaming. Bugger about for a couple of hours, preparing to seem authoritative rather than bewildered (R and J are coming). He arrives eventually, and we go fail to find a 24hr shop. Camp by an empty house. Criteria:

Drainage?
Windbreak?
Soft ground?
Teen haunt?
Noise?
Legal?

Unsurprisingly, having a tent is an exponentially better way to be.

Day 5: more Kendal.

Woken by a bemused builder at 9am. Neither of us knows what the other is doing there. Day of forced grace - me and R waiting for J. Eat beans by the river, eat Mint Cake (CHRIST) by the Castle. Mint Cake is to meringue what diamond is to coal. It is good indeed to have a companion, but I feel the need to mask my leg-weakness and pain, even so. Jokes are real again! (Donald Trump's helicopter's tapeplayer has one Kraftwerk album jammed in it.) Visit a church (St Thomas'?) - grotesque.

Sun.

J is late (straight in from Zambia). Eat crap, then go see Half Man Half Biscuit. Hits-laden set, smelly and fun.

We camp desperately, end up next to a railtrack among thistles. Laugh.

Day 6: Kendal to Sedbergh

Dunno how we slept - "Hitchcockian" night. Heat rises to about 28 celsius as we approach the Dales: and it's 18 miles of uphill. J suffers. Reach Sedburgh, where we founder - J's bike is fucked, and the nearest bike shop is Kendal, and you can't take bikes on busses, and (...) Cook dhal in a churchyard, and laugh. J returns to Kendal. Bugger about with some philosophy history - who is the empiricist who connects Newton with Russell (if anyone)? - and go find somewhere to camp. First path we roll up, Ghyll Farm, agrees with grand nonchalance. My heart swells with the kindness, and the £100 view. Wash naked in a stream, good. James succeeds & returns taxied by Mark E Smith, good. Sunburn; ah whatthehell. We eat peas in the pod, good.

Day 7: Sedbergh to Leyburn

Passing a newsagents, note Guardian scoop about Milly Dowler's phone with a theatrical "ffffuck!". See a black rabbit. (So much roadkill in Yorkshire.) Begin the day with a road dispute, I solved. Road to Hawes is beautiful but painful. Seems that every rural Northern town is a "book town". Eat total crap in a coldheart Hawes cafe. It's too hot to work at 2, so we lie in a park. My backpack is too big, but there's nothing I can throw out (only three changes of clothes, for instance). Press on to Leyburn, whose name no one can retain. Laugh. JW cancels our Middlesbrough appointment. We huzzah, a bit. Camp secretly at Stoop House Farm. (Sheep never shut the fuck up.)

Day 8: Leyburn to Ripon (Seven Bridges Valley)

Nice downhill to the A6108. R ill (dehydrated). Heat punishing even at 10am. Spend a nice hour in the shade, texting while R sleeps and J scouts. Ripon, seeped in a seeping cathedral. I am learning to treat churches as a form of entertainment - a vital skill in the C20th, but yielding less these days. RC is good and squat. Light a candle (for gays killed by Christians). Camp by Fountains Abbey, nervily. Make stirfry and inane entertainment - watching a wheel spin. Laugh... Brought Hume's Treatise with me, but I haven't read fuck-all all trip: The habit has been pumped out of me - and anyway the intro's by some snotty '50s Analytic no thankyou very much.

Day 9: 7BV to Thirsk

Yorkshire is fucking huge, but its cultural footprint is very small, somehow. Have breakfast at the Fountains visitor centre. (Eggs benedict is a bloody weird dish.) Don't go in. Back to Ripon to sit out the Ferment (unbearable midday heat). To Thirsk. S'ok - but the Blacksmith's Inn's jukebox, by this, mp3-dead, tune-starved point, is a revelation. With J, pump £5 in. O the fun of infliction. Out. Ask at a farm, who agree reluctantly. Owner looks like Harold Wilson and talks in a way that I adore but am crap at bantering with. Stove soy-bolognese and silence.

Day 10: Thirsk to Malton

First rain during night. Rob's stuff damp but ok. Task #1: climb Sutton bloody Bank, a job that a bartender last night grinned maliciously at. As soon as we're up, first real rain starts. Soaked to my pants in 4 minutes flat. Hide in a visitor centre, but soon out Into It. Uggggh execrable. Biking fast and risky (13 miles in an hour). Feet three kilos heavier from waterlogging, visibility nought. R avuncular throughout. One facial expression for that hour:

>:X

Suddenly dries. Go to Castle Howard, brideshead visited. R and I pad around the ground barefoot and talk metahistory. Lots of pagan biz around. Fear the rain. Drink in Malton's "Crossed Keys", a warmly bizarre, Thai-themed, Medieval-catacombed pub. Tastes of doom, sadly. Laugh anyway. Eat mexican: yaas. J falls off his bike suddenly on the way out, minor but galling for all that. Then R's gear-cable snaps. Thus hunt for shelter early. Find another indifferent farm - J is the first to identify its "wrongness". The doom of canyons. Shave my lips and furrow my brow.

Day 11: Malton to York

Wind torments us all night.

"J: How many stains do you have on you?
"I: Uhh...
J: I've got blood, oil, nutella, paint, suncream, bolognese, pen, grass, savlon and toothpaste on these trousers."

Eat nutella and leave with haste. "Easy" route is hard, uncertain and hit by crosswinds. Tempers fray on all parts. Wash my feet in a river while J goes begging for water and R frowns at the horizon. Called a gaylord on the back road to York (by a stranger that is, not J). Starving, disproportionately weary, and then I drink some off milk. (Veganism is impossible on the road.) Make it though, and eat in a bistro. Doze. Get a fusty 3-bed room. Decor: avocado plastic and forty-year-old taupe. Since I'm a vegetarian, R and J are designated "normals". Go see Potiche and struggle to find late night food again. York is good tho.

Day 12: more York.

Absymal night - feverish, neuralgic, tinnitic, insomniac, gut-rotten. Sleep naked & still boil in my bag. It breaks around 5am, and I collapse. Shitting blood and farting butane. Has been coming for a while, now I think about it. With no destination today, I have time to break down. Breakfast is served by B&B woman's children, ew. Saunter.

J spots a woman having a 'Proustian moment' at a sweetshop window. She's transfixed, mouth slightly open, eyes glazed. We stand a little while watching, before shame overtakes me and I wheel away. J protests that he thought it beautiful but: even so. National Railway Museum is impressive - full of things built for incredible wear, so you can poke and touch whatever. Face off against the most intrinsically evil train in the world. It's while spiritually wrestling before it I work out that I can stop the pain if I don't move and don't breathe. Circle York some more - the conversation unwittingly(?) centring on our futures. Eat in unabashedly hippy veggie restaurant. (Meh.) To the Minster for chorales: a deadening sort of awe. Saw a bouncer earlier who was a human crow - jerky, wary and cruel. The Gabrieli Consort are human eagles (superlative) but also kiwi-birds (full of something larger than themselves). Afterwards, more blood.

Day 13: York to Harrogate.

Pain largely lifts. Change a tyre, read aunt Guardian, and away. Pain returns from exertion. Lunch in Weatherby, where argument about Class vis-a-vis delicatessens kicks off. Also re: ciabatta. A dull town. To Harrogate, full of parks. (To do list: feel good.) Eat bad masala in a park and laugh. Go see Lady In the Van. Theatre is airless and womb-hot. Play's beautiful tho - the soul in question offering a lesson after all. Sleepy, I mistake the interval for the end. Rush out, find a farm, sleep in the calving field. Set up in the dark.

Day 14: Harrogate into Bronteland.

Selfrighteous passerby asks if we have permission to camp: his transformation after being rebuffed is like a balloon farting flat. Just after we decamp, the Rain comes on. A group hysteria comes on too - we dump Rob's tent, flee back down the hill. Sodden breakfast in Cafe Rouge. More laughter. J leaving on a wet train. Blunder out of town and do 25 miles in 3 hours. Dry in the wind. The Bradford valley is amazing, Italian. Stop in Saltaire for 'lunch' (see photo).

To Bingley, which we soon retreat from, set up on a grand piece on nasty scrubland. I walk a mile and back to buy water. Talk metaphilosophy. Dream about home.

Day 15: Bingley to Littleborough

Wake to find a passing dog has eaten my breakfast. Eat cereal on the verge of an A-road. We climb 1500 feet in two miles - on the edge of the Pennines now. Haworth is bloody dramatic - all 40 degree valleys and Burtonesque outcrops. More bland road towns, and then

O!

A highlight of the whole trip: an incredible, four-mile-long regular downslope to Hebden Bridge. Didn't pedal once. Shower at Todmorden and doze on an ex-golfcourse (what a lovely concept that is!) Power on to Summit Quarry, a stunning but midgey campsite. Tomato is the travel staple for some reason: 5/6 of the meals centre on it.

Day 16: Littleborough to Knutsford

Sheep creep deep as we sleep. It's not pleasant going in these parts - though the sun's not intense, we have to take big roads. Decide to skip urbania - but Oldham train station is no more, so first we look for somewhere not grim to eat (fail, so first Wetherspoon's). Lots of hassle on road. Go to Ashton. It takes us three hours to make our connecting train through Manc to Knutsford. Rob goes for food, takes 50 minutes at it, which crosses my Gerald Horizon (the time waited after the expected return-time of someone before you assume that massive disaster has befallen them). We are identified by one of J's lovely mates. Sleep in a barn. FTW

Day 17: Knutsford to Helsby

Don't want to get up. Barns be comfy. Sit on a bench in Northwich and watch strange strangers. A Securicor man stops to pet a dog on his way in to Tesco. Stops for an unseemly length of time, really. Helsby is unsignposted. We muddle on. Somewhat frayed again. Arrive at J's house after hours. Shower, eat, miss a window for a Hong Kong internship, poke around. I am three steps into his house before I see a Burial album, to be fair. Up Helsby Hill; it's a chemical, Lemon-Jelly land. J is I suppose only standardly impassive to his parents. Eat cornucopic curry. J drives us to Ellesmere to see Tree of Life, a messy and chewy old thing. Back, we sit around, read existentialists.

Day 18: Chester

Thought process on the cycle route from H to Chester: relationship between capitalism and love 1: growth and industrialisation invented the concept and supply of "leisure time" - a vital component in gardening one's romantic love. 2: Concentrated mass housing allows couples to separate without the fear of homelessness-or-exile holding them together.

Town's reet nice. J is unerring and charges around his teen haunt in a funny laconic way, but we blunder into the sights anyway: buskers, the weird double-shops, the Cryer, the Cathedral, a Roman, the walls. Refectory is good. Tension flares somewhat over my nonexistent road skillz. Poem for Chester's shot-tower:

and I, a liquid falling,
and morphing (as you do)
and pausing on the water,
sphering, perfect, new.

Good hard towels at J's. More curry, then rush comically around Cheshire looking for J's friends in the old manner, blind guesswork. Nonbonfire party at friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend Howard's. Thus get to see J in his hatching habitat, which is very good fun:

"Buhhhhhhh, mi nam is J. H., I do nut kno bout art or fukkn books."

"This guy had shit himself in the club. But he were so cool about it, we felt like idiots for not shitting ourselves!"

"When in Rome, shit in the woods."

He also gets piled on, in the course of which I clonk heads badly with another of his lovely mates. I'm totally fine, but he got hisself fucked up. Helplessly embarassed. The banter is fast and riotous; I don't keep up. He is forced to be young here. It might grieve me that I exert little of that fresh cool pressure, but nah SUCH LADS

Day 19: Liverpool

Another deceptively aimless day out (aimed well by J). Drives us at length through bewildering spaghetti roads. Knows his history, especially the Beatles tour less travelled. First stop, the Metropolitan Cathedral. It is virtuoso, powerfully unsentimental. Dozens of excellent moments are set into a shocking overarching theme. It is my favourite church. I know this simply cos for once I felt no contempt in it. To 'the Phil', the Docks and the Tate. It's Magritte at the moment, and he is loads of fun. Also the other Cathedral: equally brutalist but less modern, less true. They face each other down Hope Street, and the smaller Metro guts the shit out of him.

Back, risotto trop vert, and to the pub. Meet Cheshtronica supremo TNJX, very shy - well. Moments of pure fun - "Sad or Bad?!" and seven people shouting at a quiz machine. J drives well back well drunk.

Day 20: Manchester

"I can suck melancholy from song as a weasel sucks eggs!"

- Jacques

Roll straight out of bed onto the 1100 train to Manchester. No conductor! Rain forces us into weird cultural junkshop. Buzz about - go to the gay bit for Turing, the crap goth-encrusted cathedral, the cathedralite Town Hall. Try to see Johnny Vegas, but are crushed.

Always so much about soldiers in churches. It's enough to drive you Marxist. Manc Cath claims all of one regiment's late-C20th dead on its wall - though a decent number of them wouldn't have given a shit about Christ. Supernatural insurance has done this world too much harm.

Big public gallery is oddly dissatisfying, but there's a good Turner and some fun contemps. Try to eat in the modish Northern Quarter - no seats in: "Common", "Trof", "O??", nor "Oklahoma", so we eat in a mediocre vegan place. See Craig Charles. See As You Like It, proper good even in the Gods. Another free train back, chatting with a friendly drunk in a borrowed suit.

(The big gimmick of my trip, my personal West of England Honours list, can be found here incidentally.)

Day 21: the Wirral

One last sally. To Jodrell Bank, where we stand for 5 minutes and leave. Am quiet, fatigued in some occluded way. J puts on Beastie Boys and Half Man Half Biscuit in the car; I could just stay in all day. Do plaques for two friends, Peel and Blackwell. Rain is filthy thick. Have a "euphorically" bad time in Birkenhead. Eat in Wetherspoon's, inevitably. Fail to get a present for J's parents.

Internet for a bit, trying to fling myself into a fruitful future. (A press pass to the Edinburgh Festival, and the groundwork for Low Lands, my book on nationality.) Go a to pub quiz, at which J is extremely unhappy. "Which Canada-born Bayern Munich midfielder made his international debut against the Netherlands in 2001?": "WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". We are not good but are funny.

Moment of poetry in a grim place (toilets of the Belle Monte pub, Frodsham): remarked to J how lovely his friend P is -

J: He is, isn't he? Famously is. He thinks I hate him though.
I: [grandiose] So let him know!

Later learn that P was in the cubicle during this, trying to save our modesty by calling out, but was ignored.

Day 22: Helsby to Congleton

Woken by J having a good idea in the next room. Onwards. (J stays behind.) Back immediately with some nice STEALTH WINE for hosts.

To Nantwich quickly. Cheerfully piece together a lunch of chips and redcurrants. Staffordshire is fucking nasty. Not much thinking or talking involved, just grit teeth and get through it. Make it to Congleton about 7pm, have a drink. Meet our first Great English Eccentric, a rude hag living in a giant scrapheap of fiftyyearold sports cars. Camp in a swamp on top of a hill. DONE.

(Concept without a word: beaux vivant; informal artist; self-artist. Someone who lives according to taste, and unnoticed acts of art. "Aesthete" comes close. What would Nietzsche call them?)

Day 23: Congleton to Ashbourne

Slept about 12 hours in tolerable misery. Spend ages decamping, soggy and grumpy. Less dashing, less swashing. Uphill struggle to Leek for hours - a spry 60 yearold biker overtakes us. Go to a crap cafe who begrudge us a sale. Limp on, fringing the Peaks.

Altered consciousness, really. Focus on ruining your legs. Did about 40 mile yesterday; apparently that was too much. Stop at Ashbourne cemetary (count on the dead for peace). There's a humanising flash of sunlight, but that's all. Drink and chat amidst bunting and Scottish flags (?) Thai restaurant for tea which had the same gorgeous dense sculpted tofu as had in Beijing. Scratch out another mile, camp illegally on a footpath.

birdsong as gunfire
(which it's closer to than serenade)
eternal woodland carnage,
interminable grudge,
the cock a flare up-arcing,
and the warring won't be budged:

wings like old m.g blues.

Day 24: Ashbourne to Smisby

Hypersensitive night - too close to the road, too much stink. Another supermarket-bench breakfast and away. Fatigue lifts. Into Derby on a wave of admiration: bike paths everywhere, big news screen and a stylish contempt for its past. Shower, do cathedral, do pub. It occurs to me that EngSoc are the natural enemies of Philsoc. It also occurs to me that I want to set up a intersociety football tournament. Moment of sublime error when I leave my bike-lock key somewhere. Set the staff of Wetherspoon's searching for it before noticing it myself under the table. We leave hastily.

Except you can't, because the outskirts last 10 bloody miles. Derby hath spread her wings. Along the Swarkstone Causeway, which is a stunning thing to leave in the middle of nowhere. We're almost efficient. Face the first real campsite difficulty - ask at half a dozen houses, nothing. A nice man owns a wee unkempt field, though, and there we are.

Day 25: Smisby to Coventry

People have been good to us on this trip. The only explanation they usually give is "No reason not to, is there?" or "Life's too short to be unkind ter folk." J mocked this when I put this to him, but the point is not that this is some metaethical epiphany, but that tacit proto-principles can support action on their own, and do, and maybe always have.

Back road to Birmingham goes inexplicably easily; daydream all day, replaying the year. Stop in Atherstone and consider the lilies. Make hellish trip to Coleshill train station, which is 5 miles out of Coleshill through industrial hell. We stop in Birmingham for literally ten minutes and go to Coventry instead. Everything's closing as we arrive. Eat Cantonese, enduring the worst that Cantopop can offer. After much blundering, find a weird empty grassland and camp. Toss, turn.

Day 26: Coventry to Callow End

Up in sunshine. R's away today, so I trade my lovely inflatable mattress with Rob in exchange for the tent. Error expected. To Coventry Cathedral, lock our bikes beneath Satan.

We don't stay long - there's a Christian rock band practicing in the main cavern and I'd be claustrophobic even without their aural cack. Get overwhelmed - there's a Hiroshima exhibit in a side-chapel, and something in me just gives way. I am about as fit as i'm ever going to get; I've got no physical complaints; I've done something grand with my July - but I'm not in good shape, in some important and wordless sense. R away home. I'm unaccompanied for the first time in three weeks; overtones of fear arrive. Push out defiantly for Warwick Uni, a great glass dump of knowledge. I could deal with this for a year; 2013, say. The economists are in the same building and floor as the philosophers, but of course they never speak.

To Worcester by dark, whereupon I'm knackered. Their gallery's crap. Eat trendily (Slug & Lettuce), shower at the leisure-centre with the broken boiler. Rain comes on so I ride around the empty 'Crowngate', their covered marketplace-mall. Well fun. Waves of despair come on - have to bike 4 miles out of town, get a dozen rejections in that space. Find some Commons and collapse. Sleeping on the actual ground is quite a skill - have to work your back into and around all the bumps. Or go mad.

Day 27: Callow End to Stow

Woken by that most powerful of freejazz quartets, dogs screeching in joy near to the ear. Even given that I've an awful unfocussed and heavy feeling, in this, our fifth week of the Road. Get a flurry of texts informing me of the passing of Amy Winehouse. (What's the obscurest celebrity you'd text someone over?)

Make it to Great Malvern running on empty - no water nor nothin. Sit and eat for an hour. Overheard: [patronising] "Darling, you are what you are - it's your genes, isn't it?"
On this spot in AD1211: "Darlinge, you are whatt you are - it be Providence, see you not?"

Nice town, full of theatres and Cryers. Up, up, up to Colwall, which is unspeakably peaceful. Lurk around the Downs School reading Auden. Then away, down to Stow. All the little towns around here are obviously nice, but I can't stand them. Spot something bizarre on a hill. We stare at each other for a bit until I give in.

Wrestle over whether to get a hostel or eat well (both about £16, see). Hostel it is. Can't decide what I want first - a shower, some internet, clean shorts, food, wine, a nap, safety, a giant-ass bowl of cereals, or a little tenderness. Sort out my life; find all these things. My relief is violent.

Day 28: Stow to Oxford.

Bad breakfast and back to bed. Read the hostel's the Female Eunuch all morning ( :o )

Road is easy, or perhaps I'm finally Road Worthy. Into Oxfordshire without breaking stride. Chipping Norton - the dead heart of our media-political complex - shows none of the angry shame expected. Pass Blenheim Palace, the giant-ass pile we gave to Marlborough after he killed all those people for us at Blindheim, Bavaria. Doomed to live/drown in one day of your life. If the man had any sensitivity he'd have fucken ached.

Oxford is crowded, loud, expensive and discordant. "Honey made stone" - no, mead-vomit frozen in place. Tbh I return the impression, being a thoroughly bad tourist - I rush around, frown, steal, piss on Magdalen College and leave. Almost lose my phone - leave it on a bench - which I do feel as a rebuke by the souls of this bloody place. Camp on a farm by Didcot. Farmer banters, but I'm having none of it by this stage (to my later shame). (Want to Stop, but honour dictates.)

Day 29: Oxford to Andover

Heatstress busyness psychosis, eh? Hyperthermic tensomatic kinetic batshit, no? Stop over in Newbury, which is horseracing and nothingness.

Stock reply to crap funeral: "She really loved language."
Stock reply to crap beer: "You can really taste the hops."
Stock reply to crap reply: "That would be an ecumenical matter."

An important thing to know about yourself: you have a limited appetite even for beauty and novelty and adventure. Around three weeks, cynicism and impermeabilty of the soul begin their encroach. I don't find a hostel. The passion with which I want to get on with my life would make Nietzsche proud.

Day 30: Andover to Salisbury

Sick of the same sweat-caked clothes. Sick of a sore back. Sick of shit beard. Sick of focussing on negatives.

The 'Plain is impressive. Ride around the cathedral a few times looking for Jonathan Meades' childhood house (failure). Go down "Endless Street" just to be contrary. YHA Salisbury is pleasingly shambolic. Sit on a picnic bench outside, drink three beers, eat an entire pizza and watch the sunset. Pangs for someone to share the moment with.

Think about prankster philosophers. (As we go, the comic portion of the work increases)

Diogenes --> Montaigne -> Nietzsche -> MacDiarmid -> Derrida -> Zizek.

Day 31: Salisbury to Garmouth

Dorm was incredibly silent for a room of eight men sleeping. Not sure when I decided that Salisbury was the new terminus, but the thought of more south makes me angry by this stage. Go to the Cathedral, and then fuck off out of it.

Book I got at an Oxfam is fairly amazin:

"I beseech you! if ever we shared philosophical impulses, take responsibility for your gifts! Place it in the service of reason, or of the reality of human worth & possibilities, instead of in the service of magic!"

- Jaspers to Heidegger

(Wish I could have as dramatic a conversation about this abstract a thing with as dear a friend of mine. Puh. Stupid, pragmatic, anti-Nazi friends.)

The train undoes a month's work in a quarter of a day.

As is my new habit, take the train to Elgin instead of the bus. Use my Aberdeen ticket to get to Elgin, somehow (conductor possibly saw my expression). Elated, trippy journey home in the dark from Elgin - there's no streetlights on the main road, so every time a car approaches I'm completely blinded. Heidegger in my forebrain and epoché on my mind.

What should they know of Scotland who only Scotland know?

METAL PLACES IN ENGLAND

2011-07-29T07:02:00.000-07:00

*************************************************

***********************************************************

************************************************

****************************************

*********************************************************

*************************************************************

***********************************************************

**********************************************************************

****************************************************************

*****************************************************************************

Most of these are in Yorkshire for some reason.

INTERVIEW: James Reid, mathematical physicist, weightlifter, Doric enthusiast

2011-06-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

"I' foon laid for doot.

Thocht and scrievit – bit nae mind't?
Gye near. Ebsent freens."
- James Reid

(Foundation of doubt.
I thought and wrote - but I forgot?
So close. Absent friends.)

"Glymur dansur í høll, Dans sláið ring, Glaðir ríða Skotskur menn, til Waterloo Gym!"
- his joke about the Faroese saga Ormurin Langi

(Dance resounds in the halls, dance! form a ring! Brave Scots, ride to Waterloo Gym!)

James Reid is a mathematician earning his Master's at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at Waterloo, Canada. (He's one of 28 in the pilot class; aye, 28 of the world's best.) He's very probably the only twistor theorist to belong to Moray. You should imagine the following at high speed in a Buckie accent, punctuated with chortles and silly grins. (To be frank, he's an advert for the human race.)

Q: Roughly how long would it take for you to explain to a lay crowd what part of the world your physics work deals with?

JR: Not as long as you might imagine! Although I'm really more of a mathematician, I'm active in two fields: Mathematical Relativity and Quantum Gravity. The first uses pure mathematics to study the structure of space and time. Although Quantum Mechanics is purported to have a particularly strange ontology - inasfar as particles may be in two places at once (as indeed, they are!) - to me, Relativity is by far the richer theory, both mathematically and conceptually. That answer's a bit of a cop out, but the next isn't:

Quantum Gravity is (arguably) the deepest theory of fundamental physics. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are two physical theories which describe the nature of very small- and very large- scale phenomena, respectively. QM describes phenomena subatomically, whilst General Relativity describes physics astronomically. By virtue of their mathematical formulations, the two theories are completely incompatible. Thus, the regime at which quantum effects become important at gravity is completely unknown. These are the smallest fundamental scales in the universe, and (I believe) ALL the deep theories predict very strange behaviour there.

The most popular, best-developed theory of Quantum Gravity is String Theory. String Theory asserts that the elementary particles we see in linear accelerators are in fact different vibrational "modes" of a more fundamental object - a Superstring. To be consistent, String theory must exist in either 11, 12 or 26 dimensions. I'll happily write you an extensive comment about it, since I don't believe in String Theory. It's mysticism gone wrong. We have a wondrous gift in mathematics - it's truly the occult science - but String Theory is the paragon of our being misled. This would make a very good article in itself actually, let me know if you'd like to discuss it!

Q: Me saying "lay crowd" isn't far off, either; you also hold some mystical beliefs, in the Pythagoras/Spinoza/Pauli/Penrose tradition. What can you express about this in language?

JR: Yes, I'm somewhat mystical. At face value, mathematics is a "game". One stipulates a set of rules, according to which notional "objects" may be manipulated. One then examines the consequences of the axioms, and quickly find the that game is remarkably well-suited for describing nature.

(Aside: Penrose talks about this fairly extensively about the relation between a mathematically idealised thing, say a circle, and the thing itself - although I've only ever skimmed what he's written.)

(Aside: I didn't know Pauli had mystical beliefs. He had a strong friendship with Carl Jung, and they had many dialogues that were published in a book. That would be great to read!)

In the course of asking natural mathematical questions, you uncover new structures which are sometimes found to have application in nature. Until the twentieth century, mathematics was only really employed aposteriori in physical theories. The natural philosopher would effectively 'check' that his insight stood up the rigors of mathematics. e.g. In the C19th, there was great interest in electromagnetic phenomena. Following the work of Ampere, Faraday, Kirchoff, Coulomb and numerous others, James Clerk Maxwell succinctly described all electromagnetic behaviour in terms of two equations. Decades of sickeningly complicated calculations were reduced to:

dF = 0,
d(*F) = J

Hidden in these equations are the principles underlying almost ALL developments in C20th theoretical physics. If you only had eyes to see, Einstein's Special Relativity was implicitly described herein in its entirety.

It was astonishing. The physical structure of the universe was written in mathematical structure. The nature of a conception constrained what "could be". I hope I'm adequately conveying the magnitude!

I think this is what started the new strain of mathematical mysticism. There've been a good many more developments along these lines recently, following the most "beautiful" mathematical structures. The one I use most extensively is the "Fibre Bundle". Here's a quote from the famous 20th century theoretical physicist Chen Ning Yang discoursing with the equally famous mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern:

"Maxwell's equations and the principles of Quantum Mechanics led to the idea of gauge invariance. Attempts to generalize this idea, motivated by physical concepts of phases, symmetry and conservation laws, led to the theory of non-Abelian gauge fields. That non-Abelian gauge fields are conceptually identical to ideas in the beautiful theory of fiber bundles, developed by mathematicians without reference to the physical world, was a great marvel to me. In 1975 I discussed my feelings with Chern, and said 'this is both thrilling and puzzling, since you mathematicians dreamed up these concepts out of nowhere'. He immediately protested: 'No, no. These concepts were not dreamed up. They were natural and real.'"

- C.N Yang.

There's a lot of instances of this, centred mostly around Geometry (: what I'm into), although there are similar notions in Algebra. Hermann Weyl once commented that "The angel of Geometry and the Devil of Algebra compete for the soul of any theory" - quite true!

This grand reduction is, in a sense, a mystical knowledge. The nature of the universe is being engendered, and is made manifest, in oneself whilst one's doing mathematical physics. The cardinal difference between this and canonical mysticism is that the mathematical physicist may choose to acknowledge this as divine action or not. Those of us who continue to be astounded by it ascribe to the notion of its divinity. It's the avatar of Spinoza's god. Infinitely more special that any anthropomorphic sociopath [cf. Yahweh].

It tempers and calms us, like Buddhism or other mystical disciplines. The element of neurological temperance is there - but more tangibly, since one is looking at the universe as it is in a sense, and not at the mind as it is.

Some have been led astray by these notions. You see, identifying a branch of mathematics as physically relevant motivates physicists to explore it to it's full, often thus forgetting the concept that motivated the discovery. Penrose's Twistor theory is the archetypal example of trying to practice this mysticism properly. He appeals to only the most beautiful concepts, and, somewhat ironically - having envisioned that Twistor Theory may be the road to Quantum Gravity - it has turned out that Twistor Theory has allowed every other theory to be described much more efficiently! Calculations that took ten years on a parallel computing system now take minutes on the back of an envelope with twistor methods. Consequently, there are many strains to it being researched by folk with varying degrees of volition to his mystical reasonings.

Guided by this sense of unity, Penrose is, in my mind, the second best mathematician in the world - and has done more for theoretical physics in this century than anyone bar Einstein.

These concepts are much easier to illuminate while teaching mathematics, since the concept is impressed upon you in its pure form. I'd imagine you're very familiar with the quiet catharsis that comes about as after a long night philosophising. When you're open to the luminous minds of your friends and are invigorated. You can find that in mathematics too. Ask Johnny what his views are: he's studied complex analysis, which is like sorcery! In any case, mathematics as it pertains to physics offers the most pronounced of cultivations - at least to me, and a few others.

I think that its important to note that the mysticism I embody is a very passive one. Whilst rituals often serve to prime the mind for natural truth in canonical mysticism, "metanoia" is achieved through hard work in mathematics. I think a lot of mathematicians are of this school of thought without realising they are. They seldom feel the need to philosophise on other topics, since they (often unknowingly) engender deep knowledge about concepts underpinning the nature of the universe - they're satiated, and that brings a lot of reconciliation. One of my lecturers, a mad Russian, says "I might be rich, I might be poor. I don't know - it doesn't exist to me." He does very hardcore stuff, and it's reflected in his temperament. He talks to god.

Q: There's an old cliché about how scientists see the world that always goes round: the eyes that translate or transform everything into formulae. Do you keep your work partioned from the rest of your life?

JR: Both yes and no, depending on mood! I certainly adhere to the cliche, but it's nowhere near as pronounced as you'd imagine in the scientific community. Many scientists are neurologically stale individuals: wholly uninvigorating. They strive away on whimsical applications because "that's what science is". While I can see where they're coming from - it's very good fun to immerse yourself in an application (say, making a better engine using physical arguments) - these people are technologists rather than natural philosophers. They tend to never think about the nature of things, and even if they do, it's regurgitation of a notion they had once. They're devoid of spontaneity, and are content with their pre-meditated cop-out.

Consequently, very few scientists can look at the world like in that picture. It's immensely enrichening to do so - and very hard to see more than one facet at once! Each requires consideration in it's own regard, so I had to look at each of the equations and relate them to see what the illustrator meant - they're all correct and appropriate, which is refreshing!

The more fundamentally a scientist wishes to look at nature, the less of a partition there is between work and reality. That's a generalisation though: there's a lot of nuance to consider.

Q: Given your interest in mythology, any chance of a book on interrelations of Norse symbolism and Minkowski space?

JR: Haha! I don't think so, I'm afraid. I think this would be just about achievable in a book about mathematical mysticism, but it would be a stretch to accomodate Norse mythology. I really like Norse mythology for it's pragmatism and metaphor. It really appeals to the Western mind. Baldr's myth is my favourite: "He [Baldr] will only return when all living creatures mourn for him".

Which all the gods except Loki do. Here, in constructing their gods as facets of the psyche, the Norse have summed up the impediment we all face to enlightenment:

"Being wise would be ace, except I love fucking about and enjoying myself".
- Loki

Hahaha! There's more to it, but I think that's the salient point.

GIG: Mountain Goats @ King Tut's, 29/5/11

2011-05-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

"...the truest stories are the ones that aren't factual at all."
- with a stage-wink and half-turn

SETPLAYLIST

They open in matching suits with a slightly lounge take on 'Jeff Davis County Blues'. But he knows it's loungey. (He seems always to know what he's up to, which makes criticism a joy.)

I suppose I'm ashamed to admit my shock at finding John Darnielle to be such a happy man. I suppose I'm surprised because much of his old stuff deals in abjection - and even the recent stuff is deceptively cheerful.

He gapes and grins with silent mania on the fast numbers - like Jim Carrey in his darker moments, or Tommy Cooper's thoughtful ones. He's thus quite the actor, since each song is a day in a different character's head. (And usually a bad day, but spiritualized in its bleakness.) He keeps throwing his head back - half to keep his glasses on while playing guitar, half, perhaps, because the rock cliché amuses him. Ponderous pondering people really like his balladeering, but here he tells the stories on the hop, goofy with fun. Given their music's typical tone that makes for dissonance:

Oh god I hate her but there's no way out; that fucking baby, this fucking heat."
Darnielle live: "These people won't ever break up! (Teehee!)"

Is his grin a grimace? Is grit needed to work oneself up to such shrill declamations?

Anyway, far be it from me to shit on fun. Compelled and compelling, he boyishly delivers rock-poems that are anything but boyish. He's jolly, chunky and shaggy by this point of the tour, which makes a pleasing contrast with the fanbase (90% male, 80% troubled, 70% bespectacled, 60% stick-thin, 50% bearded...).

"But that's cos I'm a big ol' goofus"

My friend reckons he's drunk - but I reckon back that you can't do his signature whiplash strum while tanked up. The other two members depart for the middle third of the show: slow jams. Alone, he backburns beautifully, looks at his fret-hand, chin back.

The other two are mute throughout, except for occasional, mild backing vox from bassist Peter Hughes. (So no comment from me, either.)

We want his characters to rage. Much of his old stuff fetishises the mundane, thirteen sets of portraits of ordinary madness. But All Eternals Deck is about extraordinary madness instead: aging Satanists, aging celebrities, self-dramatizing speedfreaks. (So too is the album before that - if you see religious love as the extraordinary thing it is.) Religion is his most potent theme, stretched out uncommonly deep - the Dante of Durham, North Carolina saying that romantic love is analogous to faith.

He intros half the songs with a candid explanatory schtick: 'Of Charles Bronson' - "A terrible example of a person with a gigantic chip on his shoulder, but made great by it. (Like everyone in the history of the world!)";

the storming "Prowl Great Cain" about an amoralist being released from prison;

and "Damn these Vampires", about some speedfreaks, "people who are almost certainly dead by now, whose names I never knew, but who certainly knew how to colonize a fella's bedroom without an invite for twelve hours."

I'm not sure how much weight these deadpan explanations should have - a quick skim of Youtube comments shows that he does lots of them, and not coherently neither. But when he tells us a theology student fan sent him a paper on the Life of the World to Come, it's not hard to suspend disbelief. (Doesn't that sound just like what we're like?)

Worst, he claims that the Alpha Couple are real, people he still knows, still horribly together.

************************************

We swiftly get an encore, because he doesn't want our "raging through the streets seeking something to destroy, something precious to destroy" on his conscience.

He tells us that "Psalms 40:2" is about these, "the most American, disgusting thing". But he recants that for the last song. He admonishes those of us who are in the habit of only talking down one's home. It's really got a hold on us, after all, no matter where it is.

SETLIST
1. Jeff Davis County Blues
2. Old College Try
3. For Charles Bronson
4. Rotten Stinkin Mouthpiece
5. Hast Thou?
6. Minnesota
7. Sign of the Crow (pt. 2)
8. San Bernardino
9. Matthew 25:21
10. There Will Be No Divorce
11. Woke up New
12. Seeing Daylight
13. Love Love Love
14. Prowl Great Cain
15. Damn These Vampires
16. No Children
ENC

18. Psalms 40:2
19. This Year
20. California Song

INTERVIEW: Alistair McIntosh, land reform activist, professor in human ecology, urban clansman

2011-05-19T06:30:00.001-07:00

(c) Médiathèque Lafarge

"McIntosh can reference a Celtic faerie story, a Bible verse, a newspaper article and a psychology study all on the same page. I think that’s wonderful, but I’m reminded of a comment that I got back on one of my essays at university: that it was interesting, but I “should avoid the metaphysical flights of fancy”. That lecturer would miss the point of Soil and Soul entirely, because the message of the book is inseparable from the style in which it is written..."
- Jeremy Williams

Alistair McIntosh has been campaigning for social and ecological justice in all kinds of places (Eigg, Govan, Quebec, Papua New Guinea, Menie), with all kinds of work (liberation theology, editorials, speaking tours, poetry, hand-crafted longboats for inner-city kids) for a long whilie now. Sparked by experiences teaching in newly independent Papua New Guinea in the 70s, McIntosh has pushed a number of distinctly Scottish projects: the Govan Folk University, the GalGael Trust, as well as more global ones like the Centre for Human Ecology. He has a PhD in land theology - as well as an MBA in Finance (this, possibly, keeping his "enemies" closer).

Hello Alistair McIntosh,

Q: A lot of folk now get antsy around religiously-inflected work. Do you think that your being openly spiritual has put people off, or limited your exposure in secular places?

AM: First, distinguish between religion and spirituality. Religion is politicised spirituality. It has an important place, but because it derives from consensus - authority - it lacks the freedom of unmediated spiritual searching. Religion should be the socially-supported trellis up which a vine, spirituality grows, but it doesn’t always work out like that because people are people.

The question next arises as to whether or not spirituality is valid. Now, I don’t care what people think, I care whether it's true. Do we have grounds for believing that, behind the physical, there is the metaphysical, the spiritual? My first observation is from the physical: it is astonishing that existence is; that there is something. Having got over that, what are its limits? That's where you have the choice: to explore, seek empirical evidence or not explore and presume a limitation.

In my life I have explored this, both inwardly - with work into the nature of consciousness - and outwardly - from evidence that there may be more to reality than just the “normal”. Some of the early papers on my website document this. Now, I just get on with living it. You move beyond curiosity and into being. These are issues both epistemological and ontological: they're hugely important because they concern the structure of reality, and the framework in which we conceive of our values. The evidence, as I see it, points to the metaphysical reality of grounding love as the source of life. And that’s a trip!

So yes, following this path means that some people may not take me as seriously as they might. But to be honest, I don’t often feel that.

Q: And has your strong metaphysics (which emphasises feelings, deontic constraints, inherent value, and spirit as grounds) limited your audience amongst academics?

AM: Even in [scientistic] academia I find that if you come in and state your premises - your parameters, your "epistemological constructs" - you’ll usually get a fair hearing. If you don’t state them, then of course they’re wide open to being challenged. I think we’re in changing times on this. 30 years ago, religion was a fairly normal part of mainstream debate. Now that’s giving way to spirituality; in just the past decade the word "spirituality" is much more widely used. What does it imply? To me: interconnectedness, through that bedrock of love. It's the root of community (as distinct from a mere community of interests).

How do you experience it? I do indeed say that we feel it. Allow yourself to feel empathy with your fellow humankind - though you’ll only be able to do that if you act “as if” and start living it. I think that’s why a lot of people are sceptical. They maybe haven’t let themselves go into it, because empathy is costly in materialistic terms. The return on it is opening the door on a greater beauty.

Q: Soil and Soul's subtitle is 'People Versus Corporate Power'. How often do you reckon money conflicts with higher values? (Which is also to ask: Is ethical capitalism possible?)

AM: My view is that capitalism is an unfortunate reality. The truth is that we don’t all bend over backwards to by mutually-produced stuff. We don’t all insist on Fair Trade, or the Co-op, or whatever. Capitalism is an emergent entity in its own right, but one based on the aggregate of all our behaviours. The world is capitalist because we're capitalist. Sometimes at academic conferences when I’ve been challenged on that, by folk who prefer to deny their complicity, I say, “Will all of you taking this position who are wearing clothing bought from capitalist enterprises, please disrobe.” Last time I did that was to business and environment students at Exeter University. The only one who looked comfortable, and was laughing out loud, was Tim Gorringe, the professor of divinity: he was wearing a huge jumper that he’d knitted himself out of the wool of his own sheep!

So, if we look in the corporate mirror, we see our own distorted reflections back. We drive capitalism and then capitalism drives us – at least in the relatively affluent and democratic West. If that’s the case, the question then arises in my mind is how ethical it can be. I don’t buy Israeli oranges because I don’t like how they’re produced. I mostly avoid food shipped around the world. I do buy RSPCA-certified Freedom Food or Soil Association Organic when buying meat, because, given that I'm a shameful cannibal allergic to Tofu Pie, I want my behaviour to drive higher animal-welfare standards and soil conservation. If we all just raised our expectations of capitalism it would still be capitalism, but a better capitalism … which is maybe as far as we get in an imperfect world. And don’t get me on about pensions, or money earning interest in the bank! Nobody can have such things and not admit to being an integral part of capitalism.

Incidentally, I was never completely happy with the subtitle of Soil and Soul. I’d have preferred no subtitle, but the publisher wanted it, and I was writing about combats with corporate and landed power. I happen to think that corporate power has its place when properly legitimised by society. Mind that the Co-op is a corporation; the church was the very first corporation. Limited liability companies are just another variation: the problem is when "limited liability" entails limited responsibility. That’s what we must be “versus”.

Q: You teach a course in nonviolence at the MoD's postgrad military college. What on earth's that like? Are they receptive?

AM: I don’t teach a course, but I have an annual day of teaching - a lecture then a panel discussion. It’s bizarre - at least, it was at first. This is now the 15th year I’ve been doing it. At the UK Defence Academy I speak each year to 300–400 senior officers, mostly British from all the services, but some from 60 other nations as well. I give a 40 minute blast and really go full on. I’ve got it on video, and when I show it to peace groups they’re astonished that I get away with saying what I do. But the absolute crux of it is mutual respect. I say that we’re all agreed about dying for our beliefs. The issue is whether we also kill for them, and I then unpack a full-on spiritual take on nonviolence drawing on Hindu, Islamic and Christian theology. It leads to very powerful discussion - I have letters from some of the UK’s most senior commanders saying how important it is that they hear that side of the debate … and they wish the politicians would hear it too.

I have published on this, so you can see exactly the kind of thing I say. For a bit of a laugh of an article, try the one that was in Resurgence some years ago. For heavy-duty stuff see the one just published in the standard UK textbook used in officer ethics.

Why do they let me in the door, and keep it open for all these years? I think it’s because most of today’s military have seen the killing. They know that war is not a very good answer. They’re involved in peace-keeping, and know that there’s more than one approach to that. Many agree that nuclear weapons are unconscionable. There is a basic human need to explore these questions. They say things like, “You remind us of the limits – and to question our assumptions.”

Q: Does it do any good?

I honestly cannot say. But I’d rather that the military know what the arguments of nonviolence are, and why some people are pacifists, than have them in ignorance of that. I get especially strong positive reactions from the Arabic and Pakistani students. Two years ago a cluster of them gave me a standing ovation. They come up afterwards and say how good it is to hear Islam being presented in an informed way when it comes to terrorism. The very few from whom I’ve had negative reactions (“Quite frankly, I think you’re mad”) are mostly those who leave me wondering if they’re mis-selected, because you do find the odd one – pretty rare – who find the killing “satisfying” – as a cluster bomber put it last year. On balance, I have to say they've earned my respect. And within the confines of the Chatham House Rule I’m given a free hand to talk about the course; indeed, I did just that on Radio Scotland’s Thought for the Day this morning when challenging our militarised approach to Libya.

(From this morning's broadcast: "...I’ve been surprised by the reception [from the Defence Academy]. "Go tell the politicians,” some of the most senior officers will say, “that war is a poor substitute for political policy to sort out other people’s problems.” They view themselves as peace-makers, so they’ll ask: “Can nonviolence bring anything realistic to the table?”

“It may not stop the immediate killing,” I’ll say, “but neither does war. Nonviolence operates at a deeper level. It seeks to take away the causes of war.”

It offers civil defence tactics, like the Norwegian teachers used to resist Nazi indoctrination. It prepares unarmed citizens to enter trouble spots, training local leaders with the civic skills and strength of soul that can restore justice, and refrain from throwing petrol on the fire, fighting evil with more evil.

It may sound bonkers, but that’s what’s bringing change in Egypt, and established black civil rights in America, and lowered the Iron Curtain, and ejected Marcos from the Philippines, and a growing list of other examples. It was St Augustine who invented “just war” theory, saying: “We go to war that we may have peace.” But Jesus never taught just war theory. Jesus taught nonviolence: for any fool can live in conflict; it takes guts to live in peace.)

Q: I was actually at a panel on the Arab Spring recently. A group of Quakers in the audience condemned the NATO intervention in Libya and, implicitly, the anti-Qaddafi forces too. A Libyan panel member was deeply offended by both suggestions, pointing out that many of them had prayed for the UN resolution, and that the civil war was started after perhaps a thousand peaceable protestors were murdered. It's the clearest instance I've seen of the way folk talk past each other about war - no one was arguing that war was good, merely that given an armed regime, this was the least-bad decision.

And, though I knew what the Quakers meant - that war is absurd, counterproductive, indefensibly risky - I couldn't sympathise with them anymore. (It didn't help that they forgot to criticise the Qaddafi forces - and in fact almost defended him in that dodgy New Left way for his "anti-imperialism".) Do you believe that nonviolence is a simple and universal method, as they seemed to?

McIntosh has a massive amount of material up at his website, and can be found in Glasgow throughout June teaching liberation theology.

Listen Cloze: "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman

2011-05-10T13:04:00.001-07:00

"...on a job application
for a position i never got
i once put down "ornette coleman"
as "kin to notify" because of that song
he made: "lonely woman"
tho i'm sure he stole those sound-tears
from someone he had hurt, made cry--
cause
no man
has ever
really felt
like that"
- Kalamu ya Salaam

"FOR REAL JAZZ MUSIC LOVERS ONLY. ENJOY THE ART."
- injunction on the video for Zorn's cover, below

There's so much hippy chat cloaking jazz. (Tales of the otherworldly and interworldly.) Too often it's a druggy and emptily radical space. This spooks a lot of people away. (Dizzy Gillespie called it "mess" music.) But the cosmic pseudo-philosophy is the least interesting thing about it.

There's so much scary technicality around jazz. (Tales of the diatonic and atonic.) This spooks a lot of people away. (Dizzy Gillespie called it "mess" music.) This is probably overcompensation; scar tissue from classical music's racist rejection of the intensely new, clever, black musics. But jazz has kept its jargon simply because snobbishness is loads and loads of fun.

Jazz is thus both Continental and Analytic. Few capture the hard clear mist as well as Ornette Coleman did. This is the first cut on his world-messing Shape of Jazz To Come - frenetic, melody mutating, haunting. Cherry (the trumpeter) & Coleman (saxist) are preternatural together, dueting madly. "Lonely Woman" is all kinds of things - repetitive and frozen, scarcely developing.

I think I'm right in saying nobody did improvised chord structure before this. As if the word was "We'll do chord changes on the fly" - as if he simply didn't have time because there is no such thing or some shit. Harmony on the run, if you like, as you like it. Rhythm section loose enough to manoeuvre past all the erratic shit that's flying about.

Have a look if you have the eyes: http://www.freejazzinstitute.org/showposts.php?dept=transcriptions&topic=20081120044407_HalfNelson

This is what musical freedom amounts to, then: deciding what you're going to do as you do it, and to hell with tonal centers; we can always make more. (Later on he wouldn't bother with new ones.)

"State your themes, young man!"
"...Yeah, but then what?"

"Lonely Woman" doesn't sound so harsh now, screamlike bits and drum solos aside. Not quite ready to dance to it, though.

*********************************************************

But never mind that, never mind any of the gubbins and tubes underneath; what does it feel like? What's feminine about it?

A man trying to sympathise with a glimpsed stranger? An awed pathos descending on him, for once? It'd be a strange mind that had both this ratatat hihat and this plaintive swung horn! (Harmony as her subconscious, melody as her stream of consciousness? Does that work?)

*****************************************************

Covers by

-- Radka Toneff (Norwegian doing a vocal setting. The lyrics are painful and lose the wit of the instrumental, but it's nice enough.)

-- Diamanda Galas' one(!) is something else, lyricless; dementing over one single nasty piano pedal chord.

-- Dave Liebman (Recorder is striking at first, but the whole thing gets laboured pretty soon, so full of itself it could shit limbs)

-- Allen/Orr/Smith is avant as you like - "skilful" - but it never develops above knee-level in its quest for consistent weirdness.

-- Mark Kostabi,
(Boring solo piano with "Over the Rainbow" and other cheap disquotes)

--Maria Faust,
(slow, smoothened out, catching a little fire midway but remaining a negative jam)

-- Joe Lovano (his clarinet version is great on record, but you'll have to settle for this unsteady cut:)

-- John Zorn, (raucous and dutty, but robbed of senstivity and wit)

-- Joshua Redman (nujazz reimagining, all vague blips and indifference. Actually starts at 2:35, at which point it becomes an ok emulation.)

What these have in common is their failure to find anything like the original's godly pairing of sax and trumpet. Even Coleman apparently never did, after Cherry died. The real lonely woman was never alone; she had two voices ringing out for her, was two voices, trying to balance in the night.

Virtuous Prick

2011-04-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

(Songs of Nietzschean virtue)

1. HONESTY

(or "Honest to A Fault" by At the Drive-In)

2. COURAGE

(There's a bizarre amount of Nietzscheanism in the Shins, it's worth an essay.)

3. EXUBERANCE

"I don't know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish to be more than a dancer."

4. HUMOUR

5. HEALTH

(!)

6. FATALISM
"Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal..."

7. AESTHETICISM

8. HARDNESS

9. GENEROSITY

10. POLITENESS

11. FRIENDSHIP

12. PRIDE

(Honorary mention for absurdity: "Forefather")

(Also, Pride comes before the Fall)

13. SOLITUDE

(All illustrations randomly generated here.)