Peter of the Port

Misdiagnosis?

2012-01-17T08:09:00.000-08:00

There was a spot on CBC Radio recently that I found interesting. It was about an article in the New York Times Magazine - I think they interviewed the author - looking at Shaken Baby Syndrome in terms of cases of people accused of causing it, and an investigation into the scientific basis for it.

I only give a brief outline of the conclusions reached by various investigators. The signs of SBS include subdural hemorrhage and retinal bleeding. It was found that shaking alone, in the absence of other signs of trauma such as broken ribs, bruising, neck damage, is not sufficient to produce these symptoms. However, presentation of these symptoms even in the absence of other factors, is taken as evidence of excessive shaking by medical practitioners, child welfare agencies and the legal profession.

In the cases mentioned in the article the parents were accused and charged on this basis, whereas use of the stricter criteria implied by the research would have cast doubt on the guilt of the accused.

The inference I draw from this is that in the case of horrifying crimes such as child abuse, society becomes most zealous in condemning and punishing alleged perpetrators, sometimes to excess. I am reminded of other instances of blame which were discovered to be unfounded. Dr. Charles Smith, a pathologist in Toronto, gave evidence leading to a number of people being imprisoned, his evidence later being found to be false. There was a scandal in North East England where many allegations of serious abuse turned out to be without foundation. There were stories of children being involved in satanic rites that were found to be examples of False Memory Syndrome, ie. where accounts are influenced by leading questions enthusiastically posed by welfare workers.

I don't want to diminish my or others' outrage at verified cases of child abuse, but it seems to me that there is something in human nature that is too eager to find fault wherever there is any suspicion of wrong-doing, especially in this kind of crime.

ps. Another link here.

The Long and the Short

2012-01-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

Cosmologists and theoretical physicists seem to be struggling a bit to make progress in their fields. Cosmologists don't seem to be able to fit the various theories as to the origin of the universe to the equations describing the physics of the universe as far as it is known; the Standard Model, whatever that is. On offer is: creation from nothing, or continuous creation. A sudden rapid expansion followed by steady expansion. A finite universe. An infinite universe. (There may be others) Without mentioning god, there has even been a suggestion that some intelligent entity may need to be postulated to explain the origin. It seems to me though that any such being still needs to be explained.

In any case I think it's very hard to visualise infinity, and just as hard to visualise a beginning and end with nothing on either side.

Theoretical physicists are searching hard for the Higgs Boson, an elusive elementary particle that, if it exists, apparently will complete the explanation of matter at the most fundamental level, as it provides mass to otherwise massless particles. Though there seem to have been tantalising hints of it, scientists are not sure if what they are seeing is the imprint of the Higgs, or if it will do as they hope if they do find it. Once again a question of satisfying equations, if my limited understanding is correct.

It may be that there are things we shall never know, in terms of a complete explanation of the largest and smallest aspects of our universe. Considering the age of the universe and the minute proportion of it that the human race will exist, it seems to me not surprising that we cannot know how it began or will end. Any explanation is an inference from observable data, and, however sound, cannot be verified directly. In the sub-microscopic area, explanations are also derived indirectly from the results of particles colliding at high speeds.

The philosopher Colin McGuinn considers that consciousness may be beyond our capacity to understand, in terms of how it is brought about by inanimate cells. He has been labelled a Mysterian. Perhaps that title will be applied to scientists in those other fields at the edge of knowledge.

Random thoughts

2011-12-15T07:49:00.000-08:00

I wonder where random thoughts come from: things that pop into the mind unbidden. Fragments of memory, pop songs etc. They may be welcome or unwelcome, and they can appear at the oddest times, when you might be trying to concentrate on some task, for instance.

I understand that dreams are generated by random activity in the limbic system of the brain, which creates the illusion of consciousness in those parts of the brain which are normally conscious but closed off from the senses by the sleep mechanism. (Allan Hobson) It could be that a similar process operates during wakefulness.

On a more general level, I have speculated about the mechanism of memory retrieval. If memory is stored in some physical state, eg. in an arrangement of molecules in proteins, some mechanism is required to identify and retrieve bits of memory and bring them to consciousness. I suspect this applies to almost every mental operation. There is a constant interplay between active consciousness and latent, pre-conscious memory. This idea gives rise to the baffling question, if, say, words are stored somehow and are retrieved, how does the linguistic operator know which word to select next, when the word needs to be retrieved before it can be "read" ? It makes me wonder.

Probably there's a scanning mechanism that mediates between conscious and unconscious aspects of the brain, which tends to support the idea that much of brain activity is unconscious.

I'd like to develop these ideas further but fear they will remain as sketches only, or hopefully as a note to further study.

Sixties Design

2011-12-03T09:13:00.001-08:00

Continuing my Sixties theme. I left school in 1959 at the age of 16 so the 60s were my first spell of freedom. There were so many things going on that it would take a long book or several to cover them all. Here I'm just presenting a few borrowed images to show one aspect of the novelty of the 60s: the visual, manifested in design.

Eero Aarnio ball chair, 1963.

Journal cover (?)

Not everything was brightly coloured. There was a minimalist trend exemplified by this Braun collection. Bang and Olufsen also comes to mind. The design though is very 60s.

Couldn't resist this one. Clippings from fashion magazines were another popular wall decoration.
All images taken from the Wanken blog .http://blog.wanken.com/

The Barcelona Chair. Designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1929 remained an iconic image of the 60s, as did the Eames chair from 1956, below:

The Sixties - Colour explosion

2011-12-03T06:29:00.001-08:00

The Forties were pretty drab, the Fifties not much better. Of preceding decades we know little except from monochrome photographs and written descriptions. The Victorian age is noted for its austerity, though there was colour in womens' elaborate dresses. There was certainly a lot of ornamentation,in furnishings and buildings, which relates to the interest in detail I referred to in the earlier post.

Artists have always brought colour into the world, but until the opening of public art galleries their offerings would only have been accessible to owners of the work, their families and guests. Churches were quite colourfully decorated until the Puritans clamped down. But this goes beyond the scope of what I want to say.

In the Sixties colour photography became pretty much the norm. Likewise colour film, for home movies and cinema. In fact there was almost a backlash when grainy black and white was 'arty' for a while. Clothes became more colourful. The 'teddy boys' of the Fifties began this 'revolt into style' as George Melly called it, with their flamboyant dress, and the mods created their sharp styles. Hippies, later in the decade, varied from scruffy to ornate.

Colour supplements arrived with the Sunday papers. There was an eruption of posters and a craze for decorating interior walls with them. Design became a fashionable concern. New materials especially in plastics and paints enabled wider use of colour.

What I've sketched here represents the origin of today's world of HDTV, video games, online images and special-effects films, which we accept as normal.

The Sixties

2011-11-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the Sixties lately, for no particular reason, and one of the things that strikes me is that it was a period characterised by a preoccupation with things that were detailed, complex, elaborate. I never took LSD but I suspect that its mind-altering qualities influenced the culture, especially the young counter-culture. This is demonstrated in the record sleeves of the day:

Certain artworks became fashionable (this is in England), partly through being reproduced in the Sunday Times and Observer magazines, for example Durer etchings:

The Pre-Raphaelites:

John Waterhouse. Not officially a member but very similar in style.

Many of them were available as posters. In the sixties posters were prolific. Interior decoration tended toward white walls with perhaps a contrasting one in purple, burnt orange or sage green.

The layout of underground press publications such as Oz illustrates this fascination with detail:

This particular trend may have begun with pop art which began to produce fragmented images (Peter Blake, Robert Rauschenberg, and taught us to see ordinary objects as suitable subjects for art (Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol). Photography came to the fore with David Bailey and others. Art Deco and Art Nouveau became popular, again partly through Sunday magazine illustrations. Clothes styles became more colourful and elaborate, from the mods to the hippies.

I can remember walking down the Kings Road in Chelsea at its peak and feeling that I was engulfed in an exuberant spectacle.

Capitalism vs. the Climate

2011-11-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

Naomi Klein has a piece in The Nation which struck me quite forcibly. Briefly, she notes that while the right in America identifies accounts of climate change with a left-wing agenda, the left either denies the connection or stays mute. The connection that right-wingers make is that the measures necessary to alleviate the effects of climate change do in fact have many of the aspects of left-wing policies: reduction of consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (the latter requiring the former), and the imposition of strict controls in order to effect these. Most aspects of such a program are anathema to the free-market dogma of the right.

Klein argues that few left-wingers seem to have allied themselves with climate-change scientists, who occupy their own domain. But, she says, they ought to because, in effect, it's the left that understands the type of action required and would have the political will to undertake it. So the left wing ought to strongly endorse the work of scientists in the field and promote itself vigorously as the only body capable of overseeing the task of mitigating the effects of climate change. Otherwise the world will continue on its present course and suffer the full consequences.

2011-10-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

Abstract art is concerned with figure and ground, in a more direct way perhaps than other visual art forms. If you took a mounted, unprimed canvas and hung it on a white wall, the natural colour of the canvas would distinguish it for the wall, forming a figure with the wall as ground. This constitutes the simplest case. A monochrome painted canvas would make a stronger contrast. Consideration of the context of the work is especially important with minimalist works, where their placement in a gallery is critical to the way they are viewed.

Within the rectangle of the painting a simple element stands out as a figure against a ground, for instance in the series of paintings by Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, example above.

In some of my paintings I have difficulty relating elements to each other, which seems to me now as being a problem of figure and ground. Recognising this may help towards a solution.

Mind/Body

2011-10-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

I was trying to recall an article I had read which maintained that the mind and body are closely related, in terms of bodily awareness and control. I was interested in this because I have long held a similar conviction. I couldn't find the article, but a Google search revealed a huge number of web sources for the subject, both academic and therapeutic. It is evidently a subject of wide interest and concern, not just among philosophers.

I have nothing to add except to note that Heidegger, in his study of Nietzsche, draws attention to the latter's characterisation of the aesthetic sense as "physiology" (p96). "When Nietzsche says 'physiology' he does mean to emphasise the bodily state, but the latter is in itself always already something psychical, and therefore also a matter for psychology." In other words, as I understand it, the production and appreciation of artworks is based on bodily states and their effect on the mental realm with which they are intimately bound. In producing or contemplating a work of art that is affecting, one transcends normal human states by attaining what N. described as 'rapture' or 'frenzy'.

A quick Google search will find many entries which can expand on this introduction.

Musings

2011-10-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's the time of year, or of life, but I find myself turning towards philosophical ideas again. This morning I opened Heidegger's study of Nietzsche at a section discussing the latter's idea of Will to Power. I interpret what I read as as describing a process of striving, of reaching for something, in a stronger way than merely wishing for it. There's an echo here of Heidegger's own preoccupation with 'comporting towards', if I recall correctly, and a further echo of Darwin.

Nietzsche suggests that the will to power is, in effect, a function of the organism, something given in it's nature. Which leads me to conjecture that the ability to think about such things, to question existence, the world, is also something for which we are equipped. And that to follow that line of thought, to take that approach, is to commit oneself to a certain philosophical path. I'm not sure which one, though I'm inclined toward realism.

I wonder why we feel obliged to have philosophical thoughts at all, and whether we could do without them. But to take any position on life, society, the world, is to take a philosophical position, however crude it may be.

All that is solid melts into air

2011-08-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

"All that is solid melts into air" is a quote from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx. It is an evocative sentence, intended to show one of the effects of bourgeois 'progress'. To put it in context would entail quoting the whole manifesto. I shall just link to it here. The quote was used as the title of a book by Marshall Berman (Reissued 2010, many links and reviews online) which examines the impact of modernity. I didn't get a lot out of it, but the idea still resonates.

One aspect of life to which it is quite appropriate is the rapid obsolescence of material products. New models of our favourite things, cars and communication devices, appear regularly. The face of cities changes as buildings are demolished and replaced with increasing frequency. There is a feeling of evanescence, impermanence. Those older parts that are retained often take on the appearance of a spectacle. In many cases they are preserved as such, as special areas, and industrial buildings converted to residential use.

On a personal level, something like melting into air happens moment by moment. The body feels solid and persistent, but experience constantly fades away leaving only traces of memory. In the long run, of course, we are all dead, the ultimate melting into air.

The Hard Problem

2011-05-17T04:46:00.000-07:00

Many of the numerous studies of consciousness pose the question, usually at the outset, of how phenomenal consciousness, the feeling of "what it is like", can occur in the physical medium of brain tissue. There is an "explanatory gap" between the mental and the physical. It is impossible, by taking thought, to explain the basis of thought itself in relation to the body in a satisfactory, causally efficient way. It is equally impossible, so far, to establish the precise cause of mental processes by examining brain tissue. This conundrum is what David Chalmers termed "the Hard Problem", and it has been referred to as such ever since.

I don't have a solution; neither do the authors of thousands of books and papers on the subject. In the end they remain inconclusive. What they provide are a mind-boggling array of ways of thinking about it. I don't hope to do more than arrange my own thoughts, as concisely as possible.

Most approaches to the mind-body problem, as it is more widely called, reject the strong dualist position adopted by Descartes, on the grounds that it is impossible to see how a non-material substance can act on material substances. Few, however, opt for a thoroughgoing materialism, retaining the option of a weak dualism known as 'non-reductive materialism'.

I think this is a good place to start, simply because I cannot dispense with the certainty that a) I have a mind and b) that there is a world. As I maintained in my previous post the two are inextricably entwined . We know the world through the mind, that part of it at the forefront, as it were, via a the senses. The reflective part tries to make sense of it. I should note that this applies equally to scientific as to philosophical investigation. Experimental procedures are conducted by use of the senses and bodily manipulation, results assessed by reflection. One can't come out of the mental envelope in order to examine it, but if it is acknowledged that the mind is fully embedded in the world, of which the body is a part, I think it becomes easier to naturalise it, to see it as part of nature and thus in principle fully explicable.

I think now there is no doubt that the brain is the seat of consciousness. It's where the final explanation will be found, or the last part of the puzzle, the link in an elaborate chain of interactions between the human organism and its environment.

Consciousness

2011-05-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

I'm renewing my interest in this intractable subject, reading a book by Susan Blackmore. Thinking about the notion of a persisting self led me to realise that conscious awareness is a fleeting thing. Consciousness only exists in the present moment. I was conscious, at intervals, for all my life up to now, but all that remains is memory.

When I consider how memory is retained, it seems to me that it must be in physical form, stored in configurations of protein structure, for example.

There is no gap between the world and our experience of it. The world, so to speak, flows straight into our bodies through the senses, by sampling. The only gap is an 'explanatory gap'. We still don't know what the specific mechanism of consciousness is, in the brain.

Sources of the Self

2011-04-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about abandoning this blog and going back to written notebooks, but there would be a break in continuity and the problem of storing the contents of the blog for easy reference. There's just too much material despite my infrequent entries. So I feel stuck with it and might as well carry on even if even more scrappily.

Basically I wanted to use this medium as a notebook for odd ideas and observations. The format seems to encourage longer essay-type entries, but I shall try to avoid them in future.

I've been wading through Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor. I have a lot of respect for him; I think he has deep insights into the human condition, though I find him hard to follow. I believe it's worth trying to understand his mainly historical account of the processes leading to the modern view of selfhood, as one's sense of ones self strongly determines how one approaches life, and relations with other people. The self does not define itself sui generis on a blank page. Some dispositions are innate, others are shaped within a milieu of material and social circumstances. I wonder if, living within the current culture of narcissism (cf. Christopher Lasch) it's possible to examine oneself objectively, and further, to change. This is one reason I'm keen to follow Taylor to the end, as he appears to be quite autonomous in his thought, but fully aware of where it is situated in the historical pantheon of thought.

Painting

2011-03-05T12:53:00.002-08:00

Untitled (Landscape) 16 x 20 ins. Acrylic and random materials on canvas, Feb 2011.

Though non-representational, my paintings have structure. The minimum structure possible is the rectangle of the support. Within that, I tend to visualise a smaller rectangle, or square, with elements of the painting arranged roughly along its sides, unevenly distributed. The result is something like parts of a landscape are grouped.

The concept of structure has appealed to me and lodged in my mind for a long time.I don't know what can be made of it; structuralism as a philosophy was discarded some time ago. However it is a distinctive feature of the world. Perhaps one can cling to it as an anchor, in some sense, a guiding principle. Organisms wouldn't exist without it. The top picture is of an item I found, about 1 inch long, it looks like the skeleton of something aquatic like a sponge, and is a good example of natural structure. (I tried to delete the blurry shot but couldn't)

The Tree of Knowledge

2011-02-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

The authors of this book have a perspective that I find congenial, viz. a biological and evolutionary perspective. They employ it here to give an account of human understanding. Much of the book is taken up with tracing the evolution of organisms, with particular reference to the nervous system. They make the case that there is a continuous line of development from the simplest to the most complex of organisms, which retains the basic structure of the nervous system. "It couples the sensory and motor surfaces through a network of neurons whose pattern can be quite varied". (p159) a stimulus applied at the sensory surface causes a perturbation in the structure of the organism, which responds by making an adjustment which manifests as behaviour.

I refrain from making an extended précis as there are many summaries and commentaries online.

The human nervous system is highly complex, with the possibility of delayed (considered) and varied responses, over and above those of a more reflex nature. This elaborate realm of axons, dendrites and neurotransmitters is the field in which human faculties play: language, imagining, planning, thinking and so on. I.e conscious activities.

I follow M. and V. in their account of consciousness as biologically based. Some of their arguments against realism I find it hard to follow, the idea that we "bring forth a world" also the contention that consc. arises through language. These ideas I shall have to examine further, or else pursue others.

That last sentence reminds me that every writer on a subject has a different point of view, some overlapping, some widely divergent. And of course there are writers in a great many diverse fields. To acquire full knowledge of all domains of discourse would be impossible. Even a person who was widely read in one or a few fields would still be presented with alternative interpretations, singular viewpoints, and would be obliged to make a choice as to how much he would accept. And then how could he be sure he had acquired true knowledge?

Recent paintings

2011-01-24T10:58:00.001-08:00

I find that the blogs I prefer looking at are highly visual in content. Hence I deduce that mine must be pretty dull and onerous to read. I justify this on the grounds that the notes are essentially personal, albeit open to public scrutiny.

Some time ago I decided to post views of my paintings on Flickr only. I'm reversing that policy if only to brighten up the blog. I may put up other illustrations from time to time. The two paintings below, both untitled, were completed in January 2011. They are composed of scrap materials and acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 ins. and 20 x 16 respectively.

Continuing

2011-01-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

I had the idea of moving the contents of this blog into a Word document, with the idea that it might be more accessible. I soon found out that it's no easier to scroll through a Word document than to scroll through a blog, and the latter doesn't take up space on my hard drive. So I'm sticking to this format, though I think I'll make my entries shorter, more casual.

I planned earlier to write a few notes on aging. The obvious one is that one spends more time reminiscing about the past than contemplating the future. I don't know if I do more of that; it seems to me that I always have been more concerned with the past than with the future. The future does, however, seem more blank to me now. Once, although unknown, it was a source of potential experience. Now, it is merely a journey toward oblivion. At some point, there is no future.

Structure and Chaos

2010-11-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

I'm still pursuing the line of thought of the previous two entries, but in line with my thesis, it is becoming more random and disjointed. The thesis -roughly- is that tight structures are elaborated into looser structures, which is the origin of change. In physical terms, at the atomic and molecular levels structures are rigid or tight. Compounds have rigid structures but they have the property of being able to combine with other compounds (and elements) to form different compounds, also having rigid structures. Larger groupings of matter are progressively less tightly structured, and relations between them very loosely structured, if at all. This applies particularly to living organisms including humans.

At this point I'd like to clarify what I mean by structure. So far I've been thinking mainly in terms of the structure of material objects, overlooking the fact that 'structure' is a human concept, applied to observed properties of things. As an abstraction, it can be applied more widely, to music, poetry, paintings, society, society, logic, mathematics, language, thought. These have material underpinnings, but their structure is not identical with their material composition.

To recap a little, I think I mentioned the animal genotype as being typical of somewhat loose structures. Composed of highly complex parts with well-defined structure, it is capable of variation from one individual to another, and from one generation to another over time. The genotype specifies the physical characteristics of an individual, but each one is not perfect and there are variations among offspring. Environment can affect the development of individuals, and genetic mutations can lead to overall changes or adaptations over time. Relations between individuals in their environment are structurally determined only to the extent that the environment imposes constraints and affords opportunities, eg. for food, shelter and reproduction.

I think that the appearance of novelty, brought about by human action, can be used as an argument for free will, of a sort worth having, to paraphrase Daniel Dennett. It entails having a disposition to novelty and the drive to create it. Humans have a will, on the one hand, and the freedom to execute it, on the other, within structural configurations loose enough to permit it.

Humans have a yen for freedom and novelty, but they also have a desire for order, structure. This is clearly seen in the organisation of society, from physical infrastructure to law, education, politics, social customs generally, the arts, communication and religion. We like the new, as long as it is something like the old, only different. But we are creatures of habit, comfortable with routines as log as they are not too tedious.

Proceedings in neuroscience invariably point to the dependence of mind on brain structures. To some scientists they are one and the same, or at least 'mind is what the brain does'. Although it seems as if the mind is something over and above the body and brain, the idea that it is a separate, different kind of thing is heavily resisted these days, a position I agree with. The mind is a function of the brain, which is situated in the body, which is situated in the world. Being-in-the-world is what the embedded mind experiences. Direct experience is a result of direct contact with worldly surroundings, but there is also indirect experience in the form of thoughts, imaginings, dreams and other mental activity. These are able to float free from the structures that support them, though to what extent I'm not sure anyone knows completely, especially in terms of mental structures or schemas.

Before concluding I shall mention a phenomenon which is only loosely related to structure, namely homeostasis. This is the tendency of systems to return to equilibrium after disturbance. I have previously remarked on equilibrium as a feature of the world and of society, the tendency to return to normal, or try to, eg. after a war or economic crisis. What turned my thoughts to it again was an article I read regarding the ability of blind people to enhance faculties other than sight, in partial compensation. Although reasonably well-known, the phenomenon had not been extensively studied, so the researchers turned to it. Using brain-scanning techniques they discovered that 'people blind from birth can make use of the visual parts of their brain to refine their sensation of sound and touch' . This strikes me as being homeostatic in principle, the brain utilising structures in order to preserve and enhance function, when those areas might, it seems to me, have spun out of control and generated some form of wild eccentricity or insanity.

Finally, a word on the process of creation on the arts. This deserves longer treatment, but I will just observe that whereas practically all art forms were quite highly structured prior to the twentieth century, from the end of the nineteenth on, artists of every stripe began to rebel against the confines of established forms. Whereas structure in the arts, including music and poetry etc. had been changed, it was not abolished altogether as it appeared was happening now. Form cannot be eliminated, but conventional structure can be, and has been, to some extent. In the post-modern era elements of former structure were adopted and incorporated in novel ways.

Creation of artworks involves a search for novelty. The will to create must be free, in order to produce it.

Structure and Free Will

2010-11-07T10:12:00.000-08:00

There has been a huge amount of discussion, particularly among philosophers, about what constitutes free will, and sometimes whether it exists at all. I think there is no dispute that there are drives, intentions, strivings, volition: ie. the will. Whether it is completely unconstrained or determined is the crux of the debate.

Part of the problem of discussing the matter coherently lies, it seems to me, in the phrase itself, which doesn’t seem quite complete. As the term normally applies to human actions, it might be more satisfactory to talk of ‘freely willed actions or …behaviour’ A freely willed action is one that is decided upon, and carried out in a context which does not prevent it, although it may be carried out against opposition.

Before attacking the problem, I shall go back to my discussion of rigid structure on the small scale and consider an approach to freedom. Suppose atoms are moving about in a vacuum or in some medium. While each has the identical structure of nucleus and electrons, the atoms as a group do not adopt any particular configuration. We can say that their movements are random, chaotic. I suggest that here lies the beginning of freedom, in a relative lack of constraint. I say relative, because although there is no discernible pattern to the movement of atoms, the overall characteristics of the group are influenced by their environment. Gases, where atoms are combined as molecules, have certain consistent properties, likewise liquids.

It’s a bit early to make a pronouncement such as, everything in nature is either structured or chaotic, but I’m leaning toward something like that. On consideration I don’t want to present a dichotomy, rather a shading-off, from tight structure to loose structure, to unstructured.

The universe displays a tendency toward novelty. I would use a term such as ‘disposition’ but I want to avoid the idea of conscious direction. The fusion of hydrogen to helium and subsequent condensation to heavier molecules is the beginning. The emergence of life and evolution of new forms is the continuation, while in the human world, the desire for novelty is one of the most compelling forces in life. This process would not be possible if the universe were locked into a rigid structure. It came about through the dissolution of rigidity in structure, but not through collapse of structure altogether.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a basic, hackneyed question in fundamental philosophy. I think it can be generalized to: why is there this rather than that? Which is more open to being answered. Why did the universe not remain at the point of inorganic compounds? for example. The answer I would give in light of my conjectures here is that its structure was not rigid, that there was freedom for novelty to emerge. This philosophy of mine is therefore one of emergence.

Structure and Philosophy

2010-10-31T13:09:00.000-07:00

Ideally I’d like to present this as a fully worked-out, coherent paper, but for the moment I shall post it more as a draft, or series of notes.

Structuralism, as a philosophical school, enjoyed a relatively brief vogue before being discarded in favour of post-structuralism, deconstruction and various post-modernisms. I begin by mentioning it because any mention of structure in philosophy is bound to invoke the name. However I mention it only to set it aside, place it on the margins where I can refer to it if necessary. Structuralism as determined by the works of Levi-Strauss, Chomsky and others, concerned itself mainly with linguistics and anthropology. My interest in structure ranges much more widely, indeed everywhere that structure is to be found, which is practically everywhere. My philosophical enquiry is directed toward the fact that some aspects of the world are highly structured, others are not, and how does one aspect relate to the other, especially when it comes to the place of human beings in the world.

According to Wikipedia, “the concept of structure is now often an essential foundation of nearly every mode of inquiry and discovery in science, philosophy and art. Structure, as I define it, is an abstraction, being the arrangement of parts in a bounded entity. Items to note here are that for something to have a structure it must have more than one part, and that something with a structure can be looked at as an autonomous whole, though it might form part of a larger structure which can be similarly viewed.

The idea of structure is not recent. It can be traced back to Plato and his ideal forms, which define the structure of their real-world manifestations. Whereas Plato considered the form or essence of things to transcend their physical being, Aristotle argued that the form of anything is immanent, instantiated in the thing. This view has survived, more or less unchanged. In earlier times it was more likely to be termed ‘form’, a word still in use and almost interchangeable with structure. However I think of it as having a wider application than structure, a degree more general. Thus one might say,” The structure of the DNA molecule is in the form of a helix”.

Structure is found in nature to an incalculable extent. The attempt to enumerate every type of instance would be an insuperable task. It begins with the structure I like to take as fundamental; the hydrogen atom, with a nucleus and one electron. All the heavier elements build on this structure, by addition of particles, in numerical sequence, yielding the periodic table of elements. Elements combine into compounds, which combine in increasingly complex ways to form living organisms. The structure, qua pattern of relationships of components, remains nearly identical for each type of organism.

The thing that strikes me about this situation, which inspired this writing, is that the structure of things is very rigid at the smaller end of the scale, and becomes less so at the larger. It also becomes less so at the very smallest scale; think Uncertainty Principle and wave/particle disjunction. But I’m not going there. All elements and compounds have clearly defined structures. Any variation is given a different name, identified separately.

Where the system begins to loosen up is in living beings. Their smallest components have the rigid structure I have alluded to: elements such as calcium and oxygen; chlorophyll, the cell, bone tissue, organs such as the liver. But whereas the structure or arrangement of parts is invariant, the complete assembly is subject to variation. Specimens of plant or animal life are seldom exactly uniform in size, but vary within a range. Some may vary considerably due to different conditions in their surroundings: terrain, predators, adverse weather, disease, yet the majority survive.

The question of why very small parts of the world have coherent structures and larger ones do not probably has no easy answer. Anyone who looks at the world as having been designed in any sense may wonder why rigid structure doesn’t run all the way through it. If it did, of course, everything would be completely uniform and subject to unvarying routines. It may be tempting to suggest that looseness of structure at a certain level is designed, so as to introduce change, variety and evolution into the world. My solution is that rigid structure is inherent in the nature of the atom, such that when atoms combine under extreme conditions of heat and pressure, they are bound to combine in certain ways, ie. on a numerical basis. At a certain level of complexity purely numerical relationships break down, become irrelevant. One could say that the structure of molecules is necessary, that of organisms contingent. Contingent, that is, on their component organs.

Depending on how widely the term is employed, structure can be found in many aspects of the world. Weather patterns, ocean currents, geology, distribution of flora and fauna, all are structured. The human world is fairly highly structured; we refer to ‘infrastucture’. Anything manufactured has structure. Music. Mathematics. (This deserves treatment I’m not qualified to give it.) Habits and routines are structured to some extent. Rules and conventions give structure to human interactions.

My philosophical enquiry, such as it is, aims to examine how far human existence is contingent on structure, and how this affects the human condition, and how far human beings are free of structure. The question of free will arises, and whether there is freedom at all.

I hope to expand the philosophical implications in later posts.

Scandinavian and European Crime Fiction

2010-09-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

I don't get many comments on my blog entries so I don't look out for them very diligently. I just recently picked one up from some time ago referring me to The Glass Devil by Helene Tursten, in response to my posting about her book The Torso. I promptly requested it from the library, read and enjoyed it, though perhaps not as much as The Torso. There was a lot of quite tedious -no doubt realistic- investigation and interrogation to get through, but it picked up nicely at the end.

I've read mainly British and American crime writers, but have turned to Scandinavian, European and others for a change. I thought I'd just list as many as I can remember, for my own satisfaction and as a recommendation for anyone who might come across this:

Steig Larsson

Henning Mankell

Andrea Camilleri

Gianrico Carofiglio

Kjell Ericksson

Jorg Fauser

Hans Fallada

Karin Fossum

Luca de Fulvio

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Rosa

Jean-Christophe Grange

Arnaldur Indridason

Camilla Lackberg

Hakan Nesser

Giampiero Rigosi

Marcos M. Villatoro
Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall

Qiu Xiaolong

The View from Nowhere

2010-09-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

The philosopher Thomas "What is it like to be a Bat" Nagel wrote a book called The View from Nowhere, which is handily available in almost full text from Google Books. In it he explores in depth what it means to adopt an objective view of the world. When I read it I was slightly disappointed, having anticipated something a bit more mystical, maybe inspired by the Beatles' Nowhere Man. Lately I've been getting the idea that there is a 'view from nowhere' that is detached from present reality but doesn't relate to the objective world of realism.

What got me started was the fact that I often recall memories of the past which are quite clear. It struck me that if I engaged in a lengthy spell of reminiscence, 'living in the past' as it were, my subjective viewpoint would have drifted away from the present. But since the past doesn't exist except in memory, then I can't be sure of where my vantage point is. One answer would be nowhere, at least nowhere in particular. This is compounded by the fact that memory is fragmented and unreliable, so that one cannot be sure of situating a vantage point in it.

Further support for this idea is a paper by Colin McGinn, Consciousness and Space , in which he examines the notion that consciousness is not spatially located. The brain, of course, is located in the body which is located in space. Consciousness, the mind, however, is not aware of the brain and does not subjectively situate itself there. Rather, it finds itself in the world, and pays attention to aspects of it, at the same time quite probably thinking of things outside the immediate field, and outside the present moment. It is therefore somewhat difficult to pin down a fixed reference point, a view from somewhere. The conclusion I draw from this is that the self, unless attending closely to some task or item of interest immediately to hand, is liable to float, to be, in some sense, nowhere.

The theory of the mind as being totally dependent on brain processes, which is constantly being strengthened by neurological research, also reinforces my idea. If all my thoughts, memories, emotions and sense data are derived from distributed electro-chemical neural impulses, it is difficult to say where exactly my viewpoint is located. Moreover, if we take into account the fallibility of memory and the human capacity for self-deception, the concept of a firm viewpoint is further weakened.

A tentative final conclusion might be that one's point of view is a construct, formed from experience, present surroundings, and social inputs, wholly contingent.

Superstition, Magical Thinking and Paranormal Beliefs fs

2010-09-08T07:09:00.000-07:00

There's an article in the online magazine eSkeptic that explores the origins of superstition, magical thinking and paranormal beliefs. Briefly stated, the authors refer to research which shows that young children are able to discern three conceptual categories of the world, without coaching. These constitute core knowledge:

"that is, knowledge that children learn without instruction; for example, intuitive comprehension of physical, biological, and psychological entities as well as different forms of processes in which these entities engage. Core knowledge — developed by preschool age — provides the foundation for further development. It is based on what psychologists call domain specialized learning mechanisms, or modules, which evolved in response to our Paleolithic environment.¹⁵

Developmental studies show that core knowledge of physical entities includes the understanding that the world is composed of material objects which have volume and an independent existence in space.¹⁶ Core knowledge of biological entities represents a species-typical adaptation to the problem of food selection and illness avoidance.¹⁷ Even if cultures lack a scientific understanding of disease transmission they still possess an intuitive understanding of it through their core knowledge.¹⁸ Similarly, 4-year-olds know that abnormal behaviors are not contagious,¹⁹ and they can discriminate between contaminated and safe substances despite a lack of visible evidence.²⁰ Core knowledge of psychological entities includes the understanding that animate beings are intentional agents which have a mind. By the middle of the second year children understand that animate beings can reciprocate actions and have a capacity to move and initiate actions without external force.²¹ In addition, small children understand that the contents of mind — thoughts, beliefs, desires, and symbols — are nonmaterial and mental, and that they do not contain the properties they stand for.²² For example, 3- and 4-year-old children understand that the thought of a dog does not have the material properties of a dog,²³ and that the roads in a map do not need to be wide enough for cars.^24"
^{(Marjaana Lindeman and Kia Aarnio)}
^{The authors propose that these categories become confused later in life, though they don't spell out exactly how this happens. It's clear though, that once these memes are present, they are persistent and widely accepted. One such is the idea that thoughts can influence events, typified by the success of the recent book The Secret. A common injunction in my experience is to avoid 'tempting fate' by words, deeds or thoughts.}
^{However it is not my intention here to discuss the article further but to take from it the notion of innate capacities and use that to reinforce an idea of mine, which is that humans have a propensity to believe, one way or another, that precedes exposure to any claim. They are naturally skeptical or gullible. More the latter than the former, though they could be a mixture of each. Some people are skeptical of science, for example, which accepting of pseudo-scientific or supernatural accounts for this or that.}
^{I think research of the sort admirably begun in the subject article could be advanced by research into the basis of the core propensities which I have proposed exist.}

Ancient Minds

2010-08-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

Various things I have read point to the richness of the world-view of early peoples, as evidenced by religious artifacts and sites, cave paintings etc. I speculate on the cause or foundation of this, and surmise that it must spring from a concept of cause and effect. This in turn must, I think, arises from natural curiosity. That's the most basic impulse I can imagine that would lead to all the rest; a desire to push beyond the contingent, the immediately given, which would quickly yield the result that when certain events happen, others follow. Raw curiosity, and the discovery of cause and effect would, I suggest, lead in short order to the idea of an explanation, that there are reasons for, not just the observable events, but everything.

I believe that from the earliest times, humans had a rich capacity for imagination, which was employed in the quest for explanations. Lacking empirical methods which would yield naturalistic explanations, their imagination created the supernatural realm. This was not at all a hollow endeavour; some speculations turned out to be correct and led to the formation of empirical, scientific, method. Others provided mental satisfaction and social cohesion, in the form of group ceremonies or observances.

Veritistic Knowledge

2010-02-24T07:08:00.000-08:00

I've been reading sections of Alvin Goldman's Knowledge in a Social World. In it, he makes a strong case for a shared epistemology based on truth. As one who already has similar views, and tends to read only what supports them, I am amazed that it is necessary to have to make the case. However, as Goldman points out, there is an influential anti-realist trend that maintains that knowledge is socially constructed, that truth is relative, dependent on point of view and consensus.

This trend began for me, with books by Collingwood; The Idea of History, and Peter Winch: The Idea of a Social Science. The idea being developed, in essence, is that for a community with common interests, what counts as true is what is agreed upon to be true by the community, according to its standards and conventions of truth-assessment. I wouldn't disagree with this view in cases where truth-assessment actually pins down truth. Scientists, to give the most concrete example, are concerned to describe what is the case for given state of affairs, using empirical, experimental techniques of close observation and measurement.

To my way of thinking, the trend got out of hand with the advent of postmodernism and the wave of relativism it ushered in. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of this was feminist philosophers' characterising science as privileging male perspectives, to the extent of questioning the validity of scientific laws and theories, or at least accusing scientists of gender bias, skewing results especially in biology. Unfortunate though partly true, science is male-dominated, but also because I agree with much of feminist epistemology, particularly the embodied, experiential aspect of it, to which I shall return. (Check this)

The crux of the matter, as I see it, turns on acceptance, or rejection, of realism. Realism is the philosophical position that the world exists independently of any experience of it, whether individual or collective. If you subscribe to this position, as I do, you have a fairly firm basis on which to form an epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Any statement you make that is true, conforms to reality, ie. has a direct relation to a state of affairs in the world. The latter is what is the case. Facts are true statements, in my view, rather than the states of affairs to which they relate.

Knowledge has two aspects: knowledge that, and knowledge how. The former consists of a body of facts, either remembered or readily accessible in some stored form. (cf. Andy Clark, The Extended Mind) Knowledge how consists of abilities, skills, which may be partly taught through writing and speech but are memorised in the body and relevant parts of the brain; motor, auditory, visual etc. This knowledge is directly connected to the world. It is often guided by knowledge that.

I surprised myself by realising that realism is supported by religion. This came about through a reference to William Alston, who is a champion of realism, and also a philosopher of religion. It occurred to me that the Christian sense of God as creator posits a world that is not sense-dependent. Even Berkeley, the most extreme empiricist -esse est percipi- accounted for the continued existence of things by appealing to the mind of God. This is idealism of a Platonic variety, also reminiscent of the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena.

This is only an outline of something I hope to flesh out in more detail some day.

Following the thread

2010-01-19T11:38:00.000-08:00

In my last posting I was a bit hasty in implying that philosophers' ideas always supersede and contradict earlier ones. This is only true to a certain extent. What happens in philosophy, as opposed to science, is that no one system of thought becomes orthodoxy, but leaves a legacy which contributes to the field. Major philosophers from the pre-Socratics onward are still studied today.

As it happens, at the same time as I took out the Moore book from the library, I borrowed one on H.G. Gadamer, which includes an essay by himself. He identifies himself as a long-time student of Plato, and directly of Heidegger. He mentions Hegel and Husserl, and Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (which I must read again). An explicitly realist philosophy is not set out, but I take Heidegger's concept of 'thrown-ness' to be realist -the world is already there-
and I like Gadamer's hermeneutic approach. His solution to the common-ground problem consists in a 'fusion of horizons', as I understand it. So the common ground is intersubjective, and more contiguous than completely shared.

The Grounds of Reality

2010-01-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

After wading through Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein and The Linguistic Turn edited by Richard Rorty I became interested in linguistic philosophy, and also in the work of G.E.Moore, who is largely concerned with language. I've been reading a commentary on Moore's methodology by Sal Fratantaro, and note that the latter is critical of some aspects of Moore's philosophy, on the grounds of being vague or ambiguous. He is also critical of other writers on Moore, notably Klemke, whom he accuses of missing the point of various Moore statements. This makes me wonder, is it worth reading Moore? How should I judge his works. It might be safer to form a synopsis of his views, which I agree with as far as I know them.

This state of confusion reminds me of a similar state I have experienced with regard to philosophers more widely, where each one seeks to refute, or supplant, or improve upon, preceding ones, and whole schools of philosophy act in a similar way. How am I to deal with this, I ask, if I am turning to philosophy to enhance my own understanding? It can be bewildering. One way to deal with it is to consider the history of philosophy in a somewhat detached way, looking at the history of thought, of the men and women and the lives that generated that thought. Another way is to select an area of philosophy that appeals, and concentrate on it.

It occurs to me that there should be some way of reconciling different philosophical viewpoints, that there must be somewhere, common ground. Which is itself to take a philosophical position, viz. that we all occupy the same world. This is essentially a realist position, that the world exists independently of any one view of it. Which brings me back to Moore. His appeal to ordinary language and common sense appeal to me as a layman. Some of his views can be crudely stated as: I exist. Other people exist. The world exists, with its multiplicity of objects. I and other people have xisted for some time. The world has existed for a very long time.

I don't plan to enter into an examination of Moore here. There is plenty of material on the web. but I start with him because there are aspects of his philosophy I can draw on as I proceed. The main point I want to make is that the common ground on which philosophers stand is the very solid ground on which we all stand, viz. the earth itself. So what gives rise to the many conflicting views that have emerged in attempts to explain the world and the human condition? To explain that I would have to explain the evolutionary processes that have led to the formation of the human mind, a task which is beyond me. Suffice it to say that human beings have developed the ability to think beyond the range needed for basic survival, in increasingly abstract and complex ways, aided by language. Without language, I contend, this would be impossible.

At its simplest, language describes states of affairs. Its structure is based on the structure of the world. (I avoid giving examples because they often strike me as trivial, or contrived, or misleading). But language is flexible. It isn't securely anchored to the world. It is capable of producing statements that are false or paradoxical without breaking its own rules. This was was of the things that intrigued Wittgenstein. So, one can form ideas, expressed in language, that foment further ideas, such as: we only know the world through the senses. The world consists of sense impressions; that is all we know. Therefore the world only exists in the mind. This is the sort of thinking Moore refuted, and which I reject.

Not much ado

2010-01-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

When I first got interested in computers I thought it would be amazing to be able to go on a virtual bike ride through any part of the country (England), using a series of photographs of the road ahead, and copious amounts of information on towns, villages, pubs and other points en route. I found it was somewhat possible to do this, using aerial photographs on Multimap, for example, photographs on Flickr, Geograph and other sites, and info. through Google.

I had to wait a few years for Google street-level view, and then found it quite limited for the purpose of cross-country travel, as it is confined mostly to cities, and by no means all of them, and mostly to central areas. I'd like to have seen wider coverage, of areas and roads of general interest,in preferance to the concentrated coverage of residential streets that is Google policy, despite it's having strong appeal individually.

I don't attempt virtual bike tours now, but I still scan Google street level quite often, mostly of Bristol and London. looking for pubs, or just looking, a virtual flaneur. Two things strike me quite forcibly: the amount of traffic, which obscures the view, unless the street was photographed on Sunday morning, and the fact that these composite pictures are snapshots of a particular time. While they may remain in Google for some long time, it's vaguely disturbing to realise that immediately after the shots were taken, the scene changed, and some time afterwards it would have changed more radically, when the fronts of buidings were altered or removed, and part-built structures completed. One accepts this freezing in time with still photographs, welcomes it as a record, but Street View seems to present itself as a live view, which is quite different.

I find this fragmented, outdated view of the world reflected in my own memories. These have always had a selective aspect to them, turning a spotlight now on one period or incident, now another. I'd remember some things clearly, while adjacent areas were shrouded in darkness. Recently this characteristic seemed accentuated. memories were more fragmented, mere shards. Moreover they often led to things I'd prefer to forget. My life seemed pointless, merely contingent. It's a bit less so now, when I've started painting again and reading philosophy. I take small satisfaction from the fact that life goes on in a stable and predictable fashion, with its routines and minor pleasures.

Religion and Women

2009-12-22T14:11:00.000-08:00

I read an essay about the view of women as inferior and subject to strict control by men, expressed most strongly by radical moslems and enforced violently by the Taliban. The author shows that there is a culture of subjugation of women in most religions. She notes that Jimmy Carter recently severed ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after many years' association, over its recent affirmation that women should be subservient and obedient to their husbands. The more fundamental the church, the more strictly this is applied.

With this in mind, it strikes me as odd that women subscribe to religion as much as they seem to do, without speaking out in protest against such practices. Perhaps in some circles they do. And in the west they are much more free. Then again, I have heard women belonging to strict religious sects saying that they are happy to be subject to their husbands' wishes. I suppose it frees them from decision-making, which in fact tends to be the position of the housewife in the traditional family, religious or not, apart from certain areas eg. the kitchen.

Still, I think if women were more generally aware of the vilification heaped upon them in certain parts of the world and society, there would be more condemnation than has hitherto been seen.

The Working Class part 2

2009-08-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

There is an identity, based on a culture formed among people who worked with their hands; with tools and equipment, utensils. Often hard and dangerous, dirty, repetitive, ill-paid, this work fostered a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to life. People who carried it out lived in densely-packed neighbourhoods. They were close together at work and out. They spoke in regional and local accents. They were not well educated - it wasn't required for the work they did - though this changed, largely through reforms instituted by post-war Labour governments. They had simple tastes, of necessity, being poorly paid, and under-educated, and lived in cheap or subsidised housing for the same reason. They were close-knit, loyal, swift to reply physically to any slight, but sentimental.

In terms of occupation the working classes were in a majority until fairly recently (1970s?). They could be considered the basis of society, on which the other classes rested (except that they were controlled by the latter) The middle classes, self-defined, distinguished themselves by refinement: better housing, better and much longer education, better dress, better taste in general. This 'superiority' was facilitated by more intense education and the propensity for learning engendered by it: a willingness to learn about food, wine, foreign countries which could be visited, to read books and serious newspapers. Plus, of course, the funds to enable all these things. On the other side, the working classes maintained their identity by resolutely rejecting middle-class values.

The post-war years saw a number of changes to the rigid separation of classes that had existed previously. Incomes rose, education was improved, relatively, and the working classes began to be more visible. (Note: I use 'working classes' for the people, 'working class' for the culture). It was young people who led the way, in dress - Teddy Boys - and technology - motor bikes, transistor radios. They were fuelled by rock and roll, which combined with over-exuberance, led to the destruction of cinemas during showings of the film Rock Around the Clock. There were also frequent fights between rival Ted gangs. I should mention that working class culture, though immensely loyal within groups, is strongly tribal, and sorts out differences through violence, at times.

At the same time, there was a feeling of disaffection among elements of the middle classes, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Novels and films started portraying working class characters realistically: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Up the Junction. There was a mood for more grittiness in the arts: plays by Pinter and Wesker, John Osborne, novels by Alan Sillitoe. Richard Hoggart published the seminal Uses of Literacy, a study of working-class culture drawn all by practically all subsequent writers.

Redundancy had been a fact of working life since the beginning of the industrial era, as production methods changed, mechanisation was brought in, and so on. The pace of change increased from the 1950s onwards, with the increasing use of electronic data processing and the shift in manufacturing overseas. Unemployment rose, but many new jobs were created. As there were fewer jobs in traditional industries, young working-class people moved into the information technology and service sectors, as well as the remaining skilled manual areas: installers, service technicians, drivers, operators, as mentioned in my previous post. At the same time general clerical work was being de-skilled, the aptitude most required being typing ability and computer use, systems and programs being designed by those at higher levels. Clerical workers pay slipped relative to other skilled sectors.

The upshot of all this was a blending of classes at the point where the working class and lower middle class met. There had been a sharp division between the factory floor and the office. Now there were fewer factory floors and more offices, and offices became a bit like factory floors, albeit cleaner and quieter.

Another area where there was blending was in popular culture. Television programs and films, intended for a mass audience, were aimed at all classes. Pop and rock music were of working class origin. The affluent working classes could afford to consume popular culture as never before, along with the middle classes. Pubs began to lose their two or three-bar layout, lounge and public bars becoming one public bar, in effect.

This is not to say that class distinctions ceased to exist. Various public figures have declared that "we're all working-class now" which I think is nonsense, though I don't want to pursue the point. However I think that the working class identity, in a somewhat attenuated form, percolated through society and was adopted by sections of the middle class, especially the younger members. If the English temperament has, overall, become more demonstrative, more forthright and uninhibited, I suggest it is a result of this blurring of class edges through changes in the constitution of society.

Works consulted: The Way We Live Now: Richard Hoggart 1995
The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes
1918-1990 Eric Hopkins 1991

The Working Class

2009-07-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking here of the British, and more specifically, English working class. which is loosely defined as the social group that includes manual workers of all types, lower-paid clerks and retail sales people, lower ranks in the armed forces and police. It does not, therefore, include everyone who works for a living.Characteristics which reinforce the definition include income, education, accomodation, speech, consumption habits, leisure activities, tastes. I won't attempt to spell out what those characteristics are in any detail.

Of all the groups affected by change in society, the working class is the one most drastically affected. It was brought into being at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution through the movement of peasants from the land into workshops and factories. Slow to begin with, as the first industry was water-powered and literally a cottage industry producing textiles. When steam power was introduced and large mills and facories were built the process accelerated. During the 19th century large areas of high-density housing were built in and around industrial sites.

The move from rural to urban life was a big change. However I would surmise that their situation changed, the people involved did not, retaining their lifestyle as far as circumstances permitted. This is in line with my equilibrium theory. This lifestyle is very much a communal one, centred on the extended family and the workplace, the residential area, income level, and educational level. I would go so far as to say that the surviving working-class culture has its roots in its rural origins. Thus, although much affected by change, working class people have retained much of their character throughout.

Between the wars the condition of the working class changed considerably. Prior to 1914 low wages, poor housing and poverty characterised their life, laeding to poor physical condition and a short life-span. Efforts were begun to correct these in order to supply fit men for the First World War, and continued thereafter. Working hours were gradually reduced, pay increased and housing gradually improved. There had been a building boom at the turn of the century, but this, on my personal observation, was largely for the burgeoning middle class. Although traditional industries declined between the wars, new ones appeared, eg. motor vehicles, aircraft, electricity and items powered by it.

Increased leisure time and income meant more opportunities for recreation. Radio shows were popular (Music while you Work, Harry Halls Guest Night), football, horse-racing(betting) greyhound racing, motor cycle speedway, the cinema. Works outings were well attended. Hobbies included gardening on allotments, keeping racing pigeons, playing in brass or silver bands. Literacy increased, though reading tended to concentrate on newspapers such as the Daily Mirror and News of the World, and popular magazines such as Picturegoer.

Health, welfare and education were improved through the provision of schools, hospitals and clinics. Voting rights were extended. All in all, the lot of the working class was vastly better than it had been at the end of the previous century.

Still, any changes in the economic state of the country were most strongly felt by the workers, who were first to be laid off and did not have transferrable skills. Pockets of poverty remained. And changes in production techniques were strongly felt on the shop floor. Automation, which had begun quite slowly, accelerated after the second world war. All the changes in production techniques which were instituted since early in the Industrial Revolution had one aim: to reduce the size of the workforce required for a given production level. So this required workers to learn new skills or depend on the state or charity for a living.

The relative affluence of the working class depended on the health of industry, mainly in manufacturing. However, in the latter half of the twentieth century the bulk of manufacturing began to shift towards the Far East. Coal mining and steel manufacture, some of the last remnants of staple industries, were closed down. The base of the working class, in terms of work places, was whittled away. Privatisation, pushed forward under the Thatcher government, undermined organised labour. Thus the working class underwent some of the most drastic changes it had suffered since being brought from the fields into the factories.

But this class, its members, the people, didn't disappear. They are still there. I don't know enough about present-day Britain to say just how they are constituted, so much of what follows is somewhat speculative. (I avoid resorting to stereotypes as much as possible). A moment's thought produces a list of jobs that can be considered working-class. That is, jobs done by people fitting the definition of working-class. For example, baggage handlers, security guards, transport drivers, construction workers, fork-lift truck drivers, crane drivers, bus drivers, retail salespeople and catering staffs.

I have a theory, which is the main point of this exercise, is that working-class culture has spread into the main stream of British society to some extent, more so than the spread of bourgeois values into the working class. I shall have to pursue this further. So far all I have done is to sketch the development of and changes in the British working class.

Post-war England: Affluence and Angst

2009-06-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

The British population, at the end of the Second World War, was exhausted and relieved. It took a little while for things to get back to anything approaching normal; rationing stayed in force for another nine years for some goods, infrastructure needed rebuilding, industry needed reorganising. England, more directly affected by the war than Scotland or Wales, probably had more sorting-out to do, but even if that were not the case, my thoughts are more concerned with England.

Despite the poor material shape of the country, it's my sense that the people, having survived the privations of wartime conditions, rebounded fairly well and got on with life as best they could. However, if they thought life would go on just as it had before the war, they became disillusioned fairly soon. Changes were in the air.

It wasn't until the fifties that changes became really apparent. New buildings were in new styles, and with new purposes: council estates, secondary modern schools, technical colleges. There were new styles in clothes, new cars, new aircraft. The government tried to bolster a patchy spirit of optimism and confidence by launching the Festival of Britain, which was intended to show how British industry was forging ahead. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was a morale-booster, coinciding with a large increase in sales of TV sets and subsequent viewing.

Against the material advances there were some counter-currents: the Korean war, the Emergency in Malaya, the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, and at home, failure to achieve a satisfactory state of labour relations. This was part of of a larger picture of relative decline, in which Britain was losing her empire, and losing ground against other industrialised nations, having been the world leader in both these areas.

Within this milieu voices of dissent began to be heard. A group of writers labelled the Angry Young men expressed through their work a rumbling of dissatisfaction with the state of things. Post-war England was not shaping up in the way they had hoped, or had been led to expect. Look Back in Anger, the play by John Osborne, inspired the label. The group wasn't really cohesive, and it's members probably denied being members, or even denied it's existence. Room at the Top, the novel by John Braine, was not really anti-establishment, being the account of a bloke of working-class origins making his way up the social ladder in the provincial north of England. However it paved the way for a grittier style of writing and film-making as represented by A Kind of Loving, The L-Shaped Room, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Girl with Green Eyes, Up the Junction and The Pumpkin Eater. Most of them were successful as both books and films.

A more expressly anti-establishment voice was heard in the satirical TV show, That was the Week that Was, and in the magazine, Private Eye. Left-wing newspapers, the Daily Herald (Labour) and Daily Worker (Communist) were a bit stodgy and appealed only to staunch members of their respective constituencies. At some point more strident publications began to appear: Socialist Worker, Militant, Red Mole. These were matched by more radical groups, the Socialist Workers Party, International Socialists and the like.

On a more popular cultural level, unrest seemed to grow among young males, with battles between gangs of Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers, and later, skinheads and football hooligans. Milder forms of dissent appeared with the Beats, hippies, and Punks.

The context of the social scene was a growing affluence and vigorous modernisation schemes that saw the building of motorways, shopping centres, tower blocks, industrial estates. But in the larger world context, Britain was declining economically relative to other advanced countries and losing international influence.

It's hard to say what were the direct causes of the various forms of discontent: perhaps they were many. And it would probably be wrong to link together the various manifestations of discontent. Nevertheless it would be true to say that from 1945 until at least 1980 there was a sense of alienation and futility running through English society. I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of this subject and hope to develop it further. Having been out of the country for the last thirty years I'd like to find out if it persisted and whether it still exists.

Globalisation

2008-12-27T09:25:00.001-08:00

Something I read started me thinking about globalisation. It was an essay looking at early views, eg. in Shakespeare, of the world as a whole, a globe. I began to see that if one thought of the planet in this way and went back in time well before Shakespeare, one quickly saw that the world was global, so to speak, from very early on. After all, life spread across the whole world, from the earlies forms up to homo sapiens. It's the latter that's interesting for my puposes, since modern man emerged in a particular part of the world and spread fairly rapidly thoughout it. The habitable planet was not exactly a blank slate, but a well-stocked garden open for the taking, more or less (beware the predators!) Since the first outward expansion there have been many migrations, conquests, colonisations. The Roman Empire, for example, covered most of what the Romans thought of as the known world. Phoenician traders sailed round most of it. The British Empire was a global enterprise, foreshadowing today's globalisation, lacking not much more than the instant communications and fast travel available today.

Plenty has been written about the present situation so I shall not venture any comments on it. I feel that taking the longer and braoder view, however, helps put it in perspective. And looking at that longer view, we see that as humans spread across the world they diversified in appearance, language and culture. It is possible, then, that the apparent homogenising effect of globalisation will be counteracted by local variation.

What's the Matter with Kansas

2008-11-29T11:24:00.000-08:00

I read this book by Thomas Frank. It is an account of a shift to the right among ordinary working Americans as a result of radical conservative propaganda employing social issues, enabling Republican administrations to support big business which is shafting ordinary Americans. Whether this account is strictly accurate I don't know, but it was an entertaining read. It attracted a lot of discussion which I'm not going to go into. The Wikipedia entry sums it up; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What's_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F

Supercapitalism

2008-11-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

I'm parking this synopsis here as a lazy way of making notes of this book's contents. having just finished reading it;

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday LifeWritten by Robert B. Reich

From the greatly admired author of The Work of Nations and The Future of Success, one of America's greatest economic and political thinkers as well as a distinguished public servant in three national administrations, a breakthrough book on the clash between capitalism and democracy.Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has turned into global capitalism, and global capitalism—turbocharged, Web-based, and able to find and make almost anything just about anywhere—has turned into supercapitalism. But as Robert B. Reich makes clear in this eye-opening book, while supercapitalism is working wonderfully well to enlarge the economic pie, democracy—charged with caring for all citizens—is becoming less and less effective under its influence.Reich explains how widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and the spreading effects of global warming are the logical outcomes of supercapitalism. He shows us why companies, fighting harder than ever to maintain their competitive positions, have become even more deeply involved in politics; and how average citizens, seeking great deals and invested in the stock market to an unprecedented degree, are increasingly loath to stand by their values if it means biting the hands that feed them. He makes clear how the tools traditionally used to temper America's societal problems—fair taxation, well-funded public education, trade unions—have withered as supercapitalism has burgeoned. Reich sets out a clear course to a vibrant capitalism and a concurrent, equally vibrant democracy. He argues forcefully that the spheres of business and politics must be kept distinct. He calls for an end to the legal fiction that corporations are citizens, as well as the illusion that corporations can be "socially responsible" until laws define social needs. Reich explains why we must stop treating companies as if they were people—and must therefore abolish the corporate income tax and levy it on shareholders instead, hold individuals rather than corporations guilty of criminal conduct, and not expect companies to be "patriotic." For, as Reich says, only people can be citizens, and only citizens should be allowed to participate in democratic decision making. "

It was quite an eye-opener, illustrating something I've known for a long time without quite getting my finger on, viz. that corporations exist to make money for their shareholders. Reich makes it clear that this is their only bottom-line function, and within a world become more competitive through deregulation and free trade, have been forced to be more energetic in their pursuit of profits. This has led to benefit for consumers in the shape of "great deals', but not without social and environmental costs. His main argument in the second half of the book is that these costs can only be reduced through regulation, which can only be effectively imposed politically by democratic means, not through spurious 'self-regulation' by corporations.

Planet of Slums

2008-11-17T07:18:00.000-08:00

I came across the name of Mike Davis recently, and read a book edited by him: Evil Paradises, which describes rich enclaves in an increasingly impoverished world:

"Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as “The World” is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords—in many ways textbook capitalists—are redefining conspicuous consumption in fortified palaces. In Hong Kong, Cairo, and even the Iranian desert, burgeoning communities of nouveaux riches have taken shelter in fantasy Californias, complete with Mickey Mouse statues, while their maids sleep in rooftop chicken coops. Meanwhile, Ted Turner rides herd over his bison in 2 million acres of private parkland." (New Press review)

Next I read Planet of Slums:

Imagine a place where thousands live crammed together in makeshift shacks bordering toxic dumps, with no access to clean water or electricity. Residents defecate on the ground because there are no latrines, and perpetually live in their own waste because there are no sanitation services. Nobody maintains the roads or regulates traffic, so many perish in car accidents. There is no industry; there are no jobs, no education system, no health care whatsoever. Police presence is limited to collecting protection money. This dystopian vision may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it's far from that–it's reality for more than one billion of the earth's population.
Renowned American scholar Mike Davis chronicles the horrific living conditions in the world's ghettos, favelas, and barrios, detailing the global policy decisions that have fuelled their explosive expansion. The text reveals that most of the world's population growth is taking place in developing countries, with 95 percent of that growth occurring in cities. There are now more than 200,000 slums on the planet, with populations ranging from several hundred to 20 million.
Davis ties the rise of slums to World Bank policy. For the last 30 years, the institution has been lending money to impoverished nations at high interest rates, then leveraging those debts to aggressively restructure local economies. Many nations now spend more than half of their annual budget on debt repayment, and the bank requires these countries to slash social spending for what's left. The result is the complete retreat of the state–and an unprecedented level of misery for the poor of the world.
The grim situation that Davis describes should ring the alarm for civil society and governments alike. Sadly, the academic approach of the book guarantees its readership will be limited. The text is packed with tables and statistics, but it's short on narrative. The reader walks away with a good understanding of how a billion people are living–but gains no real connection to this mass of humanity. In spite of its best intentions, Planet of Slums winds up reinforcing the abstraction of slum populations when it should be humanizing them.

Straight.com (Vanvouver) review. Cutting and pasting may be lazy but it's quick. I tend to agree with the final sentence, which echoes another review I read online. Davis cuts from one slum to another in his account, without really distinguishing one from another, so that slums worldwide tend to coalesce into an homogeneous mass. Still, this global view portrays the global horror, which was brought about largely through colonialism, maintained through post-colonialism, when middle classes maintained the barriers keeping slum-dwellers out, or moved into slum areas that were tidied up, and reinforced by neoliberal economic policies.

State of the World

2008-09-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

I'm finding myself getting more interested in world affairs these days, probably as a result of web browsing and reading articles. I was given a copy of Charlie Wilson's War as a birthday present, and having read that decided to read non-fiction books again after years of reading mainly crime fiction. Charlie Wilson's War describes how the CIA assisted the mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, with the aid of congressman Charlie Wilson.

I next read Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, who gives an account of the way countries that have been subject to a disaster of some kind are made vulnerable to the imposition of an open market, allowing foreign corporations to move in. Then I read Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, who describes the rise of the "security" contractor, or mercenary army, and the privatisation of the American military.

I'm presently reading The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt, who runs the TomDispatch website which I visit regularly, and who examines the American psyche. So it will be seen from these notes that I am looking at the state of the world from the perspective of American involvement, which is considerable, and influence, which may be the strongest, but not the only one.

The prevailing world view among the administrative classes seems to be that expressed by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History, which asserts that the world model is now universally based on democracy and free markets, that the clash of ideologies is over. However he has modified that position, and I believe there are in fact countervailing forces, which is what makes the world a turbulent and interesting place.

May you live in interesting times (purported Chinese curse)

Withnail and I

2008-08-03T08:03:00.000-07:00

Watched this film last night: hilarious. An alcohol-fuelled romp that follows loosely on from Hangover Square, in a different time and place and medium. There's plenty of info on the web, eg. here, so I don't neeed to go into the story, such as it is. My only serious thought on reflection is that the lifestyle of characters such as these in the book and film, based on regular sojourns in the same pub or pubs, is not as prevalent as it once was. Impecunious types can't afford to drink more than a pint or two, and the atmosphere of most pubs today isn't conducive to the sort of scene I have in mind, where a central figure, sometimes a minor celebrity, a writer or actor, would hold court, surrounded by a regular crew of acolytes or hangers-on.

The pattern of pub-going and drinking has changed overall in recent decades. At one time it was common for men (usually) to arrive at their local fairly early in the evening and have several pints of ordinary bitter of a low alcohol content, play darts or chat with the other regulars, most nights of the week. The generation that replaced them preferred a stronger beer, to the extent that ordinary bitters practically disappeared, drinking fewer pints and staying a shorter time in any one pub, and not having strong allegiance to any one. I actually fall into this character, having always been a lone pub crawler with a few regular stops that shift over time. But the lone drinker is a different animal from those that drink in groups.

I write this in the context of recent reports of declining sales of beer in pubs in England, the gradual withering away of one of the staples of life there. One commentator pointed out that English-style pubs have popped up all over the world, which I've observed in Canada, so it's true to some extent. and welcome though they are, they aren't English pubs as such. You only find them, and English beer, in England, and in dwindling numbers. Not that I've done much to support such pubs as are here in Nova Scotia; can't afford to. I drink home-brewed beer and go out a few times a year for a meal, rather than just to drink, which follows the increasingly prevalent pattern.

Hangover Square

2008-07-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

I read this book by Patrick Hamilton a few days ago, around my 65th birthday. It was actually a re-read, as I first read it some time around 1960. Hamilton is well known as the author of plays, including Gaslight which was made into a successful film, but this is the only work of his that I have read. (It was also made into a film, less successful) It concerns a group of characters whose lives consist mainly of drinking, in dingy flats or their favorite Earls Court pub. (click on the author's name to find out more) The story itself is not what drew me to the book, and drew me back, more the style of the writing and the ambience it creates. I was fond of loose, almost plot-less books in the days when I first read this. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch was probably the one that started me off, after which I looked for more experimental stuff, including Alain Robbe-Grillet and other members of the French avant-garde.

However there's a certain type of English novel that appeals to me: Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell was another, the work of Henry Green, Rayner Heppenstall. Hurry on Down by John Wain follows this tradition, if I can call it that. Their structure is decided very much by contingency, which fascinated Iris Murdoch. In other words, the course of events is determined purely by immediate circumstance, one thing following another. I think the reason I liked them is that they were like life, or like a certain way of looking at life, plus the fact that I simply found them enjoyable to read.

The above is by way of introducing what is my main theme here, which is life after 65. I could have given that as the title of the piece, but I thought I'd come at it obliquely. The idea was to chronicle my progress and gradual decline through this terminal phase, but it occurred to me that anything I wrote would be a product of that process, and illustrative of it. I think one can't just say, "I am in decline/fading away or whatever" which is self-referential without referencing anything specific. It would make as much sense to simply stop writing, which is going to happen sooner or later.

My life has been governed almost exclusively by contingency, moving from one situation to another as things changed, or I felt like it, or met someone, etc. I've been in the same situation now for almost thirty years, so there hasn't been change, apart from having children, but I feel no less governed by contingency: life is contingent on things remaining the same.

Crocodile Soup

2008-05-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading this book by Julia Darling, who lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, northern England. It's autobiographical in style, self-deprecating, about a young lesbian woman who works in a museum. She gives an account of her unusual upbringing with odd parents, her strange brother, and the weird encounters she has with people, both as a child and young adult. I liked the short, compact chapters, the wit and wry humour. I could imagine the character Gert played by Rita Tushingham as she was in the sixties.To recapture any further sense of the writing I should have to look at it again.

The book reminded me of Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill, who writes with similar honesty and lucidity, and whose character is also treated roughly by the world. Of course there is a great tradition of anti-heroic types in literature, from Holden caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, to Lucky Jim, and the characters in Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, and so on. I'm drawn to these books and these characters partly because I identify with them, but also because they lend themselves to the production of readable, entertaining books.

Nostalgia

2008-04-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

I find that the things which spark the most vivid recollections of the past are snatches of music, mainly pop, soul, R&B, tunes that I would have heard on the radio, on pub jukeboxes, my own records, old ones that I seldom play. Sometimes it's hearing a tune that sparks the vivid recall, but often it's just a spontaneous eruption in my own head. Of course I don't require to hear a pop tune in order to evoke memories, other things will do it, but mostly they do occur spontaneously.

The point of interest, to me, in this phenomenon, is its fragmentary and selective nature, whatever the prompting source. My strongest memories are like snapshots, and like snapshots, they don't reveal what happened earlier or later. Naturally, there are always areas of the past one would like to forget, and others one would like to remember more fully. But I find that my brain throws out memories in quite an arbitrary manner, and the gaps in between seem to be getting longer and more misty. I've become fascinated by the aging process as it affects the mind, and I am in a position to experience it at first hand. It's a bit hard to tell if your mind is deteriorating, if that very deterioration prevents you from recalling if your mind was in fact sharper when you were younger. I'm not at all sure that it was sharper; perhaps a little bit quicker at times, more impulsive.

A specific case that has intrigued me lately came about by my looking up the pop music charts for the 60s and 70s, in the course of putting together retrospective music compilations, both of which are easy to do with the aid of the computer. What I found was that a large proportion of tunes on the charts were ones I'd never heard of, and others I didn't like, then or now. Those I was interested in and knew well were a fairly small number. So there are these misty grey areas in the record, as it were, as well as in memory. Another similar case is with diaries, that record films seen, which is usually of no use at all because I haven't the faintest recollection of having seen the film.

My general impression now is that life is a pretty arbitrary business, contingent rather than necessary, just one damned thing after another, as someone said about history, lacking much of a real purpose aside from the biological on.

Two Theories: Equilibrium and Paradigm Shift

2008-04-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

Equilibrium: 1 a: a state of intellectual or emotional balance : poise b: a state of adjustment between opposing or divergent influences or elements2: a state of balance between opposing forces or actions that is either static (as in a body acted on by forces whose resultant is zero) or dynamic (as in a reversible chemical reaction when the rates of reaction in both directions are equal)3: balance 6a (Merriam-Webster online dictionary)

Over the years I've become interested in the idea of equilibrium. I first heard of it in connection with chemistry -solutions in equilibrium- and biology, where it plays an important part within organisms and in the ecology. Then in economics I learned of Pareto equilibrium which I never understood in terms of mathematics but which I believe refers to the manner in which buyers and sellers optimise their dealings in the marketplace.

The aspect of equilibrium which has more recently interested me is where it applies in society. Without going into the more arcane aspects of game theory and so on, which can be found online, I just make the general observation that societies, with a few exceptions, tend to maintain stability about an axis of normality. This is based on essential human needs and the consensual means of satisfying them through production, consumption and social intercourse. Though societies face periodic upheavals and threats, they tend to return to the status quo. Of course there are quite deliberate efforts made to do so, but I suspect there is a force of inertia, of innate conservatism, running through the mass of society, which contributes substantially.

The second theory I am pondering is that made famous by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , in which he hypothesised that science proceeds within some overall assumptions, or paradigms, which remain in place as long as results, obtained through "normal science". do not contradict them. If there is a weight of contradictory results which requires re-thinking, this leads to the creation of a new paradigm. If accepted, the new paradigm becomes the ruling one, a process Kuhn referred to as a "paradigm shift". I'd like to apply this sort of thinking to society, which, according to my equilibrium theory, carries on in much the same sort of way until a sufficient weight of change causes it to alter some fundamental aspect of its overall framework or paradigm.

An example of this might be the shift from a religion-based society to a secular one; from a resource-based economy to a manufacture-based one; from an industrial economy to a service economy; from a communally based society to an individualistic one. I suppose the best example of both theories in action would be the changes in Russia, pre-revolution through the Soviet era to the post-Soviet era of today. I notice that most large-scale changes come about through economic change, and I would predict that future changes will occur similarly, eg. through global warming, dwindling oil supplies and associated price inflation. I would also predict that such changes will be put off as long as possible due to the inherent inertia of societies and their collective desire for equilibrium.

Modernity and the Nebulous Self

2008-03-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, since the early twentieth century, our urban world has become dominated by straight lines and flat planes. The photographs, film images and minmalist artworks that illustrate this world suggest that it is a static, sterile sort of place. Objectively, I suppose it is, but it is inhabited by busy, messy humans whose lives are in strong contrast to the orderliness of the modern city. Thinking a bit more about Robbe-Grillet and others in the modern scene, I began to develop a theory about their work which contrasts vague and disorganised human beings with their stark and mechanical surroundings. I'm thinking not only of built structures but of the technology of communication and control, which, though dynamic, treat human beings in a cool, dispasionate way.

Film-making is a highly technical process, as is still photography. Just as painting became self-conscious, and paintings became objects as much as representations, concerned with the painting process. so film-making began to be absorbed by its own techniques. In Last year at Marienbad, written by R-G and filmed by Alain Resnais, one sees a contrast betweeen the sumptuous decor of the Nymphenburg palace, where the film was shot, the uncertainties of the characters in their relationships, their own positions, and the analytical eye of the cameraman.

This contrast is brought out more fully, I believe, in the novels of R-G, where he describes scenes, or partial scenes, with precision, in some cases several times, within a plot which is rudimentary and obscure. This reminds me of the way in which vivid memories can come to mind out of misty and forgotten backgrounds. Thus one can be precise in some ways, but that precision is subject to human frailty

I think J.G.Ballard was taking a similar approach with his clinical descriptions of motorway flyovers, reservoirs, the geometry of high-rise apartment blocks, within the context of which human frailty was all too evident. Ballard clothed his stories in a very personal, almost obsessive style, in a sense making an object of the language itself, so that it played into the sets of relationships that probably only he was ablt to comprehend fully.

“From the window of his office, Dr Nathan watched Talbert standing on the roof of the multi-storey car park. The deserted deck was a favourite perch. The inclined floors seemed a model of Talbert’s oblique personality, forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle.”
JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Already, without touching her, he knew intimately the repertory of her body, its anthology of junctions. His eyes turned to the multi-storey car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.”
JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

I copied these quotes from http://www.ballardian.com/ wich looks like a site I shall have to investigate in depth. They are amazing. No-one but Ballard could write stuff like that, except as parody, which numerous people have attempted, just showing the appeal of Ballard. And i dont think it's much of a stretch to connect him with the French Nouvelle Vague of the 50s and 60s.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

2008-02-27T13:23:00.000-08:00

The French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet died not long ago. The announcement of his death reminded me of my interest in him when I was young. I first heard his name as the scriptwriter for a new and experimental film, around 1960. It was Last year at Marienbad (illustration above) Experiments in film and literature appealed to me, and I was able to get the city library to order the script which had been published as a book. Later I saw the film, which was indeed different from the run of the mill, fairly incomprehensible, but had an interesting feel, and great musical score.

The first novel I read by Robbe-grillet was Jealousy, followed by The Erasers , The Voyeur, and Project for a Revolution in New York. These all displayed his unconventional technique of writing in a detached sort of way, describing details at great length, sometimes several times, without supplying the usual sort of context and plot. Only an extract can convey the feel of the writing:

"On the opposite wall, the centipede is there, in its tell-tale spot, right in the middle of the panel.
It has stopped, a tiny oblique line two inches long at eye level, halfway between the baseboard (at the hall doorway) and the corner of the ceiling. The creature is motionless. Only its antennae rise and fall one after the other in an alternating, slow, but continuous movement.
At its posterior extremity, the considerable development of the legs--of the last pair especially, which are longer than the antennae--identifies it unquestionably as the Scutigera, also known as the "spider-centipede" or "minute-centipede," so called because of a native belief as to the rapidity of the action of its bite, supposedly mortal. Actually this species is not very venomous; it is much less so, in any case, than many Scolopendra common in the region.
Suddenly the anterior part of the body begins to move, executing a rotation which curves the dark line toward the lower part of the wall. And immediately, without having time to go any further, the creature falls onto the tiles, still twisting and curling up its long legs while its mandibles rapidly open and close around its mouth in a quivering reflex.
Ten seconds later, it is nothing more than a reddish pulp in which are mingled the debris of unrecongnizable sections.
But on the bare wall, on the contrary, the image of the squashed Scutigera is perfectly clear, incomplete but not blurred, reproduced with the faithfulness of an anatomical drawing in which only a portion of the elements are shown: an antenna, two curving mandibles, the head and the first joint, half of the second, a few large legs, etc.... "

Jealousy, 1957 (from http://halfaya.org/robbegrillet/rgd/jalousie.html )

This passage is repeated in several places in different ways, as though a director were making a film and trying a number of takes from different angles. Indeed, R-Gs technique has been described as 'cinematic' by many commentators. I suppose I was drawn to him by a youthful taste for experiment in literature and film. The spare, objective nature of the prose appealed to me. The camera work of Michelangelo Antonioni and other nouvelle vague filmakers appealed in the same way. I notice the use of the present tense in the above extract: here, it heightens the cinematic sense. This was the first time I recall seeing this usage, which is often employed today, to lesser effect, I feel.

Other writers of the period, lat 50s/early 60s, included Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Raymond Roussel and Nathalie Sarraute, all of whose work I read with varying degrees of comprehension. a more accessible British writer associated with those was Rayner Heppenstall, whose books I enjoyed.

Go: John Clellon Holmes and the Beat Generation

2008-01-21T09:14:00.000-08:00

They went around the corner and over to Third Avenue. Under the shuddering roar and sooty pilings of the Elevated there was a ramshackle, narrrow bar called Mannons where they always drank when they were in Hobbes' neighborhood. It was agrimy, ill-lit place, lacking even a neon in the window, the atmosphere fouled with the odors of urine and flat beer; and there were always a few dispirited, vacant-faced Third Avenue drunks in the rear booths.
From Go: John Clellon Holmes.

This was the first of the 'Beat Generation' books to be published, in 1952 preceding the much better known On the Road by Jack Kerouac by a few years. I may have read it in the early 60s, certainly extracts of it, and I did read The Horn by the same author. Reading it recently, I found it to be a mildly interesting book, not particularly well written or gripping. It's about a group of friends who inhabit New York and live mainly for parties, drugs and booze, frequenting dives like the one described -rather well- above, and jazz clubs, drifting, or rushing frenetically, from one to the other.

These characters would have been described as 'dropouts' a decade later. They are middle class, with some university education and some military service or equivalent (merchant marine) during the last years of the war. Disillusioned with the state of post-war American society, they are searching for meaning in life beyond the Babbit-like work, reproduce and consume regimen offered by the mainstream. Insofar as they find it at all, they find it in the sheer thrill of existence, heightened by the drugs, booze and rushing about that they engage in. Though words like hip and cool appear in the book, and there are mentions of being beat and of the beat generation, they don't have an ideology of hipness, a counterculture such as their sucessors possessed. However they did provide the impetus for later waves of hipsters, beatniks, hippies and travellers.

I find the period interesting because although there was this sense of tiredness, of being beaten and disillusioned, in the early 50s, there was a creative ferment going on in the form of small-ensemble jazz, and Abstract Expressionist painting, centred mainly in New York. The downwardly-mobile young people who identified with the black musicians and the denizens of seedy bars, probably helped to bring these art forms to a wider public than the more affluent paying members of the clubs would have done. But that is speculative. For me the interest lies in the fact that there have been these swirls of movement within society, of people looking for alternatives to orthodox lifestyles, with varying degrees of creativity and success. It makes me wonder if there are any elements of a counter-culture around today, other than those groups that are involved in video gaming, skateboarding and other specific activities.

Memory, memories

2007-12-20T07:22:00.000-08:00

Memory is not a medium like a book. There is no uniform coverage of experiences running in a neat chronological order. It seems to me that the mind sweeps the memory and reveals clusters that stand exposed to scutiny becoming perhaps focal points around which a nexus of memories builds up providing reference points against which experience is measured.

29th Oct. 1973

This unedited quote from my journal says, I think, what I still believe, though the second sentence leaves me mentally breathless. The point it tries to make is that when I recall some aspect of the past intensely enough, memories accrue to it and remind me of others that draw still others. It's rather like looking into the night sky and seeing recognisable constellations of stars, and others fainter beyond, then others ad infinitum, almost. Except with memories, the further you go, the more becomes recognisable.

There's a lot that I'm not keen to remember, much less recount here. Anecdotes of people and my dealings with them are not what I'm about. This is too introspective for that. What I want is to distil the essence of life's experience, get some sense of the overall pattern or the armature, what holds it together. There is something, but it's nebulous, abstract. I had a sense of it the other day, surrounding some place in my past like a veil of coloured lights, pinpricks in an inky void. It was a pleasant feeling. One thing I drew from it was the notion that time, in terms of one's life, is not a straightforward progression but a series of outward expansions from various points, "focal points around which a nexus of memories builds up."

Images

2007-12-17T15:44:00.000-08:00

The rippled surface of transparent green-blue water, its cool depth and quiet reflections. (Inspired by a David Hockney painting)

The clean edges of new buildings standing against an immeasurable blue sky.

A group of pines growing from an ancient mound of tussocky grass, an island of mystery in a landscape of rolling curves. 17th sept. 1973

The grey-brown quality of the light tempering the precise detail of hedgerows in winter. Looking down the Golden Valley from Beach Hill, the curves of the valley delineated by bare trees, a multitude of carefully arranged twigs. The earth a pattern of rich browns, rolling away into a sharp perspective. 17th Dec.

These short entries represent an attempt at original writing, as opposed to notes and reminiscences. ( The last one is from a bike ride between Bristol and Bath) It strikes me at once that although the entries in this journal were only partial glimpses into my thoughts and say little or nothing of daily life at the time, they evoke a host of memories and associations. These need to be sifted and considered before I go much further.

The pleasure of cycling

2007-12-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

The pleasure of cycling, as well as moving a precision instrument for many miles under ones own muscle-power, lies in the fact that after a certain point the irritating thoughts in the mind have been replaced by a calm and continuing vision of the unrolling landscape, and the mundane prospect replaced by the pleasant anticipation of well-earned food, drink and rest at the end of the journey.

Thus the effect is to bring the mind into balance, within itself and in relation to the landscape around it. Where the road curves beneath a ridge capped with oaks, or where the climbing of a hill opens a broad pattern of fields and pasture, the conscious or unconscious knowledge of the age of the landscape and its evolution, the ways its parts mesh in a harmonious whole, assists the achievement of that balance.
From my journal, 9th Sept. 1973

I don't need to add much to this. It's a bit more 'flowery' than I'd aim for nowadays, but it shows my enthusiasm for cycletouring and illustrates the mental aspect of cycling. The connection to the landscape is something I still feel, and it's what distinguishes cycle touring from other aspects of cycling.

Persistence of the Self

2007-12-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this, and following notes, is to obtain a journal of a sort, in which I might trace and develop those concepts and values most central to my life. This may produce a series of stepping-stones from one position to another, or some sort of pattern, or a succession of trivial cliches. I expect the entries to be brief and sporadic, as I anticipate making them only when I consider there is something worth recording. No subject will be too humble to be included, provided there is even a glimmer of light on the future or past apparent within it. Any statement I make at any point may be modified or contradicted by a later one, but will in the final analysis be judged on its own merits and in relation to the final overall context.

26th August 1973

This is a verbatim quotation from a notebook I started on the date indicated. It could almost be a statement of intention for this blog, which is one reason for my referring to it; to see how much my ideas and expression of them have changed, or remained consistent, over the years. The impression I get when I look at my notebooks, which isn't very often, is of a sense of deja vu. Thus, if I think I've had a new idea, I find that it's not new at all, I wrote about it years ago. Conversely, if I glance through my notebooks hoping to come across some fresh inspiration I find all the material drearily familiar.

Still, the thoughts expressed are mine, and are about all I have in the way of reflection,so I'm going to drag some of them out and look at them again, in this form where I can add comments from the present perspective. The original journals were private, unlike this potentially public form, but I probably wrote as if for publication, since anything written can potentially be read. And I'm under no illusion that this blog will reach a wide audience.

A few years ago I read Reasons and Persons, by Derek Parfit, back when I was still reading serious books. In one section Parfit examines the idea of personal identity, which is contingent to my area of concern. I can't go into this in any depth, but he concludes that the notion of personal identity is not a useful one. He states, roughly, that the persistence of body and brain, and psychological continuity, are sufficient to account for a person. I tend to agree, by virtue of the fact that a sense of identity is a subjective state, and subjective states fall away to nothingness in succeeding moments. So one has to ask in what does identity consist? I cannot retrieve a previous subjective state, so I cannot be sure in all details how I was feeling at some time in the past. Memory is quite selective. Everything changes over time, the body and the mind. Memories fade or become distorted, and are selective to begin with. But I still have this sense of continuity, of unified being over time, of having come down a unique path, occupying a particular life-world. Perhaps in lay terms, this is what identity is. I shall have to look at Parfit again; there's a 300 page manuscript of his available online.

Cycling memories

2007-11-20T06:04:00.000-08:00

On crystal clear days in late autumn I recall certain images quite vividly. One that comes to mind now is of cycling past the parkland surrounding a country house, where a boundary wall is visible across a grass verge, behind a random growth of trees and bushes. With the leaves mostly gone from the trees, the wall has come into view, its old stones spotted with lichen and in places ivy-covered. It has an air of mystery, this wall, which, though partly revealed, hides the woody parkland behind it, and the house which stands proudly if secretively in its green surroundings.

This image is a memory of the time I lived in Frome, a small market town south of Bath in England, in the late 70s. I did quite a bit of cycle touring in those days. The ride that I recall fragments of was one I took late in the season, climbing out of the town in a southerly direction. The place I recall above is the edge of the Marston estate where it runs beside the A361 Shepton Mallet road. At the next turning, at the corner of the estate,I left the main road to plunge down a narrow lane which followed the edge of the estate.

My route now took me over an undulating stretch of country criss-crossed with minor roads, towards a wooded hillside. Soon I was climbing, with woods on either side, towards a small hamlet named Gare Hill. The light was dimmer here and there was a damp chill in the air. A sense of gloom began to fill me, as though somewhere here was a place of tragedy or suffering. It reminded me of somewhere else; Wickham Glen, perhaps, near Bristol, also in winter. In a strange way it wasn't an unwelcome feeling, but I wasn't sorry to climb free of the woods, past the village of Kilmington and on towards Stourton.

By now I had left the clay and limestone country of Somerset and was heading into the chalk uplands of Wiltshire, where open spaces had a different kind of brooding stillness. I was close by the Stourhead estate, with its ornamental lake and gardens, but was well out of the tourist season. The village is attractive in its own right. Close by the entrance to the Stourhead grounds and part of the National Trust property there is a small pub which I found most welcome. After a pint or two of Wadworth's 6X I went on my way, joining the Maiden Bradley road for a quick descent into Mere, crossing the main A303 to enter the small town.

One of the main pleasures of cycling for me is the actual process of riding, the physical contact with the road through the frame and wheels of the bike. It's easy to overlook this in describing a ride, and it would become tiresome through repetition, but it is a fundamental aspect. I was always strongly aware of it at certain points, such as after a climb, when you're warmed up, changing up through the gears, and feel you are getting well on the way, the road falling slightly away ahead. The tyres hum, the pedals turn easily, the hubs revolve smoothly about their axles.

I had lunch in Mere in a pub that must have been a main stopping-place for stagecoaches before the motor age, and for cars later, but now quieter since the opening of the bypass. After Mere I swung round to cross the main road again and head up the B3095 toward the Deverills, a group of villages lying along that road. Iwas now on the return leg of this short trip, crossing the open spaces of bare fields which I had glimpsed from the Maiden Bradley road. There was a fairly easy climb up into the chalk downs, then a gentle descent through Kingston and Monkton Deverill in the valley of the river Wylye, which rises in this area. It was necessary to join another main road after this quiet stretch, for a short time. Here there is another tourist attraction at Crockerton, a lake called Shearwater where rhododendrons are spectacular at the right time, also a pub called the Bath Arms, a reminder of the ownership of the large Longleat estate. This estate, belonging to Lord Bath, and Stourhead, cover quite a large area in a wide arc, between Warminster and the A303 west of Mere.

I took another diversion through the woods, then joined the Warminster road for a leisurely pedal back to Frome.

Note: Many pictures available on the Web. Google Frome, or better, try Flickr and search Frome, Stourhead etc.

ps. It took me almost as long to write this as it would have taken to do the ride. No wonder I only post once a month. Note to self - jot down a few more qick notes if you want to record your thoughts.

Centreless/ Centerless Self/World

2007-10-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

I think I picked up the term 'centreless' (which I'll spell that way) from the industrial process, which gave me an image of a machine floating over a perfectly polished surface with random movements. It turned out to be nothing like that, but the word stuck, and I liked the image. Quite recently I typed the two phrases into a google search and found a lot of references, apart from grinding.

Buddhists regard the self as centreless, in fact they deny the existence of the self as an identifiable entity. Post-modernists also speak of the centreless self. These notions can be easily researched if not easily understood. As a beginning of my own understanding I want to see if I can set out what it might mean to have a centred self/life/world. NB I don't know if these terms need be treated separately, they may be interchangeable.

I can imagine one's life could be centred upon one's job, family, home, church, community, interests, where these -or one or two prominent ones- provide enduring anchoring-points in life, giving direction and focus. If one's life and world has a central point, theme or focus, then they are centred. If one drifts between jobs, marriages, places of residence etc., the less one could be said to be centred. It seems to me that the subjective side of this is at least as important as the objective, visible side. If someone has lack of purpose or direction, a sense of rootlessness, their self/world is centreless. I think Emile Durkheim was referring to this very state when he talked about anomie. The sense of alienation he described occurs in societies undergoing great change, as in the industrial revolution, when he wrote. In some form it has been with us throughout the industrail and post-industial periods, some two hundred years.

An examination of the various manifestations of existential angst in society is too large an undertaking for me to tackle here. Suffice it to say that much of twentieth century art, philosophy and sociology touches on it, and the preoccupation undoubtedly continues.

Another indication of the centreless self occurs to me in the temporal nature of life. If you consider a lifespan from birth to death, you would be hard-pressed to say where the centre is; not necessarily the middle, which may or may not be the period of greatest achievement. One goes from one stage to the next, loosing one's grip on the past except through tenuous memories. In the final stages, at least in my experience, the whole thing becomes a set of contingent episodes with no really unifying theme. If I propose that the central fact of my life was having a family, it could be argued that this was never a central plan of mine and though momentous, still merely contingent. My vaguely disastrous career path and later activities, even more so.

For all that, and in some degree because of it (ie. external influences and personal nature) I like the idea of centrelessness, in art forms such as abstraction, nouvelle vague films, novels with minimal plot, music with loose formal stucture, and the idea of the flaneur, the casual but interested stroller, observing life without being much of a participant.

Abstraction

2007-09-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

When I first started painting works like the one above (Dawning, 1999) I did not have a theory of abstraction that I wanted to express in visual form, I simply painted in roughly the style of painters I admired, in this case Mark Rothko. It's not by any means a copy, though it does borrow very loosely the three-rectangle form of a lot of Rothko's paintings. All I can say about what I like in abstract expressionist works is that I like the look of them.

This gives me the beginnings of a theory of abstraction: that there is something about the overall look of a painting that makes an impression, prior to consideration of the subject-matter. Thus one might say that it is possible to abstract that overall look and aim to paint just that, without any specific subject-matter. I'm reading something like this in the comments I quoted in my last entry, about great art having to have an 'extra spark', an 'emotional aura'. I'd go as far as to say that this applies not just to great art, but to any artwork worth a second glance.

Since I started these ruminations I had a glance over some writings on art (Aesthetics section of Stanford Encylopaedia of Philosophy, quotes from Clement Greenberg, Roger Fry, et.al.) and it was quickly apparent that much of the writing seeks to explain and justify abstraction, in terms of "significant form" , "the primacy of the picture plane", etc. As this is a rough note rather than a finished essay I'm not going to dig out and quote sources. The sense I get is that since the early twentieth century it is the form of a painting that is primary, not content.

Of course all this has gone by the board now. Since Abstract Expressionism came and went, as an avant-garde art form, there has been a plethora of styles, some of them having content in the foreground, the form or medium being just a vehicle. Eg. video productions, textual work. Abstraction is just one of the styles of the past which can find a place in the present, a worthwhile one I believe, and since it has always been somewhat misunderstood, is still worth examining for underlying principles and values. That's as far as I'm going for now.

As a kind of coda to the idea of skill as art, I'll mention that you don't see much, if any, of the obsessive attention to detail that many of the Victorian painters exercised in large paintings, after the nineteenth century. The Impressionists, who broke away from that style, remain about the most popular and recognisable group of painters among today's gallery-goers. Implicitly, then, I suggest, there is recognition that skill alone does not produce great art. The certain something that does, remains elusive.

Skill and the Arts

2007-08-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

2 Blowhards recently had a piece on the well-worn dictum that visual artists should display a certain level of skill, viz. the ability to render accurately the human face. And by extension I suppose the human figure, a tree, a horse etc. The blogger acknowledges that it is not sufficient merely to produce a competent rendering; more is necessary to make the work art: an intangible quality that gives the work a satisfying 'feel'.

I feel a great weight of tiredness descend on me when I read or hear such pronouncements. In fairness I agree with the second part. The first is more difficult to deal with. As is often the case these days there is a string of comments after the subject posting, many of them answering it more capably than I feel able to, so I'm confining my thoughts here and anyone stumbling on them is welcome to read and comment further if they wish.

Blowhard presents his case by giving examples of areas of the arts that require lengthy training: the professional musician, the opera singer, the ballet dancer. If the arts in general were defined in terms of these skill-intensive disciplines, the argument would have merit. But Blowhard himself provides the basis for a counter-argument:

But I'll admit that technical skill isn't everything when it comes to graphic arts. An outstanding artist will deliver more than a technically excellent, yet lifeless, image. A great artist needs to "set his stage" compellingly and create an emotional aura to his painting if it is to be recognized as great.
and:
Highly skilled landscape and still-life painters can be regarded as great artists provided that they can give that extra spark that brings the scene to life.

Suppose that a painter is able to create the spark without having to compose a meticulously rendered realistic scene. Think of Cezanne as against the high realist Victorian painters, Monet, the other Impressionists. They realised that the feel of the work was more important than its information content, which I suppose was a logical consequence of Romanticism and its emphasis on emotion. This was carried to its logical conclusion in Abstract Expressionism, in which Rothko, for example, had no pictorial elements except rough rectangles, but conveyed a lot of emotion. Since the Fifties there has been a plethora of art movements, some involving representation, eg Hyper-Realism, and some not. There has been a tendency toward using artworks to put forward messages, directly in text or video, or symbolically, which has nothing to do with representation or even feeling in the aesthetic sense. (What that feeling is, precisely, is an appropriate subject for a much longer treatment.)

What it boils down to is, for me, whether the visual arts should be considered in the same terms as those in which technical training is necessary. Note that it is possible to complete a degree in fine arts without taking any courses in drawing or painting at all. In other words you can take a lot of technical training in fine art without ever learning to render the human face. Anyway my contention is that the visual arts need not be so constrained. One of their main raisons d'etre is experimentation and free expression. What counts is the effect of the final result.

A final note concerns the written arts. All the creative writing courses in the world cannot guarantee a successful writer. I looked briefly at the biography of Dylan Thomas, and didn't see much in the way of formal training in poetry writing. Novelists may well have university degrees in English literature, but as far as I can see few, if any, owe their writing skills directly to their education. I don't know if I've made my case here but at least I've presented it.

Film Noir

2007-08-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

I came across this article posted in Arts and Letters Daily http://www.aldaily.com/ and being quite a fan of film noir decided to make a note of it. The author comments on the distinction between the bright optimism of post-war middle America and the growing suburban consumer society, and the dark urban milieu of the popular films of the period.

Most of them were gangster films based on the books of Dashiel Hammett, Micky Spillane et. al., with titles like Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, Kiss of Death. The writer of the article restricts the definition of film noir to American films of this type, within the period late 40s - late 50s and confines his appraisal to the distinction mentioned between the suburbs and the dark but alluringly dangerous city, some aspects of which threatened the suburbs. By the 60s, of course, the danger of American inner cities was no joke, which partly accounts for the decline of film noir. The universality of colour after the 50s must also have something to do with it. Nowadays one may be tempted to think of most monochrome films as noir.

If I were writing a study of film noir I would cast my net a little wider than Richard Schickel does. I would allude to German expressionist films, notably Metropolis, and to French films inspired by American film noir, eg. those by Claude Chabrol. I would also make reference to aspects of American culture where change was rapidly occurring after the war: jazz, abstract expressionist painting, automobile design, rock and roll. motorcycle gangs, the Beat generation, none of them directly connected to film noir but part of a turbulent cultural milieu.

I might also range further in what I consider to be film noir. I think John Frankenheimer's Seconds was a good example; Night of the Living Dead, maybe Shadows by John Cassavetes. I wonder if one could include films like Blade Runner, Blue Velvet...but that's as far as I go in this note.

Alexandria Quartet at 50

2007-07-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell was among the books I read when I discovered modern literature shortly after leaving school. Now the first series, Justine, is fifty years old, and commemorated in an essay in The American Scholar, http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/quartet-trueheart.html
The views of the author of this piece are similar to mine, viz. that the books seemed excitingly avant-garde at the time, but not so adventurous now, but have held up over time. One of the main reasons for this is the descriptive writing about the city itself, Alexandria, "Egypt’s second largest city, a seedy polyglot seaport of bygone luster" lovingly describing

"streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others’ mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children—the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés."

I don't know how long the link will stay up but I make this note to remind me of my own feelings about the Quartet. I may return to it again one day, for the third or fourth time, its hot, humid, murky, scented atmosphere and vague, louche set of characters.

Amateur psychology

2007-07-24T16:22:00.000-07:00

I was thinking I'm not an ideal blogger as I'm not too enthusiastic about talking about myself, and I don't post that often. However, as I don't imagine many people read this, if any, I could hold to my original purpose of using it as a personal journal, which is more in character with my introverted nature. So I propose to continue jotting down thoughts as and when I feel so inclined.

It occurred to me that extroverts, if that term is used nowadays, are people who project themselves into the world, and whose concerns are all external: other people and wordly affairs. (These are gross simplifications) Introverts, on the other hand, are people who are more inclined to live within themselves, as it were, and deal with the world as it impinges on them. They are more contemplative, and it might be that, being more focussed on their inner lives, those lives are richer. Depending, I suppose, on the quality of the input. NB. this is not to suggest that extroverts have no inner life, just that it tends to have a different perspective.

People with autism, in this crude classification, are at the extreme end of the introversion spectrum, and indeed have their own spectrum of severity. Instead of having an inner life that is fed by the environment, the person with autism is assailed by it and finds it necessary to put up strong defences against it, with varying success.

New Pub progress, Port Williams

2007-07-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't thought of much to blog about recently, so I continue with the main object of interest on the ground here, namely the new pub. These shots aren't too brilliant but they show the interior and the construction methods, which involve a lot of wood. The floor is a polished concrete slab and there is no basement, so if the tide ever rises this high there shouldn't be too much damage. The interior space is impressive; it should be a fine venue when it opens. We look forward to that.

New Painting

2007-06-15T06:56:00.001-07:00

This is actually a re-painting over a previous one. It's acrylic and found materials on canvas, 24 x 30 ins. in size. I haven't thought of a title yet.

Port Williams Pub Progress

2007-06-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

May went by in a sort of haze. After the winter I feel too knocked out to do very much, but then the annual chores start to crop up. So anyway I'm making an effort to post again, just as if I have an eager audience.

The new pub now has its roof trusses installed. The lower picture shows its location in relation to the disused feed mill. I look forward to its opening.

A Touch of Colour

2007-05-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

These blue flowers appeared after the snowdrops, and next to them. I don't know their name, they could be harebells. I like them because they remind me of the bluebells that carpet English woods in spring. It's nice to see a bit of naturally occurring colour at the bottom of the yard.

Snowdrops

2007-04-20T06:45:00.000-07:00

These are the first flowers that bloom in our back yard, and they don't last long. Evanescent is a word that comes to mind.

Spring in Nova Scotia is fleeting: there are wintry days, then, suddenly, summery ones. I always feel caught out, not quite prepared after being beaten down by the winter. Some people seem to have their shorts ready to change into at a moment's notice, their lawnmowers fuelled up. I might get caught up in the spirit of things and venture out on a bike later.

New Painting

2007-04-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've just finished this, which is a complete re-painting on top of an old one. I don't have a title for it yet.

I'm constantly trying to refine the way I think of abstract art, to distill the essence, as it were. My latest thought is that although abstract paintings have no overt subject-matter, something is carried over from the outside world through the painter. The choice of colour, the fondness for texture, in my case, the technique employed, are all drawn from the artist's being in the world. Elements of experience must find their way into the work, and since experience is gained in the world, abstract painting must convey something of the world, as experienced, but stripped down, abstracted. It is not therefore an entirely subjective rendering of a mental landscape.

Port Williams: pub progress

2007-04-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

Shuttering for the foundation is just visible. I think the concrete has been poured, or soon will be. Mounds of fill that were around the site are being bulldozed flat. The notice above speaks for itself. The next pictures I post will show some structure.

There are a few more shots on my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterop/

Dreaming

2007-04-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

I dream quite a lot. At least, I usually wake up with the feeling of having dreamed, even if the dream itself is already forgotten. The dreams I do remember always seem to take place in sprawling, labyrinthine cities, and in interiors where one space leads on to another with no apparent way out. There is often some task to be performed, ill-defined or surreal, or I have to be somewhere with no hope of getting there on time. I'm often on a bike in these dreams. Frequently I'm trying to find a pub, or to order a pint of beer, without actually achieving that goal. In fact I don't think I achieve any aim in dreams; they consist of movement without arrival. There are always people, sometimes great throngs, and I am never uncomfortable being among them or talking with them, albeit in gibberish. I wonder if this reveals my 'true', hidden self or a self I'd unconsciously like to be.

I don't lend any credence to interpretation of dreams, beyond perhaps revealing one's unconscious attitudes, and this is tentative. The best evidence, which is provided by Allan Hobson, among others, is that dreaming is triggered by the mid-brain in random fashion, images and sounds playing out in the brain areas that are normally active when those functions are consciously operating. Hobson believes that in some sense dreaming is a rehearsal for real-life experience. I'm not so sure. The fact that most dreams are so quickly forgotten, and so surreal, indicates to me that they have little direct connection to waking life. Being drawn from memory, they hint at actual events, but I think that the memories they are drawn from are so fragmented, mixed up, and altered that they can have only the most tenuous connection to waking life.

My theory is that dreams are the equivalent of a screensaver for consciousness. Considerable brain resources go into conscious processes; it may be that they need to be maintained by periodic use even in sleep. Or they may simply be a by-product of consciousness.

I often wonder if the reverse is also true: that the dreaming faculty somehow continues in the background of conscious processes. This might account for odd feelings of strangeness or foreboding, a vague sense of unreality which occasionally creeps into one's senses.

Latest Painting

2007-03-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

The colour is a bit washed out under dull daylight, but artificial lighting made it too orange. Its 16 x 20 ins., on canvas, acrylic paint over modelling paste and fabric scraps. it gives me a sense of fragments, remnants, eg. of the residual feelings at this stage of life. Most of my paintings have that sort of sense behind them, so I could have a series: Fragments/Remnants #I etc. (I'm not all that keen on titles anyway)

The New Atheism

2007-03-15T06:50:00.000-07:00

I went to a boarding school in Bristol, England, that was heavily involved with the (Anglican) Church of England. We were marched to church on Sunday morning, had evensong in the school chapel, grace before meals, morning prayers, and a blessing after supper. I went so far as to attend confirmation classes, mainly I think to get out of some more irksome task, and was duly confirmed by the Bishop of Bristol.

For a time, then, I entertained a nominal belief in the existence of God. I didn't continue to be a churchgoer after school, enforced attendance having been quite enough. After a while I took a hard look at the basis of my belief. I looked, in effect, for God, and found nothing there. So I gave up any pretence at belief. This had no effect on relations with others, as religious belief was and is considered to be private and inviolate. Publically expressed religious sentiments tended to be greeted with embarrassment. The general attitude in the UK was one of agnosticism, in the literal sense of not knowing, but allowing for the existence of higher powers, supernatural entities. "There's something there", would be a common sentiment. This, as far as I know, is how it remains, outside those groups and sects that have strong religious ideologies.

In the United States religious sentiment has been and remains stronger. Although there is a nominal separation of church and state, there has been some influence on the latter by the overtly religious G.W.Bush regime and its appointees, aided by the favorable atmosphere. (I think something over 90% of Americans express belief in a personal god) Anyone overtly avowing atheism is distrusted, ranked low on the order of preference for public office-holding, for example.

This situation has begun to change over the last few months, its visible manifestation being the publication of a number of books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and a performance piece, Letting go of God by Julia Sweeney. These people and their followers have been termed the "New Atheists", not that there is anything new about atheism, but because they are demonstrating a militancy that seems to be new. They are saying, in so many words, that not only is religious belief unfounded, but can be harmful, and it is time the world weaned itself off religious belief.

I applaud the boldness of this stance, but I'm afraid I don't have the drive or stamina to pursue it myself. I imagine going door to door in this Baptist-dominated community like some anti-Jehovahs Witness, proselytizing for secularism, would meet with a frosty response. Still, I believe, in principle, that if the occasion arises, it behoves us atheists to attempt to redress the balance and challenge those lukewarm beliefs and tolerance for superstition that the majority of people seem to hold.

Note: there are many web sources to be found on this subject so I have shown no links above. Googling any of the names or the words new atheists will produce many. Two that I found particularly useful were in Wired , and Religion and Ethics Newseekly .

Jean Baudrillard 1929 - 2007

2007-03-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

The French intellectual Jean Baudrillard died recently in Paris. One of the founder of postmodernism, his prolific works amount to a critique of modern society in terms of signs, symbols, technology, surface appearances. His name crops up on popular culture in connection with the film The Matrix, which was based in part on his ideas. The science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard was highly impressed by Baudrillard, but it's difficult to say he was influenced by him, as ballard's surreal landscapes began to appear in the Fifties, well before Baudrillard was known outside France. Perhaps the influence went the other way.

One of Baudrillard's ideas that I have been able to grasp to some extent is that of the simulacrum. This is something - a place, a social setting - that resembles something so closely that it might as well be it, though in fact it is not. The virtual world of the Matrix is a fictional representation of that, but I can think of a more mundane example. When I visited some English pubs last year I was struck by the way they all seemed to have been made to look old, and quite plain, though I knew the decor must have been implemented fairly recently. In a couple of cases I recalled that the bars were once carpeted lounges with plush seats. So, while a pub might have the appearance of a Dickensian tavern, it is only the simulacrum of one. Thus, when I read of proposed 'English-style' pubs in Canada, I think that, however welcome they may be, their ambience will be an imitation of a simulacrum, not something truly authentic.

Another example might be Jean-Paul Sartre's description of a waiter, going through the motions of being a waiter, while lacking true commitment to this role. This was an illustration of 'bad faith', but I think it demonstrates the idea of the simulacrum. This may be of even greater import in the world of behaviour than the world of things, especially as those two are increasingly linked. In a world with more style than substance, Sartrian bad faith may be more the norm than the exception.

New Pub in Port Williams

2007-03-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

There has been talk for some time of a pub to be built in Port Williams. Here at last is evidence of work being done on the site which had been earmarked for the project, next to the old government wharf.

I hope steps will be taken to guard against flooding. As can be seen in this picture by Terry's Creek, which flows into the Cornwallis estuary beside the site, the high tide, indicated by the dark area, comes within a few feet of the site level.

Irresolute

2007-02-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

Not too sure about this one. I've been working on it for some time, in dribs and drabs, without being able to bring it to a distinct final form. Often the underlying structure -in this case, fabric scraps, crumpled brown paper and modelling paste - defines the finished product, and no amount of acrylic paint applied in layers produces any desirable transformation. I feel like drawing graffiti on it. It's fairly large, by the way, about 32 x 36 ins.

Post script April 18th. I am liking it a lot better now. I find I have to have these around for a while for them to grow on me.

Artist at Work

2007-02-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

Work in progress

2007-02-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

I think of this kind of painting as a 'zen' painting because it is produced with thousands of small brush-strokes which induce a kind of meditational state. I don't know if I shall achieve enlightenment through it, but I quite like the results. Essentially I mix a neutral colour and stroke it on, adding dashes of other colours and working them until they are almost blended right in, apart from the contrasting areas. I'm putting another layer over what I've got here, but I don't intend the final result to look much different.

Blue in Green

2007-01-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

This is a recently completed painting whose title is self-evident, but is also the name of a Miles Davis number from Kind of Blue. Tomorrow I shall be hanging it in the Apple Bin Gallery in the corridor of the Vallwey Regional hospital in Kentville, Nova Scotia.

Lazy afternoon

2007-01-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

Sooty and Golda in their favourite place on a winter afternoon.

Dyke and clouds on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

2007-01-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

Dyke and clouds on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Port Williams on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

2007-01-15T07:25:00.001-08:00

Port Williams on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

2007-01-15T07:25:00.000-08:00

Port Williams on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Note

2007-01-15T07:17:00.000-08:00

Pictures failed to upload in the usual way, possibly owing to security over-ride on our new computer with Explorer 7, so I uploaded from Flickr instead, which produced a link only. That may be the way I do it from now on. Which is okay! Lots of blogs have little but links, so just click to see, or visit Flickr direct and see all my posted pictures there, where I'm registered as Peter of the Port, same as here.

Flickr Photo Download: Gallery window: my paintings

2007-01-15T07:07:00.000-08:00

Flickr Photo Download: Gallery window: my paintings

Drift away

2007-01-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

This is a partial shot of my latest painting. Title is Drifting, so give me the beat, boys, and I'll drift away. Some others have been accepted for showing in an art material store and gallery in Wolfville.

O Christmas Tree

2006-12-28T16:59:00.000-08:00

Still standing and lit up, but soon to be just a memory

Unanswered Questions

2006-12-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

I'm briefly setting down a couple of things that have crossed my mind:

Global Warming: though it seems to be an undisputed phenomenon caused at least in part by human activity, it is possible to come across people, some of them apparently reputable scientists, who deny either that it is happening, or that it is not caused by CO2 . This is something that I would have thought was objectively verifiable, a physical occurrence, measurable, observable. That the world's climate is controlled by physical forces, structures in my terminology, must be true, but the apparent doubt seems to indicate that the exact nature of those structures is not as fully known as we would like to think.

Free will has been debated for centuries, as to whether or not it exists. The consensus now is moving toward the position that it does not, thanks to genetic and neurochemical research (I don't have any references to hand), and philosophers have always been divided on the subject. Assuming behaviour to be determined, then, it must be determined by forces - structures - of which we are largely or completely unconscious.

Advances in neuroscience have shown that a great proportion of brain activity is unconscious and that, by implication, much behaviour is controlled by this activity; which ties in with the lack of free will. Certainly there is much in our relationship with our surroundings that is unconsciously processed: coordination of movement, aspects of vision, and there is research that shows how we are predisposed to take certain attitudes, eg. to strangers etc.

All of this, and things I've spoken of earlier, suggests to me that the underlying structure, the mechanism that controls our destiny, is something of which we are largely ignorant. I don't believe this entity to be sentient or necessarily purposeful. It may a blind, massive, random force. Yet within it there is organisation, as is evident by the organisation of the physical universe, the existence of patterns within it.

O Magnum Mysterium

2006-12-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

This is a painting I have just finished. Its provisional title is Dragnet. The photo colour is not very accurate, being too much in the yellow and red, which in itself serves to illustrate ideas I've been pursuing, of trying to understand underlying structures and processes of phenomena. In this case there is an objective basis for the colour difference, just as there is for the appearance of this computer screen.The reasons for specific phenomena can often be investigated, even when specialised knowledge is required.

Knowledge has become more and more specialised and technical; generalisations more and more frowned on or ignored, so I'm wondering if my search for general principles is a search for a chimera. Perhaps an overall explanation can only be a mental construct. Or perhaps the underlying principles are vast, soul-less and dreary, like some Kafka-esque bureacracy. One such, with apologies to mathematicians, is that the universe is mathematical; after all, elements are built up in a regular sequence which we identify in the Periodic Table, and mathematical relationships apply between (all?) physical bodies. However, mathematics, science and philosophy, let alone the arts, all arise from our perceptions of the world. A century ago most people would have accepted these perceptions as accurate representations of the world, but this point of view has been increasingly challenged throughout the 20th century, to the point where now most disciplines are regarded by the hardline challengers as 'social constructs'.

I'm an old-fashioned realist; I consider the existence of the world to be independent of my view of it, and susceptible to being understood in what was termed an 'objective' way. But still I am forced to take account of subjectivity, and remind myself of the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world, ie the world as experienced, and the world as it is 'in itself'. Thus we may never be able to understand the fundamentally underlying structures and causes of things, but always have to rely on human interpretations and constructs.
The post-modernist pioneer Jean-Francois Lyotard maintained a stout opposition to the kind of generalisation or 'grand narrative' that I seem to be looking for, and his writings had a strong influence on the mentality prevalent today.

Understanding Everything

2006-12-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

One of my aims in life is to find explanations for enough of the processes that go on in the world to enable me to get some sort of a grasp on the general scheme of things. The sort of principle I have in mind is that of entelechy, first propounded by Aristotle. Part of his thought about motion, it indicates the tendency of potentiality to become actuality, to move toward an end or telos. Aristotle belongs to the early part of philosophical history, but concepts like these have had a tendency to linger into the present day, as can be shown by such notions as development and progress. These are underpinned by such observed facts as the expanding universe, evolution and human history, though there are difficulties with regarding any of them as conclusive proof of a universal telos.

Though the universe is expanding, it is also cooling, which will bring it eventually to a state of rest, or maximum entropy, its final state. The cooling process itself resulted in condensation of particles out of an initial burst of energy, leading quickly to the formation of atoms, molecules, and eventually, complex organisms and life. The history of the whole universe is, then, a two-way story, and a finite one with an inevitable, anti-climactic end.

Evolution would appear to be a prime candidate for a teleological explanation, and was treated in this way by the influential Catholic thinker, Teilhard de Chardin, who was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the theory that evolution is directed towards some higher goal, which Teilhard called the Omega Point. This contradicts Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which postulates that evolution occurs purely by random mutations in genes. In order to account for the increasing complexity of organisms we need a concept of self-organisation or autopoesis, first described by Maturana and Varela in 1973. This is a concept that I like, and will include in my bag of tools for understanding.

Another concept that appeals to me is that of homeostasis, or the ability of a system to maintain a steady state or equilibrium. James Lovelock, a biologist, formulated the Gaia Hypothesis, which conceived of the earth as a self-regulating system, able to maintain such things as the ratios of oxygen and carbon dioxide to air at levels propitious to life. Lovelock was influenced in this by Teilhard. I think there's something in the idea but resist the notion of external guidance or sentience.

There's another way of looking at development or progress, and that is to look at the development of ideas themselves, which is something I shall leave for another time.

About Belief and other Matters

2006-12-11T06:52:00.000-08:00

I came across this in the Butterflies and Wheels site. It is a list of fashionable euphemisms and obfuscations that make modern life easier for some, and infuriating for others. The items that caught my eye are those on belief:
"Something it is taboo to challenge, question, reject, much less criticize or mock. When the adjective 'cherished' is added, this effect is doubled."
and knowledge: "Something only religious believers can have. All other kinds of putative knowledge are ultimately uncertain, but knowledge that comes from God is certain. This also provides a proof of the existence of God: without God, knowledge is uncertain; therefore, God exists."

These exactly capture my thoughts on the subtle shifts of meaning that I tried to express in the most recent post, shifts which rational people should be exhorted to guard against.

Belief

2006-12-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

I started a blog entry with the title "What I believe," intending it to be a simple list of things that I believe. But I got caught up in a philosohical investigation of what constitutes belief , and spent days considering this until I began to wonder if I could reallly believe anything at all. I think that the question is worth pursuing, though, as the word "belief" seems to be undergoing a transformation at the present time, so as to put more weight on the meaning, used by religious adherents, as faith-based and true by revelation rather than empirical verification. Thus, for example, a Christian might characterise scientific belief in evolution as being the same sort of thing as his belief in God, and no more soundly based, in fact less so. I shall maintain my adherence to the scientific version of the word, which in a sense is not so strong, as scientists do not need to have faith in their findings; they simply accept them as true, if justified by replicable results, but falsifiable. (see Popper: Falsifiability Criterion).

Sometimes the words believe and belief are used in a tentative, provisional sense: eg. I believe that the package I have picked up at the post office contains a CD; I believe that the meeting is at 3 o'clock: I believe Fred lives in Truro. "Is Dave coming? Yes, I believe he is." The word guess or suppose could be substituted for believe. This is not the sense of the words I shall be considering.

In philosophical treatises the word believe is sometimes used inappropriately, in my opinion. An example might be, "I believe I live in a green house" when in fact I know that I live in a green house, but I wouldn't even say "I know...etc." unless the statement was challenged. I'd simply say I live in a green house. This condition applies to any simple statement of fact: "There is a church on the corner" is not a belief, in my estimation, if there is a church on the corner: it is an identification of a state of affairs, if I am familiar enough with it. However, if I am referring to a place I don't know well, I might say "I believe there is a church on the corner" in the sense used above.

I don't use the expression "believe in" very often, if at all. I prefer to say I believe that, in cases where a statement is empirically verifiable, either directly or in principle. The former I can check for myself, the latter I may have to take on trust from a reputable source, ie. the scientific community. Thus I believe that statements made by reputable members of the scientific community, based on replicated observations and experiments, are true.

I believe that knowledge is justified true belief. Thus I know that a proposition p is true if and only if:
p is true
I believe that p
I am justified in believing that p
This takes me into deeper philosophical waters than I really want to get into, but for general purposes, when I hold a belief, I consider it to be true. The collection of beliefs that I hold, I take to constitute knowledge. However, a great deal of knowledge is held not in my head but out in the world. I believe it is important to have a fairly clear idea of the sources of that knowledge and its reliability. Is it in fact knowledge, or mere speculation, fantasy, or opinion?

I believe that the scope of the human mind extends far beyond the practicalities of individual existence. This is fairly uncontroversial; it refers to imagination, the ability to plan, reason, speculate. It accounts for the arts and sciences, technology. I think it also accounts for such things as religion, fables, folk-tales. I believe that many (most?) people are as, or more, prone to believe rumours, folk-tales, fables or religion-based accounts, as factual explanations. This is due to the way the human brain/mind evolved during the millenia prior to scientific observation and reasoning.

I believe that all non-naturalistic, ie. supernatural, accounts of and explanations of phenomena are the product of the imagination and associated faculties. Some things I do not believe to exist or to have any credible fouindation are: God, the afterlife, ghosts, the spirit world, clairvoyance, astrology, numerology, feng shui, etc. etc.my views on these and similar matters can be found in the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The article The Belief Engine is particularly relevant.

I believe that the tenets of Evolutionary Psychology are substantially correct. One of these postulates that along with the body, the fundamentals of the mind were formed during the evolutionary period. That is to say, those dispositions with adaptive utility which are wholly dependent on brain structures and chemistry. The 'fight or flight' reflex is the classical example. Somewhere in the evolutionary process those typically human characteristics such as curiosity, need for explanation, imagination and reflection were formed, leading, I believe, to fundamental dispositions toward one or another outlook. Hence some people are easily accepting of supernatural explanations and some, a smaller number, not, just as some people are more people-oriented than others. In other words the underpinnings of attitudes are of primitive origin, along with personality types.

This is far as I'm prepared to go now. Part II will follow as and when I can hammer it out.

Economics II

2006-12-05T09:53:00.000-08:00

Some knowledge of economics may help us to understand the way the world is going. It won't help us to change it. The subject seems to be growing in popularity among bloggers and those who read blogs, judging by a posting I came across in 2Blowhards on 4th Dec., Blogging and Economics. The links in the article opened up a whole bunch of things, including a piece on Wilhelm Ropke, a name I hadn't heard before but obviously an influential member of the Austrian school of economists which was a big influence on Milton Friedman, who was himself a big influence on present-day economics. That article is part of the Ludwig von Mises site ,whose vast scope covers all of the Austrian school of free-market economists.
ps. the number of blogs listed in the side-panel of blowhards alone could keep someone occupied for days at a time. Add that to the links appended to such good sites as Arts and Letters Daily and you have to wonder why we have any time for anything else, and why we don't all know everything there is to know about everything.
pps. One thing that does strike me is that there is just as much material that is conservatively biased on the Web, as progressive or radical, in economics especially, reflecting the prevailing orthodoxy.

On the Threshold of a Dream

2006-12-04T07:18:00.000-08:00

This was the title of an album by the Moody Blues in the late 60s. I don't think the album quite lived up to the promise of the title, which has hung around on the edge of my mind since then. It seems to fit something I experience, namely trains of thought which occur in a half-awake, half dreaming state. In one of these I was asking myself, how can I extend my mental capacity, from inside, push out the boundaries of my mind? There was a dreamlike quality to this question. Fully awake, I knew the answer from an external point of view: read, allow your mind to be stretched by someone else whose knowledge goes beyond yours. But the original question continues to intrigue, mainly because dreams themselves often seem to stretch the mind, without any external assistance.
Milton Friedman, the economist, died not long ago. Founder-member of the Chicago School of economics, he vigorously promoted the free-market economics based on neo-classical models, with monetarism , control of the money supply, as the chief means for governmental control of the economy. I learned a bit about him in college many years ago, and the announcement of his death brought his name back into view. There was an interesting piece posted in the Arts and Letters Daily site, looking into what is taught in Economics 101 now at the University of Chicago. The article, and comments in response, suggest that economics is a more diffuse and complex subject than can be conveyed in first-year courses, with subjective, ideological viewpoints influencing its various practitioners.

Paintings November 2006

2006-11-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

No. 817

Martian Landscape (arbitrary title: I'd sooner have left it untitled)

Vermilion Sands; a tribute to the story by J.G.Ballard

Edward Burtynsky: Decay and Entropy

2006-11-21T07:32:00.000-08:00

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald this morning announced an exhibition of photographs by Edward Burtinsky, a landscape photographer. I was excited by this because his landscapes are of industrial wastelands, places radically altered by human activity. Being fascinated by this type of photography, and by the idea of decay and entropy in general, I had a look at his website and was well rewarded. It is a rich source of his works, which are all of a high standard photographically, and they can be enlarged to full screen which is a huge bonus.

Music Music music

2006-11-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

Ordering things on the Web is sublimely easy. I have just received a mixed bag of CDs which reflect my varied tastes. When John Peel Day came around, celebrated each year by the BBC to commemorate one of their best-loved DJs, the CBC mentioned a compilation album of music he had played. I had a look at it online and decided there were other things I would prefer to hear, and started looking. Result, the following order on HMV:
The Soft Machine: Third album
Matching Mole: first album, featuring Robert Wyatt
Hatfield and the North: first album. All recorded in the early 70s, and all part of what was known as the Canterbury Scene which I was unaware of until recently, thanks again to the power of the Web.The label is only one of convenience as I don't believe there really was a coherent Canterbury scene, just that a number of musicians came from there and formed bands together. Kevin Ayers was another that I like.
At the same time Arkiv, the company I buy 'classical' music from, was having a clearance sale, so I couldn't resist another order. From them I got
Frank Bridge: String Quartets 2 and 4
Alan Rawsthorne: The Fibonacci Sequence: various chamber works, and
Osvaldas Balakauskas: chamber music
Two British composers of early and mid-20th century, and one contemporary Lithuanian. my previous knowledge of these composers is entirely due to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
One thing all this music has in common is that it is not rigidly structured, Soft Machine least of all. While I don't reject highly structured works- I like Haydn and Bach- I'm drawn toward loose structure with no strong theme, in books, music, and painting, and films. The closest I got to the classics in literature was D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, then Iris Murdoch, French nouvelle vague novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet, and their British counterparts such as Rayner Heppenstall. Painting starts in earnest for me with the Impressionists and moves through Kandinsky to Abstract Expressionism, though I appreciate a lot of earlier stuff, and Symbolist painters including the Pre-Raphaelites. In films, John Cassavetes' Shadows was a good example, also again the French nouvelle vague.
This all resonates with my contention that life is contingent and episodic rather than narrative, notwithstanding the fact that most lives are quite closely confined by routine. No routine can limit what goes on inside the head, which is where an essential part of life is lived.

Random Jottings

2006-11-09T05:11:00.000-08:00

Given the number of blogs in existence, which grows by thousands per day, I believe, it isn't surprising that few are read by strangers. A few are popular, especially those that have been reviewed by the mainstream media, such as New York Hack and I don't even flatter myself that all the people I've told about mine look at it regularly. So it is essentially for the benefit of the writer, enabling them to compile notes and store pictures in an attractive format, on someone elses computer, in my case the Google complex in California, I assume.
So I'm carrying on with my notes to self, available to anyone who is aware of them or may stumble upon them.
The current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies is dedicated to the theme of panpsychism, the idea that mentality is a fundamental feature of the universe. The target article is by Galen Strawson, a philosopher I respect, and I haven't read the issue because I don't subscribe to it, just gleaning what I can online.In any event I don't buy this hypothesis, which has been around in some form since the pre-Socratics. It is based on the observation that fundamental particles appear to act purposefully, eg. in entanglement , which Einsein described as 'spooky action at a distance'.
As far as I am concerned the whole business of pushing consciousness down to the sub-atomic level does nothing to explain it, merely making it the province of a coterie of people who speak knowledgeably of quantum mechanics and use mathematical expressions, enhancing their own sense of intellectual prowess but not adding to general knowledge. I favour the emergentist view, which is that consciousness arises only in complex living systems under certain conditions. I'm aware that this is a bias toward a type of explanation and not the full explanation itself.
William Seager does a good job of explaining and more or less demolishing panpsychism here.
As my attention was drawn to Galen Strawson I looked him up and found some interesting stuff here , here ,and here. (I don't know how long the links will be available. Click on them and see) The first item deals with the concept of free will, which Strawson rebuts, fairly convincingly, while acknowledging that it is a part of everyday usage.The latter two have to do with the post-modern notion, current in social sciences, that "self is a perpetually rewritten story", each of us "constructs and lives a 'narrative'... this narrative is us, our identities." Strawson attacks this too, and I tend to agree, not having much sympathy with post-modernist tendencies.The main thrust of his attack is that for many people life is not a continous narrative but episodic. This accords well with my feelings about the contingency of life. No doubt there are people for whom life is an unfolding drama on their own stage, but to make this a generalisation is erroneous.Also I detest the use of 'story' as a verb; we 'story' our lives - yuck.

A Chaos of Nothing

2006-11-07T06:42:00.000-08:00

This about a 3/4 view of a painting I have just finished, which I am considering calling Decaying Infrastructure because the whole thing suggests the skeleton of a building, but I will probably try to think of something more mild.
The title is drawn from a piece by John Derbyshire in the National review online in which he quotes from Boswell's London Diaries, in which Boswell "encounters a very old aristocrat and asks him whether, looking back on life, he can discern any pattern or purpose to it. No, says the old boy, it has all been “a chaos of nothing.” "
I don't view my own life quite so bleakly, but the comment did make me think of how life is almost all merely contingent, ie. determined by previous events and by situations. If it weren't for routine and habit, life would be truly chaotic. I'm not sure if I am grateful for this or resentful of it.
This relates to my painting insofar as it is about contingency, the emergence of some kind of form arising from the bringing together and manipulation of materials,hopefully creating aesthetic satisfaction.There is no necessity about it, as it does not seek to illustrate or represent. In some sense it is like life in general, in which we make what we can of the materials ready to hand, hoping to gain some small satisfaction.
Note: I'm almost touching on the necessary/contingent distinction of philosphical discourse, but not quite, so I won't go into it. I'm thinking more of Iris Murdochs use of the term contingent which has an existential thrust particularly in her first novel, Under the Net, where the meaning of the word is basically, stuff happens. She hopes to slip under the net of random contingency to find enduring values, in her philosophy, certainly.

Minneapolis

2006-10-31T11:34:00.000-08:00

My wife Pam was in Minneapolis for a conference a couple of weeks ago and took these shots of what looks like a very interesting city. There are the usual modern buildings, often displaying humorous comments.

There is a fascinating mix of new and old. The brickwork in the viaduct is marvellous.

Part of an old flour mill has been preserved, next to the new Guthrie Theater. From the fourth floor a cantilevered lobby projects, resembling the loading gantries which were a feature of warehouses in the past.

Alberta bound

2006-10-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

Last Friday our youngest daughter Gemma took off for Alberta. We had a meal in East Side Marios before going to the airport. Gemma on the left of the picture.
By the departure gate.Emotional farewell soon.

Beyond

2006-10-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

One of the remarkable aspects of the human mind is its ability to project beyond its immediate present, to anticipate, envisage,plan, conceive.This ability, combined with language and the ability to communicate, is, I am pretty certain, the decisive force shaping the human condition and the world humans have created.
At the root of it, I believe, lies that intuitive sense I referred to earlier of something just outside the range of vision, just beyond that bend in the road. Couple this with the traits of curiosity and the need for explanation, and you have the the mixture that drives human beings to explore and invent. A bundle of traits is necessary; the human is not a simple animal.
The drive to go beyond, as I see it, took the human race in two directions: towards science, technology, trade on one hand, towards arts and religion on the other. Because they come from the same source, these two tendencies intertwine, perhaps become confused with each other, are sometimes seen as mutually compatible. But because they divided from a common stem, bifurcated, they are also in conflict.These two domains could be termed the natural and the supernatural, though art is largely natural, with supernatural or transcendental elements, as in Symbolism . Very much on the supernatural side are such things as luck, the I Ching and every thing usually termed supernatural: belief in ghosts, parapsychology, spiritualism etc.
It is interesting the degree of trust afforded to either side of the domain beyond common experience. We rely on all the things we use and eat, which implies trust in manufacturing and inspection methods, and in the science which lies behind technology. We trust medical, scientific, legal and other professional opinion, the more easily because many of us have experience in those areas, and we can verify their opinions to some extent. But many of us also trust religious leaders, horoscopes, tabloid newspapers, tarot readings, psychics, feng shui consultants and so on, perhaps a longer list than the rational one.
I wonder what it is that elicits this trust. Authority, would be a quick answer. Perhaps authority accrues to those who have boldly gone into the domains beyond and have acquired knowledge of one sort or another. But of course no sooner has authority been established than someone appears to challenge it, following that same urge.
One of those was Stewart Brand , compiler of the Whole Earth Catalog and associate of many counter-culture figures. among them Ken Kesey, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg.

On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

2006-10-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Boulevard des Capucines: Claude Monet
Yesterday evening I heard Diana Krall singing Boulevard of Broken Dreams on the radio. It had a certain resonance with some of my own thoughts so I was drawn to it,not least because it sounded like a Leonard Cohen song. I checked this on the Web, and, as often happens, was swept away on an ebb tide of words and images.The version that Diana Krall sang on her album All for You was written by Al Dubbin and Harry Warren:
http://www.twin-music.com/lyrics_file/krall/all/dream.html which speaks of gigolo and gigalette, broken dreams, and walking up and down, in an old cathedral town.But there are more references to a song of the same title by Green Day, which has more stark lyrics http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/greenday/boulevardofbrokendreams.html
in which there is only a single lonely figure walking a lonely road, his mind on the borderline of the edge
which is where mine is at times. Various people have used the title which must have caught the imagination as it did mine. One that stuck me most forcibly was the German artist Gottfried Helnwein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Helnwein
http://www.helnwein.com/
who did a parody of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks featuring images of James Dean. Marylin Monroe, Elvis Presley and Humphrey Bogart. But his other work is most singular, surreal, with echoes of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. I can't reproduce it for copyright reasons but would urge anyone reading this to check the websites.
On the radio this morning (CBC) there was a reference to Park Avenue in Montreal, which members of the city administration want to re-name. Someone who lived there all his life wants to keep the name, which represents the tradition and character of the thoroughfare. Among his comments was that it is a 'boulevard of broken dreams', so the phrase has in effect a life of its own.
But the idea which prompted this blog post is an elusive one, something like the feeling on waking after dreaming, a feeling that may hang around all day, that there is something lurking just beyond the senses, an intimation of doom or potential richness. It isn't there only after dreaming, it may be there all the time, or pop up unexpectedly. If you thought you caught a glimpse of an ex-lover in a crowded station, or had a deja-vu moment, or a premonition, you will have experienced what I'm talking about. Ephemeral though they may be, to me these sorts of feelings are of the essence of life. But then, someone once described me as 'an incurable romantic', someone else as 'a missed opportunist', wistfully dreaming of the unattainable, perhaps, but not doing much about it.

Note: photograph reproduced from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trinity/904673 under Creative Commons licensing.

The Hard Problem / Autumn Leaves

2006-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Hard Problem arises in the study of consciousness (Cs), a subject I find quite fascinating. Its present phase only dates from about 1995, when it suddenly became popular in philosophical and scientific circles, though of course it has existed for thousands of years in the form of Philosophy of Mind. The Hard Problem is an updated version of the Mind-Body problem. It was given that name by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers,
http://consc.net/chalmers/ in a number of papers that came out in 1995 in the Journal of Consciousness Studies,
http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.html viz. Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html and Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness:
http://consc.net/papers/moving.html
which is a response to the commentaries on the first one and contains links to most of those.
The name Hard Problem stuck, though it is by no means clear that the 'easy problems' identified by Chalmers are that easy to solve, eg. the reportability of mental states and the deliberate control of behaviour; it seems to me that a full explanation will only be forthcoming when the main problem is solved. And that is, how is Cs produced in the brain? More simply, what is Cs?
The problem is compounded by the fact that all of one's experience comes through the medium of Cs. At least mine does, and I infer that to be the case with others.Cs shows us a world and enables us to act puposefully in it, but it is a transparent medium; it shows us nothing of what it is, in itself. many people, following Berkeley, have asserted that the mind is all there is, or in a more moderate form, that we can only deal with the world as the mind perceives it, not as it is in itself (Kant). Variations on this idea still appear in web discussions of Cs.
One of the main spurs to the recent revival of interest in Cs was neuroscience, after brain scanners were perfected that could identify regions of the brain showing increased activity while specific tasks were being consciously performed. It was hoped that scientists would be able to zero in on the NCC, the neural correlates of Cs, in sufficient detail to close the gap between subjective experience and brain activity. However, they have so far only been able to show, with increasing sophistication, that specific brain areas are associated with specific brain functions, not how. At the same time, it has become clear that Cs is not a localised brain function but distributed, ie. specific areas are necessary to Cs but not sufficient.

There was an interesting spot on Information Morning, the CBC Halifax morning show, with the science commentator Bob Fournier, about leaves' changing colour in autumn. Recent studies show that it is not due simply to chlorophyll departing, leaving underlying pigments with no particular function. It appears that a couple of things may be happening: the changing colour signals insect pests, particularly aphids, that they should avoid infesting the tree as it has chemical defences. Infestation of trees is deadly, because aphids will draw off the vital sap. Presumably if the warning succeeds, the chemical defences, costly to the tree, will not have to be deployed. The other hypothesis is that the red and yellow pigments shield the inner tissues of the leaves from sunlight, which is damaging when direct, and which chlorophyll screens out when present.Evidently some vital functions remain, before the leaves are shed, which require protection from sunlight.

Autumn, Annapolis Valley

2006-10-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

It was a really soft, mild day so I was moved to go for a short drive and take a few pictures. This one is down the road from where I live. The monument is the Planters Memorial, commemorating the arrival of New England Planters (colonists) after the expulsion of the Acadians. They came at the invitation of the Governor of Nova Scotia. At that time all the American colonies were under the control of the British Crown, just about.

This is on one of my cycling routes, a nice house shaded by trees at the top of a short but stiff rise.

Entrance to a farm

Sumac

North Mountain

Thanksgiving - Canada

2006-10-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

Is this the last time the grass needs cutting this year? I hope so. I use this hand-powered push and pull mower by preference; I much prefer its sound to that of a power mower, and I don't mind the exercise. By the sound of things this weekend is a popular one for lawn-mowing, unless it's just one guy on a ride-on mower making enough noise for the whole neighbourhood. The weather couldn't have been better,clear, sunny, warm, a nice breeze. We had our turkey dinner on Sunday. The turkey was about as good as it can get, a 20lb. free-range bird, succulent and tasty, with stuffing, gravy, and a wide range of vegetables.Yum!