Intermission

There will be no new posts here until 03/11/08.

From The Archive: Turn Your Computer Off, Now

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Turn Your Computer Off, Now - 09/08/05

Here's an excellent, thoughtful article in the Grauniad, by Marina Warner about why books are better than computers. It is something that should be so obvious as to not really need mentioning.

I know I - for example, spend far too much time reading stuff, most trivial stuff like blogs - the overwhelming majority of which - if not all - are like this one- a complete waste of time for both their writers and their readers.

Perhaps - it increasingly seems to me - the book is the pinnacle, at least as far as fiction is concerned.

More and more I seem films as a very poor substitute indeed for books. There is nothing so depressing - as in the recent War of the Worlds - as hearing of yet another film adaptation of a favourite , or even just well-regarded, book.

I have given up on the TV adaptations of 'great' books too. They miss so much out of what makes a great book a great book.

The irony of reading this article on the web, on a computer is - of course - not lost on me. I used to like - still prefer - the physical fact of a newspaper. Not the tabloid comics, of course, but a real newspaper.

However, there is - these days - just so much wasted paper in them. So much lifestyle junk, so many Polly Fillers and incestuous media-land gossip, trivia and oneup(wo)manship. It seems the larger, the more supplements, a newspaper gets the less there is in it I want to read. Simple economics has necessitated my move from print media to reading newspapers and magazines (where possible) on the web.

But why do I need all this information I so assiduously gather? Am I like one of those big-gobbed whales that hoover up the plankton as they unconsciously swim through it?

The Joy of Sex

It was a spring day, but rainy and cold. As we dressed again, awkward in her small car, she spoke of her husband. How he had never learnt how to do any of those special things I had so eagerly done for her, despite all his army years travelling around the world, acquiring tattoos and getting drunk in foreign brothels.

She said that, if she had even half the money he had spent in the mouths of cheap foreign whores, we could have spent our meagre lunch hour fucking in the comfort of a more expensive car. 

Take Away

I remember her name, and how she laughed easily, chatting like the rice frying in the back kitchen. I was not used to it - the attention, I mean. She looked back, over her shoulder, she was nervous too. Her father, she explained, raising her eyes towards the ceiling fan.

I nodded, I understood, or at least, I thought so. But maybe that was only superficially, sudden media images of inscrutable Asians and family bonds much tighter than blood throbbing in veins or dripping on floors.

Her sleek careful fingers touched mine as she gave my change. Such dark eyes. She smiled and then we both knew.

She took one step back, looked down, away, as the back door opened and her father thrust the hot brown paper bag, neatly folded, without a glance at his daughter, he smiled, briefly, at me.

I smiled back, hoping he would not notice my real desire, not notice whom I really wanted to take away. 

Happen

It has been a long time since I thought about it. Time can pass by so easily; hardly noticed, hardly recognised for what it is.

What is a second? What is a minute? Mere paltry things, which do not often go remarked upon. But, minutes make hours and hours make days which make weeks, months and years.

Years slip by so easily. You would not think they could, but they do. Ask yourself this: What has happened to the last ten years of your life; has it all gone by while you were not looking? Have things changed greatly in those intervening years, or is everything much the same as it always was?

If it has changed a great deal, do you feel as though it was through any action on your part, or did it all just happen around you?

It always seems as though things happen to us, things beyond our control. No life is left untouched by the world around it. Interaction is necessary, if not essential.

We cannot walk through the world without disturbing it in some way, leaving footprints. It touches us and we ought to reach out to touch it too. There is no point in hiding away from it. 

Review: In Defence of History – Richard J. Evans

[Non-fiction – History 1997]

The dreary trite pseudo-‘insights’ of post-modernism reappear again; this time with their feeble attempts to turn history into just another ‘text’. However, as Evans so splendidly puts it in this, his robust defence of history:

Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and connate be seen as either a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.

History as Evans argues has a long established methodology, which is itself constantly under scrutiny - as this book itself demonstrates by its own existence and its long line of antecedents - for establishing the veracity of historical events and the value of historian’s attempts at explaining the relationship between those events.

As with all other areas where postmodernism has tried to elbow itself into, there is little – if anything – that postmodernism itself can add to history, or history’s self-examination that is not trite, superficial or painstakingly obvious before the weight of postmodernism’s own contradictions smother it’s pseudo-profundities and irrelevances.

Postmodernism et al, of course, grew out of the failure and collapse of Marxism and all the theories and suppositions which had grown from it. Marx’s own idea that history had a purpose (or – at least – discoverable laws) and direction was – of course – destroyed by Popper (among others), and – most tellingly – by the course of history itself.

History does not make the claims that postmodernists accuse it of – of being the absolute truth about past events – and so their destruction of this strawman is not the masterstroke they seem to believe. Historians, and those of us who read their work, know that there is always more to the story than we get from any history book. History is not a science in the strong sense of that word, but it does have a rigorous methodology, enough to make both historians and their readers feel confident that they do get as close to truth as they can within the limitations of history itself. For example, historians are very aware that historical documents are written by fallible human beings, often for a variety of reasons conscious or unconscious and take into account many other factors like the context of the document, the nature of the document and so on. So the postmodernist claim that a document, or ‘text’ as they like to call it, can no longer be regarded as having one fixed meaning which is bestowed upon it by its author at the time of writing. As Evans says, though ‘it is doubtful whether anyone, in fact, has ever believed that meaning can be fixed in this way.’ He also demonstrates the falsehood of po-mo’s claim about the arbitrariness of language, demonstrating that language evolves through contact and interaction with reality, rather than just being about itself. In fact, Evens states ‘…the postmodernist concentration on words diverts attention away from real suffering and oppression and towards the kinds of secondary intellectual issues that matter in the physically comfortable world of academia.’

Of course, a great deal of po-mo – pace Foucault – is rather simplistically obsessed with what they like to see as power relationships between various actors within societies, but, Evans points out, this could be more a case of the po-mo academics themselves trying to claw back some power and influence for themselves. Hence, with postmodernism’s disdain for truth and reality:

The past no longer has the power to confine the researcher within the bounds of facts. Historians and critics are now omnipotent. To underline this, the postmodernists have developed a new level of specialized language and jargon, borrowed largely from literary theory, which has rendered their work opaque to anyone except other postmodernists. The enterprise thus seems not only self-regarding but, ironically in view of its criticism of hierarchy and prioritization, elitist as well. Its narcissism and elitism can both be seen as compensatory mechanisms for the loss of real power, income and status suffered by its academic practitioners over the past ten to fifteen years.

Constantly, throughout this book Evans – like so many other critics of postmodernism in many other areas beyond history – demonstrates that po-mo must always fail because of its inherent contradictions. For example, if all theories are equally valid, then why give any special credence to po-mo, rather than more realist theories? If all knowledge is relative, then why bother believing in po-mo and its practitioners? Why ‘privilege’ postmodernists over anyone else?

Evans, does in the end allow po-mo some limited room in the practice of historical scholarship, but only in terms of the way it makes historians more aware of the limitations of their approach and areas of study, but that is what a good historian should do anyway, it seems.

Anyway, postmodernism is well on the wane now, in areas beyond history. So soon, books like this will become objects of historical curiosity only, like books on or about so many of the ideologies that came promising so much and – in the end – delivered little or nothing of any lasting worth. Just like so many theories, ideologies and other ‘grand narrative’, po-mo became quasi-religious and ended up talking only to itself about itself within constraints that it engendered itself which kept out so much of the awkward reality that cannot be held within those constraints without the whole edifice crumbling to dust.

In Defence of History is a very good, readable, book that ought to be read by more than just historians and those with an interest in how history comes about. It is a strong defence of academic rigour and a warning that, without that rigour -which postmodernism tried so hard to undermine - if the academic, or indeed any, mind is left too open, then anything could crawl in.

Monday Poem: Becalmed

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Becalmed

This morning all my thoughts are gone.
Gone to wherever thoughts go
when they are lost in their own seas.

No longer tossed by vindictive waves
that churn and boil in useless fury.
But becalmed on seas stretched taut
like glassy silken sheets spread
from horizon to distant low horizon.