Nothing More

There is nothing more cuddly than a grumpy German.

Newest

This is my newest post.
But what if it isn’t my newest post? What if when the reader is reading this - cos that’s what readers do, they read things - like I said, what if when the reader is reading this it is no longer my newest post, that there are newer ones?
Ok, I’ll try again.
This is my newest post, but this is only the case if you are reading this now.

Is

Is this a question?

Recycling

Journal your thoughts, someone said, everyday. But what if I don't have any thoughts, and anyway who has thoughts everyday? Well yes, all of us do, endlessly more or less, but those kind of thoughts are hardly worth keeping track of, transcribing. Most of them are only fit for the rubbish heap.
But couldn't they be recycled? Recycled? Why would we want to recycle rubbish? They were bad enough the first time around.

Choice

"If you could be in two places at once and one of them was a shit-hole, what would be the other place you'd pick?"
"What?"
"What would be the other place you'd pick."
"Besides a shit-hole?"
"Yeah."
"Why would I be choosing to be in a shit-hole in the first place?"
"I don't know. That's up to you."

tower

Drop

There was a drop of water and it was very proud of itself, but then came the heat and it evaporated.

Heaven

"Will there be television in heaven?"
"I suppose so. Sure what else would we do all day?"
"How about mobile phones? Will they be there too?"
"There'll be no need. All the information will be instantly hard-wired into our brains."
"That sounds amazing."
"It'll be amazing all right."

Open Up the Gates

Americans

In a rather surprisingly slow to ensue but surely inevitable development and corollary to the use of the term 'African-American', 'white' Americans are henceforth to be known as 'European-Americans', arising ethnically as of course they do from Europe. Besides of course various other denominations, as it were, it is of note to remind the reader that a 'Native American' is henceforth to be described as an 'American-American.'

All very clear and obvious, though much excitement has arisen in the cases of offsprings of mixed ethnicity. How is one to designate someone, to be crude, of a black father and white mother? 'African-American-European-American-American'? Perhaps, and with the order reversed if the father were white and mother black. And this primacy of the masculine element in these matters of verbal delineation is itself also of course a very thorny issue. But allowing those murky gender waters to rest a while, what, to extend things a little, if an American-American were to mate with an African-American-European-American-American? Would the child be an American-American-African-American-European-American-American-American? At that point one might even argue that things are beginning to border on the ridiculous, though until one is sure of oneself and where things stand it might be safer to keep one's silence or at least speak very quietly about such matters.

Free Will

Does man, woman have free will - or to put it another way, is man free?
Only an unfree person would ask the question, so no, the person wondering if he is free is clearly not free.

Should

I should write this down.

Verona

"You know that thing, Two Gentlemen of Verona?'"
"That was written by your man wasn't it?"
"It was yeah."
"He wrote some very good stuff in fairness."
"He did all right. But he wrote some awful rubbish as well."
"He did I suppose."

Half Light of Dawn - Abul Mogard

Being Irish

"How does it feel like to be Irish?"
"Ah it feels great."
"It does, doesn't it."
"It does yeah. Everyone loves us."
"We're fucking brilliant."

Objection

"I object, Your Honour, to the detective referring to my client in that manner."
"Why so?"
"Surely it is obvious that it is prejudicial to his interests to be referred to in front of the jury as "Lump Hammer Dan."
"Overruled."

Ambling

Another loose track I must have done sometime:

Ambling

Late Shopping

LateShopping

Another piece though besides the sound quality these things are also just pretty loose in the moment recordings rather than anything like proper finished pieces.

CityRiver

CityRiverGazing

Half my music equipment  and my pc for doing music on is on the blink which has prompted me to try to get a bit of use out of a portable recorder I have. Little idea how best to use it so audio quality will probably be on the dreadful side but anyway.

Bulldog

Mililitres

"200 mililitres - what do you think of it?"
"What do you mean what do I think of it?"
"I mean what's your opinion of 200 mililitres."
"My opinion of 200 mililitres? I don't really understand the question."
"God you're not feeling too sharp today, are you!? Out late is it!? All I'm asking is what is your opinion of 200 mililitres. Nothing more, nothing less."
"What do you mean like - of the quantity is it?"
"I can't make it any clearer."
"I suppose it's a reasonable quantity."
"There now, how hard was that?"

The Unconscious

[Just a re-posting of an earlier piece.]

It is my conviction, that is not so much a conviction as, well, not a conviction at all in fact, but simply an idea, an idea for which I feel no bonds of affiliation, this idea merely being a thought, and why bind yourself to a thought - these things which appear and disappear and whose periods of absence are generally far greater than their presences - and anyway this thought is a thing of little import, perhaps more whimsical than anything else, a thought that silently rose up out of the darkness and burst forth humbly but without shame into the light of conscious knowing . . . But, wherever the hell we're going and before we go any further along the route, who was thinking this thought that arose from the invisible and oblivious depths? I, that is 'I', that which we call I and which dwells up here in the visible firmament, as it were, was wholly unaware of any goings-on in these depths from which burst forth the thought. I wasn't even aware of the existence of these depths, and who knows, perhaps all this 'depths' is mere conjecture; this implied dark matter of the soul, this great unconscious, for when you come to think of it the moment we are talking of the unconscious, well then we're in the land of the conscious, not unconscious, and how could it be otherwise?

A man was in search of absolute blackness and so descended into a cave that burrowed into the very belly of the earth. "But this is no use!" he exclaimed. "I can't see anything!" So he turned on his torch and with great satisfaction proclaimed, "Ah, now I see. How wonderful it is. Though this blackness is not half so mysterious and black once you give it a proper look."

You can't flash a torch into darkness and go on calling what you're looking at 'the darkness'. And what's more, the analogy might suggest all too much, as unlike this cave the unconscious never becomes visible. All we have is the conscious. Otherwise how could it be unconscious? I'm not saying it isn't there but what's the good in getting worked up about it, creating some kind of narcissistic fetish out of it, obsessing about this great unconscious, all the while it's actually the conscious you're wallowing in.

I have moved far from this conviction or idea which bubbled up to the surface, though you may be wondering if this idea was merely a literary device, a means towards an end - the end having something to write about, and the means the writing. Words were placed in sequence, how else could they be placed, in the expectation, or perhaps just hope, that some inspiration would in the process be ushered forth from the dark depths...we're back to these depths. There seems, for now, no getting away from them. No, I don't doubt their existence at all, but it's this unnatural, urban, civilized fetishisation of oneself I can't stand. A mental self-lust, a kind of perverted mysticism where instead of release from one's self-imagined self, one wallows endlessly within it. And perhaps that's what in essence this is all about: the intelligentsia seek intellectual justification for masturbation. That seems to me very true, though exactly why I am as yet unsure, but if true it can't be too mysterious.

Their own personality is their greatest love. Deep down (in the depths) even they realise it's a false, sterile kingdom, but they wish to conquer this thought and to rule or dwell in full confidence and complacency within this personality's domains. So all this Freudian self-wallowing wishes to prove that this personality and its desires is all fully real and fascinating, and indeed all there is. It is from the deeper silence that the intimation of the falseness of this remorseless selfhood, this personality, its self-engendering, is felt and therefore to cover up this silence is the task at hand, to silence its silence, so to speak, and to convince oneself one is doing the opposite.

But to cover it up with what? Endless thought, and, entwined mixture of cunning and stupidity that is this 'self', announce that all these words you produce are actually this enemy, the Silence, which you label the Unconscious. You make a load of noise about silence and announce that the noise you produce is this very silence, and what's so special about this silence after all- just a load of noise. And also what could be better than to persuade oneself that this silence is actually something grubby, mere base desires; rationalise it as so and only so. So the very alleged silence, this Unconscious, proffers the justification for this corrupt self-wallowing individual to continue wallowing in itself as you've declared it and its desires absolute reality. And the civilized short-sighted animal proclaims with pride: "We have tamed the animal, the Great Beyond! The rational self is king! We may masturbate with full self-esteem!" For what after all else is there?

How's that for psycho-analysis?

Oneofmine

More Stairs

I'm sure I've written stair based stuff for whatever reasons before but not letting that stop me, here's another one.

There were these stairs.
Were they going up or going down?
Well both, it would depend on which way you were going. If you were going up they were going up, if down down.
How do they do that?
Do what?
Have them going up and down at the same time. Like if one person is going up and another is going down, what happens. Or would the guy going down have to go up with the fella going up and then come back down?
But the stairs don't go anywhere!
But what good are they so if they don't go anywhere?
Yes but they're not moving. They're static.
And how do they manage that?
Manage what?
Having them static.
They just fecking build them out of concrete or something!
And there's nothing to make them move?
No!
God that's amazing.
Amazing that they don't move?
Yeah. But what's the point in them so if they don't move?
It's the people who move!
How?
By bloody walking!
Ah, with their legs is it, that's how the stairs go up and down at the same time. That's ingenious. And what if they don't move?
The people?
Yes. How would they get anywhere then?
They wouldn't.
They'd just be stuck would they? And if there was enough of them not moving, just standing around, I suppose that would mess everything up. There'd be no space for anyone to get past in the end.
Yeah but why would that happen? People go on stairs to get somewhere, not to hang about.
But they might be waiting for them to move. And maybe if they wait around long enough they forget they were going anywhere.
That'd never happen.
It might.

[No more time for now so that's it, also for now.]

A line

Just to write a great line someone told me, "I would never deny a man his rock bottom."

Careful

London South

And the original:

Net

There was a large net into which if things fell they didn't get out, but the net it turned out worked too well and in time so many things were caught in it that the strain became too great, the mesh tore apart and all fell out.

Hamlet Again

"What is Hamlet's major character flaw?"
"He's an asshole."

Maybe I should expand a little. Hamlet is extraordinarily intelligent and perhaps spiritually sensitive, but intelligence doesn't excuse all else, and perhaps even the contrary. So why does whoever above say Hamlet's major character flaw isn't indecisiveness or some such but is rather the more complete state of being an asshole? Does he behave badly - if for the sake of argument he does indeed do so - simply because he is pretending to be mad in his efforts to avenge his father? Before we go down that fascinating path, how does pretending to be mad help anything? What does it achieve? It seems it allows Hamlet to behave as the above-mentioned total asshole, but other than that . . . well there is no other than that, that is all it achieves, and there is no sense that it is helping achieve anything else.

But I'm being far too wilfully harsh surely. We get to see Hamlet's intelligence unfettered to the conventions of ordinary decorum and discourse, and engage in wild wordplay and so on. We do I suppose. We also see him behave absolutely horribly to Ophelia who he has professed to be in love with, and who is herself very much in love with him. This is naturally devastating to her. He also kills her father virtually on a whim when hearing someone behind a curtain. His response to this murder or manslaughter is to immediately attack Gertrude, his mother, for her terrible behaviour which has upset him so much. He doesn't seem too bothered about the dead body at his feet though in the midst of his verbal assault on his mother he does mention in passing to be sorry about it. He then makes very witty jokes about Polonius' soon to be stinking body to those trying to find out where he has hidden the corpse.

I don't want to be giving a summary of the play but he returns to Elsinore later and comes upon Ophelia's funeral, whose death he is basically wholly responsible for after she lost her wits due to his vile behaviour towards her, and also his more or less without remorse killing of her father. Hamlet goes into a screaming rage when he sees her brother Laertes declaring his grief at the grave. He has in obvious effect ended the lives of Laertes' father and sister but Hamlet's rage is at the idea Laertes' grief in any sense compares to his own. This Laertes needs putting in his place.

The next scene we don't see much evidence of this grief and Hamlet is mocking with much self-delight the flaws of a very minor character, Osric. Hamlet tells Horatio he earlier turned the plans of his father-in-law on their head and arranged by falsifying a letter to arrange the murders of his childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They I believe were not knowingly trying to do any harm to Hamlet but when he hears of their deaths, he says this means nothing to him and his conscience as they were meddlers.

His great profession of some kind of guilt is before his fencing with Laertes where he tells him he is sorry for having killed his father but he did it when mad so it would be stupid to blame him for it, and in fact rather than the one in the wrong, Hamlet is one of the wronged. We know however he claimed he would only be pretending to be mad but anyway such remorse rends the heart. However if more credence is leant to this idea than may seem merited - that Hamlet's behaviour during the course of the play is of someone mad and not responsible for his actions, well how much interest is there  left in such a character and play - a central character not responsible for his actions as he's mad? Not much. As a work of art & investigation into the human world, it would be almost entirely self-negating.

So anyway, I might return to the start of things having fleshed out the contours somewhat.

"What is Hamlet's major character flaw?"
"He's an asshole."

Hamlet

"What is Hamlet's major character flaw?"
"He's an asshole."


More on it here.

Nabokov

"Do you prefer Vladimir Nabakov's work as a butterfly killer or as a writer?"
"Who?"
"You know the famous butterfly killer Nabakov who also wrote Lolita."
"Is that about killing butterflies?"
"No, no! It's about a paedophile."
"And are there any butterflies in it?"
"Maybe just the odd reference."
"Why did he hate butterflies so much?"
"Oh no! you have it all wrong. He didn't hate them. He loved them."

Rembrandt Link

I was asked to provide a link to this page for my many millions of readers, many of whom are passionate about Rembrandt so here it is

Death Watch

"Did you ever hear of the death watch beetle?"
"I did I suppose yeah."
"That's a terrible name to inflict on a creature."
"Is it?!"
"Think about it man! Of course it is!"

Before the Beginning

By the great Peter Green.

faom