Friday, April 29, 2005

spring and summer


Jesus, what a beautiful day! (I picked a good one to take off.)

The sun has been out all day, the sky has been blue, there's blossom and new growth everywhere, and the birds are still singing and fledging.

Just now, I had to turn off my music and listen, through the open skylight, to the sound of the first swifts of the year: they're circling and swooping in the cooling evening air, making their exhilarating tsweee tsweee calls as they hoover insects up out of the air. Swifts are wonderful birds: wings like a curved black knife blade, fantastic agility in the air...and they sleep on the wing, only ever landing to brood their eggs.

I did some gardening earlier, and was joined by a cat...



...which mostly ignored me:



Later, I walked to the shops, and came back through the churchyard at the back of the church...



...and took my inevitable 'blossom' picture:



A lovely day for me.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

big. small. not clever


A piece of Ian McEwan's Saturday resonated with me last night. It's a bit where he's talking about the protagonist's son's aphorism -- "the bigger you think, the crappier it looks."

And:"When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible...But when I think small, closer in -- you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas,...then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto -- think small."

I used to have a few grand narratives that coloured my perception of the world: scientific progress; a belief in a meritocratic, just society; Marxism; socialist politics.
Science, I used to think, was an objective activity, predicated on the desire to advance the human cause. It had an inevitability about -- the more you know, the better things will get.
Meritocracy was rooted in my naive belief that anyone could get anywhere if they had the talent. But race, class, accent, conformity, background, and lack of nurture/valuing of every individual human life gives the lie to that. When you offset education and health with the profit motive, I think you narrow the chances for people from the bottom/from the margins;
Marxism was my intellectual tool for getting into a structured analysis of any issue. But my faith in that instrument has faded, even as the tainted dream/nightmare of the Soviet Union fades.
Socialism. In the 60s and 70s, it felt like there really were possibilities that something fundamental could happen. But that's gone: the atomisation of society, the destruction of the postwar corporatist consensus, the 'universal acid' of global capitalism, and the removal of barriers to the cross-border flows of capital have created a new, seemingly entrenched model of instrumentalism -- you're here to act as a unit of production and consumption...morality and justice must bow to the inexorable logic of the markets. Everything is in flux, and everything/everyone is so fragmented. Power -- in the form of the impersonal rules and dictates of the markets -- cannot be reasoned with, and most governments have no desire to do so. Most of us in the West/North are content with our consumption-oriented lives. Happy enough, at least, to not risk speaking out, or speaking out of turn. We keep our heads down, grumble quietly, blame foreigners and outsiders, don't see that its something more fundamental that's wrong.

So what do I have left? The local. The personal. The belief in doing right by people, of making a difference in the spheres where my morals and values can change something, or help somebody.

That's where I'm focused now. I don't think I can deal with the big stuff. I'll chip away at the base of the cathedral with my little chisel.

(Quoted material Copyright Ian McEwan, 2005; Jonathan Cape Ltd; ISBN: 0224072994)

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

infectious book blogmeme


Mags sent me this. is fun. fill in your answers, then pass it on to three fellow blogsters...and so on. a benign virus.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?


The Fog by James Herbert. If they tried to burn me, I'd just become steam, then settle back out as vapour or water. They'd never be able to destroy me. I would rule the world (nyhahahahahahahahahahaha).


Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?


Yes. As a teenager, I had a bit of a thing for Fuchsia, the daughter of the Earl of Groan, ruler of Gormenghast. This despite her gaucheness, immaturity, and strange looks -- I identified with that whole 'romantic adolescent' thing, I guess. (I also suspect that I was influenced by Mervyn Peake's beautiful, vivid prose, and by the seductive, intoxicating atmosphere of the place.) Christ...I've just remembered that I also had a crush on Irma Prunesquallor, the skeletal, myopic, horse-faced sister of the Earl's doctor. She's very severe and strange, and rather awful, but, again, there was something heady about the vividness with which her desperation, dysfunction and austerity was drawn, and about the way that she was drawn to the teenaged Steerpike, irresistibly and quite unselfconsciously. I recall her having a very long bath, and being all soft and hot and powdered in the steamy bathroom afterwards. The weird, intoxicating magic of love and lust, which appealed to my teenaged brain and body, seeped in hormones, frustration and loneliness. (This is probably too much detail for you, right?) :-p


The last book you bought:


Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman. I see it as a 'superior' kind of self-help book. I'm pretty interested in psychology, and especially in ways of reprogramming myself so that I'm happier, for more of the time.


The last book you read:


Four Quartets by T S Eliot. It's been on my shelf for years and years and years (it cost £1.95), and yet I've never read the whole thing. Contrary to what I remembered, the poems are mostly pretty accessible. I struggled (and still struggle) with some of the meaning/allusion/philosophical and religious contexts, but I felt I was getting the gist about rooting yourself in the now, and the human search for meaning in a meaningless world. I will reread them soon, I think. They're very cool and deep, like a slow stream deep in a forest. It's refreshing to step in, and you feel like something's happening to you.


What are you currently reading?


Amongst others -- Dresden by Frederick Taylor. It's about the devastating raid on the city at the end of World War 2, set in the historical contexts of: Dresden's long-term history; its Nazi era history (including its support for the party, its anti-semitism and its aramaments/electronics/optics industries); and the contexts of air war as it developed in WW2, and the military/political imperatives/desires at the tail-end of the war. I think it's intended as a corrective to the ideologically-charged and ahistorical interpretations of the raid, which have black- or white-washed things. I'm expecting a nuanced, troubling, morally-challenging work: such an awful event should be treated in that way.


Five books you would take to a desert island:


Opened Ground - Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney -- immense riches for mind, voice, and the senses; A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust -- I managed 1.5 (of 3) volumes in the Penguin translation a few years back, and I have so many great memories of them that I must finish it one day; Our Mutual Friend/David Copperfield by Charles Dickens -- dark, funny, atmospheric, and storytelling of great range, with wonderful use of language. The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake -- my comfort/nostalgia book. Cat's Eye by Margaret Attwood -- when I read this first, it just felt so true about what it is to be alive, and afraid, and in the world. Beautiful and profound.


Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?


Hmm, I'll pass this onto Taeko, RedOne and the Urban Fox. Because they're all book-lovers, and I like hearing what they think about big sacks of words.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

sigur ros


you know this icelandic band?.

their Agaetis Byrjun album is superb. really.

staccato nature notes...


...(superficially) like tom raworth (in my twisted mind, anyway).

snail slalom:
chilled cycle track
swish with night rain
sun and mist and cloud
sun and mist and lorries' exhaust
roundabout parked stupid
she flagged me down
and me down
and the wheels
skid
i told her the a34 the flyover south
hips breasts love handles
too big for her overtight overyoung clothes
aspiring teenager in a 40 year old body
nice face and glasses grateful
thanks

white blossom fall snow echoes
supersweet and sour hawthorn
a dessert unusually twisted with
bitter flavours
hedges wet decay underneath
shrill bird whistles piercing

snail migration wet tarmac
steering challenge
weed grass sheltered edge
staggered departures
shell delicate vulnerable
14 stone man and bike
metal and bone and fat and flesh
4 square inches of rubber
vectored forces

scrunch
soft parts antennae
so many so many
impossible paths through snail space
squintch
relentless depredation
masses
dogged survival
roadside richness hidden
tiny dramas triumphs defeats
contingency
lucked/fucked
sklitch
scrunch

slish
clear tarmac
sun up

Monday, April 25, 2005

A reader, not a writer


The books I have on the go at the moment:

  1. Dresden, Frederick Taylor

  2. Virginia Woolf - an Inner Life, Julia Briggs

  3. Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

  4. Saturday, Ian McEwan

  5. Critical Mass, Philip Ball

  6. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky

  7. The Origins of the Final Solution, Christopher Browning


Do you get the impression that I'm unfocussed, scattered, and overcommitted ? [He asked, rhetorically.]

A more positive interpretation would be that I'm rediscovering my love of literature/books/reading after a bit of a barren spell.

Do I have to sacrifice my writing for my reading? Or vice versa?

Sunday, April 24, 2005

as predicted


The blossom arrived on my parents' tree.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Attacked


Triffids threatening my deskspace. Scary.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

"April is the cruellest month..."


That line popped into my head on Tuesday, when I was thinking about a little scene I'd witnessed on Sunday morning: I'd sat down by the ground-floor window -- where the light's best -- to read my fat Sunday newspaper, when I noticed some movement on the driveway opposite. There was a stubby-tailed, unfledged thrush on the tarmac; big bright eyes, delicately speckled breast, sad-clown turned-down mouth, and fluffy feathers on its back that riffled in the breeze. It sat there, stock still, while a parent bird hopped around nearby. There was a bush nearby, but the flightless ball of fluff, on its stick legs, looked immensely vulnerable -- there are loads of cats down this road.

I watched the birds for a while, but started to feel anxious about the young bird's vulnerability, and how horrible it would feel to watch it being attacked/caught by a cat. I considered going out there and ushering it into the undergrowth, but then thought that they all have to take their chances. That's the way that nature works. So, instead, I took the paper upstairs to read, where I wouldn't have to watch the flightless thrush sit, helpless and flightless.

In my mind, that's why April is cruel: the juxtaposition of new life and remorseless death. (I've no idea what Eliot's poem is about, really, but I do know that "April is the cruellest month..." is the first line of The Waste Land.) I've decided to reread it, and have it dug it out of storage area 15b already. Maybe I'll pop into Blackwell's at the weekend and buy a big fat annotated edition, and get meself all learned, guv.

On the same note...I rode along a bit of the A44 tonight while I was out on my evening bike ride, and I was startled by the huge numbers of rabbits feeding on the verge (or just sitting in the warm evening glow). There were loads of baby ones, all scuttling off into the ditches/undergrowth as I clanked towards them. They were so full of energy. In contrast, the bodies of their peers lay in large numbers in the road, bodies flung, crushed, or mangled by the traffic.

Death/life. Life/death. I think there's something in one of Eliot's other poems about 'time past and time future being fused in time present'...which is all there is, innit?

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Easy shot


George W. Bush said, of Terri Schiavo:

"In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favour of life."

Meanwhile, the death penalty is in force in the US, despite all the errors and miscarriages of justice, past, present, and future:

some stats

A cheap shot, maybe, but such an obvious fucking incongruity of rhetoric and reality.

horrible


It just gets worse. I wish I knew what the simple answer was.

pause


I've really been enjoying posting to my blog every day: the discipline of writing something every day is good for me, as it helps keep me focused and alert.

However, I think that I'll probably be posting less, for two reasons: (a) I want to spend more time writing my novel; (b) I've just started reading The Brothers Karamazov, and I want to finish it before I die.

Wish me luck.

academic itch


I seem to have found myself looking at lots of academics' blogs lately. Some of them are mostly abstruse and difficult, some of them are rigorous and polemical, and some of them are extremely technically sophisticated. They're all stimulating, and they make me feel a bit dim (because of their energy, language, and focus on ideas).

I really loved my time at college as a mature student. I was also very good at the work. I started doing an M.Sc., with a view to doing a Ph. D., and then working as an academic. But I ran out of money, got depressed, and quit. That's the thing I'm most regretful about in my whole life, I think. When I look at these people's words, and think about their minds, and about how much I enjoy the world of thought, abstraction, reflection and writing, it makes me feel a bit melancholic.

I'll have a beer and wallow in that gentle melancholia for a while.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Watercooler neuroticism


Now, I'm not the world's most physical guy: I'm not the tallest, and I'm not the strongest. However, it appears that I am the only person in my office who can remove (empty) water canisters from the water cooler, and the only person who can take the empties downstairs, come back with a fresh one, and stick it on the spigot and make the big bubbles go "glulp, glulp, glulp".

There are a few people who are probably a bit too slight physically to carry 19 litres of water up a flight of stairs. But I've seen fit guys empty the cooler, or come to it and find that it's empty, and just walk away.

I couldn't do that: there's some nagging voice of social conscience/servility/consideration that says "It's empty. Someone should take responsibility and fix this aquatic shortfall." So I do.

It bugs me a bit that people can be so selfish.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Aesthetic Spirituality


I'm a rationalist, and an atheist. But. But...I can still appreciate the beauty and 'sacredness' of the things that religious people do, and the rituals and music that buttress their beliefs.

It doesn't matter if those things are Christian, or Muslim, or Hindu, or what: it's the beauty of the thing as a work of art, and the sincere, hopeful beliefs of the people that speak to me. Doctrine, separatism, dogmatism, exclusion and monopolies on the truth are not my bag, but I can recognise, identify with, and respect the basic human desire to believe in something. It's only the structures, authorities, hierarchies, hatreds, victimisations, inspiration for killings, and monolithic belief systems that get on my wick. (That is quite a price to pay for a bit of aesthetic reward, I admit.)

Anyway.

When I was in Paris a few weeks back, I spent a lovely day (it was Good Friday) walking around the Ile de la Cite and Ile Saint Louis in the sunshine, sitting down on the quaysides (or anywhere else I fancied), and watching the world go by. (There's something about Paris that makes me much more comfortable doing that than I would be in -- say -- London or New York. Something about scale /the sense of threat (?).

About 5 o'clock, I was feeling knackered, so decided to head back to the hotel. As a final sop to the spirit of exploration/the flaneur stylee, I diverted myself into a shadowed side street on the Ile Saint Louis. There was a tall stone wall on the left, and a flight of steps up to a wide doorway, whose double doors stood open. As I passed, I heard the sound of singing from inside. I nearly walked on, as my subconscious was saying "Don't turn round and look, or you'll look like a bloody tourist -- keep your head down and move on." Fortunately, I had the strength of will to ignore that miserabilist version of Jiminy Cricket, and I did turn back and climb those steps.

The voices were all female, soprano lines rising into the arched roof spaces of the church. High up, sunlight was still shining on the white painted arches and the decorated ceiling. There was a lot of gilding up there, shining in the light.

A congregation of forty or so were seated around the nave in a u-shape; mostly over-50s, but a few younger faces, too. The singers were nuns, I think, all dressed in blue habits. (I saw the word 'Carmelites' on a wall plaque, so I guess there was a nunnery attached to the church.) I looked around a pillar -- though I didn't want to be too obtrusive and intrude on these people's devotions -- and could see a load of younger blokes in bright white robes, and the 'big cheeses' up the front, elderly blokes with gold and red bits on top of the white.

The nuns were doing some kind of plainchant thing, and the simple rise and fall of the melodic lines made me think of the music of Hildegaard of Bingen. Later on, the white-robed servers (?) joined in as well, adding a tenor resonance to the music. The sound echoed around the big space, soothing and hypnotic in its simplicity.

As the sun sank outside, the light on the gilding crept slowly towards the top of the arches, trailing shadow below it. The patterned light and shadows from the tracery windows tracked slowly up the blank white surfaces of the vaulting.

A pretty, very smartly dressed young woman with lovely clean hair caught my eye, and she smiled faintly at me before turning back towards the service. I wondered what was going on inside her head, on that day of high holiness for believers, and I wondered how this religion fitted into her everyday life -- whether this was a one-off, like our visits to midnight mass at Christmas when I was a child, or whether this was a regular thing for her. Narrow-mindedly, perhaps, I struggled to reconcile all this dogma and ritual with the modernity and self-assuredness of her dress and manner. At one stage, a friend or relative came up behind her and placed their hand on her shoulder: she jumped, a bit spooked, and did that thing where you put your hand over your heart and pat it in a palpitating type way, silently signalling "You frightened the life out of me!

Later, these two women knelt, and I could see their clothes stretched tight across their arched backs. They looked vulnerable and small, and it felt strange to see people abasing themselves, almost as if it negated their humanity in some way. It felt almost voyeuristic to be watching all these people as they went about their devotions. Then they stood up and took part in a ritual that felt medieval to me: everyone lined up at the back of the church, then processed, in pairs, to where a couple of the servers were holding up a six foot cross, which looked like it was cloth-covered, or embroidered -- there was a wealth of gold and red stitching on it. Each pair of people bent, or kneeled, and kissed the foot of the cross (the servers tipped the bottom up for some of the more elderly people, who were too frail to bend or kneel). Again, it felt a bit weird to be seeing this kind of thing in 2005.

I'd been standing there, listening to the singing and the responses, and watching the service, for about an hour and a half. Some part of me felt jealous, and wanted to be a part of these rituals, to be inside this circle of belief and certainty. But the rest of me felt uncomfortable with this surrender of the self, the subjugation of the critical faculties in the face of these mysteries. I did feel glad, though, that I could still feel some kind of a sense of wonder when I heard the music drifting through that vaulted stone building. I never want to lose that ability. I'll always want my rationalism to coexist with a wordless, aesthetic sense of the sublime.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

home


This is the town(?) where I live: 0745, Sunday morning, mid-April.

the dead


This is an interesting site. I wondered if it was for real at first, but I think it is.

Kind of gritty, authentic, humbling, and perspective providing.

(Thanks for the steer to this, Mags.)

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Conundrum


Knowing that you should do what makes you happy. Not having the courage (or financial security) to make it happen.

Bollocks.

Thank goodness, though, that this is all I have to worry about. I'm lucky, I know.

Hitched


I went to a friend's wedding today. I was feeling a bit low this morning, and considered not turning up, but, realising that this would be an act not only of rudeness and discourtesy, but a betrayal of trust and friendship, I forced myself to be happy and sociable.

I'm so glad I went.

The weather was bright and sunny, the church was lovely, and the service was simple and sincere. The ladies in the choir sang, and the organ's undertow offset their high harmonies. (When they sang on their own during the registration of the marriage, you could hear the dry creaking of their voices. Ah.)

At the reception, I realised that my friend had a whole circle of bright, warm, interesting people around her. She looked lovely, and the groom made a very touching speech, full of love and warmth. The best man's speech balanced wit, in-jokes, and profundity.



It was a privilege to be part of it.

Ahh.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Drear and restless


I'm not enjoying my work at the moment.

I've found myself repeatedly bored and uninspired this week. Not really sure if it's me, or if it's the job/environment. It's crossed my mind that I've just got stale and need to change things around -- internally or externally, or both.

Ho hum.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Eternal recurrence


I used to have a recurring dream about being chased by bears. I think there were three of them when I was a child. Latterly, this dream has morphed into my being threatened by a tiger: it's outside the door, gradually scratching its way through the wood. Its power is terrifying, remorseless, pitiless. If I open the door, I will die. I will die anyway, once the claws break through. In its 'bear' iteration, I think this dream was probably about generalised fear and anxiety; the later version, in tiger form, is about death, I suspect.

My second recurring dream is about glass: I wake up, imagining that I have just crunched up a wine glass in my mouth; the whole of my gob space is full of shards and powder -- I can't even move my jaw, lest the bits move about and cut me, or I swallow some.

My third recurring dream motif is 'crashing planes'. These dreams way predate 9/11 or the Concorde crash, and they're always set in the West London suburbia where I grew up: I hear a labouring engine, or catch sight of a wing flashing in the sun, tipped up at the wrong angle. As I watch the plane dives/sinks/flops down into a space behind the rooftops, and then there's the inevitable bloom of flame, the mushrooming cloud of smoke.

I have some good dreams, too.

Natal


Tonight I will be raising a glass to my friend Mel and her partner, who have been blessed with the birth of their first child. In spring, and everything.

Welcome, Lily.

Awww...

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Regularity and randomness


I was reading something this evening about snowflake formation/how bacteria grow in culture/fractals. What all these processes have in common is they are based on a regular pattern/model of growth, and that the actual details of the growth outcome are unpredictable. So they are structured, but not determinable.

I then came across some stunning images of snowflakes.



This site has some lovely links.



Nature's amazing. Why do I keep forgetting that?

Hallucinogenic bushes


I went for a cross country ride on my bike tonight after work, desperately trying to prepare myself for Friday's weekly weigh in, and determined not to suffer the serial humiliation of putting on more pounds when I'm supposed to be losing them.

The route I discovered this evening is a 40-minute circuit of bridle ways and country lanes, and includes a couple of climbs -- one near the end -- which are really good for building stamina. This could become my habitual summer evening ride, particularly as: there are big fields of oil seed rape, which means I can get all contaminated and hoarse and watery eyed; there'll be swarms of insects to swallow, particularly when I'm gasping my way up that final climb towards home; there are lots of birds and animals to look at; there's a very pretty village in a hollow, with a fat stream running through it -- this will doubtless inspire stories about (a) 17th century English life after the Civil War, (b) Stephen King-esque tales about Lycra-clad cyclists who stepped into the corn for a pee, and who were never seen again, and (c) Woolfian rhapsodies about simplicity and the beauty of being, poised in the golden sunset light while pondering mortality and whether you left the oven on.

Also: the rabbits here are enormous. I did wonder whether the heavily-scented white blossoms on the trees lining the bridle way had some hallucinogenic properties, but I finally decided that this mammalian gargantuanism was more likely to be a product of (a) radiation-inspired mutation and (b) good country living. I mean, these adult rabbits were the size of cats. Their stride covered 3 foot six. When one of them "had a word" with me, it was in a basso profundo voice that Phil Mitchell would have been proud of.

Now...if the rabbits are the size of cats, then the badgers will be as big as labradors. And the sheep will be like cattle. It therefore follows, irrefutably, that the so-called "big cats" sighted in various locations around the country are nothing more than guinea pigs gone wild, and giganticised by stray beta particles and too much scrumpy/organic bread. It's so obvious, I don't know why it's not in all the papers.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Alzheimer's


Interesting piece in this Sunday's Observer on an alternative Alzheimer's disease therapy -- one that eschews ineffective drugs, recognises the individual's inability to form new memories, and instead concentrates on maximising their sense of well-being by drawing on their happy (and still accessible) memories of the past. There's an organisation called Specal in Burford, Oxfordshire, that promotes this approach.

As someone who's seen people become increasingly frustrated by a relative's inability to remember new things/recent conversations, I can see the attraction of this kind of approach. There's something here about acceptance, about letting go, and about letting the person enjoy their past in the present.

Monday, April 11, 2005

it's a rabbit -- no, it's a duck -- no, it's a rabbit...


I've been reading about phase transitions in one of the books I've got on the go. A phase transition, as I understand it so far, describes the behaviour of an entity that switches from one state to another, with no intermediate states. For example, H20 has three forms: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam). There are no intermediate forms -- as ice approaches the melting point, it doesn't get thick and sludgy: it goes straight from the solid to the liquid form. Similarly, when it boils, water turns into steam with no 'transitional' form.

Your brain does something analogous sometimes. For example, when you look at one of those visual illusions, like this famous one, and your brain flips from image to image, without them being able to coexist. There's also something similar going on (I think, perhaps naively), when what you've interpreted as one thing suddenly resolves itself into something else: like when you stare at a shape on the garden path, convinced that it's a bird sitting there; then the wind blows, and you realise that the 'bird' is a curled, dried leaf.

Cycling to work this morning, I emerged from thick mist into slightly clearer air (it made me think of the opening of the second episode of Band of Brothers, when the lone C-47 plane breaks out of the thick cloud and into the clearer night -- but I didn't do any of the sound effects, honest). I rounded the corner at the Wolvercote roundabout, and saw a shape on the cycle path ahead of me: it was a dark mass, with a rim of orangey red. It looked just like a hedgehog that's been badly crushed by a car -- the mass of dark body and prickles, and the brighter colour of the exposed viscera: I remember seeing one like that one morning when I was doing a milkround...driving along in the float on a beautiful summer morning, about six o'clock; the milkman stopped at the paper shop for his fags and porn magazine, and, as we drove back out onto the road, we passed a freshly-killed hedgehog, it's blood and flesh horribly bright, and glistening in the sunshine. I remember it made me feel a bit sick, to see that detail and colour so close.

Anyway, that's what I thought I was looking at this morning. As I got right up to it, though, veering aside a bit so that I wouldn't crush it any more, it resolved itself suddenly into the black and orange packaging of a Ginster's pasty thingy. I felt a proper nana, I can tell you (guv).

I never knew that they made them out of hedgehogs. Yuck.

17th century Dutch bedroom


The evening sunlight on my corner table reminded me a bit of Rembrandt -- a surrounding darkness, with highlights:



Still life with clutter.

a bloody big number


I found out how many atoms there are in a human body: loads. Far more than my puny earthling brain had anticipated:

7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That's seven billion billion billion.

I got this from here, where there are also a link to a very, very detailed analysis of how much of each of the periodic table's elements we contain.

This sort of thing makes me feel very ignorant, and makes me wish I hadn't spent so much time pissing about, when I could have been learning stuff and doing something with it.

You know that Victoria Wood song called (I think) Reincarnation? That's how I feel today: greedy for time, greedy for energy, greedy for the chance to do all sorts of different, fulfilling things.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

belongings


I took the M40/M25/A127 to Southend yesterday, visiting my brother and his family for bonding, beers, and biryani. (OK, jalfrezi -- but I love alliterative sequences, as they're so sinuous, supple, and sexy.)

I lived in west London, where the M40 terminates, for thirty-odd years, and that part of the world, and the west to north quadrant of the M25, is familiar territory for me. And yet...every time I'm driving in towards Wycombe, and Hillingdon and Uxbridge, I get a bit weirded out: I start remembering drives back from Oxford in my mum's clapped-out old car, twenty-five years ago, when the fog was so thick that we could hardly see where we were going, or when we "all had to pedal" to get the car up the hill at Stokenchurch; the weird thing is that this used to be the journey home, and I knew that when we got the Polish War Memorial roundabout, it would only be a matter of minutes before I was back amongst my familiar things, enjoying a cup of tea while the dog went mad at our return. By the time I left London, I'd really come to dislike/despair of the run-down, threatening, and gloomy nature of the district that I'd grown up in.

Driving back that way now, I feel like an alien as I near the big circuit of the M25: it's as if the whole area knows that I'm a poisonous virus, and it wants to make me feel unwelcome, speeding me on my way with hostility and malice.

Once I get on the M25, and away from the really specific environs of my birthplace, I start feeling a bit more comfortable: I start to remember that I'm a 'generic' Londoner, and that these places are full of people who speak in the same accent as me. I like that thought. It makes me feel as if I could blend in, and merge back into the city, as if I'd never left. I start to remember the strange, functional beauty of the light industrial estates; the canals, half-forgotten behind high walls and bushes; the massive, miles-long ramparts of brickwork flanking the approaches to the railway termini; all the thousands of lives in the backs of the houses glimpsed from the elevated railway lines and out-of-town tube sections; the richness of the demographics and entertainment; the sense of dynamism, complexity and importance of living in such a great metropolis.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that it wasn't London that I was fed up with, but the job/emotional situation I found myself in back in 1994. I realise that that emotional weirdness has coloured my perceptions of London ever since, and I realise that I wouldn't mind living and working there again.

It's like it's calling to me. Is that weird?

happy accident


the toaster failed spectacularly this morning: loud pfzzzttt, a flash of blue light, a sharp bang.

toasting my bread under the grill instead, i was reminded (a) of how superior that kind of toast is, and (b) of childhood holidays in rented caravans: on the first morning, mum would do bacon and eggs, and the smells of the gas flames, the bacon, the hot fat, the toasting bread, the milky tea -- as well as the underlying caravan smells of damp and moth balls -- those smells live on in my olfactory memory, waiting to drag me back to those happy days.

so...grilled toast is my proustian madeleine, innit?

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Spring diary


After the snow, the blue sky and the sun.

Lovely.

Some unmelted snow on my parents' lawn. This reminds me of my previous incarnation, as an enormous blob on the side of the great pyramid of Cheops:



And this is the tree on their front lawn. In a couple of weeks all the blossom will be out, white, white, white profusion:



I don't know how you'd calculate the number of atoms in a human body. But there's probably...100s of millions? trillions? Anyway, I think it's easy to forget how incredible it is that these millions and millions of atoms are all obeying the strict physical laws of the universe, and yet, in combination, they can make me me, and you you; how all your cells die and get replaced over time, and yet the structure of you, and of your personality, endures. It makes me dizzy to think about how wonderful and complex each one of us is. And it makes me resolve to feed and maintain my amazing structure better (tonight's beer and curry aside, of course...)

Carry on being amazing, all of you.

Friday, April 08, 2005

The Incredibles


I found this a bit disappointing, especially given the host of rave reviews it got when it came out.

It's very inventive and imaginative. It's visually stunning. The characters are wonderfully subtle in their visual rendering. There are some laugh out loud moments. And the extended chase sequence with Dash (the superfast kid) is truly astonishing in its conceptualisation and execution.

The visual rendering of the whole film is incredibly detailed, nuanced and convincing, and, by the end, you forget that this is all computer animation -- that's a heck of an achievement, to create such a authentic, kinetically convincing, and fully realised environment, at high speed, and with multiple perspectives. Awesome, in a way.

But...it doesn't feel like it's got much of a soul. The wonderful thing about the Toy Story films (in my opinion) is that, in addition to their technical brilliance and their capacity for being enjoyed by all kinds of ages, they allude to some serious and profound issues: ageing, change, the inevitability of things coming to an end -- all in charming, moving, and subtle ways. These emotional truths are played out naturally, and integrated into the rest of the action. In The Incredibles, the 'emotional' moments are like little packages, inserted artificially into the structure. Modules of sweetness.

The Incredibles has all of the technical brilliance -- and it looks really, really beautiful -- but it's a bit hollow, I think. It's superficial, like the Bond films that it pays homage to (even in the music, where the distinctive 'fat trumpet' sound from the John Barry theme recurs, and the swirling high strings track the motion).

The spectacle is magnificent, but there's not enough beneath the sheen of the surfaces, the dynamic action, and the pyrotechnics. Masses of flash, but no resonance.

No cigar, despite the sumptuous, scintillating visuals.

mainstream


This Friday, instead of something dense and subtitled, I'm going to watch The Incredibles.

'Arthouse' is an anagram of thou arse, by the way. I can do self-mockery.

Window with snowlight


This is from my 'amber' period.



You'd think I never went out of my room, wouldn't you?

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Deceptive


Been listening to the Beatles' 1967-70 hits album tonight (the blue one...remember my cousin Pat's gatefold vinyl version?).

Anyway. This is great music -- I'd forgotten just how great: they did so much innovation in that period -- arrangements, instrumentation -- and married that to the melodic/harmonic gift that Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr had. Beautiful.

What surprised me was the track lengths: Let it be is 3:52, Across the universe is 3:47, The long and winding road is 3.37, and All you need is love is only 3:48. when I used to listen to these songs on my brother's borrowed vinyl, they seemed to last for ages. Maybe that says something about the depth of the music, the number of songs per side, or the consistency of the sound world that they created. I dunno. But it's weirdly counterintuitive to think about the music's original impression, compared to the naked reality of the track timings.

Stealth credit


Election fever is gripping the, um, not the nation...the political media; and they're reporting the superficial skirmishing and obvious posturing of the two main parties, dignifying the bogus outrage and repetitive, crafted (but crap) lines with the kind of breathless commentary usually reserved for disasters and the deaths of royalty. I can't get excited about 'debate' that's really just gloss and mutual name-calling and pigtail-pulling.

Despite that, there are still important issues at stake. If you're from the idealistic old left, like me, and you have an emotional commitment to the socialist ideas that gripped you in the 80s and 90s, you can't help but be tempted to feel disgust and despair at a government that -- at face value -- appears proudest of its ability to hold the ring for the capitalist economy and make it work better than the previous incumbents.

I'm tempted to feel like that, and feel that the Blair governments have betrayed the principles that I thought Labour was interested in, and that they've done nothing of value or principle.

And yet...that feels like a too simplistic position to adopt. It feels a bit of an adolescent, immature position to adopt: to utter simplistic, blanket condemnations of Labour because of (a) their failure to implement a revolutionary socialist programme, and (b) their odious foreign policy (in tandem with Bush's neocons). Adolescent because that's what teenagers go through phases of doing: they reject everything that's on offer, and choose not to find any worth anywhere, refusing to say anything positive. They think that if they can't have everything they want, there's no point in having anything. Complete cynicism and blanket condemnation put you in a very comfortable and safe position: you don't have to think about complexity, nuance, or balanced analysis, and you don't have to engage with the very real difficulties of making principle work in a world where the structures of markets and capital flows mean that you'll fuck your economy if you reject the consensus/the dominant market conditions.

You can't render reality invisible with rhetoric.

I've been thinking about what's changed since 1997. There are some good things: wealth has been redistributed somewhat; investment in the health service has grown; the economy has been good, and I have been in work; my stepdad got prompt and caring treatment after his mild heart attack; my (pensioner) parents have had numerous additions to their pensions, heating allowances, council tax allowances, and others; my mum has had both of her hips replaced, one of them in a private hospital to reduce her waiting time (and chronic pain), and paid for by the NHS; my stepfather received prompt and caring treatment for a potentially dangerous cyst; my parents are more secure and well-off -- they are in a vulnerable group, and they have been well-served by the Labour governments.

Also: take the long view.

It's right to criticise the crap stuff, but give credit where it's due, and look at the alternative.

Just because you can't elect an ideal world, does that mean you should run the risk of getting a worse government than the current one?

Make your mind up.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Blue


There's lovely light everywhere, now that the sun is climbing higher and higher in the sky.

Today at work I noticed some floor tiles illuminated with late afternoon sunlight. I thought it looked quite spiffy:

Mathilde -- part of a character sketch


Granddad had it, she knows that now, and she's got it, too.

She remembers kneeling in the corner of her grandparents' sitting room, with her dolls and miniature cups and saucers, and her little brother Pete close by, trying vainly to get all of his plastic soldiers to stand upright on the deep, springy pile. In the opposite corner, in the chair that was 'his' by unspoken consent, granddad is sitting silently, staring at the net curtains, which are smeared with the grey, flat light of November or February; the curtains are like a haze of fine dust.

Periodically, grandma would pop in from the kitchen, wafting in the smell of boiling bacon with her, and say something to granddad, who would either look at her silently and then look away again, or grunt inarticulately without even meeting her gaze. Either way, she would mutter 'miserable fucker' and go out again, slamming the door behind her.

Even at such a young age, Mathilde was puzzled at this version of granddad: ordinarily, he was smiling, jovial, loud even. But this other, still, silent granddad sat in his threadbare chair, next to the tall, glass-fronted drinks cabinet, and stared at nothing, never saying anything, and never meeting your eye. Even as kids, they knew that it was no good trying to get him to laugh or talk to them: there was something so blank and stolid about his demeanour that made you baulk. Mathilde thought it was strange, even then, that grandma seemed to hate granddad, when granddad looked like he need to be cuddled.

At home, it became common for Mathilde to be sent out to sit on the stairs during Sunday evening tea: she remembers the sound of the radio reverberating through the wall as she sat on the staircase with her sandwich and plate of salad, feeling the hard edge of the stair digging into the back of her thighs. Even though she had been sent away for talking too much, all the rest of them at the table were still talking, talking, talking -- and laughing, too. It was unfair, and stupid. She didn't understand it, but mum and dad would never let her argue: she had to shut up and go and sit on the stairs. Every Sunday evening.

As a teenager, Mathilde thought that her moods were just like every other girl's: driven by the hormones that their biology teacher had (sort of) told them about, and in thrall to a body and mind that never seemed to settle in any particular state for more than a few hours. One day she'd be smiling and outgoing, confident enough to talk to anyone, and feeling bright and clever; the next day, out of the blue, she'd be tearful and anxious, and want to hide away so that nobody could see her -- she knew that if they saw her, they'd laugh at her or criticise her. When she felt good -- or, better, great -- she assumed that that was how things were meant to be; the lows were aberrations, and there didn't seem to be a neutral place between these positive and negative states.

She remembers a day one summer when she was thirteen. It was a hot July day, with blue sky, a few high, white clouds, and a slight breeze that moved coolly over the skin of her arms. She was sitting in their paved back garden, reading one of next term's set books, the pages feeling dry and rough against her fingertips. She thought she could almost feel the printed words, and she closed her eyes and brushed her fingers over the pages, waiting for enlightenment. None came, so she concentrated instead on the bright pink colour of the bright sun through her eyelids, sensing the warmth there, and squeezing her eyelids tight so that different colours and patterns came: black spots, yellow grids, green swirls. It was as if, when she scrunched up her eyes, she could draw impressions out of her brain. She could smell the wooden fence's parched creosote coating warming in the sun -- it was like resin and liquorice, dark and pungent -- and she thought she could hear the leaves of the bushes brushing against each other, towers of foliage and turrets of yellow flowers. She knew that the sun was glinting on the shed's windows. Everything seemed so bright and clear and vivid -- even with her eyes closed, and an involuntary smile of pleasure spread across her face. The book drooped in her numbed fingers.

She's at peace, poised in a web of sense impressions that her brain is refining and balancing, and she's coping with all this stimulation: it's as if the information is drawn slowly into her brain, at the right pace for once. It's all processed and assimilated, and put into patterns that make sense, and where everything shows up in proportion, and in its true colours. Everything is fixed, and seen in true perspective. With her eyes closed, she can turn her head and 'see' everything, feel that everything is as it should be, and that she is at the centre of this focused matrix of sight, sound, smell and touch. Everything is all right -- she could stay like this for ever.


Mathilde is one of the characters in my novel. She's blessed/cursed with arbitrary mood swings, and she doesn't know how to deal with them. In her mid-twenties, she feels as if she's the powerless victim of her body and mind. This bit of the sketch is getting at the inherited aspect of these mood disorders, and at their uncontrollable nature. It's also suggestive (based on my own experience), of the moments of 'epiphany' you get when your brain seems to be working perfectly, tuned in to all the sensory stimuli around you, and perfectly able to synthesise all that noise and make an elegant mental whole out of it.

In the novel, this stuff feeds into the thematic idea that we make structures and stories that explain our lives to us, and that the construction of these stories is partly determined by the kind of mood we're in when intense experiences happen to us: it's touching on the idea that we filter experience and make it fit the patterns of thinking that we're already (unconsciously or consciously) committed to. I suspect, though, that this might be a theme too far, as I already have 237 overlapping themes. Damn.

Prosaic or poetic?


How I love to set up false dichotomies as a way of opening a discussion about something. This technique was the basis for almost every essay I wrote in my degree course: set up a straw man or woman, then use the Aunt Sally position you disagree with as a point of ridiculous reference while you argue your preferred case -- if you could find a pair of extremist quotations to use as epigrams, all the better. It seemed to work, though, as I 'done great' at university.

(Example: "The silent 'G' and 'P' in the title of Ted Hughes' poem Gnat Psalm are representative of all that is false, hollow, and empty in the universe, and echo the pointlessness and futility of the human condition. These paired letters encapsulate the superficiality and disposability of much that counts for civilisation, and elevate the gnats' brainless dance to the same level as all of our politics, art, and religion: all there is really is the sunlight, the coming dusk, and the inevitability of death after a brief, manic existence.")

Actually, I made that one up. But you get my drift.

Anyway. I'm listening to Tom Waits' blinding soundtrack for One from the Heart. In Broken Bicycles, Tom says:

September's reminding July,
It's time to be saying goodbye..."


I guess you could render that as:

It's August.

But I know which one I prefer: romanticisation and poetics every time.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Mona Lisa


I couldn't face the mad mobs marauding towards the Mona Lisa/la Giaconda in the Louvre, so I contented myself with the museum's other extensive galleries.

However, I did feel the need to view a pensive, enigmatic lady, so I doodled one this evening...



OK, maybe 'pensive and enigmatic' aren't the words. Actually, she looks like she's looking over her shoulder at someone and thinking "Pillock!" Just as Leonardo intended.

Crying, me? Nah.


I'm an (overly) emotional geezer, but, paradoxically, I very rarely cry. I cried the night I slept at my nan's house after mum told us that "dad won't be living with us any more" -- I was 12; I cried walking home from my first proper girlfriend's house after we split up -- I was 18; I cry at funerals, mildly -- usually when we're all singing Abide with me, and particularly this final verse:

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.


I'm an atheist, but still...

There are some film/TV moments that make me fill up, too:

(1) The opening sequence of A Matter of Life and Death, when radio operator Kim Hunter is so moved by David Niven's plight, trapped in his burning bomber over the North Sea -- there's something heartbreaking about knowing that these are his last moments, and that only in the face of imminent death can he admit to his feelings, and there's also something about the way that they've found each other over the airwaves and can never consummate this precious love.

(2) The bit in ET, when the extraterrestrial comes back to life in the back of the van. Christ.

(3) The end of Nostalghia, when the deranged guy sets fire to himself in the public square.

(4) The end of It's a Wonderful Life. Please. Stop. (The trick here is in the build up, where you've seen what a great guy George Bailey is, and all the beautiful, considerate things he has done for other people, out his generosity of spirit. It lifts it way beyond sentimental melodrama and drives home the truth of how irreplaceable the love of family and friends is.)

(5) Any episode of of The Boys from the Blackstuff, but especially: (a) when Chrissie shoots the rabbits in the back yard; (b) when Dixie confronts his son in his bedroom, challenging him about not having a job; (c) when Chrissie stands up in the church and challenges the drunken priest when he gets George's name wrong at the funeral. That's brilliant fucking writing, and makes the truths and the suffering of these ordinary people blaze brighter than any so-called 'epic'.

(6) Any episode of The Rock and Roll Years that features music I remember, and tragic pictures I remember seeing on the TV -- the final US withdrawal from Saigon, for example, or the Berlin Wall coming down, or the Iranian Embassy siege, or the Heysel/Bradford City/Hillsborough football disasters.

Enough, already. I started out here suggesting that I don't cry much, but I clearly do get close to it pretty often.

Do yourself a favour: have a bloody good grizzle.

Almost wordless...


Today's doodles: a stylised pig, and the head of a sad monster...





And more wall/light obsessiveness. I like the verticals in this one:

Monday, April 04, 2005

Multimedia message

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sssssssssssssssssssss


no signal at the moment.

Later...


Sunset light after the rain:



I so need to get a decent digital camera.

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Blogger seems badly broken this evening. I can't get in to the 'post editing' part of the site, but I can post remotely, using my phone and the flickr site. Not that I have anything to say today, anyway. Got the hump.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Heimat


I've been watching Heimat on DVD this evening. It's a really affectingly written and shot piece...it's as if it reshapes your ideas about Germany after World War One, and about the lead up to Nazism and WW2.

More specifically, it focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people in a village in post-1918 Germany, a place touched by the war, but not obviously seeded with any ideas that would feed into/be drawn upon by National Socialism. It reminds you that things aren't inevitable, and that your ex post facto convictions can colour your perception of the past...(ie, because you know that Hitler came to power, and the Nazis did all the things they did, you somehow think that there was an inevitablity about it all, as if the Nazi destiny was sitting inside the stone of Germany's history, just waiting for Hitler's chisel to chip away at the outside layers and reveal the irresistible core.)

Things are more contingent than that, I think.

There's a lovely scene where the villagers are picknicking in a ruined castle, in 1923. One of the characters is a wireless geek, and all the people's faces light up with fascination and pleasure as he tunes his valve-based radio set in to distant stations. You can feel the sense of novelty. It reminds you how much of the electronic/digital world we take for granted now, as if its always been there; and yet I can remember the thrill of my first transistor radio in the early 70s...

Coincidence


A couple of weeks back, I blogged vaguely about my onetime philosophical commitment to science and hierarchical reductionism: "if I could only analyse everything by breaking it down into ever-smaller pieces, I could understand everything."

I'm currently reading critical mass by Philip Ball. It's about -- I think -- the emergent properties of society based on millions of individual actions (econophysics). In the early chapters, he talks a lot about Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and his attempts to deduce the 'best kind of society', based on logical/scientific propositions about human nature. In this section, he cites something Hobbes wrote in his De cive ('On the citizen'):

For everything is best understood by its constitutive causes. For as in a watch, or in some other small engine, the matter, figure and motion of the wheels cannot well be known except it be taken asunder and viewed in parts

Me and Thomas Hobbes, of a single mind, though 300 years apart. Who'd have thought it, eh? Maybe a career as an unpopular political philosopher is calling to me through the ether?

Geek


Sometimes I feel stupid and stale -- a bit becalmed intellectually. At times like these, I need sites like this to refresh my brain. Interesting pictures, and makes me think about the narrowness of my intellectual frameworks, suggesting that maybe I can still learn things/rejig my brain/snap out of my intellectual lassitude.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Wages


I don't know what you earn. I earn a decent wage -- more than I'm worth, probably (in a moral sense), but about right in the 'market' perspective.

Anyway.

Premiership footballers earn an obscene fucking wage, generally. I like football. I used to think it was important. But it seems to me that the business success/success aspects have fucked football up. (Um...do you think I've been watching too many fucking Tarantino films? Huh? Do you? Huh?)

Anyway (squared). Newcastle United. Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer fighting. Clearly, these boys are not the brightest lights in an entire universe of light. But they're on -- what? -- £30-40 grand a week? A week?. So they have responsibilities. And so do the people who employ them.

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Still, he's got a nice little pension fund now, eh?

Mildly obsessed...


...with shadows on walls again today.



Rectilinear forms in contrast.



Weirdo.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Things that go 'bang' in the night


Sounds of gunshots from the west. Never heard that here before. Two in quick succession: they sounded quite close -- the echo followed on almost immediately. Then a pause of about thirty seconds. Then another (single) shot...the same sort of distance. Now I'm listening intently, and feverish stories are assembling themselves in my head...murder (no screaming yet, though, after the stunning shock of the violence), hunting (lampers out after deer, rabbits, Oxonian big cats). Another long pause, then two more. And again...getting further away now.

Funny how that kind of sudden, unusual noise can set you tingling, and switch on all your senses, and let all your fears about death step a bit closer to you. They nudge you, don't they?

Lazy -- stuff from my camera phone...


A springy garden in Paris:



An angular view from a hotel room window:



Today's evening sunshine on my bedroom wall:



An uncanny impression of Michael Caine:

Micklewhite

Pathetic.

Blogged Out


My brain is malfunctioning this evening. It's the tedious time of the month at work, when I have to do the (worthy but dull) number crunching and bean counting. This is not the most energising part of my job.

As a consequence, my neurotransmitters seem to have evaporated, and my synaptic/dendritic/axonic landscape is an arid scene of parched inactivity, with a few twiggy bushes marooned, fruitless, in an ocean of sand and dust. There will be no productive activity here until the sun has come up again, the tide has come in, the dew has risen, and this metaphor has been ridden into the ground, like a...like a...dead horse.

Zzzzzzzzzz.........