More festive larks

Johann Hari is a persistently lovely man:

"There is a cost to this chilling of protest. Every British citizen is the beneficiary of a long line of protesters stretching back through the centuries. Every woman reading this can vote and open her own bank account and choose her own husband and have a career because protesters demanded it. Every worker gets at least £5.93 an hour, and paid holidays, and paid sick leave, because protesters demanded it. Every pensioner gets enough to survive because protesters demand it. What what your life would be like if all those protesters through all those years had been frightened into inactivity? If you block the right to protest, you block the path to progress. You are left instead at the whim of an elite, whose priority is tax cuts for themselves, paid for with spending cuts for the poor.

"Your right to protest is under threat."

& tomorrow is UK Uncut Day everybody!

XL

Danny Hayward on Lord Browne

Dear Harriet Harman MP,

As a constituent of Camberwell and Peckham, I write to you to voice some concerns about the proposal to restructure Higher Education fees, to be put to vote in Parliament on December 9th. I'll state my principal objection to the proposal upfront. I believe that the proposed change in fee structure will inevitably have the effect of discouraging poor people from attending university; and in consequence that it will inevitably fortify social inequality. Despite the fact that degrees will be “free” at point of service, I think it is quite clear that the prospect of approximately £30,000 in debt has a meaning quite different for a teenager from a working class family than it does for a teenager from a middle- or upper-class family. Pointing this out does not involve accusing working-class teenagers of being incapable of “rational choice.” It involves acknowledging two things. First, that working-class teenagers know at first hand how difficult it is to earn such large sums; and second, that unlike middle-class children, they are used to living without significant financial support from their parents.

My mother is a dyslexia tutor in a Further Education College in Kent. Recently she reported to me (with some surprise) that many of her students had remarked that they would never contemplate paying the proposed fees. For these students, the news that universities will charge at least £18,000 for a degree is just the sound of a door slamming shut. It is a sound most of them know well. In the current debate on fees, the absence of discussion of the psychology of social exclusion is lamentable. It is also a perfectly predictable consequence of the decision to commission a man like Lord Browne to determine and advocate “sustainable” fee structures.

I expect that these points have been made to you before. Before I finish, I wish to make some remarks about competition as it is discussed in the Browne Report. As you no doubt know, Lord Browne was an employee of BP for the great majority of his working life (1966-2008). The structure and ambitions of a global oil and gas company could hardly be more different to those of a university. Universities are successful where they can cultivate and maintain an atmosphere of mutuality and co-operation within a horizon of shared interests. The cheerfully abstract assertion in the Browne Report that “competition generally raises quality” (p. 4) is in my opinion an indication of Browne’s unfamiliarity with the university system. A more intelligently cautious assessment of competition is that it leads to different effects depending on where it is introduced. Competition among academics (for example, to provide the “best” teaching experience) could well have unforeseen and unwanted consequences. I’ll adduce two examples. Browne imagines that publication of student rankings will increase competition among academics and therefore institutional success. But by incentivising institutions to “cater” to students, we may in fact place a downward pressure on standards of assessment. And by incentivising lecturers to “follow the choices” of their students (in effect, by encouraging them to do more teaching in areas outside of their areas of expertise), we may produce a declension in the quality of teaching. Incentivising universities and lecturers to scramble after the approval of their students can have negative as well as positive effects.

However, this isn’t my central point. I mean only to say that one ought not to imagine that competition is a kind of aphrodisiac for institutional effectiveness. My central point is that competition in the form of highly bureaucratic centralised assessment can alter an institutional atmosphere, often for the worse. It can produce stress, anxiety and mutual suspicion. Certainly academics have no prerogative for exemption from those phenomena; but I write to you to say that in five years as a student, on three course programmes and in two universities, I have had plenty of opportunity to observe the consequences of stress, anxiety and mutual suspicion for academic work. The consequences are not ‘improved quality’.

Universities do not deserve special dispensations, but the recommendations of the Browne Report are indicative of a false belief, widely shared, that market imperatives can “generally” improve “quality” in any institution irrespective of its organisational structure or purpose. I can say from experience that in universities the imposition of market imperatives is just as capable of vitiating results, because good results in universities depend on the preservation of a humanely co-operative working environment. Competition is just as likely to promote exhausted, bickering and uncreative faculties, offering superficial teaching in popular subjects and practising reduced stringency in assessment.

I encourage you to speak to workers and “service-users” in this constituency about their experience of the impact of competition on “quality”. But, more pressingly, I urge you to vote on Thursday against any increase in fees.

Yours Sincerely,

Daniel Hayward

Phd in English
Birkbeck College
University of London

Codename Prague

"[...] It is hard to gauge how it has affected his personality, just as it is difficult to measure to the millimeter the distance traveled by a swarm. [...] The public image of The Author—ramrod straight, unsurprised and studded with snails that make a popping sound when removed—has given way to the general impression of a force intent on using as many words as possible to say nothing we don’t already know. It’s a choice between those who were once alive or those who are now dead. Faced with an industry impermeable to talent, real creators will turn in another direction and aim at a heightened target, a unique emblem all bedecked with resinous blossoms and chained fruit. It may feel like a mixture of a stingray, a valentine and a nasty bump on the noggin. An abyss of treasure, detail-rich and explorable at every scale. For myself, I would ask a favor of everyone reading this introduction. If you’re going to write, write something interesting and original, or get the fuck out of the way."

From Steve Aylett's introduction to D. Harlan Wilson's forthcoming novel.

Richard Tyrone Jones spotting

More on Banks / Grimwood soon I promise! But just to say I spotted Richard Tyrone Jones, poet, raconteur, & invoker of poets, who once as part of an Utter! Depravity set ate a bin, on the Royal Mile powered by two glowing green tubes (which seem to be being handed out free in the background)! Bliss!

Crot Lap

I discovered that Keith Tuma trusts his attention span has extended to Francis Ravenscrot's Pranksters in Pakistan, & immediately recalled these snaps I took in March 2009 -- insight into Ravecroft's process in the composition of that profound work!



(More on Banks / Grimwood soon I promise!)

Beautiful, efferfluent analyses of Choose Your Own Adventures! Somebody put this on transflective LCD crop top for me!

Labour need a leader suited to the 56th Century *

Great interview in The New Statesman in which Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, declares for a Special Circumstances operative, last seen overcoming a world-eater even though she is by that stage just a severed head without any eyelid, as the next leader of the Labour party. On the basis that she was uploaded before the missions & so could be cloned.

Boris would probably want fucking John Carter or someone!



The New Statesman, BTW, also recently curated the futuristic poet Keston Sutherland! Well done them. More on him when I'm done with the Grimwood / Banks posts!

* Banks's Culture novels are not actually set in the 56th Century, I am being witty! They are set sort-of nowadays and Jeremy Hunt is our envoy.

Fauxplexity

"'In those days the world was not a garden and the people were not idle as they are now. Then on the face of the world there was real wilderness, empty of humanity, and the wilderness that humanity createed, the wilderness that it paked itself and which it called City. People toiled and people idled and the idle did no work or little work and what they did, did only for themselves; money was all-powerful then and people said that they made it work for them but money cannot work, only people and machines can work.'" (Feersum Endjinn, 115)

A Review-Essay of Lucifer's Dragon, Feersum Endjinn & Use of Weapons
Part 1: Fauxplexity
A stylistic tic pervades Lucifer’s Dragon, Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s late nineties cyberpunk novel. I’m gonna call it the Disposable Image. Every few pages there’s a sentence which begins “Not that” or “Of course” or “But”.

“Not that the city’s inhabitants would be looking skyward, Karo reminded herself.” (337)

“No one had fed him all day, but then no servant could have got through his locked door, not that they had tried.” (342)

The narrative progresses through its internal contradictions. Not that it possesses the artifice of dialecti- WOAH, NOW I’M DOING IT. What’s the verdict on this Disposable Image tic?

(a) If an author emitted a bolus of rubbish, then painstakingly edited it into sense, it might end up looking a bit like Lucifer’s Dragon. “He wasn’t dead, though [...]” (370), etc.

(b) Or a valiant junkie author, struggling in a sluggish stupor to remember why he’s talking about nanites, psi-splicing or the light fur on a katGirl’s bottom in the first place – that would explain it.

Both options have a privileged relationship with junk. In (a), the book is a scrap-heap banged into shape. The irreconcilable connotations are hammered flat, but still visible. In (b), the brain-zotzed author can’t afford to cherish any image, since it’s probably the wrong one. At least, some aspect of it is likely to be wrong. So everything is liable to get junked.

Lucifer’s Dragon is of the in-your-face school of cyberpunk. Bizarre chicks ripple through OTT combat, slow-mo triggered for the round-house kick so we can see the sweat spin off their lower lips. High tech crap is staple-gunned to low tech crap, lit with neon and blown apart by laser-guided missiles launched by werewolves from satellites. Not specifically, but that kind of thing.

And, obv., it’s awesome! The Disposable Image is partly a symptom of its voracity for awesomeness. Lucifer’s Dragon won’t deny itself anything. The downside is, it finds itself having to apologise a lot.

Much of the time, Lucifer’s Dragon is like frenetically buying cheap TV sets, purely because of the blaring lurid and loud and confusing snippets of things they’re playing in the store, and just trashing each one as it breaks down.

Occasionally though, it’s like buying cheap TV sets in order to smash them up. Lara explain. The constant caveat to and qualification of transgression contrives an air of precision. It also lets Grimwood tap into hoary and ethically unsophisticated sources of excitement – sex, violence and, woah! sexual violence – without dispersing the elitist aura, without blunting the cutting edge. This blowjob may be gratuitous, but so is everything in this book.

So I think more often than not, Grimwood is sort of haggling with the reader. We learn to expect that his first offer isn’t his final offer. So he kick-starts things with a Disposable Image – then we negotiate what will actually go in the story. Here:

“But instead she just smiled. Problem was, Angeli wasn’t sure if that counted as a yes or a no. He never got the chance to ask. Simultaneously but unconnected – that is, as unconnected as anything could be in a world defined by fractal logic, quantum need and chaos – the hold beneath their feet blew with a dull crump that echoed off the warehouse walls” (323)

The phrase “Simultaneously but unconnected” suggests you might reasonably imagine the events – Karo’s smile and the explosion – are connected. Now, I guess Karo might have grinned at some wee augur of the boom. I guess the explosion might even be triggered by the grin, just as Kwai triggers the Semtex lining his guts by allowing himself to panic (that’s right, Private Reader – because when you’re in the field, THERE ARE NO SPOILER ALERTS!). But really these would be fairly exotic, that’s to say unreasonable, assumptions. I’m pretty sure the only reason why the phrase “Simultaneously but unconnected” is present is so Grimwood can get to say “a world defined by fractal logic, quantum need and chaos”.

Some of the people you will meet in Lucifer’s Dragon:

Razz – naked virgin slut bodyguard
Karo – aristo jailbait
Sasumi – tart with a heart

The only woman who doesn’t quite conform to adolescent fantasy is Passion di Orchi herself, although to be fair, she is a guilty Catholic junkie with a stripper name and “Sending his Calvins the same way as the Levis, Passion took the boy in her mouth, pushed back his hood with pursed lips and sucked him from semi-tumescent to hard in under a second. Her head swayed gently, swallowing Kwai whole and then pulling back, swallowing and pulling back.” (56)

Kwai and Passion’s rather peculiar and momentous tiff in a taxi, around chapter ten, neuters Passion in preparation for more onerous plot chores. Their conversation is conducted with Passion’s colt on Kwai’s brow and Kwai’s hand on Passion’s pussy. With all those strings needing pulling (I don’t mean tampons! Passion is a sort of megalomaniac proto-devil – you’ll see what I mean in a bit), it won’t do to have the chief puppeteer remain a sex object. Kwai, the sulky, unforthcoming and slightly “rapey” teenager, represents the prurient reader’s reluctance in letting her go from that role.

Razz fulfils pornography’s autophagic taxon “the virgin whore” on technicalities, insofar as she is reborn in a vat-grown body, which she straight away puts on the market as a hymen-augmented commodity. Razz is then raped, but remains unperturbed save her emasculating, hi-octane vengeance. This sequence is characteristic of the priority Lucifer’s Dragon gives (through a structure much like the Disposable Image) to deniability. First I am given the space to take vicarious pleasure in sexual violence, but not expressly invited to take it. Then the offender is punished. As Razz is so violent and cunning, my pleasure is available – if I need it – with an admixture of consolation, that sure justice will swiftly follow. This technique is exactly that of red tops like The Daily Star – connoisseurs, through their rape court case reportage, of titillation packed in sanctimony.

To be fair, the male characters are absurd gay teenage boy fantasies, and I must say even I thought the frozen metal floor of the Colnel’s Chrysler armoured personnel vehicle/hover sounded rather appealing.

The larger point is that Grimwood doesn’t sincerely mean all of what he writes. He writes some of it to retract it. So here’s the thing. At the stylistic level, there is project which aims to micro-manage subtext. Lucifer’s Dragon is particularly anxious to deny its sexist subtexts, because it is anxious not to appear old-fashioned. The organisation of this project is conspicuously linear and hierarchical -- conspicuously old-fashioned. Its effect is to spawn an entirely unsupervised level of subtext. Now, this is an exemplary canard which a good chaoplexic thinker is chary of and tries to get around.

Here is a diagram which explains it all:



I’m just going to go ahead and use the word “chaoplexity” in a fast-and-loose fashion; it’s a thumb jerk towards complexity science, chaos theory, systems theory, fuzzy logic, emergence, nonlinear dynamics, attractors, fractals, doop de doop. Hopefully this vagueness can be made into a virtue. I’m not so much interested in chaoplexity in its more mathematical formulations, as in what N. Katherine Hayles terms “chaotics” – i.e. chaoplexity as it has been received, in literature, pop culture, the humanities and social sciences, as it has been reinterpreted, misunderstood and hybridized in those areas (see note 1).

In a related vein, the Disposable Image has implications for how consciousness gets represented. Consciousness doesn’t work in the same way as exposition: you can’t have exaggerated experiences in order to tone them down later. There is a disparity between the semantics of language, governed by sequential syntax, and the semantics of consciousness, organised into gestalts by nonlinear dynamics.

But Grimwood’s characters often feel a bit like they’re following along in their own copies of Lucifer’s Dragon. They almost seem to react to the exposition of their conscious experience. “Not that the city’s inhabitants would be looking skyward, Karo reminded herself.” (337, my emphasis)

Angeli in particular keeps, sort of, perving on people then blushing:

“’She’s dangerous,’ Angeli insisted quietly. He was following Karo up the spiral stairs, trying not to notice how tight the 501s stretched across her ass. Hell, he kept reminding himself, he’d seen a lot more of her than that.” (322)

& (kat on a hot tin roof (contra Colnel cock on a cold steel floor)):

“Neph nodded and turned to go, then glanced back and caught Angeli gazing after her with unashamed interest, even hunger. He scowled, but not fiecely enough to hide his blush, and Neph smiled sweely. Her buttocks wriggled slightly as she climbed away up a hot roof, her tail lifting briefly to reveal the pink gash of her genitals as if by accident.

“‘Enjoying the show?’ Karo asked, sliding alongside. Somehow Angeli didn’t think she’d like the answer. Hell, he knew she wouldn’t. Didn’t like it much himself” (338).

I’m probably being a bit unfair.

I mean, I suppose a society seeded with psi readers, and injected an unhealthy dose of lapsed Catholicism, could give rise to somewhat unusual streams of consciousness – nervously performing in front of yourself, constantly checking yourself, constantly disapprovingly tutting at what was a nanosecond earlier your own immediate subjectivity.

Plus, it’s not all perving. Plenty of it is elucidation of some kind. Don’t SF characters quite frequently have “data-dump” cognition?

One approach, permitting one variety of elegance, is to obscure the degree to which some data-dump is linguistically reified – i.e., the degree to which it’s something really happening “in” the story. When this is done well, we’re not quite sure if we’re listening in on the character’s thoughts, or a kind of backstory, a kind of extrapolation of things which the character knows, but are too obvious for the character to think about.

Grimwood don’t much go in for dat. For instance, in the heart-thumping action finale, the wayward NVPD officer Angeli pretty explicitly cognisizes several interesting trivia about the production and installation of neoVenice’s photovoltaic sheets. The reader feels that Angeli thought those two paragraphs because of how Grimwood disposes of them: “But none of that mattered a shit to Angeli. They were running out of time” (328-329).

So consciousness gets treated kinda cack-handedly, as though it were easily reducible to more fundamental constituents, and as though plain old syntax specifies the seams at which it can be broken up. The result is that the character’s inner lives sometimes end up sounding lame and unbelievable.

Characters revert to cardboard incapable of sustaining either unabashed lust/bloodthirst or techno-hep insouciance. Mucking about in the guts of the chaoplexic system of consciousness in this way, flouting the possibility of relatively-autonomous emergent properties, is strike two against good chaoplexic thinking.

Strike three occurs at the narrative level. Most of the narrative structures derive from individuals realising or failing to realise their motives in a linear fashion (with a few concessions to non-linear processes). The fake nanobot imagery piped to the UN satellites says it all. For all its superficial trappings of spontaneous order – hackers and refugees cluster in rusty tubs in waters outside of any sovereign zone – neoVenice is entirely a matter of forethought, of prodigious, meticulous, linear, individual forethought. It emanates from one will only, that of mafia daughter and scrubbed-up hippie Passion di Orchi. Accompanied by her colourful sidekicks, she executes her audacious plan. With a few hiccoughs, it works. In this sense, the Passion di Orchi strand of Lucifer’s Dragon is a kind of topsy-turvy heist movie. Instead of nicking something, she founds something.

Niccolo Machiavelli would approve:

“We must assume, as a general rule, that it never or rarely happens that a republic or monarchy is well constituted, or its old institutions entirely reformed, unless it is done by only one individual; it is even necessary that he whose mind has conceived such a constitution should be alone in carrying it into effect. A sagacious legislator of a republic, therefore, whose object is to promote the public good, and not his private interests, and who prefers his country to his own successors, should concentrate all authority in himself; and a wise mind will never censure any one for having employed any extraordinary means for the purpose of establishing a kingdom or constituting a republic.”

All this demonstrates one important point: folks thinking in linear and hierarchical models can still help themselves to the terminology and the rhetoric of chaoplexity. The measure of your insight into chaoplexity (especially the adaptive complex systems I’ll be talking about in the next post), is not how many times you can say “nonlinear” in a sentence.

Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare, which I just reviewed (probably appearing Septemberish in Vector), relates how the contemporary US defence doctrine of Nework-Centric Warfare is appropriating the terminology and rhetoric of chaoplexity, without straying too far from traditional linear, hierarchical models of organisation.

Rousseau, The Social Contract:

“The man who dares to undertake the establishment of a people has to feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, the nature of man; of transforming each individual, who in himself is a perfect, isolated whole, into a part of a larger whole from which the individual, as it were, receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a morally dependent existence for the physically independent existence that we have all received from nature. In a word, he must deprive man of his own strength so as to give him strength from outside, which he cannot use without the help of others.” (76)

When Jon Courtenay Grimwood tells of the founding of a republic, and when its founding and survival seems to depend on ensemble of chaoplexic concepts, the presence of chaoplexity gaffes at the levels of stylistic control, characterisation and narrative (the "chaoplexic lawgiver" figure of Passion di Orchi), diminish our confidence in his foundational myth. This storyteller, we begin to think, does not feel chaoplexity in his bones.

But he could still be right.

T.B.C.!!!

Note 1: The vague and loose terms are preferable anyway, because I’m really talking in these posts about how the concepts of chaotics have advanced outside their core mathematical applications; especially into literature and very especially into utopian science fiction. No super-advanced grasp of chaotics is thus required, and in fact I haven’t got one either! But a very brief primer or reminder on chaos may be helpful.

In a linear system (for example, x = a + b(y)), there is proportionality between cause and effect. Whenever x is increased by 1 unit, y is increased by b units. Most systems in nature are nonlinear: the weather, animal populations, doop de doop. Such systems cannot be predicted over the long-term; because effects are not proportional to causes, minute details may blossom colossal consequences (you know, the “butterfly effect” ). One possible behaviour of nonlinear systems is chaos. Chaos is a behaviour which appears random (“stochastic”) but isn’t. In fact, chaos is completely deterministic and can be generated by very simple rules. The motion of a pendulum conforms to linear modelling, but the motion of a double-jointed pendulum is chaotic. Chaos just can’t be predicted or controlled using those rules. So even in the short-term, chaotic systems must be understood holistically or not at all. End of primer/reminder!!!

The man who was talking about archaeopteryges yesterday at 3.30 on the World Service and repeated at 8.30 was a partisan hack!!!

Why Lib-Lab or Lib-Con Could be Equally Undemocratic

Edinburgh South!

I voted Green (the weather was too good not to!), then nipped over to Armstrong’s to spend some coupons. Pottered about by the Castle, observing the midgies (research for my upcoming Transgressions conference!). On the way back I found poor Fred Mackintosh (Lib Dem!) standing at the crossroads at the top of the Meadows in his little suit, and they’d drawn a giant chalk flower around him. Instantly I knew I had committed a deep and unforgiveable betrayal. I went home and put his head up in the loo (see Note 1). Spent the night with David Dimbleby, and it was as turbulent as I have always imagined.

I am sure I was the most agonised voter in Britain! Fred narrowly missed out on Edinburgh South, so of course it went to Labour.

Finally the results are in:



Oh dear, I'm having technical difficulties. You know what I mean though.

A mixed parliament means a mixed mandate. No party can fairly enact the bulk of its programme. We deserve an all-party policy agenda. Specifically, we deserve an agenda which mixes its alignment with Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem principles roughly in proportion with each party’s popular support.

Thus 36%, 29%, 23% respectively, by the popular vote; or 47%, 40%, 9%, if you go by seats. You could say these numbers give you upper and lower limits determining how much conservativism, how much social democracy, and how much liberal democracy can legitimately emanate from Westminister (see Note 2).

There are plenty of policy mixtures which could comply with those limits. However, each party’s election manifesto is made up of interdependent policies. You can’t simply mix-and-match. A mixture must be found whose individual components complement each other, and don’t pull in different directions. We deserve an agenda that delivers technocratic efficiency as well as ideological proportionality. If it can also reflect geographical voting patterns, all the better.

That much is obvious and indisputable. The next bit is more speculative.

In considering how to weigh a particular point of policy, it’s not enough to ask how important it is to the party who put it forward. The negotiators must try to assess how popular, and how decisive, it has been with the electorate. Of course it’s difficult and involves guess-work, but polls and common sense offer some guidance.

I think that plenty of the electorate are quite shallow in our priorities. The Conservatives are probably correct when they emphasise that Gordon Brown has been dismissed as a personality. Nick Clegg and, above all, David Cameron, have both been endorsed. My hunch is that the Prime Ministership for Cameron, a high-profile ministerial role for Clegg, and obscurity for Brown, would conform with the electoral will (see Note 3). I think a lot of us are sick of the sight of Brown and have literally used our vote to keep him out of the newspapers and off the telly.

My other hunches are, first, our country is a little bit racist and xenophobic. That is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative policies on immigration (they are sort of policies) and on Europe. Second, our country is somewhat contaminated with a kind of nasty, vindictive class intolerance. This is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative’s policies on policing and on jobseeker’s benefits (see Note 4).

I don’t think, therefore, the Conservatives can be expected to compromise very much in these areas. It requires a different kind of democracy to defeat that immorality, discursive democracy rather than representative democracy. It requires grassroots movements, coordinated through networks and organisations like Hope Not Hate, the NoBorders Network and Unlock Democracy.

I think the Conservative mandate is far weaker on tax (especially inheritance tax), on efficiency savings in the current financial year, on only minimal electoral reform, on incentivizing the voluntary sector, and on plans for the NHS, education, housing, social security, and pensions. In these areas, Labour and Lib Dem can’t be expected to compromise very much with the Conservatives – only with each other.

I really have no idea about environment or defence! Probably rapeseed mecha?

If the bit I described as “obvious and indisputable” doesn’t, after all, go that way – if some lop-sided set of policies, plainly disfiguring our will, is imposed by a Lib-Lab coalition or by a Conservative government with Liberal support – if we don’t get what we deserve – then we have mandate, mandate to rise up.

Melody and I wandered out on Friday morning looking for riots and we didn’t come across any but we did find absolute armfuls of wild garlic and thistles. Bliss!

The sky looked almost too blue.

Note 1: For middle class English girls like me (originally from Newcastle!), the loo is a very important place for strong but mixed feelings. We often put up certificates and things in there, to show we’re quite proud of ourselves but not, you know, tacky. For a long time I even had a picture of me shaking hands with a man I thought was Kofi Anan! Fred went up next to my other darling, a particularly dashing axolotl whom I have also dubbed Kofi. But he will have to come down soon.

Here he is:



Note 2: (I’m leaving out the little parties because it’s just too confusing! Maybe just bung in UKIP and BNP’s 5% with the Conservatives, the SNP’s 2% with Labour and the Green’s 1% with the Lib Dems???) Imagining this spectrum with the popular vote on one end and the number of seats held on the other may look a little arbitrary; indeed it is but the arbitrariness derives from the FPP system. A kind of democratically optimum agenda configured at 36%/29%/23% Con/Lab/Lib would face a certain amount of arithmetical resistance from a house divvied up 47%/40%/9%, especially as MPs who themselves sui generis connosieurs of their constituency’s interest could do just about anything and still sleep at night.

Note 3: What mix of personalities should govern is to some extent independent of the democratic constraints described with respect to a policy agenda. In simple terms, it’s okay for a cabinet to be dominated by Conservatives, with one or two Lib Dems, or dominated by Labour, with one or two Lib Dems, provided that whoever it is superintends the kind of mixed policy agenda I describe above. (That is the sort of thing a representative is supposed to be able do. Representatives are delegates, not just trustees). But allowance must be made for the fact that many people have overridden their views on policy and specifically voted for or against Brown or Cameron.

Note 4: Thirdly (and a little less stridently) we have a knee-jerk dislike of officialdom, and prefer to judge any bureaucratic system by its failures, not by a score-sheet of successes vs. failures. I’m not exactly sure where on the Conservative programme this translates to mandate: presumably (1) wherever decisions can be decentralised with confidence that this will not lead to equally or more complex administration in the local context; (2) wherever the life of a public servant (especially a civil servant) can be made a bit more Spartan.

Note 5: This is a post about representative democracy, and what it means to live in a representative democracy. It's my stab at being non-partisan, but I am still a massive associative democrat! And my friends are all still Markists! I do worry about myself. I mean, the Conservatives abhor poofs too, but I don’t seem to have said that’s the will of the people. To defend the Conservatives in any way, however ingenious and convoluted and reluctant, on the “issue” of immigration, means I’m probably a bit a racist! I will be re-forged in the fires of deliberation like the rest of them.

Lara Buckerton's Political Broadcast

Roger E-art's rather trolling post about computer games and aesthetics has attracted some (mostly) dated interest (here's a similar page, aggregated nine years ago).

Instead you may prefer to play:

Samorost / Samorost II (puzzles)
Triggerhappy (a bit like Space Invaders)
September 12 (realism!)
3rd World Farmer (turn-based strategy)
The Intruder (just Borges + Pong)
Ergon / Logos (praxis Mario!)
File Prix Lux (loads of futuristic art)

Hmm, looks like you can't play Afternoon for free any more! Never mind, play Urban Dead! Come eat me, I'm in the zoo! Yum!

My ballot is sort of hovering to & fro in two beams, BTW, between a Green Witch & a Lib Demonologist. Always the way! Apparently one of the prospective Tory MPs is called "Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax"!

xx

Three Artists

This week I’d like to draw attention to some of the activities of my artistically-inclined sisters.

A reader recently asked if the gynocratic utopian community where I live in Marchmont has division of labour. Well I can tell you that we do! But it is more “Tiering of Being” than “division of labour.” (Tiering is less squeezy-cutty than division, and Being is more inclusive and holistic and heroic and psytrance than labour).

For example, I tend to handle matters connected with reason, instrumentality, the coordination of means and ends, NPower, etc. That’s not to say I don’t have my artistic side. My Associative Democratic verse (q.v.) is the chosen brand of culture for 8 out of 10 paradises in potentia. Like a little post-Futurist, I base my work on sound scientific principles (incorporating, of course, a sound degree of Feminist Perspectivism about scientific objectivity. It really isn't that hard!).

I did also attempt some conceptual art in the late 90s. Using a sort of pleasantly room-temperature seaweed emulsion thingy, I started making casts of vaginas, which I was going to put in a wall. “This Is What A Vagina Looks Like” or something – it may have been Posie’s idea – anyway after going through what seemed to me like quite a lot of vaginas I arranged them in a delightful 4x4 grid, and was just browsing for an opportunity to uncurtain (un-"squirt"-en?!) my vaginas when I caught wind of an artist who had embarked on exactly the same project, beginning around the same time as me only with a bit more fervour and/or proficiency who already had 5x5 vaginas.

What was I to do? The more I researched my rival, the more our concepts seemed in harmony. There was really nothing in it except the extra nine vaginas. We had hit upon the concept independently, and I struggled in vain to differentiate our motives, methods, aesthetics. The other artist was a man, did my vaginas wear more soothed expressions? They did not. They were comparably troubled.

We even had one vag in common, my friend Posie's as it happens! 2:2 on mine & 2:1 on his, so if you flip from mine to his it looks like Posie is rising into the air! It also raises an interesting question about the necessity of material realisation of conceptual art. Surely it’s enough to hear about the vagina wall, to have the concept of the vagina wall?

Of course, each individual vagina cast is sensuously, subtly unique – very much a rationale, a critique of homogenous porn “pussy” – but the conceptual variation of my vaginas was homogenous with the conceptual variation of Ted I think it was’s vaginas, if that makes sense. Moreover he had, and as far as I know, still has his heart set on 20x25, too – that’s five hundred vaginas! – so in the end I was a sport.

I know, I know, we should combine vagina collection grids. But I am still enough of an artiste to stamp my boot at that suggestion and, if not quite take a razor to my work (because, damn) then at least get my neighbour to help me move them into the garage behind the kayaks. Like weird Battleships. Repress repress!



So anyway this week I’d like to draw attention to some of the activities of my artistically-inclined sisters.

First up is Blood Diaper, a.k.a. Haley Dolan, a.k.a. Bread of Many, a 3’4” Yankee-Doodle polymath for whom the Major-Domo has stretched the guidelines on conjugal visits on a pretty much permanent basis, and I think it shows in her stationery:



What you should really do is buy some of B.D.’s stationery and then write her hundreds of thank you notes and odes on it. There isn't the slightest chance any of us in the utopos would be alive without it. The presence of the hot air balloon has proved invaluable in constitutional-interpretative controversies. Bread of Many is Blood Diaper's dedicated 'tionery blog, & in the rare minutes where she's not striking at the heart of Hallmark with one of her Praxis Giveaways, you can buy her stuff in her Etsy shop. She doesn’t only make stationery. She is an unremitting and compulsive mixed-media improviser and collaborator; anyone and anything entering her sphere of influence is liable to be shlurgled in and spat out as music, text, comics, video, disjecta membra, prosthetic rejectamenta placentas, Dungeon Masters momenta, grassroots proposals to protect local communities from skeletons falling out of pterodactyls, et cetera. More funding for special broad belts on the pterodactyls I guess. Here: Art Blab on Youtube, with Bucket. Fruit and meat, likewise, & Haley & Bucket on MySpace. Some more music from her Praxis Dude show (giant file, hopefully it will stream or something). Look closely: you can make out a youthful Keston Sutherland on steak & cheese panino!

Chloe Mona Ivy Head paints drunk women.



Hmm, she also needs to update her web site. Of course the pics don't do the work justice anyway: some of her canvases are huuge, with molten lava Googly Eyes the size of your toes, & some of them (the icons) disquietingly tiny, almost missable, yet totally potent, like veiled revenant .tar files. A set of three of them are in the Norma Rae Common Room and I just can't go in there.

The kinda Art World / Aesthetics yaddayadda on Chloe's stuff would be something like: Ivy Head explores the relationship between Happiness and Terror, & especially how the two emotions can strobe or combine in religious / booze & drug-induced ecstatic states. Her research is conspicuously gendered, perhaps because the less deeply-written dimensions of identity simply melt in the emblematic Chloe moment.

Felicity, awe, love/fear, the sensuous theological . . . how happy is it actually possible to be, metaphysically speaking? Is the limit condition defined as the sum of every particular individual happiness, of every particular individual being -- harvested, without compunction, from the little lads on the green and the psychopathic paedophiles frolicking at its rim? Even ladies & gays? Or is it less, or more, or . . . ? I don't fucking know! This is secular work -- Chloe doesn't literally believe Jesus is magic, etc. -- but the theological aspect makes the case that delirium cannot be reduced to a pathology of reason. Delirium has its own shit going on!

The Thomist idea of beatitudo, the exercise of the noblest mortal faculty (not boozing, but Reason), on the object of infinite value (guess Who?), & beatitudo's complicated but probably-very-boy-clever antecedant in Kant's idea of the sublime, seem to cast supreme happiness as a kind of error of reason (at least, in this world), whereas Chloe's work performs the inverse: reason as an error of happiness.

Now if that's an ambiguous but fertile-seeming Art World yaddayadda with which to approach Chloe's paintings . . . just forget it! This is work that puts experience first. A better critical gloss would be that "Chloe is this troll lady painter who goes goop de goop de goop goop goop."

Finally, and very quickly, because she's gone to Texas now which to be honest is a bit of a stab in the nuts for the gals -- the extremely wonderful Jenny Nuttall a.k.a. Violet Nut. She writes to us from Texas and none of us know what she means! This is some sort of print:



So: three artists who deserve the levels of exposure associated with a Tube flasher with 20x25 vaginas under her mac. Now revel!

UPDATE: Jamie McCartney, that man is called!

Some Aylett tidbits

1. Revised edition of THE INFLATABLE VOLUNTEER is out now from Raw Dog Screaming - and the first publication of the book in the US (see Amazon.com).

"In the constant apocalypse nobody cares if your skull is made of wood or your friends are flying ants. Corrosive phantoms are two-a-penny in such a high-res environment. Minotaur Babs improves the shining hour by snogging horses and has a style pedal attached to his arm so he can punch people in the manner of various celebrities. A basement of whispering apes is the source of all wisdom. Bob is propelled through a hull door with only a parachute between him and the slamming palm of god. Placid vampires suggest shapeless and impractical management policies. But how much of the narrator's vortical tale is designed to annoy Eddie and waste his time? A volley of poetic stand-up, this intense splurge contains some of the most unnerving excuses in print, all a-scramble with phosphene electricity and casual resentment. You will emerge from this revised edition glowing like a dashboard saint."

The Inflateable Volunteer is kind of refined Aylettium, trace geniality and accommodation sucked out. The revised edition eradicates the reactionary efforts of the Republican Guard of Sub-Editor Compromise.

2. Aylett comic strip 'Johnny Viable' is in issue 2 of Dodgem Logic, along with a good Alan Moore comic about a heroic penis in space, some post-civilizationist manifesto, etc. I gotta warn you that 'Johnny Viable' feels a little bit like Aylett coasting on auto-pilot. That's still better than most contemporary creatives at the top of their meticulously-cognitive game.

3. Aylett's REBEL AT THE END OF TIME (set in Michael Moorcock's "End of Time" world) will be published by PS (UK) later in 2010. W10t!