Philosophy and Music

Allan Holdsworth RIP

felephant — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 11:28:35 GMT

Holdsworth, to me, was this strange, shimmering, imposing palisade around something I was not at peace enough with myself to do more than touch with my fingertips so that I could feel its electricity course softly through me, through my heart and loin and toes. I couldn't do more not because it was too intense, but because it was too delicate; as with Schoenberg, I knew that if I were to force my way through the plasma wall, I'd end up exactly where I had always been, in Midgard, numb with bold pleasures. His sci-fi synth was a door to some ethereal realm, but all my ham-ears could do was pass over the barrier without ever travelling to that other dimension. I was always sad about this, because--even more than with Schoenberg--I felt that this other dimension is where my soul wanted to eventually end up.

It's good at least then that he's left such a rich catalogue behind, because his is music much more in my future than my past. I hope he's having fun surfing that mercury rainbow.

Various Facebook posts, collated (20 June 2016 - 23 Jan 2017)

felephant — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 15:25:07 GMT

Because I am so wise, and because I want to have various things I've said on Facebook (and others've said on my wall) in one place without navigating through ads, poor design, stupid things I've said (I'm mostly not wise at all), ephemera, and Trump posts, of FB, I'm archiving selected posts and comments below the fold. Reverse chronological order. Others referred to by their initials. I stop when I do because last Bloomsday I got excited and posted quotations from every episode of Ulysses, and the browser was already heaving away slowly enough without going further back.

23 Jan 2017. [twitter thread about how Nazis are like vampires, the correct political reaction to whom is violence.]

23 Jan 2017. I felt somehow vaguely anxious about or dissatisfied with the Women's March Against Trump in London today, in spite of the massive turnout and obvious unalloyed goodness of its ideals. I don't know whether this article gets at my concerns, but it certainly gets closer than I can otherwise get.

13 Jan 2017. This is a facinating piece, and very good. I've been wondering a lot about work recently (no doubt catalysed by being an unemployed and lazy recently-ex-student), and this (US-centric) piece makes some important points about the cultural idolisation of 'hard work' that were new to me.

The increasing computerisation of most jobs means that soon - in perhaps fifty years - the vast majority of present jobs won't exist, and its rapidity means that (unlike with agriculture at the start of the twentieth century) they can't be replaced. (Which is one reason for the continuing effects of the financial crisis.) But - as Keynes predicted and as John Quiggin recently argued should still be thought feasible (link below) - the notion that we need to or should work as much as we do is getting well past its due date.

Livingston's piece wouldn't differ, but its focus is elsewhere: about the racism involved in the ideology of the long working week, and about the need to restructure - urgently - how to think about grounds of self-worth and maturity absent the age-old structure of work.

I would like it to have said more about the narrowness of the conception of work he adopts. As a philosopher whose friends are mostly artists, I don't really even consider 9-5 jobs typical examples of work, and certainly they're unlikely to be helpful archetypes. I'd be curious to see if the vocational attitude to work stereotypical of artists and clergypeople would offer a good way of reconceptualising work.

I would also like to know how this stuff can be connected to the fresh momentum behind the Universal Basic Income campaign. Because if we can't all work (or work all the time, or work the hours that would alone give us enough money to live by), then something needs to fill that gap financially, not just morally.
Quiggin's piece

15 Dec 2016. Godfrey-Smith makes some true but well-known points about the decline of music as a profession - there is basically no money in it any more, far less than can sustain a livelihood for any but superstars (we know!) - but his solution is frustratingly - indeed, ineffectually - modest: 'People! Buy more music!'

Yeah sure we should buy more music if we can afford to, particularly when it will help people out (young artists, experimental artists). But the deep problem is (all together now) capitalism. It is not only musicians who're struggling to make a living, and asking other people who're also struggling to make a living to help out musicians is to put pressure on those already feeling the most pressure. Better to look at how wealth can be redistributed so that musicians - or anyone else! - don't have to struggle to meet the minimum wage. Better to look at how work can be restructured so that musicians can do what they love while also having a reasonable income.

14 Dec 2016. The trouble I have with criticism of 'the cult of genius' is that there are a few people, such as Bach, who just straight up are geniuses, with all the quasi-religious defiance of comprehension that people find so annoying about genius-talk. But to put Bach at the centre of an understanding of music or art is nevertheless going to be distorting: the rest of us are so far from him that he's just not helpful as a model.

This occurred to me this evening because I saw Bernhard Schimpelsberger in the Rich Mix Centre. It was a great gig. Schimpelsberger is doing some really fun and interesting things with percussion, most notably in mixing Indian rhythms with the rock/jazz drumkit and its idioms. (Though my favourite thing about tonight was his kick drum that he pitch-shifted with his left foot like one can do with timpani. It was tabla-like, but still with that low unpitched kick.) But...

The temptation is so strong to say: 'it's good, but I wouldn't buy the CD', or give it a star rating, or wonder why he's not more widely known, or point out the new musical ground he's covering... more generally, I think, I'm tempted to view him sub specie aeternitas. But to do this is to miss the point of the criticism of the cult of genius. That's not his game at all. He's a weird and intense guy, following his own star, being himself really seriously and thoroughly, and getting by doing it. His success is very human and loveable. One could imagine a post-capitalist world in which a million flowers bloomed all as unique and captivating as him - and almost all passing entirely but happily. I need to stop finding this so discouraging. It's not, it's just time.

19 Nov 2016. In response to this piece by Tim Williamson, shared by JL.

These fuckers are making such heavy weather out of something so simple. You can just say that 'heap' - and all these other 'vague' terms - don't have an absolute meaning out of some context, and/or that they can be variably instantiated. What do we *want* to say with a heap of twenty grains? "It depends what you mean by heap" - not on what 'heap' means, but on how strictly *you* are applying the term right now - or "well it's more of a heap than this heap of five grains, but less of a heap than this heap of a million grains", or "sort of". County councils and lawyers may need there to be some strict heap/not-heap line, but that's because of the nature of the legal system, not because of the nature of reality. Philosophers don't need to worry about where exactly they put the division.

Tim Williamson is by all accounts one of the major players in Analytic philosophy. It is astonishing that with all his expertise and with all he has gained from a long tradition of Analytic philosophy he is not able to answer a simple fucking question in a simple fucking way. It is a microcosm of the ill health of the tradition. Disgusting.

The very notion that a whole tradition could be so flummoxed by a heap of fucking sand that they have to try and introduce non-bi-fucking-valent logic. The mind boggles.

Ok I need to say a touch more - the reason this is an indictment rather than a reasonable mistake is because it shows how Analytic philosophers are constitutionally incapable of thinking about things in ways that aren't indebted to its understanding of the natural sciences, whereby concepts are instantiated absolutely. When it encounters non-scientific ways of understanding - as in heaps or personhood - it freaks out and tries to reduce it to a scientific understanding. It cannot resist the urge to treat the scientific approach as a universal hammer. It's childish, scientistic.

9 Nov 2016. I keep thinking of black people's lot in America before the Civil Rights Movement, at least as it's recounted by Morrison and Walker. The sort of life depicted as normal by these authors is one of hopelessness, of merely coping, of being cruel and selfish and inward-looking in order to keep sane. The inhumanity done by people who only have the energy and wisdom to look to the smallest bit of themselves, but the inevitability of that inhumanity under such pressure.

I fear now that the racism, xenophobia and hatred in society is so profound that in many ways, many people will be reduced to such a state. In a distant way, all of us, if political battles become unwinnable and all we can do is look to and love each other whom we trust, and leave evil be. It's a pathetic ambition but it's the despair to which I'm reduced. Far more meaningfully, though, is all the people who will be literally reduced to such a state: those who will suffer under profound and violent oppression.

Though there's the other side to this: surely a large part of the reason that people have voted as they have, yesterday and in Brexit, is that they were already in some such state of hopelessness. That's how I can explain to myself the vote. While this hopelessness persists as it does - and of course neoliberalism is what's at fault here - we will get many more such results. They will not always be channelled through the ballot box.

9 Nov 2016. My great fear is that this is only the beginning.

This resentment, anger, comes from the collapse of hope. Old ways of life crumble (under the Third Way), and this leads to anger and frustration, which in turn lead to hatred and scapegoating. These things lead to political actions that are against others: against foreigners, against those unlike oneself. But these actions are also self-defeating; to take the case of Brexit, it will lead to a further decrease in prosperity in Britain (immigrants are indisputably good for the economy), and so lead to an increase in hatred and scapegoating. This in turn leads to further stupid political decisions; the cycle continues. Soon we find ourselves not fighting over whether EU migrants should immediately be on the NHS - not over whether they should be allowed to permanent residents here - not over whether they should be allowed live here - not over whether they should be guaranteed free legal representation - but...

The solution has to be to prevent the decay altogether. Otherwise we are fighting an impossible battle: we are championing love to people who have ever less to love with. The trouble is, the decay is almost writ in the stars: the only reason the West is so wealthy is its history of aggressive imperialism. So how to counteract the decay? A certain sort of answer is available: an intelligent, internationally co-ordinated effort to universally increase living standards in an environmentally sustainable way. But this answer is a joke. May as well ask for a pony while I'm at it.

I see no way out of a slow decline into anarchy, or civil war, or mass persecution.

9 Nov 2016. More good news: the problem with the EU ref wasn't that it was a referendum rather than done through the channels of representative democracy. Such stopgaps against demagoguery and domination exist abundantly in the US system, with its primaries and its Electoral College. That didn't stop people voting as if they were flailing wildly in the death-throes of suffocation. Rest assured that the real problem here is that when people are being suffocated, they will flail wildly, and that Britain would have done something such as vote for Brexit regardless.

I wonder where it will stop.

29 Oct 2016. I realised today that, to my surprise, I know all but three bars of Ravel's first valse noble et sentimentale by heart. (Which is not to say I can play it at all fluidly, let alone musically! Alas for not having a piano except when I return to the parents'.) This is significantly more progress than I've made with the C Minor WTC I fugue. This is interesting: the Bach, on its face, is a good deal simpler than the Ravel with its eight-note(+!) unanalysable chords and mad leaps. But of course it's not really simpler at all. This is partly because it's a fugue, and so you have three independent voices rather than one voice plus support and embellishments. But it's also, I think, because Bach's harmonic imagination is actually more sophisticated than Ravel's. Even Ravel's! --But yes: Behind all the chromaticism, the Ravel is mainly fairly simple movements: chromatic ascents, I-V progressions, etc. Playing the Bach, it sometimes feels like it changes key in a substantial sense every crotchet, and it has these crazy melodic intervals that sound so natural that I keep trying to play standard intervals instead. Keeping my head atop this is more than I've been able to do.

Which is all just to mention yet another way in which Bach's music is not a human's but angels'.

5 Oct 2016. Undertale turned a year old last month, and it was wonderful how the birthday was celebrated by this profusion of new covers of its extraordinary soundtrack, many of them really pretty good. But this one, for me, takes the cake. It reminds me of something that struck me as really... era-defining about that game.

Undertale - uh, light spoilers from here on in - is astonishing in all sorts of ways. It uses tone to profoundly wrongfoot the player, it's got great music, its world-building and philosophical outlook is tearifyingly wise, it has a delightfully light touch with its tradition... But these are all, as it were, standard ways in which great art is great. I think that if, in a hundred years' time, we look back on Undertale as being really groundbreaking for anything in particular, it'll not be for these things, but be for how it uses its language.

What I mean is - well consider how novels, etc., normally make their language sing. It's always to do with this... poetry, this way of making language declaim. It always strikes me as Shakespearean, confident, eloquent as we use that term to talk about someone's ability to hold forth at a dinner party. And so, it's always a conservative way of using language. Poetry is old, it's rich white men who always give the best after-dinner speeches, etc. And as it's conservative, so it's becoming more and more irrelevant.

I can sort of think of some artists - DFW, Murakami, maybe - who've tried to do something different; perhaps they're legitimate predecessors, but something about that connection jars. (Maybe Scott Pilgrim is a legitimate predecessor.) Also there're obviously plenty of artists who've disclaimed interest in making language sing - BE Ellis, any Hollywood film - but then they're just inferior artists. Artists who've taken how we speak on FB and in text, though - and this includes how we use emoji, punctuation, allusion, humour, etc. - and who've taken our (deliberate) hesitancy and awkwardness, and made that eloquent *on its own terms* or *in its own spirit*, rather than by shoehorning it into the eloquency of The Canon - that is something I've not seen before Undertale.

This is apparent in this song, first in the ridiculous declaiming of the wingding-speech (that so fabulously matches the double-tone-ness of how wingdings are used in the game), and second in how the shy and awkward spoken interludes are given the dignity or (a) being repeated outside the original context of the game - as if they're bons mots that we quote like we quote Shakespeare - and (b) by being spoken *as* awkward and shy. Imagine quoting Shakespeare like this! "You know, as Hamlet says, 'man, heh, sometimes I feel like my uncle's, I dunno, kind of a jerk?'" And for that to be profound and eloquent? In Undertale it's so: that form of expression is chosen not only because it's a 'realistic' representation of speech in a certain culture, but because it's the best way of saying that thing.

What Toby Fox is doing is nothing short of giving voice to a Lebenswelt more or less for the first time.

[comments] Ok, this needs some immediate clarification/emendation.

You might think that what Undertale does is something like, reveal how well millenials or computer nerds or whoever speak, when they speak as well they might, and also reveals that they don't then speak in the backwards-looking way that most artists have made their subjects speak.

I've said that I've never seen this before - but that's not quite true, and what I want to modify.

First, as I briefly noted, there're artworks such as Scott Pilgrim, and I reckon that's doing something similar with regard to basically the same culture. But that's a small crowd.

More significantly, giving distinctive and authentic voice to a Lebenswelt is not, in those general terms, new at all. In a way it's the aim of all art. It's obviously what's going in, e.g., Homer, Flann O'Brien, Aaron Copland, Georgia O'Keeffe, bebop, Steve Reich. So I could row back and say that I only want to say that 'Undertale' is giving voice to its culture for the first time. But I don't quite want to row back that far. Because I think that in literature, this backwards-lookingness really is the law for just about everyone, and I include the likes of Joyce, Toni Morrisson, DFW, and Art Spiegelman in this. So Fox is not just doing for millenials what Joyce did for the Irish; he is doing something even more radically new.

23 Sep 2016. Submitted the Ph.D. thesis this afternoon. By rights, Clare should be taking me out for a very long night; but instead, if all the years of studying art and philosophy have done nothing but allow me to say five true lines about my best friend, they will have been worthwhile.

'Phenomenal Woman,' Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

16 July 2016. I didn't know much about this magazine before downloading this really interesting and often great mixtape, but it looks like it's the 'prove that we're cool' wing of U.S. academy/conservatory music.

There's some really good stuff on the mix - Quartet for Sax, the Goodbye the Band piece, Green Yellow Green Red, Two Windows, Symmetry stood out at me - and everything on it is good, in the sort of minimal sense of competent, professional, serious. It's also very interesting to see that the academy has turned entirely from atonality, and has begun to take aesthetic cues from rock/pop. Extended techniques are also used with the maturity that comes from this sort of stuff finally now being standard fare.

But goddamn it's so establishment! Every artist/composer has a slick website, just a *little* quirkiness, just a *little* arrogance. The WASPness oozes out between every note. Where's the urgency!? Who here would die for their music?

I've been listening to BBC Radio 3's avant-garde radio show 'Late Junction' this week too. I love the irony that the music on that show is not just something to which you'd give an 'A' grade in a Master's programme, and which sounds like it's written to get that grade; the Beeb is fighting for our life.

7 July 2016. This is what happens when your statesmen are trained by philosophers:

"[A] certain athlete had hit Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and Pericles, Xanthippus [his slandering son] said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of the contests, that 'in the strictest sense' ought to be held responsible for the disaster."

(Plutarch's life of Pericles, p. 105 of the Loeb)

20 June 2016. HAMLET: I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET: I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET: I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.
HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Radiohead's 'Daydreaming' - musical analysis

felephant — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 18:00:23 GMT

I want to talk a bit about the mesmerising quality of the second single from Radiohead's new album. It's to some extent rhythmic, melodic and textural, but mainly harmonic; and is so in a really fascinating and fresh way.

The harmonic structure is basically really simple. It's in A minor with a little modulation to D minor in the second version of the progression (which is not played every time). The chords are basically triadic - although importantly not quite.

I'm not sure how to describe all of them; for what it's worth, if we think of them in a jazz way (which isn't even helpful insofar as this way of describing them isn't temporal enough, doesn't display the voice-leading enough), I think it's Asus4 - F6(sus2) - C(sus2)/E - Dm9/F and then Asus4 - F6(sus2) - C(sus2)/E - D7(add11) - G7(add11) with alterations. But these names are really complicated (and probably ungrammatical) and distort how much the chords are really simple, all just triads/6s/maj7s with small modifications that have wonderful effects on the gravity of the harmony. This is what I want to talk about.

So look at the first progression, the Asus4 to F6(sus2) or C(sus2)(sus4)/F. The d'' in the A wants to resolve, though at this point it's ambiguous between whether it wants to resolve to an A major or A minor. And resolve it does, to the C natural of A minor (but we still don't know what key we're in as we've had no B) - but as it does so the rest of the notes move down too, the treble notes down a step and the bass down a major third - so now we have this weird slightly polytonal thing going on, wherein the treble notes spell out the original chord again except down a step, suggesting a repeating pattern of resolutions to new dissonances (which is standard enough, in classical music anyway), whilst the bass unsettles this by descending 'too far.' In any case, though, a new 'suspension' is created: it could resolve in a number of ways, but one way is, if you read it as the C(sus2)(sus4)/F, by resolving down to a C/E. And the bass F does indeed resolve to an E; but the treble notes don't move, so now we have another sus chord, a C(sus2)/E, another lovely but unstable chord, which again wants to resolve in ways in which it does resolve, but again only as the resolution is scuppered by movements in the other parts. (And we still don't know what key we're in! - is this fourth chord unresolved because it's leading back to the tonic A minor, or is it itself a tonic with a dissonance to be resolved within the chord? Going back to the Asus4 is I think enough to eventually establish the key of A minor, though.)

It goes on in this manner: every chord is and resolves into an almost but not quite perfect and consonant chord (triad, 6, maj7).

So what? Well the title: the harmony is floating, suspended, defying gravity, but without either denying or ignoring gravity. It's tenderly floating, kissing the ground. It feels to me just like daydreaming - neither asleep nor awake, between places. It's virtuosic writing: I can imagine writing very dissonant music or very tonal music, but not a piece that so perfectly catches and sustains this shimmering distance to consonance.

We hear it in the B section too, but in a different way.

Here we switch to the tonic major, sort of. But take just the first chord. Is this an A major with the changing tones of d''-f#''? Or a D major with a c#'' échapée and then e''-c#'' changing tones? Or does the harmony flitter between the two chords? And what key are we in here? We're surely at least in A or D major - but then we move down to an F major chord (unless it's a D minor - we have again the ambiguity of the previous chord(s)). All the intervals are consonant and natural, but yet the music never settles into a key or even a chord. It's so soft and tender.

There's more, too: the 3/4 6/8 ambiguity (crotchets in the treble, dotted crotchets in the bass) is just unstable between two very stable time signatures, is itself almost but not quite stable. Yorke's vocal line hovers around the 3rds and 5ths of the chords, ensuring the harmonic ambiguity, and melodically has only a hint of movement. Rising up at the start of a phrase, before slowly falling again - then rising up again, just a bit higher, before slowly descending again. Texturally too, we have these wonderful Radiohead clouds of soft sustained chords and bright-but-soft metallic chimes. But the harmony is what really gets my gut.

Emily Remler

felephant — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 12:07:04 GMT

I've been exploring music the last while, and found a musician I'm really fallen for, and who I think johnny9fingers will also fall for, if he doesn't know her already. So here he goes, because I don't know how less publicly to send her him.

felephant — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 22:57:14 GMT

I don't know whether the reason I find it extremely hard to listen to this -

- but find it much easier to listen to this -

- is to do with the former being much more saccharine and seductive and adolescently emotional than the latter, or whether it's because my response to my what-for-lack-of-a-better-term-I'll-call-romantic loneliness for the last few years has been to close off my heart to the sensuous and delicate and personal love of the former. Listening to it I don't know if the revulsion I feel is from Hannigan's faux-cracked voice or my fear that it's cracking me. I'm terrified that if I ever somehow find myself where I can't retreat scared from the kind of emotion of the Hannigan, emotion unsoftened by layers of intellect (I'm good at intellect!) and self-awareness and tradition, I will fall into a sea of uncomprehending tears. And then afterwards, if the tears are cathartic and whoever made me fall apart is still there when I surface, I'll be able to listen to Hannigan's gentle melodies with ease and pleasure.

Or maybe the Hannigan really just is trite and adolescent, and if I ever find myself in a loving relationship again I'll find Hannigan just as painful. Fucked if I know.

Conference

felephant — Thu, 28 May 2015 00:11:12 GMT

Welcome! opens ~~Coleman~~, Welcome! to this building of great stone classically formed, its dignified and disdainful façade opening to silent cathedral halls of the white man's painted canvases, its doors reluctantly open to all rich or lucky enough to be able to pay pilgrimage since those doors first opened in October eighteen eighty-eight, an opening in honour of the Golden Jubilee of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, Victoria, an opening paid for by the public subscription of those self-made men most indebted to Victoria's enlightened rule. Welcome! ~~Coleman~~ concludes, to empire!

Thus our attention was, at the outset, forcefully brought to the uncomfortable fact that the next two days of critical race theory, on the far left of the political spectrum, were taking place in a tribute to imperial hubris, and that the grand marble pillars through which we entered at the beginning of each day, and the delicate interior plasterwork to which our attention would occasionally lapse in a talk, were not innocently pleasant, but the fruit of empire, which is to say, the fruit of the very dehumanising racism we were there to criticise.

Perhaps ~~Coleman~~'s brief remarks were a bit pessimistic, though; for that conference last week did more to undermine the still-racist still-empire bequeathed Britain than any other conference I've ever attended, and I returned from it amazed, invigorated, inspired, illuminated, fevered; though also depressed, humbled, humiliated, paralysed.

Of course the conference was not the site of a new radical political party or revolutionary cell. But it demonstrated that philosophy is not an ivory-tower academics' idle conversation, but something which can dig into our concepts, arguments, Weltanschauungen, institutions, and reveal their shameful roots; not only did it demonstrate that philosophy is something that can do this, though, but at least suggested that, if philosophy does not do this, it does not merely neglect to do something it could or should do because that something is in itself important, but cannot succeed even as far as it goes. That is, a philosophy that neglects how it is ideologically structured cannot 'bracket' this and focus on questions unaffected by it: every answer it gives to every question, even the framing of every question, is poisoned by its self-ignorance.

This much is not new; but the conference also demonstrated how philosophy now can meet this challenge. Every talk did this, in its own way. ~~Coleman~~'s by highlighting how such intimate issues as sexual and romantic choices were morally and politically loaded but also how the arguments against this - arguments such as 'it's just personal preference whether I want to sleep with black men' - are not just poor, but racist, and hide their racism in a manner characteristic of much racism. Irvin's by making an argument so immediately relevant (the conclusion, briefly, that repeatedly watching videos of black men at whom U.S. police officers are asking you to look as demonstrating the black men's violence teaches us to consider black men as violent, entrenching racist (and, for the black community, dangerous) stereotypes) that you wanted to send it as a matter of urgency to television news channels so that they can stop broadcasting these videos. And so on. But more deeply, I saw how philosophy can be (has to be) both political and rigorous by the being-there of every single speaker and audience member. Dotson perhaps best exemplified it in her talk about the deep trauma suffered by her and so many other black women who are excluded from both implicitly male black activism and theory, and implicitly white feminism, and who by being excluded from both, as well as from the white patriarchy, are so alien to any established discourse that they are not only systematically discriminated against and suffer exceptionally high rates of suicide and murder, but cannot even - and cannot even, to stress again, for systemic reasons - get people to hear them, even when they're given a platform to speak. Dotson expressed the anguish, frustration and anger of this position in her talk, and gave it voice so well that I was moved close to tears. But everyone had this same fury; so there was no jargon, no academic bickering, no splitting hairs, no grandstanding, no bullshit. Shit is too fucked up: it focuses one's attention on what matters. There is no time for measuring intellectual stature to the centimeter, or for getting caught up in arcane theoretical niceties, or for turning one's eye from a mistake it takes bravery to face, or for confusing what's interesting for what's important.

I exaggerate, of course. Some talks were stronger than others; some questions were more pertinent than others; people were learning how to do this, and some were starting from a low baseline, and of course they faltered. But the atmosphere, which suffers (even needs) this, was alive: and the atmosphere is what most deeply struck me. Here is what a philosophy conference can be, must be.

There was a paralysing side, though, too, at least for me: I gave a talk at the conference, and without speculating as to whether it was any good (I wouldn't dare say that of any talk, let alone my own), I can certainly say I made some serious mistakes, and naturally mistakes that were not innocent, not the consequence of simply being an imperfect scholar, but mistakes which came from my blindnesses as basically the person for whose ease the status quo exists. I missed not subtleties but the black point of view, and fed into the very racism I wrote my paper to expose. I spent much of my reflecting on the conference wondering how I could do better, and I have yet to come up with an answer. What is certainly off the cards is ignoring urgent philosophy; that would just entrench the status quo. Also impossible is withdrawing; for whither might I withdraw? I could withdraw from the academy, but that's only one site for these issues. I cannot withdraw from life. So should I then engage full-bloodedly with critical race theory (and feminism, transgender philosophy, disability theory, and those standpoints of which I am still so culpably ignorant I cannot even think what they might be)? Only to fuck up again and again? And is every conference to which I am accepted a conference to which a member of a marginalised group (who can speak for themselves better than I can speak for them and over whom I will be accepted only because I benefit from the status quo) is not accepted? I see ways around this dilemma now that I didn't a few days ago, so I'm not entirely pessimistic; but the gate is strait, the way narrow, and I doubt I can keep to it.

Epic

felephant — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 21:19:31 GMT

So having spent many hours slowly sailing through the Unterzee, captaining a ship entirely unfit for purpose, I finally saved up enough echoes to invest in a cargo ship, that I might be able to work the thin profit margins better and advance the game's well-written terror-ridden stories. It was huge and ever so ponderous, but it could carry massive quantities of mushroom-wine and clay men, and I began to build up a nice rhythm, returning to London just as the terror of the zee threatened to consume me. Indeed I became arrogant, and, armed with what I was sure would be enough foxfire candles, undertook to explore with my crew a shattered citadel on Godfall, an island formed of a collapsed stalactite so huge it poked through the surface of the water. The candles were not enough, and we returned to the ship crazed with fear. We tried to make it to a friendly island of guinea pig warriors, but paranoia took hold of the crew - or was it me - and they mutinied - or did I lose my mind and try to kill them? No matter. Somehow, by my hand or another's or a god's, I was killed, my brand new and hard-earned ship lost.

At which I point I swore a lot and almost left off playing the game altogether. My first character's skills and perks and nice shit weren't ones that I could pass down to my next character, and I found myself starting the new game almost from scratch, doing all the tedious early-game missions I hadn't even begun to miss. So I went into the save file and made myself a millionaire, to, you know, help me out in those early stages. (The game is good for its story-writing, I want to get to the end of the game and SEE some of that writing, not go over the first hour again and again!) I got myself a battleship, and it was brilliant. All my vexation and frustration melted away because I was the damn greatest.

I only did this briefly; when I shut down, though, I felt that same pride in my own greatness. Now unjustified: I made myself some dinner of eggs, mushrooms and toast that tasted fine but looked awful (and I used ketchup, which is cheating: good food doesn't need it); and it didn't last.

I named the ship after a poem:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Realism, the novel, Joyce, philosophy

felephant — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:31:48 GMT

The Ulysses reading group is still going strong (five weeks? left), and we've some of us agreed to continue on to Beckett's prose works afterwards. I'm also reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert in my own time (and have read a fair few contemporary novels recently, as well webcomics, poetry, graphic novels, etc.), reading and writing philosophy, and thinking as I'm always thinking about my own desire to do something like write a novel. What I've been bashing my head against a lot recently is the suggestion so insisted on by one of the reading group members that the literary tradition has singularly failed to respond to Finnegans Wake (with the exception (I think he thinks this) of Beckett).

The natural response, that I'm in the habit of making, is that not everyone has to be up to the kind of thing that Joyce is up to, all the formal experimentation, self-reflection, universal scope, musicality/poetry, density of meaning and so on that make the Wake so miraculous and important. One thing Joyce is doing is telling a story - does that mean all stories now have to 'respond' to the Wake? Surely not; so why then is it supposed to be different with regard to another thing Joyce is doing, viz., writing a novel?

I'm finding that response less convincing now, not least because I'm finding the novels I've been reading recently hamstrung by what they have not learnt from Joyce. It's most obvious in the little ways you notice in the reading: wasted words, unpleasing rhythms, meaningless names, missed jokes, etc. But what's really missing is of course deeper. I think it's that novels lie, and that Joyce uncovered this and showed us how to respond to it; and that to not respond to the Wake is to lie openeyedly, which is as bad in literature as it is in real life. I suppose the point I'm making here is close to the point Adam Kelly (in 'Dialectic of Sincerity' (2014)) says is one of the idées fixes of modernism: that the novel is trying to get deeply into something, to present it as it really is - be it someone's psychology or a social order or a conversation - but that the norms and conventions of the novel get in the way of its doing so by forcing what it's trying to capture into certain shapes, unnatural to what's being represented (and, in some cases I suppose, changing it). I agree with this, but I think there's something else too, perhaps simpler and perhaps more general. It's that everything in literature is significant; perhaps it's been so for a long time, perhaps Joyce made it so, perhaps it was always so but Joyce found new levels of significance, upset everything, so that no-one can ever again say, 'oh that's just always been that way'. Names were always significant, I suppose; but now even the language you write is significant, now even how you spell a word is significant, now even whether your writing is clear is significant.

And so I'm reading The Signature of All Things or whatever, and I'm enjoying it very much; but then something stands out at me, and I ask why it's the way it is; and time and again I'm disappointed: there's no reason for it being that way. But you can't make something insignificant once it's been made important as Joyce has so made it: now, the novel can only suggest a false significance, or can only pathetically attempt to hide a significance. Gilbert tells us that Prima shouted at Secunda, say; and that, Gilbert arrogantly or nervously insists, is final. But it's not final, because nothing is ever so simple. There's a divine iridescence to the encounter as there is to every encounter, something beyond any capturing which affects the situation and its reception by the various parties like a drug. Gilbert wants to stomp her foot and say that no there isn't - she's writing in a style or tradition that would have mentioned it if it was there, and she hasn't, so it isn't - but to say that is to lie, because the iridescence is ubiquitous. The Wake forces this question, and tried to answer it by making everything unclear and perspectival, and refraining from absolute statements, and trying to let the iridescence shine through with its multilingual dense musical punning. I won't say whether it's succeeded - I barely know what's happening most of the time - but at least it's faced up to the problem. What has since? The only thing that comes to mind is Lynda Barry's What It Is. I wonder if it's not a coincidence that this is a graphic novel: the combination of the two mediums - and such different mediums - perhaps allows for greater density.

Sometimes I can forgive the cowardice or laziness: Imogen Binnie's Nevada is just telling a story, but it's telling a story from a perspective that historically has been scandalously and tragically silent, and perhaps a perspective needs a realist novel before it can have a Wake. (Although Joyce is hardly heteronormative or even cisnormative!) And The Signature of All Things is not so bad as I've been suggesting (my choosing it as an example is perhaps slightly unfair, but it's what I'm reading at the moment): scenarios are returned to later and untold aspects told; but it's never remotely as serious or thorough as the Wake.

I wonder, by way of post-script, whether it's just novelists who have to face the Wake. I suppose poets do too, but I also get the sense (though I don't know poetry) that they've always faced it. I suppose it's the same for music; Beethoven and Bach are as rich as Joyce. How about philosophy? My feeling there is that philosophy strips away everything iridescent - 'ceteris paribus' is its cry - but whether this is legitimate or not I don't know. It is abstract enough that one might suppose that we can treat all else as equal: we don't need to imagine a world like we do in literature. But perhaps in becoming honest and accurate, philosophy that doesn't respond to Joyce also becomes irrelevant. I just don't know. I can only say that I don't feel any particular qualms in doing philosophy this way. This is unsatisfying, but I suppose one can only put one's ear to one's mind and listen as hard as one can for sounds of strain. I'll keep listening, and try to listen better.

Odyssey/Ulysses

felephant — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:37:58 GMT

Tomorrow starts a reading group in which we read Ulysses alongside and in the order of The Odyssey (in order to see what happens!), so my weekend has been reading the first chapter of each. The translation of The Odyssey I have this time is Chapman's, and it's really astonishing. But Ulysses is something of a different order again. The life and richness of the characters and their interactions, the gentleness and humanity of Dedalus' ruminations along the shore, the delicacy and ease with which Joyce dances from internal monologue to conversation to remembrance to objective observation to allusion, and most of all the humour and sparkle through it all - your heart expands till it fills your chest and you can't bear keeping locked in all the mirth and Menschenliebe with which Joyce infects you. Unfortunately I was alone at home with no-one I could read it to (or just hug), and the Forty Foot is a bit far away. It's probably just as well. I was able to express a bit of it by going into university and practicing piano for a couple of hours, and by listening to Joanna Newsom's Ys, which has - or maybe I'm just projecting - something of the same openness and delight about it. But it's still all too much bottled up. Perhaps I need to join a Joycean dramatic group and learn it off by heart.

I read Ulysses for the first time when I was twenty or so, and I don't remember much about it except that I decided then too that I loved it like nothing else, despite not knowing what was going on most of the time. I'm not half as stupid now as I was then, so I hope that this time I'll get inside it as it deserves. (And this is my third time reading The Odyssey, but the first time not using Martin Hammond's fairly unmusical prose translation, and so far I'm finding myself 'moved' by it too, for the first time. Chapman's translation is really remarkable: you can see the attention he's paid to every detail, making every line somehow all of accurate, beautiful and dramatic.)

Dream

felephant — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 10:14:42 GMT

I had a dream where I visited the Berliner Philharmoniker on a Saturday afternoon when they had loads of public musical education things going on, including Simon Rattle giving a violin masterclass that the public could look in on. (As I passed, I saw two cellists looking in through the glass trying to overhear and follow his instructions.) There were also a handful of old beat-up pianos outside that people could play, and even an old rubbish harpsichord! This last I played through its stuck keys and confusing multiple manuals, and got so caught up in it that I didn't notice the fire from a building across the road infect it until too late. When I noticed the flames licking up through the case I ran across to the nearest firefighter, who inexplicable had the TICKEST Dublin accent, and he reluctantly came over to save the harpsichord rather than the building. It was too late though. Sorry dream harpsichord! You died playing Bach!

Bizness

felephant — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 10:14:19 GMT

The chorus of this song is:

What's the bizness yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
From a distance yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
I'm a victim yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
I'm addicted yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way

This chorus is perhaps the richest lyric I've ever come across. I want to try and capture a little of what I see in it, because I keep talking excitedly about it to people but getting lost in all its layers. I'll just look at the "I'm a victim yeah!/Don't take my life away" line.

Most obviously, the singer is presenting herself as a victim to someone with the power to take her life away (kill her? or something more general - grind her down), and she is begging him not to do so (is she suggesting he not do so from mercy? compassion? I don't think it's determinate). But for someone begging someone for her life, the singer is hardly cowed. She's dancing and singing with swagger and joie de vivre. This is not how victims act, and by acting this way she undermines the authority implied by her words. What is the psychology of this tension? It's flipping off Death, mooning your executioner. When can you do this? When you're powerless to change your lot; or when you don't respect who has power over you, and you will rather die self-determining and dancing than live subjugated. There is an inspiring bravery and strength of will in the psychology.

This is in the "don't take my life away". In the "I'm a victim" there's something very different going on. Victims don't sing and dance and smilingly look you straight in the eye. But this singer does. The point here is that victims sing and dance too: it's not only those who have long faces and begging on streets that need our help and who have demons: victimhood is often hidden, and rarely all-consuming. This point broadens, and is bolstered by the fact that the melody is so infectious that we can't help but sing along: victims are not just those stuck in prison cells and caught in the middle of wars; we are all victims. We are all oppressed by systematic inequalities and repressions, and the fact that we can also feel joy should not lead us to forget all the things that conspire to make our flourishing impossible. And we shouldn't be coy about this, as the singer isn't coy. She is not hanging low her head and waiting for whoever is victimising her to stop; she is taking the stage and the power, raising awareness, forte making the point manifest and embodied.

This is not all that's going on in those two lines; it's only a fraction of what I see in the chorus, which I don't entirely understand even intuitively. And the chorus is only a small part of the song, and then there's that astounding music video, with its bizarre costumes and assertive children and upside-down make-up.

Bloomsday '14

felephant — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:43:41 GMT

Happy Bloomsday 2014! I wrote the below to j_joyce. As you can see, it's an attempt to write in Joyce's style. Unfortunately I am no James Joyce, but it was good fun writing it. It's hardly edited at all - I thought about perhaps revising it, but figured that I'm being arrogant enough claiming I can write in an any way Joycean way without implying that I can do it well, as I would if I were to take it seriously and revise it, too.

Let me tell you all about the day that started too much mine, but then was shared. I returned to my native Dublin from the ever faraway land of Albion, and arrived just too late for fried liver at the bookshop of Messrs. Hodges and Figgis, but just in happy time for some amateur readings of the tale of hero Bloom. The reading read, we decamped hands bookful to Davy Byrne's, the moral pub, to eat as Bloom ate Gorgonzola sandwiches and to drink the hearty black stout of our green land. Outside this longlived establishment and the adjacent shortlived scaffolding were more readings, dramatised shoutily over the sunned and happy crowds. There I made some friends, two smiling and sharpeyed Italians, visiting with their students (who - the students I mean - were elsewhere) to learn (again, the students doing the learning here) English. (For what good the only sart of English ye'll pick up in Dublin'll do ye in any respectable vocation at all, but sure I guess they're better off aren't they with an English with a bit a music to it.)

Hands shook and characters awkwardly ascertained to be at all events acceptable, we three wandered north past Trinity College, through O'Connell Street and its Spire (which we stopped by to look up at, but not for very long, and not much wiser for it, though we did agree that we probably liked it), and eventually to the James Joyce Centre, one of the Bloomsday centres, as you might imagine. The HCE Players from Boston (so local lads then) dramatised a couple of passages, most memorably the blessing of the opening of Barney Kiernan's pub, and Ithaca. They did a fine job of it. (You could tell because the audience was splitting its sides laughing.) A wander up and around the Centre then, to see the table on which Joyce wrote the Night Book that followed today's day book; to watch a short documentary about Joyce's relationship with the National Library; and down to see the door of 7 Eccles Street, the latchkey to which is presumably still in the back pocket of Bloom's trousers that he was wearing the previous day but one (now - how an imaginary latchkey is supposed to open the door I don't know, and perhaps it couldn't (we don't know as Bloom gained ingress through the kitchen door) - but perhaps now nothing else could open the door, as no normal key, I daresay, could open it; for it is a portal detached from any passage, the house now being the site of Hospitium Mater Misericordiae, whose doors need to be bigger, and nothing now behind that door through which Stephen Dedalus accepted graciously and comprehensibly hospitium but brick). Then our own egress, back south past the Spire and O'Connell Street and Trinity College, to Meeting House Square, where, basking in the rare summer sun, we lay back and listened to some music, and some more readings, finishing with Molly's I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Dream

felephant — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 08:32:50 GMT

I had a dream last night in which I kissed a girl who was surprised by how agreeable that was and so whose boyfriend I found myself. But it was a little more subtle than this, and I confess I'm a little proud of my dreaming self's psychological acuity. When I kissed her, she didn't just reciprocate; I felt with my lips that hers clenched in resistance, and I felt stupid for misreading signals. We had to keep walking together to the place we were going, and after a while I noticed she was fighting back tears; so I apologised for being so obtuse. But the tears were from the speed with which she was having to rethink what our relationship was and what she thought of me, and the clenched lips were from the shock. Kissing her made her realise that she (had always) liked me as I liked her. So that's creativity a bit more subtle than I'd expect of my dreams. But also, the change that came about her for the rest of the dream (no more than a few hours), as I changed in her eyes from a distant friend to her big strong boyfriend was, if overquick and oversimple, remarkably complete: the change manifested in her eyes and her walk as well as in the obvious things such as putting her arm through mine as we walked.

The downside of this, of course, is that when I awoke, it was a particularly painful and slow realisation that it was just a dream. The upside is that it was so vivid that I feel not so unlike how I feel after actually kissing someone. That feeling of having been close to someone and seeing them really like the look of you persists, though it never should have been there.

felephant — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 12:01:02 GMT

When I lived in Galway back in 2008 or whenever it was, I briefly worked a terrible job as a door-to-door make-up salesman. You'll be glad to know I was rubbish at it. Going to work was in the first instance going to a small office in the town centre. We would run over responses to all the things people were most liable to say on realising we were selling them make-up. E.g., "I have some", "What about your sister?" sort of thing. Then we listened to some Energising Music, and split up into groups, each a car driver and three or four passengers, to sell make-up in towns throughout Connaught. These car journeys were pretty miserable: the local equivalent of 2FM was blaring, and my colleagues ranged from forgettable to hateful. But I'd found a small library's worth of old pocket-sized hardbacks of classic literature in my parents' house, and I remember spending so much time curled up at the edge of the back seat reading Oliver Twist or Crime and Punishment or whatever, books which blew me away at the time and are still strong with me now. The result of this is that in fact I don't remember these journeys as particularly miserable; indeed, the memory of reading those books is particularly fond to me, and peculiarly strong. Funny that.

A lady on the bus

felephant — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:22:17 GMT

On the Dublin city bus back from the airport over Christmas, I became fascinated by every part of a woman a few seats ahead of me, across the aisle, because she dressed in a way that I can't describe except as a fin-de-siècle Viennese aristocrat's dress; and because she dressed so simply perfectly. From her immaculate red nails to her fine longfingered leather gloves, her gorgeous white fur coat to her patrician cheekbones, ensconced in a soft scarf, her stately straightbackedness to her self-assured stare, her blonde hair tied in a simple ponytail even to her elegant white iPod earphones (perhaps the closest thing to a crack in her appearance (apart from the bizarre fact, that I only cottoned on to later, that she was in a Dublin Bus), but in fact I think not: it seemed rather exactly how an aristocrat would listen to music; and they were attached to the newest iPhone, the most elegant of phones) - from everything to everything, she was the perfect aristocrat.

What I found astonishing about this - and why she still sticks with me - is not that someone in Ireland could decide to dress like a Viennese aristocrat - Irish people are as fascinated with other times and places as any other people, and I never forgot this much - but that she could do it so immaculately. She was this type of person so entirely that I wondered whether she was Irish - perhaps a Polish immigrant - but regardless, the lesson for me is the same: that Ireland is not the monocultural place it was. It can have communities so culturally unlike the stereotypical Irish community that they can be uninfected by that sensibility at all, and create ladies like the one who in polished black heels disembarked well before me, whose royal bearing the cruel white light of the bus could neither tarnish nor humanise.

Thoughts on Heaney and (my) being Irish

felephant — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 15:20:47 GMT

When Seamus Heaney died, I didn't quite know how to react. I had had to read his poems in school and I loved them then, but on the whole I'm insensitive to poetry, so picking up one of his collections to read in remembrance would have been a chore, and so have missed the point. So, as I was reading some epic poems at the time, I bought his translation of Beowulf. I loved it, but I also loved Heaney's introduction, which I wanted to quote like one quotes poetry.

Sprung from an Irish nationalist background and educated at a Northern Irish Catholic school, I had learned the Irish language and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that regarded it as the language that I should by rights have been speaking but I had been robbed of. [...] For a long time... the little word [lachtar] was - to borrow a simile from Joyce - like a rapier point of consciousness pricking me with an awareness of language-loss and cultural dispossession, and tempting me into binary thinking about language. I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues... and this was an attitude that for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question - the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history and literary tradition in Ireland.

pp. xxiii-xxiv

And then at the end:

Putting a bawn in Beowulf seems one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history that has to be clearly acknowledged in order to render it ever more 'willable forward / again and again and again'.

p. xxx

Irish people, to my eyes, see their relationship to England either in an ugly racist way or in a politically correct way, one that forgets all the injustices done by ancestors to ancestors. (The one person can do both.) For those of us who are educated and have no personal grievances, it is very hard to acknowledge any uncomfortableness about our relationship with England without being racist, and without showing sympathy with the atrocities committed by the IRA and suchlike. (Not that such sympathy would ever be intended or felt: but that is not needed for it to be shown, because showing it is political and symbolic and a step removed from what we actually think and feel.) It struck me as very brave, then, for Heaney to acknowledge that there is indeed some deep uncomfortableness or resentment in Irish people. And it is also a tribute to Heaney that he can do it without being racist or sympathising with the IRA; while at the same time not stressing again and again - as I am scared not to - how we disown the uncomfortableness. He just presents it, as something in our psyche which has to be faced. And again, he makes no show of facing this: he just faces it. And in this - in humbly setting himself to the task before him, and striving to do it as honestly as possible, and facing the results squarely, without drawing attention to himself, or his task's difficulty - I realised that this was something I hold as a central virtue for my own life.

I'd always admired Heaney's quiet and non-judgemental aesthetic, but I hadn't realised how much it wasn't something I just admired but also something I wanted to emulate. And I realised this at the same time as I realised something else. In his obituaries, one of the themes that kept returning was how he could talk as an equal with anyone; he had neither intellectual arrogance nor working-class pride; he neither patronised nor fawned. This struck me as a remarkable virtue, and again one which I only wish I could embody myself.

Because of these two realisations especially (inasmuch as I can express them) it occurred to me that Heaney, though this is not a concept that had ever before had any grip on me, is I guess a hero for me, someone who embodies virtues in the way I aspire to. But what is further interesting about this is that the second virtue at least is a very Irish virtue. (I was astonished when an English friend said to me, when I started chatting to the handyman of the block of flats I live in, "Don't talk to the staff!" This comment, even in jest as the friend meant it, would be impossible in Ireland.) And so that in making Heaney a hero for embodying it, I'm being, or realising that I am, or aspiring to be, or becoming, Irish.

This is interesting because in general my thoughts are turning more and more to Ireland, as I've been away longer and as I'm somewhere more foreign; even to the point of obsession and distortion. When I was there the other week, I visited a friend in Wicklow town, and everything struck me as adorable and quaint, even the small industrial area. Another day I went to Dublin, and was inordinately pleased to be passing the time on Beweley's James Joyce balcony; I listened in to the sounds around me, and was transfixed by the sound of two men's conversation a table away, "Well Paidear how are you. You were heading to China last time I saw you, how was that?" This is nice and pleasant, but it's no good: it's seeing Ireland as a tourist, without attentiveness to its ugliness, its corruption and poverty. And this is to not see Ireland at all, but to see a fictional picture-postcard Ireland.

Perhaps this is just how it goes; as each year becomes the next, and as the economy in Ireland remains weak, I'm more and more becoming a typical Irish émigré, no doubt just a typical émigré of any country whatsoever. Romanticising the homeland is perhaps just part of that. If I ever return to Ireland, I'll no doubt be appraised one way or another of all its facets; but perhaps I never will, in which case I'll hardly be alone.

Edinburgh festivals 2013

felephant — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 01:41:13 GMT

I'm just at the end now of the family holiday in Edinburgh, where we go each year for the festivals. I've been back in Scotland two or three times since I left last August, but this time I've been hit more strongly than ever by the sense of home I get here.

It started just about as soon as it could start. The train up arrived in the station, I was first at the door, listening to some avant-garde Irish music; and waiting to get on as I was getting off was an Irish post-doc I knew from Taste. I don't know her well - in fact, I don't believe I know her name - but here's the point, an old acquaintance's was literally the first face I saw in Scotland. And not just a Scottish, but an Irish face. We reminded each other of who we were, and then she had to rush to get on to the train, so that was too brief.

I bumped into a couple of old St Andrews people - one in a coffee shop, one trying her hand as a macaron merchant - and spent some nice - ever inadequate, but still, inadequate - time with some good old St Andrews friends who live in Edinburgh now. (I'll really miss them when I leave on Monday.)

I made it to St Andrews itself one day, for a friend's birthday (SCHMETTERLINGGEBURSTAG ZU BEFEHL!!!). I arrived, with Bren, who went off to the birthday house directly, and made my way to Taste along a path that's familiar to me only since I've left St Andrews. I knew the guy behind the counter, had a brief chat with him, made myself a coffee, ate a perfect panini which he brought to me as I was catching up with the angel of a manager upstairs. Then I went to the local bottle shop to get some beer for the party (and some whisky for myself), and the girl behind the counter was very friendly indeed - I went for the Talisker (memories of Skye, even if I couldn't drink the stuff when I was there, so unused to spirits I was), and she told me I was a man after her own heart - well, someone was after someone's something - - and of course because I live four hundred miles away and wasn't even staying the night in St Andrews I made my excuses and ran away, but this is still a lovely thing to have happen one.

On the way from the bottle shop to the party I ran into yet another old friend! and a bit later two ten-year-old girls:

"What's your name!?"
"Hello! My name is James! What's yours?"
"Rebecca!! No! Paula!"
"You can't make up your mind! Are you really Paula? Are you just pretending?"
"No I really am Paula! Do you know how old my friend is?"
[Don't offend the poor thing by getting the wrong age! Wait, do little girls mind less if you think they're older than they are or younger?] "Ooh, I don't know! Are you nine?"
"No, I'm six-"
"NO SHE'S TEN!"
"That's very nice." [Did I get away with that?]

And they were sharp. Later:

"What's your name?!"
"Ja- ah, my name is Tom!"
"NO IT'S NOT YOU SAID YOUR NAME WAS JAMES!"

Not that these two girls remembered me from when I lived there: but it's not common to be accosted so confidently by two little girls! Somehow, I feel, it's a thing happens at home. Doubtless that's, empirically, rubbish. But that's how it feels.

Then, just tonight, I went to Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Bartók's Captain Bluebeard - they were on together because they're both so short. In looking for my seat I saw a beautiful girl in the row behind - oh, and it looks like I got the row wrong, she's my immediate neighbour! We went for a drink after the show - because I'm at home, I know where the good pub is, that serves Murphy's - and then there was a stand-up medley (her first stand-up!) at midnight. It was actually fantastic, and she really enjoyed it. (It was great to see her laugh!) Now nothing happened, except perhaps, we'll see, a friendship began - friends are alright, I guess - but the point is, I'd found a really interesting and cool girl, that I enjoyed talking to. In Southampton - much as I like the five people I count as friends there - I have barely, beyond those five, found anyone who doesn't bore me. I feel bored by Southampton as a whole, too. And granted no-one sings Southampton's praises: the point here is that however many its virtues may be, they're not, so far as I've seen, ones that lead me to feel at all at home there, or to fall for it in any way.

Diary

felephant — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 22:38:26 GMT

I took the notion a couple of years ago to keep a diary, to counteract my startling ability to totally forget things that matter to me. But 'keeping a diary' is a deeply unnatural thing for me to do, so despite trying as hard as I could to fulfil my obligation (which was how I saw it), I lapsed after a few months. For one reason and another, I've taken to it again in the last few weeks. I've also started looking through my old entries, to see what I've forgotten. I expected this to be highly embarrassing: but it's not at all, because even in my most private outlet, which was for no-one's eyes not even my own, I write with the same English detachment, caution and moderation that I have in every other aspect of my life. So the most explicit and raw sentences I get are ones like "It occurs to me that I might be jealous, but I'm not sure." I don't know whether it's that my soul really deeply does just want to read books and drink tea, or that I'm repressing my emotions in a more comprehensive way than I can even guess at.

It feels a bit like a waste: but I guess it isn't, because were I not to have told myself that at that time I felt jealous or whatever, I almost certainly would have forgotten. I also probably would have forgotten the entire episode. And that would've been sad. So I guess the diary is worthwhile, even if a bit disappointingly dull. If you ever find yourself in my room and take the notion that you'd like to read my secrets, then probably you're better off doing something else instead.

felephant — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:42:18 GMT

(Holy shit!)

San Francisco and LA

felephant — Wed, 29 May 2013 23:20:29 GMT

The first thing to say about this was that the St. George's Spirits Distillery in Alameda has a tour exactly as brilliant as zentiger and all his friends say it is. For $15 I got a tour by a fairly annoying over-enthusiastic guide (which is not why it was brilliant), and then a taste of two vodkas, a bourbon, a rum, an absinthe and a sweet dessert liquor, each of which was really interesting, especially the vodkas. Shame I didn't get to meet TLW or yourself, zentiger, but if ye're ever in Britain or Ireland, let me know and I'll see if I can repay your recommendation.

The rest is boring: it's only here so I don't forget.

San Francisco was quite nice; mainly I think because it's kind of like Europe. Also our apartment was in the Mission area, which is supposed to be one of the more colourful parts of the city. I did little in SF: wandered around, climbed a hill that was lovely because you could see the whole city from it, wandered further, looked for a decent coffee shop (didn't quite find one, though lots of places came close, and my standards are ridiculously exacting, so that's no criticism), poked around a few second-hand and/or niche bookshops, wore short-sleeved shirts and was able to sit still in them without feeling cold (which was really lovely), tried some restaurants with the family and ate some donuts in the artisan donuttery underneath our flat, at which donuttessen I got free donuts because its and our landlord were one and the same kindly donutter. I quite like that San Francisco has such a thing as an artisan doughnouterie, but donuts still taste like sugar to me. Americans no doubt can discern every variety of sugar even when dissolved in strong Joe.

So to LA. LA is really creepy. LAX is ugly, as was the drive thence to my hostel; downtown (where my hostel for the first night was before my family, who came down the following day, took me to the house we stayed in for the remainder) is a collection of gigantic concrete bricks strewn down with the taste of Vogons, with the space filled in by huge roads and even bigger carparks, but never trees or parks. And over all this is the haze of smog. It was for me more or less exactly what everyone says it is. Although I found the public transport pretty competent along the main arteries (even if I was helped significantly by Google Maps).

This is downtown though, which, I gather, is not actually where people go to do things; out where we stayed after my first night, West Hollywood, all is green and wealthy; endless suburbs, admittedly, but ones in which each house is designed individually, and that's quite nice, although it means that nothing is walking distance, and the public transport doesn't - and can't be expected to - adequately cover the ground. The shops in West Hollywood are also creepy, but in a different way. Downtown, they're creepy because they're all huge and kitschy; in West Hollywood, they're creepy because they're all massage parlours, pedicurists or fashion-clothing outlets. (In SF there's a bit of creepiness because of how many stores are speciality dog bakeries.)

Well enough of this. I didn't actually spend too much time gathering impressions of the city, because I was doing things with people I know most of the time. I first went to a two days of a conference on something called deontic modality, which is one of the research areas on the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. Many of the speakers and attendees were full-on linguists. I'd never seen a linguistics talk before, and, although they were interesting in a sociological way, I do hope I never see another, and I can only assume that my friend, for whose sake I was there, has gone mad. But there were two talks by philosophers, John Broome and Frank Jackson no less, and they were pretty interesting, even if only by comparison. (Both gave talks dealing in one way or another with the paradox that the following sometimes looks true, depending on how you fill in the variables: "From 'You ought to do A and B', it does not follow 'You ought to do A'".) Jackson, a septuagenarian by now, gave a rambling talk which involved him repeatedly throwing his arms up with a vigour that looked impossible for someone of his age. Broome advanced a massively controversial thesis that he could defend perfectly, and was clearly delighting in fielding incredulous and barely coherent objections from the linguists.

When I arrived in USC on the morning of the conference, I didn't know exactly where to go. But when I was close, I saw a group of people who somehow looked philosophical, followed them and ended up in the right place. I don't know what it is about philosophers that distinguishes us so. I think flannel might be part of it. A more obvious giveaway, though, was a stocky man with a huge bushy beard, a balding head and a ponytail. This man later turned out to be Adam (I think), a philosopher from Pennsylvania; and he and I spent a lot of time talking over local beers in a bar the philosophers all went to after dinner one evening. Despite this guy working on the most boring topic imaginable, he was really lovely, and had a really good understanding of avant-garde literature and even Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, which is the most un-analytic work of philosophy I've ever read: it doesn't even really have arguments, it just sets up a way of looking at our moral life which is rich enough to do justice to it. How someone can 'get' this stuff, but then spend their time on deontic modality, is beyond me.

Anyway: on the first night, I was looking for somewhere to read, and found the city library, which was due to close half an hour after I arrived. I asked one of the librarians if she knew anywhere I could go when they closed, and she told me about a place called The Last Bookstore, right in the middle of Downtown; this place was an oasis. I arrived to an open-mic night, which was shit but interesting, and wandered around till they closed (at 11pm!), which was brilliant. The place is huge, and its entire upper floor was a dollar-a-book place, where some shelves were arranged by spine colour, where there were elaborate sculptures made out of books (such as books flying out, as if they were birds, from a bookshelf), and where there was an actual tunnel of books between two of the rooms.

Another thing that happened me was that my brother and I were given by one of mam's friends super-duper passes to one of the movie studios' theme parks. Some of the rides were pretty fun! Even the virtual rollercoasters, which are astonishingly well-crafted. Also it turns out that most ocean scenes - filmed by this studio anyway - are filmed in this one little lake with a green screen in it and a fake New York just out of shot.

On my last full day, I went to LACMA; which is really special. And that's all I have to say on that.

Probably the nicest thing I did was visit a friend who now lives in LA. I took the bus to her in Santa Monica, and we ate falafel, went to a candy store, looked at a car showroom, took a ride on a ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier. It was nice because it was a long, gentle, unpressured evening, but mainly because we talked, and especially because we talked about her recent ex-boyfriend, who's one of my best friends, and my recent ex-girlfriend, who got on with her well, though they didn't know each other well. Both relationships were serious, and I guess they're on both our minds a lot; to talk about them was perhaps the most memorable, most genuine, meaningful thing of my whole time in California.

California visit

felephant — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:05:28 GMT

I'll be in San Francisco next weekend, and then in Los Angeles the following week. Some of you guys live in that area, right? (By 'that area' I mean California, which is about the same size as Cork, right? I know that's a big area but not further than my good company can draw someone, I hope.)

I have a diary, you know. I haven't written in it since 2011 and even then it was from obligation. But I keep forgetting things, so I'll bring the diary and write down the things that happen and then I'll have overcome my mortal memory with science. I'm sort of excited about this for some reason.

Anyway, if anyone's not about but has been about, any recommendations about what's worth doing while there would be appreciated!

Some drama

felephant — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:23:39 GMT

I went to London for the Easter weekend to meet mam. It was nice: I went to a Bach marathon, some museums, art galleries, artisan coffee shops, a nice restaurant and generally took it fairly easy. But when I came back to Southampton this afternoon, I found that my room had been broken into! Nothing was taken (just a couple of euro notes), largely because I have nothing worth taking. So I felt rather "haha, joke's on you, thief!" The one thing that would've been worth taking is my guitar, which is worth far more than everything else I own combined, but I don't know if your average burglar can tell one classical guitar from another, so it's even still in tune.

I called the cops, that seeming to be the right thing to do, who were very nice altogether. First two came around to verify my story and get a statement; when they confirmed that I had suffered a break-in they called a crime-scene-investigation-type person. I had had a bit of a chat with the lady in charge by the time this next lady arrived, so the latter was greeted with "Hi Lea, how are you, this is James, he comes from Ireland and Scotland where apparently they don't need to close their windows when they leave home." (For I had indeed left my outside window ajar, for the fresh air, and that was how the burglar got in.)

The one thing that I thought might've been obviously worth nicking was my passport. I put this to the policewoman taking my statement, and she speculated that because Ireland is a smaller country, and there aren't, y'know, as many people there, that maybe someone would notice, if, you... know what I mean? Which was just so adorable. As if Ireland is one big small village - and if someone appears to border control with my name and someone else's face, there's a real chance the guard'll say, But sure you're not James at all, I knew James for many a year and sure that's not his face at all here! What do you think you're tryin' te pull?

Well anyway, the window's going to be closed fully in the future, and I'm going to count my blessings yet again, for I learned this lesson the easy way. Cities are dangerous you know.

Football

felephant — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 17:54:25 GMT

Southampton is a football town. Obviously you don't notice it most of the time; but every so often there's a game, and I'm in the right part of town, and you do notice. In Ireland, every year the all-Ireland GAA or hurling finals take place in Dublin; and then, yeah, you see people in full buses and cars and trains from whichever teams are in the finals, decked out in their county colours; but in Southampton it's different: the team colours you see are Southampton's own team colours; they're the colours of where I live, and so my colours (I never lived in Dublin); and they're the colours of a team in the English Premier League, which to me only exists on TV. It's bizarre: it's like living in Hollywood and seeing film stars.

A few weeks ago, Southampton played Man City, and beat them 3-1. This was an insane result: Southampton are struggling to avoid relegation, and Man City won the Premiership last season. I didn't realise it was on, so the next day, innocently, I went to the local store to buy some eggs or milk or whatever, and the guy behind the counter had a massive smile on his face, asked me how I was, friendly as you can imagine - and this in England! I smiled back and secretly thought 'weirdo'. Then a lady came to the counter beside me and just as I leave my guy says to her, 'Are you going to frame that?' She was buying the local paper, sports page up, Southampton's victory the only story on the it. She responds that she's from the other side of town, and that all the other shops have sold out.

That was adorable. Today Southampton played QPR, who are at the very bottom of the table, and lost 2-1. I was walking home from town at the same time as all the fans in their colours; some guy almost ran me down because I was walking across a road that he felt I had no right to be walking across. A thick-set guy, driving with his family, Southampton's red and white on his hat and his scarf.

Widor's Toccata (Symphony No. 5)

felephant — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:06:09 GMT

Cockney style.

I think I found my favourite YouTube comment

felephant — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:53:36 GMT

In response to this video,

someone asks, "Anyone know what tyhe second tune is called???", and gets told that it's 'The Trip to Killarney'. Then this other guy adds:

"its also called 'mammy's horse is dying' or 'the mangled badger' or ' the whore among the nettles roaring' or ' the dog that smoked me fags' and in donegal in called ' the cow that ate mammys shawl'
"its originally a donegal tune handed down, got it off a blind harpoonist at a fair day in doolin, trad arranged by pa connors and his brother pa connors"