The Quiet Road

Blogging will be rather light over the next couple of weeks. As you may have noticed, I’ve been trying to post more regularly of late (a combination of having time on my hands and a decision to be more disciplined with my writing… I’m committed to spending a certain amount of time every day writing; depending on my mood it might be working on fiction, the book of essays I’m putting together, or this blog).

However, the lovely Citizen S and myself will be getting married in a week and a half (I know! Who’d have thunk it? And so long as I can keep her from sobering up for the next ten days, it should actually happen). It’s going to be a very small (non-religious) affair and most of the planning and organisation is already done. All the same, I imagine I’ll have less time than usual to sit around in my dressing-gown posting stuff here.

I’ve got articles in the drafts folder that probably only need a few more minutes, so hopefully activity here won’t come to a complete halt. But do expect a lull for a couple of weeks.

Oh, and wish us well!

Bit of a brazen post this, but I figured it’d be worth a shot. Some requests…

I’m currently planning to expand upon my Master’s research in the form of a PhD. There’s really not much work being carried out on the psychodynamics of sustainability… analysing our ecological psychosis… the schizophrenia of the group mind… call it what you will. Gregory Bateson’s pioneering work has largely been left to gather dust despite the incredible importance and relevance it holds for modern civilisation.

Certainly there have been some books written on the subject, often rather good ones too, but really not enough to do the subject justice. Also, they have a tendency to be somewhat inaccessible. Bateson’s own writing can be quite difficult to digest and while both Narby’s Intelligence in Nature and Kidner’s Nature and Psyche have much to offer the dedicated academic, they are unlikely to ever reach a large audience.

It’s my aim — and yes, it’s a lofty one, but why set the bar low? — to produce a PhD thesis that can be successful both academically and also from the standpoint of the educated but non-specialist reader. The subject deserves to be released from the confines of the ivory tower.

However, while I’m putting together my proposal and continuing my research now, it’ll be a year or so before I get officially underway. I’ve missed the various funding deadlines for this year and, well, there’s other stuff happening that preclude the kind of intensive, full-time dedication that starting a PhD might entail.

Therefore, I’m kind of twiddling my thumbs right now, which is why I’m writing this post. My readership is small but select and I’m hoping some of you might have a bit of advice to share. Obviously any input with regards to putting together a PhD proposal (in the broad field of philosophy) would be greatly appreciated. But in the meantime I’m also looking for one or two things…

Firstly, I’m a bit of a dab hand when it comes to building websites and web applications. It’s been my main source of income for a while but work has slowed down considerably of late so I’m looking to expand my client base. I have a web portfolio, with the rather grandiose title of Ring Forth Web Studio, which you might point people towards if you hear they need sites built (WordPress installations and ColdFusion programming in particular).

Secondly, I’d really love to know how to go about earning a crust (or even half a crust) out of freelance writing. Yes, I’m aware that’s the Holy Grail for every blogger but if, dear reader, you’ve worked out how to achieve it, I’d be eternally grateful for your advice. You can either leave a comment here, or contact me via email at ‘jim’ at ‘numero57’ dot ‘net’. There’s also a web form over at ringforth.com for getting in touch about web work.

I’m aware that this is something of a stab in the dark, but I figured it was worth a try. Thanks for reading. Normal service shall resume soon.

I just want to post a brief note about the comments policy on this blog. Earlier today I received a visitor, Dusty Johnson, who decided to post the following few words on an old post of mine: “you fucking fag you suck”. Now, I try to approve all comments that are not obvious spam, so I thought long and hard about whether or not to approve this one (well, I considered the issue for a minute or so… which is roughly as long as it merited). Ultimately I decided to trash the comment for two reasons.

Firstly, the internet is already full of banal insults published by morons with the emotional maturity of a 13 year old, and “you fucking fag you suck” doesn’t really add anything my blog… or to the world in general. In fact, I feel that the less morons posting “you fucking fag you suck” on the web, the better.

Secondly, if I approve the comment, then my spam filter will consider anything else posted by Dusty Johnson to be legitimate. And frankly I’m not sure Dusty is the kind of person to whom I want to provide a platform.

Therefore I suggest that anyone who decides to insult me in the comments do so in a clever or amusing manner. Dusty won’t get a second chance, though, as anything clever posted using that name or email address will clearly be plagiarism. Swearing is fine (I don’t have any vocabulary hang-ups) and insults, while not exactly encouraged, are perfectly acceptable. But I’ve got to maintain some standards here, and “you fucking fag you suck” really doesn’t meet them.

I received this email from Merrick a little earlier. I reproduce it here without further comment. Well, except to say, check out the site. It’s bloody great.

I just made the internet get bigger!

In 1978 Tom Robinson released Glad To Be Gay. It was the first time anyone apart from a handful of gay activists had ever heard a gay protest song, let alone one so bitter and furious. Robinson managed to get it into the Top 20 despite radio stations refusing to play it.

He’s updated the lyrics many times over the years as new issues have come to the fore and old references became obsolete.

I’ve done a website tracking all the versions, with references explained, MP3s, a big interview with Tom and more.

It’s not only musical and creative history, but social and political history too, a lesson in how different attitudes were so recently and how many people suffered despite harming no-one.

Check it out if you get chance: http://gladtobegay.net/

Merrick

I can’t say as I’m a great fan of twitter. Part of that is my reflexive tendency to rebel against overhyped social media. Admittedly twitter isn’t the source of all evil in the world, like Facebook is, but the thought of millions of people around the world checking to see what Stephen Fry ate for breakfast this morning just makes me despair. The modern cult of celebrity irritates me profoundly and twitter has gotten itself all tied up in it.

Like text-messaging, certainly I can see the utility of the thing. Although (naturally) the number of pointless and inappropriate tweets appear to outnumber useful ones by a factor of several trillion. Twitter seems to encourage people to broadcast the minutiae of their lives to all and sundry… as though Facebook Status Updates had escaped from their rightful home and set up camp at another domain. I’ve also noticed an increasing trend of people attempting to have serious discussions via twitter. The ramifications of Sudanese partitioning simply can’t be debated in 140 characters or less. And doing so runs the risk of trivialising important issues.

That said, I’ve finally succumbed to the thing and become a reluctant twit. The lovely and wise Citizen S insists that it might help me widen the readership of this blog. I’m not at all sure that I really want to widen the readership of this blog, but if Citizen S says that “more people should be reading what you write about sustainability” then I shan’t argue. Whether or not twitter will help in that respect is yet to be discovered.

Anyhoo, if you fancy becoming one of my small band of disciples followers, then just click on that little button there and twitter will handle the rest.

God help us all.

UPDATE: Incidentally, what’s the etiquette with regards to “following”? If I start to follow someone’s twitter feed and discover it’s full of “my cat just did a big poo” type tweets, will my decision to stop following them be the equivalent of telling them to fuck off?

As the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice, I’ve made a few tweaks to the layout of this blog. This was done at the same time I switched my web-hosting plan and as far as I can tell, it’s all gone pretty smoothly. Obviously if you notice anything broken, I’d be grateful if you could point it out.

The one thing I have noticed is that the URL for my RSS feed appears to have changed. I could probably spend a few hours working out why this has happened and undoing it, but instead I figured it’d be a good deal easier to ask the three of you who actually subscribe to my blog to just check your newsreader and update the feeds should it be required.

The correct URLS are:

• Entries (http://numero57.net/feed/)
• Comments (http://numero57.net/comments/feed/)

As has become traditional, I’m spending the festive season in the wilds of West Cork. Limited net access, no mobile phone signal and roads made impassable by ice… couldn’t be better really.

I’m sitting here looking through the window and out across the Atlantic while beside me, my parents’ new puppy redefines “cute” with every movement. Tonight there’ll be food, drink and It’s A Wonderful Life on DVD. And at the risk of sounding dreadfully trite and obvious, I’m forced to suggest to you, dear reader, that you should join me in “enjoying the little things”.

I hope you all have a truly splendid festive season. Indulge and be indulging. Stay warm, take care, give and receive with grace and good cheer.

Just a quickie… I’m heading into Trinners tomorrow (that’s Trinity College, Dublin for the uninitiated) in order to wear a very silly outfit and have a piece of paper handed to me confirming what we already knew… that I’ve spent more time than is sensible reading books about group psychodynamics and am now a bit of an expert on the subject. Yay me! After which there will be feasting and merriment.

Have a splendid day y’all. I certainly intend to, even if I have to wear a bow-tie.

… and it all comes back to the same fundamental question. “How urgent is this?” No, I’m serious here. What do you really feel is going to happen? Not some abstract theory about possible consequences, what you actually believe. Because if you really believe — truly, deep down, like you believe the sun’s going to rise tomorrow — if you really believe the consequences of resource depletion are as dire as you’re telling me. And if you really believe that the only way to avoid a complete catastrophe is the implementation of some kind of global social re-engineering project that radically changes almost every aspect of society, then the only remaining issue to resolve is… how much time do we need to find an isolated rural home and learn to grow potatoes?

Because there’s just no way the changes you’re suggesting will ever happen. No way the world, humanity as a whole, is capable of the kind of changes you’re talking about. It. Will. Not. Happen.

If the options are, and I’m going out on a limb here and granting for the sake of argument that they are, “planned global change to sustainability per your definition” or “self-destruction via over-consumption” then we may as well get loaded and enjoy the ride, because we live in a society pre-programmed to choose the latter. It’s not even up for discussion. Every decision we’ve made since deciding that fire and the wheel were good ideas has been about choosing the latter option, and it’s just ridiculous to suggest that an “appeal to reason” could possibly alter that programming.

Now, I’m yet to be convinced that resource depletion is the problem you say it is. Though I don’t deny that you make a very convincing case. Of course, you’d probably be even more convincing if you dropped all that philosophical guff about collective psyches and… what was that phrase you kept using…? “ecology of mind”? Ninety percent of people simply have no idea what those words mean, and they won’t take the time to find out. So you lose them. They think you’re talking down to them, or trying to make them feel stupid. And ain’t nobody going to sign your petitions or adopt your manifesto or join your party… not if you make them feel stupid.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re not stupid and you aren’t completely right, but the best way to convince people to act in a certain way is to make them believe it was their idea to act that way in the first place. And you won’t do that with the alienating language of academia…

(leastways that’s roughly what Colonel Gaddafi said to me in my dream the other night. In an American accent)

UPDATE 16:47: It’s probably worth pointing out that the dream concluded with me chasing Danny DeVito through a furniture store. We were on skateboards. So I’m not sure how much I should read into it.

This is one of those posts about blog trivia, so will be of limited interest to many. But I thought I’d do one in honour of my spam filter having just caught its 100,000th piece of spam. Actually, when I logged in just now, Akismet told me that I’d had…

I have no idea how that compares with other blogs of a similar size (i.e. very low readership / traffic) but it seems like an awful lot to me. Sadly the actual one hundred thousandth piece of comment-spam was one of those “loads of question-marks” comments — indicating, I suspect, that it was submitted in a typeface my browser can’t process. This is given further credence by the fact that it links back to an Israeli website selling cheap “Nutraceuticals and Functional Foods”. So I’m guessing that my 100,000th piece of spam was in Hebrew.

Try explaining that to someone from the 19th century.

The 99,999th spam was also for cheap drugs. In English this time. So if anyone needs any amoxicillin, I can send you the link.

The 100,001st spam, on the other hand, was an example of my favourite kind. The classic nonsense poetry spam… “I so understand, in last paragraph just whole salt and is stated”.

This can be reformatted thus…

Ain’t that the truth.

Meanwhile my incoming traffic is still heavily google-based. I’d say at least 60% of my readership is of the “search, click, glance, back” variety. I’d like to think that I manage to snare one of those a month as a regular reader… but even that may be optimistic.

And there are three topics which, via a variety of different searches, account for the majority of those google hits. First up (and this pleases me) are people searching for “CO2 per barrel of crude oil” or some variation thereof. The next largest group are those who come looking for the techno-viking video. I’m not even in the first 10 results for that. Which means people are skipping over 10 perfectly good links to a video in order to watch it on this site. Ten or fifteen of them a day. Which is odd I think. And the third biggest draw is the “Dublin to London by bus” post. Like the CO2 emissions thang, that’s quite a useful post, I guess, so it’s nice to see it getting readers.

Some questions that — according to google — people thought they’d have answered here. And, in case they return, the answers…

Is psychoanalysis harmful?
In general I would say, “no”. But it rather depends on the analyst.

What is the authority principle of Freud?
I have no idea. I suspect you are referring to the ‘Reality Principle’ (though I’ve never heard it referred to as the ‘authority’ principle). The definition provided by Wikipedia is nice and concise, while there’s a longer extract from the Dictionary of Psychoanalysis over at answers.com.

Why is windows genuine advantage suddenly popping up?
Don’t ask me, I gave up trying to understand Windows a long time ago. “Weird stuff happens”. I suspect there’d be a measurable drop in global stress levels if Microsoft used that as the tag-line for Windows. Kind of like a big “Don’t Panic!” sign.

Who has the biggest balls?
In Britain it’s clearly Lord Goldsmith. As for elsewhere? I really couldn’t say, but if you turn off google’s safesearch filter I suspect you could have an unforgettable time trying to find out. Or for a slightly different take on the matter, you could check out Flight of the Conchords and their sugarlumps.

What are 3 countries besides the usa that are have placed bans on smoking?
There’s a whole bunch of them, each with slightly different levels of prohibition (though only in Bhutan is the actual sale of tobacco illegal).

I think my favourite search term of late, though is “marijuana found in the antarctic“. I’ve searched myself and can’t find what the person might have been referring to.