Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Gee – You Guys Really Specialise

Daughter is now heavily into Chess though I’m not sure she has actually grasped the idea of actually thinking about each move before it is made. The result is that her American-Voiced Chess program is continually chatting to us from upstairs, an alternation between a man’s and a woman’s voice which brings to mind a genteel argument. I suppose I will have to try and resurrect my own extremely poor Chess skills. We used to play in the Sixth form common room though I was only ever on the fringes of the main Chess group. We really should have been studying but hey – the sun was shining and we were all … er … indoors huddled around a chess board.

The youngest has been on a voyage of self discovery this week. He suddenly discovered his navel and not having spotted it before thought something really bad had happened – “Mummy – big hole”. This of course meant that everyone else in the family had to prove that they were the same. None of this stopped him lifting his shirt at every opportunity and pointing excitedly.

Life for the rest of us has involved lounging around trying not to look as if we were melting. All the thunderstorms that have been promised (I have a signed document from The Met Office saying so) have missed us and gone on to soak some undeserving South-Eastern Water area. They’ll be up here sooner or later, hanging around our (full) reservoirs whistling, with a view to filling up the odd tanker or two while no one is watching. Oi! Come back with our water! We have new grass in what was once just a pebbled area and then was a disaster area of a slag-heap for months. Have to say that the last man who worked on it certainly knows what he is doing and has been able to create something rather wonderful out of the postage stamp that is our back-garden. The children now have somewhere other than the few square meters in front of the television to lounge around.

All this domestic bliss has meant that the terrible problems of the rest of the world seem to be receding into irrelevancy. This is of course a shame but it makes me wonder about the weighting that is given to various news stories depending on how relevant they are to out own little realm of balance. There is a sort of perverse equation that means that certain numbers of dead people are only the equivalent of certain numbers of other dead people. The weighting is of course down to how much each death will affect us here. So anything that relates to oil comes way up the list. Basically, it comes down to how much an event will affect the economy. I’ve long thought that terrorists have gone for the wrong targets. So many dead and injured from any atrocity are always going to mean much TV coverage, standard outrage and condemnation, but in general after a while we seem to switch off to the suffering unless we are directly affected. A campaign of just nuisance against infrastructure would be more damaging because what people really cannot stand is having to queue for petrol or panic about not having enough toilet rolls. Spread out all of that annoyance over the whole population and Governments would soon have to rethink policies. I must add that I do NOT advocate any such behaviour in the same way that all right-thinking people do not call for terrorist attacks. You will see me panicking just as much as anyone else.

I could never understand why the Rwandan genocide was not in the headlines for months and then suddenly it was ten years ago and the only things about it were a few mid-news items from the BBC about the aftermath and reconciliation. Yet we have reminders of various economic crises every day. I suppose that a real and deep depression has the potential to kill many people and I don’t know enough about economics and world affairs (C grade at O-Level) to say whether any economic downturn will really kill people in the future. I seem to remember reading some things that say that in our western society that is not possible any more. If we can reduce our dependency on oil or even do with out it completely like Sweden aims to then we might be able to look forward without a nervous eye on the markets at every opportunity. Economic downturns only happen because of people, because of collective pessimism; the world economy for all its slick marketing image and clever copy about how wonderful various goods and services are, is at the mercy of rumour and hearsay. There is of course the inertia of something so large Things which happen this week may not cause measurable affects for months or even years; that is of course Chaos theory in action but isn’t that what globalisation will lead to? Small, local business entities can react faster to the situation on the ground, though I suppose that a determined company can make people redundant as quick as it likes and any oil company can up it’s pump prices as soon as the words “oil futures” break out of the relative calm of the business news into the realm of death and disaster that makes up the headlines these days. So be confident! Buy something today and keep those wheels turning. Oh dear – that’s not what I meant at all.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Paradise News

Here is a story which makes me rethink my idea of history. To actually have a photograph of the wife of Mozart seems a physical impossibility bearing in mind all those 18th century outfits from Amadeus but of course he died young and his wife lived on. There is such a contrast between the brightly coloured images of Mozart’s life and the dour, almost puritanical look of his wife in 1840. It could all be a fake of course; the bloke at the back leaning over looks rather like Hitler who has been the subject of various hoaxes himself. All the women seem to be dressed like Florence Nightingale which gives a further link forward with the sound recording of the founder of modern nursing from 1890 We are around for only a short time but the difference these days, after the sputtering of technology, is that we will gradually become more than just memories when we are dead. Through the sketches of human likeness, through photography and sound recording and video we fade in to a post-death existence that is becoming more and more defined. Soon, with cloning and whole memory recording or even the download of consciousness, we will not die when we die – just step from a fleshy body into a technological one. We must be the first generations to be able to think of this, to be able to defeat our defined and allotted spans.

I know my wife thinks this is horrible and reflecting on it, I am not sure I could take the step if offered the chance of being immortal inside a machine. I sometimes think of the boundary moment when all my memories and parameters for thinking, get absorbed into whatever wonderful machine has been made. It is just a copy – I go on and my other self goes on with no link between the two. Maybe you could see some sort of sphere that gradually absorbs not only your mind but your body as well, creating a continuous line from human to machine existence. I have to go back to Douglas Adams’ mice who tell Arthur that he could be programmed not to miss his lack of brain after it had been removed and diced. Immortality is probably the thing with the greatest gap between what you imagine and the reality. It sounds wonderful but the long game is just one of boredom and ill-feeling. I can imagine many “machines” committing suicide. It might even be built in to the programming. You can select to leave existence at any time. Just how many would last for ever. Obviously I cannot have any real idea of what this existence would be like. What if you could continually transfer your mind from one youthful body to another? What if you could go back to being three yet with the mind of an adult?

And what is the point of any of this anyway? I can always do the naïve rant about what is the point of anything while humans behave so badly to each other but that is human nature. The absorbing process would have to remove that to prevent the transfer of our imperfect world into the machines and by then we would not be human any more, just unemotional machines. Many of us are already. I’m not one for silences; I am sneakily with certain shock-haired MPs regarding the wallowing in self-pity thing but if there is one (and today warrants one even for me) I will respect it and use it for what it is intended – not stick to the letter but laugh and joke silently using written notes and worse still – clap at the end. It is the “I am not part of it so I will ignore it and so doing be part of it” thing. You see the crowds throwing abuse outside high-profile murder trials, behaving in ways that lead to people not having respect for each other. The cycle continues.

Yes I am a repressed member of the English Middle Class. How did you know?

And at last, to Paradise News itself. This is a book by David Lodge in which an excommunicated Catholic priest has his life changed by a visit to a dying relative in Hawaii. I had forgotten how well written this book is. It may suffer slightly in the development of the characters but it is supposed to be a comedy after all. It is easy to read despite some references to theology especially the existence of the afterlife – Paradise News – Heaven – Hawaii - get it? It has a very satisfying ending.

I have been trying to persuade my wife to read it though my warning about some of the theology being against her beliefs has put her off. She has instead at last started to read The Bell Jar and breathlessly announced that is was very well written though this may be an overstatement due to her view that this book, her previous reading, is so badly written. It is just “he said she said, they said”. If you are going to write a biography which is just so much interview, you might as well dispense with the stuff you write yourself and just transcribe the interviews. This worked brilliantly for Jean Stein’s Biography of Edie Sedgewick which just had paragraphs from all associates. Little Miss S by Edie Brickell is about her. However, it sometimes seems that Edie S herself was so out of things for most of her life, that she is just a catalyst for information about The Factory and other things.
Wounded Angel

Maybe we should make a video – drag everyone who is prepared to speak on camera to the BBC, stick them in front of some makeshift backcloth and get them to say what they think of things. Survivors, relatives of the dead, the emergency services, get everyone involved to say something. Stuff that grainy pathetic excuse for an atrocity back into the dust where it came from. That latest video release from AQPRD came across as a sort of perverse Queen’s speech; here I am with our boys, mixing chemicals in some remote hut, blowing a hole in the ground. It takes no intelligence to do that. It takes intelligence to persuade and manipulate the poor and ignorant believers into doing those things. Not in my name, ever.

The hatred and brainwashing is never far from the surface in anyone but for most of us it is overridden by a desire for a quiet life free from worry. The fact that the only message we can send our government is a single cross every four or five years does not make us complicit in the mistakes made by our dear leaders. We do not always vote over foreign policy. In fact I would doubt that more than a handful of people even have in mind the wider world when they reach the polling station. Penny off Income Tax? That will do nicely sir. That does not make the public a target. Being lied to – saying that July 7th has nothing to do with war in Iraq – is almost as bad. Even before the release of the two videos which explicitly linked the atrocity with UK policy abroad, we knew that was wrong. I have started using the word that in proper context indicates the illegitimacy of someone when referring to The First Lady’s husband. I cannot bring myself to write his name as it annoys me. That’s how I feel. Get over it. Bank those Tax Credits boys!

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Mo Chuisneoir - Saiorse

Listening to something by Dead Can Dance

We have been trying to watch The Convent over the last few weeks having watched The Monastery last year. However, while my wife managed to keep up with it and indeed shush me on the few occasions when I got annoyed enough to comment; it did seem that the women were much more involved with earthly concerns than the men from the Monastery. Much of the friction came from the discipline that the women had to follow – or in most cases not follow. They annoyed me just by not actually finding anything spiritual anywhere. Now I am not sure whether this was because the order (The Poor Clares) is closed and not used to the free spirits that were dumped on them or because the women were just more earth-bound than the men. I am afraid I did not like two of the women at all; they were not much more than giggling schoolgirls which is sad considering that one of them is a poet who, from her website, seems quite likeable. I don’t want to carry on with this much because I suspect that the artificial situation would put anyone into a strange state. I will just say that Sister Gabriel had an otherworldly aura which to me seemed to be able to calm down anything. While mentoring one of the women, I wanted to shout “look at her! Look at her! See how happy she is? Ask her why?” But then again I’m not a bohemian and never have been.

Not like my brother who lived in a huge rambling flat in a huge rambling house overlooking The Valley under the Malvern Hills. There were things everywhere without actually having anything in a place where it could be considered to be at home. Drum machines and Keyboards and a collection of art magazines that would require a top shelf from here to Clare Curtis-Thomas’ house. He seemed to live on Vesta Curries – those powdered thingies rendered exotic by the addition of a handful of sultanas – and beer. He was a new romantic as well for a time though most of his outfits involved baggy trousers with tank-tops tucked in.

I feel a poem coming on. Something with the word fragile in it – pronounced in the American way to rhyme (almost) with cudgel. Maybe you will get to see it some time. The future’s so bright.