adynaton

Moving On

2012-02-04T23:46:00.002+02:00

Google has of late been preparing some sort of integrated Stazi/Gestapo list which collects all our information into a easily marketable package. I'm an old fashioned guy who has old fashioned views about data mining and already began to grow suspicious when Google acquired YouTube and began bombarding me with crap that fits my profile. I don't like it and it makes me paranoid. Because of this, I'm moving the blog to WordPress at Non vi sed voce. If there are regular readers out there, and the stats would suggest there are a couple, please head on to the new blog for future updates.

It's been a nice few years on Blogger.

Cheers,
Adynaton

French Psychoanalysts Are Ridiculous People: Sophie Robert's Le Mur Banned in France

2012-01-28T22:51:00.009+02:00

Not too long ago I watched the Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask and enjoyed the way the host of the series mocked close-minded academic blowhards. There seems to be a trend for these kinds of documentaries, because yet another one popped up on a mailing list. However, whereas it is usually enjoyable to watch the likes of Hjernevask, this particular documentary called Le Mur: La psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’autisme really got my goat. The main reason for that was that the victims of the psychoanalysts presented in the documentary are autistic children. The analysts appear as absurd fiction peddlers who not only deserve to be mocked but must be mocked as much as possible and as soon as possible. The whole documentary is on YouTube and a bit of googling gets more hits.

Awful people. Anyway, the second disturbing thing about the film is that my sources tell me that the film has been banned in France because the psychoanalysts' feelings were hurt. The filmmaker, Sophie Robert, is now in a bit of trouble, although the ban should bring more publicity to the film and the child abuse committed by the psychoanalysts. Usually theoretical bullshit is fine when it does no real harm, but someone has to draw the line. Sophie Robert did just that and now the analysts are protecting their pride with lawyers. They seem like despicable creatures who preach Lacan and Lévi-Strauss like I sing in the shower: off key and laying waste to civilization. I actually couldn't watch the documentary in one go, but it's important I did finally manage it. Anyone reading this should try the same. I must warn you, though, that you have to withstand a pretty hefty dose of French psychobabble before the documentariste tells us that the point of the film is to advocate therapies that were adopted in the US thirty years ago. In case you need a palate cleanser afterwards, check out the Temple Grandin movie to see how that worked out.

"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

2012-01-21T16:50:00.010+02:00

Language Learning: ProVoc Vocabulary Tool

2012-01-15T12:51:00.015+02:00

After a long day at the office yesterday with very little to show for it, I went online in search of something that could assist me in language learning. Because I've recently thought about vocabulary in particular, I downloaded a free Mac program called ProVoc. The idea was to find an option for flash cards. People say they are an effective way to learn vocabulary, but I don't see myself using them. I'm much too lazy. The way I've studied vocabulary has been to read an article from an online paper, look up the words in an online dictionary and memorize them as best I can. There are two problems with this. One, I have to copy-paste words from the article to the dictionary and go back and forth. And, secondly, I usually leave no trail for systematic revision. I have done some word lists, but they seem a bit pointless. It's nice to have something like ProVoc where I can put them to use.

Maybe it will inspire me to make more word lists now that there is a way of revising and testing myself. But even if I don't there are quite a few vocabulary files by various people on the site I can use if I am feeling lazy. I've tried some of the Latin, French, Spanish, German and Greek ones and they seem mostly OK, although one does bump into the odd spelling mistake sometimes. The software can also be used for other kinds of memorization, of course. Some grammar stuff like conjugations etc. make perfect sense as word lists. And it doesn't even have to be language -- I noticed someone used it for studying high school chemistry, for example.

The point of the program, for me at least, is that it gets rid of all the mechanical stuff I have to do in order to revise. ProVoc lets me sit back and do nothing but read the words. That is, basically do nothing when I learn and then test myself if I feel like it. It makes things easier but also gets rid of the distraction of transferring words from the text to the dictionary every time. It's perhaps not even a question of being lazy, then, but doing the job with as few distractions as possible, which aids concentration, with as little effort as possible. Both make the task a little bit easier and although things that are worth your while are usually difficult, it is not difficulty itself that is the objective here. Worthwhile things are difficult, but in this case they should be made as easy as possible.

Noise Sensitivity and the Effects of Noise Canceling

2012-01-12T14:30:00.022+02:00

I'm not an expert on noise sensitivity and can only reflect on my own experiences, but I've acquired some insight since I purchased noise-canceling headphones for use in my office. They arrived three days ago. My office is in my university building and in terms of ambient noise it's perhaps not the noisiest place in the world, but enough so to cause a number of problems. There is an air conditioning system, a radiator and of course the computer fan. All these in themselves are not that distracting, but put together they create a hum at certain frequencies that I find annoying. I say annoying, but the problem is actually much more severe than that. I realize that now after spending a few days in the office with my noise-canceling headphones on. The hardest thing about the whole experience has actually been to come to grips with the fact that my noise sensitivity was a real problem that had to be taken care of somehow.

I've played in loud rock bands since I was a teenager, much of the time with no protection, so I'm not shy about loud noises. Constant amorphous noise, however, is a different matter. On several occasions, it has given me migraine attacks, shorter headaches and just a general feeling of uneasiness. I tire easily. After a few hours on the train, for example, even with headphones or earbuds on, I'm completely exhausted and can't function properly. And this is the one symptom I never did recognize as severe enough. Fatigue sneaks up on you and makes everything difficult. Loud continuous hum is murder and it's made worse by the fact that most people around me seem to be oblivious to it. This means I can't complain too much about it. Others seem able to block it out somehow. How they do it is a mystery to me.

The Humming

The three days I've worked in my office with my new noise-canceling headphones have been quite a revelation. I've always been aware of the hum, but thought that I should man up and take it like everyone else does. As a result, I've been completely exhausted when I get home in the evenings. However, I thought the headaches were just the same headaches I've always suffered from. Never did I think they were anything but normal. The contrast has been amazing. I'm no longer exhausted at the end of the day and feel much better throughout the workday. The physical effects have been equally remarkable. Apparently I'm very tense and sit in an awkward position with the noise. The noise means I'm in a constant state of near panic -- I should mention the panic attacks as well, I guess -- and my stress levels have been very high. With the headphones I can work longer hours, concentrate better, I don't need as many breaks and am not as easily distracted as before.

All this is to say that the headphones (fairly cheap Audio-Technica ATH-ANC23 earbuds, in case you're wondering) have been a lifesaver. My only regret is that I didn't get noise-canceling headphones sooner. The change in my overall well-being has been remarkable and they have genuinely enhanced my quality of life in just a couple of days. It sounds like hyperbole, I know, but to someone who is very sensitive to noise this should all make sense. To regular folk, those who are able to overlook such things, it will sound ridiculous and perhaps even a bit pathetic -- I know this from being teased about being a "sensitive" child --, but if you suffer from ambient noise I would advise you to get a pair as soon as possible. Seriously. Don't be bossed around by normies. There are a number of options available from the cheap but very good Audio-Tech buds to the swanky Bose stuff. They can be expensive (I can't afford the Boses, but have heard good things about them), but it's well worth the fifty bucks or euros to three hundred to get rid of all the nuisances and genuine pain that comes with noise sensitivity. Some seem to take hums and noises in stride and others simply can't. If you are one of those who can't, you shouldn't have to when there's an easy fix.

Noise-Canceling Headphones Are Awesome

2012-01-09T13:40:00.006+02:00

On an acoustic phonetics course some time ago, I discovered that if you create a sound wave that reverses the phase of the ambient sound, it will result in silence through a process called phase cancellation. It was an amazing thought which meant, at least for me, that there could one day be a switch you can turn in your house which makes everything go completely silent. Of course, engineering does not work in the domain of absolutes, and hence there's no such thing as absolute silence but for the deaf, but even a small bit of noise-cancellation can seem magical.

My office has an incredibly loud AC and although everyone else seems oblivious to it, it sometimes gives me a headache and it has bothered me quite a bit for a while now. Everything seems to have a fan. I've used my Sennheiser HD-25 headphones to help block out the noise, but they can be a bit clumsy sometimes. There are noise-canceling headphones these days, but the good ones are quite expensive. After some snooping, I found that the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC23 earbuds were good value for money (Amazon has them at ridiculously low prices) and ordered a pair. They arrived today and I was ready to be disappointed, being the miserable pessimist I am. But I was pleasantly surprised when I switched on the noise-canceling on these things. The torrent of noise just switched off and the continuous sensory overload I've been suffering from all these months just went away. Perfect!

Some of the hum still gets through, but the low frequencies which do the damage are completely cut off -- the system cuts the lower frequencies and lets the outside world in through, as it were, a cutoff filter. It's pleasant, very pleasant. The noise-cancellation creates a slight hiss, but it's not too disturbing. It's actually so pleasant that I'm thinking about saving for the pricey Bose stuff to gain access to more hi-fi silence. I've always been very sensitive to noise and this will save me a lot of bother and frustration. If I could install a system like this in my head permanently, I would. In the meantime, these earbuds do the job very well indeed.

The French Are Awesome

2012-01-08T19:48:00.015+02:00

The French have a fantastic language, great literature and art, great food, and their arrogance about it all is absolutely adorable. It's a shame about their popular music and their generally clumsy sense of humor, but by and large they are just about the coolest people in Europe. And now they have decided to go ahead with a financial transaction tax, reports say, whether the British like it or not. The Tobin tax idea is one that someone has to take a go at first before anyone else dares to do it, so kudos to the French for their bravery.

Sarkozy said on Friday that France would not wait for European partners to agree to a pan-European tax which Germany and Italy back but which Britain, keen to shield its huge financial services industry, vigorously rejects. Presidential adviser Henri Guaino said on Friday that France would decide by the end of the month how it would apply the tax and State Secretary Benoist Apparu said on Sunday a bill could be put to parliament as soon as February ahead of a recess at the end that month.

The Brits don't want to do this, because the City is basically a pirate island of the European finance markets and politicians do not want to anger their masters in any way. The fear is that the finance moguls will remove themselves from the City and go elsewhere, taking the wealth they keep for themselves anyway with them. Perhaps Mogadishu or the Gulf of Guinea would be a good place for them to start anew. There are great profits to be made in Mogadishu and, although it may sometimes be necessary to step over a body or two, it's basically a paradise for anyone not too bothered by bullet holes. I'm not sure if there is any infrastructure left, but then again even Dubai gets by without a proper sewage system and moneybags love that place.

Happy New Year Americans!

2012-01-01T17:07:00.011+02:00

The ACLU reports that the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize just signed a bill that will allow US officials to disappear people if they so wish. This is monumental news and shows that anyone thinking about going to the US should think twice. No reason, no charge, no nothing, and they can just take you and make you vanish if they so wish. Actually, they can come for you anywhere, take you, and make you disappear forever.

"President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. "The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally." . . . The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.

So, there you have it. In one stroke of a pen Obama became the head of Stazi, the Gestapo, and more. The Supreme Court will hopefully have something to say about this, but Jesus Christ this must be one of the most heinous acts of any head of state in a long time. It's also against international law and sort of a war crime. They did give the Peace Prize to Kissinger as well, so the Swedes have not been adverse to giving the Prize to war criminals in the past, but talk about a fall from grace! Happy New Year Americans! and enjoy your Orwellian nightmare.

Merry Christmas Mr. Putin

2011-12-24T23:35:00.000+02:00

Gratuitous Post About Autism and Word Lists

2011-12-20T22:08:00.015+02:00

The front page becomes slow to load when there are more than a few embedded videos in it and this is annoying because I use the page as a gateway to my daily news fix. This post will knock at least one video from the front page. The problem could be fixed via the blogger settings, but I need a reason to write too.

I watched the Temple Grandin movie and enjoyed it very much. It's nice to see one about geeks that does not have a silly love story in it. Nor did it have the great singular breakthrough that finally releases all the cathartic emotions that were pent up for so long. The point is that they aren't there, at least not in the same way. Most symptoms were portrayed in a way that seemed to make sense. The sensory overload, panic attacks, patterned thinking and social awkwardness were probably pretty realistic and the point was made that autistic people cannot nor should not be cured. Symptoms can be controlled and of course some mental facets should be explored and developed. Which is the great message Dr Grandin has promoted for decades.

The second thing I did today (instead of writing my thesis which is what I should have been doing) was to search for word lists to memorize. Two lists caught my eye: one for German and another for Latin. The Latin is much broader than the German. Both were links from maths departments. This is odd, but I'm not curious enough to try to figure out why. I'll learn them both and see what happens. Perhaps the best way of going about doing an experiment would be to select a language that is completely foreign to me, but right now practical things dictate how I should proceed. The German file has around 1200 words and the Latin roughly 3400 -- at least that's what a quick line count says. It's not enough for either language, but it should help me get a feel for the sort of studying that focuses on word lists and perhaps suggest some other possible methods.

Study Finds 20,000 Dutch Children Raped by Priests

2011-12-18T11:47:00.000+02:00

"We are all capable of keeping two sets of books"

2011-12-17T09:37:00.015+02:00

Contemplating the misfortune of others was Christopher Hitchens's purpose in life. Having him in the limelight was like having your own bully in the schoolyard wreaking havoc in the bullying network that consists of stupid people trying to play the game in a way that guarantees those who shout the loudest get the best things in life. What we could learn from him was a frankness that had even Swiftian characteristics, albeit without the madness that finally overcame Swift. That frankness consists of telling people how they think unthinkingly when they forget which books they should be looking at, when important things are discussed by adults and "the discretion of the troglodytes", as one philosopher called it, cannot be tolerated. When important things are at hand, we must speak of them by their true names. This takes courage, because you will be bullied if you speak up.

There is a time for polite conversation and then there is a time for bluntness. The great scholar of argumentation Stephen Toulmin wrote in his classic work The Uses of Argument:

The words of some men are trusted simply on account of their reputation for caution, judgment and veracity. But this does not mean that the question of their right to our confidence cannot arise in the case of all their assertions: only, that we are confident that any claim they make weightily and seriously will in fact prove to be well-founded, to have a sound case behind it, to deserve – have a right to – our attention on its merits.

Who has the right to our confidence? When people speak of grave matters, the burden of proof is assumed to be respected by everyone participating in the conversation. How quick one is to doubt the sincerity of others is a question of character: the skeptic will be quick to ask for validation with impunity. But it is, of course, also a matter of facts and the truth. The skeptic, the philosopher and the rhetorician all see a kind of sanctity in truth which does not have the fullness of the divine but is rather a pristine void that guarantees freedom for the life of the mind.

There is a culture of politeness in public debate and that is wonderful when the participants are worthy, but when people unworthy of the subject take part this culture is not our friend anymore. It becomes part of the problem, the enemy of reason and reasonableness, and has to be subverted. If there is one thing Christopher Hitchens will be remembered for, I think, it will be his brutal treatment of ideologues. Those insincere or even sincere unworthies who would make the world into a prison of their own cramped ideas and impose a tyranny of flaccid fictions. It is very sad that one of the angriest voices willing to make them appear as ridiculous as their are is now gone. "We are all capable of keeping two sets of books", he once said, and we should be reminded of that every day or else we will start believing that morality and ethics are mere abstractions and that the good life awaits us only after this one has passed.

Economists Are To Blame For the Crisis

2011-12-16T15:16:00.014+02:00

The new Professor of Economics at JSBE Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi says in a recent interview what few Professors of economics say: "We economists almost destroyed the global economy." Naughty, naughty economists! You should be ashamed of yourselves! However, it's not like the economists are the brightest people in any university. In fact, the way they are described in mine always takes me back to a wonderful old Laurel and Hardy short where the two are joined by others in a frank discussion about utilitarian ethics from the economist's point of view:

Although that's not completely fair, economists just seem to attract people who are attracted to money and hence a bit silly. And Alajoutsijärvi has a point. One must wonder what on earth have economists been teaching these monsters whose greed and lechery know no limits. In terms of ethics, I'm guessing that the rule is: if it's not illegal it's not unethical. This easily turns into: if I'm not caught, it's not unethical. Alajoutsijärvi says that "mainstream economists and the majority don't think they've done nothing wrong; they and other business leaders only disparage politicians." Politics is closely tied to the banking sector, so perhaps they share the blame, but economists have surely done enough to make sure there's enough blame to share.

The Professor recommends the Real-World Economics Review which I have never read or heard of, but shall look into if I can maintain my interest for this woeful subject long enough. A quick look at the journal tells me it was formerly called the Post-Autistic Economics Review and it is related to something called Post-Autistic Economics. The term autistic is used here in the non-PC informal way to denote someone who lives in a frictionless world of fantasy instead of the real world. I would love to chastise these people for using the term in this way, but I did the same in a recent published piece and am also guilty. Perhaps we should call economics like this by its true name and change the movement's name to Post-Stupid Economics. Post-stupid things are of course dreams as long as human nature cherishes stupidity, but that's what dreams are for.

Nerds Against Vampire Ego Porn

2011-12-14T07:48:00.000+02:00

Language Learning: Vocabulary

2011-12-11T23:51:00.006+02:00

Some languages are fun and others necessary to know. The learning process is never over and one must spend some time maintaining the languages one knows while updating a third and maybe beginning the next one. I've known at least one of those annoying people who seem to have acquired eight languages with relative ease and almost pass for a native speaker in each. I'm not one of them and actually have to study. It takes time to learn to read a foreign language, even if it is a familiar European language like French or German and doesn't have a script that looks like a Keith Haring piece or grammar that makes differential equations look like ... another Keith Haring piece. It takes a lot of time and effort, I'm sure, even if you have a mutant brain.

My latest acquisition, an impulse buy really, was Rush Hour German. It sounds like a fairly standard language course and I've been happy with it. The file is five hours long, which is usually a good indicator of quality. But here's what I came to realize listening to the course: there are still not enough words in it to make you able to read a German newspaper. Bild, maybe, but that's mostly pictures of cars and tits. A proper newspaper, I mean. Rush Hour German says it will teach you 400 essential words and that that should get you going. Maybe it will, but it will not get you very far at all.

English has the most words of any language and my Wikipedia source tells me 2,000 words is enough for a rudimentary grasp of English -- the figure is apparently based on research conducted in the fifties. Probably, but you are going to need quite a few more words to read and write anything resembling decent prose. The number sounds low for some reason and 400 sounds ridiculously low for German as well. Perhaps the hours checking French words from a dictionary are knocking in the back of my head and calling bullshit.

To get back to the Wikipedia article, research from the 80s tells us that 2,000 words provides 80% reading comprehension (whatever that means), for 6,000 words that number is 90% and 98% for around ten thousand words more. I suspect something of importance happens on the higher end of that scale. At an average rate of 3,000 words per year the average student will have gathered the 12,000 words possessed by the average high-school graduate in four years. Chomsky told Ali G that a normal mature human being will have tens of thousands of words at his or her disposal. I'm guessing here, but tens of thousands sounds like true fluency. I'm sure I know 400 words of German and yet can do very little. Perhaps it's because I don't know much of what is being left unsaid when I say something.

The larger figures begin to make sense when you think about how long it actually takes the average student to learn a new language. Four years of active study sounds about right -- by active I mean that you are learning about eight new words a day or 3,000 a year. It's a leisurely pace when you compare it to Mr Mutant Brain and his ilk, but even so it does assume daily contact with the language. It also gives us a hint as to how to accelerate language learning: learning more vocabulary. If your memory is more or less normal, you might be able to double the amount of vocabulary you learn in a year. Make it not the word of the day or eight words a day, but sixteen. It sounds simple, and I'm going to try it. In two years, perhaps, I'll be able to write down my results in German and tell the world that the secret of learning a language is looking up words in a dictionary and then remembering them when you see them next time.

"Those People" in Amsterdam

2011-12-05T15:26:00.008+02:00

I'm looking forward to visiting Amsterdam and because I'm getting old, what I look forward to the most are the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. There are a few other museums to go to, not to mention the city's architecture which can be experienced by just walking around like an idiot, which I am perfectly willing to do. There's also a bunch of 17th century history stuff that would be nice to put in context, which I can do at least to some extent just by seeing the city. Then there is this:

Not being a party animal anymore, the wild reputation of the city did put me off a bit, but thanks to Bill O'Reilly those fears can now be put to rest. I count myself one of "those people" now, those people who like to let others do their own thing. Amsterdammers seem like that, so I'll probably feel very much at home there. My trip is well outside the tourist season and this makes me hopeful that the city will not be full of tourists. But if so, that would be OK too. After all, most of them would be "those people" as well.

A Song for the Breitnerweer

2011-12-04T14:54:00.000+02:00

One More Post About the Sexes

2011-12-02T15:39:00.007+02:00

For some reason, I've once again strayed to strange waters and thought about the sexes. This has to stop and I think I've come to a conclusion that puts the matter to rest for now. After watching two Scandinavian documentary series, the Norwegian Hjernevask and the Swedish Könskriget, I'm amazed to find that these stories of mean and manipulative people, mostly women, promoting what they perceive as women's issues or feminism have made me think more highly of women in general. They have also given me the courage to say that people like the ones targeted by the documentaries are either stupid, incompetent or mental.

It looks like many of the most vocal people promoting themselves in the field of gender studies are bullies and it's very important that they are made to appear as ridiculous as they are. The Norwegian documentary did an excellent job doing so and apparently the incredibly smug attitude of the researches portrayed in it cost Norwegian gender studies millions in research grants. Careers were probably ruined by Hjernevask, as they were thanks to the more sinister Swedish Könskriget, and the clownish presenter of Hjernevask was absolutely the best person to do what he set out to do. A comedian, his approach was to poke gentle fun at people and yet not to get bullied into submission by his interviewees. Ridicule is a wonderful argumentative tool when it is used correctly.

When one meets these smug people, it's important to know what you are in for. One of the most persistent argumentative tactic, and I would think the one they are most used to, is to tell the listener that how they think about a given issue is wrong and then correct the installed misconception. Because I'm stubborn, alarms go off immediately, but it's difficult to know what to do when given this paper tiger sermon. Two ways of responding come to mind and they both involve getting away from the question-begging the person addressing you is trying to entrap you in. First, you could prove the original assumption mistaken, as the host of Hjernevask did, but that might involve finding a Steven Pinker to explain stuff to your smug friend. On the other hand, facts seem to have little impact on them and it might just be a waste of time. The other response is to make fun of them. This makes sure that you don't have to play the question-begging game and it's way more satisfying than trying to argue with people who will not listen.

It's a liberating feeling to realize this. Ridicule has a part to play here and it's important. It's also OK. You will not mock women as a gender and so mock half the population of the planet. If you are around clever people, they will work out what you are doing and hopefully join in the conversation. The taboo around mocking feminist fundies will disappear eventually, so now's the chance to do it. Silly people are silly people and they deserve all they get if they try to bully others with silly arguments. One doesn't want to become a bully oneself, so it's best to react with jovial mockery, keep it light and be civil. That's my theory at least. Hopefully I will have a chance to try it out soon.

I Laughed Hardest at the Snipes Bit

2011-11-30T23:06:00.003+02:00

Twilight -- A Review of a Review

2011-11-29T16:19:00.014+02:00

My film criticism site of choice is Ruthless Reviews and they don't disappoint with their review of the new Twilight movie. Modern popular cinema is mostly rubbish, so it's pleasant to read nihilistic and hateful reviews of its cynical attempts to tap the lowest common denominator. Sometimes these reviews are informative as well, like this one which equates the Twilight franchise with porn. It's a meditation on the differences between men and women in the worst stand up comic tradition, but it brings out the way in which both porn and Twilight feed the vanity of the spectator.

If Twilight is considered cinema, then Busty Nurses 9 is too. Sure both happen on screen, but the screen is secondary. It’s your own reaction you crave. Everybody knows what will happen already: Bella and Edward get married and start a family, Nina Hartley does reverse cowgirl to the guy with the brain injury and cures his amnesia. We put ourselves inside these visceral simulations via cinema to harvest our deepest desires: Women want to be eternally worshipped by supernatural forces that fight over them while overdosing on praise from this world and the next. Men just want to get boned by sluts. And love has absolutely nothing to do with either of these things.

There is very little to add to this but to say that I believe Dan Brown's junk seemed to work in the same way. Take one regular young lady with whom all the women in the audience can identify and make her Jesus Christ. The association is automatic and a woman will find herself Jesus Christ for a while, which apparently gives her great pleasure. As with Twilight and love, it has nothing to do with religion nor is it supposed to. It's designed to make one think one is a god among men, worshiped and revered as divine.

I don't get this reaction in any visceral way and the review is as close as I will get to watching Twilight, but thinking about it made me realize I do get Charles Bronsonesque revenge fantasies. It's great fun to see Clint Eastwood or Arnie lose it and murder everything in sight. That's fiction and it should stay fiction, as Frank Miller's crazy comments have recently shown. Ruthless Reviews reviews these action fantasies as well in their 80s Action section. I get porn, of course, but can't experience Twilightesque porn in the same way, perhaps for lack of estrogen. Fantasies about being worshiped as a god or by demonic forces for whatever reason sound like nightmares to me, but it's great to finally see a sensible explanation of the phenomenon that takes into account how some get off on Twilight like others get off on Busty Nurses 1-9.

Soilwork

2011-11-27T23:54:00.014+02:00

Once upon a hot parched midday,
Long welcome friends began a tale.
Bleary-eyed, fiery breath, decay,
The first began to sing and wail:
"We've grown impatient with the world.
How it refuses to be known!"
He said as their brows went unfurled,
All posts deserted, covers blown.
"The thought of seeing through the seen
And hearing truth in truth once told,"
Said the other (What could he mean?),
"'Twas old 'fore old Plato was old."
Their forms slipped by unseen until
Silhouettes turned to dust and browned
The air. Breath from the one so still
Ploughed unploughed thought and split the ground.

Inappropriate Behaviour Towards Women

2011-11-24T13:28:00.027+02:00

The Finnish press is hosting an orgy at the expense of this man, Mitro Repo.
He's an orthodox priest and member of the European Parliament. Apparently a number of anonymous people somewhere in parliament circles said he behaves inappropriately towards women and he in turn has asked for forgiveness. For what, we don't know. One of his colleagues says it might be because he's a touchy feely Karelian and a jolly fat man, or something.

I don't know anything about the case and frankly don't care, but it's stories like these that used to make me resent women as a bullying cabal who want to enforce codes of conduct on everyone and everything around them. It's irrational and silly, but remnants of the resentment remain thanks to a long conditioning history. I try to act as politely as possible, but all the while keeping my distance from what I in the past thought incredibly flippant and dangerous creatures. I'm a bit better now and find myself in agreement with women's causes, but that's because I don't view them as bodily creatures at all anymore. This is off limits in polite conversation and as these disembodied beings I talk to every day do not have bodies, I can't even empathize with them when their bodies cause them problems. The whole issue has been secreted away into a compartment I'm too sensible to open.

The weirdest thing is that because of this women don't appear as full human beings to me. This might be the result of yet more resentment as feminism has for ages argued against such notions and an appreciation of scenarios where the remedy becomes the disease, but I seriously doubt this is the case. These attitudes were explicit in the past, now more often implicit, but surely still cause trouble for women and I can see that. Let's call it an irony, then, that women have deprived themselves of their bodies and become not quite human in the completely subjective realm of my head. I probably need therapy to get over it, but I'm too tired of people telling me how I should think about these issues. It's people like them who got me in this mess in the first place and my schedule is busy enough as it is.

Latin Syntax Goes on Holiday

2011-11-20T15:27:00.010+02:00

It's getting too cold for jogging, so I've had time to plan a holiday trip and to stress about my studies. The holiday would basically also mean the beginning of the final step towards finishing my thesis and upon reminiscing about my time with one of Terence McKenna's books, I'm thinking Amsterdam. I don't have the money or the will to go to South America and it's about time I made another series of art posts here. Therefore, Holland seems like the next best thing.

In the meantime, I've been trying to check my Latin skills -- you don't really know what you know unless you review once in a while. Doing this, I came across a line in Virgil's fourth Eclogue:

Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas.

My source gives as its translation: "Now the last age foretold in the Cumean Sibyl's song has come". It's poetry, I know, and in Latin word order doesn't really matter, but it is depressing to discover that I'm helpless with sentences like these. Embarrassing admissions of ignorance follow.

"Ultima" obviously means "last", "Cumaei" is a proper noun, "iam" is "now", "venit" is the verb, "carminis" is "song", and "aetas" is obviously "age". So, the sentence roughly goes: "The last Cumean come now song age". Not being sensitive enough to inflections and conjugations, I'm left staring at the sentence like an idiot. I have to try to work back from the translation and pair up the relevant expressions. "The last age" is "ultima aetas", "of the Cumean song" is "Cumaei carminis", and the rest is easy. The sentence thus would be: "Iam venit ultima aetas Cumaei carminis". My first instinct was to write "Iam venit ultima Cumaei carminis aetas", but I have no idea why.

"Venit" and "iam" I recognize, no problem. But the nouns don't open up easily while reading and it's a question of digging up whatever their grammatical forms might contain. "Carminis" I do recognize instantly to be a genitive; "Cumaei" I don't, but after checking the declension tables I think I should and feel like an idiot. Why the phrase "ultima aetas" is split in this ludicrous manner is a mystery to me. Infuriating, actually, even though it makes no sense to be angry at Virgilian poetry. My first attempt to rework the syntax above does indicate that I'm perfectly willing to split the noun phrase to contain "Cumaei carminis", but for some reason inserting the verb is not OK. As I said, I have no idea why, but it's probably due to other languages that make more sense to me. In other words, my brain is fried from studying too much and needs a bit of a jolt. A vacation will not improve my Latin, but at least I'll get to see the works of a few Dutch masters.

Pilkington's Homunculus

2011-11-14T23:43:00.001+02:00

Choosing a Life

2011-11-11T23:06:00.012+02:00

A columnist for HS called Valtteri Väkevä wrote a piece today commenting on what the Finnish Minister of Education had said about choosing a place to study. He sounds idealistic and young, just as one should when the time comes, and not at all kind to the Minister's views which include cutting education from the cultural sector. For his efforts, he received a barrage of replies from mad and incredibly bitter people who want him and anyone around them to know that life is supposed to be blood, toil, tears, sweat and generally shit. That one should not have dreams or aspire to greatness, whatever that entails. If I had to live a day in the mind of any of these people, I would gladly throw myself under a bus.

Kids rarely choose their profession according to the fickle needs of the market -- that doesn't make any sense since the markets change and evolve faster than it's possible to get through a program that makes you into whatever the profession du jour happened to be at the time you enrolled. In a few years time, just about when it's time to graduate, many of those predictions will be wrong and other opportunities will have emerged. It's always a gamble to some extent.

It's none of my business to tell others how to run their lives, but I hope nobody becomes the kind of horrible soul gobbling troll seen pissing in Mr Väkevä's comments box today. Have dreams, make mistakes, rinse and repeat. People will tell you you should be this, that and the other thing, but people say lots of things.

The Berlusconi Problem

2011-11-06T08:55:00.003+02:00

Tough Times

2011-10-30T08:56:00.001+02:00

Your Greek's on Fire

2011-10-20T20:24:00.010+03:00

This fall season the fashionable man in Athens chooses fire for trousering. The benefit of fire for trousering is not its durability, to be honest, but its light flowing texture. A linen jacket or even a classic white T-shirt complete the look. A more casual outfit should incorporate more somber colors.

Fire comes in a single color, fire, but is very versatile during the day. It is rather less suitable for dinner and tends to attract unwanted attention even on cloudy days. It is strictly for those sunny Mediterranean mornings for which Athens is known. Try patterned light gray cotton socks with fire trousering for a bit of fun.

A Modern Poet Foresees His Life

2011-10-19T14:36:00.005+03:00

In servile contemplation he,
Synced with calculated emotion,
The poignant moment just at hand
Epiphanizes every notion . . .
No, just the one, that heavy one
Which releases the tears of one
Overwrought, the wretched scum
With more wealth than they can sum.
But let us not be like that, friends.
Let us acknowledge that here flows
A river of uncertain trends
That will in turn force out us bows.
It's ours to choose if we take them
Standing up or on our knees.
The latter helps elude the phlegm
And so evade their rank disease.

Take your pick, but carefully,
Lest we moon posterity.

The Case Against Exercise

2011-10-18T17:47:00.002+03:00

My exercise regime consists of a 30-45 minute jog roughly every other day. Some weeks I run more often and some others less, for example if I'm too busy with work. Recently, I've been running slightly more and as a result my appetite has grown to monstrous proportions. I eat a lot when I exercise, as one should, but still try to eat clean foods and avoid sugar and other poisons. Sometimes I need quick energy and have some chocolate, like today. I've also had a cup of rice with chili con carne, a pizza, four apples, bread and tuna, coffee, tea and a few carrots. It's six o'clock in the afternoon, I'm still hungry and making plans for a big supper.

I'm not worried about my weight or squeamish about food, but this is ridiculous. My metabolism has accelerated to the point that I burn through food faster than I can eat it, if my sense of hunger is anything to go by. That is, I don't have to diet to diet. Fat is burning with a normal diet and I'll lose weight whatever I do. That's great, but a bit scary. Food has to be around all the time or else pangs of hunger have to be tolerated. A stupid thing to worry about, but it's a source of stress I could do without right now.

When I was lifting weights for exercise, I found my appetite grew, but it was nowhere near this dramatic. When the first snow falls, I'll probably quit jogging for the winter and take up weights again. It is difficult to maintain focus for more than two hours being like this, when food has to be shoveled in at these enormous quantities. There's not even the benefit of extra fat gained to keep me warm during the coming winter. The next six months will be a period of intense concentration, so it will be best to try to mortify the flesh at least to some extent. In the meantime, I'm thinking eggs for supper.

Outrage in Rome

2011-10-16T10:12:00.001+03:00

Classical Music Is For Enjoyment

2011-10-08T15:49:00.013+03:00

I have an incredibly middle class confession to make. I enjoy Shostakovich much more than I do Stravinsky. The gasps I hear when I say this, if there are any, are from people who have really had the time to think about Soviet composers -- not a handful of people -- and who enjoy the playful anarchy of a Stravinsky piece. I simply prefer the neurotic headache inducing tension of Shostakovich. Tension is the key word here: listening to Shostakovich is like playing a hopeless game of Tetris with blocks that are not even supposed to fit together. Sometimes, very rarely, the tension is released for a while, like in the clip below, but even then there is an element of failure in the process.

Not once have I heard someone say: "You like Shostakovich more? Me too! Let us talk of Soviet migraine music over coffee and posh biscuits!" It simply does not happen. Perhaps that's the reason I made the error of glancing at the comments of a YouTube performance of the man's first violin concerto and found the most tedious, snobbish and infuriating comments.

One of the arguments said that Shostakovich wrote the piece for Oistrakh, a fellow victim of an oppressive regime. The violinist here, the wonderful Hilary Hahn, is from Virginia, and known for her technically flawless Bach interpretations. She also never experienced Soviet oppression and because of this, the comment said, she cannot express the violence of the piece as Oistrakh did.

What a banal, pointless and silly thing to say. Should we, the human race as one, construct new gulags, a tyrannical communist regime, decades of oppression and genocide, place poor Hahn in a New Soviet city raped by authoritarianism, and only then give her the chance to play the Shostakovich piece so that your ears are not offended? What absolute rubbish. I am aware that YouTube comments are the lowest form of communication known to man and that classical music critics are the most pointless creatures on earth, but it should be said that people who make comments like this do not like music. They do not understand the genuine enjoyment music can bring to the lives of even those of us who prefer tension and headaches to carnival and anarchy. They are especially annoying in fields of high art like classical music where most people are unsure of their opinions anyway. Classical music is meant to give pleasure. Never listen to people who don't listen to it for enjoyment.

Webern and the Wall

2011-10-05T16:30:00.000+03:00

Over 700 Arrested on Wall Street

2011-10-02T09:56:00.002+03:00

Of Doubts

2011-10-01T18:27:00.009+03:00

Not too long ago, I decided to buy a packet of my usual nicotine replacement pills. These are wonderful hits of nicotine that can actually get you high if you are ailing. I wasn't, but a combination of nerves and boredom convinced me this was exactly what I needed. Sugar sometimes works the same way, but the price of a sugar fix is usually worse than that of nicotine. Having been off sugar for a long time, I tend to look like the elephant man after a dose and suffer something like a hangover afterward -- my doctor says this has nothing to do with diet, so let's call it a persistent correlation instead of a causal connection. The most innocent pleasures in life become poisonous when old habits die.

This does something very different. Withdrawal has a psychological impact which makes me wake up in the middle of the night horrified about where life has taken me and equally terrified by the uncertainties of any future I might have wherever it is I have ended up. It's not a full blown existential horror as it is when you first stop a habit and it's not a surprise anymore as it was when it first hit me, but sufficient to give pause and make you lose a night's sleep. If I had my own place, this could be corrected by a puff on my pipe or perhaps a cigar. In more civilized times this would have been possible anywhere, but for now I'm stuck with horror, a pathetic, balless, soulless version of the naked lunch experience. Things start to look very Greek very soon.

Habits are nice in that there is usually forced stop at the end of them, a point when everything falls and crumbles, an infectious telos. Choosing life is no choice at all, it just gives you a pointless existence, time and no means of using it. There is no central office to command our pointless march to senility. It's a belligerent, misanthropic sobriety which I have grown to hate. That is perhaps the biggest doubt of all. There is no friction in life, the blood flows clear and beautiful and completely pointlessly. Whatever your poison, sugar or bug powder or nostalgia, you need something that can hang you dry.

Blimey!

2011-09-27T12:01:00.001+03:00

Debt = No Future

2011-09-25T23:10:00.000+03:00

A Quick Note on Literary History

2011-09-24T21:13:00.008+03:00

Recent scholarly work has shown that the role of literary history as a way of shaping the minds of the masses had radical potential. It dwindled into Victorian conservatism, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The point of literary history and perhaps intellectual history in general was for some to trace the evolution of the human mind. Literary history and historical criticism were seen as means of taking hold of evolution and forcing it in the direction deemed most desirable. It sounds like something an incredibly boring Batman villain would think up, but it happened.

The psychological approach to literature probably begins with John Locke and David Hume in Britain. Hume was famously an early influence of Kant's who in turn began creating the framework in which human experience was even possible. Fast forward to German idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and you will find the outlines of experience stronger than Kant left them, even frighteningly so. Schiller is one of those who tried to make it more practical. When someone like Nietzsche comes along and begins to sketch an image of the unconscious as a cultural phenomenon -- Schopenhauer should probably also be mentioned here --, we get an image of human experience without a teleology and tied to a powerful metaphysics.

The details are filled out with theories like Eliot's with their "objective correlatives" as well as Bloom's theory of influence. There are formulas in art which are tied to specific functions or semantic fields and by picking these apart we can take control of them. Large projects of social engineering are indeed in motion as we speak, but we rarely notice them until a bomb goes off somewhere, or kids riot in the streets, or something similar. The lovely Nietzschean notion that all one's beliefs might be synthetic implants becomes overwhelming.

All this I learned while giving a series of lectures about the history of literary studies. It feels odd to reject cynical notions of human nature as never changing and always self-centered, but there is little choice in the matter. Thought, as a large and unforgivably hazy historical notion as a whole, has become self-conscious and is self-consciously now fashioning itself into something else -- that's the bizarre vision that now seems to make sense. For someone raised mostly on Anglo-American pragmatic ways of thinking the metaphysics of absolutes and wills to power are of less interest. But the genius of those who figured out how to arrive at the vision does seem awesome.

Of Typos and Ahistory

2011-09-19T20:46:00.007+03:00

The editor of a university paper for whom I have written things once or twice before asked me to write a column about the recent riots in London and the UK. Self-righteously annoyed by the way people did not seem to grasp what the kids were saying and doing, I wrote a short piece where I referred to Professor Gus John's BBC interview and indulged in Fukuyamaist speculation about how the world of these kids is alien to us born before the end of history. Great fun to write, a bit cheeky, but quite harmless and to the point.

Some of the fun came from playing with the concepts historical and ahistorical which I related to the confused manner in which old people tried to grasp the reasons behind the rioting. I thought there was no particular reason in the sense that old people thought there should be, a historical reason in terms of social structures or class distinctions etc. Politicians and the rioters all serve the same ahistorical forces now, liberal capitalism, and it's not a great deal for the kids. The politicians are without any authority to criticize them, they're getting paid much more than your average teenage hoodlum. If they can get a gold watch or plasma screen for nothing, they take it and there's no moral issue behind it.

What happened as the column was going to print was that the editor corrected a few mistakes, or what he perceived as mistakes, and this included the word "ahistorical" which was promptly transformed into "historical", the complete opposite of what I meant. I almost did not mention this to him, because it seemed to make my point better than anything. He did not seem to have the concept of ahistorical wired in his head in the way I meant it. Or perhaps he did, but the question never came up and I must assume he thought it a typo. In any case, I feel vindicated and the point of my column was made for me in a way that would have been impossible for me to do had I also been the proofreader.

On Spending Too Much Time With Books

2011-09-10T16:04:00.017+03:00

My glasses broke the other day and I decided to pay a visit to the rude woman who sold me my last pair. The store is in a mall and as it was a Saturday it was filled with people enjoying a day out, shopping their cares away. In a twitch of accidental yet unforgivable snobbery, suddenly all I could think of as I weaved my way through the groups of smiley happy people was: Most of them have never read Horace. A friend had pointed out something like this to me earlier. I don't get out much.

The sparkly shiny things displayed in the mall, the loudest and brightest pleasures of life, are what one should actually desire. This is what those who want us to buy these products scream at us every day. It's no use pretending to be so bookish and clever as to think thoughts of Horace could outshine their splendour, they might say. I've tried desiring the right things, but I don't understand people who would rather pass the time watching a fashion show in a mall on a Saturday instead of reading Horace, or doing something else that organizes the inquisitive sophistic mind into orderly rhetorical rows of information. The point of the brainjerk seemed to be about what one chooses to call pleasure.

My grandmother, a teacher, told me when I started getting a bit more serious about my studies: "Don't get lost in books and remember to pay attention to real life as well". I replied that sitting in the library was as real as anything and that I didn't really see her point. Now her point seems clear, but unfortunately I have disobeyed her. Perhaps it is the case that my head is in a constant state of disintegration and maintaining some semblance of order is a full time job, but I doubt there is a pathology behind all this. Enjoyment of the kind that came to mind in the mall and which seems so odd to so many is subject to habit. In my case, the habit is explained by a sort of vague project of pessimistic perfectionism, once begun with the acceptance of the impossibility of reaching perfection, but doing it anyway. It's a long term project that will only get a fraction towards its original goal, but that's no excuse for not trying to "fail better", as Beckett would have said. I wonder if the people in the mall had heard of Beckett?

The last time my glasses broke, a similar string of ponderous thoughts about aging followed. Let's hope the next pair lasts longer. However, there are some perks to these neurotic explorations of one's own character. It chips away at one's schoolboy pride when one finds out something about oneself one did not want to learn. Aging means that finding one's exceptional objects of interest, be they Latin poetry or modernist literature, do not have to be the subjects of explanation and justification anymore. One has one's interests, their origin is forgotten, so they have always been. They don't need an explanation. What does require explanation is how others are able to live, and live happily, with the dullness that must accompany their Horaceless, Becketless, whateverless lives. The world isn't the world or the universe the universe without them.

Plenty of War

2011-09-08T19:09:00.008+03:00

When I read of the trenches and the men who fought and died,
I wish I had my sins back and nightmares we so have tried
To reconstruct to remedy, whenever they were called.
To know the hollow efforts of those sons who're lost and loved,
To say that it is true, in fact, there's nothing there to see
That could have justified this bliss, that dull futility.
There is always a but, but, but, and something tells me that
There will be plenty of war, and for every little brat.

Minor Sounds Humming Somewhere in Brighton

2011-09-06T20:36:00.000+03:00

The Low Anthem Sing About Failing Better

2011-08-19T14:41:00.001+03:00

Yale's Learn to Read Latin -- First Impressions

2011-08-17T22:08:00.007+03:00

Yale University Press launched a series of books a few years ago called Learn to Read Latin. Their purpose is to teach the student to read Latin. With the experience of quitting Latin courses at least half a dozen times, I'm fairly confident in saying this is a good one. I'm at chapter IV and it's been pleasant reading so far. When I came across a graphic showing how prepositions work in the first chapter -- a figure in the shape of a house with arrows showing where each preposition points to -- it brought back fond memories of a similar schema in my first English grammar book. It made sense then and it makes sense here.

All the stuff that should be in a Latin book should be here and, as the title says, the point is to get the student to read as quickly as possible. In other words, all the basics should be OK, the book has an angle, etc. There's no point boring anyone with the basics but to say that they haven't screwed it up. What's actually interesting about the book (I only have the textbook) is that they seem to have struck a balance with the amount of grammatical explanation required for the job. Often there are questions, relevant questions, that remain after an explanation of a particular grammatical feature in textbooks and the reader is left cursing and googling for the information, or simply puzzled. Here's an example from chapter II about the indicative:

Since Latin tenses have three possible times (present, past, future) and three possible aspects (simple, progressive/repeated, completed -- the progressive and repeated always being grouped together in Latin), it would have been most efficient if Latin had had nine tenses corresponding to the nine possible combinations of time and aspect. In fact, Latin has only six tenses in the indicative mood. Three Latin tenses have two possible combinations of time and aspect. A list of the six tenses of the indicative mood and their times and aspects follows, with sample English translations for each.

That's a simple and effective overview of the situation and this keeps happening when one reads the book. You know how many grammatical possibilities there are and why they work and you are also told some other options don't work. There's no feeling of being overwhelmed with grammar as often happens when everything is dumped on you without explanation of the things that seem possible but are not allowed by the grammar of the language you happen to be studying. The style is laconic and hence things move at a good pace and although crucial points are sometimes repeated stuff keeps moving along.

Another nice thing the authors do is provide translations of their examples in the way how people actually translate them in practice. An example: "Pulchrum est patriam amare" is translated thrice: "Beautiful is the country to love", "To love the country is beautiful", "Loving one's country is beautiful". That's how an English speaker usually does it and it's nice to have someone holding your hand through the process. The book doesn't require much prior knowledge of grammar, it's easy to read, expertly written, informative and unless the next 500 pages are junk, which I doubt, there's no reason someone reading this shouldn't learn to read Latin fairly quickly. More vocabulary is probably needed, but that will fix itself with time once a basic level of reading is reached. In case you are wondering about the Melvins video, I put it there to make this post less boring.

16th-Century Choral Music in a Tiny Office

2011-08-15T18:53:00.005+03:00

I was going to embed a video from NPR's amazing Tiny Desk Concerts series here, but the player doesn't seem to be cooperating. Therefore, links:

(1) Paul Jacobs plays Bach.
(2) The Julian Lage Trio.
(3) Stile Antico sings sixteenth-century choral music.
(4) David Russell, guitar god.
(5) The Low Anthem plays quiet music.

There's loads more on NPR's site.

Professor Gus John on the UK Riots

2011-08-10T10:50:00.004+03:00

Some kind soul uploaded this interview with Professor Gus John which is probably the most insightful analysis of the big picture behind the UK riots I've seen until now.

I'm afraid the quality is not very good, but his words are audible enough. Let me know if there is another copy of this with better video/audio. It's a great interview.

Riots in . . . Ealing?

2011-08-09T09:21:00.022+03:00

The London riots. It feels odd to start a post with those words again. The situation is still developing and some are fishing for reasons for the looting and mayhem. The shooting of an alleged drug dealer by the police was what tipped the scales, but nobody is seriously considering that to be the reason for what's going on. The Guardian's London blogger wrote a thing that was fairly interesting if inconclusive. The Telegraph had an article titled Riots: the underclass lashes out which quoted Hobbes and Adam Smith and was like something you would expect from a caricature of a Tory newspaper. The question remains unanswered. Why do these people riot?

In a BBC clip I think I heard a youth saying that maybe they should pick up some watches while the shops burned around them. You know, because why not? Why not have a plasma TV? It's the nonchalance of the suggestion that is shocking. It does not hang together in a consumerist schema of working for your money and spending it as you choose. It's outside the system, finally. Why should you pay if it means you have to sacrifice eight hours a day or more for the thing? Your life for a plasma TV and a nice watch? It isn't a good deal. Especially when you can just walk to a shop window, smash it, and walk away with your new toys. It's just stuff. That seems to me the immediate reason for the looting now that you can do it in the safety of a London in flames.

Of course, there should be a serious sociological analysis to back this up. I don't have one, but I have a justification for stealing that new shining, if a bit scorched, flatscreen TV. The corporations that sell them and banks that get the money are thieves. They run the world like thieves and act like thieves. The only reason they can do this is because the political classes are corrupt. Neither of these groups have any integrity nor are they in a position to preach morals to the underclasses, as the Tory paper calls them.

Another thing mentioned in several reports is that very often the rioters are smiling and seem quite happy to be doing what they are doing. Maybe that's because this is perceived justice for the crimes of the upper classes? Or maybe because they have never had a future, nobody has noticed that the UK is shitting on them, and this is their time in the spotlight. The important detail that many of those most severely affected are small businesses and little people does not seem to factor in. It's not yet a class war, perhaps we could call it a class skirmish, but already the first casualties are those caught in the middle.

Fat Boy Running and Reading Fat Boys

2011-08-05T21:10:00.005+03:00

Due to an expanding waist and a fat man looking back at me in the mirror, I took up bike riding a while ago. It's a wonderful way of keeping fit and one gets to enjoy the scenery as well whilst mangling one's quads. After a good deal of bike riding, I thought I'd graduate to jogging. It was difficult the first time, everything ached, sore throat, out of breath, very little distance covered. Second time, much better, steady pace, still conscious after the run. The third time will be even better. And so on.

One thing I had to do was to get the feel for the machine again, which feel at the moment is basically running as if my midsection were a ball with two stumps attached to it and sort of rolling my carcass along the pavement. The image works better than trying to visualize a young gazelle sprinting across the savanna. Riding the bike is great, but running kicks my ass in half the time and said ass is in sore need of a kicking.

Another thing I've been doing is reading fat books for a lecture series I'm preparing. The reading I have to do is about 2,000 pages and hence I tried to discover, once again, some ideas for speed reading techniques. None of them really works and most links online lead to snake oil salesmen. One thing almost all of them say is that subvocalization slows down your reading speed. I've always thought this was odd, but if by this is meant that the reader should not mouth out every single word as if he or she were reading words out loud, then it's good advice, and obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds. But what about thinking the words aloud? If you have to suppress subvocalization, how sub do you go?

I subvocalize and so, it seems, do some others who are much faster readers. The books I'm reading now are quite densely packed with information, I'm taking notes as I read and I can manage about 300 pages a day if necessary. It's not that impressive, but I think I'm getting better and I'm trying to go faster every day. I subvocalize, at least I think I do, that is I sound words in my head as I proceed. Not all of them, but they do roll along in quick sprints and they do this much faster than I could read out loud. To tie this to running, my uncle once told me of a dream he had where he had superhuman strength and speed in his legs and he could rev them up like an engine while running to move like pistons at ridiculous speeds. This would propel him forward at equally incredible velocity. You can do something like that while reading and sprint across the pages, so why not vocalize in your mind as fast as your eyes and brain allow you to? That's what I'll continue to do until I find something better.

Ferry Cross the Mersey in Bulgarian and 9/8 Mashed With You Only Live Twice Performed by Some Norwegians

2011-07-30T19:26:00.003+03:00

Self-Obsessed Poison and Kindness

2011-07-30T11:40:00.004+03:00

The Fruits of Right Wing Hate Speech

2011-07-26T09:57:00.003+03:00

The sanity of the Norwegian terrorist who killed dozens of people in and around Oslo has been the topic of many articles and public debates in the media. The main thing that seems to come out of them is the simple fact that the killer, apart from acting out his psychotic fantasy, sounds completely sane. Scandinavia has experienced a surge of radical right wing rhetoric in recent years and the success of right wing parties is a good indication of its effectiveness. Links to various other groups like the EDL have been established and possible related terrorist cells are being investigated.

What these cells might be apart from internet forums populated by idealistic losers is difficult to judge from what has been said, because they might be just that -- harmless idiots ranting against immigrants -- or groups of armed lunatics ready to commit further atrocities. The fact that this happened in Norway does not make things easier. We all remember the Black Metal craze some years ago which was basically started as a joke by some Brits and then taken seriously by humorless Norwegian youths with nothing better to do. A Swedish nationalist politician has caused uproar by stating that multiculturalism is the cause of all this. The True Finns in Finland, on the other hand, have been very quiet, except for one of their party members condemning violence against innocents.

It is often easy enough to read wingnut rants as satire, but when they begin to sound reasonable they do turn into a dangerous influence on those who wish to break from reasonableness and act unreasonably while appearing to follow reasonable arguments. Immigration and multiculturalism do create problems and tensions in any society, but to think that mass murder will take care of the problems is an insane inference. Multicultural and open societies will not fall because of a terrorist act; the argument which leads one from one state of affairs to the other is flawed and if there is madness in the argument itself it is in this inference. If there is one thing the average internet dweller can do it is to mock those who wish to put the genie of multiculturalism back into the bottle and mock them loudly. Anonymous has the right idea concerning the killer's manifesto. RL applications would be a welcome change in public discourse elsewhere. Ridicule is the best grassroots weapon right now and we should all hone our skills in mockery to combat hate speech whenever it slithers our way.

Amy Winehouse

2011-07-25T19:10:00.000+03:00

Education in the Service of the Marketing Department

2011-07-16T20:40:00.010+03:00

I've noticed more and more people repeating the view that education should serve the needs of society more effectively. This is usually an underhand way of saying that higher education should serve the needs of business. Universities, it is said, should produce workers who can be recruited ready-made to design and construct, say, mobile phones or other exportable goods. I'm perhaps too sensitive to these calls, because my own interests lie in philosophy and literature which two disciplines do not produce mobile phones or cleverly designed wood pellet heating devices or anything marketable. In a word, I'm useless, but I've come to think that my apparent uselessness may actually be an asset.

Kaleva had a short story (in Finnish) about how the changes in the Nokia Meego line of devices has halted the efforts of one Finnish city to train engineers to work on the platform. I'm sure a lot of planning has gone into this and it was assumed that Meego would be around for a long time. This was before the current bosses of Nokia decided it was best to donate the company to Microsoft and hire Elop to drag down the value of the greatest corporate success story in Finland. It's their right to do this and even acquire as much stock as they can before transporting the company somewhere else to relaunch the brand. Companies can do whatever they want in this respect, and have.

Where it gets difficult to stomach is when the business world expects the education sector to follow the whims of volatile, erratic and irresponsible business owners. The skills of a highly trained workforce can be made redundant in one corporate meeting and this has to be done, we are told, because the gods of marketing say so. Well, there is no market for English literature or philosophy. Or the classics. Or linguistics. There is work for teachers of these subjects, but I'll be damned if I know what the people I will be lecturing to next semester are training themselves for. I doubt many of them know either.

At the moment, I'm supposed to be writing a passage concerning Plato's idea theory for a lecture on literary history and the project is once again turning me into an idealist. This probably has something to do with lectures on Shelley I had to write earlier this summer. I even bought a new book on Hegel for my library, the Taylor one. (Almost bought another one, but the £40 price tag was a bit too much -- one of the downsides of being an idealist is poverty.)

What draws one to ideas is the promise of something beyond one's immediate material needs that can provide something permanent and lasting. Shelley and the Romantics show in their poetry that oddly enough these most permanent and lasting things in the world are immaterial and rather ephemeral in their everyday manifestations. Software is probably a borderline case, functional text of some kind, but the business interests that control the demand of software work on brutal materialist terms. They probably base their evaluations on numbers; wonderful ideal constructions harnessed to do work beneath their dignity. Literature and philosophy are beyond the grasp of the marketing department, because we are completely useless in creating the slaves or robots that would be ideal for the needs of markets powerful enough to decide when a workforce or a community is useless. We should be proud of it.

Silver Lining in the BSkyB

2011-07-11T21:22:00.010+03:00

The News Corp scandal keeps unraveling and it's wonderful. "Beyond Watergate" said one journalism professor, Hitchens wrote an angry article, there are live pages in the Telegraph and Guardian, YouTube channels, etc. etc.

The New York Times writes:

In truth, a kind of British Spring is under way, now that the News Corporation’s tidy system of punishment and reward has crumbled. Members of Parliament, no longer fearful of retribution in Mr. Murdoch's tabloids, are speaking their minds and giving voice to the anger of their constituents.

Even the old Dennis Potter interview is being mentioned in comments:

While murder is never the answer and should never be advocated (especially when the target is such an old man), Potter's foresight here was even more brilliant than usual. Hopefully, all this will shake up the tabloids which, even though they are enticing, always leave you hating yourself that tiny little amount that's required to keep most of us docile.

PKP - Oulu

2011-07-10T13:01:00.003+03:00

punaisenkuningattarenperiaate.blogspot.com

Thoughts on Living Without a Future

2011-07-09T18:34:00.012+03:00

A friend of mine recently decided to buy some property and this got me thinking about what it would take to find myself in a position where I could buy my own place. A quick calculation told me that if I saved money at the rate I'm saving now, I would be able to buy a decent apartment in my hometown at the age of 90. That is, after I paid off my student loans. And I have not factored in inflation, soaring house prices, or interests. With a loan with a moderate interest rate, I suppose I would be around 120 years old by the time I paid off the loan. Clearly, then, I'll not be able to acquire property with the money I make now.

When the subject came up during a conversation at lunch, I told my friend that he could be talking about space travel for all I cared. When my parents were young working people could afford houses and could afford to live in them, raise families and make a living. That world seems to have disappeared and I often wonder how things got this way. One answer might be the recession during the early 90s when hundreds of thousands of people lost everything when Finland was flooded with cheap money that was promptly pissed away and the country was plunged into a financial crisis. I read a blog post today that estimated that well over 200,000 people lost everything and were driven into lifelong debt. 14,500 of them decided this was best dealt with by suicide, although I'm not sure if that latter figure is correct or in how many of them the recession was a direct cause.

A Lancet study has revealed that suicide rates have surged during the current financial crisis. In an interview with the FT one expert said that there was almost certainly a direct link between the increase in suicides and the state of the economy. However, a Finnish suicide expert -- and we know something about this subject -- was skeptical and told the YLE that Finnish suicide rates have been falling since the 90s and that the statistics should probably be interpreted on a longer timescale.

Depression is the usual direct cause of suicides. In short, one sees no future for oneself and goes numb. In terms of finances, I suspect there is now a generation of people like me who have never had a normal future like our parents saw it. We live with what was a devastating state of affairs for the previous generation. All work is temporary, there is no financial security, no possibility to save up enough money for old age, or even any point to do so when the price of that future is astronomical and genuinely beyond our reach. Finland isn't too bad in this respect, so I shudder to think what people in countries where wages are lower are going through.

We might have cured one kind of depression by eliminating any hope of a future, but what is it really like living without a future? The only way I can describe it is by saying that it's a kind of Fukuyamaist perspective on daily life. Fukuyama said that history has come to an end. By this he meant (and here I'm almost certainly misrepresenting him) that the grand history of the world was now over as we have come to the end of histories as they were conceived of by previous generations.

I would make a slight adjustment to the way Fukuyama phrases his famous theory and say that for the generation growing up after history ended things appear without a future. That's what we as individuals have to learn to live with, or rather live without. The future has ended, it has gone away and the next generation will never know it existed at all unless we continue to point it out to them. By the end of history, Fukuyama means pretty much the same thing -- that a kind of telos in history has disappeared --, but I like the word future instead of history here, because although talking about the end of ideology as a result of the absolute hegemony of Western liberal democracy is fine, it's very difficult to write decent songs about it.

Murdoch and His Friends Don't Want Your Dead Children

2011-07-07T19:31:00.002+03:00

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your hand happens to be a best-selling UK tabloid, you can close it down. An extraordinary move from Murdoch Inc. This must be very serious indeed.

Murdoch and His Friends Want Your Dead Children

2011-07-07T08:07:00.005+03:00

Even the Telegraph predicts an end to Cameron's career. It's a fishy political piece, but it might have some truth to it. The fact that Ford and Coca Cola have withdrawn advertisements from News Corp's paper is a sure sign of something very serious. Now we'll see how oily Cameron actually is and if he is oily enough to slither out of this scandal.

David Harvey Saying Important Things

2011-06-11T23:26:00.001+03:00

Refuse Stupidity

2011-06-08T21:32:00.013+03:00

Graham Linehan is an Irish television writer whose work most people probably know best from Father Ted. He's also been interviewed about his writing in quite a few TV and radio programmes. Recently, he wrote a theatre adaptation of The Ladykillers and was invited on something called the Today programme to talk about the new play. He wrote an article about his experience for the Guardian in which he bemoans the stupidity of the conversation in which he was expected to participate. The setting was, to his surprise, of the children's debating society variety and he was brought in to defend his work against a hired gun who was to argue against the very notion of turning the movie into a play. Linehan was taken aback and refused to participate, although this didn't slow down the counter-debater or the referee.

It was Michael in the red corner, me in the blue! Ding! Defend yourself! Justify yourself! What the host didn't realise is that because I'm not a politician, like the fellow I saw in the green room preparing his lines with an aide, I didn't have to be held hostage to their artificial, reductive, harmful format. So I shrugged and, as politely as I could, told them where to go.

There is an art to telling people where to go in the politest manner possible. Graham Linehan can teach us a lot about it. He can also teach us something else that is very important. That is to refuse stupidity when we are confronted with it. Of this particular debate format he says: "It is a binary view of politics, of life and, as a result, it is also a dishonest one." It's also insulting to the guest who was, after all, invited over to have a discussion, not to play a part in some perverse tableau designed to pander to the lowest common denominator. The art of conversation is a beautiful art and it should be treated with respect. This way, we will have a better chance of treating each other with respect as well.

Reserves Were Called

2011-06-06T00:20:00.003+03:00

When sex mattered
Reserves were called
To find your arms,
Whomever it wanted.

There're now few cares,
There aren't reserves,
No sickly charms
Or so charming wonders.

It was all born
From vows bot-sworn.
So few alarms
Sound wankers and siren.

What Had To Happen Had To Happen After It Happened

2011-06-04T21:55:00.010+03:00

Whenever I'm overworked and stressed about teaching, I turn to philosophy and dream. Sometimes about being a philosopher, although I would never be so reckless and know that much of philosophy unbearably involves arranging and rearranging various conceptual mechanisms into old and new configurations. This kind of philosophical toad work is probably the best one can hope for, because it's near impossible to be an employable philosopher nowadays. People look at them like they were rare birds who exist against all odds. But there are also us hobbyhorsers and tinkerers who enjoy the occasional lecture on the old questions and the wisdom of the self-selected few while being perfectly happy with our gray plumage.

When I first read Hegel, I thought his method of writing was extremely, excessively arduous considering what he had to say. Then I understood that it was the only way of writing what he had to say. He could have said what he had to say explicitly, but then he would have not been able to say what he had to say, because with what he had to say came a certain way of saying it. His argument had to be demonstrated as much as explained and it became its own demonstration. All this is unnecessarily complicated and needs no comment from me, but as I said, I tinker.

What Hegel needed was someone to say what he didn't say. He needed a caricature of himself and then someone, like Zizek above, toading away, to say what he didn't say. This used to be called negative theology, Hegel's argument taking the place of God here. Unfortunately, Hegel had to first write that which would become the basis of his caricature. It had to happen like this, Hegelians would muse, but not in the sense of predetermination. Now that it has happened, it seems inevitable and we create an explanation to show it was inevitable, thus making it inevitable. "Hier jugé, on fait la loi aujourd'hui", said Camus. Or was it, "il fait la loi aujourd'hui"?

What Zizek seems to be doing in this clip is bringing abstraction back to earth like Hegel meant, to explain that abstractions have actuality. They are very real things and not ephemeral thoughts floating around in the ether. They crunch between the teeth of your interlocutor when he opens his mouth to think. This needs to be said because reality somehow redoubles or folds on itself and creates the appearance that we have two of them and an ontological split in between. Dualists are usually the most passionate monists. "Matter matters", they say, "less than thought and spirit" or vice versa and think they are thinking outside their ever-present quotation marks, as if it wasn't meant to be.

Zizek also recognizes the Hegelianism of Eliot's literary criticism, and I'm fairly sure he's also aware of Bosanquet and Hegel's massive influence on British aesthetics in general. It would seem like we who think about literary influence, both Eliot's and Bloom's, are often Hegelians. I think it's caused by the fact that literary texts are static and all exist at the same time. They always wait in this state until they are ready to let us say: "Ah, I knew it had to be so!"

"Respect the human rights of people who use drugs"

2011-06-02T07:52:00.010+03:00

WSJ, among others, reports on a new call for the decriminalization of recreational drugs in the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. The Report singles out cannabis for legalization and regulation. The rhetoric of the Report is very direct:

End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.

What is really great about this is the recognition of the human rights of drug users. What it implies, however, is that people who either choose to use recreational drugs in addition or instead of legal alternatives or are addicted are not currently treated as human beings because of the war on drugs. It's not really a war on drugs and it never was: it's always been a war on people who use drugs. The Commission includes many former leaders, including Kofi Annan, and states that it's aim is "to bring to the international level an informed, science-based discussion about humane and effective ways to reduce the harm caused by drugs to people and societies." The Commission also includes George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece, and he should, I think we all agree, give cannabis legalization a go and try to balance the budget of the country.

What all this tells me is that there is some hope that I'll be able to light up a legal spliff in my lifetime and also see the work of those who treat addicts given the respect it deserves. It also tells me that we on this side of the war on drugs will eventually emerge victorious, which is not bad for a bunch of stoners, junkies and freaks. Although, to be honest, I don't think most of us even noticed there was a war on.

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

2011-05-27T10:05:00.004+03:00

A link to graphs and further discussion.

Spring Poetry

2011-05-23T23:35:00.012+03:00

Leafy Trees and Allergies

Leafy trees flower,
But allergies block the scent
As if it should be.

A Sonnet for Infertile Muses

I know of the muses of whom men sing
Poetry that will make your blood curdle.
There is a danger of that happening.
Men have grown for their muses infertile
And morose in their praises that rise up,
Or sink, to the ears of those who demand
Only sacrifice and mock the full cup
Of the courting slave, of the stroking hand.
What were you, then, but a lady who hid
Her blessed wisdom in idle games of love.
I have the blossoms, but they will forbid
A flourishing despite the push and shove.
Was it worth it or did we waste our time
On unfinished songs only thought divine?

The Simple Finns

2011-05-13T23:45:00.004+03:00

The Finnish elections were billed as an event that would change the face of Finnish and perhaps even European politics. Protest votes that went to the True Finns would really shake things up, I thought, as I once again watched in amazement at the way the left failed to gain from the general air of resentment in the country. The people on the True Finns ballot were more or less regular folk, people whose inflammatory opinions ranged from amusing to frightening. Imagine internet forum dwellers or that guy from the pub getting into office. It's exciting, but scary once you realize there are those among them who are perhaps not the sort of people you want running your country. They did put the brakes on the previous right wing government for a few days, but they themselves are further on the right on many issues, so it's not reassuring. With the True Finns in opposition, on the other hand, we will have a cabinet nobody voted for and against which a large number of people did vote.

The party leaders were unanimous in their post-election interviews: the True Finns have won big and they should be represented in the cabinet. Because of the Portugal bailout the True Finns ended up in opposition and it's probably for the best. It's a position where you have to be ready to ask tough questions, even at the risk of sounding stupid, and this I believe they can do. They were built up as an opposition party and they would have been in opposition even in the cabinet, as strange as that sounds. They will also be joined by the Centre Party, the very people against whom their voters protested, which is prime sitcom material in the making.

The National Coalition Party, the right wingers, have a slight advantage to the Social Democrats who will be joined by minor parties in a coalition. From my perspective, the Social Democrats are the true conservatives in Finland, not in terms of absolute ideology -- although they have been moving toward the center for the longest time --, but in terms of representing the political status quo and they have reflected the sentiments of the nation at large for as long as I've been around. One can only hope that they will be forceful enough to reign in whatever Twilight Zone plans the right wingers have in store for us. They should, I'm hoping, find some support in the True Finns for some of their ideas.

This may yet end in disaster, but that's how the game is played. For instance, one researcher warns that the opposition could easily become a very right wing affair. Again, one must ask where the left is in all this. There might be room for a coalition of the left in the cabinet, and this will become clear in the next few days. But on the whole, what matters now is that we beat Sweden in the hockey World Championships on Sunday.

Your Children Have No Future: The Curse of the Tempophagi

2011-05-06T14:49:00.004+03:00

Everyone is an economist these days. The disasters in Ireland, Greece and Portugal are on everyone’s lips and much worse is, so predict the doomsayers, to follow with Spain and whichever country is the flavour of the month. Italy, maybe. Some suggest that a new global or at least Pan European monetary scheme has emerged from all this. Mario Blejer, for one, writes in the FT that it is all a kind of public Ponzi scheme.

The gist of his article is that as countries are at risk of defaulting on their debt, or de facto defaulting, the EU has chosen as its tactic to support them with more debt. The new Portugal package, for example, will increase the country’s debt to 120% of their GDP. This game, says Blejer,

is based on the fiction that this is just a temporary liquidity problem and that the official financing helps the countries involved to make the reforms that will allow them to return to the voluntary market in normal conditions. . . . the fact is that this situation is only sustainable as long as additional amounts of money are available to continue the pretence.

It’s a fictional economy with very real results. The Ponzi scheme element of it all takes on bizarre and grotesque aspects when it becomes clear that it might not actually be able to collapse:

Some of the original bondholders are being paid with the official loans that also finance the remaining primary deficits. When it turns out that countries cannot meet the austerity and structural conditions imposed on them, and therefore cannot return to the voluntary market, these loans will eventually be rolled over and enhanced by eurozone members and international organisations. . . . In a private scheme, the pyramid collapses when you cannot find enough new investors willing to hand over their money so old investors can be paid. But in a public scheme such as this, the Ponzi scheme could, in theory, go on for ever. As long as it is financed with public money, the peripheral countries’ debt could continue to grow without a hypothetical limit.

The scary part is that when a scheme like this collapses -- and keeps on collapsing -- someone has to front the bill: “As in a pyramid scheme, it will be the last holder of the ‘asset’ that takes the full loss.” This will be the tax payer. Or, more precisely, the future tax payer. Your children will pay 80% tax to finance the wasted lives of their parents if this happens. It has already happened, really, and the wasteful generation of our parents has dug a hole so deep no amount of cash will create a permanent solution in the short term. The abstraction of money into futures has led us down a path that has allowed present generations to eat away at the future of their children. As a result of their feast, we are now of our fathers' generation and such will be the fate of our children as well. It’s this incestuous daisy chain of debt that has finally united Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic and its bond is as strong as any union could ever hope to be.

Stewart Lee's Genius

2011-04-28T07:56:00.003+03:00

Here's a snippet of Stewart Lee's article on the royal wedding in the Guardian:

It's no coincidence that as genuine social mobility in broken Britain is eroded, so commoners turn to the National Lottery, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Winning them represents the only chance real people have to change their circumstances significantly. It could be you. And, like some giant illuminated penis flying over the rooftops of suburban homes and frothing at random passing women, William has pointed himself at Kate Middleton, the Susan Boyle of social mobility. In declaring her his princess, he brings hope of real change to millions of people denied a decent education and the means to better themselves, to millions of tiny babies denied even books, that one day they too could be randomly rewarded with untold wealth and privilege.

The video has little to do with the article, but any excuse to post a bit of his stand up will do. The article itself is a sinister masterpiece.

Leonardo's Flying Machines

2011-04-21T17:10:00.000+03:00

There Is No Blanket

2011-04-12T22:46:00.001+03:00

Just What Is the Point of Vince Cable?

2011-04-09T14:05:00.008+03:00

I don't read the Telegraph that often, but stories about education do always interest me. In one Telegraph story, a commentator asks the question we all have in mind: "Just what is the point of Vince Cable?" The point Cable makes in the story, that UK universities should not charge their students the amount sanctioned by parliament after parliament took away most of their money, is of course clear, albeit insane enough to summon Zathog the Tempter of Those Who Search in Envy from his ancient slumbers. Maybe that's what he's trying to do, in which case I must apologize.

That said, why can't someone make a decent Lovecraft film adaption already? The best are always small independent productions, which are great, but we need something to set the standard. Maybe that would appease Cable and he'd go away.

Sean Lock's Sexually Aggressive Australian Madonna

2011-04-07T22:18:00.001+03:00

You Better Be Funny

2011-04-06T13:09:00.001+03:00

Some Rioting

2011-03-26T22:02:00.001+02:00

Some Piazzolla

2011-03-26T17:51:00.001+02:00

Ruskin Aphorism

2011-03-12T16:06:00.003+02:00

There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism, and since our life must at best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel.

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

I've Definitely Peaked

2011-03-08T14:19:00.015+02:00

Working from home has its benefits. For one thing, I can read in my bed in my pants and call that work. My flat is much warmer than the one I had in the UK -- despite the freeze Finland has experienced this winter I've been much warmer here than I was in Surrey last year -- and while it's not luxurious, I've lived in worse places. What I want to say is, I can't complain. But today something happened which told me that it is going to be downhill from here. Small signs have already appeared. I'm more absent minded than I used to be, I don't care for my appearance that much anymore, I get tired more easily and seek equilibrium instead of excitement.

My glasses broke and I had to mend them with super glue. I waited until the next day, of course, no need to hurry these things. I went to the shops, bought some lunch and the glue. The coffee was dripping when, after lunch of course, I sat down to fix my glasses. One of the arms came off its hinges and I had to reattach it. The instructions on the packet said that only one of the surfaces should be coated and that too much glue could actually weaken the bond. I did all this and, as per instructions, got out a paper towel with which I could quickly wipe away any extra glue.

Before applying the glue to the slot into which the joint of the arm would be inserted, I tried out the applicator by squirting out a bit of glue onto a piece of paper I used as a worktop. It worked fine and the rest of the operation was a success as well. It was time to wait for a few minutes for the glue to harden, so I poured myself a cup of coffee and took out a doughnut I had bought from the baker's for this very occasion. I had a sip and a bite and without giving it a second thought picked up the paper towel and wiped my mouth. The paper towel was of course the one I had used when I was mending my glasses and it had rested on the super glue, absorbing whatever it could from the little puddle I had left on the worktop after my applicator test.

Washing up, I thought of the circumstances that made me smear glue on my lips -- they were definitely getting glued shut as the adhesive worked its magic. Maybe it was time to give this life to someone else, someone who might benefit from it. I bet that's how most saints and heroes and other lunatics begin: they get bored out of their minds and find their lives absurd. They super glue their faces shut and if they have the courage they just think: "Fuck it, I don't need this. Maybe someone else does." Or perhaps that's why people start families. They look at themselves in the bathroom mirror trying to think whether it was cold or warm water that should be applied to glue to make it go away and think: "This is not going to get us anywhere." Whatever the reason, it seems apathy is the common motivator for people I know who seem to have lives to have lives.

I wiped off the glue as best I could, noted with pleasure that none of it got in my mustache and got back to work. After a while, it struck me that I had not experienced the sense of drama proper to the occasion and, immediately after that, noted that I still have to work on my apathy, because when I'm done I should not have to think of myself anymore. The mystery of the absent drama will be as clear as day and I shall remain indifferent. If there was a god to whom I could pray for this, I would. But there isn't, and there shouldn't be. The true gods of apathy do not bother themselves with being. Their followers pray to the existing gods if they pray at all, because why not?

A philosopher of modernity once said that we are living in an age of infinite intensity that lacks all substance. He wrote that in the fifties, but turn on the television now and you will see exactly what he meant. It's complete fluff that is designed to be shot at the viewer at high volume. It really doesn't matter what the the images and sounds actually mean as long as they are piped into the eyes and ears of the viewer fast enough to create an experience of intensity. Stoic apathy is the answer to this corruption. Its goal is the elimination of intensity by replacing it with apathy. The semantic rubbish is just rubbish, but the torrent of intensity it creates is nevertheless difficult to master and the road to indifference is long and fraught with danger. A working pair of spectacles are essential.

An Attempt at a Film Review: Possession (1981)

2011-03-01T15:27:00.019+02:00

The obvious comparison most will draw from watching Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) is to Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009). The difference between the two for me was that I did not feel compelled to write anything about Antichrist as much as I, to use an awkward word here, enjoyed it. Possession is labeled a horror film and it is more terrifying than any genre horror flick. True to the genre, it has a monster, but it is a footnote to the terror of its exploration of madness. Sleep doesn't come easy after Possession, because it feels like I've just woken up from a two-hour dream of reassuring and strangely comforting insanity.

The plot revolves around a crumbling marriage (and other vague elements which are mostly left unexplained), but all in all it appears to be about schizophrenia. The madness is Anna's, played by the lovely Isabelle Adjani, and partly her husband's, played by the equally lovely Sam Neill. The fragmented narrative delivers the impact of their insanity to the viewer and creates a disturbing projection of mental illness for us to embrace. The aim is to erase, for a moment, the fine line between everyday rationality and the threat of incomprehensibility.

The enjoyment to be had from the sublime mental disturbance that should perturb the viewer comes from the contrast between one's immersion into the film and the sane and easygoing world of reason one has to return to, where bills have to be paid and small talk prevails. While I was coming out of it, my mind wandered to a brief conversation with an acquaintance in the office corridor. What did I say to him? Did I make sense? Or did he perhaps catch a candid remark and saw that I was so far gone as to not care about making sense anymore? Did I Charlie Sheen him? For a moment I was sure I was to be committed on the basis of that brief exchange.

Watching Adjani thrash about in the famous subway scene was not nearly as disturbing as seeing her abusing one of her pupils in ballet class, or listening to her monologue about fate and chance. The small slips that betray madness are always more interesting and shocking to watch -- it's a cliche, but things sold by the gram are always more exciting than things sold by the pound. Schizophrenic language has some qualities of poetry, although it is rarely as disciplined of course, and it is easier for these slips to be transferred to the viewer in art because similar linguistic exploration is licenced by the artistic medium. One seldom voiced rule of poetry says that it is on the same plane as madness, but nevertheless distanced from the register of actual lunacy.

Michaux was mentioned in Possession by Anna's kooky lover Heinrich. In Michaux's book on mescaline, the author at one point discards language and begins to draw nonsensical pictures. Language breaks down and is replaced by images. His simulated madness realizes language is mute at its core. Schizophrenic language -- which should be distinguished from the language of the schizophrenic -- doesn't say anything and yet says too much by underscoring the impotence of language through free association and repetition, and this was very clearly conveyed by Adjani's relentless performance. It's a scary thought, if there really are such things as thoughts.

For the longest time, it has been fashionable to talk of language as being mere surface. Truth and meaning have been reduced to ciphers in communication and content (thoughts, ideas, call them what you will) has been deemed a mirage of the linguistic webs we weave to fool ourselves into thinking that there is something behind the veil of words we dress ourselves in. For the first time I find myself appalled by the thought; whether it is because I find myself using the word 'thought' in an unqualified sense of the word or because I know I do so out of despair, I don't know.

Perhaps the terror comes from precisely this catch-22: the only way to find faith in truth, or find faith in general, is to act in despair and deny the obvious, but a faith in denial is no faith at all and what in fact remains is a recognition of the hopelessness of faith. Something has been gained from this hopelessness, faith itself, but it is sullied by the very means of its birth. There is a word for this in religion: sin. Why accepting faith as an option in this situation is the solution religion offers is still a mystery to me.

If this is what Possession tries to hint at, it means to say the human mind is an aberration, a freak of nature that never should have happened. The fall from grace, forbidden knowledge, consciousness, they all point to a rationalization of rationality by reason to justify its own sordid existence. It's a rather bleak conclusion to draw from a fine film, but I hope it makes sense. God, I really do.

Greeks on Fire

2011-02-23T17:52:00.002+02:00

Gaddafi Has an Umbrella . . . and Something About Dogs

2011-02-22T13:46:00.002+02:00

The Food Liberation Army

2011-02-19T21:50:00.001+02:00

The Future, Probably

2011-02-18T20:46:00.001+02:00

What's Going on in Bahrain?

2011-02-14T19:39:00.001+02:00

Opposites Government

2011-02-13T08:52:00.011+02:00

The leading members of the UK coalition government have been consistent liars so far. The student fees are just the tip of a great big yellow iceberg. They make sure the UK will have a more stark division between a privileged educated class and drones with no prospects of a better life. It wasn't what the people voted for. In fact, a lot of people voted for the complete opposite, and this seems to have become a consistent pattern in UK politics today: you get what you voted for in writing, but the complete opposite when it is time to make policies.

The Telegraph ran a story recently about the fact that the City provided half of Tory funding last year:

A Tory spokesman said last night it “beggar’s belief” that anyone could suggest bankers could influence Tory policy on the day the Party announced an increase in the banking levy.

Well let's go a-beggaring anyway. The Guardian, in turn, put out a story that shows that the City is now becoming a legitimate tax haven. To say that this is a coincidence is, in a word, bullshit. In fact, it doesn't beggar the belief that the banks are now in charge of the country. What is astonishing is the poor quality of the propaganda spouted by the political facade they have set up.

Cairo Protests

2011-02-01T18:42:00.004+02:00

I've had a nasty inflammation on my nail for the past two days and it has made typing painful. It's one of those things that comes and goes and can't be helped, but this time has been worse than before. (It always is.) It's slightly better now, so I guess I shouldn't complain considering that things could be much worse. I could have a million people at my doorstep calling for my resignation.

Unrest in the Arab and Muslim World

2011-01-27T09:53:00.001+02:00

Good Advice on Reading

2011-01-26T13:00:00.012+02:00

While looking for tips on improving my sight reading, I found this video by the harpsichordist Margaret Fabrizio. I'm not familiar with her work, but found her advice very good. I'm also not a huge fan of the harpsichord, but she does play a lovely Bach.

She draws an analogy between reading music and language learning. Having dabbled in music and languages a bit, it's nice to see someone spell out the links like this.

Wise words, food for thought and Bach. This made my Wednesday, and a quick search on YouTube shows there's more of her music online for later.

Best Show Ever

2011-01-25T23:58:00.001+02:00

Tramadol Nights Episode 1 - BBC Untitled Street - Funny video clips are a click away

Jack Lalanne's Two Point Plan

2011-01-24T13:37:00.001+02:00

Beware British Salesmen

2011-01-20T09:50:00.011+02:00

Berlusconi's noose is tightening; the metaphorical legal noose, you guttermind. I'm sure most of us don't have anything against sex with teenage prostitutes. In fact, they need the business and perhaps they sometimes even need the lovin', so somebody has to do it. I don't even have an objection against the prime minister of a country visiting teenage prostitutes if he is discrete about it. In fact, the Finnish prime minister might even get away with it in public, but she is much more easier on the eye than Berlusconi and our values are quite liberal, if you don't count the odd gas attack on the gays. However, I do have an objection against a prime minister who neglects his job, creates conditions that force young girls into prostitution and then has sex with them.

I read in David Cameron's recent call for a meeting with Nordic countries a reaction against the nonsense that goes on in southern EU states.

"David Cameron says the summit is about opening up the flow of ideas, of trade and investment, particularly in green technology, as well as social policy," our correspondent says. "But there's a hard political edge as well. Only two of today's participants use the euro: two others aren't even members of the European Union: some see this as the 'Cold Europe' Club of sceptical nations."

I'm not that sure about the Eurosceptic stuff implied here, and goodness knows what Cameron has to sell, but I do hope he gets a lesson in social policy. Basically, the lesson should be that social policy works better if you stop destroying society.

The more sinister tone of Cameron's approach is that he describes himself as the salesman for British business. Finland has gone down this road once before, but that time we had little choice but to forge an alliance with the Germans who were at the time experimenting with uniting private capital with national policy. That Italian import to the Nordic countries didn't end well and I suspect the British equivalent will be as rotten. Therefore, if this is what they are selling I hope our prime minister will be careful not to trust British salesmen.

I Was Raised Lutheran

2011-01-19T15:16:00.002+02:00

I'm actually glad about my religious upbringing after reading news from the Catholic side of the aisle. Lapsed Lutherans carry much less baggage.

Let's Observe

2011-01-18T17:13:00.001+02:00

Pretty Cool for a Swede

2011-01-17T08:28:00.000+02:00

News in Astrology

2011-01-16T00:17:00.007+02:00

Sweet news for those who aren't big on astrology: "Parke Kunkle said the Earth's wobbly orbit means it is no longer aligned to the stars in the same way as when the signs of the zodiac were first conceived." I've never met anyone who thinks there is something to astrology, but watching Prof Kunkle make his point is very enjoyable nonetheless.

He's much nicer about his findings than, say, Sagan was when he spoke against astrology, but he can afford it because he is making a claim based on hard data. It's been well over two hundred years since Voltaire told us we should "console ourselves for not knowing the possible connections between a spider and the rings of Saturn, and continue to examine what is within our reach". Now the stars, in a way, are within our reach, even if we are still waiting for some to catch up with the Enlightenment.

Misogyny and So On

2011-01-14T00:03:00.000+02:00

Misanthropy and So On

2011-01-09T11:57:00.000+02:00

Simon Hughes Makes a Joke

2011-01-08T13:02:00.015+02:00

The Guardian published a story yesterday in which the Liberal Democrat deputy leader made some funny noises about poor kids in the universities. His reasoning is so twisted and strange that it might go on to create a new genre of political rhetoric. What he seems to say is that the government has given a lot of support to the UK university system and therefore they should now do as they are told and admit more poor bright kids. It's astonishing to hear an argument like this from a man who was educated in Cambridge. He also has the gall to say: "You cannot expect to go on as you are. It has failed miserably." It reads like an article in the Onion.

First, the government has taken away 80% of the teaching budget from the universities and given nothing in return. Second, poor bright kids will not afford university now, because the government tripled the tuition fees. Third, if universities actually had the choice, they would pick the brightest students, rich or poor. Now they need the money, so they will pick the rich. Fourthly, the university system was just fine before, although the student fees were pretty steep to begin with. You cannot expect to chastise the universities for doing their job, take away their money and then ask them for favours in return. It's beyond arrogant and completely absurd.

The article says that Hughes was critical about scrapping EMA, but that just makes his views even more baffling. I can only conclude from his perverse, almost Gothic reasoning that this man has serious problems seeing what goes on down in our world from whatever planet he inhabits. Or else he and the Guardian are trolling, which would be in very bad taste.

The one reasonable quote in the story was from Tim Hands: "Universities should be free to select the best candidates, regardless of background. The best should not be discriminated against on political grounds. At a time when the economy is under threat, to tamper with our intellectual economy is misguided." Hands's bio says that he is a state school educated Cambridge reject who's now the Master of Magdalen College School, so he's one of the people who know what's actually going on. Not by virtue of being a Cambridge reject, of course, but because he works in the field of education, unlike Hughes who is merely the government's adviser on access to higher education.

Someone Still Plays Rock'n'Roll

2011-01-07T16:49:00.001+02:00

Useless Academic Thinking

2011-01-06T08:19:00.003+02:00

Easy Music

2011-01-03T17:17:00.005+02:00

I somehow found my way to NPR's classical music site and their 2010 collection of shows under the title "The Best New York Alt-Classical Concerts Of 2010". Some of it is pretty good and all of it is definitely better than most stuff on the radio. I have an aversion to songs where brass or woodwind players use their breath and voice as an effect, so I didn't enjoy those pieces much, but they were easy to skip. The NPR list isn't strictly all classical stuff, because there some pop/jazz/electro things in the mix, but that just brings more variety to it all and the selections create a fine afternoon or two of new music from 2010. The station behind the list is Q2.

I recently reviewed a book on modernist aesthetics which categorized the arts in terms of their, for want of a better word, comprehensibility to the public. Writers on art have done this for centuries. Paintings were deemed the easiest, literature was somewhere in the middle, and music was the most difficult to appreciate or at least to discuss, because it is a very technical field once you get into it. Furthermore, most of us have been reared on entertainment only suitable for children, songs more suitable for four-year-olds than adults with aesthetic needs that shrivel up and die if they are not nourished with somethings heavier than post-Beatles singalongs about loving your baby.

Even if the enjoyment you get from the arts is proportional to your knowledge and experience, the point is not to be snobbish about your enjoyment. You do have to genuinely like what you are hearing if you wish to develop your taste in music and I suppose this would apply to art in general. Snobs and narcissists only enjoy themselves and can rarely catch a glimpse of the pleasures that are waiting for them outside. These pieces are easy to enjoy even for a musical philistine like myself, the pleasure they bring demands little effort and listening to them feels like a gentle tumble into a new world worth exploring further.