Counago & Spaves

From today's Sunday Tribune (cunning linguist section):

Spave (verb)

Spend money on items that are on sale and save the difference in price; thus, the illusion that you are better off financially than you were before (eg "Those Manolos were reduced from 450 euros to 300 euros in the sale, so I effectively pocketed 150 euros on the deal"). Mainly found in the vocabulary of females.

When in fact:

Spaves (n. pl.) Mainly found in the vocabulary of males. Usually accompanied by Counago. As in, "I spent hours wandering around the Spaves part of town but for the life of me I couldn't locate Counago."

Spokesman says not to worry about all the Prozac in the drinking supply because it's "watered down."

Cannabis supplied by the Canadian government is rubbish, say users.

From the Korean Central News Agency:

"U.S. President Bush during his election campaign in Wisconsin State on Aug. 18 hurled malignant slanders and calumnies at the supreme headquarters of the DPRK and groundlessly accused north Korea of steadily developing nukes, while asserting that it is important for the United States to unite with China, Japan, south Korea and Russia and now these five countries are urging the tyrant to disarm himself, according to a Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun Internet report. This vituperation let loose by Bush against the supreme headquarters of the DPRK has lashed the Korean people into towering hatred and resentment at him and touched off unprecedentedly bitter anti-U.S. sentiment across the country.
It is the unshakable mettle of the Korean people to take strong counter-actions against anyone hurling slanders and calumnies at the supreme headquarters boundlessly respected and trusted by all Koreans.
Had Bush have even an iota of elementary reason, morality and ability to judge reality as a human being, he would have not dared defile the political system of his dialogue partner so malignantly.
Bush is, in fact, a thrice-cursed fascist tyrant and man-killer as he revived the fascist war doctrine which had been judged by humankind long ago and is now bringing dark clouds of a new Cold War to hang over our planet and indiscriminately massacring innocent civilians after igniting the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
It is the greatest tragedy for the U.S. that Bush, a political idiot and human trash, still remains in the presidential office of the world's only "superpower," styling himself "an emperor of the world."
In a word, his vituperation discloses his cunning political ploy to mislead the world public opinion and bring down the inviolable political system of the DPRK, come what may.
Bush said the U.S. was seeking a peaceful solution to the nuclear issue of north Korea in the framework of the six-party talks. This is nothing but a fig-leaf to hide its sinister design to destroy the political system of the DPRK by force of arms.
Bush's open brigandish demand that the DPRK disarm itself simply reveals the true intention of the U.S. to settle the DPRK-U.S. nuclear issue by bringing down the former's system, not through dialogue.
The U.S. is staging even "Ulji Focus Lens-04" joint military exercise aimed to unleash a war against the DPRK after massively shipping up-to-date war equipment into south Korea, blustering that a military option has not been completely removed from the table. This clearly indicates that the U.S. option is not dialogue but showdown.
Now that the U.S. has clearly revealed its true intention, the DPRK can no longer pin any hope on the six-party talks and there is a question as to whether there is any need for it to negotiate with the U. S. any more.
The option for a stand-off is not a monopoly of the U.S.
It is the DPRK's firm resolution and conviction in sure victory to react to confrontation with confrontation and return a preemptive attack with a preemptive strike.
The reality today makes substantially convinces the army and people of the DPRK that its Songun politics is entirely just.
The U.S. foolish attempt to bring the DPRK under its control by force of arms by bringing down its system compels the latter to bolster up its war deterrent both in quality and quantity in order to beat back any aggressor at a single blow."



More of the same here.

Possibly premature, since I've only just started reading it, but presenting views worth examining by pro- and antiwar camps as well as anyone with an interest in the prospects of the Pax Americana.

Anarcho-syndicalism in action.

So, it's Naomi Klein. What of it?

Ann Coulter pied. Of course, one can't condone this sort of thing etc. etc.

Had it been Iran that invaded Iraq and removed the barbaric dictator Saddam Hussein, would it still have been a just war worthy of our support?

We will miss you, John Peel.

Thanks for everything.

The Nightingales are back!!

Probably shouldn't use that title: it's copyrighted by my bosses, I imagine.

My appointment with my G.P. on Tuesday resulted in a look of horror on his face when he learned that I'd been back in work after my spell in hospital. "You've been suffering from a serious illness. Take the rest of the week off. Put your feet up and read a good book," was more or less what he told me, the last sentence being verbatim. I phoned my boss and told him the good news straight away, and since Monday is bank holiday over here, I have until next Tuesday to lie in bed and read. Here's what I've managed since the last set of reviews:

Anarchism, by Peter Kropotkin: A collection of pamphlets and articles by the great P.K., including his contribution to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. By and large, these works are, of necessity, more general and vague than his longer texts, but they give a flavour of Kropotkin's views and remind us that he knew full well where Marxism and the Soviet Revolution were headed, even if the Marxists didn't. Credit where it's due: Either the Marxists knew their philosophy would result in tyranny if put into practice and pretended not to, or else they were just blinded by love of theory or wishful thinking or strategic denial. For all the arse that's written about Marx's erudition, let's not forget the difference between learning and wisdom. And Kropotkin's Mutual Aid shows that he had a better understanding of Darwin, too.

Marx after Sraffa, by Ian Steedman. I was tipped off about this work after reading the interview with Norm on his blog (see link at left). This is an economics text that manages not to be excessively dry and if you have any interest in problems with Marx's theory of value, this is the place to come. Steedman points out that valid refutations of Marx's argument date back to the late 1800s/early 1900s but that it is only since Sraffa that such refutations have been taken seriously. He demonstrates that Marx's solution to the transformation problem is inconsistent and that the whole issue of transformation is in itself a red herring because reference to values is entirely unnecessary in showing that surplus labour is the source of profit and that exploitation of labour takes place. The real problem for Marxist theory arising from Marx's errors lies in the invalid conclusions drawn regarding the tendency of the profit rate to fall and the inferences regarding the inevitable crises of capitalism and its ultimate downfall. There's no reason to assume it's ever going to happen.

London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew. A monster of a book, which I forced myself to read as part of the research for my next novel, set in London. Mayhew presents scores of interviews with the working classes of early- to mid-19th-century London and describes their living and working conditions. Lots of references to Ireland, of course, thanks to famines and free trade, but also a source of many occasions for nostaliga, at least for me, in that many of the descriptions of street hawkers brought back memories of London in the 70s and 80s, as a kid visiting Petticoat Lane and a student buying hot chestnuts off the bloke on Oxford Street. Mayhew manages not to be repetitious, mainly because he lets the people speak for themselves and reproduces their dialects and idioms with apparent sympathy and accuracy. A treasure trove.


Violent London: 2,000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, by Clive Bloom. Another giant of a book and replete with fascinating information about popular insurrections in the capital. Like Mayhew, Bloom writes sympathetically of people's rage and anger at injustice. Early chapters cover Boadicea, the Peasants' Revolt, the Diggers and Levellers, and the Gordon Riots, which began as anti-Catholic but turned into a general insurrection, then turns to the Chartists and popular resistance to the formation of the police (On Lord mayor's Day 1830, a notice was posted up which read, in part: "All London meets on Tuesday. Come Armed. We assure you from ocular demonstration that 6,000 cutlasses have been removed from the Tower, for the use of Peel's Bloody Gang . . . These damned Police are now to be armed. Englishmen, will you put up with this?").

Later chapters deal with the Sidney Street siege, the suffragettes, the Battle of Cable Street, the Anti-Nazi League, Grosvenor Square, the poll tax riots, and the guerrilla gardeners and the Countryside Alliance. My only disappointment was the lack of reference to the Stop the City festivals. Otherwise, this is well worth a look at.

Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, by Andre Gorz. Written about 1980 but prescient enough and much of what Gorz identifies in terms of demographic and technological trends holds good; the expansion of contract work, McJobs, an increase in automation of both industrial and service sectors, and a labour aristocracy comprising the permanently employed, namely, technicians and experts. Gorz's main argument is that the development of productive forces under capitalism will not only fail to establish the preconditions for socialism but will actually hinder its realization. Rather, we should be pushing to expand the sphere of freedom outside the workplace and reduce the margin of necessity, the amount of time spent in the workplace, to a minimum, say two hours a day. Marx's homo faber will be developed outside of the workplace (automation, after all, has made work into a grindingly boring process of repetition), where communities should be organized to provide a new arena for self-realization (which of course includes community involvement, engagement, and commitment).

I wasn't entirely convinced. The idea that all workers will be interchangeable in the workplace (except for the technicians at the top) is presented here as an obstacle to appropriation of the means of production, because, as Marx himself said, factories produced 'monsters,' individuals 'incapable of any independent act,' 'stunted' and 'crippled' people, governed by an 'entirely military discipline.' In other words, the workers don't know how to do anything except press a few buttons and stand back. Now, any good Leninist will tell you, this shouldn't be an obstacle to appropriation so long as you have the technocrats available to step in and remedy any faults in the production line. So long as the capitalists are removed from the equation, all the worker has to do is keep pressing a few buttons, secure in the knowledge that he's working for the benefit of society instead of for exploiting capitalists. And all the surplus labour he generated can be redistributed by the Party to where it's most needed. Lenin could quite happily borrow from Henry Ford because he never envisioned a revolution in the productive forces. For him, and Trotsky, there was nothing wrong with a hierarchical and highly fragmented division of labour, so long as the proletariat had 'seized power.' No wonder they emphasized the dignity of labour. How else would they keep people at their stations (oh well, yes, guns). The proletariat could win their freedom and they wouldn't even have to leave their workplace.

The socialist movement needs to accept, Gorz argues, that the means of production and a considerable portion of what is actually produced do not lend themselves to genuine and concrete collective appropriation by real workers. The problem is one of changing the means and structure of production in order to render them collectively appropriable.

As I say, there isn't a necessary contradiction here. If Lenin and Trotsky had been able to reduce the working day to a couple of hours, they would have earned the eternal gratitude of a proletariat prepared to tolerate the crappy work. That sort of scenario seems to be what Gorz has in mind himself: Automation, rather than social revolution, offers the possibility of expanded free time. What we need to campaign and struggle for now is the equitable distribution of the entire output. That, of course, requires the removal of the capitalists.

A lovely article from Cultic Studies Journal by Dr. Dennis Tourish on the similarities between the practices of Militant Tendency, and by extension, other Trotskyist organizations, and those of religious cults. Not a new analogy, I know, but nice to see it given concrete (and amusing) examples and scientific scrutiny.

While all those other self-important blogs drone on about the fucking war, here's a piece of news of essential importance and relevance to everyday English life. We've all been cleaning our teeth the wrong way. All our lives.

Remember in school how you were told not to clean from side to side but to clean up and down? Well, it wasn't until I moved to Ireland and started playing soccer with a crowd of surgeons, doctors, and dentists (it's a long story) that I discovered I'd been damaging my gums for the past 40 years.

Over here, dentists teach their patients that you should brush from the top gum down and from the lower gum up, not up and down like they tell you in England. By following the irish method, you remove particles of food and detritus from between the teeth, AND, more improtant, you avoid pushing back the gums and exposing the soft enamel. The English way increases the risk of sensitive teeth, because it leads to receding gumlines. No doubt the toothpaste manufacturers are involved in some sort of industry conspiracy to prevent the truth from coming out: That's why you'll always see shelves of Sensodyne in the dentist's surgery.

Now, after me: Down from the top, Up from the bottom.

You know it makes sense.

Not sure yet this is such a bright idea.

In today's Guardian, Terry Eagleton describes a mishap on his way back from buying a donkey from a farmer in Mayo. Well, what the fuck do you expect? You were just lucky you didn't end up in hospital in Offaly.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings profiled in the September 20 New Yorker.

A work colleague of mine is teaching an undergraduate course on Heidegger and asked me if he could borrow my copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Fortunately, this is the one book I have two copies of: The first, bought when I was 18, is covered in adolescent scribblings along the lines of 'how true' and 'yes, exactly!' that have rendered it unreadable, so I bought a second copy several years later and actually read the damn thing cover to cover, while on holiday (there's not a lot else to do in Fuerteventura).

My colleague required the text, he explained, because there's a section in which Sartre deals with Heidegger's concept of Mitsein, and my colleague was concerned because one of his students knows Heidegger inside out and was likely to pull him up on this subject during the next class. "I can see him, sat there, actually thinking DURING the class," he told me, like this was an unpardonable crime.

I said nothing, coward that I am, but should have pointed out to him that it might be reasonable to regard this as a hazard that comes with the territory. After all, if you're going to teach philosophy, don't be surprised if some of your students end up thinking.

I know from my own experience just how painful it can be. Philosophy, especially, is a subject in which your success as an educator can be measured by the independent thought generated by your students, however discomfiting it is for you to have to confess your ignorance in front of everyone when they demonstrate their intelligence.

It's a humbling discipline, if you're doing it right.

But this episode also brought to mind Woody Allen's classic line: "I failed my metaphysics exam the other day. I was caught looking into the soul of the boy next to me."

He was lucky it wasn't Sartre he was cribbing from. Imagine what was in his soul.

Web site for the Beyond ESF conference.

Time to move on?


I don't know. Some of us have long memories. I'm determined not to have Sky in the house till he's dead.

Looks like I've managed to figure out how to paste in links to other sites - and with no help from anyone.

Some of them even seem to work.

Watch this space. Or that space over there.

Dougal McGuire is a 1,000 to 1 outsider for the papacy according to Paddy Power bookmakers.

An article from the September issue of Wired magazine on psychologist Gordon Rugg of Keele University, who seems to have solved the mystery of the Voynich manuscript, a 400-year-old book written in an undecipherable code. His success has come as a result of a re-examination of the scientific method and an analysis of the logic used by experts. One statement from this article that stood out for me was the finding that 11 percent of papers printed in Nature and the British Medical Journal contain serious statistical errors.

George Lucas's THX 1138 is being rereleased in a digitally remastered form, with a number of extra shots, commentary, and documentaries. It's a classic.

Soon we'll all be saying it, if Kent Jones's assessment in the July/August Film Comment is anything to go by:

Hong Sang-soo's beautifully titled Woman Is the Future of Man (I'll say!) won the prize for most invisible film in competition (if you don't count The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, that is). Hong's movie is so unassuming that many took it for little more than a riff on his previous work. It unfolds like a minor anecdote: two old friends pay a visit to a former lover (of both men) that extends through the following day and into the night, ending for Hong's surrogate character in embittered despair. If Cassavetes had been born uptight, pissed off, and South Korean, he might have made this movie.

The simple structure, unwinding over roughly 36 hours, unassumingly encompasses a lifetime of disappointment and inescapable male foolishness. It's quite a rich, absorbing spectacle to watch this supposedly happy family man worm his way into his old lover's apartment for the night, ask for a blow job so he can get to sleep, run into his students and berate one of them during the obligatory drinking scene, and end up in the most depressing motel room for yet another blow job from a willing student methodically fulfilling a classroom crush. Hong's mastery-of narrative, of tone-is undeniable, and the acting is utterly flawless. But his new film begs the question: How much does the endless parade of passive women, self-deluding men, drinking sessions, and not so carefully cloaked depression belong to him, and how much is it the property of Korean culture?

Once you've seen the film, it's hard to get the adoring student's entreaty to her befuddled prof out of your head. With the greatest politeness, struggling to kneel in a miserable room barely big enough to stand up in, this smart, calculating, beautiful young woman utters the soon-to-be immortal line, “May I suck you off, sir?” A suitable slogan for the hard-sell, aggressively sybaritic atmosphere of Cannes.

It's a recommendation. I'll buy my own copy, thanks.

Cheers for the film previews, Jose. Will you be doing the Catalan subtitles for these?

Sacha Baron Cohen has been reaping the Kazakh whirlwind. There's nowhere to hide these days, mate.

Hello there,

I told John I would post some suggestions as well, and here I go.
There's a couple of films coming soon that could be interesting, and you've probably heard about them already. One is 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow', which I think has already been released in the UK. The old-fashioned sci-fi look is what attracted me when I saw the trailer. You can watch it at the official website (http://www.tiscali.co.uk/skycaptain) and read some opinions here: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0346156/

The other film is 'Team America: World Police', the last effort by 'South Park' creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The trailer looks quite promising. They seem to laugh at everybody and everything. Here's the official site: http://www.teamamericamovie.com/
There's a site in Spanish where you can watch the trailer, tv spots and some film clips (http://www.quedetrailers.com/trailers1230.htm). I myself didn't watch the film clips yet. I'd rather wait to see the whole film... I don't want to spoil the fun.

Greetings from Barcelona,

Jose

An article in the American Journalism Review reporting the belated accolades accorded the journalists of Knight Ridder for their reluctance to believe government claims that Saddam had WMD.

"Sous rature" from this point on.


Rest in Parse

This sample of a typical undergrad student essay was submitted by one of our team members who shall remain unidentified for fear of retribution from his wards. Many thanks.


Consider Eavan Boland’s approach to the role of the poet or the nature of poetry in comparison to either Lyrical Ballads or Aurora Leigh.

The role of the poet in Browning’s Aurora Leigh is about Aurora Leigh who wants to be a poet but she is a woman whereas her cousin, Romney says she can’t be. This infers like Wordsworths Ancient Maryner that you shouldn’t mess with Nature. Let us look in contrast now to Eavan Bolands’ poet’s role’s, however, it seems as though it could be said that it is possibly another role altogether because although she is a woman, despite this she is Irish. The role of the poet in Wordsworths’ “Tintern Abbey” is like ‘the language of ordinary men” to symbolise how beautiful Nature is after hard times. As in ‘The Thorn’ when the garrulous old, unreliable narrator tells to us the story of the beautiful bush who is Martha.


In the Victorian times of the eighteenth-century women and Irish were being repressed by men. They were supposed to sew, cook and have children, and do the washing up.(1) In the ‘Idiot Boy’ they are very poor and repressed but the boy has superior knowledge to the poet even though he is mentally challenged. Also, we see the childlike innocence of the child in ‘Now we are Seven’ but the poet is very patronising to the sweet little girl with her superior wisdom. This makes him a hypocrite because he said in the Preface that the role of the poet was to praise the common people- this is not the way to treat children. But in Boland’s poem the old woman has eaten all the children because their were no potato’s. This seems a much worse thing to do!

Literary critic Michelle Foucault states;
‘There is no author.
He is dead.(2)

However, I feel she has misunderstood the plot as much of Bolan’s poetry is very alive and full of ideas. Bolands’s poems are shaped like coffee cups so that we can learn ‘Lessons’ from the ‘Objects’. Hence, the title, ‘Object Lessons’. But in contrast Wordsworth writes poem’s that have lines that have a rhythm and stop at the ends. Browning uses many female words like ‘she’, ‘witch’ and ‘Lady’. But in contrast Wordworths pronouns are all heavy and masculine like ‘him’ and “the”.

In conclusion, though they lived a hundred years apart and one of them was even Irish the role of these poets is to “tell the truth in ordinary language’ and to assert the timeless beauty that poetry is.


footnotes:

1: http://www.google.com

2: Foucault, Michael The Norton Theory Book, (WW Norton ltd, 1996; America)) PP76

On reflection, I was a tad unfair to Garry O'Connor in describing his biography of Casey as lacking in roundness. There's plenty of detail about Casey's personal life and how he managed to bear grudges at the tiniest of slights. Most peculiar was his nearly lifelong relationship with Harold MacMillan, whose family's publishing house was responsible for putting many of Casey's works into the public domain. More peculiar still is the suggestion that Casey's wife had a more than Platonic relationship with MacMillan, with Casey's knowledge (there was a significant age gap between the couple).

Casey comes across as a real begrudger, an unreconstructed Stalinist, and as someone with legitimate grievances against his treatment by the Irish, as well as a superb playwright. Like Patricia Highsmith, he deserves admiration for his bolshieness, his willingness to think outside the box, his refusal to conform, and his readiness to burn his bridges.

Apologies to O'Connor clearly due, then.

Not related in this book, but still my favourite story about Yeats, is the account of his one and only visit to a pub. His friends were determined that he should go to one at least once in his life, so they dragged him along to Toner's on Baggot Street, where he sipped a sherry (whether or not in the little snug by the entrance is not recorded) and then declared, "Right, I have seen the inside of a pub. Now take me home," or words to that effect. And he never set foot inside another pub.

Anyone who knows Toner's might say, "I'm not surprised"; the best that can be said of the place is that it has "character." And yet it's also the finest pub in Dublin, which doesn't say much, I suppose, for the rest, but it says an awful lot about Yeats.

For the International Rooksbyism blog just established by Ed Rooksby, who seems a decent sort. Keep an eye on it.

I managed to get some reading done in hospital, despite the searing agony and constant lusting after nurses. I finished off Garry O'Connor's biography of Sean O'Casey, which was entertaining if a little one-dimensional: O'Connor is an actor himself and focuses on the plays rather than the politics. Nontheless, I came away with some amusing descriptions of W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, and Virginia Woolf. And I wasn't aware that Alfred Hitchcock had made an early 'talkie' version of Juno and the Paycock in 1930 which was criticised for its anti-Semitism (not in the original play: Hitchcock turned the tailor Needle Nugent into a 'stage-Jew' called Kelly).

I also dipped into a couple of books by Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism and The True and Only Heaven. However, I must confess that neither book held my attention, both being full of unsubstantiated generalizations or attacks on straw men. Lasch is clearly erudite, or at least well-read, but also clearly writing from a crypto-conservative perspective that takes for granted that which remains to be proven, i.e. the negative impact of progress, the negative effects of the 'decline' of 'the family' and so on. As a consequence, his analyses tend to be partial, incomplete, lacking in vision or awareness of alternative interpretations.

Next up is The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. So far an excellent collection of narratives from ex-Communists (Koestler, Silone, Wright) explaining how they came to disillusionment with the Communist Party in their respective countries. Part Two consists of fellow travelers offering similar tales: Gide, Spender, and Louis Fischer). Enjoyable stuff, albeit 60 years old. The sort of material I'd recommend to anyone who still thinks the Bolshevik seizure of power was anything other than a defeat for the Russian people.

Everyone should have that 'Kronstadt' moment.

Don't point at airplanes.

When you talk you only repeat what you already know, but if you listen you may learn something.

Andrea Fraser, on the other hand, received $20,000 from a 'collector' to have a 'sexual encounter' with her, which was filmed and then exhibited as part of her show here. What was that about everyone having a price?

An article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry reports that Disney cartoons are educating children to fear the mentally ill. Well worth a read.

Sorry for the lack of posts on this site recently. It's all been down to this. I was surprised by how common this illness is: Appendicitis affects between 1 in 7 and 1 in 10 people at some time in their lives. Jeez, I NEVER have anything exotic (oh, except gonorrhea of the gums, of course).

The good news is that the mass/abscess seems to be resolving, so that they can take out the appendix in 6 weeks' time. Expect another slowdown in posting then.

In the meantime, no jokes like "did you hear the one about the editor and his appendix?" (I don't have a punchline yet.)