30 April 2004
Sittlichkeit
29 April 2004
More Weblogs
Ok, I kept coming across them all anyway....there are more links to weblogs on the side. Besides, I want to make the blissblog person feel happier. He (well, it posts as "Simon Reynolds" anyway...gosh, the anonymity of immateriality, he could be anyone) says that blogs are:
3/ "ego driven"
....and (sad but true, I'm not happy about it by any means) testosterone-driven also
Of course he could me that ALL blogs written by EVERYONE are written from the standpoint of their testosterone, regardless of their overcoded fleshy bits, but I think he probably means that there aren't that many, erm, girlz writing about stuff that aint about them being a whore or what have you....
This is the bit where I write about Grime or Eski or whatever in true Blogg stylee (double g, double e)....I bought the new Wiley LP yesterday, along with Gardiner's version of Bach's Mass in B Minor. "I don't think anyone has ever bought those two things together," the polite young man behind the counter said. "But they exhibit the same glory and exultation of the infinite capacity of the human spirit to over-reach itself in profundity" I replied. Actually, that last bit isn't true. I merely dropped my money on the floor and looked embarrassed as the counter-guy rolled his eyes at the number of people queuing impatiently behind me. Bollocks to it.
27 April 2004
I got me a robin rimbaud
26 April 2004
Infinite Electronic Thought
Right, as I'm too sick to be bothered to write anything else, I'm merely going to post a list of weblogs that I have encountered and approve of in one way or another. These are mostly of a philosophical bent, rather than a music/cultural criticism one (finite thought: does everyone who has a blog also have a philosophy PhD and a record collection the size of an unhappy, obese rat?) Answers on a white label of Heidegger's inaugural speech cut up with the sound of someone throwing a climbing-frame down a spiral staircase....arf.
Firstly, we have the über-Gruppenfuhrer of perfectly polished prose k-punk, who is linked by just about everyone who has ever used a computer.
I had already put up glueboot, who seems like a lovely young lady who writes about philosophy, art and political injustice, amongst other things. Mike writes about his music and other things on smunk. The man at the poetics of decay writes complicated psychogeographical accounts of breakfast plus dark tales of useless buildings. a gauche writes about Deleuze and Badiou etc. undercurrent has lovely photos and terse prose. philosophical conversations has loads and loads of discussions of everyone's favourite Sein Stormtrooper. I have a funny feeling that smokewriting is someone who used to take seminars at a certain philosophy department in the Midlands. spurious is a proper philosopher (he may even have a job) with lots of references to Bataille and Blanchot.
Infinite good health to you all.
23 April 2004
Don't take out the eyes, but leave them to cloud over like opals in the heat of the fire
Here's a (slightly old) breathtaking display of rhetorical ballet care of everyone's favourite Wagnerian elitist wine-drinking phony Wiltshireman: Scruton sacrifices pets. Thanks to our very own Bible scholar johneffay for the reference....
There are too many good lines to extract without spoiling the overall effect, but in terms of its unsettling style, it's up there with anything written by Adolph McGroot over on whorecull:
adolph1
adolph2
adolph3
22 April 2004
Extinction in Hackney Sunshine
©
Reading Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man by Michael Boulter. Well, it's antihumanism of a sort, if not exactly the kind I'm supposed to be working on.
Sample quote: 'The insects and the birds are still at the early stage of high diversification. Both radiations are much longer and more diverse than most other animal groups have been, and neither shows signs of reaching its maximum. Here are the signs of where the new life on the Earth will develop when the large mammals are gone. The smaller ones - the rodents, insectivores, carnivores and bats - will be delighted.'
Millions of rats scampering about with little smiles on their whiskery faces. Brings a tear to one's opaque black eye.
This will perhaps bring a whole new meaning to the word rationality, har har. Give them a couple of centuries, and they'll be wearing little wigs and discussing the best way to exit their self-incurred immaturity... sapere aude sweet rats! 'The far-stretched terrestrial ecosystems will be restored to new equilibria and the air will offer new space for innovation and developing communities.' There'll be no need for anyone to get out of the ratrace, cos there'll only BE the ratrace, and all manner of rats will unite in the name of ratkind (even the blind, naked ones). Horrah! And it's sunny today too.
Therefore I highly recommend taking a stroll in Abney Park Cemetery: freaky Victorian graveyard. Apparently there are 300,000 people buried there, which seems a lot to me, given that it's not all THAT big. Still, in the profoundly brilliant sunshine, even mortality doesn't seem so bad, which is just as well 'cos we've only got the odd century or so to go, apparently.
20 April 2004
Wanted: one foreign secretary
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger (1923 - ), New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973
Austin has a theory that Blair's sudden call for a referendum on the proposed EU constitution is merely further evidence of his desperate need for bigger and bigger kicks (as is the way of all proper gamblers). After winning the vote on the war, tuition fees, etc. (far, far, too easy), sleep-deprivation and burgeoning amphetamine psychosis has lead to a depraved need for stimulation - hence the increasingly irrational about-turns and a demand for even closer votes (and here Nietzsche's analysis of decadence is most appropriate). Is Blair deliberately promulgating a politics of 'lip-quivering intensity', as the garfish Howard puts it, to distract us from the fact that England is actually Fraggle Rock, and the British people a figment of Sprocket's imagination? We deserve to be told.
I wonder if Blair's already had the meeting with Murdoch ('will the last person to leave Europe please turn out the lights'). Watching C4 news, you have to ask why Jon Snow isn't our foreign secretary, rather than the aptly-named Jack Straw. He seems to know more about the rest of the world than Straw, and I'll warrant he can speak at least one other foreign language (unlike Straw). Any other suggestions?
19 April 2004
Infinite Radio Waves of Thought
There's a series on philosophers being presented by Jonathan Ree on Radio 3. Unfortunately, you've already missed the one on Rousseau in Staffordshire and the Nietzsche in Basel episode, but there's still this one left to go: Marx in Paris (Sunday April 25, 21.30). Actually, you can still listen to the Nietzsche one here for a few days: the world's most dangerous moustache
So, last night's Nietzsche episode... As is usual with these things, it was primarily biographical rather than conceptual ("he was mates with the Wagners, then he wasn't, then he met Paul Ree and talked about Darwin" etc.). For some reason they had asked Angie Hobbs and Roger Scruton to describe what Nietzsche meant by the Apollinian and the Dionysian, which seemed a little inappropriate, given that neither of 'em are Nietzsche scholars (not even in a loose sense!), and thus what they said was top-class rubbish. Still, listening to the descriptions of Nietzsche's early lectures on the Greeks at Basel town hall was amusing, given he spent most of them savaging the bourgeoise illusion that Ancient Greece was a forerunner of polite European society ("and he looks like such a nice young man too"). Raimond Gaita was on too, saying just how saddened he was that Nietzsche was so popular, cos he was, like, well dangerous to the minds of da yoof. Possibly so, but sadly, he wasn't really given much of a chance to say why he thought so.
You know something? I love Radio 3. I mean, really love it. Look at tonight's line-up for example:
21:30 Night Waves
Should criminals be forced to wear T-shirts declaring their crimes? Philip Dodd talks to one of America's most influential philosophers Martha Nussbaum about Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law - her new book exploring the role shame and disgust play in our lives.
Just brilliant.
And it helps you sleep too, putting on the announcers with the softest, sweetest voices in the world on past midnight. Then they go and play Stockhausen or something and ruin it.
18 April 2004
Holiday Reading and the almost-Spanish Inquisition
'A length of rusty railing separates her house from the pavement. Condoms have been crucified on the railing spikes and the word SLAG is emblazoned across her door in green paint. I step towards it. There are three buzzers. Only one of them has a name. Sabrina. I press it.' - Brass, Helen Walsh.
Apart from deciding that all holidays are a bad idea, unless you're staying with friends, family, or those swingers you hooked up with on 'fat wives UK', this week I have been mostly reading. I would have said in the Mallorcan sun, but the rain in almost-Spain seemingly falls mainly on the ejits who go there.
Once I'd ascertained that the only incoming news to the place was the Daily Hate and the Express (why, if you were a British ex-pat living in Mallorca, or the Algarve etc. would you continue to want to read about the scumminess of Britain, the 50-ft pregnant teenage crack whores, the pill-gobbling, the violence etc.? I can only assume it's smug exceptionalism - "oh, we left all that behind, and if you don't get off my Villa I'll set my alsatian, Pedro, on you").
An increasing backlash seems to be haunting the Balearics...not only did we support the war with more fervor than the offed Aznar, but we continue to insist on building plastic pubs called the 'St George' in the middle of the countryside. Local papers were complaining that few of the Brits seem to vote or learn enough Catalan or Mallorquin to get involved in local or community issues. All the property developers and real estate agents seemed to involve British firms (so presumably not a lot of redistribution going on there, and all manner of outpricing, often-empty second homes in towns contributing to a general malaise and hostility). Can we excuse this kind of thing with a simple: 'tourism brings money to poor areas' shtick? I'm really not convinced. So, no more holidays ever again. I always quite admired Frank Auerbach's working style: one day a year off painting, consisting of a day trip to Brighton or somesuch. Now that's what I call discipline. And a holiday.
Still, we did manage to keep warm by burning a German edition of Bridget Jones's Diary that someone had left behind (units of flame, 451F, v. v. good).
Brass is worth a look. As well as all the pills, booze and sociology, there are some genuinely intriguing things going on. When the protagonist, Millie, wonders off, gets wasted and pays for sex with one or other of the only prostitutes who agree to do it, or goes to lap-dancing clubs, or reads porn, she occasionally ponders the status of her lust: 'I reduced girls to bodies or bits of. I saw them in terms of tits, legs and arse. I undressed every girl that I met, bending them like plasticine - this way and that way into every possible position. No one escaped appraisal or categorisation. I never saw myself as an object though. I neither identified with the women I objectified or the men that objectified them. I saw myself as something entirely different, as some sex-crazed genderless freak.'
Attack of the sex-crazed genderless freaks? If this is what Foucault and pills does to Britain's youth, it could be a lot, lot worse. Wonder if the Daily Mail would agree.
09 April 2004
The 'Dead and childcare issue
well, I haven't had a chance to listen to the new GD hexi-decimal live album, or whatever it is that John is getting so excited about, but nevertheless I dedicate this last post for a week or so (yes, I know, it's only got three words on it already) to them. And childcare.
Oddly enough, I do have something to contribute on the latter topic. The other day I was introduced to, sicked upon, and forced to hold a very small "human animal" who was about five weeks old. In this atomised world of secular Protestantism, late births, tiny nuclear families and so forth, I had managed to reach a rather alarmingly late age before ever having held such a creature. And what a fucked-up thing it was too.
Apart from negotiating the whole where to put the dangling head issue (the crook of your arm, it turns out), and getting over the fact that its eyes were not actually looking at anything (disarming), it was ok. "My," I thought, "there's a tiny brain in there, with a language faculty, a pineal gland, and a weird bundle of optic nerves" (my anatomy not having progressed much beyond the 18th-century). It was, as my Schopenhaurian friend pointed out (they are the best ones, of course), nothing but pure will, lightly coated with a layer of seemingly-human skin. Oh man!
Coupled with a tale told by the young thing's mother regarding its rather forceful early sucking, which broke the skin, and led to aforementioned infant drinking and then sicking up a mixture of blood and breast milk for a while, I couldn't help but think: "how animally".
Then I started wondering about the adaptive value of squeamishness (and don't even think about writing in and telling me that 'adaptation' and 'value' have nothing to say to each other). What the hell use has the state of being so revulsed and anti-biological? Has a useful fear of disgusting things become corrupted via the utterly damnable invention of plastic (for example)? Answers please.
On a related matter, I am taking a straw poll on the following question: when does one reach the age of reason? Schopenhauer says girls arrive at it when they're 18, cos that's all the reason they'll need, the mendacious things. Men, apparently, are supposed to arrive at it when they are 28. Sartre seems to imply that no one ever reaches it, unless you're being hypocritical about it, but then you can't help that either, and in the end the whole thing is a fraught, guilt-ridden, mess.
Still, that was better than talking about the Grateful Dead. The only album of theirs my father used to play was, you guessed it, 'In the Dark'. The bassline from 'west LA fadeaway' still haunts my nightmares. Still I liked the lyric 'I may be going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I'm enjoying the ride'. Which covers both childcare and GD adequately, I think.
08 April 2004
The rat with sunglasses in the Natural History Museum says: 'our time will come'
'The egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the State except "get out of my sunshine"' - Max Stirner, 'The Ego and His Own' (1845)
'In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I found my affair on myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: I have founded my affair on nothing.'- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and His Own' (1845)
Funny how Stirner, that proto-existentialist of yesteryear, determined that the anti-foundationalist 'nothingness' at the heart of being would necessarily entail supreme egoism, whilst Sartre thought it would introduce a commonality of understanding ('In every purpose there is universality, in the sense that every purpose is comprehensible to every man' - 'Existentialism & Humanism', 1946). Anarchists....... you can never get them to agree on any damn thing.........
So, without further ado, here is the word of the day: 'involucre'......definition: 'a whorl of bracts surrounding an inflorescence or at the base of an umbel.' What good, good words! Almost Carollian in their almost total uselessness. But we need more useless words. How else are we to disrupt systems of meaning and the deadweighting of days by the same damn sentences.........
This is the point at which I quote a French playwright in order to defend myself against accusations of rampant ponciness:
'Do not appear so scholarly, I pray you. Humanise your talk, and speak to be understood. Do you think a Greek name gives more weight to your reasons?'
— Molière, The Critique of the School for Wives (1663)
Ha ha, did you see what I did there..?
Two more quotes for the day, as I better do some work:
'The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us.'
—duc de La Rochefoucauld, Sentences et Maximes Morales, 1678
'Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.'
—Marguerite Duras, Practicalities, 1987
05 April 2004
Zombie rats from hell
suppose I better write something else before more comments than original material turn up....Again, a big thank you to Mike for setting me up (and not in a blind date with a psycho or pyramid scheme kind of way). Now I can populate the web with an infinite number of pictures of blind naked mole rats. Of all possible worlds this one clearly has to be the best....
Someone who might not agree with that:
"The 2004 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture will be given by
Professor Noam Chomsky and is called, 'Simple Truths, Hard Choices: Some
Thoughts on Terror, Justice and Self-defense'. Professor Ted Honderich will
preside. The lecture will take place on 19 May at 5.30 pm in Logan Hall, The
Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1. The lecture is free and
open to the public. There are no tickets, and no reservations can be made.
We suggest you arrive early to be sure of a seat."
Anyone who would like to come with me is welcome.
'The human voice will certainly not have changed decisively in the last 250 years. Bach's choral sound can therefore probably be attained from boys' and youths' voice that have had first class training.'
1. The sex choir will enter a vigorous programme of top physical training.
2. The sex choir will not accept any youths under the age of 250.
3. The sex choir will perform Bach's 'Mass in B Minor' every third Wednesday on the balcony outside my window.
4. And, lo, the minors will be massed.
'Thou that takest away the sins of the world have mercy upon us'....convinced I have consumption. I may not have the poetry to go with it, but I do have a bona fide lung infection (and a prescription to prove it). However, the pills say 'Amoxy 500' on them, so perhaps they are for myxomatosis instead........shotgun and rabbit pie......country roads take me home.
ID cards = rivers of biometric blood: have you seen the new volunteer 'UK Citizencard' volunteer scheme? Not sure exactly what the 'advantages' of paying £7 for such a thing are, besides convincing the newsagent on the corner that you do indeed desire adult bus tickets and not child ones (out of pride if not financial cunning). Ahem.
Off to see 'Monster' tonight......slab-faced - yet beautiful - women killing and eating and fottering and that sort of thing. Sounds ok.
A presto.
04 April 2004
There will be Newtons among the monkeys and Vaubans among the beavers
'I'd like to read you writing about: globalisation; humanism & Chomsky; sex choirs; life in Stokey; Enlightenment; the poverty of hedonism....' Bruce tells me this is what I should write about........
John, on the other hand, says I should comment on 'Stuff that interests me, so: The Grateful Dead and Childcare'
Well, I may be 'Shadowboxing the Apocalypse' for the forseeable future then. I'm just going to see what this post looks like up and then write something else..........
John, on the other hand, says I should comment on 'Stuff that interests me, so: The Grateful Dead and Childcare'
Well, I may be 'Shadowboxing the Apocalypse' for the forseeable future then. I'm just going to see what this post looks like up and then write something else..........
