On the Corinthian Spirit

Read D.J. Taylors book On the Corinthian Spirit yesterday in two sittings. One from page 103 to the end of the book and the other from the beginning to page 103. Samuel Johnson used to recommend non-linear reading — largely because he found reading something of a chore, but I do find it curiously enjoyable. After all, very few books are written in a linear fashion so why should you read them as such. You don’t look at a painting from the top left hand corner and then slowly make your way down to the bottom right corner, do you?

Anyway, as I was saying, I read D.J. Taylor’s book about amateurism in sport and found it a mixed pleasure. On the one hand, it is short and informative. On the other, it is incredibly slight and quite unsatisfactory. Taylor clearly advocates that we ought to embrace some of the gentlemanly spirit of the Edwardian amateur without ever writing in a less than straightjacketedly professional way.

This blog is enjoyable to write because I do it in a spirit of abandonment without any idea of remuneration. Am I an amateur? Maybe, but hopefully not in the modern sense of ‘obviously incompetent’. In the olden days amateur was the best thing to be, it connoted all that was good about sportsmanship and good form, especially compared to the mercantile ‘professional’.

Would the world be abetter place if we id away with the professional sportsman? undoubtedly. You wouldn’t get this terrible situation where teams like Chelsea can buy their way to trophies. The best players would be spread out around the country. We could get some local pride, as they have with the Basque-only policy at Athletico Bilbao.

In the same way that Anthony Burgess divided novelists up into A (slaves to plot and convention) and B (bigging up language and originality), so you could divide them into professional and amateur. Burgess is clearly professional, whereas Beckett and Joyce where amateurs. Samuel Johnson (the anti-blockhead) was a professional, Keats was an amateur. There is a lot to be said for turning away from the attractions and degradations of money, but equally it can be an enormous help for focusing the mind. Imagine if I had to earn my money writing — what a calamity that would be for the world. I don’t even know where I would begin. Probably I would try to get work writing blog posts for money or copywriting for brochures — something incredibly lowly at any rate. What else could I do?

All over the internet.

Every so often here is a news report that suggests that office workers are wasting increasing amounts of time on the web. Usually the story is inspired by the latest internet fad — whether ebay, myspace, or facebook. In response, employers have taken to installing software like Websense on their networks, which prevents users from using more than a pre-allotted amount of time on such sites. Many sites are blocked entirely.

In my experience, this kind of thing is counter-productive. The internet is a big place and no blocking software can hope to get it right all the time. Some extreme bestiality sites go free (I assume), whilst sites that are really useful to my job are impossible to get at. The simplest way to avoid Websense is to use a proxy, which is an enormous timesaver, much better than going through the rigmarole of getting the IT department to give me authorization.

Unfortunately, the worst kind of procrastination doesn’t occur on prohibited sites at all. It is that procrastination that occurs mindlessly that really seems to cause the problems. The automatic checking of email, the refresh of your social network friendslist, the quick scan of the Guardian whilst a program on your computer is loading. It is this kind of procrastination that fills my head with unnecessary noise.

So over the last couple of days I have been experimenting with a simple firefox extension that blocks sites that you don’t want to visit. It is like Websense, but with the added advantage that you make the choices. Like stopping smoking, stopping such idle habits is incredibly challenging. The brain — so used to its daily routines — seizes up and is unable to process ideas.

Nevertheless it seems to be going fairly well so far, if only because my procrastination regime was so well orchestrated that I have effectively lopped off the entire tumour without allowing it to spread all over the internet.

Something incredibly important to our sense of self.

There’s a general agreement — is there not? — to avoid talking about pornography. You just don’t hear people mentioning it in polite society. It is treated as if it just doesn’t exist. Occasionally someone will break the sacred rule not to mention it, but what they have to say is often too particular to be of any general interest. Porn is boring, unless you’re using it for the reason it was made, in which case it can be very exciting.

I remember reading that some miscellaneous mammals had been shown their equivalent to pornography and had, given the choice, preferred to miss out on food than the sex on television. Human beings aren’t quite that bad, but you have to wonder about the effect that all this stimulation of our deepest pleasure centres must have. Perhaps we aren’t even close to satisfying the abysmal depths of our sexual potential.

Sometimes I wonder what people think about when they watch pornography. It is something that interests me quite a lot because it seems to me that porn taps directly into the unconscious. With porn we can surprise ourselves.

The things you like are always odd but oddly conventional. I wonder what it was like in the olden days before we had access to porn? What did people masturbate to? Did people make love more? We should employ more sexologists to tel us how people lived in the past. It might make us feel better about how we ourselves live. If we could latch onto something ‘natural’ we’d be able to gauge how close or far away we were from such a state.

Is the word ‘natural’ still problematic. Growing up in the pomo 90s it seemed that every word we took for granted was problematic. The effects of deconstruction was to reduce the amount that people could say by focusing on the vocabulary that they used. To satisfy this urge toward linguistic self-reflection, people used to concentrate on the exceptional cases. A discourse on nature would address the writings of a Victorian bigot who believed that thrashing wives was ‘natural’. Things like that.

Of course, at the time — and even now — it felt ever so clever. We were so knowing, so superior to those unreflective idiots in the past. But it was a hollow victory. We had lost something crucial, something incredibly important to our sense of self.

There is so little worth keeping.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the collapse of civilization and the end of the world as we know it. A quick google leads to an ocean of facts and figures about climate change, peak oil, survivalism etc. It can easily get quite overwhelming. None really get to the heart of what life will be like without electricity, cars, and the more frivolous aspects of civilization. In film, Barry Hines’s Threads gives a chilling glimpse of the effect of a nuclear winter and the Mad Max films show what life might be like without oil. But I haven’t read any books — at least not since Z for Zachariah when I was a child — that really made the end of the world a visceral reality. Until now.

Yesterday I found myself engrossed in Cormac McCarthy’s terrifying book The Road, about a world that is almost dead. Marauding gangs trailing chained catamites search for food amidst the ruins, whilst a boy and his father try to do the same while retaining a level of dignity.

The question I ask myself is: could I do it? The hero’s wife killed herself when she could no longer take the desolate lifestyle. Would I be like her or would I try to survive? Would I know when to keep my head down or would I find myself locked in a basement having my limbs slowly consumed by a desperate family.

The beauty of the book is how slight are the glimpses into the possibilities that exist in this world. Sometimes things seen out of the corner of the eye are more horrible than those you face head on. I try to imagine what life would be like were the meteroites or the bombs to drop on Britain and the nuclear winter were to destroy the biosphere. What good would it be to live in a block of flats? you’d have to move out of the city with its fearsome gangs of Neds and go out to the hills. Apparently the medieval castle is the best form of defence, which makes sense as that was the last time there were marauding bands in the area.

What Threads captured so well was the extent to which order would do its best to carry on officiously despite the grim inevitability of its doom. How long would the Prime Minister or the Queen be kept safe? These are questions that I would love to see answered, though prefereably not with a full-scale civilizational collapse.

Of course, you are reading these words on a medium that is guaranteed to disappear when the blackouts come. What good is the internet without electricity? What will remain at all of our civilization? We have produced so much but there is so little worth keeping.

How long before it all collapses?

Tom Hodgkinson wrote an interesting Country Diary entry the other day appealing to Britons to wake up and rebel against the banality of modern life. His specific targets were the mindless routine of drinking lager in front of the television every night, shopping for everything in soulless Tescos, and squandering your life on the internet.

Life is getting progressively worse it sometimes seems. All those things that we valued in the past — like community spirit, book reading, local produce, small-scale events in the local alehouse — are being replaced by gimcrack corporate tat. (But were things much better in the past. Didn’t people used to read rubbish books, watch crap telly and drink themselves to death?)

What do we want? Why are we all so scared of getting it? there are so many people all trying to make a living. The national population is too big for any common culture. That is why everything feels so fake.

Last night we went to see the very forgettable Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I went because I have a small obsession with the comedian Russell Brand, whose radio show streams of consciousness are endlessly fascinating. Brand wasn’t in it very much and dropped out of the film in a quite perfunctory way. Instead we saw the relationship traumas of some annoying everyman American. The film was most reminiscent of the abysmal Heart-Break Kid and had a similar streak of misogyny running through it. Though not quite as strong — insofar as it lacked any kind of edge.

If I were inclined to write a review I would probably talk about its depthless mediocrity, bemoaning and bewailing a culture that allows such bland fare to be released. In short, I would be echoing Tom Hodgkinson’s rant against these terrible days. How long before it all collapses?

If you don’t like the book you’re stuffed.

At some point in the last century, musicians or producers or listeners lost the ability to appreciate the sonic space between instruments. Possibly they were seduced by the potential of 32 48 64 track recording facilities. Possibly they were afraid that someone would realise that they weren’t actually very good musicians. Still, I don’t think there is a truly adequate explanation for the preference for musical sludge. No explanation that would justify this slide into decadence.

Listening to The Last Shadow Puppets album The Age of Understatement, the egregiousness of this lack of space immediately becomes apparent. Overlarded with strings and brass, the album is supposed to be Arctic Monkey, Alex Turner’s, take on the Walker Brothers and early Bowie. To me it sounds like some snotty kid with a screw loose whining over the top of the most leaden indie orchestral work that I’ve ever heard. Am I getting old? Maybe.

Last night finally got around to watching Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped version of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. I never much liked the novel A Scanner Darkly, finding one of the least engaging of Dick’s works — the stuff about hemispherical breakdown in the brain was too literal, the drugginess was tedious rather than unnerving as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, only the scramble suit idea was really good. As such, I wasn’t that surprised that the film was something of a non-event. It is done really well and accurately captures the spirit and action of the book but if you don’t like the book you’re stuffed.

The last moment.

So, what happened yesterday. I didn’t do much, in fact it disappeared in something of a blur. A bluntened blur. My girlfriend finally found this blog, though she says that she hasn’t read anything (apart from the piece on Marienbad which we had discussed the previous day).

I don’t mind who reads this thing, really I don’t. I wouldn’t publish it online if I did. But it does help your writing when you aren’t constantly worrying about who is reading what you write and what they think of it. Which readers particularly bother me? Work people and family, mainly. People with whom I tend to repress parts of my personality. People who don’t encourage any intellectual or social exuberance — for what is a blog if it doesn’t have intellectual or social exuberance?

Anyhow, I’ve recently been conducting experiments into sleep and the quality of consciousness. It is easy to blame poor quality sleep for the poor quality of your consciousness when, in actual fact, the way you live your waking life is to blame.

There’s a sleep guru who recommends a minimum of 9 hours sleep per night. Other reports suggest that people who sleep a mere 7 hours per night live longer and healthier. It is confusing. And high achievers in business are united by one thing — their ability to do without sleep. It makes you wonder whether the secret to success isn’t just to be able to operate at a fairly high level whilst feeling overwhelmingly knackered.

The aforementioned sleep guru appealed to pre-civilizational sleep patterns — a golden age when we had no candle or electric light, rising and falling with the sun. He recommended going to sleep at 9.30pm and waking at 6.30am. This sounds fine, but is impossible for anyone who has any kind of social life.

Sleepologists always recommend blocking out all light and getting a good mattress. Well, I recently bought new light-blocking curtains and bought a memory foam mattress and know now conclusively that it doesn’t make all that much difference. It is the amount of sleep you get that stops you from feeling tired. In my experience.

Perhaps the greatest drain on your resources and the reason you feel tired is your lifestyle. Who can wonder that people are exhausted when they are stuck in offices, chained to desks and unable to breathe fresh air? Then they go home to vegetate in front of the television. As such, I’m going to make a concerted attempt to live better — starting with doing more interesting things in the evening. Relaxing into sleep, not working until the last moment.

The Wave Pictures are well worth checking out.

The Wave Pictures (TWP) are the best new band I have heard in ages. I should perhaps point out that I haven’t heard any new bands in ages, but I see lots of R&B on The Hits and they’re much better than those bling-obsessed fools. Just signed to Moshi Moshi, with an album two weeks away from being released, TWP recall the best of anti-folk with the whacked out dizziness of a Sixties garage band.

Quite how new TWP are is debatable — they seem to have been going for years — quietly recording several CD-R albums when the bass player and drummer came up to visit the singer, who was at university in Glasgow. They look young, but somewhat jaded. Don’t know why.

Listening to their myspace, you’d think they were an entirely different band to the one that played the Brel last night. Last night they were fully electric and singer/guitarist Dave Tattersall produced some wonderfully wonky tremolo solos on his cheap fake Strat. Andre from Herman Dune — who has apparently released his own TWP covers albums — accompanied the band with some nonchalant indie noodlings of his own. It was all superbly engaging.

Perhaps the only problem with TWP is that the singer sounds a lot like the chap from Starsailor with the over-enunciated over-English clarity of his voice. Lyrically, they are a world away from the banalities of Starsailor. Take this surreal line from ‘Long Island’:
“I was an auto-focus illuminator flash gun, in aquamarine biology blue,
spitting out prints I printed you on photon quality glossily greasy chip paper with a tortilla dip chaser – and then later, I pinned you down.”

The Wave Pictures are well worth checking out.

Posters

For reasons unknown to myself, I am anti-materialist. Nothing irks me more than extraneous possessions. If it were up to me, which it isn’t, everything would be digital. There’s so much less clutter with digital. It’s far easier to forget about stuff on a harddrive than it is to cram it into a warddrobe.

Nevertheless, I am more than happy to help add stuff to the world. If you ask me to design posters, books or magazines, I will bite your hand off. What with the coming breakdown of civilization, physical objects are going to be much more valuable than these ephemeral websites.

Thus, I recently designed the following two posters for the diarist, Rob Wringham, and the artist, Laura Gonzalez.

I don’t think it helps.

I sometimes think that professing a love for arthouse cinema is the evolutionary equivalent of the burden that peacock’s carry around with them to impress their mate’s. These films are so unpleasurable and so cripplingly boring that it takes an act of brute will to tell the world that you enjoy them.

Yesterday, I eschewed channel Five’s screening of The Goonies for the questionable pleasures of Last Year in Marienbad, Alain Resnais’s classic moody mystery. Did I enjoy it? Alas, no. I really dislike the soundtrack with its jarring, grating organ music. I find the characters obtuse and annoying. The splendour of the cinematography I can leave to those people who enjoy trudging around country houses. It’s boring and lacks wit.

Yet, for all these valid reasons to dislike a film, I still feel as if it were me who has the problem. Imagine a peacock that decided to get its feathers clipped in favour of being able to fly and fight. Would he be more successful or less? Has there ever been a case of evolutionary fitness reverting away from impressive oddness towards robust vigour? Or do creatures who have been burdened by their differences tend to be quickly extinguished like the Dodo?

Of course, it is arguable that not liking all arthouse cinema is a much better evolutionary tactic than liking them all . . . just not in the circles I move in. I don’t think my girlfriend thinks any less of me for my penchant for Die Hard-style high-concept action films, but I don’t think it helps.