3 years of fascist bullshit

Elberry is now 3 years old. Looking back i disagree with my younger self a little, sometimes a lot; but since blogging is truly journalistic, written day to day, let these past entries stay as they were: at the time i believed what i wrote, even if it now sounds like crap. The day to day flux and transience is appropriate to this form.

This blog began in July 2005, when i was doing another of my minimum wage jobs, in a bank (i.e. in hell). No one read it for a good 9 months or so, and posting was at first infrequent due to my then living in a Hitler-like bunker without electricity or internet access. i only really began to regularly blog in February 2006, when i landed a job with unrestricted internet access. i don’t think i had more than a handful of readers till 2007, but by then i’d found the writing itself sufficiently enjoyable, and i had by then - having accepted my novel & stories would remain unpublished - got used to the idea of being unread.

Had my blog been more ‘popular’, perhaps i might have tailored my posts to an audience. As it is, the 18 months or so of being almost totally unread encouraged me to write for myself. A difference, here, between self-indulgent blogging, of the “so, like, Mike and I went to this film that totally rocked! I had to throw up twice because of all those vodkas! Then we went partying and I met Kate and said OMG!” type, and my ‘writing for myself’ (i hope!), the latter only really satisfying me when it would also interest some hypothetical other reader.

i have, a few times, considered ‘angling’ for a particular audience (e.g. writing regular book reviews rather than just when i feel like it), or censoring myself, encouraged by angry people leaving foolish comments of the “I don’t like this aspect of your blog! Get rid of it!” variety (but adding that they weren’t telling me what to write or bullying me, but merely expressing an opinion…). My natural donkey-like contrariness, however, made me all the surlier and unamenable to correction and bullying. Since no one makes any money out of blogging, i see no reason to write other than for myself and my hypothetical other reader.

i have been subject to various strange and twisted commentators, malign and frustrated hunchbacks who, while taking absolutely no pleasure in my blog, nonetheless read it every day and left variously abusive comments, sneers, put-downs, or deranged accusations. i am glad of these peculiar people, though i’d not mourn if they were turned into frogs. They taught me not to take blogging too seriously, and not to argue or even attempt to reason with human beings: both excellent lessons.

Blogging filled the gap after i’d finished most of the editing work on my novel. Sometime during 2006 i realised the novel was unpublishable, not because of any inherent faults, but because i am not famous. At first i was understandably miffed, but after reflecting upon some of my more malign commentators, i realised it’s no bad thing to write in privacy, to be unread. i took some of the abuse seriously at first, and had to close down for a while. In order to keep blogging i’ve had to distance myself from the virtual world. It is not merely that one lacks cues of voice intonation and body language here; something in the abstraction, the unphysicality of the screen and keyboard (which in their utility really only engage the faculty of sight) amplifies ego, anger, vanity. With some blogs and some commentators i am reminded of Buffalo Bill grotesquely posing in drag in The Silence of the Lambs, purring hideous solicitations to his reflection. Their posts and comments are the equivalent of Buffalo Bill’s posing, admiring his imagined self, trying to convince others that this is, indeed, who he really is.

In such a world obscurity is a privilege; to remain unread is to be free. While i would be bemused and repentant if tomorrow my Sitemeter showed absolutely no readers, you all having taken me at my word, i am quite happy to have very few readers. My blog is not serious; i am not serious.

a bear too far

Another good piece from The Chap on the subject of Paddington Bear (readers from outside the UK should probably read the link to Paddington Bear first):

A bear has been thrown into solitary confinement at Paddington Green police station, after being found at Paddington railway station with a label attached to his duffel coat naming him as “Mohammed”. The label also proclaimed his origins as “Darkest Sudan”.

Under British appeasement to Sharia Law, it is illegal to leave bears unattended at railway stations.

[...]

A spokesman for the Association of Shouty Moslems shouted: “Everything about this bear is an offense to Islam, from his duffel coat and battered sou wester to his quaint little suitcase and his penchant for marmalade sandwiches. But most of all his name, which is only allowed for Sudanese schoolchildren and half the male Moslem population. The bear must either change his name to something more suitable, such as Pooh, or die.”

Mohammed was said to be “confused” at being hurled into solitary confinement, and was concerned as to when he might be given some marmalade. “This would never happen back home in Darkest Sudan,” he said to his lawyer. “I only came here for the excellent railway services and the famous British tolerance.”

i say the Bishop of Rochester should sort this out.

god and tobacco

Via The Chap, i just came across this stirring tale:

A devotee of Lady NIcotine and God has defied the new smoking law by lighting up in a police station. The Reverend Anthony Carr, of Holy Trinity Church in East Peckam, Kent, walked into the station in Tonbridge and said he wanted to report a crime. Asked what it was by the desk sergeant, Rev’d Carr then took out his pipe, lit it and, through clouds of aromatic tobacco fumes, said: “This is the crime.”

The desk sergeant asked the vicar to extinguish his pipe, as he was in a no smoking area, and the Reverend replied, “I will not.” When officers told him he would not be bundled into the back of a van he said “What a pity”.

Clearly a stout character. Note that:

A spokesman for the Bishop of Rochester said: “We regard this as a personal matter - the church would not wish to comment on the incident. Officially, the church doesn’t condone breaking the law.”

The Bishop of Rochester is another sound character. When he says (or tells his spokesman to say) “officially, the church doesn’t condone breaking the law” what he obviously means is “bravo! let more of our clergy take to smoking and law-breaking!” Perhaps there is some good in the old C of E after all.

the decline of the West

Michael Mann, god among directors, is filming a tale of 30s gangster John Dillinger. Here is a picture from the set, with Johnny Depp as the man himself:

Note the tie. Note the hat. Note the suit. There is even a waistcoat. This is, clearly, the right sort of gangster. Now let us turn to a contemporary gangster, namely 50 Cent:

Note the tattooes. Note the drug-addled, bestial stare. Note the improperly-worn baseball cap. Instead of a waistcoat the man is wearing a bullet-proof vest.

i say no more.

the EU

‘Consider Europe. You have voted yourself deeper into that little mess. I would have saved you from the stinking cheeses of Brussels and words longer than French trains. Satellite porn, knickers in windows, naked bodies in the streets. Tattoos on foreheads and school dinners made of cheese. Nothing but cheese. Rights for criminals. Criminal rights. Human rights. Cheese rights. Criminal human rights. Rights to be a criminal not a human. And what about those robots? You didn’t consider that when you voted for my opponents. It’s as though you want to be overrun by Japanese robots. Well, that’s what you’ll get in the next five years. Criminal robots from Brussels with 50% extra nipples and sticking their probes into your cheese. And don’t say I didn’t warn you!’

 from J P Murgatroid’s excellent novel-memoir What Ho, Proles!, a book i highly recommend for publication despite the author’s lack of celebrity and notoriety. Once a dashing Tory MP, he is now consigned to a mental institution but interested publishers may leave messages for him here.

how wizards dress

People often ask me, “Elberry, how can I tell if a chap is a wizard or not? Will there be a long flowing beard, a huge pointy hat? Will he be 9 feet tall and covered in jailhouse tattoos? I want to make sure I don’t accidentally irritate the wrong man and get blasted or turned into a frog.”

There is no hard and fast answer to this one. However, some sources suggest the below photograph shows a number of highly dangerous wizards waiting for the No 10 bus to take them to the nearest tea room. Beware, then, should you meet a dapper chap in a spiffing suit and trilby - mind your manners or you may have to hop home.

preparing for The War

i bought another waistcoat last night. If civilization is going to break apart into Blood Meridian style chaos, i shall need many waistcoats.

frog faced bitch

So it’s not just me who noticed this odd coincidence. Via the Daily Mash:

BRITAIN is an awful place full of violence and corruption, and those responsible should be ashamed of themselves, the wife of former prime minister Tony Blair said yesterday.
Cherie Blair told a House of Commons committee that crime, education and the health service were all much worse than a decade ago and only couples with £3.5 million townhouses in central London were safe.

“This country used to be a nice place to live,” she said. “Cricket on the village green, old ladies cycling to church, you name it.

“But everything seemed to go to hell not long after we moved house about 11 years ago.

the labyrinth

In Robert Littell’s CIA novel The Company, the grandly-named James Jesus Angleton, ‘Mother’, head of Counter-Intelligence, refers to his work as being ‘a wilderness of mirrors’ (a line from TS Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’). The real life Angleton apparently never caught a single mole in his 30-odd years, but in his relentless paranoia ruined the careers of many officers because, for example, they had once shared a flat with someone whose girlfriend was a Communist. Littell suggests that Angleton may himself have been a Soviet agent, since he did great damage to the CIA without seeming to do any to the KGB.

The difficulty of Angleton’s job - attempting to monitor and counter the KGB’s attempts to compromise the CIA - could well have driven him insane. For example, there would be no way of knowing if an officer was really a Soviet spy, or whether the KGB were setting a loyal CIA man up for Angleton’s suspicions, as they could do, easily enough. If an apparent KGB defector brings top quality intelligence, is that because he is a true defector or is he still KGB and his documents and reports merely the coin to buy away suspicion? And so on. Hence, the wilderness of mirrors.

i find this an interesting if extreme situation. The internet too is a wilderness of mirrors. This is one reason i don’t hate people for their political beliefs: the Iraq War and what not are too distant for me to be sure of. i have my instincts, based more on images of men like Bush and Blair, and my experience of the human race; but i do not know. To devote my blog to hate rants against not merely Bush but anyone who disagrees with me would be, indeed, to enter the wilderness of mirrors.

Analysing information is tricky. Presented with so much data, one develops an explanatory hypothesis. It probably won’t fit the data perfectly; but one can explain away the discrepancies as ‘background noise’. How much background noise one is willing to explain away depends on one’s commitment to the hypothesis; so emotion is an integral part of analysis. When analysing data for standard deviation, it is common to take 5% as a determining point; so if there is a 1-5% chance of the data having occurred by chance (that, say, people in Wales shag sheep), the analyst confidently states that it is not chance but that, rather, Welshmen like to shag sheep. It is, however, possible that these results were the result of chance - it’s just the likelihood is under 5%. This threshold can be adjusted according to the researcher, so if one were especially committed to the Welsmen shag sheep hypothesis, one could raise it to 10 or 15%.

There is a sense in which, the moment one begins to analyse the data, the data responds, very subtly, insinuating itself into the analyst’s perceptions and emotion. Thus William Burroughs quoted one scientist as saying “I would never accept telepathy is possible, no matter what evidence was presented.” One sees a similar, autistic rigidity all the time on the internet, especially in discussions of politics at the extreme left and right: X has already made his mind up and so won’t even consider evidence which may contradict his opinions. Reading such blogs i feel a great weariness, as if i am caught inside an endlessly replaying scene in a not very good film; rather than encountering a human mind i have stumbled upon a human who has made himself into a machine, a tumble drier, perhaps, recycling the same opinion over and over again, substituting new hatred and rage for proof or curiosity.

Since we cannot arrive at a perfect match between data and hypothesis - as  Saint Augustine says, we cannot know our own hearts, let alone another man’s - all understanding is limited, contingent. It is possible that Bush is a good man who went to war in Iraq because he genuinely and deeply cares about the Iraqis, and wanted to save them from that bad man Saddam Hussein; it doesn’t seem very likely to me, but i suppose it’s theoretically possible.

Unless a hypothesis is totally and obviously wrong, and can be so demonstrated, the mind tends to accommodate the devised structure to explain away discrepancies, gaps, outright contradictions. Since there will never be a perfect correlation of hypothesis and data, the mental structure is flexible, can be stretched, swivelled, adjusted as need be. So understanding is a constant process, as new data is fitted into the existing structure, or denied, or admitted but only so no one will ever see it. So Ptolemy’s vision of the geocentric universe, beginning in error, multiplied explanations - epicycles and eccentric circles - to assimilate the data that, in fact, showed he was wrong.

Understanding is not the Baconian imposition of the human will, but rather the beguilement of the mind by itself, by the great prison-house of certitude. To look at the data is to begin to weave already the prison; though i would say it need only be a prison if it is taken as final. If, rather, understanding is seen as the endless path to rûna, to the inexhaustible mystery, then in its overt limitation it is the just path to walk. Otherwise, if one supposes knowledge is a thing one can somehow acquire, and then lock up forever -

Knowledge is chimera, for beyond it lies other knowledge, and the incompleteness of what is known renders the knowing false.

(Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant)

a word from Tolkien

 

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

(Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)