tag: Miscellanity



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29
Nov 2007

Back to basics

by Jim Bliss

Here’s a bunch of links to check out while I’m finishing the Schreber essay.

Gyrus emailed me a link to this video at The Onion… Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough? (Warning: Funny bit preceded by annoying commercial).

And while you’re in a video-watching mood, head on over to youtube and check out some of this stuff…

  • Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett ‘n’ Joyce. I’ve linked to this before, but it bears repeat viewing. It vies for place with the very different, but equally wonderful Brokeback To The Future, as the best thing I’ve seen on youtube.
  • “What keeps mankind alive?” asks William Burroughs on September Songs. His answer, hidden amongst the weirdness, successfully sums up ‘the later Freud’ in a single triplet… “Mankind can keep alive thanks to his aptitude for keeping his humanity repressed / And now for once you must try to face the facts / mankind is kept alive by bestial acts”. You can always trust Uncle Bill to get right down to the nitty of the gritty.
  • From the sublime to the ridiculous, and as an antidote to Burroughs’ rather bleak message; Is Chewbacca trapped in my nightstand? It’s 45 seconds long. You only need the first 15. And if that didn’t make you at least smile, then let me do my bit to brighten up your day by pointing you towards Four Hands Guitar. I predict you’ll be grinning within 30 seconds.

Don’t watch. Read. On a screen.

Too much video? Well, there’s some plain old text-on-screen to be had if that’s the bag you’re into. First up, David Byrne explains the sub-prime mortgage crisis. (Is it just me, or is that a weird sentence?)

Next, let me point you at Heathrow: Whose Priorities? and more generally at the smokewriting blog which is a good’un and worthy of a bookmark or an rss grab. It’s not the focus of the blog, but I think Rochenko writes very well on the subject of sustainability. And there’s very few who do.

Climate Change. Oil and gas depletion. One merits capitalisation, the other not just yet

Oh yeah, and on the subject of sustainability and what have you… can I just state for the record that we have almost certainly passed the peak of global oil production. Just thought I’d get that out there. Sleep tight.

I’ve got a really chunky article on climate change and peak oil gestating at the moment, but the last couple of weeks have been all about Schreber, so it’s on the back-burner and will be for a while longer. For those of you who can’t possibly wait “for a while longer” and demand some kind of preview / forewarning, then allow me to condense my recent thinking on these issues down to a single paragraph. Hell, you don’t even need to read the article now that you have this handy “cut-out-and-keep” paragraph to carry around with you and refer to (in particular, at moments of crucial decision-making)*.

Climate change is a very real threat, and although there are collective steps that could be taken to negate some — perhaps much — of the damage, these steps will not be taken. Despite the severity of the threat of Climate Change, however, we face a more immediate threat in the shape of oil and gas depletion. Like Climate Change there are steps we could take to deal with this problem which would result in a minimum of human suffering. Just as with Climate Change, we will not take those steps. We’re a bunch of neurotics living in a psychotic culture built upon an absurd collective delusion. We’re fucked and we’re fucked up.

And now, here’s Tom with the weather…

Paint it white

Actually, just to wrap up the Climate Change theme, I assume you’ve all read Björn Lomborg’s latest piece in The Guardian, Paint it white? He proposes to combat climate change by painting everything white in order to reflect more heat away from the planet. And he backs up his argument (or appears to) through clever selective use of statistics and scientific jargon. It’s a piece of outright genius, and while I don’t have much time for his views, I salute the man for his rhetorical skill. The discussion that follows almost universally takes the piece at face value; there are one or two who see the joke among the 130-odd comments; a testament to his skill as a writer. The piece is actually a parody of the kind of science and environmental writing that appears in newspaper columns, and although the parody is being produced by someone on the other side of the ideological fence to me, it doesn’t stop me appreciating the quite important point it’s making about how almost anything can be dressed up as science in 600 words.

I mean, he’s talking about “white-washing” the cities! And people are taking him at face value.

I’d prefer a Bag of Holding, but this’ll do I suppose

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but the world’s first true invisibility cloak — a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum — has been created by physicists in the US. If ever there was an opening line that made you want to read an article, eh? Sadly the actual technology is a long, long way from where your imagination just leapt to, dear reader. Still, one to watch. Or listen out for.

* I am not responsible for any damage caused to your screen during attempts to “cut-out-and-keep” portions of this website.

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30
Sep 2007

Psychoanalytic Studies

by Jim Bliss

I’ve been admitted to the M.Phil course at Trinity and will be starting in a week or so. My first lecture is — I think — Tuesday 9th October, and will be on “Existentialism and psychoanalysis”. It appears that my disastrous interview didn’t sink me after all.

This is good news.

6 comments  |  Posted in: Announcements


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30
Sep 2007

Guide to Spectator Sports (Part 1)

by Jim Bliss

I’m not a sports fan.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as impressed as anyone by people doing incredibly skilful or difficult things. I will sit, wide-eyed and uttering little “oohs” and “aahs”, as an archive reel of the best goals ever scored in football gets shown on TV. I will “whoaaa!” along with the rest of them as a basketball player launches himself from halfway down the court and slam dunks. I’ll applaud like a trained seal as a hurling player catches the sliotar, rounds two defenders faster than you can blink and rifles it into the top corner of the goal. And I’ll shake my head in disbelief as Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe perform apparently superhuman feats of acrobatics as they cover every inch of the tennis court in a spectacular rally.

So I do get the idea of spectator sports. But let’s be brutally honest here… 99% of a sports fans time is spent anticipating those magical moments… waiting for them. The only exception to this (in my rarely humble opinion) is – bizarrely – golf. But more about that another time.

Anyways, given that people clearly don’t watch sports simply for the few transcendant moments, there’s obviously something else at work. Psychological identification and emotional transference mostly. Hardly a secret. The sports fan invests part of themself in the team or individual they are rooting for.

Why a particular team is chosen is often down to geography. A team of eleven men wearing the colours of your nation becomes “us”. We are playing Germany. Everyone in Chicago wants The Bulls to win. In Chicago, The Bulls are “us”.

Here in Ireland, when it comes to hurling or gaelic football, it’s completely unheard-of to support any county other than the one you were born in. But other times it’s more abstract… what percentage of Bjorn Borg fans were Swedish I wonder? And Manchester United apparently have millions of fans in China.

Football (soccer)

The world’s sport. Everyone loves football. Well, except the Americans. They hate it so much they invented a bastardised form of rugby which involves next to no ball-foot contact and called that football. I think they hoped it would mess with everyone’s heads, but everyone just ignored them and went on playing proper football. Actually, it’s wrong to say “the Americans”. Most Americans are fanatical about football as it happens, just not the United Statians (though I hear a certain Mr. Posh Spice is changing all that). I spent a while in Brazil. None more fanatical, let me tell you. The president of Bolivia recently had his nose broken playing football. And remember that South American goalkeeper who was shot dead upon his return from the world cup? Now that’s taking your sports seriously.

The trouble with football though is it’s just not very interesting to watch. A three-minute highlight reel from a 90-minute game is generally the best you’re going to get. As a neutral observer of last year’s world cup (Ireland failed to qualify) I tried to watch a few of the games. Two billion people can’t be wrong, right? Wrong. Waves of existential nausea crashed over me as I sat there, terrifyingly conscious of 2 billion souls enjoying what was – to me – a spectacle devoid of any value whatsoever. Rarely have I felt so alone.

I admit I only managed to sit through one full game and rarely even made it to half time in the others. So perhaps I coincidentally missed all the good bits. But those precious minutes of my life spent watching 11 overpaid French primadonnas faffing around with 11 overpaid Italian primadonnas can never be recovered. That hour and a half have gone forever. And out there, somewhere, was some paint I could have been watching dry.

Cricket

Popular in England and a few ex-colonies, this peculiar activity is not so much a sport as it is a bout of abstract gittery. It’s only worthwhile function is to provide ambience for villages in Sussex. Y’know… it’s a warm summer day, you’re lying by the river and enjoying the stillness. There’s a wonderful insect hum in the air that seems to focus the silence rather than disturb it. And off in the far distance the sound of cricket bat on ball and a smattering of applause punctuates that silence every few minutes.

But aside from playing a small part in an English summer soundscape, cricket is otherwise devoid of any real value and is actually extremely irritating if one is accidentally exposed to it. In that sense it’s the sports equivalent of a cloud of midges.

Carrying bluetongue.

Basketball

I lived in Chicago for a while, right when Michael Jordan was leading The Bulls to their nine thousandth consecutive national title. The entire city would come to a stand-still when the Bulls were playing and even a disinterested foreigner like myself couldn’t help but be impressed by the fervour with which the locals followed their team.

Then I watched a game on TV. What a waste of time! Each team is expected to score during an attack. Your team takes the ball, passes and dribbles it to the opposition end, puts it through the hoop and then rushes back to defend. The opposition team then passes and dribbles the ball to your team’s end whereupon they put it through the hoop. Repeat for 48 minutes. So the excitement isn’t focussed on your team scoring points, but on the opposition missing them. The winner is the team that doesn’t screw up as often. How underwhelming is that?

Rugby

Ireland have just been knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina. According to the media prior to the competition, this Irish squad is the best the country has ever had. They were genuine contenders to win a first World Cup for our small island. They would go all the way and carry the entire nation with them. Turns out they weren’t so great after all. Turns out they struggled against the weak teams in their group and were comprehensively outplayed by the strong ones.

Anyways, I don’t have much to say about rugby as I don’t know much about it. Except that Ireland aren’t as good as they thought. Argentina are better than the Irish thought. And there’s not a single product available to the Irish consumer that can’t be sold with a rugby-world-cup-themed advert. There’s an official soft-drink of the Irish World Cup Squad of course. But there’s also an official snack food, an official beer, an official water, an official airline, and official bank… all we were short of was “Anusol: The official hemorrhoid treatment of the Irish World Cup Squad”. Spectator sports are becoming little more than marketing opportunities.

Football (American)

Ha. A-ha ha ha ha. As Giles once remarked… “I think it’s rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility should feel compelled to strap on forty pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby.” Wise words indeed.

Tune in to Part 2 where I will discuss football (Gaelic), motorsports, cycling and golf among others.

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21
Jul 2007

I've waited for years to use it…

by Jim Bliss

D: … but what about Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand?
jim: Sorry, but I just can’t take anything seriously that’s named after a 50s B-movie.

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6
Jul 2007

Er… Nietzsche?

by Jim Bliss

Crappity crap crap fuckity fuck!

Well, I’m back from my interview at Trinity. Many thanks for the good luck wishes (in the comments to the last post) Zoe and Lucas… plus the others who emailed or texted. In the end, however, I fear I may have squandered all those positive vibes. Of course, it’s very easy to exaggerate one’s screw-ups in retrospect. And just because things didn’t go 100% perfectly doesn’t mean they were a disaster. All the same…

Q. So which philosophers are you currently interested in?
A. Er… [jim draws a complete blank… can’t even think of a single philosopher’s name, let alone one he’s currently interested in]… er… [the seconds tick by. For feck’s sake, there’s a copy of Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method in my bag not three feet from where I’m sitting! Yet can I think of a single name? No, I can’t.]… er… Nietzsche?

Or how about…
Q. So describe the basics of Freud’s theory of dreams…
A. Wellll… [once again jim draws a total blank. The words “symbolism” and “displacement” refuse to come to mind, as does the phrase “wish-fulfillment”. So instead there’s two minutes of incoherent nonsense as I try to describe Freud’s theories without recourse to those three terms].

Of course, the moment I stepped out of the interview, my brain kicked in… and as I walked down the flights of stairs and out of the building, I was muttering… Freud saw dreams as being of central importance to psychoanalysis. Initially he viewed dreams as a process of wish-fulfillment undertaken by the unconscious mind. However, because dreams often don’t appear that way, he hypothesized that dreams had both a manifest and a latent content. The manifest content — how the dream is recalled by the dreamer — is often a heavily-disguised or censored version of what the dream is really about. And what the dream is really about is the fulfillment of unsatisfied childhood desires. These desires — often shocking to the conscious mind — are rendered safe by two separate but connected processes; displacement (the association of disturbing emotions with apparently innocuous images) and symbolisation (almost always sexual in nature). Later in his life, however, after working with World War One veterans who had suffered from shellshock (what we’d now term Post-Traumatic Stress), Freud was forced to modify his theory of dreams. His ideas that dreams — almost invariably — referred back to childhood was incompatible with the clinical data he was gathering from the war veterans (whose recurrent nightmares of the trenches were clearly neither wish-fulfillment nor related to childhood events). This eventually led Freud to hypothesize the existence of ‘The Death Instinct’ or Thanatos.

Now, why the hell couldn’t I have said that in the interview? Why did I end up muttering it to startled passers-by instead? Goddamn it!

And what makes it all worse is the fact that the interview wasn’t exactly intimidating in any sense. The professor (Dr. RS) is very amiable, easy company. Formality was kept to a minimum and the whole experience was more like a chat than a classic interview. Albeit, a chat where one of the participants has inexplicably forgotten half his vocabularly and about 90% of what he’s read in the past 6 months.

Still, all I can do now is wait and hope that I’m recalling things as worse than they were. I’ll find out “within a month”. Fingers crossed and all.

3 comments  |  Posted in: Announcements


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5
Jul 2007

var about_me= Math.random()*8

by Jim Bliss

Apparently what the internet really needs is “eight random facts about me”. Eight facts to clog up google and slow down everyone’s search for nude pictures. Yes, it’s another one of those memes. And this time I’ve been tagged from two separate directions. Larry “nice arse” Teabag and Justin “light my fire” Yoghurt, employing a classic pincer manoeuvre, have inflicted this upon you dear reader. Please remember this fact should you want to vent your spleen at anyone. As is traditional on these occasions, one of the eight is made up…

  1. I was arrested and interrogated by the KGB while in Leningrad during the 1980s.
  2. I have seen 357 of The Guardian’s One Thousand Essential Films. This means that despite being — statistically speaking — roughly halfway through my life, I’ve only seen a little over a third of “essential films”. That said, I’m not entirely impressed by the thousand chosen. Takeshi Kitano has three films in the thousand which is more than I expected to be honest, but still less than he deserves. And the fact that Violent Cop and Zatoichi, excellent though they are, are on the list instead of Dolls and Hana-bi makes no sense at all. Also, where’s Manhattan and Stardust Memories? Why do Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and El Topo make the list, but not Santa Sangre? And how the hell can the list find room for a ‘Carry On…’ film but not include Stalker, 2046, Dances With Wolves or Yojimbo?
  3. I have an interview at Trinity College tomorrow afternoon for a place on an M.Phil course. Eeek!
  4. I once had to “take the controls” of a helicopter in flight because the pilot wanted to do a line of speed.
  5. When I was in highschool in Athens, myself and my friends used to play a drinking game called “Zoom, Schwartz, Figliano”. I remain undisputed champion.
  6. I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
  7. When I was 17, a friend of mine sent me a bag containing a number of very powerful mexican psychedelic mushrooms. He included a note which read “2 of these should sort you out”. Unfortunately, thanks to his illegible handwriting, it looked very much like “20 of these should sort you out”. Having only had experience with psilocybe semilanceata up until then, the number “20” didn’t seem all that unrealistic. That’s almost two decades ago now. I’m still hoping to come down some day.
  8. The first record I bought was the 7” of Ray Parker Junior’s Ghostbusters. The first album I bought was Remain In Light by Talking Heads. The first compact disc was Scoundrel Days by a-ha.

And now apparently I’m supposed to tag a bunch of other bloggers and invite them to join the memery. But that seems willfully cruel. Instead just let me say; if you’re on my blogroll and you want to continue this thing, then consider yourself tagged and have at it.

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25
Apr 2007

Some reviews

by Jim Bliss

Hallo folks. Well, I’m finally back from my extended Easter break. A long-weekend got transformed into a ten day holiday thanks to West Cork’s unusually-Mediterranean weather. Technically I was cycling (on my new and excellent bike). But I feel a bit of a cheat making that claim as the time mostly consisted of sitting on cliff-tops or beaches and eating the occasional biscuit. In amidst all the lazing about in the sun though, I helped someone clean a patio (don’t ask). Right at the end, after all the heavy lifting, bending and scrubbing was done, I decided to give the stones one last leisurely sweep. It was just then that some hitherto uncomplaining muscle in my lower back decided to go “ping” (or whatever sound muscles make when they tear).

At the time it was fairly painful, but bearable. The next day though was spent sitting in a car on my way back to Dublin. A journey that gave my back plenty of time to seize up good and proper. It’s starting to sort itself out now, and movement without unreasonable agony is possible again. But lying motionless for over a week has given me plenty of time to reflect on the fact that I can spend a week cycling and clambering over rocks and climbing the occasional tree and it be nothing but physically pleasurable… but a few hours of repetitive labour will bugger up my back.

This should surprise nobody except the creationists.

Of course, lazing around on the couch blitzed on painkillers and muscle-relaxants is hardly the worst fate that can befall a person (though it annoys me that I was forced to resort to such medication… the dearth of quality sensimilia in this country is shameful). Especially a person with an extensive DVD collection. So, some quickie reviews…

Stalker. It’s possible that this late-70s Russian art-SF film would be utterly incomprehensible even without taking a bunch of strong painkillers. Right now though, I can’t say for sure. Hypnotic, dreamlike and very odd. I recommend it.

Six Feet Under (Season 1). Television is almost never this good. The writing is wonderful, the acting is flawless and the production values make most Hollywood films seem pale and one-dimensional. I must admit to being vaguely annoyed by the very final scene of the season, but aside from that I can’t think of a single thing wrong with this programme. An unflinching and visionary look at human relationships and emotion. A work of genius.

Stranger Than Fiction. I have very little time for Will Ferrell (his part in Zoolander was bearable only because the rest of the film was so funny) but given the hype surrounding this film (I can’t help but be interested when the name Charlie Kaufman is mentioned, even if only by comparison) I figured it was worth a shot. And it turns out that — just like Jim Carrey — Will Ferrell is capable of doing a half-decent job when cast against type… in this case as a dull, repressed, buttoned-down office worker. Definitely worth a look.

Casino Royale. A bearable action flick. The chase scene at the beginning is by far the best part. When it shows up on TV it’s worth tuning in to the first ten minutes or so. Sadly it’s all downhill after that. Even the much-discussed torture scene is sanitised, so that it forces you to wince rather than turn away from the screen (as in Reservoir Dogs or Syriana). If someone’s getting tortured on-screen and you’re only wincing, then the director hasn’t done their job very well.

The Ice Harvest. John Cusack is a very watchable actor. And he’s been in some excellent films. Unfortunately his ratio of good films to utter dross isn’t as good as it once was, and he’s getting close to being an indication that I don’t want to see a film rather than a reason to see it. This is a particularly silly thriller that telegraphs every single plot twist and has a dire cop-out ending. Avoid.

I also rewatched Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls (possibly my favourite film ever) which gets more beautiful and moving with every viewing. Kitano had a degree of international success with Zatoichi which — it seems — irritated him somewhat. In response he made what is apparently one of the weirdest and most impenetrable films of recent years… Takeshis’. I can’t wait to see it!

Books

Lately my reading has become rather more focussed than is traditional for me. Regimented even. On my shelf since Christmas sits Pynchon’s massive and enticing Against The Day. It is, as yet, unopened. Well, that’s not strictly true… I couldn’t resist reading the first couple of pages… it starts well, introduced by a Thelonious Monk quote — “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light” — and opening aboard the hydrogen airship, Inconvenience. But I decided back at Christmas that I’d wait until summer to read it. For two reasons. One of them being that the best place and time to read great fiction is under some trees on a warm sunny day.

A bit less fluffy, the other reason is simply that although I’m looking forward to full-time study, it’s meant I’ve had to spend a wee while “revising”. See, before I made an abrupt about-turn and got sucked into engineering, my original degree — quite a while ago — was in philosophy. It included courses on ‘The Philosophy of Psychoanalysis’, ‘Theories of Rationality’ and the heavily-psychoanalytical ‘Philosophy and Gender’. Nonetheless, it was still primarily a philosophy course and in no way did it provide a formal grounding in psychoanalysis. And because psychoanalysis is a complex subject (in the sense that there are a multitude of competing theories) it can take a while to acquire a fairly thorough overview. There’s no single book I’ve found that does even a quarter-decent job, so it’s a case of reading several different collections, often with a phrase like “The Essential” in the title (as, for instance, in Princeton’s excellent The Essential Jung) and keeping those most invaluable tools by your side… The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology and The Penguin Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. The bevelled edges are pretty cool too.

I’m also starting to get the impression that Lacan is just Sartre with Venn Diagrams. But I imagine you get into trouble with the psychoanalytic community for saying things like that.

Anyways, I’m recovered enough to sit at the PC for more than five minutes without fretting that my back is going to seize up again. There was a worrying few days when I convinced myself that I’d slipped a disc, which I’m told can sometimes require surgery. Thankfully that wasn’t the case and I managed to cycle to the village and back today without any ill effect. So once I’ve caught up on my email, I’ll hopefully be blogging on a semi-regular basis again.

5 comments  |  Posted in: Reviews » Book reviews, Film reviews


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31
Mar 2007

Standing outdoors. Then: don't see 300

by Jim Bliss

Having spent almost no time online this week, I kind of binged today. There was a moment this evening… I was fetching some juice from the fridge… when instead of reaching out to grasp the fridge door-handle, my hand moved semi-consciously as though to mouse-click a notional ‘open’ button on the fridge. The cognitive dissonance was unsettling to say the least. So I immediately went for a long walk outdoors.

I stood under a tree at the edge of a field and watched a small group of cows. They were, like myself, standing around doing very little. Unlike myself, they were very occasionally taking mouthfuls of vegetation and slowly chewing them. For my part, I ate a portion of heavily-vinegared chips from the village chip-shop. It turned out to be an excellent antidote to information-overload.

Sound of lazy cows
Taste of grass, and vinegar
Broader horizons

Later, myself and a cousin went to see 300. I feel compelled to say the following; please don’t waste your money. It’s an awful film! It has enough redeeming features — just about — to keep you sitting in the cinema once you’ve paid your money. Though having said that, I’d possibly have walked out if I’d been on my own. At the time I wasn’t to know that my cousin was thinking exactly the same thing.

Redeeming features… it is occasionally very pleasing to the eye. But so is MTV, and I don’t want to pay a tenner to watch two solid hours of that. Hmmmm… OK, redeeming feature then.

Because beyond that, it’s a bunch of unlikeable and interchangeable half-naked body-builders shouting “We’re Fucking Hard, We Are!” Occasionally the King of Sparta gives a speech to his men in a style that veers oddly between Genghis Khan and the President of America as played by Harrison Ford.

With some judicious editing, 300 would make a fantastic six minute video for a Rammstein track.

UPDATE: Via Ken MacLeod, check out this review of 300.

3 comments  |  Posted in: Poetry, Reviews » Film reviews


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14
Mar 2007

A cheeky request

by Jim Bliss

I’m feeling a wee bit crappy. I’ve got a bastid head-cold (how many colds am I going to get this winter? Eh? Usually I get one a year, if that, around October time. I’ve already had two since Christmas. And I’m eating tons of fruit and drinking pure fruit smoothies like they’re going out of fashion. I’ve got vitamins coming out of my ears people! Not literally of course. That would be odd. And probably require medical treatment. But you get the picture). And the cold has arrived just in time for my birthday tomorrow (cash and high quality sensimilia to the usual address). Not that I had anything planned, but it’s still crappy timing.

I mention my birthday only because I just realised that this blog turned one-year-old last week (well, that and wanting the cash and high quality sensimilia). I’ve noticed most bloggers seem to mark the birthday of their blog in some way.

OK, now that’s done, onto that cheeky request…

… as some of you may know, I’m applying for a Masters commencing this autumn. An M.Phil to be exact… it may lead on to a Phd in Psychoanalysis in the future. Aaaaanyways… what with trying my hand in industry for a while, it’s almost a decade and a half since I was last in academia (and that university — UNL — has only gone and got amalgamated into London Metropolitan). I need an academic reference for my M.Phil application, and I suspect the best I’ll get from UNL / LMU is a rather impersonal letter from a lecturer who only half remembers me. Not that I’m unmemorable. Far from it, I hope. But it has been a long time and while I imagine I’ll get a recommendation that says good things about me, I want one that says remarkable things. So while I’ll get hold of the UNL one, I’m hoping to go one better.

And with that in mind, if any of my regular readers is an established academic who — having got a sense of who I am through my blog — is willing to say nice things about me in a letter, then I would be eternally grateful and will say very nice things about you at every opportunity. Even at the most inappropriate times. Also, I’ll buy the drinks if you decide you need to meet me prior to recommending me. My email address is jim ‘at’ numero57 ‘dot’ net.

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16
Feb 2007

Catching up Two

by Jim Bliss

Ummmm, first I’d like to pose a quick question of style, dear patient reader. Do you think it’s better for a blogger to write three or four short posts, each about a specific topic or news item or whatever; OR, one longer piece incorporating all? Y’see, my natural tendency is to write vaguely chatty meandering posts that take in a few issues… sometimes giving them their own sub-heading, sometimes just allowing them to run into one another and do their own thing. It’s how I think… probably has something to do with spending the 90s trying to be both a philosopher and an industrial engineer. And I’ve noticed that I’m very much in the minority on this approach to blogging. Most go down the several shorter posts road. While that clearly makes a blog easier to reference and arguably more useful as a source of information (as far as a blog can be), it’s just not the way I write.

All the same, if a huge majority of my readership (say… three or more) felt that shorter, punchier posts might make this a groovier place, then I’d certainly give it some consideration.

Which doesn’t mean I’d change my style of course. A part of me would indeed consider it, but there’s also a part of me that would think, “oh, who gives a rat’s arse what they think?” And I’m not entirely sure which part of me would win that battle.

All of which is a characteristically verbose introduction to another, ooh look! a collection of links and a paragraph about why each of them is noteworthy post. Dig.

First up is Steve Bell’s most recent “Dr. John” Reid cartoon. What I find both chilling and very funny (don’t you love art that inspires wildly conflicting emotions?) is the fact that the cartoon merely depicts Reid along with a caption that accurately sums up his position on freedom of speech. It’s phrased wickedly, of course, but it’s basically no more than a bald statement of fact. Lovely.

Then we have the news that a US Air Force pilot has been demoted / forced to resign because she posed naked for Playboy. Of course, anyone who knows me will immediately realise that I’m only drawing attention to this story because it allows me to quote Apocalypse Now in context… not that you really need a justification for quoting The Now whether in or out of context. All the same, who can read that story and not hear the voice of Kurtz…

We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes because it’s obscene!

Can you think of anything more ridiculous than an organisation that trains its members to more effectively murder people, getting squeamish when one of them flashes a bit of flesh?

But I wouldn’t want to think all the best stuff is happening in the mainstream media. Cos it ain’t. You never ever get lines like, “It illustates more eloquently than my analysis ever could just how utterly fucking deluded Mr Bond is.” in the mainstream media. And the world is a poorer place because of it. Read Merrick’s short but sweet piece over at Bristling Badger; have faith in the market.

Meanwhile, on the ever-readable journal of David Byrne is one of the best bits of writing I’ve read online for quite a while; Free Will, Part 2: Support Our Troops. I have to wonder though… is he dropping by and nicking my ideas…

Is there such a thing as a psychology of nations, of people? Do nations get neurotic? Crazy? Sad and angry? Bitter and resentful? Proud and arrogant? I think maybe they do.

Oi David! That’s my Masters Thesis… back off mate! Or at least wait until I’ve been accepted onto the course.

Although I’m no longer a Londoner, some my friends are. I still take a great interest in the goings-on of London, and still have a bit of a soft spot for Ken Livingstone despite his conversion from Red to Reddish-Purple. Without a doubt, one of the best things Ken did was to start the process of forcing car owners to pay for some of the damage they do. For this reason, reports of the Congestion Charge being a failure should be vigorously exposed as the blatant lies they are whenever they appear. For more on this, head over to Pigdogfucker and read Lies, damn lies, and the Congestion Charge.

And in brief…

  • On Everday Apocalypticism over at Smokewriting… “the sense of having participated in an apocalypse which one failed to notice”. What a splendid turn of phrase. Rochenko’s post tackles some of the the same themes that David W. Kidner explores in Nature & Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity (I imagine. I only started reading Kidner’s book today having been delayed by a pressing need to re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four).
  • At Random Speak, L has discovered one of the most startling statues I’ve seen in a long time in Another Post on Odd Art. It’s difficult to believe the sculptor didn’t know exactly what he was doing.
  • Via Perfect I discovered this long but excellent essay by Jonathan Lethem; The Ecstasy of Influence. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the creative process and how it relates to the expropriation, rearrangement, remixing and fusion of pre-existing ideas. The first novel I wrote contained two chapters which were entirely composed of cut-up and rearranged Jorge Luis Borges stories… done the old-fashioned way too, enlarged in a photocopier and physically cut up and pasted onto card… none of yer fancy software solutions. So Lethem is very much preaching to the choir with me, but a fascinating piece nonetheless.
  • Justin at Chicken Yoghurt has this to say in his latest post… “This blog is now taking a break. I don’t know how long that break will be but hopefully it won’t be a permanent one.” This is sad news indeed and displeases me enormously. No doubt the chap has his reasons. But it’s still bad news and his voice will be missed. There’s a whole Serious To-Do going on in the UK political blog scene right now with threats of legal action being made left, right and centre. Well, mostly ‘right’ actually. I’ve avoided the subject but may well weigh-in with a suitably inappropriate comment or two in the near future that’ll offend absolutely everyone involved and see me vilified and attacked with sharp lawyers.

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