It pains me to report that I actually have to do some work today. I am on holiday next week, and the incompetent oafs who organise my replacements are sending along yet another try-out today – although, true to form, they have neglected to tell me when – and I have to organise everything on the assumption that I will be dealing with a congenital idiot with all the work ethic of a Californian skate punk. Thus, I will have to raid the archives for today’s offering. I will be blogging from internet cafes next week but, as I always manage to have adventures in my week off, I’m sure there will be plenty of updates. Reading the following – which is getting on for five years old – I’m tempted to take the boat out to Camden Town…
The cut – the old name for the canal reflecting the method of its creation – runs out of London to the north-west. From east London – I had been at Victoria Park - it runs first through Hoxton, St Pancras and King’s Cross before it is gulped into the 1,000-yard Islington tunnel. I’ve been through the Islington tunnel half a dozen times, and I keep meaning not to smoke skunk before I enter. It really is not an appropriate drug of choice for a journey through a dark, brick, glorified Victorian drain. The trick is, before entering any tunnel, to slant your boat’s headlamp to the right hand side so that it illuminates the tunnel wall rather than filtering uselessly into the gloom ahead of you or blinding oncoming skippers. After a spliff or two, though, the perspective becomes a problem and I keep thinking the boat is reversing. Once the tunnel is safely negotiated, it’s Little Venice, lying as it does between Maida Vale and Warwick Avenue tube stations. I saw Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders there once, walking her dogs. I saw The Pretenders in Purley in 1978 and Hynde wore purple and white jockey silks, complete with hat and riding crop. Very good live, although I think the bass player and the guitarist are dead now, sort of ruling out ‘live’.
Maida Vale is home to a fine set of boats, both narrows and Dutch barges. There is a two-year waiting list for a mooring there but it’s not for the pikey likes of me and I pushed on to Camden Town to spend a week in the fleshpots before I headed out into the New World. Well, Milton Keynes.
I’ve always liked Camden Town. It wears its no-good heart on its sleeve. Where other parts of London say, hey, visit me, live here, I’m cool, I’m down with the kids, they all end up being just different sore organs in the same diseased body. Camden ‘fesses up. Have you ever noticed the dirt in London? I mean the ingrained filth, the stuff on the pavement, like nicotined fingers, the stuff even the rain won’t wash away, the stuff the hardest rain just floats and moves around. Camden wears the dirt like hip jeans. I have to confess that as Sabrina Fair and I came into Camden Town on that blustery Good Friday, 2005, we had nothing but a good time in mind. As I hadn’t touched alcohol for ten months, this would of necessity involve drugs and, as I had been smoking domestic skunk fairly constantly, those drugs would need to be something from the darker end of the menu.
As I moored up on the very desirable stretch at the top of the three Camden Locks, I realised I was being watched. Now, this is nothing new in Camden Town. The locks themselves take you through the heart of the market, and they are not the place to make a pratt of yourself, what with half the young bands in London watching you while draped on their arms are more little honeys than a Fellini film. But this was a different kind of observation. This was two guys on a bench watching me not as though I was mooring a narrow boat but as though I had just stepped out of the mother ship with a 30-foot android standing by my side. The twin reasons for the fierce glamour Sabrina and I appeared to have cast on their day soon became apparent. The first clue was the impedimentia that lined their bench of choice. The inventory comprised a half bottle of brandy half empty, an industrial-size bottle of 8% ABV cider similarly depleted, an empty punnet next to an almost full punnet of mushrooms and, as a codicil, a plump baggie of skunk. This explained why their eyes were like 1970s coloured vinyl 45s, and the single phoneme that escaped the lips of one of these good fellows explained far more.
“Fock”.
Ah, the Irish, always hot on the trail of the ubiquitous and yet grail-like craic. And they had found it, right here in Camden Town. And here I was, like Pizarro on the South American silver trail, eager to share in their spoils. After introductions and a half-hour or so sharing their stogie-sized joints and munching a few mushrooms, I popped back inside Sabrina to make sure everything was ship-shape in the event of the afternoon becoming radically other, and that was when I got my worldly reminder that ointment wouldn’t be ointment without its attendant fly. The first I was aware of a rent in the gentle veil of the day was the sound of someone ‘playing’ an acoustic guitar outside the boat. This abrasive sound was accompanied by a keening, skirling vocal, the lyrics of which were of home provenance and served to denounce the musical talents of one Pete Doherty.
Sure enough, the Micks certainly had company in the shape of two new arrivistes. The soi disant troubadour was around 24, unkempt hair, teeth already going to hell in a handcart but with something about him that spoke of expensive education. He dispensed another of his impromptu satires on the state of the modern music industry – and the injustice of his own exclusion from that golden city – and then he saw me. “Hello Henry,” he said. “My name’s not Henry,” I replied. “Okay Henry.” And so it went for a little while. He was one of those ex-public schoolboys who take the piss with everything they say and for whom every conversation is an exercise in trying to get a rise out of the other person. He was clearly intelligent but he had set his tilt against the world. Everything was to blame: pop music, modern culture, Pete Doherty, his education, his father’s money, everything, tout le monde. His father, it transpired, was a fabulously wealthy lawyer who had been at the centre of a famous libel trial a few years previously involving a politician and a wealthy foreign store owner. This information I gleaned from his companion, with whom I fell into conversation once the miscreant had stopped taking the piss and sloped off to chat up two American students who had been admiring Sabrina’s curves.
The other guy was personable; I quite liked him. He had apparently been summoned through time from the Camden Town of the late 1960s: Tudor haircut, flounced Granny-takes-a-trip shirt, harlequin trousers, tinted Lennon specs. He ran – maybe still does – a psychedelic record store and we had a short conversation about 60s psychedelia. The Chocolate Watch Band was mentioned, I recall. He was fascinated, as we somehow moved on to the topic of Fatboy Slim, to find that I had been to school with that artiste, whose real name the psychedelic one believed to be Norman Cook. I was happy to inform him – and you, gentle reader – that Fatboy Slim’s real name is Quentin Cook and he hails from Reigate’s rather posh stockbroker belt, whence he most definitely did not gain his faux northern accent. He also has a sister called Lois who I saw a couple of years ago at a party and is as charming now as she was then. Which is charming indeed, in case you think I’m being facetious.
Returning to the colourful figure on the Camden Town towpath, the conversation took the following turn:
BUTCH: “Is your friend always like this?”
CHAP: “Yeah. Pretty much.”
BUTCH: “You must have to pull him out of a few scrapes.”
CHAP: “How do you mean?”
BUTCH: “I mean a lot of people must want to hit him.”
CHAP: “Oh. Yeah. I have had to get him out of a few things.”
BUTCH: “Only I’m going to hit him in a minute.”
CHAP: “Oh. Really?”
BUTCH: “Yes. Not hard, and only once. But I am going to hit him. Okay?”
CHAP: “Um, okay.”
And with a few words from the psychedelic one to his surely doomed friend, silence reigned once more. As the boy walked off, he turned to me and said, “Bye, Henry.” I said, “My name’s not Henry,” and then I prepared to go into Camden Town and buy drugs before striking up a conversation in thye street with Dr Jonathan Miller, who actually recognised me before I recognised him. [To be continued].
* Title of a song on Cut by The Slits.
Friday, 20 November 2009
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Philosophy: Six of the best
It has been brought to my attention that today is National Philosophy Day. William Gazy has pointed out the superciliousness of having a national ‘day’ for anything, but I suppose that, being qualified in the subject, I ought at least to bring a six-pack to the party. With this in mind – and if, that is, anything like ‘mind’ can be said to exist [just kidding] – I’d like to offer a little list of philosophical treats, a little metaphysical goody-bag to take home with you from Butch Towers. These half-dozen little rascals will keep you away from the technical and the over-long [but not out of the pub, wherein they can be read in comfort] and, should you dip into any of them, I hope you get as much from them as I have. They are in alphabetical order rather than any order of preference:
Boethius – The Consolation of Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Oration on the Dignity of Man*
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
Plato – The Symposium
Rene Descartes – Meditations/Discourse on the Method
Of course, there are countless options, but 600 pages of Spinoza or David Hume, rewarding as they might eventually be, are not going to give you a taste for the subject you might want to repeat. My list – offered with all the humility philosophy has to offer – is intended to whet the appetite, to offer a taste of honey, for the only subject I have ever truly loved.
*This key Renaissance text seems impossible to get in book form. I’ve had it on order for two years from Watkins, the esoteric bookshop in Cecil Court, London, and they still haven’t come up with it. Better to go here.
Boethius – The Consolation of Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Oration on the Dignity of Man*
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
Plato – The Symposium
Rene Descartes – Meditations/Discourse on the Method
Of course, there are countless options, but 600 pages of Spinoza or David Hume, rewarding as they might eventually be, are not going to give you a taste for the subject you might want to repeat. My list – offered with all the humility philosophy has to offer – is intended to whet the appetite, to offer a taste of honey, for the only subject I have ever truly loved.
*This key Renaissance text seems impossible to get in book form. I’ve had it on order for two years from Watkins, the esoteric bookshop in Cecil Court, London, and they still haven’t come up with it. Better to go here.
Happy National Philosophy day from all at Butch Towers. And remember; sapere aude ["dare to know" (Horace)].
The message is the medium
I’ve never got involved with Twitter for sound reasons, the arrival at which I like to think I owe to my powers of reasoning in combination with the available information concerning that medium of communication; it sounded silly. I’m sorry if you’re all dedicated Twitterers, but it seemed to cater for people who got teary-eyed and wobbly-lipped if faced with a nasty, big, long blog post. I remember reading about it in the press when it first hit. It sounded fucking stupid. I remember all the fuss about Stephen Fry, and read some of his ‘must-read Tweets’ in another newspaper. They read like a nine-year-old’s reports from Scout camp. Now, Fry is over-rated, but people treat him as though he were fucking Petrarch. Add that to the fact that there are millions of people who would clamber over drowning women and children to make some contact, however slight, with the pantheon of the new Olympus of celebrities, and I suppose you’ve got a fad. I’ve watched the creation of ‘Twitter Tsars’ in political parties, and even had a friend extol the virtues of Twitter with such enthusiasm I kept sneaking looks at the back of his head to see if there was visible evidence of cranial trauma.
Now, over at Dizzy Thinks comes the results of a poll concerning this desperately modern branding exercise. The main skinny has been ripped out of context by the Butch Towers context staff:
“The press release basically said that Prospect [magazine] did a poll and most people on Twitter are Guardian-reading whingers… What the poll actually shows is that Twitter actually tends to be used by like-minded people talking to themselves about the views they all agree on… Twitter is a communication medium that encourages groupthink whilst simultaneously making the group believe their views are having influence on a wider population when in fact they're all just shouting at each other in a locked and sound-proof room.”
Now, if you happen to be a Guardian-reading whinger, you will counter by arguing that the blogosphere is the same; a limited though healthy virtual ecosystem where like-minded bloggers read each other's posts for the confirmation of their own political tendencies. But this is not so, or not exclusively so. I have no idea of the proportional representation of different political viewpoints on the blogosphere, but I don’t think it’s lacking in left-wing popsies, is it? What irritates the Guardianista is that it’s the right-of-centre blogs that actually get read. Also, even a cursory glance at a political spectrum of blogs will show that those from the right are far more likely to entertain heterodox ideas. It’s a great paradox that modern Lefties are far more conservative than the Conservatives, who have caught that contemporary political swine ‘flu called progressivism.
The other sneering canard about the blogosphere is that it’s dominated by men. I saw it referred to as the ‘blokeosphere’, which I rather like. Now, whenever there is a perceived domination of women by men in any field, feminists tend to reach for two weapons: positive affirmation and the accusation of repression. Neither is appropriate for the blogosphere for the simple reason that there is no barrier, cultural, gender-based or financial, to setting up a blog. It’s free and so easy that you can manage it even if you’re not Renaissance man, woman, or Stephen Fry. So the mostly female journalists who despise the blogosphere – Les Demoiselles d’Avignyawn, to re-heat a gag I deem too good for one use only – have to change tack. Oh, the blogosphere is so boooooring. Women have far better things to do than waste their time feverishly pecking their keyboards and indulging their clearly wrong political beliefs. Bollocks. Chippie rubbish. The women I read on the 'net are far more compelling than all the Pollys and the Maddys and the Jackies and the Yasmins and their dull intellectual decor.
Also, the blogosphere’s political content is only a part of its appeal. I suspect that one objection journalists have to blogging is that the people producing the content are not only unpaid and unregulated, they are also, in the main, more interesting human beings than journalists tend to be, fuller, more rounded characters. We all know that moment in a journalist’s column where he or she lets us into their lives for a glimpse through the crack in the door. And we all know how dull it generally is. "Ooh, they’ve closed down my favourite bistro in Hampstead, must walk the dogs, ooh, the school run is such a chore." Fucking stroll on. I have never wanted to know more about a journalist whose work I’ve read, and I’ve certainly never wanted to meet one, whereas there are dozens of bloggers I want to know more about, many I’d like to meet.
Which brings us to the next aspect of the blogosphere’s appeal. Non-political bloggers – or at least blogs which do not explicitly thematise politics; most bloggers I read are politically literate regardless of the express content of their blogs – are written for a number of reasons, none of them pecuniary, at least to begin with. Catharsis, closure, communication, confession; the impetus for blogging comes from deeper reserves of the self than is needed for mere journalism. Blogs bring me far closer to the experience of another person’s life than the newspapers do, partly because any real lives that are allowed into the hallowed halls of the MSM have to be viewed through the bland lens of the journalist.
And this, I think, is why the MSM has been all a-twitter this year while restricting its mention of the blogosphere to the big fish who can’t be ignored, the Guidos and Iain Dales, beasts whose dorsal fins have clearly cut the water.
Twitter is simple and silly and easy to write about while appearing hip and down wiv da kidz. Twitter is Facebook Lite for kids with rubber hats, plenty of time on their hands and a paucity of imagination. The blogosphere, on the other hand, is the real instantiation of a previously empty word; infotainment. I am informed and entertained in equal measure by weblogs. It is also a far more social occupation than Twitter, which is just a Tourette’s flurry of gorm-o-grams for the Miliband generation, fizzy sherbet for the iPersonalities.
Here’s to the blogosphere, then: existential cornucopia, experiential bazaar, church of the heterodox and all-round, thorough-going benison. As for Twitter, I suspect its day is almost done, and it will fade into cultural history like the 8-track stereo and the Betamax video recorder. You Twitter away, my little darlings, and leave the blogosphere alone. The grown-ups want to talk.
Now, over at Dizzy Thinks comes the results of a poll concerning this desperately modern branding exercise. The main skinny has been ripped out of context by the Butch Towers context staff:
“The press release basically said that Prospect [magazine] did a poll and most people on Twitter are Guardian-reading whingers… What the poll actually shows is that Twitter actually tends to be used by like-minded people talking to themselves about the views they all agree on… Twitter is a communication medium that encourages groupthink whilst simultaneously making the group believe their views are having influence on a wider population when in fact they're all just shouting at each other in a locked and sound-proof room.”
Now, if you happen to be a Guardian-reading whinger, you will counter by arguing that the blogosphere is the same; a limited though healthy virtual ecosystem where like-minded bloggers read each other's posts for the confirmation of their own political tendencies. But this is not so, or not exclusively so. I have no idea of the proportional representation of different political viewpoints on the blogosphere, but I don’t think it’s lacking in left-wing popsies, is it? What irritates the Guardianista is that it’s the right-of-centre blogs that actually get read. Also, even a cursory glance at a political spectrum of blogs will show that those from the right are far more likely to entertain heterodox ideas. It’s a great paradox that modern Lefties are far more conservative than the Conservatives, who have caught that contemporary political swine ‘flu called progressivism.
The other sneering canard about the blogosphere is that it’s dominated by men. I saw it referred to as the ‘blokeosphere’, which I rather like. Now, whenever there is a perceived domination of women by men in any field, feminists tend to reach for two weapons: positive affirmation and the accusation of repression. Neither is appropriate for the blogosphere for the simple reason that there is no barrier, cultural, gender-based or financial, to setting up a blog. It’s free and so easy that you can manage it even if you’re not Renaissance man, woman, or Stephen Fry. So the mostly female journalists who despise the blogosphere – Les Demoiselles d’Avignyawn, to re-heat a gag I deem too good for one use only – have to change tack. Oh, the blogosphere is so boooooring. Women have far better things to do than waste their time feverishly pecking their keyboards and indulging their clearly wrong political beliefs. Bollocks. Chippie rubbish. The women I read on the 'net are far more compelling than all the Pollys and the Maddys and the Jackies and the Yasmins and their dull intellectual decor.
Also, the blogosphere’s political content is only a part of its appeal. I suspect that one objection journalists have to blogging is that the people producing the content are not only unpaid and unregulated, they are also, in the main, more interesting human beings than journalists tend to be, fuller, more rounded characters. We all know that moment in a journalist’s column where he or she lets us into their lives for a glimpse through the crack in the door. And we all know how dull it generally is. "Ooh, they’ve closed down my favourite bistro in Hampstead, must walk the dogs, ooh, the school run is such a chore." Fucking stroll on. I have never wanted to know more about a journalist whose work I’ve read, and I’ve certainly never wanted to meet one, whereas there are dozens of bloggers I want to know more about, many I’d like to meet.
Which brings us to the next aspect of the blogosphere’s appeal. Non-political bloggers – or at least blogs which do not explicitly thematise politics; most bloggers I read are politically literate regardless of the express content of their blogs – are written for a number of reasons, none of them pecuniary, at least to begin with. Catharsis, closure, communication, confession; the impetus for blogging comes from deeper reserves of the self than is needed for mere journalism. Blogs bring me far closer to the experience of another person’s life than the newspapers do, partly because any real lives that are allowed into the hallowed halls of the MSM have to be viewed through the bland lens of the journalist.
And this, I think, is why the MSM has been all a-twitter this year while restricting its mention of the blogosphere to the big fish who can’t be ignored, the Guidos and Iain Dales, beasts whose dorsal fins have clearly cut the water.
Twitter is simple and silly and easy to write about while appearing hip and down wiv da kidz. Twitter is Facebook Lite for kids with rubber hats, plenty of time on their hands and a paucity of imagination. The blogosphere, on the other hand, is the real instantiation of a previously empty word; infotainment. I am informed and entertained in equal measure by weblogs. It is also a far more social occupation than Twitter, which is just a Tourette’s flurry of gorm-o-grams for the Miliband generation, fizzy sherbet for the iPersonalities.
Here’s to the blogosphere, then: existential cornucopia, experiential bazaar, church of the heterodox and all-round, thorough-going benison. As for Twitter, I suspect its day is almost done, and it will fade into cultural history like the 8-track stereo and the Betamax video recorder. You Twitter away, my little darlings, and leave the blogosphere alone. The grown-ups want to talk.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Stalkers in the house of Capulet
I don’t know if you are familiar with The New Adventures of Juliette, but I discovered it, rather sadly, just as the action seemed to have ended, like turning up to see a band just as the last chords of the encore are dying away. Anyway, Juliette writes about her life, more specifically about her love life. As love lives will, her ship foundered on the rocks but has since picked up in a way that perhaps demonstrates how blog-hosting could be the new internet dating, and all seems hunky dory for the gal. As my own Dante-like journey through the concentric circles of love took up a disproportionate amount of my postings not that long ago – which I would never have expected when Butch Towers became open to the public – I was immediately interested and became a regular reader. She is candid and doesn’t shy away from self-examination which, as seasoned Butch-botherers will know, is hot potatoes here at BT.
Now, Juliette has a cyber-stalker, or troll, or whatever the buzzword is this week. He [I’ll lay a pound to a pinch of shit it isn’t a she] leaves some extraordinarily insulting, misogynistic comments, all of which the blog hostess publishes. His spelling speaks of a man who would be all thumbs, mentally speaking, with The Daily Express, and he posts as ‘Anonymous’, which is hardly the actions of a preux chevalier.
I rarely get exercised by rudeness, it being such a staple of the modern experience, but something about this little fellow tugged on my coat once too often. If Juliette allows my last two comments on this posting – which had great relevance to my own past – then I’ve invited him over to Butch Towers. If he comes – and I’ll be sure and let you know – I expect you all to be at your meanest.
Also, I suspect he doesn’t know about reverse ARP, a method we used to use in the PI racket and which means, effectively, that you can trace an email or similar to a specific terminal, and therefore to an address. I want him over here at Butch Towers. Perhaps we might follow him home together.
Now, Juliette has a cyber-stalker, or troll, or whatever the buzzword is this week. He [I’ll lay a pound to a pinch of shit it isn’t a she] leaves some extraordinarily insulting, misogynistic comments, all of which the blog hostess publishes. His spelling speaks of a man who would be all thumbs, mentally speaking, with The Daily Express, and he posts as ‘Anonymous’, which is hardly the actions of a preux chevalier.
I rarely get exercised by rudeness, it being such a staple of the modern experience, but something about this little fellow tugged on my coat once too often. If Juliette allows my last two comments on this posting – which had great relevance to my own past – then I’ve invited him over to Butch Towers. If he comes – and I’ll be sure and let you know – I expect you all to be at your meanest.
Also, I suspect he doesn’t know about reverse ARP, a method we used to use in the PI racket and which means, effectively, that you can trace an email or similar to a specific terminal, and therefore to an address. I want him over here at Butch Towers. Perhaps we might follow him home together.
The cross or the hemlock? You choose
I suspect I might have appeared a little glib when I declared on Monday that "mankind had a choice of saviours, Christ and Socrates, and we chose the wrong guy." I can only say that I am a godless man who discovered, almost as soon as his Derrida-soaked PhD was deposited at the British Library, that deconstruction wasn't really his religion after all, but that the history of philosophy very definitely was. I think Aristotle writes somewhere that a man can know a lot about a little or a little about a lot, and I think I am generally to be found drinking in the latter of these categorical saloon bars. I believe it is also somewhere in the work of 'the master of those who know' [whose extant work is really extended lecture notes] that every man should be able to play the flute, but not that well.
Now, as I've had cause to mention before, we here at Butch Towers pride ourselves on the erudition of our modest but shamelessly well-informed phalanx of readers and, almost at the speed of thought, my post had garnered a reply from Berenike, who also, and rather mysteriously, goes by the name of exlaodicea:
"'the West had a choice of saviours, Socrates and Christ, and we chose the wrong guy'. That is like soooo asking for the obvious Chesterton quote, by the way :)"
I had one of my production dwarves fire off a reply instanter:
"Ooh! Ooh! What Chesterton quote? Don't hold out on me, don't make me have to Google this. I'm on pins."
To which the following reply:
"(see these new(ish) blogger comboxes? dey do ma nut. I have to open Opera to comment. Or allow cookies in Firefox, which I don't want to do. meep. my life is so hard.)
Arrr, it is here I have seen Chesterton quotes before then? I thought you'd guess it immediately then.
'Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and not tried.'
There's also the Ghandi quote:
'If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, all of India would be Christian today.'
Christ isn't the problem, it's the Christians.
Most of us would have been better off chucked into the sea with millstones round our necks, ekcetra. In fact, there was something about this recently. Off to find it."
I don’t pretend to understand the opening bit about opera and Firefox and comboxes, but suspect it to be Popish metaphysicking. I will now be promptly assassinated by a man in a floppy hat with buckles on his shoes. Damn. I hate it when that happens.
Now, I don’t know my G K, having only read The Man Who Was Thursday, and I’d never come across that one. But Christianity hasn’t been tried? I think it was given a fairly thorough outing in the Dark Ages, no? If Chesterton meant that we don’t live like Christ, well, spot on Dickie. But neither do we live like Socrates; why is this a less-prized state?
What I was getting at was this; what makes a choice of figurehead a religious choice, which goes on to command allegiance, and what might make it a philosophical one, which extends the courtesy of choice to the adherent? What is the impulse that separates religion from philosophy? When I use the term 'philosophy', unless otherwise instructed, I mean it in the Platonic sense, with an eye [and Nietzsche writes of the 'remarkable accuracy' of Greek vision, quite literally] the sense of the original Greek, where the word comes from roots meaning 'to love' [philein (I think)] and 'knowledge' [sophos (probably)]. Philosophy, for me, is not a technical discipline - of which more later - but a simple love of knowledge. 'Learn everything', writes Hugh of Saint-Victor. 'Nothing is superfluous.'
Now; two men, both executed by their respective governing authorities four hundred years apart. Christ was 33 and his execution was political; Socrates was 70 and his death was every bit as politically motivated. Christ had disciples, Socrates wealthy patrons - including Plato - and they both practiced personal humility, meaning they both crashed on a lot of couches as well as having coherent moral codes.
One of them became the dramaturge of a world-wide religion which spread - because of the pre-existent social structures put in place by the Roman Empire - at an incredible rate. The other is seen as the fons et origo of what has become a marginalised, specialist academic discipline. There's no crass opposition here between reason and faith; both men offered a vision of an afterlife, whether in heaven or the strange journey of Er in the Republic. The Rock and Plato's Academy; the two emblems of two separate strands of belief.
The choice to make one of these figures the representative on Earth of a deity is a purely metaphysical choice. Christian thinkers - and I am painting history with a broad brush here - have consistently separated faith and reason, from Augustine through Aquinas to Kierkegaard, including even that fulcrum of the Mediaeval and modern worldviews, Petrarch. You don't have to - and indeed can't - prove the articles of faith. That's what faith is; the renunciation of the possibility of philosophical proof.
The choice to make the other, Socrates - whom Erasmus had difficulty in refraining from worshipping as a saint - into a paradigm for knowledgeable self-examination is a more curious twist of intellectual history.
As is well documented, the Church had strong repressive views of philosophy up until and even after Aquinas, as Galileo and Descartes almost found out to their costs [and Bruno did, burnt in 1600].This was mainly because 'philosophy' had, to a great extent, retained its pre-Socratic roots as proto-science by virtue of being passed on to the Medieval mind via Aristotle, Plato not really being available in the West until the great translations of Marcilio Ficino in the 16th century, although it is Platonism - via Neoplatonism - which more properly funds the metaphysics of Christianity. The Christian church did not like the cut of philosphy's jib at all; too much prodding around and disturbing dogma. God is what we say he is.
As thinkers such as William of Ockham showed, divine revelation was an essential part of man's relationship with God, and it seems absurd that God would not have factored in science in his overall strategy and encouraged it as a sort of divine codex.
Where do all these strands meet? In my view - humbly offered and still larval - the problem with a religious choice is that the religious authorities which follow the success of a cult will have an impregnable position if they can commandeer a metaphysical idea which is, in principle, unprovable and thus undisprovable.
Whereas from apparently cast-iron concepts, Socrates showed that no final truth is produced and that this failure can be proved, Christ attempted to show that moral concepts, for example, could be shown to be true by reference to something which cannot be proved.
All this is intolerably ill put; I think what I'm after is a kind of counter-factual [all the rage in philosophy of history] world in which I went into a church and saw a bust of Socrates and folk sitting reading, or thinking quietly, an area without genuflection and reflexive guilt, a place where the mystery of the self might be approached without the necessary for physical and moral prostration. Berenike said,
"It's not Christ, it's the Christians."
Well, that's the type of talk that got Shelley thrown out of school, and you have to say it's a very well-taken free kick. Christians often lay claim to moral coding as though it were only possible through the medium of the Church. Why should this be so? Why could not a universal belief-system based on secular, Socratic principles, be as good an occupation for us all, part angel and part devil as we all are? Why did we choose the cross and not the bowl of hemlock?
I think we require the return of Socrates far more than we need the return of Christ. Religion has always relied on philosophical methodology far more than vice versa. I believe Heidegger was right; 'We are too late for the Gods, and too early for Being [Dasein]'.
Now, as I've had cause to mention before, we here at Butch Towers pride ourselves on the erudition of our modest but shamelessly well-informed phalanx of readers and, almost at the speed of thought, my post had garnered a reply from Berenike, who also, and rather mysteriously, goes by the name of exlaodicea:
"'the West had a choice of saviours, Socrates and Christ, and we chose the wrong guy'. That is like soooo asking for the obvious Chesterton quote, by the way :)"
I had one of my production dwarves fire off a reply instanter:
"Ooh! Ooh! What Chesterton quote? Don't hold out on me, don't make me have to Google this. I'm on pins."
To which the following reply:
"(see these new(ish) blogger comboxes? dey do ma nut. I have to open Opera to comment. Or allow cookies in Firefox, which I don't want to do. meep. my life is so hard.)
Arrr, it is here I have seen Chesterton quotes before then? I thought you'd guess it immediately then.
'Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and not tried.'
There's also the Ghandi quote:
'If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, all of India would be Christian today.'
Christ isn't the problem, it's the Christians.
Most of us would have been better off chucked into the sea with millstones round our necks, ekcetra. In fact, there was something about this recently. Off to find it."
I don’t pretend to understand the opening bit about opera and Firefox and comboxes, but suspect it to be Popish metaphysicking. I will now be promptly assassinated by a man in a floppy hat with buckles on his shoes. Damn. I hate it when that happens.
Now, I don’t know my G K, having only read The Man Who Was Thursday, and I’d never come across that one. But Christianity hasn’t been tried? I think it was given a fairly thorough outing in the Dark Ages, no? If Chesterton meant that we don’t live like Christ, well, spot on Dickie. But neither do we live like Socrates; why is this a less-prized state?
What I was getting at was this; what makes a choice of figurehead a religious choice, which goes on to command allegiance, and what might make it a philosophical one, which extends the courtesy of choice to the adherent? What is the impulse that separates religion from philosophy? When I use the term 'philosophy', unless otherwise instructed, I mean it in the Platonic sense, with an eye [and Nietzsche writes of the 'remarkable accuracy' of Greek vision, quite literally] the sense of the original Greek, where the word comes from roots meaning 'to love' [philein (I think)] and 'knowledge' [sophos (probably)]. Philosophy, for me, is not a technical discipline - of which more later - but a simple love of knowledge. 'Learn everything', writes Hugh of Saint-Victor. 'Nothing is superfluous.'
Now; two men, both executed by their respective governing authorities four hundred years apart. Christ was 33 and his execution was political; Socrates was 70 and his death was every bit as politically motivated. Christ had disciples, Socrates wealthy patrons - including Plato - and they both practiced personal humility, meaning they both crashed on a lot of couches as well as having coherent moral codes.
One of them became the dramaturge of a world-wide religion which spread - because of the pre-existent social structures put in place by the Roman Empire - at an incredible rate. The other is seen as the fons et origo of what has become a marginalised, specialist academic discipline. There's no crass opposition here between reason and faith; both men offered a vision of an afterlife, whether in heaven or the strange journey of Er in the Republic. The Rock and Plato's Academy; the two emblems of two separate strands of belief.
The choice to make one of these figures the representative on Earth of a deity is a purely metaphysical choice. Christian thinkers - and I am painting history with a broad brush here - have consistently separated faith and reason, from Augustine through Aquinas to Kierkegaard, including even that fulcrum of the Mediaeval and modern worldviews, Petrarch. You don't have to - and indeed can't - prove the articles of faith. That's what faith is; the renunciation of the possibility of philosophical proof.
The choice to make the other, Socrates - whom Erasmus had difficulty in refraining from worshipping as a saint - into a paradigm for knowledgeable self-examination is a more curious twist of intellectual history.
As is well documented, the Church had strong repressive views of philosophy up until and even after Aquinas, as Galileo and Descartes almost found out to their costs [and Bruno did, burnt in 1600].This was mainly because 'philosophy' had, to a great extent, retained its pre-Socratic roots as proto-science by virtue of being passed on to the Medieval mind via Aristotle, Plato not really being available in the West until the great translations of Marcilio Ficino in the 16th century, although it is Platonism - via Neoplatonism - which more properly funds the metaphysics of Christianity. The Christian church did not like the cut of philosphy's jib at all; too much prodding around and disturbing dogma. God is what we say he is.
As thinkers such as William of Ockham showed, divine revelation was an essential part of man's relationship with God, and it seems absurd that God would not have factored in science in his overall strategy and encouraged it as a sort of divine codex.
Where do all these strands meet? In my view - humbly offered and still larval - the problem with a religious choice is that the religious authorities which follow the success of a cult will have an impregnable position if they can commandeer a metaphysical idea which is, in principle, unprovable and thus undisprovable.
Whereas from apparently cast-iron concepts, Socrates showed that no final truth is produced and that this failure can be proved, Christ attempted to show that moral concepts, for example, could be shown to be true by reference to something which cannot be proved.
All this is intolerably ill put; I think what I'm after is a kind of counter-factual [all the rage in philosophy of history] world in which I went into a church and saw a bust of Socrates and folk sitting reading, or thinking quietly, an area without genuflection and reflexive guilt, a place where the mystery of the self might be approached without the necessary for physical and moral prostration. Berenike said,
"It's not Christ, it's the Christians."
Well, that's the type of talk that got Shelley thrown out of school, and you have to say it's a very well-taken free kick. Christians often lay claim to moral coding as though it were only possible through the medium of the Church. Why should this be so? Why could not a universal belief-system based on secular, Socratic principles, be as good an occupation for us all, part angel and part devil as we all are? Why did we choose the cross and not the bowl of hemlock?
I think we require the return of Socrates far more than we need the return of Christ. Religion has always relied on philosophical methodology far more than vice versa. I believe Heidegger was right; 'We are too late for the Gods, and too early for Being [Dasein]'.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Art for art's sake
Best not to get started on art. Just decide what you like by looking at lots of paintings, that's my advice. You certainly don't need to know why you like it, although aesthetics is interesting in its own right. Urban art, or similar phrases, fill the soul with dread as you anticipate some clod of deferential rubbish pitching up in the town square, but in Uxbridge - in whose forests Queen Elizabeth I used to hunt - early in 2007, I saw something to cheer the soul, something of beauty and artistic merit...
"A new narrow boat has turned up in the middle of the local park. It’s not an awful hangover from the flooding earlier this year, it’s art. And it really is. Don’t allow people who claim to know about art tell you about art; decide what you like. Art critics are the imams of culture, their election is soi disant.
As I walked across the park, I heard the mad whine of a small chainsaw. I looked instinctively at the fallen beech trunk that I first saw three years ago. Then, it had been neatly cropped at either end and someone had painted across its length. But it wasn’t the usual riot of tagging, the same visual dross that disfigures every town like the livid scribblings of an unbalanced alchemist. Someone had neatly daubed interlocking, horse-shoe-shaped crescents on the fallen giant and it looked good, a neat reminder of the human, the rational desire for pattern in among nature’s apparent tendency to the random. As I tromped toward the mad wasp of the chainsaw and its wielder, I thought; terrific. I thought, with all the prejudice of the English modern whose head is beginning, like a beaten footballer, to hang, that now they were cutting up the only nice-looking thing – nature aside – in the town.
Not so. Tom is an artist from Devizes, who lives in a narrow boat of his own. He was busy converting the beech trunk into a sculpture of an old working narrow, complete with horse and tillerman. The detail was jaw-dropping even before Tom told me that he had done the whole thing with the chainsaw. No carver and gilder’s chisels or planes here.
The chainsaw is an appropriate metaphor for the current predicament of BW in its relationship with the dread DEFRA. SAVE THE WATERWAY FROM CUTS, reads the poster on the wall of the local boatyard.
Will they just fill and concrete the Grand Union Canal one day? Will it become a ‘linear estate’ or some other combination of opiate buzz-words? Residents of Grand Union Street will have US-style addresses.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Oh, 7260 Grand Union Street. Just by supermarket 167.’"
"A new narrow boat has turned up in the middle of the local park. It’s not an awful hangover from the flooding earlier this year, it’s art. And it really is. Don’t allow people who claim to know about art tell you about art; decide what you like. Art critics are the imams of culture, their election is soi disant.
As I walked across the park, I heard the mad whine of a small chainsaw. I looked instinctively at the fallen beech trunk that I first saw three years ago. Then, it had been neatly cropped at either end and someone had painted across its length. But it wasn’t the usual riot of tagging, the same visual dross that disfigures every town like the livid scribblings of an unbalanced alchemist. Someone had neatly daubed interlocking, horse-shoe-shaped crescents on the fallen giant and it looked good, a neat reminder of the human, the rational desire for pattern in among nature’s apparent tendency to the random. As I tromped toward the mad wasp of the chainsaw and its wielder, I thought; terrific. I thought, with all the prejudice of the English modern whose head is beginning, like a beaten footballer, to hang, that now they were cutting up the only nice-looking thing – nature aside – in the town.
Not so. Tom is an artist from Devizes, who lives in a narrow boat of his own. He was busy converting the beech trunk into a sculpture of an old working narrow, complete with horse and tillerman. The detail was jaw-dropping even before Tom told me that he had done the whole thing with the chainsaw. No carver and gilder’s chisels or planes here.
The chainsaw is an appropriate metaphor for the current predicament of BW in its relationship with the dread DEFRA. SAVE THE WATERWAY FROM CUTS, reads the poster on the wall of the local boatyard.
Will they just fill and concrete the Grand Union Canal one day? Will it become a ‘linear estate’ or some other combination of opiate buzz-words? Residents of Grand Union Street will have US-style addresses.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Oh, 7260 Grand Union Street. Just by supermarket 167.’"
Monday, 16 November 2009
Urban Samson in Damascene situation; Delilah held
Quite what it is that makes a memorable weekend is as hard to define as it is to nail a fried egg to the wall, to quote my father in jocular mood. The weekend before the one before last, for example, was so good, up until Sunday at least, that I don't really remember any of it. All I know is that I met Gazy and Jencks on Friday evening in the Wetherspoon's in Whitehall, woke up on Jencksy's bed in Bromley on Saturday morning, discovered Gazy and Jencks downstairs on sofas [apparently I had demanded the bed; I’m surprised Jencksy didn’t deck me], drank all day and didn't eat for 48 hours until I tucked away a Sunday beef roast in an Irish pub in Harlesden.
The following weekend I repaired to my mother's, my old room always being an agreeable place to lick my wounds, even if they currently required licking only very lightly. I selected books from my comfortable little library and read at random: Walter Pater's elegant essay on Pico della Mirandola; one of the H P Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos stories; the introduction to Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to a Study of Greek Religion; Andy Warhol's diaries. I stayed the night. It was sad without the dog on the bed.
This weekend began with my doing something I haven’t done for over five years. Stop sniggering at the back. I can see you and it’s your time you’re wasting. No, I got my hair cut.
Any of you in reader-land who have had the grave misfortune to have seen me in the flesh will know that my hair alternates – and has done for some time – between long and ridiculously long, and is generally to be found beaten and scraped into submission in a ponytail. Not any more. I minced round to a hairdresser’s close to work, and a charming Bulgarian girl washed my hair before the chop. Now, getting your hair washed – if you’re a man – is a rare event, and it reminded me of when Mummy used to do it, and how little boys laugh when she makes a big hair-horn on top of their heads. I nearly fell asleep; it was wonderful. Then, the Bulgarian snipper, who we’ll call Ali, put all sorts of clips and what have you in my thatch-like barnet and got cracking. The result? I love it. It’s slightly foppish with a touch of the Renaissance [the Italian one] about it. The pony tail is a thing of the past, and there was a hell of a lot of hair on that floor afterwards. Anyone want any hair bands?
Ali was not a fan of the UK, but was not ungrateful to be here. People in London were not friendly, she said. She lives in Wood Green with her mother, sister and 11-year-old son. Now, when I was stepping out with Elaine – the second funniest woman I have ever met – she lived in Wood Green, and the Turks and the Armenians were making a sustained effort to turn it into the OK Corral then, seven years ago, so Christ knows what it’s like now. Ali’s English was good for someone who’s only been here a year, and I think she may even have been a little flirtatious. I didn’t reciprocate, being wary of women just at the moment, eyeing them as one might watch lionesses in a safari park, attentive to any who might get too close.
I’ve always liked going to the barber’s. When we were kids, we loved having our hair cut because the barber was Babs, her shop called Babingtons. Well, in addition to being a good hairdresser, Babs was generously endowed in the secondary sexual characteristics department, and her chest provided an ample pillow for a young boy to relax on while she worked on the back of the head. More than a few of us would go to bed with a temperature after a visit to Babs.
In Brighton it was Fred’s, the undisputed king of the flat-top. I had a flat-top for years at university. My hair is perfect for this most stylish of cuts. You could have put a spirit level over the top of my bonce and that little bubble would have sat smack bang in the middle of it. Fred would use a specialist comb which he lay over the head before clipping everything that protruded over the top. He was the doyen of the Brighton rockabillies.
During the Brixton years, I had my mop attended to by George the Greek. Have you noticed, incidentally, how many men’s barbers are Greek Cypriots, and how many of them, in turn, are as bald as a cue ball? Strange but true. Every now and then I’d get a shave as a little luxury, sitting swaddled in hot towels while George the Greek whetted his razor against a leather strop. George the Greek had an unnerving habit of shaving me with this cut-throat razor while he was watching the horse racing on his little black-and-white telly. The strokes would get faster if his horse was running well, while I sat as still as a statue and feared for my arteries at the hands of this potential Sweeney Todd. George the Greek told me that he was taught to shave by covering an inflated balloon with lather, then shaving it without bursting it. So there we are.
So that’s hairdressers. The rest of the weekend featured an enjoyable drink with a Dutch drummer in The Spice of Life in Cambridge Circus, a new song recorded at Dragan’s, some man-hours spent tidying up the boat and laying a new rug Mum gave me and which looks spiffy, and some quality reading. It also featured a bit of an epiphany.
It wasn’t exactly Paul on the road to Damascus, or even Augustine in his Milanese garden, it was me tronking up Acton Lane in the wonderful storm light you sometimes get between showers. One of England’s foremost portrait painters once told me that this light is unique to England, and was by far the best light in which to paint, albeit fleeting. The artist in question once pissed off Margaret Thatcher by telling her he didn’t like the colour of her suit, and also claims to have been left alone with the Queen, which is not supposed to happen to a commoner, after he requested that she dismiss a footman who was disturbing his concentration. He used his own urine, he once confided in me, as paint thinner. It pleased him to know that members of the establishment, the great and the good, had their portraits hung on their walls containing his piss. But I digress.
My cosmic penny-dropping was this; the West had a choice of saviours, Socrates and Christ, and we chose the wrong guy.
On Saturday, as it got dark, I walked through a gale to the off-licence for a couple of cold Buds, regained the boat, lit a fire, rolled a spliff and read Dante long into the evening, sometimes reading aloud for my own pleasure.
The following weekend I repaired to my mother's, my old room always being an agreeable place to lick my wounds, even if they currently required licking only very lightly. I selected books from my comfortable little library and read at random: Walter Pater's elegant essay on Pico della Mirandola; one of the H P Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos stories; the introduction to Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to a Study of Greek Religion; Andy Warhol's diaries. I stayed the night. It was sad without the dog on the bed.
This weekend began with my doing something I haven’t done for over five years. Stop sniggering at the back. I can see you and it’s your time you’re wasting. No, I got my hair cut.
Any of you in reader-land who have had the grave misfortune to have seen me in the flesh will know that my hair alternates – and has done for some time – between long and ridiculously long, and is generally to be found beaten and scraped into submission in a ponytail. Not any more. I minced round to a hairdresser’s close to work, and a charming Bulgarian girl washed my hair before the chop. Now, getting your hair washed – if you’re a man – is a rare event, and it reminded me of when Mummy used to do it, and how little boys laugh when she makes a big hair-horn on top of their heads. I nearly fell asleep; it was wonderful. Then, the Bulgarian snipper, who we’ll call Ali, put all sorts of clips and what have you in my thatch-like barnet and got cracking. The result? I love it. It’s slightly foppish with a touch of the Renaissance [the Italian one] about it. The pony tail is a thing of the past, and there was a hell of a lot of hair on that floor afterwards. Anyone want any hair bands?
Ali was not a fan of the UK, but was not ungrateful to be here. People in London were not friendly, she said. She lives in Wood Green with her mother, sister and 11-year-old son. Now, when I was stepping out with Elaine – the second funniest woman I have ever met – she lived in Wood Green, and the Turks and the Armenians were making a sustained effort to turn it into the OK Corral then, seven years ago, so Christ knows what it’s like now. Ali’s English was good for someone who’s only been here a year, and I think she may even have been a little flirtatious. I didn’t reciprocate, being wary of women just at the moment, eyeing them as one might watch lionesses in a safari park, attentive to any who might get too close.
I’ve always liked going to the barber’s. When we were kids, we loved having our hair cut because the barber was Babs, her shop called Babingtons. Well, in addition to being a good hairdresser, Babs was generously endowed in the secondary sexual characteristics department, and her chest provided an ample pillow for a young boy to relax on while she worked on the back of the head. More than a few of us would go to bed with a temperature after a visit to Babs.
In Brighton it was Fred’s, the undisputed king of the flat-top. I had a flat-top for years at university. My hair is perfect for this most stylish of cuts. You could have put a spirit level over the top of my bonce and that little bubble would have sat smack bang in the middle of it. Fred would use a specialist comb which he lay over the head before clipping everything that protruded over the top. He was the doyen of the Brighton rockabillies.
During the Brixton years, I had my mop attended to by George the Greek. Have you noticed, incidentally, how many men’s barbers are Greek Cypriots, and how many of them, in turn, are as bald as a cue ball? Strange but true. Every now and then I’d get a shave as a little luxury, sitting swaddled in hot towels while George the Greek whetted his razor against a leather strop. George the Greek had an unnerving habit of shaving me with this cut-throat razor while he was watching the horse racing on his little black-and-white telly. The strokes would get faster if his horse was running well, while I sat as still as a statue and feared for my arteries at the hands of this potential Sweeney Todd. George the Greek told me that he was taught to shave by covering an inflated balloon with lather, then shaving it without bursting it. So there we are.
So that’s hairdressers. The rest of the weekend featured an enjoyable drink with a Dutch drummer in The Spice of Life in Cambridge Circus, a new song recorded at Dragan’s, some man-hours spent tidying up the boat and laying a new rug Mum gave me and which looks spiffy, and some quality reading. It also featured a bit of an epiphany.
It wasn’t exactly Paul on the road to Damascus, or even Augustine in his Milanese garden, it was me tronking up Acton Lane in the wonderful storm light you sometimes get between showers. One of England’s foremost portrait painters once told me that this light is unique to England, and was by far the best light in which to paint, albeit fleeting. The artist in question once pissed off Margaret Thatcher by telling her he didn’t like the colour of her suit, and also claims to have been left alone with the Queen, which is not supposed to happen to a commoner, after he requested that she dismiss a footman who was disturbing his concentration. He used his own urine, he once confided in me, as paint thinner. It pleased him to know that members of the establishment, the great and the good, had their portraits hung on their walls containing his piss. But I digress.
My cosmic penny-dropping was this; the West had a choice of saviours, Socrates and Christ, and we chose the wrong guy.
On Saturday, as it got dark, I walked through a gale to the off-licence for a couple of cold Buds, regained the boat, lit a fire, rolled a spliff and read Dante long into the evening, sometimes reading aloud for my own pleasure.
Friday, 13 November 2009
Taking it one day at a time
I expect it’s much the same as giving up smoking; the dedicated quitter will still have a few early twitches and habitual gestures which need to be checked. I found myself reaching across to an Evening Standard on a tube seat before I realised that my mortal soul was in danger. I crossed myself and left Satan’s broadsheet where it was. I did, however, glimpse the headline:
HOWZAT! BROWN TAKES REVENGE ON MURDOCH
Now, let me guess. The next home Ashes series will be on terrestrial TV. Murdoch owns Sky, does he not? I remember hearing about this on the radio yesterday, before news of morally questionable practices in the pasta sauce industry came over the airwaves. So, that’s that paper read.
This morning, I bought a Daily Mail. I buy one every morning for an old lady I know, to save her schlepping over to the shop on her stick just for her news fix, something to roll her eyes at and tut in her good-natured way. The cultural changes she must have seen over her long adult life, I suspect, would make any of us do the same. The headline on the Mail referred to Gary McKinnon, the hacker facing extradition to the US. He is feeling suicidal. NuLabour are fighting his corner. Those two facts may be connected; post hoc propter hoc.
In my snug little office, Schubert once again takes the place of the smarmy Today crew, or the fat-faced warblings of Nick Ferrari [UK radio talk-show host, populist and right of centre in a sensationalist way], who I would sometimes listen to as he often has interviews which are a little less constrained by orthodoxies than their equivalents on the BBC. Also, my mum’s been on his programme so many times [on the phone] that they’re practically best mates. Other than that, anything could have happened and I just wouldn’t know it.
Not that there is, you understand, a total news blackout here at the Towers; I’m just confining the news I osmote [if that’s a word; Spellcheck thinks not] to the internet and, more specifically, to the blogosphere. Weblogs began life as link pages, portals to similar sites posted by aficionados of one or other cultural enclave. If you like this, you’ll love this. For me, they haven’t changed in anything but complexity; the blogs I visit will be interested in the same areas of the news that I am. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to pop over to the ‘net and do just that. You can amuse yourselves here for the nonce, I’m sure. There are books in the Butch Towers library, or you may walk in the extensive grounds. There are, alas and perforce, no newspapers.
There; I’m back. Have I benefited from my brief morning trawl through the world wide wibbly-wobbly web? Well, I didn’t know of the existence of Big Brother Watch, who inform me that a question asked in the House of Lords has found that the powers of surveillance provided under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) are being used by local councils 200 times a week - an average of 29 times a day. Now, the link is to The Daily Mail, but this doesn’t disqualify my argument or current practice. It just means that someone else has read the ‘paper for me and selected which part of it will interest me. I have, after all, my own agenda.
Elsewhere, it is a slow news day even for the blogs. The wonderful Boing Boing is always worth a dozen newspapers. Biased BBC is one of the more self-explanatory blog titles, if you don’t know it, and their threads include a consideration of why the BBC finds it so difficult to accept that the Muslim convert 'Beltway sniper' who has just got the needle in the States [remember; Islamic death sentence = cultural difference. American death sentence = racist brutality] might have been acting from motives connected with his nice, new, shiny religion of choice.
Daniel Hannan presumably has more time on his hands now he has quit as an MEP, but is always a pleasure to read, not least because he can write. I agree absolutely with his take on that curious gentleman, Gordon Brown, and his recent epistolary efforts:
“You know what I think of Gordon Brown. He has bankrupted and dishonoured our country, destroyed our private pensions, given away our gold reserves, lied to us about Europe. Why Labour MPs insist on sailing into the election with Jonah, not just on board, but commanding the bridge, is utterly beyond me. None the less, he doesn’t deserve criticism he is getting.”
Ghost of a Flea is a sassy Canadian [I think] blogger from whose site I learn the following about Saint Obama, whose halo is apparently slipping a little:
"The president who campaigned for a more 'open government' and 'full disclosure' will not unseal his medical records, his school records, his birth records or his passport records. He will not release his Harvard records, his Columbia College records, or his Occidental College records—he will not even release his Columbia College thesis. All his legislative records from the Illinois State Senate are missing and he claims his scheduling records during those State Senate years are lost as well. In addition, no one can find his school records for the elite K-12 college prep school, Punahou School, he attended in Hawaii.What is he hiding? Well, for starters, some of these records will shed light on his citizenship and birth."
I don’t remember seeing this in the newspapers here, which brings me to another point. The blogosphere is not the negation of the MSM. As pointed out, it relies on that MSM in a parasitic/symbiotic way. But trawling the blogs is, effectively, to read all the ‘papers, or to have them read for you. The blogosphere is a conglomerate of sentient search engines.
I could go on, but you’re every bit as capable of following blogrolls and links as I am.
So, I’ll continue to buy Private Eye and Standpoint, but the newspapers have had their last dime from petty cash here at Butch Towers, and I would rather listen to the mournful lieders of Schubert than the self-satisfied tones of the BBC.
HOWZAT! BROWN TAKES REVENGE ON MURDOCH
Now, let me guess. The next home Ashes series will be on terrestrial TV. Murdoch owns Sky, does he not? I remember hearing about this on the radio yesterday, before news of morally questionable practices in the pasta sauce industry came over the airwaves. So, that’s that paper read.
This morning, I bought a Daily Mail. I buy one every morning for an old lady I know, to save her schlepping over to the shop on her stick just for her news fix, something to roll her eyes at and tut in her good-natured way. The cultural changes she must have seen over her long adult life, I suspect, would make any of us do the same. The headline on the Mail referred to Gary McKinnon, the hacker facing extradition to the US. He is feeling suicidal. NuLabour are fighting his corner. Those two facts may be connected; post hoc propter hoc.
In my snug little office, Schubert once again takes the place of the smarmy Today crew, or the fat-faced warblings of Nick Ferrari [UK radio talk-show host, populist and right of centre in a sensationalist way], who I would sometimes listen to as he often has interviews which are a little less constrained by orthodoxies than their equivalents on the BBC. Also, my mum’s been on his programme so many times [on the phone] that they’re practically best mates. Other than that, anything could have happened and I just wouldn’t know it.
Not that there is, you understand, a total news blackout here at the Towers; I’m just confining the news I osmote [if that’s a word; Spellcheck thinks not] to the internet and, more specifically, to the blogosphere. Weblogs began life as link pages, portals to similar sites posted by aficionados of one or other cultural enclave. If you like this, you’ll love this. For me, they haven’t changed in anything but complexity; the blogs I visit will be interested in the same areas of the news that I am. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to pop over to the ‘net and do just that. You can amuse yourselves here for the nonce, I’m sure. There are books in the Butch Towers library, or you may walk in the extensive grounds. There are, alas and perforce, no newspapers.
There; I’m back. Have I benefited from my brief morning trawl through the world wide wibbly-wobbly web? Well, I didn’t know of the existence of Big Brother Watch, who inform me that a question asked in the House of Lords has found that the powers of surveillance provided under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) are being used by local councils 200 times a week - an average of 29 times a day. Now, the link is to The Daily Mail, but this doesn’t disqualify my argument or current practice. It just means that someone else has read the ‘paper for me and selected which part of it will interest me. I have, after all, my own agenda.
Elsewhere, it is a slow news day even for the blogs. The wonderful Boing Boing is always worth a dozen newspapers. Biased BBC is one of the more self-explanatory blog titles, if you don’t know it, and their threads include a consideration of why the BBC finds it so difficult to accept that the Muslim convert 'Beltway sniper' who has just got the needle in the States [remember; Islamic death sentence = cultural difference. American death sentence = racist brutality] might have been acting from motives connected with his nice, new, shiny religion of choice.
Daniel Hannan presumably has more time on his hands now he has quit as an MEP, but is always a pleasure to read, not least because he can write. I agree absolutely with his take on that curious gentleman, Gordon Brown, and his recent epistolary efforts:
“You know what I think of Gordon Brown. He has bankrupted and dishonoured our country, destroyed our private pensions, given away our gold reserves, lied to us about Europe. Why Labour MPs insist on sailing into the election with Jonah, not just on board, but commanding the bridge, is utterly beyond me. None the less, he doesn’t deserve criticism he is getting.”
Ghost of a Flea is a sassy Canadian [I think] blogger from whose site I learn the following about Saint Obama, whose halo is apparently slipping a little:
"The president who campaigned for a more 'open government' and 'full disclosure' will not unseal his medical records, his school records, his birth records or his passport records. He will not release his Harvard records, his Columbia College records, or his Occidental College records—he will not even release his Columbia College thesis. All his legislative records from the Illinois State Senate are missing and he claims his scheduling records during those State Senate years are lost as well. In addition, no one can find his school records for the elite K-12 college prep school, Punahou School, he attended in Hawaii.What is he hiding? Well, for starters, some of these records will shed light on his citizenship and birth."
I don’t remember seeing this in the newspapers here, which brings me to another point. The blogosphere is not the negation of the MSM. As pointed out, it relies on that MSM in a parasitic/symbiotic way. But trawling the blogs is, effectively, to read all the ‘papers, or to have them read for you. The blogosphere is a conglomerate of sentient search engines.
I could go on, but you’re every bit as capable of following blogrolls and links as I am.
So, I’ll continue to buy Private Eye and Standpoint, but the newspapers have had their last dime from petty cash here at Butch Towers, and I would rather listen to the mournful lieders of Schubert than the self-satisfied tones of the BBC.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
No news is good news
It’s finally happened. They finally did it. All the warnings, all the voices in the wilderness pleading, begging Western governments to stop, all those who knew the truth but were silenced, marginalised, smeared, ignored, labelled insane. But, to quote Emile Zola on the Dreyfus case, truth is on the march and nothing can stop it now. The following was about fourth item in on the BBC Today Programme’s half-hourly news round-up – 8.30am, prime time - and, whatever you may think of the BBC, you have to stand up, clench your teeth and your fists, force back the tears of rage and admit that this is really happening:
“A study of pasta sauces has found that some of them have up to three times the recommended salt level – many of them those endorsed by celebrity chefs.”
I turned the radio off. I turned it off and I’m not turning it back on again. I put on a Schubert tape, and the function selector will be staying in the ‘Tape’ position for the foreseeable. And when it is time for luncheon I will do what I always do, with one small adjustment. Usually, I stroll up to an agreeable boozer in the High Street, order up a pint of ESB in its distinctive goblet, and with its rich overtones of marmalade, select a newspaper from the generous, leftist pile [Indy and Grauny, but no Mail or Telegraph] and settle into my favoured seat [I always have a favoured seat in one of the many, many pubs which have become my adoptive local over the years] to yawn my way through the articles inside, 80% of them identical in all the papers. But not today. Today I will do all of the above, except that my [re-]reading matter will be Richard Tarnas’s excellent The Passion of the Western Mind.
I think I’ve just about had enough.
The radio and the newspapers are going the same way as the television, and I quit that silly little habit years ago, way back into last century. Newspapers now contain syndicated features which, as mentioned, appear in your paper whatever your choice of rag, bulked up by bland op-ed pieces [paid blogging, essentially], advertising, re-written press releases, endless sports writing, travel, home, money and property sections, and inconsequentialities whose spiritual home is on Yahoo’s welcome page. By page three – The Sun’s timeless parade of knockers notwithstanding – most newspapers have already run an ‘amusing’ story about a celebrity, or a spat between academics, or an animal in jocular circumstances. The rest of the paper can be comprehended simply by reading the headlines. If something catches my eye, I will file it mentally and chase it up later on the vastly more adult medium of the blogosphere. It is one of the current and laughable canards concerning the MSM that print media is somehow more mature than internet comment. Sure. The internet does indeed cater for the childish – and indeed children – but even a toyshop usually contains a chess set.
Come the new year, when my work bonus should provide for a spanking new laptop with Wi-fi and everything, I will have bought my last newspaper. To quote Paul Simon, I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.
Now, it is the case that the MSM are united in one respect; their determination never to print a single word I write, but this is not sour grapes. If a newspaper called me tomorrow and said, Butch, the comment page here at The Daily Standard Gazette is a little lifeless. Would you accept a great deal of money for tarting it up a bit with your hilarious and yet poignant prose? I would say yes, thank you very much. But I’d still hold this belief; newspapers are now a part of trash culture.
The writing, for a kick-off, looks increasingly like the lexicological spawn of some next-generation software designed to distil all the limpest prose that’s ever made it onto a comment or leader page and blend it into something the great unwashed can imbibe through a straw and consume without having to chew. A bland generator. I know a sub-editor on what is probably the UK’s leading newspaper. He is also a blogger. His writing is vastly superior to the stringers whose work he must inspect. The stylistic innovations, the freedom of subject matter, the lack of adherence to an editorial line, the intelligence pulsing behind every line like a vein in a 1950s headmaster’s temple, the sheer entertainment value; they all far outstrip anything to be found in his newspaper.
And all the Jackies and the Yasmins and the Madeleines who despise the blogosphere, what a dull bunch they are; Les Demoiselles d’Avignyawn. They hate the blogosphere because most bloggers are men and, as we know, men are a discredited gender. Why, then, do I get all my usable information from the blogosphere, while from the MSM I learn about transgressive pasta sauce, or have to listen to a news report that begins; “David Cameron will today set out…”?
Come on, join me. You know perfectly well you want to. Leave the newspapers alone for a month. Use the money you save to buy a little gift for yourself or your sweetheart. Give it to a tramp. Buy drugs with it; you’ll probably learn more. Don’t give head room to the conceptual Potemkin Village that every newspaper is, don’t waste your faculties in a vain attempt to understand the world through the distorting lens of people who are cloistered and vain, don’t fill the tabula rasa of your consciousness – the most precious gift you have ever received – with Jedward and what someone who lives in Islington thinks about them.
Rene Descartes – the I-think-therefore-I-am man – was haunted, in his later life, by the idea that his memory might become full. He was a mechanistic thinker [like La Mettrie, who wrote L’Homme Machine at around the same time], and believed the memory was quite literally textile, a vast page but finite, a writing-block which could one day be too full to contain any more information. Pretend you are Descartes, suspend your disbelief willingly for a while. Resist the temptation to fill the page of your memory with syndicated shit.
Defenders of the MSM will say that it still sets the agenda, provides the content and exists as the body the parasitic blogosphere needs to survive, but we all know that that parasitism is increasingly becoming symbiosis, as the MSM follows up more and more – often uncredited – snippets from the blogosphere. It certainly sets the agenda but, as Rupert Murdoch is about to find out, news will always come free from somewhere. If the MSM collapsed tomorrow, citizen journalists internationally would soon become content providers. We have the MSM but we don’t need it. Why do I need to read the reports of journalists in Afghanistan? Why can’t I read bloggers’ accounts from both sides?
I will still need newspapers, however. It is winter, and I have a device [a gift from my mother last Christmas] which allows me to pulp newspaper and press it into brick-sized blocks which I then dry out and burn on my solid-fuel stove. And so I still derive a little warmth from the MSM.
“A study of pasta sauces has found that some of them have up to three times the recommended salt level – many of them those endorsed by celebrity chefs.”
I turned the radio off. I turned it off and I’m not turning it back on again. I put on a Schubert tape, and the function selector will be staying in the ‘Tape’ position for the foreseeable. And when it is time for luncheon I will do what I always do, with one small adjustment. Usually, I stroll up to an agreeable boozer in the High Street, order up a pint of ESB in its distinctive goblet, and with its rich overtones of marmalade, select a newspaper from the generous, leftist pile [Indy and Grauny, but no Mail or Telegraph] and settle into my favoured seat [I always have a favoured seat in one of the many, many pubs which have become my adoptive local over the years] to yawn my way through the articles inside, 80% of them identical in all the papers. But not today. Today I will do all of the above, except that my [re-]reading matter will be Richard Tarnas’s excellent The Passion of the Western Mind.
I think I’ve just about had enough.
The radio and the newspapers are going the same way as the television, and I quit that silly little habit years ago, way back into last century. Newspapers now contain syndicated features which, as mentioned, appear in your paper whatever your choice of rag, bulked up by bland op-ed pieces [paid blogging, essentially], advertising, re-written press releases, endless sports writing, travel, home, money and property sections, and inconsequentialities whose spiritual home is on Yahoo’s welcome page. By page three – The Sun’s timeless parade of knockers notwithstanding – most newspapers have already run an ‘amusing’ story about a celebrity, or a spat between academics, or an animal in jocular circumstances. The rest of the paper can be comprehended simply by reading the headlines. If something catches my eye, I will file it mentally and chase it up later on the vastly more adult medium of the blogosphere. It is one of the current and laughable canards concerning the MSM that print media is somehow more mature than internet comment. Sure. The internet does indeed cater for the childish – and indeed children – but even a toyshop usually contains a chess set.
Come the new year, when my work bonus should provide for a spanking new laptop with Wi-fi and everything, I will have bought my last newspaper. To quote Paul Simon, I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.
Now, it is the case that the MSM are united in one respect; their determination never to print a single word I write, but this is not sour grapes. If a newspaper called me tomorrow and said, Butch, the comment page here at The Daily Standard Gazette is a little lifeless. Would you accept a great deal of money for tarting it up a bit with your hilarious and yet poignant prose? I would say yes, thank you very much. But I’d still hold this belief; newspapers are now a part of trash culture.
The writing, for a kick-off, looks increasingly like the lexicological spawn of some next-generation software designed to distil all the limpest prose that’s ever made it onto a comment or leader page and blend it into something the great unwashed can imbibe through a straw and consume without having to chew. A bland generator. I know a sub-editor on what is probably the UK’s leading newspaper. He is also a blogger. His writing is vastly superior to the stringers whose work he must inspect. The stylistic innovations, the freedom of subject matter, the lack of adherence to an editorial line, the intelligence pulsing behind every line like a vein in a 1950s headmaster’s temple, the sheer entertainment value; they all far outstrip anything to be found in his newspaper.
And all the Jackies and the Yasmins and the Madeleines who despise the blogosphere, what a dull bunch they are; Les Demoiselles d’Avignyawn. They hate the blogosphere because most bloggers are men and, as we know, men are a discredited gender. Why, then, do I get all my usable information from the blogosphere, while from the MSM I learn about transgressive pasta sauce, or have to listen to a news report that begins; “David Cameron will today set out…”?
Come on, join me. You know perfectly well you want to. Leave the newspapers alone for a month. Use the money you save to buy a little gift for yourself or your sweetheart. Give it to a tramp. Buy drugs with it; you’ll probably learn more. Don’t give head room to the conceptual Potemkin Village that every newspaper is, don’t waste your faculties in a vain attempt to understand the world through the distorting lens of people who are cloistered and vain, don’t fill the tabula rasa of your consciousness – the most precious gift you have ever received – with Jedward and what someone who lives in Islington thinks about them.
Rene Descartes – the I-think-therefore-I-am man – was haunted, in his later life, by the idea that his memory might become full. He was a mechanistic thinker [like La Mettrie, who wrote L’Homme Machine at around the same time], and believed the memory was quite literally textile, a vast page but finite, a writing-block which could one day be too full to contain any more information. Pretend you are Descartes, suspend your disbelief willingly for a while. Resist the temptation to fill the page of your memory with syndicated shit.
Defenders of the MSM will say that it still sets the agenda, provides the content and exists as the body the parasitic blogosphere needs to survive, but we all know that that parasitism is increasingly becoming symbiosis, as the MSM follows up more and more – often uncredited – snippets from the blogosphere. It certainly sets the agenda but, as Rupert Murdoch is about to find out, news will always come free from somewhere. If the MSM collapsed tomorrow, citizen journalists internationally would soon become content providers. We have the MSM but we don’t need it. Why do I need to read the reports of journalists in Afghanistan? Why can’t I read bloggers’ accounts from both sides?
I will still need newspapers, however. It is winter, and I have a device [a gift from my mother last Christmas] which allows me to pulp newspaper and press it into brick-sized blocks which I then dry out and burn on my solid-fuel stove. And so I still derive a little warmth from the MSM.
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