The Unique Sound of the Cricket

'All the happiness the earth possesses in not being broken down into matter and spirit was contained in the unique sound of the cricket.'



The Unique Sound of the Cricket: Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876.Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was working as a teacher in the provinces. It was, apparently, stressful, and Mallarmé came to feel that he’d entered “the Void”—a liberating (albeit terrifying) abyss of... Read More »

BBC Archival Footage-In Their Own Words British Authors J.R.R. Tolkien P...

Winter (1923) | BFI National Archive

When you knew where you were with the seasons.

Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we be able to buy and enjoy cheese?

Of course not!  To both!  Although wait a minute - how can I say that with such dismissive certainty?  Nobody knows if there will be an apocalypse, or indeed what form it might take should one occur.
Say, for example, there was an apocalypse booked in for next Tuesday.  Would it wipe out the entire globe, or just half of Kilmarnock (not the good half, obviously)?  We simply do not know.  Would cheese be available, in either respect?  I think it is quite likely that some foodstuffs might survive, and that cheese might very well be among them.
Especially the hard kind,  such as Parmesan.
Would we be able to buy it?  Only if money and a trading environment survived.  Money and buying might be consigned to the dustbins of history, post-apocalypse.  We might have to stoop to 'looting' it.
As for 'enjoying' it - well, stolen fruits and all that.  And it would all depend on a decent cheddar being available. And on not impairing one's enjoyment of said cheddar by worrying about skyrocketing cholesterol.
I'm bored thinking about it now, and am moving on to 'what if the whole world went underwater due to apocalyptic flooding and to escape Kevin Costner - how quickly would we develop gills?'

Are We Turning into Machines?

Surely this isn't likely.  At least, not terribly.  I mean,  I accept that as organic beings - if you take a teleological perspective - we are wending our way along a Hegelian-style continuum of evolution - that is, probably.  Perhaps.  Then again,  perhaps not.  And whereabouts we are on that continuum, should such a thing exist, or be occurring, is a matter of pure conjecture.
Where does that leave us?  Sort of where we always were I suppose.
I don't think we're that far from the 'fish crawling out of swamp' stage really.  Well, so it seems if you look at social media.
We certainly use a lot of technology - our lives revolve around it now - and technology is increasingly involved in health care and in food production, so that we even ingest technology without knowing it.  The virtual web surrounds us and numbs us like the poisonous silvery threads of an enormous, crushing, stifling spider's web.  The harder you struggle, the more you kick, the harder it is to escape.  (Is that true?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps it just feels like that.)
One of the things that worries me most is that already there are no letters, no diaries with which secrets are shared, no accounts of daily life written in the watches of the night and hidden under pillows. Will there ever be political diaries again?  A Chris Mullin, a Tony Benn?  What about Byron and his Letters?  Nowadays he'd have an Instagram account and probably a leaked sex tape.  Everything's ephemeral - close your account and it's gone,  all gone, all bar that embarrassing photo you were tagged in on Facebook that just will never go away.
Perhaps as we age we will have failing parts of us replaced so that eventually we are completely mechanical, and just require to be 'maintained' and 'serviced'.  Hips, knees, kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. Teeth.  Faces.  They do all this already, in some form or other.  So, semi-mechanical humanoids, yes, that I can envisage.   What about brains?  Will they be next?  And what about souls?  I think we all have those, and I'm quite sure you cannot manufacture a soul.  A machine may be able to 'think', but it cannot have a soul.
No, I don't think we''re 'turning into' into machines.  I'm not convinced that we're turning into anything, we're not evolving at all.  If we're doing anything, anything at all, we're spiralling downwards, the trajectory is downwards, earthwards, drilling into the dirt and knocking ourselves senseless on rocks.  We don't understand time never mind the infinite, and our place within it.  Our view of existence is limited,  we see only a fraction, like navigating through life via that steamed-up triangular window in the Apollo 13 space capsule.
What gives me hope is the organic world.
Nature doesn't like nasty machines.

Next post - Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we still be able to buy cheese?

To Love Somebody-Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Brothers

Beach Boys-In My Room

BONZO DOG (DOO-DAH) BAND - 'The Intro And The Outro' - 45rpm 1967

'Adolf Hitler on vibes.  Nice.'

Splintered World

The world has changed a lot during my lifetime and especially so over the last ten or fifteen years.
Obvious,  I know.  I'm just trying to get my head around it in order to make sense of the world as it is now, and my place therein.  If indeed I have one.
When I was young, and if you were of the working class, there were unions to represent you and steady, reliable jobs that paid proper wages and at the end of your working life you got a pension.  You knew that, you were sure of it.  You saw your parents' generation doing that.  They'd fought in the War, most of them, and if they were old enough to have done that they were also old enough to remember what life was like before the NHS and the Welfare State and they valued these things.
There was plenty of work.  You applied for jobs on paper, or if it was a temporary job you might just phone or go along and speak to whoever was in charge.  In summer, there were generally plenty of seasonal jobs in hotels or on farms.  And if you couldn't work, there was social security instead of 'welfare'.  You could go to the Job Centre and look at the job cards and if there was something you could go for you took the card to the desk and spoke to someone who would assist you.
Now what do you do?  You fill in some crappy online form and send it to some anonymous agency which takes all your personal details and stores them who-knows-where, and you never hear from them again.
Or perhaps that's just me.  Is it just me?  I don't know.
Property was affordable.  They talk of affordable homes now but they aren't really affordable, not for the majority of people in the way that homes used to be.
People generally did better than their parents, educationally and financially.  If you didn't do well at school there were other chances, if you wanted them. People went to libraries and evening classes and learned new skills to help them 'get on'.  There was no such thing as 'student debt'.
That's all in the past now, by and large, and of course, there's no going back.  Even if you wanted to go back, you couldn't. You never can because things never gel together in exactly the way things used to be.  Some might say that's just as well and perhaps in many respects they're right.
A lot of people were like me and didn't want to 'get on'.  In fact. they spat in the face of 'getting on'. The old certainties were taken for granted.  Looking back from where I am now, I can see that that was quite the luxury - at least, if you so chose, you could 'get on'. At least, for most of us, there was the option of so doing.  Now?  Not so much.  Not at all, for many.  For many. there is nothing but bare survival and little if any

chance of escape.
To me it seems that the world has splintered into layers.  At the bottom, there are those who live among the shards of life,  living among shattered pieces of the old and the new.  Grubbing around in the best way they can.  There is no sense, anywhere, any more, not really any sort of a workable consensus anyway in the way that there used to be, that 'these people' (or 'the poor') have a right to a decent life and dignity and that we should all help each other to achieve that because by helping one we help us all.  Lives are uncertain at best, precariously desperate for many.  The old certainties of job security and having a sense of how one's life would, or should, evolve aren't there any more.  The new certainties are fear and chaos. Patterns have shifted or vanished, like unused paths to an abandoned coal mine.  At the top, are people who seem to have everything, and who seem to control everything, materially.  And there are just enough people in the middle to stop the world imploding. People who can afford mortgages and these big white cars you see all over the place and even second homes.  People with buy to let mortgages, for heaven's sake.  People who have retired on public sector pensions and who can afford to eat out a lot.
But there are far too many people at the bottom.  And the bottom seems far, far grottier and far, far harder to escape than ever it used to be.
Where will this end?  I fear for us all.

Algernon Blackwood reading Pistol Against a Ghost (7/5/1948)

A tree - i.e. a thing that newspapers used to be made from. 

Is it a good thing to 'have news'?
For fairly lengthy spells in the '70s  I lived in parts of the Highlands where you didn't have news. You'd access a TV maybe once every few weeks and a paper maybe once a week.  You might have a radio and get the odd snippet from that, or someone would mention something in a pub.  That would be about it.
'News' as we now know it didn't really exist.  It happened somewhere else.
I'm still aware of what occurred back then.  I have a sense of the history of the time, I think. I don't remember ever feeling I was missing out.
You didn't worry about 'the news', as such. You kept in touch with friends by letter and occasionally by phone. It was enough.   Nowadays your every move is tracked on Facebook, which is why I don't use it.
'I see you've been here.  Seen that person.  Liked that thing.'
Sod off and mind your own business.
It's beyond my comprehension.  As people say now, 'I can't even.'
But that's a digression - that's the personal side of news.  In terms of proper 'news' - 'news' news, or perhaps rather, 'the' news - we now have local, national and global news, 24 hour news. You can now get 'news' on a watch, for pity's sake.
How did we manage before?  Why do we need to know all this STUFF?
We don't, of course.  It's simply put in front of us, larded with targeted adverts and cookies and other tracking devices.
I find it quite addictive sometimes.  It can be gripping following dramatic events online.  On the other hand the rolling news on TV is dire, especially their inane, flailing questions when they desperately try to fill in time.
Can you imagine if there had been Twitter during World War Two?  Nobody would have done ANYTHING except look at their timelines.  Hitler would surely have run even more amok.  Well no, perhaps not.  Someone would have started a petition to stop him. LOL.
And it concerns me that we don't know if what we're ingesting online, news-wise, is accurate. Who's answerable if it's not? Everything's so fast, so plastic, so disposable - it's almost as if it doesn't matter who says what because it's gone in an instant.  Gone before you know it.  It used to be said of newspapers that they were tomorrow's chip wrappers.  Virtual news seems even more transitory and perhaps that might sometimes be a good thing;  if you're the subject of an intrusive news story of course you want people to move along quickly, nothing to see here - yet there's something unhealthy and invidious about it, as if the awfulness of it all doesn't really matter because it was only awful for a short while.
AND I really don't like that it's all chosen for us, all this rubbish.  Who's behind it all?  I'm pretty sure it isn't usually a human being. Of course there are still 'proper' newspapers, of course there are, and thank goodness for them but they're being increasingly squeezed into a corner as all 'news' seems to meld together in a gelatinous squelching mass, produced and prioritised by algorhythms and..er...stuff that I don't understand and am not quite sure I want to, although I think I really should.  Perhaps an algorhythm is an improvement on Bob Maxwell or Rupert Murdoch,  I really am struggling to decide.
If you look at what is fed to people in the guise of news on Facebook, especially, it's astonishingly crass and shallow.  And cynical.  Can the people who produce all this tripe be held responsible - sued, even - for inaccuracies - not to mention for intrusions into people's personal lives, in the way that newspaper editors and owners formerly were?  Will apologies be published to the person who was pictured parked badly in a disabled bay at Tesco, or with their bumcrack on display as they bent over to pick up their shopping in Asda?  I doubt it.   I worry that people don't trouble to look beyond all this.  Why should they?  Their lives are busy enough.
Move along here, nothing to see.
Well - nothing I'm prepared to admit to online anyway.

Batshit Crazy

'Oh she's bat shit crazee
She's batshit mad
The batshit it has taken away
The little bit of ummm....something something...
Whatever.'

To be sung to the tune of Football Crazy, by Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor. Preferably in a cellar with the door shut.

Bright Shiny Things and Dirty Little Secrets

I’ve got another Diary to read*.  

This time it’s Kenneth Tynan’s.

It’s spiky and incomplete and full of quotations that caught his eye.  I’m very much enjoying it, so far (I’m on page 44, just).

The thing that popped into my head is this.  He had a bright shiny life full of dirty little…secrets.

That is not a bad thing.  Everyone has dirty little secrets.  They’re the things that drive us on.  He was only fortunate to have the bright shiny life part, as well.  I’d go so far as to say that he wouldn’t have had the bright shiny life part without the secrets. I’d perhaps venture even further, and say the dirtier the secrets, the brighter and shinier the life.

Dirty big secrets aren’t really interesting.  You want a dirty little secret.  It’s the grit in the oyster.

When you read a Diary you think you’re getting the nitty gritty. You’re really not, of course.  The only Diaries in which you’d get that are raw, pure diaries that you might find under a random pillow of a random maniac, or at the other extreme, a 1920s ‘housewife’ recording her seasonal jam-making** and such-like.  Someone who writes unself-consciously because they don’t imagine themselves a writer and who seeks simply to record the daily grind.  Which in itself is full of miracles that jump from the page as you read.  Published Diaries, of course, are carefully edited. Nevertheless they're probably my favourite type of book***.

I suppose if nobody had secrets nobody would write.  It’s secrets that drive some people to write, some people to paint, and others to hide themselves away in a cave, with a supply of custard creams, a sleeping-bag****, a flask of best brandy, and all of their secrets, dirty or otherwise, locked away in a strongbox.

I could go on.  But I won't.

*Two pounds eighty one off of Ebay, by the way, including P & P.  If ever I come into money, I'll pay full price for books.  She says shamefacedly.  Till then... 

**George Orwell recorded such things in a section of his Diaries.  A wonderful read.

***As I was typing that, I knew it was wrong. I also like biographies and, well, anything really.

**** and earplugs, to muffle the sound of the secrets fighting to escape from their prison.

Remember when....we had privacy

Remember before the internet - when we had 'privacy'? When we had - for want of a better word - 'boundaries'?  Before emoticons and DMs and photographing your own bottom and transmitting it round the entire planet?  Remember when you actually had to make an effort, if you wanted to spy on somebody?  You couldn't just do it from under your duvet using only your thumbs while working your way through a tube of Pringles.
Now we're all being spied on - all of the time.  And nobody cares.  Nobody cares!  It seems normal! NORMAL!
It's not normal.  Nothing about life in 2016 is normal.  The weather's not normal.   Food isn't normal. And being in contact with people ALL the time isn't normal.  It's freakish and unhealthy and creepy. Where's the psychological space?  We're all under constant surveillance, all of the time, whether it's the obvious things like having your shopping 'choices' monitored and scrutinised so they can sell you more, and your so-called friends and family poking their noses in via the internet and thinking they know all about you, or darker things like the 'security services' (who are they?) and stalkers that you'll never ever know about because they live in their bedroom in Nebraska and you live with your son's ex-girlfriend in a semi in the Wirral and earn your living videoing your own bottom and your husband's dead in the freezer with a tattoo of I heart David Attenborough on his left artificial pec, and - and it certainly isn't 'normal'.
Everything's done 'online'. Banking.  Shopping.  Listening to music.  Watching telly.  Making stuff up. Like what I'm doing now.
It's not normal, I tell you.  Not NORMAL!  Nothing is, nothing is.  I used to think I wasn't normal till we got to this appalling stage and now I think I'm the most normal person alive.
Nothing's done 'outside' any more. By 'outside' I mean outwith the parameters of the internet. Because nothing CAN be done outside any more.  Or so it seems.
Remember when you could close your front door and take the phone off the hook and that was IT? Peace and bloody quiet.  If someone wanted to spy on you they had to stand outside your house and WAIT.  Writing stuff down in a real notebook with a real pencil and taking photographs with a real camera containing a 'spool' or 'roll of film' which they then had to get developed in a 'dark room'.
Remember that film, One Hour Photo, with Robin Williams, where he spied on that family via their photographs?  It seemed freakishly hi-tech back then and now it's like the dark ages.
And oh yeah - remember when, if you got fed up, you could get on a random bus to Wick or Land's End or Milton Keynes and VANISH - and nobody would know.  You weren't traceable via CCTV and your mobile phone, and you wouldn't have your coupon blasted round 'social media' until you were 'found', whether you liked it or not.
  

Welcome, 2016

This year's resolution (I can only manage one) is to write more.

I've been writing off-line, and I'm thinking I might put some stuff on here again.

I've quite a few ideas, but I'm quite put off by the internet and social media in particular,  because while I enjoy following the news and so forth,  things seem to turn awfully aggressive if you venture to express an opinion beyond the bland.  I don't want to have to engage with that.



Word of the day is 'milque-toast', by the way.