(Warning: large chunk of theory ahead. The practical comes later.)
We have expectations about what we will do and have in our lives; we have an idea of the moral, physical, cultural, social, and intellectual person we want to be; and we have an idea of the person we are at the moment. These three thing - ambitions, personal development and self-image - make up the majority of what we are as a person. The assumption is that as people we are coherent: that our ambitions, personal development and self-image are consistent within themselves and with each other, and are compatible with our circumstances: that is, our ambitions and development are attainable given our resources: wealth, income, talents, opportunities, family, education, physical appearance and strength, social position, energy level and social skills. We assume as well that we are accurately self-aware: that we have an accurate understanding of what our ambitions and assets are, and our self-image is one that other people would accept was a description of us. We assume that having coherent ambitions, development and assets, as well as being accurately self-aware, will lead to effective behaviour directed towards the attainment of those ambitions.
I say all that with deliberate pedantry, because I want the background against which to state my theses:
(i) Only a very small proportion of us are ever coherent and accurately self-aware
(ii) The rest of us are varying degrees of chaos in fog, and that causes us to make poor decisions and behave badly at times
(iii) Living closely with another person raises to a near-certainty that we will behave badly
(iv) The richer the culture, the more wealthy, active and uncertain the economy, the more ambiguous the key social roles, the greater the emphasis on the primacy of the individual, the greater the chaos and fog in which young men and women start their adult life
(v) Without that chaos and fog, "we would still be living in grass huts”.
In other words: most people don’t make sense, a fair number are slightly crazy and more than enough reached adulthood outright damaged. How many? I’m no great fan of the psychiatrisation of everything, but let’s let the National Institutes of Mental Health have their say (though translated into the Vulgar tongue):
Bipolar: 2.6%
Schizophrenia: 1.1%
OCD: 1.0%
Chronic Anxiety: 3.1%
Eating Disorders: 4.4%
Psychopathy: 1.0%
Socially withdrawn: 5.2%
Borderline: 1.6%
All: 19.5%
If you looked at the source, I didn’t count the depressions because those don’t indicate personality damage as much as bad luck, ADHD is otherwise known as “being a boy” and Social Phobia seems to me to double-count Avoidant (Socially withdrawn in my list). PTSD is a big deal in the US where they haven’t stopped sending young men to fight in shit-holes since about 1990, and it’s not so prevalent over here. Panic Disorder (Panic attacks) is agoraphobia and other stuff, and isn’t what I mean by “damaged”. OCD I can take or leave. The NIMH have left out drunks, junkies, coke-heads, speed-freaks, cutters, sex-addicts and other substance abusers, and none of them are healthy people. However, it’s difficult separating them from the recreational users. I’m going to put the messed-up addicts-of-all-kinds at around 2%. We’re looking at about one-in-five people. Even if accept that the American psychiatric profession has an unhealthy relationship with the pharmaceutical companies and trim this all, it’s still over one in ten.
So I’m going to say that about five per cent of the population are coherent and accurately self-aware; about ten percent are outright damaged, another ten per cent are slightly crazy, leaving three-quarters of the population as not quite making sense. Sounds like the world I live in.
Where does the chaos and fog in the human soul come from? Genetics, family, school, the culture we choose, all these need to interact in a limited number of ways to come out coherent. I came from a classic ACoA household, but the stories I read, the films I saw, were all about getting on in the world - the last thing an ACoA will be any good at. I found a better fit between me and philosophy, but then I had to go back out into the world again. I was a complete mess for decades, and I still don’t fit together well.
The chaos and fog does not explain everything, as if a calm, civil, composed personality could be achieved by self-knowledge and acceptance alone. Some people are just born violent, shrewish, aggressive, bitchy, nasty, cheating, dishonest, lazy, complaining or generally unpleasant. Others are born weak, indecisive, cowardly, retiring, withdrawn or introspective. Just as we are not born with an intellectual tabla rasa, we are not born with a perfect personality that is messed up by some traumatic event: most of us are born messed up already, and parents, schools, peers, television, novels, songs and everything else just make it worse. Mild dysfunction is the natural condition of humanity.
What does this mean? That with few exceptions, most relationships of any kind are going to fail, and most attempts to start a relationship are not going to get past the introduction. Divorces, sexless marriages, dead-eyed husbands dreaming of the day their wife falls under a bus, irritated wives wishing their husbands would give them a cash-generating reason for divorce, lovers who tire of each other, friends who drift apart, band members who split for “artistic differences’ or ‘personality clashes’, novelists who switch agents when they get successful and artists who trade up galleries for the same reason… it’s built right in to the human-social condition.
When an inter-personal relationship goes wrong, nothing "went wrong", it was just natural decay. Of course, a society can encourage that decay, and make it easy for people to quit, or it can stop producing stuff that makes relationship-decay easier.
All this also means that attempts at building a more coherent self might not have the beneficial consequences you would imagine. In a crazy world, the sane man is utterly confused. But that’s for next time.
Monday, 12 May 2014
Thursday, 8 May 2014
My Top Ten Joni Mitchell Songs
Recently a columnist in the Guardian did a Top Ten Joni Mitchell songs, which prompted this.
Joni Mitchell writes songs for sensitive girls of all ages and both sexes. But listen carefully, and you’ll hear that she’s nobody’s victim. The Sisterhood doesn’t revere Joni like they do Laura Nyro, whose weird avant-garde genius was tinged with a just the right amount of Sister-friendly victimhood. Joni might be “coming to people’s parties / stumbling, deaf dumb and blind” but she’s not apologising for it, and she’s not blaming anyone, it’s just how she feels, and she’s slightly cross with herself for feeling that way.
Anyway, this set me to thinking what my Top Ten Joni’s are. In the end, pretty much any ten songs from up to 1980 will do, but these are mine:
First and always for me will be Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire
That sinister riff, the haunting vocal and the precise lyrics convey the emptiness and squalor of career-junkie-dom,making Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death a sentimental ditty by comparison. First time I heard this song, one November afternoon in 1972, it blew me away.
Next up is You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio
“I know you don’t like weak women, you get bored so quick / And you don’t like strong women, ‘cause they’re hip to your tricks” – and she never even met me. How did she know? Back then I thought it was the weak (strong) woman’s fault she bored (intimidated) me, but now I know it’s my addict-y character.
The rest I’ll leave to you to find on You Tube.
Carey - from Blue
Conversations - from Ladies of the Canyon
Cactus Tree - from Song to a Seagull
Two Grey Rooms - from Night Ride Home
People’s Parties - from Court and Spark
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines - from Mingus
Refuge of the Roads - from Hejira
Chelsea Morning - from Clouds
Joni Mitchell writes songs for sensitive girls of all ages and both sexes. But listen carefully, and you’ll hear that she’s nobody’s victim. The Sisterhood doesn’t revere Joni like they do Laura Nyro, whose weird avant-garde genius was tinged with a just the right amount of Sister-friendly victimhood. Joni might be “coming to people’s parties / stumbling, deaf dumb and blind” but she’s not apologising for it, and she’s not blaming anyone, it’s just how she feels, and she’s slightly cross with herself for feeling that way.
Anyway, this set me to thinking what my Top Ten Joni’s are. In the end, pretty much any ten songs from up to 1980 will do, but these are mine:
First and always for me will be Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire
That sinister riff, the haunting vocal and the precise lyrics convey the emptiness and squalor of career-junkie-dom,making Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death a sentimental ditty by comparison. First time I heard this song, one November afternoon in 1972, it blew me away.
Next up is You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio
“I know you don’t like weak women, you get bored so quick / And you don’t like strong women, ‘cause they’re hip to your tricks” – and she never even met me. How did she know? Back then I thought it was the weak (strong) woman’s fault she bored (intimidated) me, but now I know it’s my addict-y character.
The rest I’ll leave to you to find on You Tube.
Carey - from Blue
Conversations - from Ladies of the Canyon
Cactus Tree - from Song to a Seagull
Two Grey Rooms - from Night Ride Home
People’s Parties - from Court and Spark
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines - from Mingus
Refuge of the Roads - from Hejira
Chelsea Morning - from Clouds
Monday, 5 May 2014
April 2014 Review
The big deal about April was my gym-six-days-a-week-for-six-weeks experiment. Did I keep it? I missed two days because of colds with accompanying fever, and skipped Easter Monday because I don’t like crowds. That’s 33 out of 36 days, which isn’t half bad. I did a personal best of 2x2x187lbs on the bench with a spot, and can now knock out sets of 4x176lbs with far more comfort than when I started. (Before you start giggling, you have to do that at my age, not yours.) I gave myself a half-way treat with supper at Picture, and then an it’s-done reward with supper at Picture again. Have I mentioned I really like Picture?
I saw the amazing tap-dancing of Savion Glover at Sadlers Wells, and had supper at Moro in Exmouth Market, with Sis; Divergent, The Quiet Ones and Spiderman 2 at Cineworld; and the first season of the Italian series Inspector Montalbano on DVD. I read Robert Trivers’ Deceit and Self-Deception, James Davies’ Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, Lawrence Principe’s The Secret of Alchemy, and a collection of essays on the Philosopy of Pseudoscience, and Colonel Thomas Hammes’ The Sling and The Stone.
I made some more decent progress with the interminable Riemann-Roch essay, and watched an fascinating lecture by J-P Serre on How To Write Mathematics Badly.
I had a cold for at least two weeks of the month. So I wasn’t functioning at a very high level, and was kinda inclined to “go home” as a default setting, rather than “hang out for another hour and catch a movie”. I have learned this about having colds: unless I have an actual fever, when exercising can be actually dangerous, the point is to show up and work. In the gym I might only do 80% of what I would ordinarily do, and at work or the keyboard, a lot of it might be deleted and re-written, but when the cold is over, I don’t have to start again after a week off. I’m still about where I was just before the cold.
Oh. And I made my first cold approach for about sixteen years: ten or so in an LTR and five or so just plain not in the mood. If you had blinked, you would have missed it, but she knew I wanted to talk to her, and she had given me a definite IOI a couple of minutes before, and a couple of times before that. When the moment came, I suspect we both chickened out. In the Bad Old Days, I would have beaten myself up for being such a wuss, and be obsessing about what a failure it was even now. But I’m all spiritual and in recovery now, so I decided to treat it as what it was: my first cold approach for sixteen years. It had to be done, and now that’s over with.
I saw the amazing tap-dancing of Savion Glover at Sadlers Wells, and had supper at Moro in Exmouth Market, with Sis; Divergent, The Quiet Ones and Spiderman 2 at Cineworld; and the first season of the Italian series Inspector Montalbano on DVD. I read Robert Trivers’ Deceit and Self-Deception, James Davies’ Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, Lawrence Principe’s The Secret of Alchemy, and a collection of essays on the Philosopy of Pseudoscience, and Colonel Thomas Hammes’ The Sling and The Stone.
I made some more decent progress with the interminable Riemann-Roch essay, and watched an fascinating lecture by J-P Serre on How To Write Mathematics Badly.
I had a cold for at least two weeks of the month. So I wasn’t functioning at a very high level, and was kinda inclined to “go home” as a default setting, rather than “hang out for another hour and catch a movie”. I have learned this about having colds: unless I have an actual fever, when exercising can be actually dangerous, the point is to show up and work. In the gym I might only do 80% of what I would ordinarily do, and at work or the keyboard, a lot of it might be deleted and re-written, but when the cold is over, I don’t have to start again after a week off. I’m still about where I was just before the cold.
Oh. And I made my first cold approach for about sixteen years: ten or so in an LTR and five or so just plain not in the mood. If you had blinked, you would have missed it, but she knew I wanted to talk to her, and she had given me a definite IOI a couple of minutes before, and a couple of times before that. When the moment came, I suspect we both chickened out. In the Bad Old Days, I would have beaten myself up for being such a wuss, and be obsessing about what a failure it was even now. But I’m all spiritual and in recovery now, so I decided to treat it as what it was: my first cold approach for sixteen years. It had to be done, and now that’s over with.
Monday, 28 April 2014
7 Habits, Well 6 Actually, That WIll Make You More Successful
I came across this while browsing Business Insider, which I do much less now than I used to. It's from a US Navy SEAL officer (Q: How do you know someone was a Navy SEAL? A: Give them five minutes and they will mention it) and I found myself agreeing with much of it. So here we are...
1. Be loyal. Team loyalty in the corporate environment seems to be a dying philosophy. Loyalty to the team starts at the top. If it's lacking at the senior executive level, how can anyone else in the organization embrace it? Loyalty is about leading by example, providing your team unconditional support, and never throwing a team member under the bus.
2. Put others before yourself. Get up every day and ask yourself what you will do to add value to your team, such as simply offering your assistance with a project. The challenge is overcoming the fear that your team member might say: "Yes, I really need your help with this project…tonight."
3. Be reflective. Reflective people often spend too much time analyzing their actions. But imagine if you could harness this talent into something highly valuable? Reflecting on your mistakes, such as mine in Iraq, ensures you never repeat them.
4. Be obsessively organized. Some of us innately have this ability, often to a fault, and some have to work at it a bit more. You have to find a process that works for you. I've known people who will put something on their to-do list after they did it and then cross it off to feel a greater sense of accomplishment! Whatever your system is, make it work for you.
5. Assume you don't know enough. Because you don't. Any effective team member understands that training is never complete. It's true in the SEAL teams, and it's true in any elite team. Those who assume they know everything should be eliminated. Those who spend time inside and outside of the workplace developing their knowledge and skills will provide the momentum for their team's forward progress.
6. Be detail-oriented. Attention to detail is one of our company's values. Do we get it right all the time? Of course not. Imagine, though, if all members of a team are obsessed with detail in their delivery? My lack of attention to detail in the incident in Iraq could have had catastrophic results. Don't ask yourself what you are going to do today to be successful; ask how you are going to do it.
7. Never get comfortable. Always push yourself outside of your comfort zone. If you do this continually with every task you take on, that boundary will continue to widen. This process will ensure that you are continually maximizing your potential, which will positively impact your team.
You may be wondering how you could ever have a relaxed life if you maintain all of these habits. But that's the beauty of it. If you enjoy what you do and form good habits, it all becomes second nature. Maintain these habits, and encourage your team members to do the same
. ... and we're back. Notice that 1) is prescriptive for managers. That's how they should behave and how you should if you make it to management. The good ones behave like that and the mediocre ones are just, well, what they were hired to be. Be one of the good guys.
The only one I disagree with is 2). There's nothing wrong with asking the rest of the team if you can help out, if you've done all your work, and you're pretty sure no-one is going to take advantage of you. The deal with adding value is that you add what they pay you plus some profit. After that, they have to add value to you as well. This very rarely happens in a large company, which, let it be remembered, hired you for the skills you already had, not because you were a smart guy who could pick up their stuff real quick.
I'm going with the others because they are about humility, growth and self-respect, important values all. And you thought the SEALs just blew shit up?
1. Be loyal. Team loyalty in the corporate environment seems to be a dying philosophy. Loyalty to the team starts at the top. If it's lacking at the senior executive level, how can anyone else in the organization embrace it? Loyalty is about leading by example, providing your team unconditional support, and never throwing a team member under the bus.
2. Put others before yourself. Get up every day and ask yourself what you will do to add value to your team, such as simply offering your assistance with a project. The challenge is overcoming the fear that your team member might say: "Yes, I really need your help with this project…tonight."
3. Be reflective. Reflective people often spend too much time analyzing their actions. But imagine if you could harness this talent into something highly valuable? Reflecting on your mistakes, such as mine in Iraq, ensures you never repeat them.
4. Be obsessively organized. Some of us innately have this ability, often to a fault, and some have to work at it a bit more. You have to find a process that works for you. I've known people who will put something on their to-do list after they did it and then cross it off to feel a greater sense of accomplishment! Whatever your system is, make it work for you.
5. Assume you don't know enough. Because you don't. Any effective team member understands that training is never complete. It's true in the SEAL teams, and it's true in any elite team. Those who assume they know everything should be eliminated. Those who spend time inside and outside of the workplace developing their knowledge and skills will provide the momentum for their team's forward progress.
6. Be detail-oriented. Attention to detail is one of our company's values. Do we get it right all the time? Of course not. Imagine, though, if all members of a team are obsessed with detail in their delivery? My lack of attention to detail in the incident in Iraq could have had catastrophic results. Don't ask yourself what you are going to do today to be successful; ask how you are going to do it.
7. Never get comfortable. Always push yourself outside of your comfort zone. If you do this continually with every task you take on, that boundary will continue to widen. This process will ensure that you are continually maximizing your potential, which will positively impact your team.
You may be wondering how you could ever have a relaxed life if you maintain all of these habits. But that's the beauty of it. If you enjoy what you do and form good habits, it all becomes second nature. Maintain these habits, and encourage your team members to do the same
. ... and we're back. Notice that 1) is prescriptive for managers. That's how they should behave and how you should if you make it to management. The good ones behave like that and the mediocre ones are just, well, what they were hired to be. Be one of the good guys.
The only one I disagree with is 2). There's nothing wrong with asking the rest of the team if you can help out, if you've done all your work, and you're pretty sure no-one is going to take advantage of you. The deal with adding value is that you add what they pay you plus some profit. After that, they have to add value to you as well. This very rarely happens in a large company, which, let it be remembered, hired you for the skills you already had, not because you were a smart guy who could pick up their stuff real quick.
I'm going with the others because they are about humility, growth and self-respect, important values all. And you thought the SEALs just blew shit up?
Thursday, 24 April 2014
Feeling Functional Can Be a Little Dysfunctional
I was reading James Davies’ Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good recently. The descriptions of how SSRI’s and other happy pills felt familiar:
“Most participants described a general reduction in the intensity of all the emotions they experienced, using words like ‘dulled', ‘numbed', ‘flattened', or completely ‘blocked’, to describe how they felt...A few participants…reported their emotional experience had become more ‘cognitive’ or ’intellectual’...Most participants also described feeling emotionally detached or disconnected from their surroundings… a detachment extending to other people… reduced sympathy and empathy, and felt detached during social interactions…Most participants described a general feeling of indifference to things in life that used to matter to them...All participants experienced a reduction of intensity or frequency of negative emotions… Although this reduction was usually at some stage a relief, many participants also reported it impaired their quality of life."
Which is kinda how I feel, but probably (I hope) not to the same extent as the participants. I noticed a while ago that music played at home just didn’t have the same effect as it used to: sometimes an entire CD can go by and I realise I’ve missed it. (Spanish Sahara on the iPhone while commuting can still send me.)
All the feelings that tug at me are the tired old co-dependent cliches: self-pity, rescuing and the like. Useless, dysfunctional, like smoking. Those are, however, the feelings that I know how to have. If I dial those down, I’m really not feeling very much, and it’s like I’m happy-pilling myself.
Like Carole King says “I’ve been alone so long, that I just don’t know, what to do”.
I couldn’t take the hormone hit of actually having someone touch me, or touch them, with sexual intent. I can air-kiss and tent-hug no problem, but that letting go and sinking in to the kiss and the embrace? Jesus. I would have to trust that it wasn’t going to end then and there, because I would be left with a revved-up metabolism and an awful, awful come-down. I’m staying away from “intimacy” (aka "sex and cuddles”) because I just don’t want the hangover.
I’m being functional. I’m avoiding doing things that will make it harder for me to follow the work-eat-sleep-work cycle, or to need to put up with the many indignities and bullshit that the world inflicts on us. Functional is flat, sober, numb, ‘cognitive’, (emotionally) disconnected. Dysfunctional is highs and lows, drunk and ecstatic, sensational, emotional and connected. All those make you take days off, and argue with people, and have hangovers, and sleepless nights, and grudges, and all those other good things that are, apparently, what living is about.
Just as I would rather be sober, I would rather be functional, even of now and again it means a passage in a book can set me off on a self-pity jag like this one.
“Most participants described a general reduction in the intensity of all the emotions they experienced, using words like ‘dulled', ‘numbed', ‘flattened', or completely ‘blocked’, to describe how they felt...A few participants…reported their emotional experience had become more ‘cognitive’ or ’intellectual’...Most participants also described feeling emotionally detached or disconnected from their surroundings… a detachment extending to other people… reduced sympathy and empathy, and felt detached during social interactions…Most participants described a general feeling of indifference to things in life that used to matter to them...All participants experienced a reduction of intensity or frequency of negative emotions… Although this reduction was usually at some stage a relief, many participants also reported it impaired their quality of life."
Which is kinda how I feel, but probably (I hope) not to the same extent as the participants. I noticed a while ago that music played at home just didn’t have the same effect as it used to: sometimes an entire CD can go by and I realise I’ve missed it. (Spanish Sahara on the iPhone while commuting can still send me.)
All the feelings that tug at me are the tired old co-dependent cliches: self-pity, rescuing and the like. Useless, dysfunctional, like smoking. Those are, however, the feelings that I know how to have. If I dial those down, I’m really not feeling very much, and it’s like I’m happy-pilling myself.
Like Carole King says “I’ve been alone so long, that I just don’t know, what to do”.
I couldn’t take the hormone hit of actually having someone touch me, or touch them, with sexual intent. I can air-kiss and tent-hug no problem, but that letting go and sinking in to the kiss and the embrace? Jesus. I would have to trust that it wasn’t going to end then and there, because I would be left with a revved-up metabolism and an awful, awful come-down. I’m staying away from “intimacy” (aka "sex and cuddles”) because I just don’t want the hangover.
I’m being functional. I’m avoiding doing things that will make it harder for me to follow the work-eat-sleep-work cycle, or to need to put up with the many indignities and bullshit that the world inflicts on us. Functional is flat, sober, numb, ‘cognitive’, (emotionally) disconnected. Dysfunctional is highs and lows, drunk and ecstatic, sensational, emotional and connected. All those make you take days off, and argue with people, and have hangovers, and sleepless nights, and grudges, and all those other good things that are, apparently, what living is about.
Just as I would rather be sober, I would rather be functional, even of now and again it means a passage in a book can set me off on a self-pity jag like this one.
Monday, 21 April 2014
19 Things To Do
The ever-interesting Christian McQueen had an article recently on the equally ever-interesting Return of Kings, 19 Tips On How To Get Over Your Ex-Girlfriend. Not that I have a recent ex-girlfriend but it struck a chord with me. It’s about getting over a case of one-itis, which it should be a balm to all wounded male souls that even McQueen could get. Adapting it to my circumstances, I get the following actions:
The first six actions are about removing the traces and momentii of ex-gf from your life. In my case, for “ex-gf” read “co-dependency”. In practice, this means I stop looking for a relationship: that’s not what I need, and I can’t do them. Didn’t have the training and I will choose the wrong girls. Hence, ignore any attractions to the kind of girl I would have found attractive. I’m looking for sex. not cuddles. What I’m looking for is a woman who wants to get laid, and whatever else her Hamster tells her she wants is no concern of mine.
The next two say: book a trip. By a co-incidence, I had just booked a flight to see a friend in the Netherlands for a weekend.
The next says: work out. See my six times a week for six weeks.
Number eleven says to re-connect with my guy friends that I lost because of the relationship. At my age, I barely have any friends left. I lost quite a few when I got sober. However, this doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try reaching out. Not sure who to, but I can try.
Then there’s a couple about gaming and having sex with ten women. That could only have been suggested by a nightclub promoter, since even at a Krauser’s lay rate of 2.5%, that means finding four hundred women to approach. However, the real point is getting some bodily contact and sex.
Number sixteen is about reviewing my personal style, haircut and grooming and getting it done before the trip. I’m always up for some style revision.
The next one says: go on the trip and let loose. This is the interesting one for me. What the heck is “letting loose” for a sober alcoholic who has to watch what he eats and needs to get his beauty sleep? First thoughts are a lot of sex, sleeping late, a couple of good meals and a night club or a comedy club. Actually, maybe forty-eight hours where I didn’t have to think about what I was doing next. It would be good to work out the answers that I can go on a holiday-away again.
Next up is taking up one of the "goals, dreams or passions I may have laid to the side”. Like any wage slave, I’ve laid aside most of my life so I can make a living and pay my bills like a mensch. My “ex-gf” is the need for approval and validation, from women, audiences and men, in that order. What did I set aside to please her? I wanted to be accepted in academe, but I never really wanted to be accepted in business, until I spent some time unemployed. Now I am accepted, as much as I ever will be. Tick that box. I do have a dream (no details), and realising it will cost money, and to do so will mean I have to not give a damn about being accepted by the industry. If I do it, it won’t get me a new home, or any new friends, or a new chapter, or any damn thing.
I can do all of that.
The next two say: book a trip. By a co-incidence, I had just booked a flight to see a friend in the Netherlands for a weekend.
The next says: work out. See my six times a week for six weeks.
Number eleven says to re-connect with my guy friends that I lost because of the relationship. At my age, I barely have any friends left. I lost quite a few when I got sober. However, this doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try reaching out. Not sure who to, but I can try.
Then there’s a couple about gaming and having sex with ten women. That could only have been suggested by a nightclub promoter, since even at a Krauser’s lay rate of 2.5%, that means finding four hundred women to approach. However, the real point is getting some bodily contact and sex.
Number sixteen is about reviewing my personal style, haircut and grooming and getting it done before the trip. I’m always up for some style revision.
The next one says: go on the trip and let loose. This is the interesting one for me. What the heck is “letting loose” for a sober alcoholic who has to watch what he eats and needs to get his beauty sleep? First thoughts are a lot of sex, sleeping late, a couple of good meals and a night club or a comedy club. Actually, maybe forty-eight hours where I didn’t have to think about what I was doing next. It would be good to work out the answers that I can go on a holiday-away again.
Next up is taking up one of the "goals, dreams or passions I may have laid to the side”. Like any wage slave, I’ve laid aside most of my life so I can make a living and pay my bills like a mensch. My “ex-gf” is the need for approval and validation, from women, audiences and men, in that order. What did I set aside to please her? I wanted to be accepted in academe, but I never really wanted to be accepted in business, until I spent some time unemployed. Now I am accepted, as much as I ever will be. Tick that box. I do have a dream (no details), and realising it will cost money, and to do so will mean I have to not give a damn about being accepted by the industry. If I do it, it won’t get me a new home, or any new friends, or a new chapter, or any damn thing.
I can do all of that.
Monday, 7 April 2014
Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac
It’s taken a while to process this movie. It’s not an art-house version of Thanks For Sharing, and neither, thank God, is it a art-house version of the execrable Shame. It’s not a study of sex addiction or nymphomania, and actually is not about sex at all. If you want to see a movie about sex, download something from Kink. You will never see a film about sex in the mainstream cinema. There are penises (erect and flaccid) and vaginas, and what looks like people having sex, but a lot of that is digital compositing. I’m also assuming that the bit where Jamie Bell’s K hits Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Joe with a glove stuffed with coins is not real, otherwise it would have had to have been one take and Gainsbourg would have been un-filmable for a week while the bruises went down. Nah. Likewise the whipping sequence: that’s either a body-double or a prop.
So what is it about? It’s about someone who behaves in some unconventional ways because she chooses to. We should twig that the whole thing is some kind of half-metaphor when Joe explains that, in her early twenties, she was having sex with ten men a night. Do the math. That many plates can’t be kept spinning. And yet again, she has a recurrent case of one-itis for Shia La Boeuf, as would be understandable in a healthy young woman. One-itis and plate spinning don’t go together. It’s also a satire on men’s need to rationalise women’s sexual behaviour.
Right at the start Joe insists to Stellan Skarsgård's Seligman, that she is a bad person.
Now, let us remember the rules. Women are never bad people, and if they do something that if a man did it would be a bad thing, it’s okay because, you know, patriarchy. Seligman therefore refuses to believe her, and throughout the film attempts to rationalise every bit of her behaviour, even, for heaven’s sake, in terms of Walton’s The Compleat Angler. There’s even a you-go-girl speech towards the end about how she was “exploring” and “demanding her rights”. The bit where Seligman, having heard how the guy who took her virginity by three strokes from the front and five up the rear, after turning her over like a sack of potatoes, explains that 3 and 5 are Fibonnaci numbers, is so truly silly that we must assume that von Trier did it deliberately: “look at how silly this guy has to be to understand what happens to her”. (Either that, or von Trier is truly weird.)
In return for all this listening and attempted understanding, Joe kills Seligman, as right at the end, he attempts a half-hearted rape. In most cases a simple “What the frack do you think you’re doing”, followed by a hefty dose of shaming, would do. Seligman is an old man, and he’s not holding her down. The last time I looked, it wasn’t yet legal or even morally acceptable, even in Denmark, for women to kill men who were attempting to rape them. (Kick them in the nuts, sure, but the legal principle is that the force used in self-defence must be proportionate to the force used by the attacker.) However, I suspect it’s a device to end the movie, which has no other real reason for stopping.
Oh yeah, she’s a bad girl. Prima facie, the scene in the SAA meeting is a little unconvincing: from Joe’s denouncements of the other women in the group, we get the idea that sex addicts are rather pathetic women driven to use sex to fill an emptiness in their lives. This is to set up the contrast with Joe, who likes her desires and urges. As a way of making Joe’s acceptance of her own agency clear, it does the job. She’s the drunk who decides they would rather be drunk than sober and leaves an AA after-meeting coffee session with a little speech to that effect.
I’m not suggesting that von Trier is making any Red Pill points. But he’s a provocateur, and so it’s not surprising that he takes a dissenting view on the morality of his character. He's clearly not speaking about all nymphomaniacs, as Steve McQueen was doing about "all" sex addicts, and that's why von Trier's film is a flawed art movie, whereas McQueen's is propaganda disguised as seriousness.
As a film? Von Trier is a film-maker first and foremost. The stories and characters come afterwards. Of course the plot is silly, just as silly as the idea that a planet would whoosh past Earth and then turn round within three or four days and collide with it.I think it’s better than his last two, especially as he keeps the scissors out of Gainsbourg’s hands (yep, you just winced at that, didn't you?), even if this time he gives her a gun. You don’t read late-period Henry James to find out if the girl gets the guy, and you don’t watch a von Trier for a cracking yarn. Some things don’t have to make sense, they just have to work their magic on you.
It will be on Curzon Online for a long while yet. Go watch.
So what is it about? It’s about someone who behaves in some unconventional ways because she chooses to. We should twig that the whole thing is some kind of half-metaphor when Joe explains that, in her early twenties, she was having sex with ten men a night. Do the math. That many plates can’t be kept spinning. And yet again, she has a recurrent case of one-itis for Shia La Boeuf, as would be understandable in a healthy young woman. One-itis and plate spinning don’t go together. It’s also a satire on men’s need to rationalise women’s sexual behaviour.
Right at the start Joe insists to Stellan Skarsgård's Seligman, that she is a bad person.
Now, let us remember the rules. Women are never bad people, and if they do something that if a man did it would be a bad thing, it’s okay because, you know, patriarchy. Seligman therefore refuses to believe her, and throughout the film attempts to rationalise every bit of her behaviour, even, for heaven’s sake, in terms of Walton’s The Compleat Angler. There’s even a you-go-girl speech towards the end about how she was “exploring” and “demanding her rights”. The bit where Seligman, having heard how the guy who took her virginity by three strokes from the front and five up the rear, after turning her over like a sack of potatoes, explains that 3 and 5 are Fibonnaci numbers, is so truly silly that we must assume that von Trier did it deliberately: “look at how silly this guy has to be to understand what happens to her”. (Either that, or von Trier is truly weird.)
In return for all this listening and attempted understanding, Joe kills Seligman, as right at the end, he attempts a half-hearted rape. In most cases a simple “What the frack do you think you’re doing”, followed by a hefty dose of shaming, would do. Seligman is an old man, and he’s not holding her down. The last time I looked, it wasn’t yet legal or even morally acceptable, even in Denmark, for women to kill men who were attempting to rape them. (Kick them in the nuts, sure, but the legal principle is that the force used in self-defence must be proportionate to the force used by the attacker.) However, I suspect it’s a device to end the movie, which has no other real reason for stopping.
Oh yeah, she’s a bad girl. Prima facie, the scene in the SAA meeting is a little unconvincing: from Joe’s denouncements of the other women in the group, we get the idea that sex addicts are rather pathetic women driven to use sex to fill an emptiness in their lives. This is to set up the contrast with Joe, who likes her desires and urges. As a way of making Joe’s acceptance of her own agency clear, it does the job. She’s the drunk who decides they would rather be drunk than sober and leaves an AA after-meeting coffee session with a little speech to that effect.
I’m not suggesting that von Trier is making any Red Pill points. But he’s a provocateur, and so it’s not surprising that he takes a dissenting view on the morality of his character. He's clearly not speaking about all nymphomaniacs, as Steve McQueen was doing about "all" sex addicts, and that's why von Trier's film is a flawed art movie, whereas McQueen's is propaganda disguised as seriousness.
As a film? Von Trier is a film-maker first and foremost. The stories and characters come afterwards. Of course the plot is silly, just as silly as the idea that a planet would whoosh past Earth and then turn round within three or four days and collide with it.I think it’s better than his last two, especially as he keeps the scissors out of Gainsbourg’s hands (yep, you just winced at that, didn't you?), even if this time he gives her a gun. You don’t read late-period Henry James to find out if the girl gets the guy, and you don’t watch a von Trier for a cracking yarn. Some things don’t have to make sense, they just have to work their magic on you.
It will be on Curzon Online for a long while yet. Go watch.
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