Editorial Policy

I've always regarded the posts on this blog as a way of working out my thoughts on whatever junk is wandering through my head at the time. Dogma, ideology and a fixed programme isn't my thing. Today's idea is tomorrow's history. Some things have remained the same throughout my life, but a lot changes, and not just the music I listen to, the pictures I look at and the novels and textbooks I read. I am never going to read much about chemistry, nor sociology, nor economics, and Greys' Anatomy will be forever a closed book to me (the book, sadly I saw about one series of the TV show).

Every now and then I will get caught in a rabbit-hole, which happened recently (see previous post). I made the mistake of re-reading about the Situationists, a group of philosophers / artists / intellectuals, whose reputation has always been a mystery to me. Those rabbit-holes can take up a lot of time and produce nothing especially conclusive or enlightening.

So I'm not so sure I want to have any old random junk going round my head anymore. When I was working it was more or less unavoidable, as work was one giant junk-heap in itself.

Some of the stuff I've written is not junk. Anything on music, some of the recovery-related things are the diary entries they are, but there is other stuff I wouldn't want to repeat.

At this point a lot of bloggers will announce they are going on holiday. I don't want to do that. Blogs never come back from holidays.

Writing a blog post about something has its own value. I can be a lot more unconsidered in a hand-written journal than a blog that strangers might read. Scribbling down my immediate thoughts and feelings can let them out, never to return, but not always, and I might go on thinking and feeling roughly the same about whatever-it-was. Whereas working up something suitable for third-party consumption forces me to review what I'm thinking, recognise the cliches, the contradictions, the obviously silly stuff and generally produce something that seems reasonable. That does change the way I think. That's the value.

But a trip down a rabbit-hole generally does not have a lot of value, which is why we call it a 'rabbit-hole'.

I'm going to try to hold myself back from the rabbit-holes - looking back, I haven't done too badly this year.

I'm also going to avoid reading the news, especially first thing in the morning. It's just doomscrolling ("the act of spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news") and it is doing me no good.

I'll let you know how that works out.

Woke Is A Career, Not A Principle

Woke is not a moral movement of any kind. It isn't even a cockamamie religion.

Religious commandments come in three parts: one that defines its practices of worship and the believer's relationship with the God(s) of the religion; another that sets out how to behave like a decent member of society; and the third that creates shibboleths (a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important) to distinguish the Faithful from the kuffers. Bacon. Circumcision. Beards (or not). Eating beef. Leavened bread. Drinking alchohol. Wearing only plain clothes. These are usually found in the commentaries.

Obedience must be despite, not because: obedience to a rule means nothing, after all, if there's a beneficial reason for you do whatever it is, whether it is a rule or not. Shibboleths are great obedience-tests.

The best shibboleth is trivial and arbitrary. It's exactly because there is no reason for it (What did pigs ever do to anybody? What is so gosh-darn important about your wife wearing a scarf over her head?) that following it becomes a sign that one is Going Along to Get Along.

After a while, the shibboleths supersede the Commandments. Not killing someone who steals your sheep is tough: it's easier not to eat pork. Gesture becomes more important than substance. Exceptions are made for good earners who are prepared to put on the social show. A man may beat his wife and steal from his neighbour, but as long as he keeps his beard long, and kicks back to the Bishops, he will be considered a Good Man. It's shallow, but a lot of societies function with it.

A lot of people understand 'Woke' as just such a coherent, if fanatical, collection of shibboleths. Sexism, Trans Rights, Climate Change... that kind of stuff. These are, you guessed, useful idiots. That includes every journalist who writes as if 'Woke' is a coherent moral movement or trend.

It isn't.

Each of the Woke shibboleths has single-issue activist organisation(s) pushing it. Each of those has their financiers, for whatever reason they have, and their leaders and chief ideologues. Some of those people have conducted successful entryist campaigns in what were once respected institutions (the BBC, the Met Office, the National Trust, amongst others) and turned them into organisations campaigning for the chosen ideological ends.

Take #MeToo. Between its transformation into a high-profile movement in late 2017, and a New York Times article about a year later, around two hundred mostly older men had lost their jobs, and around one hundred of them had been replaced by women. That was not a consequence, it was the purpose.

The preferred targets are older, preferably with waning reputations. Who are in the way and vulnerable. Who may no longer be profitable and whose business partners want to dump them. Who can be sacrificed to protect the others. Who may have been a**holes, and can finally be dumped to everyone's great relief.

Woke is not about righting wrongs. It's not about social justice.

It's the instigators of a cancel-campaign demonstrating their activist moxie, a calling-card, a CV bullet-point, for a salaried job with an activist organisation.

It's a tactic for getting jobs in, or getting people sacked from, a group of professions: politicians, academics, media folk, pundits, authors, actors, photographers, artists, activists.

Why these professions? Because serious businesses have a lot of filters in hiring, and generally do a lot to protect their productive people from whatever is the latest parasitic nonsense. Also, the kinds of people who go in for this year's nonsense avoid jobs where they will have to do some useful work involving actual skills. This is why Wokesters don't fight for representation in sewage maintenance, bus driving, North Sea oil rigging, or even computer programming. Too dull, and too easy to see if someone actually knows anything and is contributing.

Next time you see Woke outrage, remember it's about getting someone into or out of a job.

Judge an idea by the company that keeps it: Woke sucks.

Situationism: Why?

I made the mistake of re-reading a book about the Situationists recently (The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark). I'm going to explain why I did this so you don't have to.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, psycho-geography, derives, detournaments and potlachs. A lot of their best jokes wound up as graffiti on Parisian walls in 1968.

I still didn't get it. What were they complaining about, exactly? What we used to call consumer society back in the 1960's? The Invisible Committee complain as much, forty years later, about self-improvement and (what amounts to) the ubiquity of the media conglomerates. What is it with French intellectuals and pop culture?

Something about pop-culture in the 1960's made Guy Debord think something new was happening? Organisations were starting to understand how to manipulate the news media. There was more advertising and it was more eye-catching. Even though the Beatles reminded us that money can't buy me love, the Sunday supplements were telling us that some nice new furniture would sure make life more comfortable and stylish. Pop-culture might have been trivial or merely amusing in the past, but now, Debord seemed to be suggesting, it was being used to was alienate ordinary people from each other and from a sense of community and commonality. For the nefarious purpose of making Capitalists richer.

Seems to call for a revolution of some sort. For French intellectuals at the time, that could only mean a political revolution. Wait. Didn't the Russians try that? And it didn't really work out too well. The Chinese weren't doing so well either, for all the hero-worship of Mao Tse-Tung. Political revolution without an accompanying social revolution had proved to be meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Political revolution was no longer possible, but without it, all other forms of 'revolution' are mere changes of fashion. Quite the corner to paint oneself into.

Nevertheless they felt that one has a duty to do something to protest, undermine, and generally not be so damn gung-ho about Capitalism and all its works. Hence the celebration by some French intellectuals of la perruque (otherwise known as 'skiving' in English), of minor acts of sabotage, of not going along with the system, petty thefts of time (visiting the dentist in work hours without 'making up the time') and other resources (searching for personal purchases on the company internet). The Invisible Committee, descendants of the Situationists, suggest communes that survive on a mixture of Welfare fraud, self-sufficiency, and part-time jobs. Even they admit that won't last long, but they don't suggest the next step. And it amounts to saying "find like-minded people", which is the last resort of the desperate.

These are petty acts, literally petite: 'small, insignificant'. The difference won't appear to the third place of decimals in the annual accounts of Groupe Casino (owners of Monoprix and others) or Amazon. That pettiness is the reason I just don't get the Situationists and their descendants. Haven't people been doing this since the first Egyptian to hide round the back of a pile of pyramid bricks?

Situationism and its descendants, Invisible or not, seem to have been taken up by people who don't find their current life entirely satisfying, but don't find it dis-satisfying enough to do anything about it. They do not want to engage in, say, Trade Union activism to improve their working conditions. Many of them have jobs that pay reasonably well but are mere bureaucratic roles (university lecturer, for instance), and they want to believe they are not just drones. They engage in la perruque, pay tradesmen in cash, insult everyone else's job (by calling it BS), and maybe even pay cash instead of card. This proves to them that they are resisting. For what that's worth.

Probably not the supporters Debord and the others were looking for, but in the end, a theory is judged by how it really-exists, by the company it keeps.

Showing Up

It's a show business term, meaning to arrive on time no matter what mood you're in, how much sleep you didn't get last night, or how sick you're feeling. Showing up is what you do when you have no enthusiasm for anything, don't want to be doing whatever it is, and couldn't give a flying damn if whatever it is never gets done. Showing up is when you do stuff despite yourself. It's when you grind through your tasks and routines even though you really want to stay home because you have run out of energy, and you have no interest in anything except maybe sleep and junk food.

Eventually that mood passes, through no action of your own, and all that Showing Up means you do not have to spend the next four weeks getting back to where you were before the slump set in.

What nobody tells you is that every time you Show Up, it takes a little bit more from your capacity to feel joy and spontaneity. Show Up too often and life starts to turn grey as an August sky in England: you will not know why you are doing anything, because nothing gives you pleasure any more. You can tell people who have Showed Up too often: they never stay a minute longer than they need to, because they are not getting any pleasure from being there or anywhere else. They prefer being on their own, doing nothing that needs to be done.

People who no longer have a real reason for getting out of bed, but work a job, exercise, eat right, get regular sleep, keep themselves alert and clean: these are the maestros of Showing Up. It's what anyone who does not want to become a pathetic mess of a victim does: sober drunks and clean addicts; divorced men whose children are alienated from them; men who are never going to have a girlfriend. It's what people who almost made the Olympic team do for the rest of their lives. It's what husbands and wives in dead marriages do because their religion won't let them divorce or they can't live on their own. It's what kids who were dropped from the band do, when the band gets its first hit. It's what the children of emotionally absent parents do, unless they turn to drugs and booze and promiscuity.

Normal people do not do this. Normal people react to a hard knock by putting on weight, drinking more, turning into couch potatoes, eating badly, sleeping erratically, turning up at work unshaved now and again, having bad days right in the middle of the office, and taking up with unsuitable partners. Normal people can let themselves go, get Type II diabetes, get overweight and flabby, or lose weight and look like they might snap in the wind. Normal people do not Show Up. They expect to be taken as they are, because what else should they do?

Showing Up is not a virtue. It's a necessity. The alternative is unwashed clothes, flab, and Type II diabetes.

Some people treat it as a productivity trick, the way some people treat not drinking as a productivity trick. Not drinking when you don't have a problem with booze is harmless. Showing Up when you don't want to be there is not harmless. It's what strips you of the capacity for joy and pleasure.

I spent at least a decade of my life Showing Up, and it was way too long.

Now I have to figure out how one lives without Showing Up.

On Being Lazy

Lazy is unwilling to do work or use energy.

Engineers use the word to describe part of a system that doesn't do anything unless it has to.

Lazy people don't avoid doing things. (That's indolence.)

They avoid making a big fuss and bother about getting whatever it is done.

Lazy people tell the truth. Then they don't have to remember what they said.

Lazy people tidy the house up once and then put stuff back where they got it from.

Lazy people have a routine. Then they don't have to think about what to do.

Lazy people have simple wardrobes. Then they don't have to think about what to wear.

Lazy people cook simple, healthy food. Because it takes three minutes to make an omelette, and thirty minutes to leave a chicken breast in the oven.

Lazy people work for a living. Have you any idea how hard criminals graft?

It's how you do the work, not the work you do, that makes you lazy.

Lazy people use the right tools for the job. It's easier that way.

Lazy people start a new job by working hard to understand and master it. Then they can do it all in the morning and kick back the rest of the day.

Napoleon said he preferred clever lazy Generals: they would get what he wanted done with the minimum of fuss. What did he do with the stupid, energetic ones? Those he had shot.

Lazy people do things that need doing, not things that some busybody thinks should be done.

Lazy people have time to do the things they want to do, because they are not busy doing make-work.

"Busy" does not mean "useful". It means "occupied with a task" or "having too much to do" or just "fussy".

Lazy people work smart, not hard.

And never do today what could be done tomorrow if there's something else you'd rather be doing today.

Because, when someone else describes you as "lazy", what they mean is you're not doing what they want you to be doing, when they want you to do it.

The boss gets to call you lazy, because he's paying.

No-one else does, because they aren't.

If This Is "Vintage Wolfe" What Does That Make Me?

 Browsing the fiction department in Foyles the other week, I found this...

Um. I read this when it first came out.

It's now "Vintage".

That wasn't supposed to happen.

And yet, it did.

Two Shots of Regent's Park

 

Sis and I took a stroll from Primrose Hill through Regent's Park the other Saturday. The view from Primrose Hill needs more than an iPhone to do it justice, but the view over the Regent's Canal and the playing fields are okay. I had no idea there was so much space given over to football pitches, and it looked like every third amateur football team was out that Saturday. And why not?