Utopia/eutopia

                                                 ... feral.                         Happy Birthday Babe!                 Up, Down.               Marilyn, 1926. 

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Contents:   Cartoons, Ok-lahoma! (you know that tune), The Meat of the Matter, How can it be?  K'bye.

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George Monbiot has published a book called 'Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding' which I will not likely read but seeing it advertised on The Guardian website reminded me of what I know about the feral condition. 'Rewilding' is redolent of teen spirit correctitude; moreso when coupled with 'enchantment'.

I keep this photograph of an onça pintada taken by Araquém Alcântara as my desktop background to remind me of what feral means, and of what it does not mean. Alvaro noticed it.

[Christy Clark the cute Liberal B.C. premier seems to have kiboshed the Northern Gateway. (?) Who can believe a word these people say? Here's Joe Oliver's lame response.] 

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I wonder sometimes if the Globe's editors slide some of Brian Gable's insights off to the side for use another day (which never comes); but in May there are five that stand out. Maybe they have spent long enough polishing Stephen Harper's turds, and have decided not to pull so many of their punches. (Mind you, the last one has no signature. Could it be a guilty conscience?)

Greg Perry's stands out even more.

[Originals:   Greg Perry: Employee of the Month; Brian Gable: Canada Appreciation Day, Justin Trudeau, Green Period, Banana Republic, Titanic.] 

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When Lula commented after the tsunami hit Aceh in 2004 that it was a 'what goes around comes around' kind'a thing he showed his lack of understanding - he later corrected himself as I remember. A-and scientists are properly careful not to make direct causal connections between specific weather events and 'the environmental apocalypse' in its climate warming/changing aspect.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding all'a that ...
Consider f'rinstance the numbers of shelters constructed in a zone which has been badly hit many times - in recent memory: May 3 1999 & May 8 2003 & now, May 19 2013. 

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The French cartoonist tOad is coming up in my estimation to a position beside André Dahmer. There are two sites I follow: a collection of what look like daily cartoons in a blog at Le Monde; and an ~weekly collection of magazine illustrations.

With the latter he sometimes includes cryptic rhyming couplets (which my French is insufficient to make sense of). The one above with the eloquent red line carries:
            Du dessin qui décrit à celui qui décrète
            Il y a un pas pris sur des lignes de crête.
With the help (?) of Google Translate the best I can make of it is:
            From the drawing that describes to the one who decrees
            A step is taken on rising lines.
Which is not very good I know ...

He put out an eloquent series on the UNFCCC fiasco ... just a sec ... here. Many of the daily ones are topical and go completely over my head, but some of the images stick firmly and I return again and again to look at them. This one: Violences, with a caption (sort of translated by the author this time) blows me away:
            Personne ne répond, n’a rien contre ni pour,
            Sur le champ du social les plus durs coups sont sourds.
            Society fears outbreaks of violence
            It nestles and steers with unflinching silence.
I make it:
            No one answers, there is nothing for or against,
            On the social field the hardest hits are deaf.

Black Betty had a baby. BAM-BE-LAM. (!) 

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        [Utopia is for old folks. Young people like money.
         You don't think about changing the world?
         If they pay me well ...]

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The meat of the matter:   Eutopia: (another one'a them eu- words) from Greek εὐ (a form of ἐύς) 'good' + τόπος 'place' = 'a good place'. Utopia: οὐ 'not' + τόπος 'place' = 'not a place'. Neither the same nor opposites.

Northrop Frye mentions utopias as category five (or something) of comedy/satire in 'Anatomy of Criticism' (1957), Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths. He treats the subject more fully in 'Varieties of Literary Utopias' (1965).

He doesn't take on Doris Lessing anywhere that I can find. I am sort of surprised that he didn't demolish her somewhere along the line. Here is her preface, Some Remarks, to Shikasta (1979). Make of it what you will. That she claims Old Testament antecedents is a stunner - beyond some superficial echoes of certain stories I guess that part must'a went over my head. She is awarded a Nobel prize for literature in 2007. Imagine! Read her acceptance speech.

The term 'space cadet' comes to mind, possibly coined for Lessing herself. Also 'air head'. How far can you go on sentiment & superstition? Far. Consider Cloud Atlas f'rinstance.

[Also try this for some crit-lite. If I were going to frame a myth around endings it might be more like Byatt's Ragnarök. (I have noted some shortcomings of Byatt's take on Abishag elsewhere.)] 

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How can it be?   This phrase by John Wesley (1703-1791) has appeared here before. It's a rhetorical device, a ploy; sure, and maybe that's all that it is.

There are (at least) three settings: two found on-line (these are Midi files and will play with Windows Media Player) - Sagina by Thomas Campbell 1777-1844, and Surrey by Henry Carey 1687-1743; and a third, Peniel by Josiah Booth 1852-1930, not found but mentioned in the 1930 edition of the United Church hymn book.

I've sung these tunes with all my heart; but it's the single phrase - How can it be? - that makes it believable, that connects it; not as a matter of truth but like a joke you can understand whether you find it funny or not. An objective correlative in human terms (and also of course, possibly, a rhetorical device).

Another phrase - "necessary & sufficient" - which comes (as I remember it) from Voltaire poking fun at Leibniz in Candide. This is exactly what I have been thinking about the environmental justice movement: What are the necessary & sufficient actions to stop the madness? And it blows my mind that not a single person will speak to me about it. 

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Here's Bill Moyers interviewing Tim DeChristopher: on Vimeo or Moyers' website. Tim is on his way to Harvard Divinity School in the fall, to become a Unitarian minister he says (somewhat uncertainly) ...
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?It's funny because after watching Bidder 70 I poked around for a Unitarian church to attend some Sunday; test for effect, suck it and see - decided against it for no particular reason.

It's not my place to be second guessing Tim DeChristopher ... still ... can't help but wonder. Didn't the phrase noli illegitimi carborundum originate in some divinity school somewhere? Is another preacher necessary? Sufficient? 

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In Higgs Boson Blues Nick Cave sings, "Who cares? Who cares what the future brings?" Good question(s). A heroin addict apparently, with a decent version of Black Betty too ...

And a tip of the hat to Alvaro in San Salvador who tells me that dirty gold mining (by Canadians) there is even worse than in Brasil because El Salvador is so much smaller - which I do not understand at first, but then, yes.

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Nothing to do with Tim DeChristopher or the 'movement', certainly not Alvaro & El Salvador; but it suddenly pops into the forebrain entire:

Their brief history is characterized by incessant defeat. The very name of the tribe, A----, is the word for corpse in the language of all the neighboring tribes. There is no record that this unfortunate people ever won a single battle, while the songs and legends of its enemies are virtually nothing but a sustained howl of triumph. (Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers.)

Must be a fugal thing ... life is increasingly one non sequitur after another.

The wasps have started coming in again and getting trapped against the window. After a day or so they slow down enough to be caught with a draft glass and a piece of paper and I put them out. An annual ritual of some kind. Here's Bob with Duquesne Whistle: "You're like a time bomb in my heart." Feral too in his way. Maybe it's a condition of age.

The copyright maggots have taken down the clip of the ending of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Don't they know clips like that work for them? If selling movies is what they want that is - must be something else they want then. See what I can do later on. Here: last two minutes.

Short answer: There's too many books already! Let's burn some! (kidding :-)

Esteja bem. 

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¿por qué estamos indignados?    "This is not an ideological revolution. It is driven by an authentic desire to get what you need." Stéphane Hessel.

Down.

Modern mind.

(... Mind? ... Modern? ...)                                                                                               Up, Down.                              Equinox 

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Contents: Urban Consciousness, Venus de Pedra, Carbon Tax, Connectivity Cost, Updates, Edward Burtynsky, Rhyming Slang, Beyond the Zero.

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Did I say 'focus' last time? Idiot!    And it's equinox not solstice you fool! After looking at it for several days, vaguely ... troubled but not aware enough to figgure it out?

If all the world was apple-pie, And all the sea was ink; And all the trees were bread and cheese, What could we do for drink?             Gammer Gurton's Garland             or, The Nursery Parnassus,             1774, 1810 ... If all the world was apple-pie, And all the sea was ink, And all the trees were bread and cheese, What should we have for drink? It's enough to make an old man Scratch his head and think.             Harry's Ladder to Learning,             1849-1850, text at Gutenberg.

"Nobody knows you when you're down and out," sing Bessie Smith and Otis Redding; which takes me back to the summer of ... 1963 in North Bay and (well before this tune came out) Dock of the Bay.


(Would you like some cheese with that whine? :-) 

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In Toronto it seems anything but the facts will do, any response but a true one. Sure, some try ... you can hear the anger and frustration of Danny Harvey in this video (which does not seem to play properly?).

In the video last time David Suzuki mentions the demographic shift in Canada from 80-20 rural to 80-20 urban consciousness over a period of less than 100 years. And what do these urban dwellers know anyway? Two or three generations seeing nothing but the sanitized margins of Algonquin Park. I'm just lucky, (like Edward Burtynsky) my father took me into the woods often enough to learn something.

Last week I watched two Michael Cimino movies: The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate. Long movies, three hours, proof that the maker had sufficient discretion for full indulgence. But despite scenes of powerful clarity they each end ... in (to me) failure as stories. The Deer Hunter, which effectively completes at the moment in which De Niro does not shoot the deer, dribbles off instead into a tearful rendition of 'God Bless America'. Heaven's Gate (touching on some of the same issues as Pynchon's 'Against the Day') is too unfocussed to comment on, a nonsense.

The currency of urban consciousness is cinematographic stories, but they can't be trusted. A trite conclusion, sorry. 

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Oboy! Oboy! Naked women! Hyeuh, hyeuh, hyeuh ... (Pynchon fans may recognize the dulcet tones of Pig Bodine.) Palæolithic (gotta love those dipthongs); literally 'stone' age, so somewhere between 2½ million and 10,000 years ago - quite a stretch of time, far beyond my imagination. And 'art' so there are enough high-falutin theories on the go (floating around it, like milkweed seeds) to cramp your style if you happen to be trying to, say ... figure-skate on the head of a pin.

Identity - this art is me. Projection - maybe I can fly; maybe this art can fly too. Introjection - "When a child envelops representational images of his absent parents into himself, simultaneously infusing them with his own personality," (says Wikipedia approximately). Or as a defence mechanism; presumably assuming, "You won't hurt me - I'm you!"
[Nope, (close but) not quite like any of that.] 

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It all started in the free section at the London Review of Books (LRB): Lucky Hunter-Gatherers; which captivated me from the first paragraph - something credible about it. This despite more than the usual full-fallible quota of slip-ups from Internet bad habits. I assumed early on (f'rinstance) that T.J. Clark is female. When I eventually saw my mistake I went back to try to see where it came from - and couldn't. And later on, trying to fit luck into it - and again, couldn't; until I meticulously re-read up to "‘Work’ was far from being a stable category, and certainly wasn’t an all-determining one. Lucky hunter-gatherers, at least in this respect," about half-way through.     So, not to trust anything your read in this blog eh?

He praises "Jill Cook’s marvellous catalogue" which is available for purchase (pricey though) here. I trolled for the images presented here using this list at Wikipedia.

[I might just as easily have reflected on it for a moment, thought "Yeah, like carrying a rabbit's foot ... and about the same size too!" and taken it no further (and nearly did).] 

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Anyway, bullshitting began with the first man:
"You know the hottie who lives in that cave?"
"The other day I was passing by and ..."

[The original carries a somewhat different message, but I like the play of 'contos de foda' (bullshitting) and 'contos de fada' (fairy-tales).]

So ... the authors: Tim & Jill (went up the hill?). He is important enough to have a potted bio on Wikipedia: T.J. (Timothy James) Clark; and both are readily available to see and hear something of how they think: Jill Cook interview at the Bradshaw Foundation website, and TJ Clark talking about Picasso (there is lots more, these are just the ones that seemed best to me).

So ... what have they got that moves me to all this enthusiasm?

Mus' be that quality without a name thang agin. D'you think? Edward Burtynsky same kinna way. (Slippin' into a hill-billy lisp to mask the obvious.)

[Everyone knows the word 'Stonehenge'. 'Henge' is a word in its own right too. First, there are other places called henges: Dowth Henge, Monknewtown Henge, etc. - old, roughly circular, made of stone. And it's always worth plumbing the OED, in this case for a list of (generally obsolete) meanings: the ‘pluck’ of an animal; hanging, suspended, articulated ... stones; a hinge.] 

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Carbon Tax:    Thomas Friedman says It’s Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win.

Taxes go where? Well ... they go somewhere between: a) nowhere; b) a rich-man's pocket (or a rich woman's); c) a bureaucrat's pittance; d) a nonsense program; e) a minor benefit of some kind; and, f) back into the hands of the payer.

Friedman doesn't seem to understand the distinction (I'm an American! I don't have to be subtle!) - but give him credit, any sort of carbon tax is preferrable to none. Others, the left-lib hand-wringers like Paul Krugman prefer d) & e). Even though there is an inevitable vigorish fraction of c) involved in f) - entropy, perpetual motion machines and all that - I presume most tax payers would prefer it. That is if they could see it as a possibility and accept the notion that, yes, something revenue-neutral can have an effect.

Jim Hansen makes the case here for revenue-neutral Fee & Dividend carbon taxation schemes: An Honest Effective Path. Quite convincing ...

... but the last time I mentioned this topic, the pundits at The Guardian didn't even list it as an option. Doh?! 

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The cost of being cool in k-k-Canada: (as compared with, say, Iceland.)

A 2011 report from the OECD: International Mobile Data Roaming; and a recent post by Michael Geist: Canadian Wireless Reality Check.

One of those graphs is in Gigabytes and one is in Megabytes - there are 1,000 Mb in a Gb so ... it looks to me like downloading while you are roaming is 1,000 times more expensive. I asked Michael Geist if this is a reasonable conclusion - and he answered the email but not the question - so I'm just guessing. PPP figures in the OECD report. It apparently means Point to Point Protocol - but they don't explain how it is relevant.

Bottom line message? "Trust us, we're experts." The good news is that Canadians are being screwed about proportionally to Icelanders (but from a starting point about six times greater).

Kewel! (Or maybe that should be 'Quewel!' And no, I don't have a mobile telephone - gave 'em up when I realized Congolese women were being brutally raped to provide the tantalum.) 

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 Updates: (Bakatcha!)

No Dash For Gas: EDF drops lawsuit against environmental activists after backlash.

 

Fuck the bees: Bee-harming pesticides escape proposed European ban. Oh well. Ralph Nader says one pound of plutonium will do in eight billion (are there even eight billion of us here yet?) but actual results are equivocal.

 

Cosmic endings: Higgs boson particle: Physicists confident (not really, more equivocation). AND Sun Storm Forecast: Tiny Chance of Havoc; see also Carrington Event & Carrington's report. AND Superbugs!

 
BUT the only smart guy I know who still talks to me says: Penguins! (Thanks for that Martin.) 

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I saw this talk some years ago and thought Edward Burtynsky was already somewhere in this blog - but as usual I can't find it - so:
If he sees this I hope he is not offended by the violence necessary (at my level of skill) to render thumbnails into HTML. He keeps a website. I noted what looks like $10,000 for a print so ... you may understand some of the bourgeois urbanity (I was going to say 'Pollyanna positivity' but didn't) evident in the TED talk.

He gave a presentation recently. Eventually it will turn up and I will try to remember to post a link. 

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Rhyming slang, the impenetrable code of figurative language. I spent some years working around Geordies - and eventually I'd catch on when they muttered 'give it a butcher's'. It is a code without a key. As I think about it now I see every phrase spoken or written with a figurative dimension requiring personal history - a modicum of Good Samaritan energy, or at the very least some of Kant's 'good will' and Illich's 'conviviality' - to be ... comprehensible. Mostly not. Takes time.

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Human discretion has been hijacked by politicians (and their servants, the bureaucrats), and human spirituality has been hijacked by religions. It was well worth 1,000+ pages of Thomas Pynchon to find myself primed to catch this enlightening thought.

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Back in the day, facing final examinations, I decided (instead) to read every word of William Faulkner ... nothing changes very much :-)

Be well. 

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Beyond the Zero:    (Zermelo?)

I finished 'Against the Day' last week; and not wanting to overstate: Wowzers!                     (!!!)                         (¿¿¿)

Very possible to gush on about secular transcendence, time and times shifting and merging cf. circularity á la 'Finnegan's Wake', etc. so I won't; except to say ... Thomas Pynchon knows about wind, and many of its (nine billion?) names and what they mean and how they blow ... and this is mid-March in some country north of the tropics ... windy weather. Comin' up on Easter too eh? (In case you prefer your transcendence sanctified.)

A collection of teasers:
                         One: The Light Over the Ranges part 5 - Lew Basnight becomes a detective,
                         Two: Iceland Spar part 12 - Lake Traverse marries Deuce Kindred.
                         Three: Bilocations part 5 - Yashmeen Halfcourt & Cyprian Latewood.
                         Three: Bilocations part 6 - Kit Traverse on the S.S. Stupendica (short excerpt).
                         Three: Bilocations part 12 - Lew Basnight encounters Lamont Replevin (excerpt).
                         Three: Bilocations part 17 - Kit Traverse's choice (excerpt).
                         Four: Against the Day part 4 - Yashmeen & Auberon Halfcourt (excerpt).
                         Four: Against the Day part 7 - overture and possibility (short excerpt).
                         Four: Against the Day part 11 - A trio (an excerpt some may find salacious).

[I thought of including Four: Against the Day part 20 in which Lew Basnight meets Lake Traverse & Deuce Kindred, and the whole of the last chapter, Five: Rue du Départ, which runs through at least several of the modes to be found in 'Anatomy of Criticism', but ... didn't, and won't - though I have them scanned and will gladly share via e-mail for the purposes of discussion with anyone who has a notion.]

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First (to me) came 'A Journey into the mind of Watts' ... 1966 (oh look, it's on-line at NYT) - maybe - 'V' was out in 1963 already, 'The Crying of Lot 49' also in 1966, so maybe somebody told me, can't remember - but it is Watts that stands out in my memory. Re-reading it this morning and some of that feeling comes back. 'Entropy' came to me about that time too; another bit of light for a white boy grew up in Toronto where there were no black people visible at that time, 50s; and no idea what a 'lease-breaking party' might be, nor a lease for that matter.

This ain't no hagiography gentle reader, nope.

Ah ... can't find 'Entropy' on-line ... have to remedy that ... here you go: Entropy 1958-59. 

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Down.