Travel broadens the mind

Last week you wrote, perhaps unfairly, that you couldn't imagine a place worse than China. Well, what about East Europe? All you know about it is they've probably got bad plumbing and endless, freezing winters. Lots of anti-semitism and skinny women. Also, totally fucked up by the Commies.

'You can't see someone being shot'
---Herta Muller.

Maybe something's lost in translation but that does sound shite, doesn't it? You sometimes wonder if they write about anything else but Nazism/Communism/Interrogations/ Bad Plumbing...I brushed my teeth. A daily act of "resistance". Put kettle on stove (bit of a Yorkshire accent slipping in here). Stove not working. Stove not work. (Is there a hidden linguistic affinity between Yorkshiremen and Native Americans?).

Russia...now, there's a place to avoid! And the so-called 'Far East'. Jesus, is there anything more mind-numbingly boring than Singapore? One might as well go to Terminal 5. Everyone wants to be a business manager. They still read the Reader's Digest out there for Christ's sake! But it so well order...

Cambodia, Vietnam (if they're not one country, that is)? Nah, there's no avoiding eating slugs or the landmines. Can they even speak English?

An American kid to his mother outside the Leaning Tower of Of Pisa: "Is that another Chrch? I ain't going to no more Goddam chrches."

Or Pakistan, land of mystery and the original commando-survival package tour all rolled into one. All wel-come. Unless you are Jewish or a woman or practitioner of black magic. At customs you may be asked to deposit any narcotics or pornography you are carrying with you. Please pick up your receipt. We are hospitable nation but please follow cultural norms. Do not shake hands, smile in public or talk to animals in zoo.

This is land of Sufis. Don't come here with your polluting thoughts and Jimmy Savile perversions. We have history stretching 5,000 years, 10,000, ..even before human beings came down on earth. Look at this tree stump. Been in our family for 83 years.  Very good for artificial legs. 

India! Have I told you about what an utter waste of time that place is? People eating on the streets next to pigswill. And I don't just mention that coz I is Muslim. You have to pay 10 Rs just to be allowed to piss on a tree. That's capitalism for you.

Holland? Oh, my. Never seen such ugly looking prostitutes in my life. And that's a tourist attraction?! Nearly as bad as Tracey Emin and so-called modern art.Is there anything more nauseous in the whole world (except for one of those insipid women's reading groups and all that prattle about "love" and "loss"...and how you couldn't stop crying...)

'You don't put accountants in charge of music. When that happens, you just have shit-ass music that sells but doesn't have soul. Music is not just a fucking graph.'
--Cy. Lauper.

Five Years

'And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you're beautiful,...'

---Ziggy.

Hope. Change. We can do it. Unless you're Palestinian. Get thee back to the ghetto. Pathetic.

~~~

A certain social fabric somehow exists.
---Bagehot.

Through all these years of mass murder, expulsions, evil, greediness, hunger, pettiness, hatred, human beings have somehow pulled through. Something humane and decent has survived. We still talk of us, still dream of the stars, and feel at ease with the late sun on our backs, imagining the world is okay, that it makes some kind of sense, the way it is, just right now.

What endures, what remains? Not the music, or even the old buildings (since one can overlook them, forget them). Character, a 'chance predominance'...your race, your face. It's hard to say for some, but the Palestinians are a people.  There, said it! Wasn't so hard after all. After all these years, you looked and you found Faith under the left nipple. It was there all the time. It was that simple, that obvious, like the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus that no-one talks to.

Was talking with R (no, not you, R) and he said: there's a student who gets right down to the core, the essence of what's being said and puts to one side all the trappings, the paraphernalia, the side-shows, the trailers and enticements. The icy truth under a cold heaven. And yet, and yet, how we wanted the warmth of ambiguity, the human unknowingness that resists explanation. Maybe if two bodies met, they'd be okay with all the darkness between them. 

The Stammering Century

Admit it, why don't you: you're attracted to crackpots.

Well, yes, at a theoretical level, I guess. Heaven knows why. But yeah, the small communities in California, say, that have gone out there in their radical solitude to escape the world of things, like the Syrian eccentrics in Peter Brown's Late Antiquity. Ec-centric, off-centre, out of the loop in an innocent kind of loopy way. The Bohemian world-weary hippies, drop-outs who think freedom shouldn't be tied to a flag. Someone who wants to fall and doesn't give a damn or who's got some one-time solution to the world's problems, has dreamt up some utopia  in a sweaty night vision and is willing to sell it for 64 cents. Transcendental meditation, Zen stillness, a Buddhist mantra penned by the man himself when he was in Oregon, the "inner you" meeting the "outer you" and other crazy shit that makes LSD look like liquorice.

"Every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" now thought he had a political message.
---George Orwell.

But also the Christian revivalist types, thumping on wooden desks, crying out to the wilderness about the redemption of all ye sinners, the number of devils hidden in a woman's licentious lips and lustful gaze, or how you will burn in hell until you're dry like a bone and all that type of stuff. It just has, I dunno, great comic potential. Anyway, I love those stories about hell-fire.

Closer to home, the fundos and crazies here are less entertaining (because more dangerous). But the all-American crazy,with Durer's eyes and the wild, erratic sentences, that kind just cracks me up.

Admit it, a kind of crazy type of woman is attracted to you. Someone who is really "deep" or is looking for that depth. Oh yes, the thing to be avoided at all costs is superficiality.  The other day someone wrote to me on facebook something like: "I've totally fallen for you..blah, blah..."

"What, in three days of knowing each other?"

"Yes"

" Well, all I can say is that you've got very poor taste"
(which is like the classic line from Groucho).

"I get the feeling that you're a very private man. Am I right? What's your sign?"

There's something deeply suspicious about people who think everything is "mysterious", not quite what it seems. Everything has to be a sign for something else, a world of perfect substitutability, a medievalist's fabulous scheme. "62," Freud said.

"I can tell a man's personality by a single word. Say one word."

"Xylophone"

Then you've got your sort of regular delusionals, the conspiracy-theorists or the people who believe they can see real world events in their dreams before they actually happen. If it ain't the joos it be dem dere negores. World domination by the losers cooked up by the dregs of the system. You wonder if that ain't but the effect of 19th century peasants coming to the city.

Point Omega

Someone once said somewhere: if you want to know something about a book, turn to page 99.

You always read on the blurbs: 'the first lines gripped me' or the first sentence was magical and drew me in.  Our fascination with origins, the opening shots, the line between the boring old world and the exciting first page, the second lives and fresh starts. The romance of crossing over. There it is: the intangible sense of newness: the novel.

Recently, it was the first line from The Big Music that was supposed to have this magical quality of hooking us to an image (and it is an image we want, after all, and not the beauty of the words); then it was the catchy opening from Canada. There must be something, after all, that generates and sustains interest and when you think about it wasn't it there all along in those first notes? One reason you never seem to able to finish Exley- despite numerous attempts-is that the first pages just seem mediocre and a far cry from the classic it's supposed to be. Of course, the real reason is the quality of the paper and the poor print. One reason you can never start M.D. Foot's Debts of Honour is that the quality is too good.

Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-great-novels-with-bad-endings.html#ixzz2DVOFdieP

And then what about the last pages? Is there a book that ends so well that you forget how average the rest of it was? Is there something like what Kahneman calls a "peak effect"? The best last pages have to be from Stoner, though if pressed you wouldn't be able to say why. But when you want to slow things down, give up marking passages or phrases with your pencil, and simply let things sink, then you're in the zone. Leo the African and Khayyam were polar opposites; on with a good first third, the other with a good last third.

Maybe short stories cut through the beginnings and endings problem.

Are endings always good, do you always eagerly seek them and if so why?

'Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary-to end.'
---from The New Yorker.

Real life isn't like that. Get back to the mundane routines. Your life isn't like that.

The end to that Auster book was terrible, comical even. But Falconer! Now you're talking.

There is nothing, by the way, on page 99 of Great Jones Street so that theory is out the window.

~~~

Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-great-novels-with-bad-endings.html#ixzz2DVOFdieP

Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-great-novels-with-bad-endings.html#ixzz2DVKGO6P5

  

Kairos

For the n th time you feel you're slightly off the beat, out of sync. All very well saying one shouldn't be conformed to the times one lives in, but that presupposes a conscious act of will. To be silent when one should have spoken; to speak when one ought to have been silent.

There is a proper time for giving back and for receiving. Some great harmony that alludes you. Not that you care much about "the world" and its mechanisms but part of you does wonder. There is no "pure" time here, no time mapped out in space that one can traverse in any direction; lived time is a walk in a dark room. This person who lives in time and space is neither a "being" nor an "agent" but "I", crooked and all.

You push back the reasons and eventually you get to a bedrock which is unknowable, even though it is offers a  kind of gentle half-understanding. There is a type of bewilderment that is quite common to our types...the soul ties its shoe; the mind washes its hand in a basin.

Perhaps something utterly simple, away from the convoluted scribblings of "thinkers" and the shenanigans of academics.

Jamie Woon - Shoulda

Tiananmen Square

You have to laugh, don't you. Apart from floating millions of tonnes of shit (read: commodities) around the world-which I guess is just part of the modern world for you- what gets on your wick is the capitalists pretending to be Commies. Or, in other words: them having their cake and eating it too.

I can't think of a single place I'd rather not go to. Maybe 'sock city' which produces 60% of the world's socks would be okay-ish for a day visit. But, nah. Maybe India, which just represents a slightly better version of the stuff here. Personally, all those miniatures make me feel like throwing up and I'd rather see a dancing bear than the Taj Mahal. What about the "mystical east". Yeah, right, if you can find your way through all that garbage, the slums, the cheap materialism, the jingoistic nationalism, and the stench from refuse and dead bodies that is. The "spiritual east" is a corner shop in Bombay. Some guy who hasn't cut his nails for 20 years ain't it, bro'. For heaven's sake, haven't they heard of personal hygiene? [The best line ever: Churchill on hearing that Gandhi was back in town: Oh no! Not that bloody fakir again!]Not so "spiritual" when it comes to atrocities in Kashmir, Gujarat, or the Punjab methinks. But let's not go there. Where's Sunny Leone when you need her? Wheel in Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra or some other fucking charlatan.

Is it me, or does the Dalai Lama smile too much? Reminds you of Peter Sellers in Being There. The saffron robes. Yes, of course. But I could just nab one from Qatar airways next time without all the hassle of the spiritual practices. Have I ever told you, Roxana, how much "religious" people piss me off? They're nearly as bad as the anti-religious.

Of course, the Paks. are just as bad. Not much of the "peace of Islam" when it comes to the rape and massacres in East Pakistan or the support of all sorts of crazies in Kashmir, Afghanistan, etc. But, no, let's talk about Sufism or 'the glories of the past', anything for Christ's sake but reality!

Bellow

[]he was in the time of life when the later action of heredity begins, the blemishes of ancestors appear-a spot, or the deepening of wrinkles,... Death, the artist, very slow, putting in his first touches.

The end is nigh ish.

vive la différence

Why do you say, Monsieur, that for all appearances you are an atheist. Why don't you just come out and say: "I am an atheist".

French intellectual: Ah! Tres bien. It is because, 'ow you say, I do not say "I". I-to the extent that I exist- must posit another's existence before I can say "I" with any confidence...but, who is this I that posits or de-posits? and ere we face the paradox of the fissure in inter-subjective relations brought about by a mechanical play of the forces of globalization which may or may not be conducive to the "heightening" of attentiveness, so to speak, as the case may be.

Was it not this 'nomadic thought' that drove Descartes to an internal wilderness, to the edge of madness that was Reason approaching its limits, the dynamic instability of the subject encountering the 'face' of the unkown object that is not an object.

French intellectual: Non!

Would you like to elaborate on this profound statement that is neither "yes" or "no" but a sort of "yes" and "no" juxtaposed to modernity's ambivalence towards the questioning self?

French intellectual: I do not say "yes" and I do not say "no"; I do not say "yes" or "no"; and I do not say "yes, but no" nor do I say "no, but yes"; I do not say "yes & no". I do not say anything because to say anything I would say "I" and I do not say "I". As I said earlier: I-to the extent that I exist-must posit the other.

Let us move on. Do you have cornflakes with cold or hot milk?

French intellectual: you raise a fascinating point, for what is meant by the word "milk"? I asked-to the extent that I exist, of course-my wife, who very much exists, for some hot milk. In a beautiful act that affirmed her existential maturity and post-colonial, post-modern, post-punk, post-God and post-natal depression vital "discourse" with modernity she said: "we are out of milk"

Is that when you divorced your fifth wife?

Voila! Mais oui.

~~~

Coming soon: the German intellectual, ya. At one with nature and eternal life and other such nonsense. Nonsense on stilts, as old Jeremy once said.

Where I was from...

Where I was from was a long time ago.

I don't know if it still exists; I suspect and half wish it doesn't.

Above 'hot spot' you picked up D. Johnson's Tree/Smoke book, some Capote and Joan Didion's Where I was From; the latter only out of nostalgia...

Under the bridge, the Thames unusually choppy, the early morning gulls very noisy. Those lovely folding wooden tables are being opened up and set out in lines. Books are hurriedly stacked on them in no apparent order-and it's this people really come for, the chance find, the sudden gleam in the eye when someone finds what they've been looking for for aeons or if they chance across a book they'd read in childhood and forgotten until that very moment. And all that parceling out of chance and randomness under the bridge a result of casual, early-morning settlements and unselfconscious arrangements by the booksellers. They keep lots of coins in solid green boxes, set themselves down for the day, light up a cigarette or warm their hands by rubbing them together.

There are few people around to witness this spectacle. Sunday light is invariably brilliant, true, spotless, almost eternal in its possibilities. Under the bridge sounds are muffled by the shadows and all the words are thick, squarish.

Always good to be there before anyone else; other people are hell. To your delight you read the opening pages of JD's book. One for later, perhaps. Except no matter how many times you return you never find it again. Perhaps that's the way with bridges, or maybe it's just London: nothing gets repeated. There's a chance, an opening, then it's irrevocably gone, sinking back into the shadows. Who would have thought an aimless Sunday morning walk would have afforded so many opportunities for useless speculations on the role of chance in our lives!

The books. do you..er..actually read them or do you just talk about them the way a starving man imagines a fabulous meal in a French restaurant? The books are now just signs, to what, God only knows; the words glint back into the sun, as unreal as California.

~~~

Today you see a person with a long rectangular beard, jet black, not totally out of control. There are probably one in ten million people with such beards in England, an old 18th century Russian patriarch's beard. Fiercely stupid but still not the fanatical beard that sprays out in all directions. The well-trimmed types are usually conservatives or semi-educated; beards without a mustache are, of course, the missionaries (tablighis) or the Saudi-influenced. Now and then you see the wispy, straggling beards of the cunning foxes. Then there are the Iranian-influenced types and even the Ahmadis once had their own distinctive style.
  

November 14th, 2012.

'The dark moon's non-existent seas'; the traces of blue shadow behind your radiant face, your sad eyes. The acrid smell of burning leaves, stinging the eyes, bringing forth a moment of awareness. November fires, unforgiving, lest we forget.

Foundation stone: that which separates the waters from civilisation, chaos from order. The seasonality, the regularity of the floods is a containment but has now broken free from time. Our law-lines, the boundaries we erect to assure ourselves of who we are. What would we do without our borders, our barbarians, the specific rituals of pacification, the pattern we throw over randomness like a nomadic kilm?

You must re-invent yourself, side-step the ongoing stream, change your clothes, look positive for once, for Christ's sake. You must lose yourself to find yourself. Get rid of that drowsy Oriental look on your face, she said. All those simple years spent near mountains, the generations of idleness, all that has mysteriously been passed down to you...

The days narrow, there is less light in the sky now. Earth grows slow, conserves its energy, keeps the dream of spring carefully tucked in its folds, like a child hides a toy, or like the way a priest keeps the sense of the goodness of the world close to his thoughts even in bad times. There are no more anchors in the world, said the poet. Things are going to slide. Time is out of joint and my bags aren't packed yet. No time to go back for three books. But you have kept a large brown dry leaf in a book and a chestnut in your coat pocket for safekeeping. Your picture books-Russian Icons and Kufic Calligraphy-have been lovingly stored, numbers have been committed to memory and your heart is at rest.

The mid-afternoon sun is weak, its pale peach light strangely linking one building to another, and for awhile it is as if each person's destiny is mysteriously related to the others under this light. Friends smoke and drink tea. We have fewer words now. There is a deep silence. Ash on our fingertips, the greyness spreading on our faces.How we got here nobody knows. No profound awareness, no deep insights for us who live day to day. Some look out blankly into the horizon. No answers there. Don't look at me, kid, I'm as clueless as you. We, the last remnants of the bourgeoisie, hold onto our possessions as if they were the world.

It is weird-and this may strike some of you as odd-but there is no talk of religion amongst us. If we do talk, it is of death or women or money and the lack of it. Like everyone else, I guess. Unless you're a woman, of course, in which case you don't talk about death. 

By now the light is fading from the windows, which grow darker by the minute. The crows near the mosque avoid the slanting light. We get up to go, nothing is resolved, nothing is made clearer. We imagine, perhaps not unwisely, that it was intrinsic values that were at the root of the matter.    

A Common Mind

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
and neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my love and I.
---Elizabethan song.

The Dougal finally found my copy of 'Commons'. But first, perhaps, I should go back to Annette's lovely, lovely Tanner lectures on Trust.

Trust, an acceptance of our vulnerability, our dependency on others.

Rest in peace.  

~~~

Affirmative action

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise

---Auden.

There are moments when you find the ability to slow things down in life, when the moment ceases to be a "moment", and you are distanced from it; it flows, calmly.

Of course, for most of the time your Jewishness dominates. I found a corner of the world that had my name on it; but now the wind blows through my house, as if it were the end of days.

I walked off the plane, without any baggage, straight through immigration at Heathrow. There wasn't a single person there, no lines, no people, nothing. Just a sleepy-headed official. Breezed through the corridors, sat on the train so lost in a reverie that the two hour journey flashed by; at Woodford everything was as you left it; down the hill, time running off your back..the Church, the old brick school, each passing by you as if in a dream. The Cross, brilliant white, like fine porcelain. You walk, unhurried, your steps light with a rare sense of direction. Around the corner, your heart in your mouth, your timing perfect; the great tree bronzing itself in the open sky, the first few chestnuts flung to the ground, like a try-out; the creaky black gate. Each sensation registering separately, and yet all were linked.

The swami, gingerly opening the door, with no idea of my return. The mid-morning ordinariness of the world exploding into reality. You walked into a dream, more real than the world.

"Would you like some tea?"

"I wouldn't say no"

Asian Journal

There is a certain bookstore in Lahore, close to 'Jalal Sons' and not too far off from 'Punjab Tikka House'. Not a very remarkable shop by any standards. But it does have the one remarkable feature: one will always find a book that one desires (I'm tempted to say that Providence plays its hand here and that it's actually 'needs', not desires).

Walking into that shabby little shop, which always changes its name...'old book world' to 'old book city' and now just 'old books', you imagine that you're a kind of Mr. Benn. Sadly, they've reduced the number of books they sell by about 75%, filling the shelves with cheap plastic Chinese toys, kid's magazines, piles of discarded Cosmopolitan, and other useless stuff. The shopkeeper looks up at me from his seat and asks me: "What are you looking for?" The tone of his voice makes you think there's something fateful in his question. "I don't know...nothing in particular."

Of course by now my heart has sunk just a little bit. One of the best and worst features of capitalism (or more generally, of the world) is that it keeps on relentlessly changing. Really is quite disorienting. Well, at least you have the books the Dougal has sent to fall back on...some DeLillo, A. Baier's Commons of the Mind, and New Finnish Grammar. As you move further down into the shop, the lighting becoming poorer as you do so, the books become progressively older and stranger. If there was any order in the stacking it has now gone. Genre, dates, themes, authors, all those categories that we are so dependent upon to make sense of our world are thrown out of the door. Paperback gives way to hardback. You're rocked back in time slightly. You hear a faint alarm going off in the distance; at least you think it's the distance. Twice you take out your phone from your pocket to check someone isn't calling.

By now it's becoming increasingly difficult to read some of the titles, the gold lettering having been worn down by time and dust. Some books just have plain white covers and could be just about anything. It might be Fanny Hill; it might be Aquinas. Mystery is there, you don't have to reach out for it.  One part of your mind is aware that you have to leave soon, that your friends a street away are waiting for you. A few religious books now seem to be appearing. Red and gold. The technical stuff, the useful and worldly textbooks having long disappeared. We're now in different territory. Open country. Picture books and religion. Two minutes 'till class starts. So I'll end. I guess you can make out what I bought.

~~~

You think you'll open a book at a random page and find the line you're looking for. The first one that leaps out at you is:

"I realized that what I was doing was all unnecessary work."
---Morimoto Roshi.

homesick for...

Modern man lives only on the earth and imagines no other world, except this one amplified in colour and intensity. We have become like angels, our only respite a day off. Each song is known by its first note, and each book has been made into a film. Go up to space, 100,000 feet, on hundred and twenty, lose count, the measure of night and day, only to realize how small you are. Or sink to the bottom of the vast Atlantic to note how a dark, blind fish hasn't changed its form or pathways for five million years. There are no more secrets and no more milestones; we'd blacken our faces for second spaces if we knew what we were talking about...

In a dream you see Ubo, in his 1970's navy blue three piece suit, his legs folded like an aristocrat, his 'tash thick and blooming...there he is, explaining something or the other to everyone at some grand annual family dinner. No one understands. Only when he tells it as a series of jokes is there any comprehension and by then everyone has realized it doesn't matter. You wake up, as always, with a glow of semi-understanding. Half your life is spent in this state: thinking you almost know what it's about...

If we knew what we were sick of we wouldn't be so unwell. God is 'dead' (please note the inverted commas, God) and Man isn't feeling too well either. Here it is, life thickening all around you, the dust settling on the high branches and the roots alike, in a great sweep of democratic vigour.

This lack of routine has aged you. The shadow work going on until one day you'll be caught unaware. Little r isn't a baby any more. "And how did you come to that conclusion?" I ask. "A fish living at the bottom of the sea doesn't know if he's old or young."

"Because I can draw a circle," she says.

Except the circle she draws is broken, open, the ends never actually meeting. There is something quite perfect about it.

'One day we'll say 'The sun ruled then'
Don't you remember how it shone on the twigs,
on the old as well as the wide-eyed young?
It knew how to make all things vivid
the second it alighted on them.
It would run like the racehorse.
How can we forget the time we had on earth?
 ....
We'd pick daffodils, collect pebbles, shells-
when we couldn't catch the smoke.
Now smoke is all we hold in our hands.

---Jules Supervielle.

the Individual

Rowan Williams's fantastic lecture on Personhood can be found here

You want to, at some later date, relate this to Mary Douglas's Missing Persons, since one of the most important sources of the atomized, alienated view of the individual comes from economics. Deeply connected, one thinks, with ideas of property, "inwardness" and "alienability". 

The "I' in the individual; as opposed to what Etzioni calls 'I-We'.   

"What appears to someone as a desirable goal depends on what type of person one is." 
---Aquinas.

 

England, mein England.

"...the talk of the manifold talker, glancing lightly from topic to topic, suggesting deep things  in a jest, unfolding unanswerable arguments in an absurd illustration, expounding nothing, completing nothing, exhausting nothing, yet really suggesting the lessons of a wider experience, embodying the results of a more finely tested philosophy, passing with a more Shakespearian transition, connecting topics with a more subtle link, refining on them with an acuter perception, and what is more to the purpose, pleasing.
---Bagehot.


It says something, perhaps, when you find greater charm in the language than in the people.

The character of the English people: dull and boring. But then again, isn't that just everyone?  There's something about dullness that can act as a bulwark against fanaticism and abstractions-as long as it isn't too dull, I suppose. Of course, in England there are no intellectuals, just as there are no public places. (Hurrah! Is there anything worse than a French intellectual?)Notions such as 'the life of the mind' would elicit derisory howls of laughter. And what of that much vaunted eccentricity, then? That's just a clever ruse if truth be told. A society that produces rows and rows of back-to-back houses, that delights in its subjects patiently standing in line as if it was a virtue to be ranked amongst those of any medieval saint, could hardly be said to foster eccentricity. Huxley was perhaps right after all: Bentham and straight lines.

Granted, the sea-faring history may have allowed a certain amount of paranoia to seep in, but if there is anything like an essence of a people then it is this: plodders and planners, foul-natured, self-centred to such a degree that even wild criticism will be of more interest to them than a moderate and balanced appraisal that sets no great store by such frivolous categories as "a people"; in addition to that, an incredible lack of generosity of spirit that perhaps befits an island race.

There are no wild places in England. Rolling hills, a scenic beauty: yes, that's true, but is this domestication of nature, rows and hedges, the enclosure movement, is this not symptomatic also of  a certain love of 'home' and a dreary suburban 'deadness' of spirit that wishes above all else that one not be disturbed? What passes as conversation in such strange isles: the weather, beer, football and celebrity gossip. Is there anything more depressing than the blank and vacant look on the faces of your fellow travelers, faces that are only briefly and silently illuminated, as from within, when the thought of sun and holidays provides a temporary respite from the grey drudgery of the routines of 'getting and spending'?

One of their greatest characteristics, however, is irreverence (although it is often forgotten just how deep a role reverence and conformity play in all our lives. In this case, it is not to religion, which usually gets the two finger treatment, but to class). But no, if there's one word that stands to define the English-and there isn't- then it's 'liberty'. Can there be liberty without irreverence, or a sense of humour?

The Palace of Desire

 Watching Obama's speech. As always, you're taken in a bit by the fantastically smooth delivery but, as always (thankfully!), there's an underlying sense that this is just another bit of showmanship, razzmatazz. There he is, the brilliant orator, Stevie Wonder's signature tune fading into the background, the lights focused on 'the decider'. The wait, the exhaustion (an old trick from Goebbels?) The rumours..as the Beeb said: "he's entered the building". [They've 'lost the plot', by the way. One of the commentators says: "what he's selling to ..." Huh?].

Cue family, cue flag-waving fanatics. Cue all the tried and tested cliches: move forward (blah, blah, blah); need to unite the nation (blah, blah, blah); what a great nation we are (blah...you get the picture); how great the troops are (here they missed a trick...the camera should have panned to a "veteran" in a wheelchair (or maybe an image of DeNiro from Deerhunter?)). I think of a rather tired and old advertising man in small-ish mid-west town penning this tosh in the back room of his house. Of course, my cynicism is tempered by my joy of the fact that those crazies are out of power for four more years. And then who knows, H. Clinton? Bring out the cigars...

~~~

Women in advertizing. Of course, you're not totally averse to the idea (you ain't joined the Taleban...yet!) and ol' Kimmy is quite fetching but you have to laugh at the naivete (that is, you'd have to laugh if there wasn't a serious side to this).

All the billions spent on advertizing, on the production of things that seem quite frivolous and superfluous. Fashion: the production of something that is-for a moment-seen to be desirable. 'Use-value'? You've gotta be joking, brother Karl.

Let us not talk about the process of  how we rank our desires, or whether we should or can evaluate them with the aid of ethics, reason. Instead, desires are just supposed to be raw data. It goes without saying that this is just a fiction that helps sustain the idea of 'consumer sovereignty' and the extension of desires. At no point in time should we suspect that it is because something has become a commodity through market rhetoric and practices (M.J.Radin)  that it is to be desired (the salad and/or KimK). And God forbid that we should think desires are mimetic or socially constructed! The warm glow of Obama's words, the quick of desire flashing from Kardashian's body; register them, and don't think too much about it.

So, what's the choice: the empty sign or the fanaticism of the conservatives (Republicans and mullahs)?

This is from the turn of the last century...

"I feel in these old walls, in this broken well, in these small columns which are crumbling, in a coat of arms that is obliterated, five centuries of mystery and sunshine...then I look, I observe more closely, and I notice, above approach, and what is it I make out?
Simply: Menier Chocolate..."

---cited in Vertigo, P. Blom.

And, of course, the irony is that the conservatives themselves are as much a part of the game as the people they oppose, with their made-up stories and childish romanticizing of the past.

the swerve

"The whole universe is made of curves."
---O. Niemeyer.

Was still working at the age of 102; is now nearing 105. E. Carter, who recently passed away at the grand age of 103, also worked till very late (haven't listened to him, but check bob's wonderful site, an overgrownpath for insights). Hobsbawm, of course, whose last book was published at the age of 94. D. Athill (94) on a book tour; Mary Wesley (first book at the age of 70); Fay Weldon (81) and N. Gordimer (89) published novels this year; Mary Midgely (90), still writing; Ruth Stone (96), a prolific writer. E. Fienstein (82) a British poet, playwright, and novelist. Anne Stevenson (79)...
(from The Guardian).

There's hope fro Romney yet!

Sorry, sorry.

Youtube is still down thanks to the ridiculous ban. In any case, should be getting Natalie Clein's From Jewish Life soon. Can't wait. In the meantime, downloading (er...buying) The Pledge, The Master, A. Part's Adam's Lament, and Beasts of the Wild South. 

The sudden swerve, the tyres coming to a halt on the gravel. How did we get here, mid-life and stranded, the trysts and twists of fate, like an animal caught in the lights, catching his own breath. Which way now? Unscripted, or if it is, then you can't read. 

Romney up to..er..47%

For Pete's sake, don't tell me...if you vote  for Romney, the black sun will not be amused.

Just reading Ignatieff's wonderfully acrobatic mea culpa in the NYTimes. What an ass! Simply loved his book, The Needs of Strangers, but the guy's a dickhead. He's tried to name-drop his way out of his own idiocy, citing Kant, Beckett, and God knows who else. Political theory, 'judgement', and all that jazz. The simple truth, though, is that he couldn't see what any five year-old could: the war against Iraq was a looney escapade cooked up by a bunch of vicious, nasty and insidious ideologues.

In a similar vein, you often hear people making all kinds of excuses for the rise of fanaticism. Firstly, there isn't really any such thing as 'fundamentalism' or if there is then that's a good thing: be true to the fundamentals and put to one side (read: destroy/destory) all this farangi nonsense and bastardization of culture. Secondly, there's no way a "real" Muslim could commit such atrocious acts so it must be...drum roll...those Amrikis/Hindus/Joos. Of course, if you could actually realize you were delusional you probably wouldn't be delusional in the first place. Or maybe you would, if you were schizophrenic.

Watching CNN's  "analysis" is always good for a laugh. Reading Phelps's awful trash, 'Innovation and Morality'. It is painful to think this guy is an academic. Here's a classic line from it:

"There's something revealing in the fact that European society has birth rates so low. It suggests that Europe lacks a sense of opportunity for a rewarding, challenging, fulfilling life."

I kid thee not. Then again, could it be something to with average breast size, Mr. Phelps?

And there are more nuggets of wisdom from the Nobel-prize winner:

"You can see the stultifying economy on the faces of the young people in Europe, many of whom would dearly like to get out."

Oh, I dunno, some of the faces I've seen in Europe are positively charming, old bean. Can you think of any more inane generalizations. There is a lot to be gleaned from the back of cornflakes packets, Phelpsy.

It's not surprising, really, that there should be so little sympathy for the social welfare state or its underlying philosophy (what Phelps might call Communism). Because that would mean recognizing there are alternative ways to live, to organize a society, instead of falling back on the old cliche that my way is the best way (a rather irritating tick the human species seems to have). In that sense, not too different from Muslim and Jewish nutters: we, the chosen ones, have seen the path (nay, verily verily, we are the path).

"Been around the world and I..."

"Bustling activity will more and more take the place of reasonable consideration...It is not by bustle that men become enlightened. Spinoza was content with the Hague; Kant, who is generally regarded as the wisest of Germans, never traveled more than ten miles from Konigsberg."

---Bertrand Russell.

In time we may find there is no wisdom in space or in space travel.

"A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live."

"What yoke can be imposed on men who need nothing?"
---Rousseau.

Notes from Xenos's lovely 'Scarcity and Modernity'..all ties in, freakishly, with Russell: the need to reflect on desires, on what is meant by need. The need for roots? Well, yes, that's a tough one. Who, today, has any roots? What is close at hand must be disparaged, denigrated in favour of borders to be crossed (is there desire without transgression)? It is often said that needs relate to the isolated individual whereas desires are by their very nature relational. What we desire is at least in part socially constructed. Does the emulative nature of desire lead, eventually, to a "black inclination to harm one another"? (Rousseau).

But is it not the case that, at least at the extreme, it is desires that isolate ( the gambler, the pornographer)? An unmoored imagination, neither constrained by Tradition or social norms or "customary expectations"(E.P.). What is desired is something that cannot be attained, a pleasure that is at once always around the corner and simultaneously satisfied. Perhaps this is a source of unhappiness, our always being on our feet, in motion, 'perpetually moving happiness machines.' Next time things will be better. If we are what we desire then who are we? Are we even sure that we really want what we desire?

If you could track a person's history by the history of what she desired. The world: the locus of the exchange of desires.

But this silent transition in the way we talk, from the language of needs and rights and obligations to the language of desires, preferences, wants: taste is just a crude, arbitrary and momentary feeling that picks up one commodity out of a dazzling array of possibilities. Prior to that, perhaps, is the making over of various 'things' into commodities. One must be made desirable. Even if you ain't got it, flaunt it.

"Trinkets and baubles", Smith said. "Deception" and illusion as the great motors of civilisation? Ever widening and finer refinements, 'conveniences', the profusion of useless things and cheap throwaway products, for nothing must be allowed to last in this shape-shifting world. The "unnatural growth of the natural" (Illich), the relentless pursuit of growth, change, innovation. All very dizzying from a certain perspective, no doubt. If we didn't have that spark would we be confining ourselves to lives of immeasurable boredom? Perhaps. And yet the irony is that the system requires us to be bored out of our wits, to be discontented with our current situation and to believe that anything passing through our hands to be dispensable, dated, never quite the real deal. Life itself is seen as a series of choices (optimality), and if you don't get the best deal in life you've been swindled-except this time it isn't the fault of God or the State but yours because, in the final analysis, it was your choice.