Engaged with today

Miles Davis – Milestones
Cannonball Adderley – Somethin’ Else
Herbie Hancock – Maiden Voyage
Takashi Miike – Audition – as shocking as the first time I saw it.
Benjamin Kunkel – Indecision - clever, but not particularly good. I shall return to work on my novel in which there is no particular reason for the protagonist’s questionable mental state – why do these novels always have to have a trauma or Wendepunkt?

The Poincaré Conjecture

seems to have been solved by Grisha Perelman, a Russian mathematician, who, as you can see from the report is somewhat of an outsider within (surely that should be without, as in the hymn we used to sing at junior school) mathematical circles, and has refused the Fields medal. He will also, no doubt, turn down the prize from the Clay Institute (those of you with better memories will remember that I posted about this conjecture as one of the Millenium Problems), and for this and the purity of his mathematical and inquisitive spirit I salute him. My mother would question as to why, if he can solve a problem like this, he can’t do the basic maths to work out that a million dollars would be good for his bank account, but what can you do?

Carnival

This weekend. I will be avoiding it like the plague. Too many police. Too much control. And the sound systems have to shut down at 7pm. I will be helping my brother string up disco lights for his pub tomorrow, but tonight I am relaxing with the latest Good Times compilation filling me with the carnival vibe. I shall leave you with the wonderfully distorted Channel One Sound System and ‘Conspiracy’:

Irie?

National Express

I took the coach down to Portsmouth on Monday night after work – I think for the first time ever, although I may have travelled back via London from Manchester after visting the universities there as a 17 year old.

Anyway, after only using the train/car for the last 12 years, the journey opened my eyes – not only do you take a number of backstreets to get from Victoria to Putney, pass through Richmond, Kingston and Tolworth, but then also stop in Guildford (another place I used to frequent in my youth), then back on to the A3(M) – and usually direct into Portsmouth, but the coach turns off some 20 miles out of Portsmouth and uses the old London Road.

As we crawled down this road, I saw parts of Portsmouth I had either not visited or seen for years – as children, our summer holidays always began with a trip up this road on the way to Scotland or anywhere else. It was fascinating to see how little place like Cowplain, Purbrook and Widley had changed in the intervening 20 years. They seem to have been frozen in time as the traffic has deserted them entirely. They still have small parades of shops, newsagents, tea houses, and the assorted slightly bizarre specialist shopping experiences you tend to get away from the main shopping areas – caravan showrooms, old-style cake shops, etc… There must be masses of these places, with businesses slowly going bankrupt across the UK as larger roads are being built, shopping centres become ever larger, and supermarkets diversify their product ranges ever further. Whither the spirit of British capitalism? A nation of shopkeepers has become a nation of factory outlet visiting credit card users…

Back in Ealing

Away for the last three days – I’ll catch up on my day off tomorrow.

Happiness

is not a cigar called Hamlet – it is browsing the London Transport Museum photo archive. Relive your youth. Look at your old Tube station. Be amazed at the art-deco glory of Boston Manor station. Or not.

Orthodoxy

Now, as some of you may know, I have (more than) a passing interest in the history of the Orthodox Church – I think it sprang originally from my interest in Dostoevskii, Solov’ev, Rozanov, Leont’ev and any other non-rational Russian thinker of the 19th/early 20th century you care to name.

As those of you who have studied Russian thought know, the writing about it, especially by Russian scholars is overly tendentious, taking either a strongly Soviet line, or a strong emigre anti-Soviet line.

Unfortunately, the histories of the Russian church I have delved into have had this same tendency (one shared by a great many of the conservative thinkers in Russia at the moment, step forward Mr Solzhenitsyn) – that is an overt romanticization of the pre-Soviet past, of Russian history, of the Romanov family, of the Orthodox church and of Russia’s role within the world. Nothing new, you may say – romanticization of the past seems to been a genetic defect amongst not only the Russians, but amongst most nations that have experienced trauma (of whatever form), and there are clear intellectual antecedents in Russian history, and in modern Russian culture for this romantic messianism.

Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church is a magnificent introduction to the Orthodox church in general, and I wish there were an equivalent for the Russian Orthodox Church – in English, ideally – I have just picked up the 4 volume History of Russian Christianity by Shubin, but the fact that he has written, travelled and translated widely within this sphere slightly fills me with dread.

You’ve got to have a job…

Gwen Guthrie in classic 1986 style, thanks again to thebestlegaladvice.com. One of my favourites to play out, this, especially when I’m in a rare groove kind of mood. Or there are lots of drunken women/homosexuals.

U can’t touch this

How to become a man of genius

If there are among my readers any young men or women who aspire to become leaders of thought in their generation, I hope they will avoid certain errors into which I fell in youth for want of good advice. When I wished to form an opinion upon a subject, I used to study it, weigh the arguments on different sides, and attempt to reach a balanced conclusion. I have since discovered that this is not the way to do things. A man of genius knows it all without the need of study; his opinions are pontifical and depend for their persuasiveness upon literary style rather than argument. It is necessary to be one-sided, since this facilitates the vehemence that is considered a proof of strength. It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed and to do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the very latest thing.

There is no novelty in this recipe for genius; it was practised by Carlyle in the time of our grandfathers, and by Nietzsche in the time of our fathers, and it has been practised in our own time by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence is considered by his disciples to have enunciated all sorts of new wisdom about the relations of men and women; in actual fact he has gone back to advocating the domination of the male which one associates with the cave dwellers. Woman exists, in his philosophy, only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labours. Civilised societies have been learning to see something more than this in women; Lawrence will have nothing of civilisation. He scours the world for what is ancient and dark and loves the traces of Aztec cruelty in Mexico. Young men, who had been learning to behave, naturally read him with delight and go round practising cave-man stuff so far as the usages of polite society will permit.

One of the most important elements of success in becoming a man of genius is to learn the art of denunciation. You must always denounce in such a way that your reader thinks that it is the other fellow who is being denounced and not himself; in that case he will be impressed by your noble scorn, whereas if he thinks that it is himself that you are denouncing, he will consider that you are guilty of ill-bred peevishness. Carlyle remarked: “The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.” Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark. You must not denounce well-defined classes, such as persons with more than a certain income, inhabitants of a certain area, or believers in some definite creed; for if you do this, some readers will know that your invective is directed against them. You must denounce persons whose emotions are atrophied, persons to whom only plodding study can reveal the truth, for we all know that these are other people, and we shall therefore view with sympathy your powerful diagnosis of the evils of the age.

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

Bertrand Russell