Search This Blog

15.10.23

CHANGING THE RHETORIC OF MOUNTAIN BIKING



I have been a cyclist for some 40 years as an adult.  I have never been without a bike or two in my shed, somewhere.  That's because I fell in love-literally in love- with cycling.  I was living in a one bed flat in St Annes on Sea in Lancashire, having just moved up from Cambridge and obtained a job as a forklift driver in a light engineering factory.  This involved a six mile commute each way and I had no car or horse.  A bike was the only answer and so I obtained a shiny new Raleigh racing bike from a catalogue and was set to go.  The first few weeks were a nightmare as my body was shocked into fitness with muscle groups stretching and strengthening and the heart and lungs enlarging exponentially and then it came:  That magical moment when the body and the bike merge into one symbiotic unit that can just keep going over endless miles, accelerate, climb, swerve as necessary and with serotonin flowing through the brain forcing you to just burst into song in order to release the joy.  That's how I fell in love with cycling.  Through a ten mile daily commute along busy A roads with a brief cycle lane available for a small portion of the distance.  And the bike became my single vehicle-if I was invited to friends in Manchester sixty miles away, I cycled.  If I wanted a camping weekend in the Lakes I strapped and tied some old tent (Vango Force 10 !!!) and sleeping bag to the bike and cycled.  If I had to go over a hundred and fifty miles I'd sleep in some bus shelter to avoid a rainstorm as it never occurred to me, at that point, to wild camp in the woods.  Cycling became my single choice of movement.  I exchanged my now knackered silver Raleigh (Uther) in 1986 for a shit brown Orbit Horizon tourer (Chokka) which I rode thousands of miles before attaining the glory of a silver grey Dawes Super Galaxy (Miles Eater) in 1992 which, though riding many thousands of miles, I never really warmed to, emotionally.  The Dawes was nicked, only fairly recently (curses upon you thief!)
It was then that I moved to my current mount, technologically at the current apex of bike development- a Scott E-genius Electric Mountain Bike (The Beast) circa 2017.  
I should add that I bought one of the first Mountain bikes to be seen in the UK- a Saracen, painted lime green with thick steel tubes and knobbly tires round 1989 to explore the local moors around Ramsbottom and it became a great mount for my children to ride on as tots on the bike seat.  
No suspension of course but great fun as I recall until it got nicked in December 1995 along with my son's brand new bike which was his Christmas present.
I should also add that I bought my first Brompton in 1992 from Bicycle Doctor in Manchester, where I also bought my Galaxy.  It was a great little tool for short commuting and I even used it briefly in central France for a spot of touring and loved it a lot until it was nicked in 2012 locked up at Preston Park Station in Brighton.  My new Brompton is laquer styled frame, six geared (reduced) with a Son hub dynamo, Brooks saddle and snazzy leather Brooks grips.  She's a real beauty.  Twitchy ride but good for ten-20 miles and with the addition of a waterproof big front bag made by Ortlieb in shocking orange.
I have always lusted after the mythical Rohloff gearing system, fully enclosed in an oil bath and practically maintenance-free.  Up in Glasgow Kinetic Cycles do a Brompton Rohloff conversion, yeah a Rohloff conversion turning the wee toadie into a full blown beast of a touring machine.  Throw me in a Gates Carbon drive too could you?  Oh and a Son dynamo lighting system!
Here with credit to the editor of the splendid journal from Bikepacking.com are his excellent thoughts:


1. CHANGE (THE RHETORIC)

As the editor at BIKEPACKING.com, I see a lot of bike related content. After a while, it’s easy to gloss over the prevailing tone of mainstream mountain biking media, social streams and culture. You know, the one where trails aren’t just ridden. They’re ripped, crushed, owned, and shredded. Scenery is supplanted by skids, tail whips and big air. All too often, the image of mountain biking is portrayed as destroying land, not savoring it. This overtly aggressive lexicon has also slipped into the words, visual language, culture, clothing, and graphics that define it.THIS OVERTLY AGGRESSIVE LEXICON HAS ALSO SLIPPED INTO THE WORDS, VISUAL LANGUAGE, CULTURE, CLOTHING, AND GRAPHICS THAT DEFINE IT. It’s no wonder other land user groups fear us. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate carving fast singletrack just as much as anyone. Mountain bikes are incredible machines and the skillsets that individuals have developed to push them to their limits is amazing. But I also think there is a softer, alternative voice that needs to be heard, nurtured, and grown.
Fortunately, the rise of bikepacking presents the opportunity to seize a new vernacular. One that offsets aggressive imagery with that focused on stewardship and appreciation. One that places landscapes, cultures, exploration, and solace over hits and berms. The language of bikepacking, both literal and visual, hinges on words like ‘remote’, ‘access’, ‘wander’, and ‘backcountry’. Visuals that tell a story that goes beyond outright speed and technical mastery. We see this as an extremely positive message, especially in the face of worldwide land access issues. With the right educational information around ethics and advocacy, we believe in the value of encouraging the growth of this alternative perception of mountain biking.

DOES RELIGION DRIVE MEN MAD?

 THE IMPLACABLE NATURE OF THE IDEA


I  observe, as many do, the unfolding disaster in Gaza and thoughts emerge unbidden in my mind.

I wonder about countries and religion and how so often these modes of supposed salvation drive men and women into vortices of complete madness leading to unthinkable cruelty and barbarism.

How human men (and they are mostly men) will murder children, rape women and torture their fellow humans with gleeful commitment, even enthusiasm for inflicting the maximum level of pain and humiliation. 

How is all this possible?

My answer is expressed with all humility as these are simply my thoughts, those motes of dust in the wind.  But I strive for some anchor for the immense pain I feel in my heart upon watching this unfolding cataclysm of hatred and horror in the Middle East.

My sense is that this all begins in the mind.  That what we witness here is a result of thoughts and imagination replacing reality.

Let us take a comparison.  Look at what we call countries.  Do they exist?  Well yes, we consider we come from a particular country. When we are asked the question where are you from we will often reply, well I'm from the UK or I am from South Africa or I am from Brazil or I am an Israeli or I am a Palestinian. 

In this sense our country of birth or a new nationality we have taken on becomes a large part of what we may refer to as our identity, it describes part of what we perceive as our essential Self, our being.

Then we may be asked by this imaginary interviewer-What are you about?  What do you believe?  And often, what do you do?

But let’s pause a moment at the question of our country.  What is a country?  Is it not simply an idea?

There are no real lines of demarcation in nature that determines what group of Homo sapiens will live in a specific area. Those borders are created inside someone’s head and often collide with other ideas of conquest, war, colonisation and economic expansion.

These ideas collect behind the original idea of ‘country’ and what is an imaginary reality becomes more real than the actual reality. An endless train of countless carriages hurtling on its way to another constructed idealised reality.

Because the fact is that countries do not exist in actual reality. In many ways they are fictionalised entities that are concretised in imaginary nature but they cannot exist in nature because they are not real.  They are ideas.

If we imagine the human species were to instantly vanish what would be left?  Well there would be buildings, temples, prisons, immense cities, ports, lots of walls and fences, military bases and seaside resorts.  But there would be no countries.  Because countries do not exist in independent reality.  They are ideas of place rather than place itself.

If we look at a mountain, say Kilimanjaro, we can see that it exists in nature.  It is an existential fact that is not dependent on thoughts or belief systems for its being a concrete part of nature.  Unlike countries, which only truly exist in the minds of their inhabitants and therefore have no concrete existence in nature.

Is it not the saddest thing that what drives the great wars and slaughters is simply an idea?  

Perhaps we should get rid of this idea and simply live on our planet?

Religion too is perhaps the most powerful of these ideas based as it is on the single strongest driver of division between humans - the idea of God. And then inevitable meditations upon the nature of this God.

Whether it be called Jesus or Jehovah or Allah or the Lord Buddha or the Creator, or Shiva, these are all versions of the same idea.  An imaginary Being that requires a set of rules and beliefs and behaviour to be placated or worshipped or honoured.  Rules that can be infringed with resulting punishments.  Highly varied schema of intolerance is directed between these different ideas and it underpins the continuing holocaust between humans located in their various idealised territories that we call countries.

I will nail my own colours to the mast.  I do not know if there is a God.  I choose not to believe that there is because I choose not to believe in something I cannot understand.  If God has existence it would surpass our understanding containing within itself all meaning. 

In the seventeenth century Spinoza made the case that God must be part of natural law and that therefore miracles cannot have taken place because they are in defiance of natural law and that consequently the Bible must be taken as metaphor, not fact.  He also stated that this God acting in accord with natural law, with Nature, is highly unlikely to require strictly determined rules of behaviour or ceremonial activity or specific dress as these are simply ideas from the imagination of humans.

Spinoza’s ethics, massively simplified, state that humans should live in accordance with natural law and thus acquire what he called ‘blessedness’.

I can live with this ‘idea’, it makes sense to me to seek ‘blessedness’ though I struggle with the acquisition.

However given my own ‘ideas’ on the subject I am most content to allow my fellow humans to worship and pray to whatever God they imagine and I wish them comfort from it.  I do not however consider this gives them any right to predate and destroy and discriminate on those who interpret this most ungraspable of notions in a different way from themselves.

I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Faith and even attended a Seminary as a boy, destined for the Priesthood, when, as a devastated 14 year old I came to the realisation  that this was all nonsense upon stilts.

Perhaps then we should get rid of both ideas.  That of Nations and that of Religions.  Perhaps we should just be in the world.

None of this helps the men, women and children of Gaza facing annihilation or the avenging Israeli’s who have lost their loved one’s in Hamas’s shocking assault.

But like many others I stand mute in the face of this unfolding catastrophe.  I stand mute, looking at the cold, hard and vengeful eyes of the leaders and the blood of the innocent which will once again flow into the river of human time and the circle of hate growing, ever growing.  Once again I stand mute and uncomprehending at the implacable nature of The Idea.



26.3.23

ME AND BOB DYLAN

Me ’n Bob Dylan. 

Me’n Bob Dylan first got together in 1975.  We met through an intermediary, a tiny, moustachioed Geordie accountant called Ken with the features of a vertically challenged Apache who had been thrown in the hot wash, warrior-hook nose, high cheekbones and imperious and coldly mysterious mien, crowned with a shock of jet black hair.  He did not carry a tomahawk.  Ken was the first proper Bobcat I had met and such relationships lead to an almost continual exposure to Bobness of all kinds.  A kind of cultish indoctrination but with a large joint maybe substituting for the waterboarding bits and a chilled setting where the Bobcat endlessly spins his (sometimes hers but not too commonly) carefully curated vinyl discs of Bob’s truth-strummings .  Bobcats seem to be obsessive collectors and, for many of them the vinyl revival was immaterial as they will just keep on keeping on, till the wheels fall off and burn, as it were.

Ken however did have one early recognised substantial problem.  He appeared to suffer from significant alcohol induced psychosis.  After only three pints the wiry little Geordie would up and target a likely victim or group of victims, it mattered not how many, how big or how tall.  And he would proceed to scare them shitless.  I will always remember him confronting a group of hairy bikers enjoying an innocent pint in a Blackpool pub and offering them all outside where he was going to ‘fook the lot of yoo fooking bastards’.  The bikers who had been sprawled across their table like a tribe of vikings out for rape and plunder, meekly gathered their helmets and left, looking back at him fearfully.

I explained to Ken patiently, for the umpteenth time, that I could not tolerate his continual transformation into a psychopathic bully after consuming miniscule amounts of alcohol.  I told him that scaring people was wrong and the clincher, I told him Bob would never approve of such behaviour.

We had a row.  He offered me outside for a fooking.  Upon the instant of the fight, He punched a metal bin hard enough to break his knuckles and truth be told I never actually saw him fight anyone.  It was all to do with the threat of a fight, with the fear arising from his violent presentation. I went off in a huff.  He chased after me and begged, literally begged me, to return with him to his house claiming his wife would never understand if I didn’t go back with him.  Despite my better judgement I went back and as I mused upon the surreal night’s happenings he put ‘Blood on the Tracks’ on and I finally understood, listening to that album for maybe the tenth time, what all the fuss was about.  All my heart’s pain came welling up.  All the loss.  All the missed chances.  But hell!  We’re only sitting around listening to music.  Why are we all sinking into maudlin musings, suicidal ideation and holding back the tears as well as the night?  That’s Bob for you.  He’ll sucker punch you in a minute.  ‘Tell her she can look me up…If she’s got the time…’  Nobody can kick you in the guts so snarlingly, so caringly, so duplicitously, so poetically. 
Typically, as a scaredy-cat kind of a guy, I went back to the beginning of the work, so as not to miss anything, not the total beginning but just to ‘Freewheelin Bob Dylan’ with the picture of Bobby and Suze crunching through the New York snow, over the graves of countless dead Indians.  Cute.

But it wasn’t really what I was up for.  ‘Girl from the North Country’ is a pretty song for sure but it didn’t measure up to the ‘Blood on the Tracks’ pain and rage.  I moved quickly on to ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ with Bob in Guthrie-style workshirt and ‘Grapes of Wrath’ style ‘seen-it-all-eyes’ on the cover. Bob, who’s never jumped a train or done a days physical labour, slaving in the burning sun of a Californian fruit pickin’ farm with his Mexican compadres, in his life, staring out at you like he’s definitely bound for glory.  But ‘Chimes of Freedom’ is a great song, and it speaks of an ability to feel the pain and transmit it with enormous empathic resonance.  ‘Times they are a changin’? Well I’ve always thought it was a shit song man!  Get out of the way!  Hells-a-comin’ to breakfast sort of vibe.
So I moved on to ‘Bringing it all back home’ and that was it.  I touched the raging wellspring of genius from which I recognised the eruption of ‘Blood on the tracks’ and my mind was well and truly blown.  Did ’Subterranean Homesick Blues’ predict rap?  Like many young lost souls I knew without doubt that I was down with Johnny in the basement watching him mix it up.

In 1974 I opened an Open Air concert in the amphitheatre in Stanley Park in Blackpool (yes yes, I know!) and sang, solo, ‘It’s alright Ma, I’m only bleeding.’  I must have been crazy but I learned that a guitar in your hand is a major attractor to the female sex.  Thanks for that Bob!  Thanks for all that pain! Thanks for nuthin’ Bobby!

I spent hours listening to the album on repeat play and allowing it’s chaotic rhymes and antsy visionary images to wash over me, turning me into a tiny Bob-figurine.  I changed my hair to duplicate Bob’s mop, got a leather jacket and obtained a new nose from somewhere.  I began to smoke incessantly and even slept wearing my Raybans.

Then I encountered the inevitability of ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’
The miracle of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ described so memorably by Bruce Springsteen as the first hit of the snare drum being like the sound of the door of your mind being kicked open.
This album changed the way I thought about music.  It changed me.  It alerted me to the magical marriage of snarly poetry and rasping guitar.  It got me loving the organ.  Whoever would have invested so much in a whining harmonica?  It taught me the meaning of resistance through poetry and song. Like all the great texts it educated me.   

Because I too was in the kitchen with the Tombstone Blues.  I too was checking out suitable properties on Desolation Row.  I was obsessed with the wee speed-addled chappie.  I was in love with Bob’s rage.  I had become a Bobcat.

Fast forward with me to Earl’s Court 1983 and I’m staring at the thousands of clean looking Christians holding their lit lighters aloft and occasionally shouting ‘Praise the Lord!’ or ‘Hallelujah!’  To return to my spinster analogy I regarded them with the curiosity of someone attending a fancy dress party where a particular few are naked.  What exactly are these people doing here I thought.
Bob’s up there on stage looking a tad chunkier than I thought he should.  And he looks a bit pissed off.  A bit miserable.  It’s the Shot of Love Tour and I’m encountering the last ebbs and flows of Bob’s born-again conversion.
Jesus had personally spoken to him, of course he had, who else would he speak to on this bereft planet apart from Bob and maybe the Dalai Lama?  But Bob was getting bored-you could tell that.
With a wave of his hand and a snarl, he sends the Band off and returns alone with his acoustic guitar and harmonica.
Here’s his set list for the night-(A Tammy Wynette cover!!!!)

Gotta Serve Somebody
I Believe in You
Like a Rolling Stone
'Til I Get It Right  (Tammy Wynette cover)
Man Gave Names to All the Animals
Maggie's Farm
Simple Twist of Fate
Ballad of a Thin Man
Girl From the North Country
Dead Man, Dead Man
Slow Train
Abraham, Martin and John  (Dion cover)
Slow Train
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
In the Summertime
Mr. Tambourine Man
Solid Rock
Just Like a Woman
Watered-Down Love
What Can I Do for You?
All Along the Watchtower
Lenny Bruce
When You Gonna Wake Up?
In the Garden
Blowin' in the Wind
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
Knockin' on Heaven's Door 

That’s not a bad little menu for a Bobcat!  But for me it proved to be a temporary Swansong and we were to part for many years.

The Christianity killed off my mad enthusiasm and with the death of John Lennon I went off with The Beatles and Miles Davis and Stockhausen to another party. I still flirted with Bob though, like old friends whose paths have diverted in the wood but who remain in touch for birthdays, weddings and funerals.
Then, years later I got hold of ‘Time out of Mind’ slapped it on my playlist, listened to it about twenty times and Bam!  There I was once again hit by these amazing lyrics, and this great tight band.  TOOM was released in 1982 but I collided with it in 2018 and here I remain, a returnee to the fold, having just purchased the Mobile Fidelity vinyl Ultrasound recording of ‘Blood on the tracks’ for zillions of pounds and wow, but its mean tragedy drills deeper than ever. 
November 2022- And here comes ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ with it’s 17 minute clincher track

1983 fast forwards to 2022. The gig at Manchester Apollo.  The tickets are scammed online with massively inflated prices with viagogo.  The t shirts at £30 each.  Bob behind his piano.  A bit doddery but in fine voice with amazing interpretations of 'I contain multitudes' and especially a wonderful reinterpretation of ‘it’s all over now Baby Blue .’
I am struck initially by the hordes of Mancunians filling the theatre carrying giant 2 pint plastic glasses and I sit there prune faced and tight lipped like a disapproving spinster invited to an orgy.  They’ll be pissing all through the gig I say spitefully to my wife, Millie who tell’s me to chill the fuck out. Bob and his band emerge out of darkness onto the stage.  Is it him?  Where is he? Oh he’s there in his sparkly jacket.  Yes its him! I can just make out his head behind that piano bobbing up and down like a sniper’s invitation-'they shot him down like a dog' he later drawls.

Dylan's band were:
Tony Garnier – bass.
Charley Drayton – drums.
Bob Britt – guitar.
Doug Lancio – guitar.
Donnie Herron – violin, electric mandolin, pedal steel, lap steel.

And yes, those two pint plastic glass-slurping fuckers were pissing though the entire gig!

23.10.22

 

I saw this recently on the 'Recommendo' newsletter.  It looks like a good set of questions.

Twitter thread of self-fulfillment questions
Greg Isenberg says he asked 1 billionaire, 1 PHD math professor and 1 99-year-old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves and then he shared them in a Twitter thread, as a list of questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career. The ones I’m pondering are:
  • What is it that I can think of, read, watch, listen and talk about for hours on end without tiring of it?
  • What would this look like if it was fun?
  • How do I want my life to be different in one year?

1.10.22

The Irresistible Rise of Helen DeWitt-Currently this Blog's favourite author!

 'Lightning Rods'. Published 2011. Started 16.8.22-Finished 31.8.22

Thoughts?  Beautifully written.  Remarkably funny.  Huge degree of intelligence on the part of the writer.  Could not recommend this enough!  Sadly this couldn't have been written by a man these days.

The mechanism for preventing sexual harassment suits against male workers in corporations is given full expression.  My favourite novel of 2022 until, that is, I started reading 'The Last Samurai' - More to follow on that.



A Polemic on the current practice of Social Work with Children and Families

The primary object of social work is to create a society where it has no need to exist.  

Right away we are approaching  a battle.  A battle against systems that would deliberately create a dedicated organisation where a specific type of activity which we may call surveillance social work is brought to bear upon the poor.  Surveillance /measurement/ Secret monitoring/ Professional Cabals/ 

A mean spirited social work that fully participates in the poverty and inequality and discrimination against those who may be poor while paying for families to live in overcrowded and filthy accommodation, children to be abandoned to private social work provisions lacking any sense of obligation and service to anything other than profit.  (WELL CLEARLY I’M GOING TO GET LOTS OF MY CHEST!)


The primary object of current social work however, appears to be to engage in a project of technical bureaucratic intervention in a society that invades every aspect of the lives of the poor, most particularly by a creeping intervention in family life, without reference to the capacity for transformation and, even if such transformation were positively acknowledged, without the resources or skills to accomplish it in any meaningful sense.

In this project that I shall call neo-liberal welfarism, the social workers are joined in their interventions by the various tribes of the welfarist universe, united by this project of child protection under the disguise of soft policing by chronic programmes of endless assessment, innumerable meetings, diagnostic determinations, psychological categorisations and psychiatric considerations, various cabals of professionals-only discourse, and endless judgement and measurement.  Labels of all kind abound with all manner of evidential weight attached.  All underpinned by a legal system chronically obsessed with process and timescales over potential and possibilities and legislation often enacted in fear of further tragedy rather than in hope of better outcomes, with all the practice implications that are embodied in fear of failure, and public excoriation in the hallowed and considered prose of the gutter journalists who delight in the character assassination and moral dismemberment of all social workers unfortunate enough to be involved in the tragedy of the death of a child at the hands of his or her parents.

And so we proceed, marking our milestones by the death of the innocents and 'drawing conclusions on the wall.'  We must be risk averse, ever watchful, we must record every detail, we must act before disaster strikes.  We must establish modes of ruthless surveillance.  And as the gutter press so gleefully command, we must stop these evil monsters bent on murdering children, in their tracks.  We must be relentless and give them the damnation they so richly deserve.  


5.3.22

WALTER REDFERN ON PUNS/PICTURESQUE TOUR OF THE ENGLISH LAKES/THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE









RESISTANCE. BY SIMON ARMITAGE


It’s war again: a family
   carries its family out of a pranged house
      under a burning thatch.

The next scene smacks
   of archive newsreel: platforms and trains
      (never again, never again),

toddlers passed
   over heads and shoulders, lifetimes stowed
      in luggage racks.

It’s war again: unmistakable smoke
   on the near horizon mistaken
      for thick fog. Fingers crossed.

An old blue tractor
   tows an armoured tank
      into no-man’s land.

It’s the ceasefire hour: godspeed the columns
   of winter coats and fur-lined hoods,
      the high-wire walk

over buckled bridges
   managing cases and bags,
      balancing west and east - godspeed.

It’s war again: the woman in black
   gives sunflower seeds to the soldier, insists
      his marrow will nourish

the national flower. In dreams
   let bullets be birds, let cluster bombs
      burst into flocks.

False news is news
   with the pity
      edited out. It’s war again:

an air-raid siren can’t fully mute
   the cathedral bells -
      let’s call that hope.


Simon Armitage


Simon Armitage's (Our Poet Laureate in the UK) Poem is hearfelt and so moving.  The prospect of a war at the near end of the first quarter of the 21st Century is almost unbelievable.  My own view is that it matters little to bullies that you stand looking on their crimes wringing your hands and decrying the outrage of it.  Bullies, psychopaths and murderers only understand a response as forceful as theirs or greater.  Then they often seem to disappear as if they only existed as a result of our fear of them, which may, in fact be the case.


The open-hearted response of the British to the assistance of Ukrainian refugees is to be honoured.  However I am puzzled about the country's warm response to the Ukrainians compared to the hostile environment and unwelcome meted out to Syrians, Latino's and Africans.  Could it possibly be that the Ukrainians are white "like us" and not brown, black and yellow people and therefore "not us but other?"

That would of course mean that the broken bodies of Africans and middle eastern peoples are worth less, that their lives have less meaning.  How could it be possible that such poisonous racism could have taken root in the hearts of the Brits?

Of course our black, brown and yellow brothers and sisters have known that for some time.


So we must remember these Iliads are woven in the crook'd dreams of the hollow men and will always be, until our consciousness develops to the elementary point that such monstrosities become unthinkable, even unimaginable.  As a species we are not there yet!  Not by a long way!


May your God go with you and may all our Gods preserve and support the brave Ukrainians in their hour of War.  Love and Will. In balance.

17.1.22

A library the internet can’t get enough of!



Every year or so, the library in the photograph above — with stacks of books piled high and buttery lamplight aglow — resurfaces on the internet. It is often (erroneously) attributed to the author Umberto Eco, or said to be in Italy or Prague.

In fact, Kate Dwyer reports for The Times, the library is not in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of the Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey — a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. His book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, some 35,000 of which eventually made their way into the university’s libraries.

Why do people love this image so much? Don Winslow, the author and political activist, who recently posted a photograph of the library on Twitter, said it was “as stunning as a sunset.” Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of the blog the Aesthetics of Joy, pointed at the photo’s sense of plenitude: “There’s something about the sensorial abundance of seeing lots of something that gives us a little thrill,” she said.

And what would Dr. Macksey think, if he knew his library had taken on a life of its own? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books and literature with others,” his son, Alan Macksey, said. “He’d be delighted that his library lives on through this photo.”

16.1.22

I'm back!

 Ok Happy and Healthy 2022.  May your dreams fall like feathers of glory around you as they come to beautiful fruition!

I've been away.  Spiritually, intellectually emotionally.  UNPRESENT.  I'll write about it over the coming months.

For now I have just seen the comments that have been made and been awaiting moderation for over a year for which I am truly sorry.  I will answer every one over the next few weeks.






I will try to post weekly from here in -and from the bottom of my heart thank you for reading my little blog! 

First Edition of 'The House at Pooh Corner' with charming Shepard illustration of Winnie playing a balalaika


 

9.1.22

From my Poem 'The Twenty One insights'.

Now he cast his nets at my request,

and all he said reeked of naked truth.

‘First, wake up!  And sniff the guiding wind,

the teaching that is written in the sky,


written in the clouds for all to see.

Men were stretched to look up at the stars,

not to snuffle in the clotted mud,

or labour for some crook in factories

Like icebergs calving in a frozen sea,

his words touched me like sea-dreams deep within.

Touched that yearning that I know is in me.

‘You cannot walk through life with eyes tight shut!


And neither is this role a waking dream.

Sleep or wake-each must have it’s place,

and don’t forget to actually breathe!

To breathe is to inhale the dust of stars.

18.9.21

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ACTUAL CREATIVE MOMENT-TIM ROUGHGARDEN

Sometimes we walk in the moments history is born and made.  As Tim Roughgarden states below introducing his new lecture series-now is such a moment.  This is from Tyler Cowen's Blog, Marginal Revolution.

It’s worth recognizing that we’re currently in a particular moment in time, witnessing a new area of computer science blossom before our eyes in real time. It draws on well-established parts of computer science (e.g., cryptography and distributed systems) and other fields (e.g., game theory and finance), but is developing into a fundamental and interdisciplinary area of science and engineering its own right. Future generations of computer scientists will be jealous of your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this new area–analogous to getting into the Internet and the Web in the early 1990s. I cannot overstate the opportunities available to someone who masters the material covered in this course–current demand is much, much bigger than supply.

And perhaps this course will also serve as a partial corrective to the misguided coverage and discussion of blockchains in a typical mainstream media article or water cooler conversation, which seems bizarrely stuck in 2013 (focused almost entirely on Bitcoin, its environmental impact, the use case of payments, Silk Road, etc.). An enormous number of people, including a majority of computer science researchers and academics, have yet to grok the modern vision of blockchains: a new computing paradigm that will enable the next incarnation of the Internet and the Web, along with an entirely new generation of applications.

9.7.21

Response to a piece in the Sunday Times by Matthew Syed

 Matthew Syed seems one of the more insightful journalists working for the Murdochs though I continue to have obvious problems with Journalists musing on the erosion of ‘liberal democracy’ (whatever that is) whilst taking the filthy lucre of one who is a prime eroder of said democracy.

Here we have a continuation of a genre of journalism, realpolitik, personal anecdote, frankly expressed insight, tell it all-warts and all, which seems to be exploding.  It’s breast beating but disguised as insight.  It bemoans the loss of what, in reality, never existed, because specific interests with paws on the levers of power cannot in what might be laughingly referred to as ‘their view’ allow IT to happen.  What that IT is, is a functional, widespread, engaging and engaged, honest and transparent political system that responds to a series of checks and balances that are beyond the control of individuals or interest groups and to which all subscribe on pain of political disgrace and annihilation.

What we have instead is a philosophical hotch-potch of self interested think tanks, lobbyists, millionaires and billionaires, Corporate interests, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, Control of media, a militarised Police Force, State Erosion and Public Services nullified with their replacement by inefficient and unqualified private providers seeking profit from said Services.

The family silver has, of course, been sold.  The grounds also hived off for luxury flats and crowded estates.  The owners are all absentee landlords yet members of all the right clubs.  Navigation through the replacement forests of think tanks and special interest groups requires a Privately Educated School System to groom the next wave of Alpha’s in the codes and signals required for flourishing.

The point is that all of this, all of it, was clearly signalled in 1979 with the election of Research Chemist, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and with the installing of the actor Ronald Reagan in the US and the resulting onslaught of neo-liberalist ideology that led to the systematic dismantling of effective democratic state structures and the mass sell-off of public goods at bargain-basement prices to chronically liberalised international financial markets.

Along with privatised utilities of life-essentials like water, coal, gas, transport and public housing came the neo-liberal wraith coming up the rear with the inevitable consequences arising of endless war, privatised military and the hijacking of the military industrial complex by gangs with political masks.  The encouragement of massive corruption in the absence of state controls.  The exploitation of Africa and Asia for her mineral wealth made inevitable by TIFF and TIPP trade liberalisation as with the continued ravaging of Earth’s resources for short term profit.

The World stares obliterative disaster in it’s ugly face, not only for the humans but for all the extraordinary critters and vegetable and arborial life forms. Shrouded now in our winding sheets, stitched together in sweat shops by children, using micro-plastics dredged from the oceans, we await the inevitable. Mostly with the percolated anxiety of cattle milling outside the slaughterhouse, sometimes with an oddly triumphant and wilful ignorance that seems to celebrate itself.  Sometimes we wait frozen with despair or rage. 

But mostly we carry on.  Fighting, fucking, crapping, littering, music making, despoiling, loving, hating, boredoming, maniacal thoughting, opiated, close reading, not reading, mobile phoning texting, bullshitting, group thinking, micro exploiting, ageing, Being, transcending, being born.  Hope, hopeless.

To be alive is to be Cassandra, the doom-caller.  There are worse things, but I just can’t think what they are.


22.4.21

Epistemological Standpoints (Mark Fisher Project)

Georg Lukacs

History & Class Consciousness

III: The Standpoint of the Proletariat

5

Thus man has become the measure of all (societal) things. The conceptual and historical foundation for this has been laid by the methodological problems of economics: by dissolving the fetishistic objects into processes that take place among men and are objectified in concrete relations between them; by deriving the indissoluble fetishistic forms from the primary forms of human relations. At the conceptual level the structure of the world of men stands revealed as a system of dynamically changing relations in which the conflicts between man and nature, man and man (in the class struggle, etc.) are fought out. The structure and the hierarchy of the categories are the index of the degree of clarity to which man has attained concerning the foundations of his existence in these relations, i.e. the degree of consciousness of himself.


WTF!!!  How dare you create a paragraph like this Georg!  A spanking on the bare bottom is in order!!!  I do not mean to be disrespectful but...really!


So the name of this mental foundation of thought processes is the wonderful STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY.  What a great descriptive!  But what does it mean?  

16.3.21

Essay4th! H P Lovecraft and the Art of Supernatural horror-Lovecraft's great Essay: Supernatural horror in Literature.

 A mere 46 years old at the time of his death in 1937, Lovecraft is the father of what came to be known as Weird Fiction.  

Lovecraft's extraordinary essay on supernatural literature and tales begins thus:

'The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.'

That's a lot of fear!

ENDNOTES FOR 2020

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”

— Charlie Munger


21.11.20

DECEMBER NOTES

MONTAIGNE:  Given the subject matter, “Of Experience” has about it a remarkably buoyant magnitude. Take, for instance, the following passage, as translated by Donald Frame in The Complete Essays of Montaigne:

It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

Propelled by verbs—perceive, arrest, grasp, make, try, try—the sentences wheel and wrestle across the page, resisting stasis at every turn, refusing to wait around. They achieve that mimetic, nearly miraculous work of performing the very action they describe. Here and elsewhere, Montaigne’s musings on mortality, his gripes about illness and aging, his love-hate relationship with the natural order, not to mention his fervent epistemological stocktaking, make for a stubborn blueprint for life in the red zone, an operative action plan for how to wring futility’s neck.

The ubiquity of suffering heightened Montaigne’s attentiveness to the complexity of human experience. Pleasure, he contends, flows not from free rein but structure. The brevity of existence, he goes on, gives it a certain heft. Exertion, truth be told, is the best form of compensation. Time is slippery, the more reason to grab hold.

In each of these apothegms, we find evidence of what Keats would later call, in a letter to his brothers, “negative capability,” a notion that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his essay “The Crack-Up,” summarized as the capacity to embrace two contradictory ideas at the same time and go on functioning. “Of Experience” is one of Montaigne’s gravest works—“We must learn to endure,” he writes, “what we cannot avoid”—but the writing is so vigorous, so uninterested in despair. In the end, we get the sense from the writing that the writing was Montaigne’s method of magnifying enjoyment. Reading him might be as good a way as any to suspend life’s flight.

 Drew Bratcher 

---------------------------------------------------------



George Giacinto Giarchi graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1981 with a PhD in Sociology, and subsequently became Professor of Social Care studies at the University of Plymouth from 1977 to 2016. He is remembered in Scotland for his innovative social inscape study of the Argyll town of Dunoon in the 1970s - ‘Between McAlpine and Polaris.’

I am astonished to see how our lives intersected and terribly disappointed we never met.  I lived in Dunoon in the early 60's and have some searing memories of that time that I will write about one day.

Also would love to read his study of the impact of the military industrial complex on a small Scottish town.  But it's hard to get hold of.

3.10.20

‘Meaning and melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment.’ Review of important book by Christopher Bollas by my bestie, Professor Jim Davis

 

‘Meaning and melancholia: Life in the age of bewilderment.’ Routledge 2018

By Christopher Bollas.  Reviewed by Jim Davis.


It was such a delight an inspiration for me to read this book.  Here is a leading light in the psychotherapeutic world applying his creative and innovative psychodynamic thinking to a range of social, cultural and political issues.

My fear has been that the early-days ‘portrait’ of Transactional Analysis as a ‘social psychiatry’ has, mostly, come to resemble Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, and  that Pearl Drego’s call to transactional analysts to get out of our ‘psychic closets’ and involve ourselves in social movements for change remains largely unheard.

At the heart of this book, as the title suggests, is the fundamental importance of the search for meaning, and it is the process of searching that’s crucial as opposed to finding any definitive ‘truth’.  As Bollas puts it, ‘Arguably, the quest itself (for meaning) constitutes the meaning to be found’.  Indeed one could describe the book itself as an invitation to do just that.  RSVP!

His view is that there has been a ‘longstanding turn towards cynicism and passivity in our culture, a loss of belief in ourselves which has grown across generations and is now a psychic fact of our lives.’   Socially this fatalism manifests as a ‘detached, cynical spectatorism, opposed to any active engagement and involvement…an abandonment of a commitment to social justice.’ With the loss of meaning, and the feeling that our lives can make a contribution, mourning has turned to melancholia, and we share the experience of a collective ‘bewilderment.’ 

Bollas begins his book, in the Preface, by referring to the disturbing victory of Donald Trump in America, the vote for Brexit in the UK, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.  In doing so he offers us an invitation to widen our perspective from that of the individual, and even the family (itself shaped by politics, economics and culture) to the social, political and cultural realms.  He enjoins us both a)  to use our psychological theories to understand what is happening in our social world, and b) to account how ‘what is happening in our social world’ in turn shapes our selves. 

Social, political, economic and technological factors create frames of mind which are shared collectively, and are transmitted from generation to generation. Throughout the book Bollas’s search for meaning can be seen as dialectical - a ‘dialogue’ that shuttles between two seemingly opposing perspectives – in this case the social (history, politics, culture, technology) and the individual - based on the underlying notion that it is the exploration of the relationship between the two perspectives that elicits meaning. 

 

Bollas describes his book as a contribution to ‘political psychology’ and a ‘social psychotherapy’, and as an attempt to put psychological insight at the heart of a new kind of analysis of culture, society and history.  He bemoans the way commentators tend to ‘shy away; from psychological introspection in explaining the ‘anguish of political phenomena’ and seeks to provide  a ‘vocabulary and a set of perspectives that can set the stage for different types of conversations about our predicament’.  For example he refers to the paradoxical phenomenon of white working poor Americans identifying with Fox News and pro-Trump billionaires,  and suggests that this can be better understood psychologically - as an example of how oppressor and victim will form curious attachments to one another - than by means of socio-economic analysis.   If we do not understand the ‘dynamics of this collective ‘charge’, we risk losing contemporary societies to ‘explosive entropy.’  This book is therefore also a call to action, both in and beyond our ‘psychic closets.’  As I have pointed out elsewhere (ref)  ‘History tells us that slavery, racial discrimination, sexism, apartheid, colonialism weren’t seen as ‘social problems’ that anyone did enough about until the abolition, civil rights, #metoo, anti-apartheid independence social movements turned them into one.’

Bollas opens his analysis from the belief that in order to understand the present, and think about the future, we need to start with our history, and in the first few chapters he traces the history of the West (USA and Europe) over the last two hundred years. His aim in this is to make sense of how social, political and economic factors eg industrialisation, the horror of two world wars, colonialism, globalisation and technological change shaped the formation of collectively shared states of mind over many generations. 

For example, in relation to colonialism, ‘By the 1880s the overwhelming power of Europe over the rest of the world sponsored a manic state of mind; fuelled by self-idealisation, they licensed themselves to ravage the world.’  He wonders, psychologically, how many Europeans allowed themselves to recognise the ‘murderousness’ of this colonialism. The optimism about ‘progress’ to be found in Western society throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries could be accomplished only by splitting, and projecting unwanted parts of self and society into the ‘other’….so when Europe colonized Africa it found its perfect ‘other’: ‘’savages’’ would contain the projective identifications of Europeans’ minds.  They were seen to be primitive and violent so that the West could be sophisticated and pure.’  He describes this as a turning away from the reflective life, ‘burying ourselves in our ventures’, oblivious to the exploitation of the working–class and colonised people elsewhere in the world, which were seen simply as manifestations of the ‘natural order of things’’

 

As a former professor of English, Bollas begins his exploration of the impact of this social history on the fragmentation of inner life via reference to the literature of the early and mid 20th Century - Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Camus, and Sartre.  He portrays Camus’ ‘The stranger’ and Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ as ‘literary derivatives of two World Wars that crippled the soul of the Western self’. In place of the hero, we now have not so much an anti-hero as a negated human being; an absence of self and thought where once existed presence, insight and soul searching’. 

I remember reading Nausea’ (1938) and the impact it had on me in my impressionable youth.  The main character, Roquentin, spent most of his time in the library (searching for meaning no doubt!).  There he met a character whom Sartre named the Autodidact, whose knowledge of literature seemed truly extensive, that was until Roquentin realised that the only authors the Autodidact ever referred to had names, the first letter of which was between a and n, but never o or beyond.  Turned out he was working his way through the entire library, from a to z in that order! Reading Bollas I realised that the Autodidact represented Sartre’s negated human being, a self without presence or soul searching, collaterally damaged from world war two.  The ‘nausea’ of the title refers to the experience of life’s meaninglessness and absurdity, a characterisation that matches Bollas description of our most recent and current history as an ‘Age of Bewilderment’.

In a series of chapters which focus on how the social, culture shapes the individual, he makes that point that all individual psycho-diagnoses reflect the cultural mentalities of their time.  He gives a number of examples, beginning with the emergence of the borderline personality in the middle of the 20th century, characterised by splitting, idealisation and projection.  Bollas extends the idea of borderline as a ‘cultural suggestion’, a way of understanding how radical contradictions between ideological positions held within a society can successfully be kept apart, eg Remainers and Leavers about Brexit.  It is precisely this borderline social structure that characterised post-war America, and enabled it to continue to idealise itself as the liberator of the free world whilst at the same time sustaining its war machine for the conflicts that followed.  The split between the idealised America and the paranoid war-making America, between a country of promise and a country of profound racial prejudice, between its identity as a leader in the global community and an inwardly retreating nationalism, all served to create a profoundly confusing borderline ‘object structure.’

 

The cultural disinterest in inner life has also led to the formation of a new personality type – which Bollas calls the normopath.  Unlike the borderline they are not filled with anger, but rather are those who seek refuge from mental life by immersing immersing oneself in material comfort and a life of recreation, fundamentally disinterested in subjective life. They are abnormally normal – seemingly stable, secure, comfortable and socially extrovert’  Normopathy relates closely to what Mark Fischer (ref) terms hedonic depression, characterised not only by the pursuit of pleasure but also a retreat into displacement activities such as addictive consumption, and a narcissistic withdrawal from ‘society’ and social issues. 

In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Transmissive Selves’ Bollas turns his attention to the shaping of selves by our increasingly technologically mediated world. Regarding the impact of social media he says ‘We may wonder if we have ever before walked so blindly into a mass transformation….with so little idea of where we are going.’  He argues that whereas modern media may seem in some ways to have brought the world closer together, in fact such immediacy has created a disguised form of distance - we are not closer, but further apart. Our lives and selves are based less on immediate experiences and more on those indirect perceptions ‘spawned by the information revolution’

Selfies for example do not reveal the self but rather an ‘other in a solitary act of estranged intimacy’, and when we abandon actuals to communicate with virtuals we are momentarily dissociated.  Perhaps, even more fundamentally, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the like allow us to become, so to speak, part of the show. As we transmit our private selves to the world, we also become a function of that new technology - what Bollas calls the ‘transmissive self.’  We become both the vehicle of the communication, and ‘extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us’  Forebodingly, Bollas suggests that ‘A glance at the android future promises, not depth of communication, but a vision from the mental shadows. ’

In and altogether too short a chapter on the implications for what goes on in the therapy room, I was intrigued by the way Bollas developed Freud’s idea of the return of the repressed (ie the reappearance of unconscious mental content being expressed in a disguised form).  Bollas coins the term ‘return of the oppressed’.   ‘Wherever there is oppression of any form the oppressed self is forced to find compromised forms of thinking and expression, as a result of that oppression.’  By way of example, Bollas cites the idea of the ‘pseudo stupidity’ of slaves feigning various types of incapacity as a form of resistance, for example by ‘accidentally’ breaking machinery, or appearing unable to follow instructions, ie deliberately committing bungled actions as a defence and protest.  ‘Part of the challenge facing the present-day psychologist is how to restore interest in being a subject in the face of oppression’.  As a challenge relevant to all TA Fields, Bollas asks ‘What tools can the clinician use to analyse oppression and the ‘return of the oppressed’ in order to help the client find a space and a voice for reflective thought, expression and identity in relation to any form of oppression - racism, sexism, gender identity. (ref Ds CP, Johnson on gender, me on resilience)

 

Continuing in his shuttling back and forth in the dialectic between the individual and society, Bollas shifts his attention to the impact of Globalisation. Increasingly, and in a multitude of different ways, people have felt profoundly alienated by the world around them and seem to be in retreat from complexity and loss of meaning, seeking refuge in a search for a simplified view of life. This has fuelled the rise in fundamentalism, in protest about being governed by forces outside peoples’ understanding or control.  It seems to me that Brexit has thrown up many examples of this pattern, eg ‘get Brexit done’, ‘take back control’ – political mantras that oversimplified complex issues, stirred up widespread fears, and appealed to swathes of voters in the recent general election.  As Bollas points out, in the US context, this movement also represented a vote against the elite and remote government in Washington.  He suggests that voters shifted from Obama to Trump (similarly, in UK: labour to tory) not because they were attending so much to the policy differences between the two, but because they wanted to ‘take back control’.  ‘Emotions, not evidence based ‘facts’ (especially the ones that made people miserable) would be the new criteria for meaning making. If thinking something made you feel better it had to be right; if ideas made you feel worse, then they were bad and to be eliminated’  

But, Bollas warns, the refusal to accept the complexity of life and the mind does not come without a price.  It corresponds, he suggests, to what Freud meant by the ‘death drive’ - ‘the self’s retreat from a non-familiar world into the enclave of the secluded self.’  In the heat of the moment we can abandon complexity and opt for a simplistic version of reality, a more self- friendly version of things, and one based on paranoid projection onto others.  Scapegoating simplifies a highly complex set of fears, and as Bollas emphasises, the group projection easily escapes reflective processes, pointing out that ‘the attack on Baghdad showed very clearly who really had the weapons of mass destruction’  Similarly, in Trumps projective identifications – Mexicans are rapists, fake news, ‘crooked Hilary’ -and his offering of simple solutions to complex matters, he is gauging the feelings of society and ‘organising them into a political rhetoric, which captures paranoid aspects of people’s imagination.  Paranoid thinking works because it binds people around powerful feelings, and simplifies complex issues into digestible ones.  ‘When political movements are based on paranoid ideas, the group process becomes all the more dangerous, as isolated selves discover there are millions of other people who share the same views.  The retreat into paranoia then becomes even more deeply assuring and confirming’ 

In this way Bollas suggests that certain ideologies can function as ‘emotional and psychic holding environments’, such as in the appeal of the right wing neo-liberal push to reduce the regulatory functions of government.  Regulation, they argue, is the enemy of freedom.  Government is trying to take something away from us.  These are felt, not simply as opinions, but as statements of fact, together with the belief that powerful forces in our world have taken away something that was cherished.  This in turn evokes a sense of loss, abandonment and helplessness.  ‘Fear, failure and impotence is a cocktail of emotions endemic to the marginalised’ and one of the ways out of this dilemma is to transform helplessness and depression into anger. In this way extremist views may represent a form of emotional, psychic holding in the face of extreme forms of dismay.

Deregulation, he emphasises, doesn’t apply only to the removal of the government’s regulatory functions, but extends more widely into a rejection of all forms of self and social regulation.  Trump’s shameless expression of racist and sexist views is a manifestation of what happens when an individual abandons self-regulation.  If this becomes widespread, it can result in a society governed by ‘id capitalism and primitive states of mind.’ Confronted by opposing views the paranoid feels under threat. Indeed anyone with opposing ideas is a ‘migrant seeking to cross the borders of the mind.’ This way of looking at things provides the paranoid self with a ‘powerful and pleasurable sense of cohesion in a world that otherwise seems contaminated by its opposite - plurality.’