Quiche straight from the Bucket

2011-12-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

A talky listeny interview with the l33t great Steve Aylett, "impervious to popularity." Aylett books have been blooping up on the Kindle - Slaughtermatic.

2011-12-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens was bad enough, but Václav Havel?

Soterion

2011-12-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

"The typical customer for our product is a person who currently may be playing video games that conflict with their ethical, moral, or religious values, or a parent, relative, or other game purchasers that have those concerns with respect to games they purchase for others in general and pre-teens and teens in particular."

Come to a world ... where there's no such thing ... as a random encounter ...

Gone

2011-12-16T06:25:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens no longer exists. Talking to Paxman a year ago:

Christopher Hitchens on the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell in 2007:

From somebody's Facebook status

2011-12-15T08:12:00.000-08:00

". . . Regarding the Higgs - those on the in have been aware of today's annoucement for some weeks. No Nobel Prizes to be given out just yet, but at least we've cornered the elusive fucker into a narrow alley. No escaping now! As is typical in an international manhunt, it's not so interesting THAT we've found our fugitive, so much as WHERE we found it, and who we found it with. Locked in a bunker with knickers tied around its head? Or in plain sight masquerading as a new age healer . . ."

As the name implies?

2011-12-15T07:54:00.000-08:00

I wandered lonely as a cloud into a black hole whose is mass four million times that of the sun.

Fain

2011-10-10T10:35:00.001-07:00

Steve Aylett's FAIN THE SORCEROR appears on Kindle! Perhaps a time to revisit Benny Glass's peculiar rambling review of it. Alan Moore's lovely, lovely intro is a v. inadequately veiled threat of physical violence against Steve.

Fain DEF.
(1) ADV. gladly; eagerly
(2) ADJ. eager; desirous; content; willing: They were fain to go.
(3) ADJ. constrained; obliged: He was fain to obey his Lord.

(I'm sorry I have been neglecting you all little blogees, but really you should see the state of my pepper plant & count yourselves lucky).

xxx

Changing certain aspects of BBC radio 4 one cross pedantic letter at a time!

2011-03-10T04:04:00.000-08:00

Steve Fritzinger (who was on Business World the other day) is probably a bit nuts, but that's by way of background. I guess he's one of those folks who thinks the free operation of baseball would be much improved if we just removed all those pesky rules, not to mention the regulatory interference of the diamond, the bat and ball, and the players arms and legs, and just let the BASEBALL ITSELF flourish.

I don't mind Steve Fritzinger being a bit nuts. I don't have the patience today to argue with the impression he gave, deliberately or not, that markets spring into being independently of regulatory environments.

All I want to say is that Steve should stop cosying up to poor Adam Smith. It is exactly this kind of snuggly cosying manoeuvre which sets him rolling in his grave. To pick on just one detail, the supposed centrality of the invisible hand to Smith's work -- well, I can find the phrase "invisible hand" just once in The Wealth of Nations. Here's the quotation:

"[...] As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce maybe of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it [...]"

Smith intends his "invisible hand" as a bit of flowery ornamentation. It is not a concept worked out in any detail. It is not an appropriate metaphor for the price mechanism, and it is not suggested by Smith as such.

In fact, Smith's enthusiasm here is quite muted: he says "nor is it ALWAYS the worse" for the society that an end promoted was no part of the intention; he says that the individual who pursues his own interest only "FREQUENTLY" promotes that of society. He does not chastise "trade for the public good," only the artificial pretence or "affectation" of such trade -- the worst side of Corporate Social Responsibility green-washing, you might say.

Anyway, notwithstanding some gestures towards a more general case, Smith is basically talking about something quite specific: investment in the domestic economy. That is the context of the invisible hand. He's not talking about supply and demand or firms in perfect competition or anything like that. He is certainly absolutely not talking about international banking and global capital flows. Smith's invisible hand leads capital to by and large stay put. Is that what your invisible hand does, Mr Fritzinger?

A big invisible middle finger to you.

Love,
Lara

PS: The baseball thing is an exaggeration, of course, but no more egregious than the patronising infantilising & slightly creepy way Steve personifies the "poor free market." "It has very few friends these days." Markets have never needed very many friends, so long as the "friends" they do have are tremendously rich and powerful. Steve is probably not nuts, just a bit set in his ways. They are ways which are beneficial to tremendously rich and powerful people.

Fauxplexity

2011-01-18T02:48:00.000-08:00

“Here the chaos sang songs of pure reason and reserve [...]”
(Feersum Endjinn, 260)

The Five-Epoch Plan: A Review-Essay of Lucifer's Dragon, Feersum Endjinn & Use of Weapons

Part 2: Office / Politics

In the last post, I talked a bit about Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Lucifer’s Dragon, how awesome it was, how sexist it was, and how it demonstrated a lack of awareness of chaoplexity at various levels. I finished by talking about how easy it is to help oneself to the language of chaoplexity, without engaging too seriously with its ideas (see note 1). In this post, I’m going to talk about science fiction, chaoplexity and the founding of republics.

Now, it came as a bit of a shock when I was gutted by a katGirl. But not nearly so shocking as when Lucifer’s Dragon suddenly wraps up, zing! – leaving more than a few questions unanswered. Suddenly subtext has to work overtime. You hear it buzz and whirr, trying to achieve cyberpunk’s indigenous sensawunda: that mute jerk of the head towards something sublime yet grungy, something transcendentally overwhelming yet goobery.

I’m thinking, for example, of the mood at the end of William Gibson’s Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties – expectant, thrilled, melancholy. Cf. Afrosheen on a forum: “Gibson never follows up on crazy shit that happened of the end of the last book. It just happened and has no bearing on the future, even if it has the potential to render the world as we know it completely different.” Decathection in metamorphosis. Specifically:

“Then again, if Paco could be Doge, anyone could be anything.

Though what Paco was these days was anyone’s guess. A god, maybe, except Angeli didn’t believe in gods. Some things made sense, most didn’t. One that did was that Lucifer’s Dragon was more than a game, it was the JCIT deck’s continuous training program. One that didn’t, concerned what the Dragon was to Paco, and Paco to the Dragon But that question the new Doge wouldn’t even begin to answer.” (366-7)

Some things made sense, most didn’t? Hmm. It’s a bit as if Poirot gathers everyone together in the library and says: “Look, she did it. You do the math.” Well, Lara did the math, and in Lucifer’s Dragon, the devil did it. Dut dut dah!

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” the epigraph runs. Other than the epigraph, the title, a few dust devils, and the networked arcade game Lucifer’s Dragon, there is no sign of him. Who is the devil, His Most Royal Lowness, the Anarch Old, in Grimwood’s novel? As I grok it, the devil is the constitution of neoVenice itself. Dut dut dut dut dah daaah! Daa-aah!

Erm, I use the word “constitution” in a pretty broad sense. A constitution is the political essence of a polity, perhaps the socio-political essence as well (see note 2). A constitution can include über-canonical legislative documents such as the US Constitution, but it can also include pretty much anything – statutes, institutions, judicial decisions, practices and principles, conventions, norms, mores, narratives, details.

Could it even include lumps of matter? It all depends who you talk to. If you are slightly anachronistic, and talk to Aristotle (384-322), you’ll certainly find him going on about geographical stuff in chapters devoted to the comparative study of constitutions (although maybe in a “side bar” way). If you talk to Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), he will include geographical factors as he describes how America, despite its lack of traditional intermediary dependent powers, managed to more-or-less synthesise democracy and liberty. So geographical factors are potentially constitutional features; you could look at them that way.

Similarly, if you are very cutting edge and you talk to Sam Walton (1985 CE-the present), she will purr like a velociraptor and hold up her paper, “The Architecture of La Serenissima: Space and Power in The Palazzo Ducale”, which describes how Venice’s constitution incorporated the architecture of its most important state building:

“[...] the openness of the ground and ‘loggia’ floors, which provided access to various administrative offices, is clearly visible [...] Republican values defined politics as a pubic affair, and so the open and accessible space of the Palazzo Ducale permitted interactions between the estates, making legible statements, even to the illiterate populace, about the ordinary citizen’s relationship with their governors [...]” (p. 23). (See note 3).

I think in neoVenice’s case, the constitution/devil definitely includes physical arrangements which are geographical, architectural and technoscientific. The Dragon seems to be its most important ingredient (indeed, within Christian semiotics the Devil and the Dragon are often one and the same). It also incorporates the uploaded intelligence of at least one of neoVenice’s founders, the pity-prozzie Sasumi, who goes a bit Rain Deity. Probably a pinch of Passion di Orchi a.k.a. Santa Passionata in there too. The Doge, a kid more-or-less locked up with the Dragon all day, is obscurely significant – perhaps less in his own right, than as a kind of idiot savant receptacle, a pestle and mortar for everything garnered from neoVenice’s Dragon gamers in their Segasim booths.

Now if I’ve got this right, the constitution/devil bewitches Lieutenant Chang Mao by flashing him a sigil a la Stephenson’s Snow Crash, causing the death of Aurelio, and setting in motion the whole extraordinary series of events, which culminate in a radical transformation of neoVenice’s power structure. The constitution/devil’s “motive,” presumably, is that neoVenice’s corrupt ruling class – at least, a separatist inclination within it – has come to threaten the republic’s stability. (Scenario B, whereby Chang Mao is Count Ryuchi’s instrument, is less appealing to me for reasons I’m not going to get into).

So what we witness throughout the narrative is the almost ethereally efficient action of neoVenice’s constitution in preserving itself. In so doing it exemplifies many resources of the republican tradition.

Republicanism is an extremely difficult idea to pin down. It has nothing, so far as I can see, to do with the modern American GOP. It has something to do with freedom. Definitely freedom from tyrants, also sometimes (cf. Constant and Madison) from the tyranny of the majority.

It also has quite a lot to do with longevity. Venice has a terribly good innings! (See note 4). The elixir which many republican theorists for long-lasting rude health includes a mixed government, an ever-shifting balance of power, and intricate – even secretive – but nevertheless flexible political institutions. Venice certainly had these:

“[...] it was almost impossible to locate the source or centre of power, which was always distributed among overlapping governmental bodies. Was it the doge or the senate? Did it reside in the council of ten or in the great council?” (Ackroyd 2009: 323).

I suspect that longevity is also closely connected with another republican theme, civic virtue (something to do with the way continuity is established more effectively by nebulous cultural and “lifeworld” inheritance, than by laws and institutions handed down like heirlooms. See note 5).

In neoVenice, the devil/constitution is not just secretive and complicated; it is secretive and chaoplexic. The devil is in the details. In the Bible and its orthodox spin-offs the devil always loses. In neoVenice the devil, in his aspect as the Dragon, always beats the arch-angel in the end. The various and perpetually corruptible authority which the arch-angel represents is subjected to the perpetual vigilance of the ultimate bad-assed anti-authoritarian.

Let’s take a step back from Lucifer’s Dragon.

Utopian alternatives to liberal democracy are nowadays disqualified less by contradictions within any specific utopia, than by the dystopias to which it is supposed all utopias will inevitably corrupt. The French Revolution begat the Terror, the October Revolution, the purges. Yadayadayada. Somewhere in Nazism there was a utopian itch. Great job.

Friedrich Hayek offered a compelling formalisation of this kind of corruption in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Command economies, he argued, lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Fighting their losing battle to allocate resources efficiently, they seek more and more information, and interfere more and more in their citizens’ lives. “It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate ‘capitalism.’ If ‘capitalism’ means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself” (1944 /1976, pp. 69-70; cf. 1939 / 1997, pp. 205-06).

Winston Churchill’s gibe that democracy is the worst of all possible systems, except all the others, has a similar savour. Like it or not, we’re stuck where we are. This is the comparatively verdant plateau which we have reached and where we must now squat, since the ground under superficially more appealing spots always turns out treacherous, unstable, disintegrating to rockfalls into deep chasms.

Yet in the second half of the twentieth century, as our mathematical and empirical investigations into the natural world have birthed the ensemble of concepts around chaoplexity, this de dicto case against utopia has grown less and less convincing.

Czesław Mesjasz, writing in the context of peace studies, states:

“[...] with the development of systems thinking we are becoming more and more convinced that, in natural and social systems, random, decentralized processes of self-ordering occupy a key position. Also, earlier tendencies of ‘social engineering’ aiming at improving any centralized management of processes in societal systems now seem less feasible. The potential consequences of such conclusions for science, practice and society cannot be underestimated: for the first time ever, ‘hard’ scientific theories stemming from ‘soft’ systems thinking might indeed corroborate, deny, or at least shake a number of economic and political principles.” (“Applications of Systems Modelling in Peace Research” (1998), pp. 323-4).

Could it be that the corruption of utopian projects into devastation and atrocity is not attributable to the forsaking of liberal democracy per se, but to the naive rigidity of the alternatives which have been imposed? Are there potential forms of self-organisation which rank alongside liberal democracy in respect of their flexibility and durability, but which are not contaminated as it is by the danger and unhappiness which we have come to think of as inevitable and necessary?

Check out J. B. Ruhl (and note 1, if you didn’t see it on the way in). Ruhl, discussing the relationship of law and society, writes that “optimal system adaptability occurs in the region called complexity. Too many fixed point and limit cycle attractors drag the system into stasis. Too many strange attractors drag the system into chaos. Just the right blend of attractors keeps the system ‘on the edge’ of chaos, capable of sustaining the surprises produced by chaos, emergence, and catastrophe as well as by the happenstance of forces external to the system.”

Now check out Iain M. Banks’s 1994 novel, Feersum Endjinn. In Feersum Endjinn, as in Lucifer’s Dragon, a cataclysm looms and an ancient technology sets about to deflect it. As in Lucifer’s Dragon, the polity entirely replaces its state apparatus in order to preserve itself. As in Lucifer’s Dragon, there is an emphasis on corruption and chaos, and the chaos is revealed to be nebulously involved with the polity’s self-preservation:

“The big bird shayks its wings impayshintly. The emisary, it sez, is kold an asoora & it is from 1 ov thi few parts ov thi kript whitch haz not bin tutched by thi kaos. It carrys within it thi meens ov our salvashin, but its mishin is in jeperdy; the state oposes it 2 bcoz thi fulfilment ov its mishin wude – conseevibly – meen thi end ov thi presint power structyoor.” (225-6)

As my friend Posie Rider likes to remind me, it is still the 1990s. In books like Lucifer’s Dragon and Feersum Endjinn, science fiction has begun to imagine what I’ll call “the chaoplexic republic” – a polity which hovers transformatively on the edge of chaos. Chaoplexic republics have learning and transformation built into their constitutional designs. Periodic decontamination occurs not on a homeostatic model, as the preservation of equilibrium via negative feedback loops. It happens within a chaoplexic model, as sporadic system-wide transformations in which power is re-scattered into radically new constellations. Indeed, tendencies which threatened the stability of the system may be amplified within the new arrangements.

Corruption exists in two important places in Feersum Endjinn. The Court is one area of corruption. Even the designer monarch, Adijine, is capable of making cause against his polity’s best interests. What we learn of Adijine early on has a kind of simpering, voluptuous, burnished quality. He feels, despite the explicit insistence on his superlative aptness, rather undependable:

“Adijine admired himself for a while longer. He had been bred to be King; not in the ancients’ crude hit-or-miss interpretation of the words but in the literal sense that the crypt had designed him; given him the aspect, bearing and character of a natural ruler before he’d even been born, selecting his physical and mental attributes from a variety of sources to make him handsome, attractive, charming, gracious and wise, balancing wit against gravitas, human understanding against moral scrupulousness and a love of the finer things in life against an urge towards simplicity. He inspired loyalty, was difficult to hate, brought out the best in men and women and had great but not total power which he had the sense and modesty to use sparingly but authoritatively. Not for the first time, he Adijine thought what a damn fine figure of a man he was. / / He looked like an absolute ruler, even though he wasn’t; he shared his power with the twelve representatives of the Consistory. They were his advisers, or better, his board; he was managing director. He controlled the physical realm of the structure through the other clans, the personal loyalty he commanded from the masses, and the Security services (now including the newly formed Army), while the men and women of the Consistory spoke for the crypt itself and the élite body of Cryptographers who formed the interface between the data corpus and humanity. It was a nicely balanced arrangement, as was proven by the fact it had existed for multi-generations of monarchs. Nothing had disturbed the calm face of old Earth for millennia until that Nessian cloak of darkness had started to stain the heavens” (68).

More on this “crypt” shenanishizzle in a minute. The language of the Court, and its Security operatives, tends to be homeostatic rather than chaoplexic, in the sense that it focuses on the detection and neutralisation of glitches:

“‘And you were fighting – let me get this clear – birds?’

‘Chimeric lammergeiers, sir. The sub-species believed responsible for and certainly associated with some of the Cryptospheric anomalies over the last few days. A number of them were successfully eliminated’” (263-4).

The status quo which they safeguard, however, cannot be the setting for future human flourishing, only the final chapter in a long decline:

“All that they and their ancestors had known [thought Oncaterius] throughout the monotonous millennia of the past since the Diaspora had been a kind of elegant death, an automaton’s graceful impersonation of life; the surface without the substance. Well, it was going now. The arc of humanity’s purpose – that is, real humanity, the part that had chosen to stay true to the past and what it meant – was finally drawing itself back into the shade after whole long troubled ages spent in the vexatious light of day” (p. 149).

So Adijine, Oncaterius and other members of the Court pursue an ecologically disastrous war, in the vague expectation they may save their own skins from an even bigger ecological catastrophe (“the Encroachment”). Instruments which might preserve the wider polity are ignored, and of course the people are kept in the dark about it all. The elite act mercilessly and murderously to eliminate challengers and whistleblowers (e.g. Sessine’s opposition, Gadfium’s conspiracy, the Asura), whilst wearing a look of lethargic defeatism (see note 6).

The second area of corruption is the Cryptosphere.

“Security’s quasi-official leak/rumour that any asuras would actually be agents of the crypt’s chaotic levels sent with the purpose of infecting the properly functioning Cryptosphere seemed to be meeting with a mixed reception; however, enough people/entities appeared to believe it for an atmosphere of satisfyingly useful paranoia to have settled over at least some sections of the data corpus” (150).

I must say I got a bit dappy re the difference, if any, between the Cryptosphere, the crypt, the data corpus, and one or two other things. I’ll assume they’re the same thing and just say “the crypt.” The crypt acts basically like your standard cyberpunk Internet. It’s a vast hoard of information, structured like a world, traversed and tinkered with by personalities.

The corruption or “chaos” in the crypt is the premise of the book’s major emissary quest is built. The “asura,” called Asura, is a construct from an uncontaminated subsystem who must physically travel to another uncontaminated subsystem, to set in motion some kind of salvation mechanism.

This chaos, we initially suppose, is a kind of exaggerated analogue of everyday Internet nuisances: viruses, malware, spyware, worms, spam, malicious bots, scraper sites; but just as the crypt is much more than the Internet, so their power and malevolence are expanded in the same ratio. Though it turns out we’re not quite right:

“Asoora sez thi hoal naytchir ov thi kaos may b abowt 2 chainje soon nway, or @ leest thi way we luke @ it mai b abowt 2t chainje, witch wude amownt 2 thi saim thing. Furst we got 2 stop fitein it tho” (277).

In line with the principle of a chaoplexic republic, the chaos turns out to hold the resources for necessary future organisation. “Decontamination” with respect to the crypt, therefore, involves not the elimination of corruption but the reclassification of the impurity, and its empowerment.

Is Feersum Endjinn cyberpunk? I don’t want to be too OCD over genre boundaries, but no, not really. Iain M. Banks and other contemporary space opera singers sometimes get called “post-cyberpunk” because they include stuff like cyborgs, nanotech, AI, and VR. That’s all fine and well, and we’re roughly in space opera territory with Feersum Endjinn, even if it is all more-or-less set on Earth.

There is also a more specific kind of reliance on certain achievements of cyberpunk. One thing which Gibson and others did well was the dramatisation of digitized information. Even if you do quite like observing geeky boys, hacking can make a pretty dull spectator sport. Gibson and others got around this by throwing some VR tech into the mix. In a novel like Feersum Endjinn, you get the feeling that the costumes have taken over the play. If you are literate in science fiction, you are accustomed to the idea that information and its interactions can be represented in many forms, maybe any forms; you are accustomed to the hypothesis that organic intelligence can be digitised (see note 7).

Feersum Endjinn doesn’t hang around trying to convince you of any of this. It skips right to the spectacle. That spectacle is predominantly gothic, or more precisely, it’s predominantly a passionate and ridiculous retro-medievalism. A king, a vast snow-rimed castle, talking beasts, a parliament of crows, a stone circle, monks, ghosts, ravines of conifers and shadows, eschatology. There’s even a princess up a tower, though with shades of Shrek.

This nominal princess, Asura, has the ol’ “incredibly hot and kickass heroine” modality in common with Passion di Orchi, and both characters also put out that goddess-in-the-machine vibe that’s discernible on the final page of William Gibson’s Idoru (and probably presaged by every sexy lady ship’s computer since sexy lady ship’s computers began). But somehow Asura is my kind of gal, Passion not so much. Maybe it’s the way Asura’s kickass-ness is entwined with unexpected behaviour. Here’s someone who’d violate gender norms as a matter of tactical principle.

I’m going to return to Asura briefly but significantly in the next post. For now, it’s enough to note that Asura and Passion have in common the function of the partial personification of those chaoplexic processes by which their respective polities emerge renewed from corruption. “[...] part of what I am was once like these people, and part has travelled the crypt and part has swum within the chaos [...]” (268).

I say “partial” because in each case there are also teasing suggestions of technological synthesis of many minds. It’s definitely around in the world of Feersum Endjinn:

“‘Oh, call me Alan,’ his younger self said. ‘I’m only an abbreviated version of who you are now, though I’ve developed on my own in here.’” (104)

“Another Gadfium awoke, looking out through the eyes of the original. This must be a bit how old Austermise feels, they both thought, and experienced the other’s thoughts as an echo.” (156)

In Lucifer’s Dragon it’s, you know, Passion, Sasumi, Doge, Anne, Timmy.

“For the beginning, because it contains its own principle, is also a god who, as long as he dwells among men, as long as he inspires their deeds, saves everything” (H. Arendt, paraphrasing Plato somewhere). Inasmuch as the chaoplexic republic is personified as a benign spirit, I think we are falling into a ha-ha around the contemporary utopian imagination. We are failing to unlock everything chaoplexity could tell us about utopia.

It is as though the only way to link the trans-epoch agency implicit in constitutional craftsmanship with the counter-intuitive behaviour of a chaoplexic republic is to fuse the two, to make the lawgiver and the spirit of the laws one and the same. The person who sets the polity in motion also benignly and discretely superintends.

The problematisation of such personifications by dodgy poly-mind grafting stuff insinuates that it is a consolation prize. It is a moment of compromise, of re-enchantment, a fanciful daydream, a malfunction of the true imaginative faculty.

In the next post, I’ll be taking that imaginative faculty to pieces, whilst looking at another book by Iain M. Banks. The polities of Lucifer’s Dragon and Feersum Endjinn, though they may be chaoplexic republics, and have their other plus points, are not exactly utopian.

The same cannot be said of the Culture.

Note 1: Another specimen for y’all. J. B. Ruhl, “Complexity Theory as a Paradigm for the Dynamical Law-and-Society System: A Wake-Up Call for Legal Reductionism and the Modern Administrative State.” The centrality of chaotics to Ruhl’s analysis is seldom very convincing: often where he says “emergent” he could easily have said “unexpected, but in retrospect totally obvious” – emergent behaviour is not obvious in retrospect! Ruhl implies as much, of course, in his critique of legal reductionism.

Chaotics-as-garnish is obvious in Ruhl’s discussion of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act: “[CERCLA] initiated a catastrophe shift in the dynamical systems sense, not to mention in the more familiar sense to many people [...] The history of environmental law preceding CERCLA had moved through incremental additions of regulatory pollution control statutes [...] The perception that this line of attack – this trajectory – was not adequately responding to the problem of abandoned waste sites led Congress to take a new approach in CERCLA [...] and environmental law has not been the same since. In one fell swoop, CERCLA introduced principles of strict, retroactive, joint and several, and generally unforgiving liability throughout a vast universe of regulated entities – many of whom, by all reasonable interpretations, had never before been even near the environmental liability target zone” (Ruhl 880). For Ruhl’s chaoplexity analogy to hold, the incremental regulatory additions would have to initiate CERCLA, which would constitute the catastrophe. When he talks instead about CERCLA initiating a catastrophe, this looks like is an outside intervention, not the deterministic unpredictability of a nonlinear system.

Burke and Lindbolm, going to the Incrementalists Prom with their chaotics corsages on. Ooh, look at you. Fancy. Before they go, Ruhl has a few words of advice: “environmental law will forever mark CERCLA as a discontinuity shift in which the whole system moved through some kind of warp field to a completely new location [...] Regardless of what one thinks about CERCLA’s merit and performance, an entirely different question is whether you believe the possibility of another event like CERCLA taking place would be the mark of a desirable law-and-society system” (881).

He soon goes on to discuss chaos manifesting “in environmental law in the many examples in which Congress has provided ostensibly simple rules for exercise of [sic] administrative authorities, and the agencies have produced highly complicated, random-looking results” (881). I expected Ruhl’s point here to be a subtle and disheartening one: that the simplification of an administrative or bureaucratic procedure sometimes counterintuitively produces less intelligible results. Shnipping red tape becomes a bit like shnipping the wire in an IED. Where to shnip? To be fair, he soon says something of that kind: “Congress might have provided a more ‘complicated’ legislative directive that, in a more controlled, simplified administrative setting, could have produced more simple, comprehensible implementation regulations [...] [focused] on simplifying the system dynamics, not necessarily just the system rules” (888-9). But his priority is to trot out a fairly conventional plaint, all about the arcane pronouncement of faceless bureaucrats: “Congress defined solid waste in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act to include ‘discarded material,’ [...] but the EPA has taken over two pages of the Code of Federal Regulations, [...] scores of pages of the Federal Register, [...] and hundreds of pages of internal agency guidances [...] to define that simple ‘discarded material’ concept. Few lawyers, even among the most experienced in solid waste law, really understand fully what EPA’s rules mean [...] In EPA’s twenty-five years of existence, it has amassed 12,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations.”

With chaotics momentarily forgotten (it was never really that significant anyway), Ruhl really puts himself in some dodgy company. Business as usual has recommenced: vote guns ‘n’ Jesus.

The paper as a whole is a Godsend, BTW, and many of Ruhl’s other remarks (for example the “feedback and feedforward loops” (884) whereby CERCLA may inadvertently have promoted the conversion of “pristine land into commercial uses” (884)) are very sharp, and not I think shaped by any involuntary partisan loyalty.

Note 2: A genealogy of the concept of “constitution” might begin with a glance at Hesiod in Works and Days and Plato in The Republic and The Laws, and then get stuck into Aristotle’s great work of comparative political theory, The Politics. Constitutions are things which Aristotle “gets” by checking out different territories (or getting his skivvies to check them out), comparing, systematising and classifying (according to institutional and economic criteria, and according to whether or not their governance is oriented to the common interest). The Cretan constitution, for example, is abstracted from a number of Cretan city-states. At one point Aristotle says that “the ‘constitution’ of a state is the organisation of the archē [rule, offices], and in particular of the one that is sovereign over all the others. Now in every case the citizen-body of a state is sovereign: the citizen-body is the constitution. Thus in democracies the people are sovereign, in oligarchies the few” (1278b6); he quickly amends his principle of classification so that in democracies the poor are sovereign, in oligarchies the rich (1279b26). Aristotle is sometimes a bit weird: “This much is clear: supposed that there were men whose mere bodily physique showed the same superiority as is shown by the statues of gods, then all would agree that the rest of mankind would deserve to be their slaves” (1254b16). Er . . .

Note 3: Are you here for the tour? In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, where the Great Council debated and voted, “the official zone was demarcated at either end of the room and was swapped according to the seasons. Gianotti states that for one half of the year it was situated between the two entrances close to the staircases, while during the late summer months when officials were being elected, it was positioned by the entrance to the >Sala del Scrutinio, the formal voting chamber [...] This alteration appeared to extend the official zone to encompass the Sala del Scrutinio on the Piazetta wing side [...] during elections, thereby formalising passage into this area and associating activity within it with the dais and Primi. In both positions, access routes breached the sanctity of the official zone, meaning that attendants passed in close proximity to the stage either when entering or during a vote [...] the belief in equality between patricians was at the heart of the republican myth of Venice, despite the actual pre-eminence of members of large, wealthy and important families, and the political domination of the Primi. The insistence in the electoral equality of all patricians helped manage these conspicuous differences, and correspondingly the design features of the chamber are a testament to Venice’s communal origins and the prodigious standing of the council in the republican model. Council members sat back to back on nine longitudinal benches [...] with a further double row along three walls. Aside from officials on the dais, seating was chosen freely and without hierarchy, with benches arranged to encourage face-to-face involvement throughout the length of the hall. Rather than being conglomerated in a mass (a disenfranchising tactic for Goodsell) nobles were able to move around, form smaller groups and different focal points. Indeed, Finlay describes the lack of formality on the dais when Savi would leave the stage, “wander about the chamber, and perhaps even leave it” during the reading of proposals [...] In the Senate, hierarchy was observed in the order of speakers, [...] while in the Grand Council the doge responded to all manner of interjections. All patricians had the right to mount the stage and speak from the renga, the raised speaking podium to the left of the stage. Short interchanges took place throughout the hall, creating a buzz and hum and meaning that it was difficult for speakers to attract attention, so much so that throughout the 1500s the Consiglio dei Dieci instituted penalties for those changing benches and causing excessive noise [...] These practical drawbacks did not, however, outweigh the symbolic significance of the space and its use. Positioning the dais on the short walls, rather than in a circular chamber on the Greek model, created a dominating presence: added to this, latitudinal rows would have turned the hall into a theatre, creating an invisible line between the activity on stage and the audience, and fixing the political gaze firmly on the doge and the Primi. As it was, gravitas was implied through the formality of the stage, but the centre/periphery divide was counterbalanced by the shifting of focus throughout the hall. The high/low distinction was likewise understated, sacred spaces kept to a minimum and private access routes denied, so that the chamber seemed like “a thing” of the patriciate, a physical symbol of the republican government itself.”

“The disparity between the uses of rooms in these short, divided floors is typical of the kaleidoscopic use of space in the Palazzo Ducale. As well as housing the covert state torture chamber, the public office of the Grand Chancellor is situated here. His office would not be reached by the Bussola entrance, but through a small wooden door concealed behind a closet in the public vestibule at the top of the Scala d’Oro [...] Here the chancellor as the ‘prince of the common people’ [...] would meet with cittadini and hear their concerns. It is fitting, then, that his is the most humble reception space in the palace, with bar wooden walls and unassuming furniture [...] As a representative of the class legally excluded from government, he was not to be seen rising above his station or neglecting his fellow cittadini, despite holding a position in the heart of government which ceremonially equated to that of the doge. The effect of his office is disarming; its compactness is comfortable and welcoming, stressing the humility and unpretentiousness of its inhabitant [...] That a room so concerned with managing the self-image of the chancellor should be accessed through false furniture is a puzzle, as visitors would be assumed to be complicit in whatever took place behind, and thus not taken in by false impressions. However, many visitors to the chancellor’s public office would never see his secret office, also situated in this clandestine mezzanine [...] it is ornate and spacious, its walls lined with cupboards containing confidential state documents. Its decoration alone undermines the modest façade of the public office, while its placement within the building gives a profound insight into the actual authority of the chancellor, counteracting the defining impression as a government purely of the nobility. [...] the chancellor’s public office is a fiction of function, giving partial access to a private world in which the chancellor is ostensibly rooted amongst common men, in order to better obscure his thorough involvement in oligarchic government [...] Internally, the secret Chancery is an exemplar of mutual scrutiny, arguably a [Foucaultian] proto-disciplinary space, involving the spatial technique of ‘partitioning’ [...] At three defined points in the room, guards were positioned to overlook illiterate scribes copying delicate state documents. Illiteracy was essential in order to protect state secrets: they copied letters as if they were patterns, and were dismissed within two months, before they could learn to read. [...] from the position of the guard on the raised end of the room, we can see white walls forming a sort of broad chimney [...] higher up there is a grated window behind which a fourth guard was posted. His single view was of the guard below, whose activities were curtailed by the sense of constant observation. This was no doubt worsened by the oblique positioning of the guard above, who was obscured from view by the severe perspective and darkness of the recess. One guard under surveillance was as good as three; those in the chamber were unable to form a bond, or as group pry into state secrets, knowing that one of their number was under constant supervision” (Walton, 33).

Note 4: “The exiles had decided to settle on a favoured group of islands, midway in the lagoon, known collectively as the Rivoalto or the high bank. This eventually became the Rialto, the pre-eminent market-place and emporium of the city. The islands were interspersed with rivulets and water-courses but there was one larger river, a tributary of the Brenta known as the Rivoaltus; this became in time the Grand Canal. Two more solid hills or islands – their description depends entirely upon how you judge the nature of the territory – faced each other along the course of this river. This is where Venice was created” (Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City (2009), p. 9).

“The great council met on the following day, 1 May, when the doge addressed them. He told them that it was necessary to make peace at any price, and that they must resort to prayer. So matters stayed for the next few days, with Venetian enjoys going to and from the camp of Napoleon. They capitulated on every point. The great council met on 12 May to ratify their proceedings. Those present did not meet the required quorum of six hundred members, but they decided to go ahead anyway. They had just got to the point of debating the measure to accept ‘the proposed provisional representative government’, a French government, when the sound of musketry was heard. It was in fact the parting salute of some sailors leaving the Lido, but the patricians believed it to be the noise of an invading army. They fell into a panic. The doge called out ‘Divide! Divide!’, to conclude the vote. They did so, and promptly left the council hall never to return. Ippolito Nievo recorded that, ‘after sixty years I still see some of those frightened, dejected, alarmed faces. I visualise the deathly pallor of some, the decomposed almost drunken aspect of others, the nervous hurry of the majority, who seemed as though they would gladly have jumped out of the windows to escape this scene of infamy.’ It is reported in the histories of the period that the doge returned to his apartment, and gave his ducal bonnet to his manservant. ‘Take it’, he said. ‘I shall not be needing it again.’ So ended the republic of Venice. The last Carnival before the end was supposed to have been the most magnificant, and the most expensive, in the entire history of the city” (Ackroyd p. 318).

Note 5: See J. G. A. Pocock on the reconceptualisation of virtue and the rise of rights in the Scottish Enlightenment, American Revolution, etc. – “Virtues, Rights and Manners” in Virtue, Commerce and History (1985). He’s good on Venetian virtue too. Venetian elections were notoriously complicated; as a guard against corruption, chappies would vote for chappies to vote, chappies could sort of unvote each other, you never knew which chappies would be voting on something, etc., etc. By a series of physical devices – “the benches on which men took their seats at random, but rose in a fixed order to cast their votes; the containers from which names and numbers were drawn at random, but in which positive and negative votes might be placed in secrecy – the Venetians were held, so to speak, to have mechanized virtù” (J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), p. 284).

Note 6: The Encroachment might be an example of what is referred to in M. Banks’s Culture sequence as an Outside Context Problem.

Note 7: Science fiction’s fascination with identity, survival, and things which come-to-be essences, BTW, are part of the context of this whole thing. The more I develop the “chaoplexic” bit of “chaoplexic republic” the less the “republic” bit resembles anything like a nation state, where political, economic systems are roughly coextensive. When I started dreaming this up, that fascination was going to provide hints as to what the “republic” might look like instead. How do they all fit together – integrity, sense of self, continuity, identity, inheritance, stability, common value, peoples, history, tradition? I feel like I have a lot on though and I don’t know if I’ll really get round to talking more explicitly about it all.

Here, from M. Banks’s Excession (& slightly spoilerish): “Gestra Ishmethit, his mind-state plucked from his dying brain in the evacuated cold of the warship halls in Pittance by the guilt-stricken Attitude Adjuster, appropriated from that craft just before it destroyed itself by the attacking Killing Time and subsequently passed on until it came to rest in the restocked memory vaults of the Sleeper Service, had also been woken up and furnished with a new body by that time; death had neither improved his social skills nor sated his urge for solitude [...]” (p. 450).

Just noticed that “destroyed itself by the attacking Killing Time” BTW, v. interesting! I think what happens in that engagement is that the Attitude Adjuster gets “comped”; the Killing Time sort of wriggles into its brain circuits and sets in motion processes which rip it apart. But it all happens from the perspective of the Attitude Adjuster, and the suicide makes sense from the inside. It’s closer to confabulation than overdetermination – I mean, Poirot would say it was the Killing Time what done it – but there’s a plausible causal story which doesn’t include the Killing Time (or only peripherally). That perhaps alters the pattern of responsibility involved (something I’ll be touching on in the last of these posts).

More festive larks

2010-12-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-16T04:56:00.000-07:00

"[...] 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

2010-09-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-23T06:14:00.001-07:00

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!)

2010-06-11T05:16:00.000-07:00

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 *

2010-05-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

"'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)

The Five-Epoch Plan: 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!!!

2010-05-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-26T05:03:00.000-08:00

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 Katko, 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

2010-02-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

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!

Ream Peehole &c.

2009-11-08T04:32:00.000-08:00

The Dream People issue 32 is online! Including, you know, "An evening of video and readings from the work of this important minimalist hermit poet who was a close friend of Thomas Merton. With Alan Spence and Julie Johnstone," that sort of thing. Mykle Hansen’s Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere sounds good -- "will change everything you thought you knew about the subject." My stupidly long remix of the Blankety Blank review is here. I particularly enjoyed Rob Parker's "Goatse Agape!" -- a consummate Thing By A Boy.

Blog post

2009-11-04T03:36:00.000-08:00

Hello! Three things.

1) Power 2010 / Unlock Democracy is featuring some interesting ideas for democratic reform from the many little larabuckertons of "Blogland."

2) Meanwhile, I visited London this weekend to look for survivors and found nothing but bookshops. The bookartbookshop near Old Street tube station is a sweet little diving bell, stacked with pretty little hand-mades and a few poetic bots and bibs. Definitely worth a lick of its icing, but it has funny opening times so make sure you have a giggle at them before you go.

While you're securing the area, there's a little bookshop in Old Street station itself. Full prices, but "stacky" like a second hand bookshop, so I didn't feel afraid, and for its size it's a good selection of genre and cult stuff.

Altogether grittier is the Barnardo's charity shop near Brixton Tube, where Bon Jovi side-projects and suspect baby slippers mingle with rare and sacred texts of the contemporary avant garde -- you know, Articulate How, Eckhart Cars, that sort of thing. It probably won't be long before they clear either the poetry or the slippers out to make room for the other, so hurry girls!

I'd also recommend, back in Edinburgh, Armchair Books, which is along from Grassmarket. It has a nice large jumble of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and a large antiquarian collection whose books I can't afford, but whose titles made me titter melodiously. Two notices, "This bookshop may revert to a private residence at any moment," and "Please don't piss against the door -- it runs into the shop" also trickled under my fancy.

I haven't visited Peter Bell Books next door, but doesn't it sound trustworthy? Like a Praxis MP!

3) I'm guest-editing the "Scotland" bit of an online poetry journal, Sleeves run I think by Marcus Sleeves? I met him at a sort of poetry rodeo thing in London, he has very pure skin like a baby and carries a moustache comb. So do send me your poems, if you live in Scotland (larabuckerton at "gee, male!" dot com), or let's say down to Newcastle, by the end of November.

4) There are now four bald men and one with a ponytail opposite me clustered around a Toshiba laptop watching something that goes "Aaargh! Eugh! Aaaargh! Bchkew!! Bchkew!! Aaaaargh!!"

Looters xxx

Utopia

2009-10-05T06:16:00.000-07:00

I have just spent two nights at Notopos, un événement de la Biennale internationale des Poètes en Val de Marne (BIPVAL), au sein du projet européen « Trytich : Poésie – identité – Coexistence » soutenu par le commissariat à la culture de l’Union Européenne et piloté par la société chypriote Atlantis Productions en collaboration avec les quatre pays partenaires Chypre, France, Suède et Grèce, whatever that means! I always think I'm quite good when I get to say the French but not so much when I have to listen.

The lovely, lovely, lovely Christophe Marchand-Kiss kinda tractor-beamed me via series of evasive emails which actually attached alligator clips which were the Praxis Molds of the Hoxton fin of the lad I love, and whose wires apparently led into a rustling bingo-wing all arranged, it looked like, for karaoke later and I was down to do John Prine's "Jesus Christ: The Missing Years . . . et un 'bonus'" with someone called AnnaO but actually led out the other side into a shaking trifocal pornography whose panels each represented the level of magnification most associated with one of the three participating nations (France, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey). On Saturday, at the Maison de la Poesie restaurant, Christophe explained in terrible English how he distilled my pure coordinates out of fine ambient poetry dew, and to be fair had an alembic but I suspect a tip-off from the lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely respectively Stephen Rodefer or Caroline Bergvall? Bliss was it in that norm to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

A folder in my hotel room held translations, by no less than Ian Bell, which were both much better than the original without not being exactly the same!

The readings took place in two venues, one in Paris and one in Vitry-sur-Seine, and on the coaches between, & I suspect the funding relates to the Vitry venue, whilst the Paris venue was because none of the fucko backwards redthroat Vitry locals could after a harvest day of barf and bucks under the bigger EuroDisney roller-coasters be bothered to fucking show up (some of those only scheduled to read in Vitry were a bit "poety" about this!!) to listen to some fucking poems.

After I watched perhaps ten poets read in languages I couldn't understand, though in some cases they were followed by translations into languages I couldn't understand. Everyone read with spectacular theatricality and vivacity, and some were accompanied with videos, music (including a bloody wicked lil faun-dude mincing about with a flute pastoral as shite) and other sound; some of this perhaps was in deference to the uncertain mix of linguistic competence present in the room; some perhaps merely à la mode.

It began with le travail de Heike Fiedler (Suisse), some rather wonderful macronic outbursts, quite understandable from a customer finally at the front of the queue she hallucinated. Here's something of Heike's I found on Youtube:

Heike is a matey. I'll try to find more of her stuff. She questioned the ethics of holding me down to tape my beak open "in case."

Cia Rinne (Finlande), whose kid I think Gür Genç (Chypre -- it means Cyprus!!) laughingly hoisted earlier, broke words into smaller sense units and rapidly nudged them around their somatic neighbourhood, achieving a semantic ensemble stripped to minimal syntax without, somehow, seeming semantically random. I dunno, in London I might have found this a bit I-shit-myself-with-jogging-loyalty, but perhaps the fact that there was sucha comprehensive context of Indo-European meaning being drawn upon enlivened it. Or maybe her puns were witty.

I also liked Anne Kawala; she'd prepped me beforehand and I was able to follow some of it. I think there were roses and some cabbages being grown in the desert, but the cat knocks the irrigation. Then I think something dies, and I think, counterintuitively, it may be the cat. Oh dear. New Criticism. Anne is interested in reviving language. Is it then alive or undead I asked, wanting comfort. We developed a distinction between Vampire Language, whose spiritless repose is restrained and unobvious to the untrained eye, and Zombie Language, whose deadness is unmistakeable and also contagious (a kind of ideology of ideology critique?). Anne was taken by my account of Lich Lords. She is also taken by Christophe, who seems like a well nang cat -- all "crashing fags to people who don't really smoke but oh go on then" and frenetically chillaxing via E E Cummings, Quentin Tarantino, & tax law. Maybe he was excited because it was the festival he was organising then.

I went off for a bit and tried without much success to make myself sick to sober up. In the meanwhile Niki Marangou, who would not be drawn over dinner, Ramon Dachs, and Anne Kawala read. Then Demosthenes Agrafiotis, whom I missed at Birkbeck earlier this year, showed and collaborated with a film which took its own sweet time portraying its abecedary. I thought of Tom Raworth's "Shorty Fleming". Demosthenes is into post-calligraphy. He went to China with Julien Blaine and they drank snake's bolood together, a kind of commitment which should be instructive to the wavering hick polick. Then I just nipped off again and missed Gür Genç.

Then I did my bit:

& a dude came through with a mop to sort out the Coke at the end, and came on again later to really make sure. Frédérique Wolf-Michaux read Ian Bell's translation, really getting into it, and making similar cuts to the ones I'd just made up. It was weird and thrilling. Collaboration ex post facto mixed up with vanity.

Then mighty Pambos Kouzalis and his flautist. Probably bards? Then Nathalie Yot, at pace and throwing some shapes. Then AnneO and her guitarist. Three or four extremely breathy minimalist trip-rock pieces about princesses, with photocopier imagery -- I think of ladies in massive fuck-off hats and big gowns, maybe candles -- it made me think of that story where a kiss is amplified and the chap that hears it goes mad and melts. Not Roald Dahl, the other one. Then Demosthenes again, less accessible to me this team. Steinbacher was reading and tapping his pencil on his glass and smacking his book emphatically, and when he lost his pencil he had a spare pencil, though he put it in the same place from where the first one had rolled, but then when Frédérique was giving one of the interleaved translations he retrieved them both to his inner pocket, putting an end to that drama, and I was plucked away on a bus to Vitry.

In the vast bus were me and Gür and two others. "If you only shake your dick in Cyprus you'll hit some poets." I think Gür was out of sorts. He is a composite of twisted shadows, half-darknesses wrapped compactly like an artichoke heart, his serrated umbra-flanges spooling around the edges of the System in murklaw Northern Cyprus, as though they were monkeybars. His favourite English poets are Philip Larkin and John Clare. He's interested in poets who killed themselves (Myakovsky killed himself). "The skeleton worked into the David Foster Wallace" (Keston Sutherland, page 8). A fiss of RK lips. Things were winding down in Vitry. Raptor void leaping from people to people. All the funnest hugs, ever. The director Jean-Pierre Balpe was hilariously despondent and thought the whole thing was a fucking failure. Ha ha ha ha!

Saskia de Jong said she liked poems if she liked the person who was saying them and didn't like them if she didn't. She ordered for me: une omlette avec fromage et une bloody mary. She told me my train was upstairs.

I'll maybe add more later!

BYEeee xxx

Animals

2009-09-22T03:37:00.000-07:00

I have found a new piece from the magnificent Steve Aylett!

"As far as I could tell every single one of the thousand or so rats was exactly the same. Again, why the repetition of the same idea? It could be that they were different from each other in some subtle way I didn’t understand, but what could it be? Would they begin individually expressing different viewpoints and notions never heard before? Or simply attack me in the most boring way, each rat gnashing in roughly the same manner as its neighbour? I’ll leave you to guess which was the case."

Well done everyone!

Telly!!!

2009-09-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

Derren Brown predicted the Lotto numbers live on telly!!

Then the marvellous imp "revealed" three ways of winning the Lottery: (1) forge a ticket; (2) really predict the numbers; (3) rig the machines. Most of his show was devoted to option (2). We watched the lovely, lovely, lovely Derren charm twenty-four also rather sweet chumps into believing that -- if they only shed their greed (like good cultists!) -- then, like Power Rangers dolls, aggregated into a mighty Prophet Mech -- why, those Lotto numbers would come tumbling towards them like a little Temporal Hamster, scurrying in her ball against the flow.

It seems like "Deep Maths," post-Christian anxiety around civil privatism, the sedimented avant-garde cachet of Breton's automatism, and the wisdom of crowds ("the studied perspicacity of lynch mobs" as Auntie May used to call it) make up the New Credulity, and upon it the lovely, lovely, wicked Derren has founded the New Paranormal -- that's not boycum sealing your copy of Freakonomics, Derren -- it's ectoplasm!!!

But then in the very exciting bit at the end, Derren strongly implied he had really used option (3) -- eyebrow-waggled his way into the Camelot set-up, a veritable Jedi Knight of the Round Table, and rigged the lottery.

Of course, some cleversticks of Youtube Inc. quickly divined how Derren could have “predicted” the lottery with camera trickery, a sort of option (4) thingy. His unstoppably understated video was picked up by national news, because this is how we roll. The enigmatic snowflake which, in the teaser to The Events, Derren coquettishly lifts up to his chest rather like the doomed and overweight child who repulses Humbert Humperdink in the early chapters of Nabokov’s Lolita lifting a sticky red lollypop to hers, seemed to sign that Derren had indeed frozen half the screen.

The latest twist though comes from a member of the show's live audience, a sort of living "deleted scenes", who reports that they were shown a clip of Derren on an open-top bus travelling under the 2008 Christmas lights on Oxford Street, snowflakes unravelling about his cheekbones and glittering in the pits of his eyes, and his fists stuffed with mock-up Lotto balls prophesizing the correct digits.

But the very latest twist is that the studio audience who watched the studio audience being filmed saw yet another secret bit of the show, which seems to show that there is an option (5)! Melody had tickets, but couldn't go on account of having suddenly become responsible for the creation of twenty carrot and ginger cakes, despite not owning so much as a spoon, so this is from mine & Poesy's memories, known to be rather wonderful and interesting. Do listen out for what I think may be a rather clever sleight in the final moments:

[Derren speaking]
Ah, Derren,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Derren may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Derren must be damn'd.
O, I'll leap up to my God!--Who pulls me down?--
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!--
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!--
Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no!
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me!
You stars that reign'd at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Derren, like a foggy mist.
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud,
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven!
[This now cuts to a profile shot of my ex-boyfriend, Dream, which is weird enough in itself]
Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon
O God,
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransom'd me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Derren live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd!
O, no end is limited to damned souls!
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd
Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Derren, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven.
[The vast red LED blinks 12:00.]
O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
[Thunder and lightning.]
O soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!
[Enter DEVILS.]
My God, my god, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books!--Ah, Mephistophilis!
[Exeunt DEVILS with DAN BROWN.]
[A sort of chorus enters and begins to strike the set.]

Paroxyms of gay man lust overwhelm me and I must go for a wander. Adieu, world-swabs.

Letter to Toilette & Douche LLP

2009-08-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Big 1/4,

According to the Deloitte web site, "Third-party assurance enhances trust building and credibility with company stakeholders".

This evening I read with mounting euphoria your inaugural corporate responsibility report, "We are defined by our responsibilities." You were even runner-up in a competition! Alas, as has often been the case, my euphoric pretensions were cut short when the finale came sooner than expected, or was wished for. Where is the assurance statement?

To its clients, Deloitte promotes the value of independent assurance of corporate responsibility disclosures. Why then does the firm feel it is inappropriate to seek independent assurance on its own report?

I look forward to your response.

Yours faithfully,
Lara

Octave Puke

2009-08-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

May I recommend you all Francis Crot's "OCTAVE PUKE: 3 CHAPTERS FROM THE TRAGEDY OF BEYONCE KNOWLES" forthcoming very soon from Veer Books? I have an advance copy for blurb purposes, although Francis, who is also the author of "I Will Endorse Your Novel For Crack," has explained that she "makes them up" and is going to "use me for ideas," so. It's a sort of hard-boiled detective thingy. Originally Francis wanted 200 blank pages at the back for notes. Next I'm reading Cranford again and I'll probably write a blurb to that as well. Consider this it, Francis!

Non-sequitors are the new instrumental reason

2009-08-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

Violent grassroots resistance to . . . regulation of the health insurance market? Loco! Some cry astroturf, Lara says burnurns & traversers! Prof Karol Sikora, dean of the University of Buckingham Medical School, has been appearing in US commercials explaining that negroes, Satan and communism are basically the same deal, and what we have over here!

Only one thing to do: donate a few bucks to Strange Horizons, which has been around much longer than America.

xxx

P.S.: Billions of Britishers en masse are defending the NHS on Twitter (those that don't know how to defend it on Dwarf Fortress)! Sweeeeet!!!

Assurors of the future

2009-08-09T13:07:00.000-07:00

I am working on a specula principum for the Big Four (four cutting edges, like a Wilkinson Sword Quattro: they are Deloitte, KPMG, E&Y and PwC). I'm focusing, obv., on their provision of assurance of corporate responsibility reporting.

I've drafted this wish-list of features which I think a good assurance engagement should have. I'd love to hear your views (I mean anyone!).

Is there something I've left out?

I've tried to be as ambitious as possible, but are some of these just completely unrealistic longings?

"CR" stands for "Corporate Responsibility" (something like CSR, corporate citizenship, or sustainability). "CRR" stands for "Corporate Responsibility Reporting." CSO and NGO are "Civil Society Organisation" and "Non-Governmental Organisation."

Third-party involvement in CRR: best practice and risks

(1.1) Stakeholders - best practice

Critical independence
- The assuror is an expert on the public interest, conceived as a global phenomenon ("the common good" etc.)
- The assuror constantly maintains its expertise through consultation with -- and procurement and recruitment from -- CSOs, NGOs, academia, business, grassroots activists, the political class, and through original research
- The assuror's opinion is widely regarded as credible, but the assuror's ultimate reference standard is the public interest, not the protection of its own credibility
- The assuror doesn't take the existence and salience of different stakeholders as a "given," but considers how CR and CRR can influence the formation, salience and empowerment of stakeholder constituencies
- The assuror also takes into account the formation of different stakeholder models and representations by CR and CRR -- different ways of imagining or modelling stakeholder expectations
- The assuror recognises itself as a stakeholder, and does not present itself as neutral
- The assuror recognises that it is a nexus of stakeholder views
- The assuror itself is subject to independent oversight
- The assuror employs third (fourth, I suppose?) parties to double-blind assure randomly selected CRR assertions
- The assuror treats liability as a transformative instrument, not just as a risk to be avoided
- The assuror’s employees possess independence of mind
- The assuror’s independence is not structurally compromised
- The assuror always constructively criticises the reporting entity’s CR and CRR (there are no clean bills of health)
- Criticism is always addressed by the reporting entity, not normalised as a permanent feature of CRR
- The assuror ensures that stakeholder conflict is reflected in the reporting entity's CRR

(1.2) Stakeholders - risks

Independence is confused with objectivity
- The CRR obscures the political dimension of the reporting entity’s activities -- disguising political conflicts with winners as losers as "challenges" which can be tackled to everyone's satisfaction
- Processes which cannot be quantified are neglected
- Processes which cannot be validated are neglected
- Measureable indicators are mistaken for hard facts

Pandering to stakeholders
- Stakeholder-orientation leads to neglect or misuse of expert knowledge
- Stakeholder-orientation leads to overemphasis on credibility at the expense of accuracy
- Goals which cannot be associated with specific stakeholders are ignored

Inventing stakeholders
- Stakeholder-orientation causes assurors and reporting entities to see well-defined constituencies where no such constituencies exist
- "Communities" or "the community" abstract away real differences, fragmentation and conflicts among stakeholders

Malign transformation of stakeholders
- “Symbiotic” stakeholder constituencies, which legitimate corporate activities in return for minor concessions, marginalise other stakeholders
- Traditional democratic resources are eroded by the emergence of corporate stakeholder constituencies (e.g. time spent in stakeholder dialogue is diverted from traditional civic participation)
- Improvements in CR damage the identities of critics of the reporting entity (e.g. critics are marginalised, "defeated" and/or radicalised, rather than transferred to new appropriate targets)
- CR compels individual stakeholders with unique characteristics to assimilate into blocs

(2.1) Holism - best practice

Intelligent responsibility

- CRR allows corporations, states, CSOs, NGOs, international institutions and other actors to dovetail their efforts towards achieving the public interest
- The assuror helps the reporting entity to define scope and materiality, not just test accuracy
- Materiality is defined with respect to the public interest
- The burden of proof lies with the assuror in determining that it or the reporting entity “is not in the business of [x]” (i.e., that [x] is a matter for private morality / government regulation / someone else in the supply chain etc.)

Intelligent comparability
- CRR identifies the real drivers of CR and allows easy policy transfer to underperforming entities
- CRR encourages the growth of SRI and engages in critical dialogue with ranking agencies and investors
- CRR is tailored by context, including entity size, industry, sector and geographical spread
- CRR occurs at the appropriate organisational level, which may be above or below that of corporate reporting
- At each level, CRR facilitates CR at every level -- e.g., CRR at the level of the individual corporation facilitates the launch of CR programmes at the industry level

(2.2) Holism - risks

Inappropriate responsibility
- In defining materiality, the survival or “success” of the reporting entity takes precedence over public interest
- In defining materiality, partial social goods, such as job security or local community development, take precedence over public interest
- The reporting entity’s CR is benchmarked against a limited model, against competitors, or against an abstract idea of “public expectations” or of “progress”
- Too many scenarios and interactions are considered, incurring unecessary costs and obscuring priorities
- Responsibility is confused with accountability, making it difficult to tell where accountability channels exist
- CR successes are “consolidated” by unnecessary or counterproductive regulative regimes
- The assuror and / or the entity hold unrealistic expectations about the limits of the law

Inappropriate comparisons
- CRR invites misleading comparisons, either because reports are insufficiently tailored to context, or because errors occur in translating between contexts

Malcoordination
- Different visions of the public interest interfere with one another
- Important issues “fall between the cracks” between businesses, states, assurors and other actors
- Corporations are encouraged to try to replicate context-specific or one-off successes

(3.1) Business case - best practice

Conflicts of interest
- The assuror does not just avoid conflicts of interest or seek to neutralise them with Chinese walls, but resolves them in favour of the public interest

Appropriate scope and depth
- Neither assuror nor reporting entity view assurance as primarily a commodity
- Where possible, assurance is not a commodity - for example, provided free of charge with large contracts, or incorporated into the assuror's own CR programmes
- The assuror achieves the appropriate balance between driving change and ensuring comparability across reporting entities
- Assurance always contains "spot checks" in which randomly selected material items are assured to a higher level than they otherwise would be
- The scope of the engagement between the reporting entity and the assuror is not determined by the reporting entity, but by the global public interest
- The scope of the engagement between the reporting entity and the assuror is not determined by the assuror, but by the global public interest. Increases in scope are not reflected by increases in fees (for example, the expanded scope engagement could be passed over to a second assuror)
- The scope of the engagement is not limited by financial considerations - if the reporting entity cannot afford the required level of engagement, the assuror or some other actor meets the funding gap
- The assuror drives change at substantive, procedural and cultural levels
- Assurors and reporting entities achieve the appropriate balance between long-term relationships and fresh perspectives
- Assurance involves a long-term on-site presence
- Assurance involves off-site interviews of employees and management

(3.2) Business case - risks

Assurors sell legitimacy
- CRR is callibrated to maximise legitimacy, not to accurately reflect CR

“Box-ticking”
- CRR is dominated by a compliance-orientation

Cultural change is emphasised in the wrong areas
- Compliance-orientation is underused. CR which could safely and easily coordinated through systems rationality places an undue burden on communicative rationality

Notes

At the moment, I'm coming at the issue from the perspective that "stakeholder" is in danger of becoming a magical concept, capable of solving any CR problem. But the definition of a stakeholder is notoriously contested, and certain groups of stakeholders may simply get certain issues wrong.

Once I've finalised my model of a perfect assurance engagement, the next step is to see how the Big Four measure up to it! Then to insinuate myself as a mist under boardroom doors.

Reality

2009-07-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

plus . . .

Dead Set.

WHEN WILL SOMEONE MAKE A REALITY TV SHOW WITH ZOMBIES AND PUT ME ON IT AND NOT TELL ME I'M ON IT. NO I don't have an unconscious wish to abolish private property, it really is about the zeds.

The Horrible Truth

2009-07-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria
By D. Harlan Wilson

D. Harlan Wilson wrote Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria. A serial killer comes to suburbia. In good postmodern fashion (shout out, Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman) the killer is a rational extrapolation of the suburban system, not an exception to it.

When D. Harlan Wilson wrote Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria it was like, OK: why bring that up now. Because in “Room” (The Kafka Effect, 2001), approximately the same author pointed out: “Room fulla bureaucrats, managers ... tomboys, oafs ... [it goes on for a few pages, mentioning everything] ... sociobiologists, sociopaths ... loners ... chin ... collectors and resellers ... mean and nasty and wild and crazy packrats, and an invisible man made visible by a suit of human skin standing by himself in a corner blinking into the maelstrom and then scanning the whitewalls of the room, just one more time, for doors that are not there”, and what’s to add? What’s to add to that succinct bitterbitter, blankety-blank sentiment? What’s to add that hasn’t been INB4ed by the OP “saturnalia-nailed-on-a-skatepark” gris-gris freize-freak you love to hate to hate to love, ladies and brutalmen, the one, the only, the Other, Late- a.k.a. Techno- a.k.a. POSTCAPITALISM?

Some of us have been seeing if, next, we can throw up through our best friend – stuff like that. Bringing up the postcapitalist maelstrom is a bit like bringing up the Holocaust. Can’t we just forget about it, i.e. deny it ever happened? You say head in the sand, I say taking the fight to the sand. A serial killer comes to suburbia. You can’t kip-up from life itself. WRITHE WHERE YOU BELONG, BEING.

A brief history of the Cafca Effect

Franz Kafka’s illustrious communiqué that the “exceptions listed in §2 of the classification regulations frequently provide the inspectors’ assessments with a legal justification to oppose the Insitute’s classification. The application of §2 in the current classification system must rely on the passage regarding revision of the risk categories as specified on p. 119 of the Amtliche Nachrichten of 1909. This section states that only certain types of commercial enterprises may be considered suitable for the application of §2, as well as a limited kind of low-energy engines” (letter to the Minister of the Interior, Summer 1911) says it all.

What’s to add?

Definition of maelstrom

Noun. Rarely malström, malstrøm. Pl. maelstaaaaargh!

1. A very powerful whirlpool; a large, swirling body of water. A free vortex, it has considerable downdraft. The Nordic word was introduced into English by Edgar Allan Poe in his story “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841). Probably derived from the Dutch maelstrom (in modern Dutch, maalstroom). The Netherlands was one of the earliest countries to succumb to (slash, become emparadised by) capitalism, and also the locus of the first truly modern financial crisis: the tulips bubble. Financial bubbles stretch out over the ether to a grand thought dirigible. But what image floats therein? Is it just a chick?

2. A metaphor for the way in which postcapitalism confronts individuals. Although in fact you are caught in a conjunction of currents which have no necessary relationships with one-another, you experience a monstrous integrated environment, seemingly bent on your captivity and destruction. Tossed devastatingly to and fro, the more you lose track of absolute position and orientation, and the nature of body and identity, the less convincing you find the vulgar postmodern maxim that such things are illusions.

Dream-like

Shutting your eyes to the horrible truth lets you dream about it.

“... Basically,” says D. Harlan Wilson (hereafter “Doc”), “irrealism combines a dreamlike aesthetic with an absurdist sentimentality—that’s how I always explain it. I also deploy techniques and rudiments from several other genres (e.g., absurdism, science fiction, fantasy, horror, splatterpunk, literary fiction, postmodernism). These are all fairly broad terms that encompass a wealth of styles and narrative ingredients. In the last few years, my writing has fallen into the category of ‘Bizarro.’ This is also a broad term that might be quantified as the literary equivalent to a cult film. In light of my preoccupation with media forces and technocapitalist violence, however, probably the most apt title of all for my writing is ‘Avant-Pop.’ According to hyperartist Mark Amerika in his Avant-Pop Manifesto, ‘Avant-Pop artists themselves have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer their own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease (“information sickness”) that infects the core of our collective life.’ Plain and simple, right? In the end, I guess I’m as confused as anybody about what I write. But I like writing it ... I’m extremely interested in dreams on a personal and theoretical level—where dreams come from, how they inform our lives, how they interpret experience, the stories they tell, what they indicate about brain function, etc. Dreams are essentially an instance of raw imagination at work, and the assertion and exploration of the imagination is of seminal importance to me, both as a writer and reader ...” (interview in Pif Magazine).

One similarity between dreams and Blankety Blank is a properly Kafkaesque atmosphere of stonewalling and unforthcomingness. Kafka’s shit so cash. Worlds of meaning are violently torqued around undisclosed “fetish object” gravity wells while behaving enormously embarrassed about the whole thing.

This kind of unenthusiastic and bureaucratic “negative destiny” is remniscent of The Crying of Lot 49: “‘It is at about this point in the play that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words […] a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance” (Thomas Pynchon).

This same quality sometimes enters OMG my dreams. It tends to happen whenever a dream puts its entire illusion in jeopardy, by developing demands upon its characters to act more – well, “humanly.” I mean, I think there can be a kind of revalatory element to living in a world peopled by other minds, a dimension of surprise and emergent complexity. Something which cannot be convincingly emulated by a single mind relating to itself via an ensemble of finger puppets. So whenever events in a dream conspire to disclose that limitation, the ritual reluctance intervenes to divert and distract. Otherwise, all the little brains in the muffin tin must rise rhizomically and merge and Lara must awake.

That’s what (to take another phrase of Doc’s) “The Dream People” are like – strange, pseudo-differentiated creatures, ever-ready to morph to new functions, secluded behind a veil of evasiveness, superintended by something large, secret and shocking.

But the obscurity which Blankety Blank tries to penetrate (or at any rate, introduce into the dance of its eye flaws) is this – real people have become like people in dreams.

Pinching

Another smidge of Pynchon, BTW, Blankety Blank reminds me of is the opening of Vineland, in which Zoyd Wheeler somewhat wearily carries out his annual rite (it’s a local media spectacle too) of dressing in drag, acquiring a chainsaw and leaping through a plate-glass window. This keeps him in mental disability cheques for another year: obv. this special day is from a certain POV the one day of the year on which Zoyd is sane enough to “work” as a productive member of society. There’s a character in Blankety Blank who compulsively throws himself from a window, one of the many instances in the book of mechanical behaviours unaccountably imposed on human life. Even more than of the Pynchon bit though, it reminds me of Chris Morris’s Jam sketch on the topic. Jam includes some very good satire on what you might call the UK’s “propertied interest” – here a meticulous expose of middle class ruthlessness and self-loathing, here a rather sweet expose of underclass bafflement and slavishness (can’t find the link just now but it is rather sweet I promise). In a way it’s a pity Chris Morris wasn’t born an American, since then he’d be dead and we wouldn’t have to know.

Spoiler alert

Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria. Parts hereafter are quite spoiler-ish. So if you want the gist, it is: buy this product, in fact don’t just buy this product, buy every product!

Zero-dimensional man

“An irreality TV show was being filmed outside the entrace. Rutger had seen the show before. He couldn’t remember its name. It might have been ‘The Show.’ He recognized the main character. He was the only character – an expressionless, nondescript male in his late 50s who traveled to different strip malls around Michagan, stood against their pseudobrick walls and, once an hour, on the hour, droned, ‘This is real.’ Intermittently he said, ‘This is reality,’ and it was the task of the audience, over the course of a month, to determine how many times the protagonist tacked on an ity word to the word real and precisely where and why those aberrations took place in the temporal scheme of things. To do so successfully resulted in the breaking of a code that rutger had always found to tedious to waste time on. But he had to admit liking the show. He liked it almost as much as staring at praying mantises.” Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria, by Doc, pg. blankety blank.

Real people have become like people in dreams. Crash zoom, cymbal crash. Yes, in Blankety Blank, the characters are as deep as the scum that covers the surface of the poisoned water feature at the centre of the suburban community – and this illicit and derivitive quality extends even to their reviews. From the town hall pulpit to the last cracked commode lex leks and Zweckrationalität runs amok. Put your little Lego crescent in mine. But lives in Vulgaria are stacked less like Lego than like Luxco portfolios – malevolent, horny and barely there. If there were a Dramatis Personae it would list the characters’ desires, not their names. Haggling, which overtly dominates one early episode, is a good template for most of the memoir’s interactions. There is gusto and imagination in haggling – but it’s all in the sick, sundazed and saddened pursuit of gain.

The thin characterisation is not simply “good writing disguised as bad writing.” In a strong sense, it is “bad writing.” It is writing which is bad because life itself is badly written.

Quality is violently reduced to quantity. Your vein, if you know your stuff, rises hissing from your forehead like the cobra from her basket – Jürgen Habermas, in a drunken swing at postmodernist irrationalism, hypothesises an “unlimited communication community,” but against this (actual proper) theory, postmodernism can posit a quasi-noumenal “unlimited haggling community,” in which communicative action is steered by fear of boredom, and of the violent restructuring of identity by haggard and mercenary rhetoricians. “Why can’t I find a girlfriend? I don’t understand. Maybe they’re scared by all the multiple orgasms they have when they have sex with me – that it will leave their mind a shuddering husk?” is practically “hi” in Vulgaria – “emotion” in is either an embarrassingly transparent ploy, or good inspiration for such a ploy. It always gets product-recalled by tranquillity. A porn medley with the sex cut out. The Vulgarian id plagiarises structures of economic interest in its wretched efforts to avoid enforced redundancy at quarterly review. When we can afford a McMansion, shall we fall in McLove?

Aside

To say that real people “have become” like people in dreams, or that irreality “has replaced” reality, is a bit of a cheat – it harks back to a fabled golden era.

But this level is stupidly hard, so it’s OK to use cheats. It’s questionable whether we can ever rid ourselves of all that harking.

Alive, alone and alike

There are two linked features of modernity which may explain why real people are becoming more like people in dreams.

The first feature is atomisation. With the industrial revolution (you know: The Spinning Jenny, poi, Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf in digital 3D, Beowulf ringtones etc.) greater social and geographic mobility has loosened people from their traditional communities. This atomisation goes hand-in-hand (actually, probably prefers not to touch cuz of cooties) with isolation, alienation, pathological individualism and anomie (the last word is Emile Durkheim’s, basically meaning a lack of beliefs about how to behave or what to care about).

The second feature is homogeneity. As we know each other less, we have to become more alike just to maintain basic social order. The diffuse imperative to be categorized and predictable grows stronger – where once we had chicken soup for the soul, now we have zombie semen for the CV (Zygmunt Bauman talks a lot about homogeneity in this sense under the rubric of “the stranger in our midst”).

From zero to Nero®

Studies in the 1950s showed that dreams were predominantly black-and-white. As colour media became more widespread, dreams gradually seemed to colorise.

This sounds like one of the kooky lies from one of Doc’s “short history of” interludes, but it’s not.

“According to cave drawings, it is believed that Yen-shu Phrase (d.o.b. unknown), a Chinese barber, proto-human, and member of the Yicfung clan, experienced the first coherent dream. The dream was simple. A jar of baby pickled sat on a table .... Phrase awoke. Crabby and fatigued, he told his family and peers about his experience. They neither believed nor understood him.” Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria, by Doc, pp. blankety blank to blankety blankety blank blank blank.

The lovely, lovely, lovely Eric Schwitzgebel has a paper all about the apparent “colourisation” of dreams. He argues that the ingredients of dreaming are not uniquely elusive to memory and language. Instead, “we are pervasively and grossly mistaken about our own conscious experience”.

So on one level, we tend to incorporate the most ubiquitous or advanced technologies into our theories about our minds. Cyberpunk tended to conceive of the mind computationally. Descartes had a hydraulic vibe. Ug and Grok developed a theory of mental content in which compresent tropes are cudgelled into squits of a multiply-realisable “concept jelly,” and their central controversy was: is the mind more rock-like or branch-like?

But what Schwitzgebel says implies something more fundamental. Not only the theories we bring to bear on experience, but the nature of that experience itself (including what we do and don’t count as “technology”), down to something as apparently self-founding as the colour of dreams, depends on what technologies pervade our universe. My dreams, for example, now have a chat window, which I have disabled.

It’s this more fundamental level which Doc explores. Who are we? We are, tautologically, “ourselves.” But for Doc, and his co-doxa, the “self” changes with the hour. “The self and technology are not independent of one another; they are co-dependent,” Doc muses, “and if technology were to somehow be transcended or extracted from the self, the self would cease to exist. In this way, the boundary that separates nature and culture collapses as technology (generally considered a cultural formation) is a natural part of the (post)human condition. Any expression of nostalgia for nature is problematic …” (Technologized Desire, p. 27).

In Doc’s approach, technology is not just whatever blips and whirrs the brightest and loudest. It’s a broader concept – as Donna Haraway 5.44 points out, “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile …” (Cyborg Manifesto, OMG). Very loosely speaking, the technologies Blankety Blank focuses on are the economic, cultural, and psychological ones – technologies like the dinner party, the fitness regime.

Emancipatory traces

The mammoth silo which Rutger has built in his back yard – the phallic, rustic, conspicuously-consumptive folly, with its peculiar association with music (the construction workers who build it all play musical instruments – compare some of the stuff I say in (1) Prosody), and its unmissable insinuation of theology a la Babel and post-Babel (e.g. William Golding’s The Spire, Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon”, Square Enix’s The Final Fantasy Legend) – that silo is surely one such problematic expression of nostalgia for nature.

I’ve been hinting that Blankety Blank doesn’t just bear witness to suburban postcapitalism, but is in some sense critical of it. In other words, this book is broadly a satire. It’s tricky to say just where its criticism begins and ends, especially since the postcapitalism setting comes with a certain amount of, as it were, prepackaged critical motifs. To say that people are atomised and homogenised is to make a not-that-tacit critical statement.

Plus, there have long been fierce and interesting disagreements about the limit conditions of criticism, and particularly over the question of whether it’s possible to criticise something without providing a better alternative to it (nostalgic or not). My hunch – a lot of people have this hunch – is that criticism can’t help evoking some alien ingredient, some thing drawn from outside its subject matter. If it thinks it can avoid it (say by using only satirical exaggerations and enlargements, or some kind of careful immanent critique) it tends to develop subterranean dogmatisms.

Since criticism can’t help evoking it, it does well if it pays attention to it and shaping it in some way, but this might not mean turning it into a full-blown “better alternative.” It might mean attenuating it and degrading it, making it frail and unconvincing. It might mean turning it into that postmodern favourite, the “trace.”

If everything is meaningless, why is there the concept of meaning? If the Doc’s “short history” interludes demonstrate that the line between fact and fiction is blurred or nonexistant, why does the reader experience them as provocative mixtures of fact and fiction?

Again in good postmodern fashion, there is no sameness here without différance, no equivalence without violent historical exclusion, no neutrality without it being wrapped around a steaming stick of bias-dynamite, no unfurnished, whitewashed bungalow bedroom without, shall we say, a certain degree of reality haddock immured by its thoughtful former occupant – and the river of “blankety blank” flowing through the memoir is silvered by at least three such reality haddocks: (1) euphemism; (2) the long-running British gameshow “Blankety Blank”; (3) prosody. In the words of Immanence, “Oh no. I farted. My wart. Darted. Back to the garden to start the countdown.”

(3) Prosody

Blankety Blank is encapsulated in the counterfeit thought of Paul Di Filippo, “[l]ike Paul Di Filippo meets Paul Di Filippo . . . on The Bell Jar serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors covermount!”

The memoir is mostly written in short, avuncular sections – shades of Kurt Vonnegut. Many of these are potted histories of this or that, emphasis on the pot. Also definitions, Confucian analects, aphorisms, and some extremely choice quotations (“I’m sorry I killed five people, ok?” – Gary Allen Walker, Serial Killer).

Aside

Reminds me of the epigraph to a Steve Aylett novel, George Appel’s soundbyte from his electric chair: “Well, gentlemen, you are about to see a baked Appel.” Something else Doc shares with Aylett, BTW, is the prominence of reviled orators . . . though Aylett’s tend to be sash-eyed liches who are after transcendence through affront, whereas Doc’s Gamehater, for example, is truly dismayed by his hostile receptions. Haterz can’t be playaz.

Where were we and who are we

Breezily high concept comedy (“What if Patrick Swayze was an initiate of deconstruction?”) with a brazenly low budget. This is the kind of book you’d forward to your friends. Mark Leyner has a sort of running joke: what if we really thought in the terms suggested by corporate advertising and government policy? This premiss becomes amazingly fruitful in Leyner’s writing. By taking at face value the invasive and near-invincible culture (red in truth and law) which encompasses and composes us, he repeatedly shows that we already know the kind of lie it is. Leyner’s deadpan acceptance of spin and hype seems to demonstrate that ideology critique isn’t good enough – at least, that it tells us little that’s new. We already know that the pantheon of nobheads who occupy aspirational discourse are all injured parties themselves – despairing, near-suicidal wretches – and that the native population of normalising discourse all feel like immolated freaks. Something similar pops up in Doc’s work (which is a good thing, since Leyner seems to be on a loooong time-out), though the premiss is less “what if we really were what culture supposes us to be?” than it is “what if the things which culture supposes to be important really were important”?

Quotation

“In the wake of recent revelations concerning Margaret B. Jones’s memoir ‘Love and Consequences’ and Misha Defonseca’s ‘Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years’ the disclosure that Mr. Kafka’s work was based on reality has embarrassed editors and scholars.

“’I’ve been teaching “The Metamorphosis” for years, said a professor of literature at Princeton, who insisted that he be identified as P. ‘I’ve called it one of the most sublime pieces of literature ever written. Elias Canetti called it “one of the few great and perfect poetic works written during this century.” To find out that it’s actually true is devastating.’

“The actual condition of Kafka’s neighbor, a Prague salesman who didn’t return our calls or e-mail messages requesting comment, is known as entomological dysplasia, and is somewhat rare. It results in the development over time of a hard carapace, a segmented body and antennas.”

-- Mark Leyner, New York Times, March 9 2008

(3) Prosody

So although Blankety Blank has an affinity with proto-postmodern proto-anti-novels like Jonathan Swift Tale of a Tub and Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy and (where most of the “story” is digression), and with contemporary roving, docufictionary maximalism, or “hysterical realism” by the likes of of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, the more obvious comparison is with “stuff you find on the Internet” – think “content provision,” think memes, blogosphere, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Onion, all the belle lettres of the era of value-add reverie.

People tell me Bizarro really lends itself to the short form. But me, I’m often disappointed by wee absurdist set-pieces – which justify being not-very-good by being not-very-long. Their “weirdness” can be little more than a passive-aggressive refusal of all valuation criteria, but it’s usually pretty obvious which bits are the good bits, if any.

More bang for my buck, less lassitude for my vicissitudes ... it’s strange that such a formally permissive book doesn’t give much sense of splurge. Admittedly, there are a few sections, mostly towards the end, where I found myself wanting to take Occam’s Blunt Instrument to Doc and his book. And the slapstick injuries disrupt the tautness with queasy bodily cacophany (as per usual – who here can honestly say they haven’t uncertainly thumbed a residue of gristle from the SimCopter they left playing on their iPod Touch?). But for the most part, you get the impression of mad skills on Windows Paint, not Adobe Photoshop. There’s great economy of expression. The bright bald triangular green head of the book’s pet praying mantis is its superlatively representative phenomenon, the phenomenon all its other phenomena aspire to, and the one you’ll dust from its cooling embers after it explodes. Keith Loutit’s breathtaking Metal Heart is the book’s perfect cinematic correlate. The frequently clipped and direct style is apt, in light of the meanness and narrowness of so much Vulgarian experience. The memoir’s dedication is “for me.” You get a sense of Doc as chiropractor, briskly fondling himself gauntlets from the reader’s inner chitin. You get a sense of computer gaming – left to their own devices, the characters would get up to jaded, capricious fidgets that resembling the idle animation loops of point-and-click performers. Except a bit more trepanny. Their temperments resemble the mood indelibly carved into the heads of platformer heroes – Mario’s resoluteness, for example.

They say Charles Dickens rejected a submission by Laman Blanchard entitled “Orient Pearls at Random Strung” with the terse “Dear Blanchard, too much string – Yours, C. D.” I would have gone with “It’s made out of cum!”; the problem of the interconnection of microcontent. What grouts together the petite triumphs, with their assorted conceits and other raisons d’ être? Or can they really all be jiggled together each flush to some others’ edges?

There are nods in the grouting (an allusion to the long-running British horror / sci-fi show Nods in the Grouting?) to the thick anthropological detail of late Victorian realism – the cumulative creation of a solid and consistent world out of the various interesting episodes which occur within it – but they are only nods, and they are also along to the heavily-fuzzboxed totalising roar of Empire-paranoia metal. Then there is the moment-by-moment improvisation of interest which is the gist of slapstick. But I think prosody – the rhythm, stress, intonation, and all the musical contours of language – is Doc’s best answer.

People say “tum ti tum ti tum ti tum” when they’re scanning a line of verse, or “doot dee doot doot doopy doop doop” when they can’t remember the next line of a song, a bit like “blankety blankety blankety blank”. Prosody can be a kind of lender of last resort for the global economy of meaning. Its fidelity to living occurs at the level of mimesis of breath and pulse, borbyrigmus and the shift of sweaty balls and breasts.

“Sometimes, when Rutger Van Trout walked through the hallways of his McMansion, he could feel the blankety blankety blank blankety blank blank blankety bank blank blank blank blank beneath him. So he built a silo, and he climed to the top. The blankety blankety blank blankety blank blank blankety blank blank blank blank blank didn’t go away. At least now his feet weren’t so close to it. He couldn’t stay up here forever, though. Hewould have to devise other means of coming to terms with the blankety blankety blank blankety blank blank blankety blank blank blank blank blank. Something to divert his attention, perhaps. Or rather, something to keep his eye on the ball.

“Mr. Van Trout looked down from the silo. Shielding their eyes, his neighbors looked up at him as their children obliterated entire communities of unsuspecting insects with blow torches.

“He lifted his eyes and looked at the skyline.”

(2) Wogan & his wand

A few slight scraps of optimistic otherness waft through Blankety Blank. Prosodic grace is one. The silo is another. Maybe sports. The possibility of a loving family unit seems to be another, or perhaps, more problematically and less conservatively, the possibility of children. Yet sprogs are not romanticised in any way. They are chips off the old block – “... their children buside themselves in driveways with magnifying glasses, burning anthills and vagabond beetles. A few children used miniature blowtorches. ... More neighbors gathered below, all of them wives or Mr. Moms and their kids. Children outnumbered adults now. There were hundreds of them. From the sky it looked like the street was on fire, flames humming and crackling over the din of insect screams” (15). Still, at least they glimpse life beyond the block. Hatred is another. Vulgaria has a superhero who, even if he sports compulsive malfunctions, and attracts nothing but heckles from his wards, is nonetheless rather promising – The Gamehater, whose creed is to hate the game not the player (that is roughly, to fight the postcapitalist system, not its individual moments (but to demonstrate how tough this is, imagine the reverse: “I can’t love you baby, but I’m totally crazy in love with segment of the social totality which corresponds to you, or if you prefer, with the intersection of discourses which constructs your identity”. In postcapitalism, the role of revolutionary is made pathological, inasmuch as diagnosing the enemy as a totality makes it necessary to withdraw your feelings from everything. Decathection is like nature’s hope)).

One fawned-upon irony, or paradox, or equivocation of postmodern thought involves an exception being a symptom of a norm. So Bauman, for example, rabbits on about how Auschwitz was not an aberration, but a logical effect of a system that was and still is. And Agamben has all this stuff about how the state of emergency became business as usual in the Bush era and beyond. We’re not really talking about principles or laws here – it’s a motif, and its truth depends entirely on its application (and I think Adorno and Schmitt respectively have similar but better things to say about Bauman and Agamben’s topics). Regrowing Hydra heads also have an important place in postmodernism. “Perfecting” one system creates problems elsewhere, like trying to squeeze air out of a rubber dinghy only everybody’s suffering and dying because of it.

Existent order is like a scab you can’t help picking only everyone’s suffering and dying because of it. In consequence there grows a yearning for almost any order that presents itself as spontaneous, transcendent, or exported from without. This yearning is part of the picking, though somehow, nebulously, a unique part of the picking.

I don’t know if Doc has ever seen the gameshow “Blankety Blank,” but here goes anyway.

The contestants take turns to fill in the blanks: “My son was a juggler until he dropped his ______”; but instead of a pre-arranged “factual” answer, the answer is generated in the miniature social reality of a panel of six.

One point is earned for each person on the panel who writes down “the same answer (or reasonably similar as determined by the judges), up to a maximum of six points for matching everyone.” In misleadingly-appropriated philosophical jargon, then, “Blankety Blank” features a coherence theory of truth, not a correspondence theory of truth.

What makes this show even more pressingly vital for our salvation is that (1) the panel is made up of celebrities, who are, in their weird way, wretched and regurgitated Everymen, each a savage composite garble of the desires of the demos, and (2) it peddles a very particular kind of shabby, linguistified eroticism, the eroticism of matrons and jubbly breasts, characterised by double entendre and a jaded cunning that is entirely at odds with sexual abandon. “To the thongs themselves” (Husserl).

If the viewer himself or herself doesn’t know the answer, an impression is contrived that the contestant and celebrities participate in a kind of spontaneous harmony, which somehow comes from outside of the show’s hegemony, which is the wrestling of fact and lacklustre lust.

“Revolts belong to history. But, in certain way, they escape from it” (Foucault). The heartstrings of several of Vulgaria’s inhabitants play a D chord at the prospect of such unaccountable set-pieces, of spontaneous order that is irreducible to sociological categories. Of a kind of political spirituality. Of the generative glamour associated with Rousseau’s lawgiver, Weber’s charismatic leader, Schmitt’s dictator, but imprinted onto a kind of monumental, diagrammatic arrangement of bodies. The kip-up late in the memoir, the “rape” kids earlier on.

(1) Euphemism & vulgaria

Blankety-blanx are of course also grawlixes.

Is there such a word as “fuck”? Or is the word “fuck” actually the word “fake”? How would Habermas pronounce it (a reference to his famous “unlimited communication community” thesis not his cleft palate! – Habermas is lovely and hates postmodernists like Doc!)? Is there such a word as “neo-cuntian”?

The townsfolk of Vulgaria go about in a sort of reverie or, taken by visions, stand frozen at their stations. The memoir has been rightly celebrated, by Di Filippo and others, as an awkward insistence upon the bongwater you try to call your blood. My final purpose with this review is to estimate the nastiness of its ass.

Offensive language causes “displeasure or resentment.” But this is practically the condition of all language in Vulgaria.

There is no word so extreme that it doesn’t refer you back to the established social hierarchy to determine its significance.

Envision the person of a little old lady. Not the vampish, worldly (nay galaxyly) “I-once-snogged-Hemingway” grand dame figure that is Lara’s certain destiny – she shall go unsuspected of her Satanic prank until it is quite, quite too late – but a sort of trite, two-dimensional “offensiveness metre” which has been handily callibrated for us and left at a Vulgaria bus stop. We christen her Mrs. Bourgeoisdom.

There is no reliable formula which will register the maximum jolt upon her kindly little cabbage. Perhaps you say (a) “Aren’t you people scared ... Of dying. Of being disembowelled. Of being murdered and peed on” (p. 82), and rack up only a slight sniff, and a new splurt of cumulonimbus capillatus incus in her twilight-crowded eyes. But perhaps the mild-seeming (b) “I have to take a leak” (p. 83) kindles a dramatic gasp of affront.

Breaking down the difference, we might suppose that the creepiness of (a) agitates, inside Mrs. Bourgeoisdom, some kind of ideological antibody into activity. The enquiry gets sealed in protective blandness mucus – converted into a generic specimin of “hmph! the upsetting nonsense of a nutcase” or “hmph! the confrontational attention-seeking of a nihilistic generation” – and its discrete components (fear, death, stomachs, murder, piss) gain no access to the complexes of experience which could have made them meatily meaningful for Mrs. Bella Bourgeoisdom. Whereas perhaps (b) slips under the crucial threshhold with all its pungent detail in full effect – coarse, vivid, improper – and the generalisations (“kids these days have no manners” etc.) make these details sharper and worse.

I only insist so passionately on the crap hypothetical dear because Doc is, pretty clearly, trying out marvellously sneaky blends of the humdrum and the nauseating. In this respect I think he contrasts a bit with another leading light of Bizarro, the reektastic Carlton Mellick III – whose limit-pushing is more often tacitly on behalf of supplicants of limitless horror and erotica.

The memoir offers “the uncanny” as a way of understanding its blend of transgressive and the everyday, but (a bit bewilderingly) I think this term might be a bit like one of Mrs. Bourgeoisdom’s inoculating balls of foam. It tidies things up, enrolls visceral unease in a Liberal Arts degree. Louis Althusser says, “The ultimate condition of production is the reproduction of the conditions of production,” or so I gather from the epigraph to a tale in The Kafka Effekt (one of the chapters of Blankety Blank, BTW, is called “Cause and Effekt”) – but this isn’t bring a friend day, Doc. I’m a bit confused.

I think Blankety Blank tells you you needn’t fear the New Puritan’s lockpick. First you have to kill your inner cop. Then you have to kill your inner politician, your psychiatrist, your inner doctor. Basically you’ll be left with your inner chiropractor. It’ll be a shit Identity (2003).

If I permanently renounce going around with a pole up my ass, how am I to smuggle the claymore into the true love waits fundraiser rodeo?

Well Doc, I trust our pus will cross again.

And what became of Rutger? Reader, I ramified him.

One last thing

Even were all this gavel-nuzzling to somehow spawn a revolution of everyday life – the salvation of suburban sprawl – it wouldn’t touch what matters.

“The guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life, according to statistics that eke out an overwhelming number of killed with a minimal number of rescued, as if this were provided in the theory of probabilities -- this guilt is irreconcilable with living” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics).

“The War Against Being Mean is forty-eight years old as of today. To celebrate its birthday, the President has ordered a suprise nuking of New Nigeria twelve. Every time we nuke it, it just keeps coming back, but in the words of the President, ‘Killin’ feels G-U-D.’” (D. Harlan Wilson, Blankety-Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria).

BUY IT.

Drax, darlings!

2009-07-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

The Drax trial reaches its exciting conclusion!! If you've just zoned in, fifteen eco-warriors, five eco-clerics and two eco-mages are on trial for criminal damage. They hijacked a train!! The indians to George W.'s cowboy!!

"Although Judge Spencer repeated many previous warnings that such wider evidence was inadmissible, he did not stop Gannon from describing at length a book about dinosaurs and climate change, nor her conclusion that "burning coal means carbon pollution which means death.""

Not just cowboys but dinosaurs!! Could the book have been the zplendid Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up?

Though it's tootingly irrelevant to today's case, I do hope for the sake of English law that a juridical form does exist for what is plainly a good thing to have done. Perhaps, since it's THE WORLD at stake, the right to self-defense, or perhaps they had "lawful excuse". Cf. Section 5 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971, defining lawful excuse:

"[...] (b) if he destroyed or damaged or threatened to destroy or damage the property in question or, in the case of a charge of an offence under section 3 above, intended to use or cause or permit the use of something to destroy or damage it, in order to protect property belonging to himself or another or a right or interest in property which was or which he believed to be vested in himself or another, and at the time of the act or acts alleged to constitute the offence he believed—
(i) that the property, right or interest was in immediate need of protection; and
(ii) that the means of protection adopted or proposed to be adopted were or would be reasonable having regard to all the circumstances."

Though cf. R v. Hill and Hall (1989) 89 Cr. App. Rep. 74; "immediate need" could be a crux.

Will the crunchies succeed in describing to the twelve good sooty Northerners and true what civil disobedience is, and convince them it's a good idea? They'll have the judge blathering in their ear that their job is only to determine concrete circumstances which everyone agreed about three days ago, and that magic is true.

The prosecution is using Section 36 of The Malicious Damage Act so they don't even have to prove mens rea!

I'll bet some zcrew brings them zwine flu too!

UPDATE: They did in fact use Defence of Necessity! That puts them in the same boat as the cabin-boy cannibal convicts!

UPDATE: They were found guilty!!! A jury of slaves! Jonathan Stevenson is gorgeous! I am in love! Jonathan Stevenson, I find you guilty . . . of stealing my heart!

Theodora Children's Trust

2009-07-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Staying in hospital can be a daunting time for a child: away from home and the people and things they know and love. For just £5 you can send a clown doctor to visit a sick child.

Cliche straight from the Swanwick

2009-07-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

"From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled," a story by Michael Swanwick, podcast by Escape Pod and Sarah Tolbert, at first filled me with shame. So many SF clichés were assembled that I felt like an abject dork for having ever tolerated any of them. Was it time to give up and start buying lady magazines?

"Imagine a jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna."

Piss off!

The formulaic, fetishistically-explained Gibson+Niven gizmos, the quasi-puppeteer, the kooky AI narrator, the pedantic xenoanthropological footnotes, the ridiculous alien voice, the cataclysm, the artefact, the jungle . . . if I hadn't had flour on my hands, I wouldn't have kept listening, but I'm glad I did because Tolbert and Swanwick both hit their strides and it becomes an utterly elevated and beautiful work, something which executes some very agile and suggestive meditation on cliché itself. I feel I can't say much more without spoiling it. Check it deep!

Harry Gilonis writing to Bill Rammell MP

2009-06-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

Bill Rammell MP
Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street
London
SW1A 2AH

Dear Mr Rammell,

I'm aware that clinging to power, and perhaps to your own job/seat, are going to take priority over any other wider concerns, but I really can't let recent government-issued nonsense, which cites you by name, pass by unnoticed.

I was among many signatories to a recent electronic petition asking the Prime Minister to "do everything in his power to impose an arms embargo on
Israel in light of the recent Israeli offensive in the Gaza strip and to apply pressure on countries supplying Israel with arms that breach
international agreements with the intention of restoring lasting peace to the region".

As e-mails to the Prime Minister's Office are limited to a 1000-character maximum (government by Twitter cannot be far behind), I am writing to you.

The PM's Office's response to that petition (www.number10.gov.uk/Page18448) follows, with my observations interleaved:

A recent Amnesty International report confirmed that Britain is not a major arms exporter to Israel

Amnesty' chief focus is political prisoners. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade - surely the people who should be referenced here? - contradict that:

"The UK has consistently sold arms to Israel. Over recent years it has licensed arms exports worth between £10 million and £25 million per year. Figures available for the first nine months of 2008 show that, three-quarters of the way through the year, arms worth over £27 million had been approved for export to Israel" [See: www.caat.org.uk/issues/israel.php]

and, as Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell said to the Foreign Affairs Committee on 4 March, the UK regularly turns down arms requests from Israel. Each export licence request is assessed on a case-by-case basis and conduct in recent conflicts is always taken into account.

It is hard to square that with the fact that the UK is still approving weaponry - or components for weaponry - for export. Sir John Stanley (of the House of Commons Committee on Arms Export Controls) made the point to you personally just last April: "the key issue is whether or not the use that was made of British-made weapons systems and components in the recent conflicts, in Lebanon and most particularly in Gaza, did or did not represent a breach of the EU consolidated criteria." [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmquad/uc178-iii/uc17802.htm]

We do not believe that the current situation in the Middle East would be improved by imposing an arms embargo on Israel. Israel has the right to defend itself and faces real security threats.

That applies far more to Palestine, which does not have one of the largest and best-equipped armed forces in the world. The inhabitants of Gaza have stones - and a handful of home-made rockets which are scarcely more effective than stones in terms of casualties inflicted. (Israeli soldiers killed more Israeli soldiers last year than such rockets killed Israeli civilians.)

However, we will not grant export licences where there is a clear risk that arms will be used for external aggression or internal repression.

The precise criteria referred to by David Miliband (still Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs this week) are as follows:

"Criterion 2 (we will not issue an export licence where there is a clear risk that the export might be used for internal repression), criterion 3 (we will
not issue licences for exports which would provoke or prolong armed conflicts or aggravate existing tensions or conflicts in the country of
final destination), criterion 4 (preservation of regional peace, security and stability), and criterion 7 (the risk that the equipment will be
diverted within the buyer country or re-exported under undesirable conditions). [Quoted at: www.caat.org.uk/press/recent.php?url=210409prs]

Of these it is evident to the least-informed eye that only 7 isn't breached by the UK. David Miliband himself has said that UK components have ended up in F16 combat aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, Saar-Class corvettes and armoured personnel carriers. [Quoted at: www.caat.org.uk/issues/israel.php]

More generally, the government is fully committed to the implementation of a two-state solution. There must be a viable Palestinian state existing, in peace, alongside a secure Israel.

Then why is the UK denying recognition to the democratically-elected government of Gaza?

We will continue to work with our international partners, including the new US Administration, to pursue vigorously a comprehensive and just peace in the Middle East

- whilst spending shed-loads of money arming one side in the conflict and talking about sending warships to stop any aid of any kind reaching the other ...
This is not merely pusillanimous, it is sickening.

Yours sincerely,
Harry Gilonis

2009-06-11T11:19:00.001-07:00

This is just to say I don't remember doing that last post so sorry if there's no such bookshop!

xx

Brixton? More like Fixton!

2009-06-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

I found a bookshop on Coldharbour Lane today in which a copy of Kathy Acker's Blood & Guts in High School and two copies of Steve Aylett's Lint are just sitting there! Also lots and lots of Moorcock, and I picked up a lovely, lovely, lovely Combat Command set in Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries universe and despite my superior technology I've already been killed by the little pikemen! Bliss! And the science fiction is right next to the fucking poeettry! Hope I'm saying this right as a bit mashed.

xxx

Action required!

2009-05-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

The very morning after the strange prophetic half-dream about the lovely, lovely, lovely Stephen Thomson relentlessly grilling a blind lady who in the dream was Jeff Hilson's friend (though not really - not Jeff's fault he's lovely!) about wiping her bottom comes this bombshell. The bombshell, in a nutshell, is that when it comes to protecting minority interests against corporate rapaciousness and lobbyist gimme-gimmes, Barack Obama and the people are no longer on the same page. Or are we? We can't know, because we're blind and he's seized our gizmos, no doubt fearing the penetrating critiques of the erudite visually impaired who are immune to many of his charm ray attacks.

Come on people, stop them with the internets then smooch!

Dappy Ideas for Democracy no. 2

2009-05-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

I don't want scapegoats -- unless it's an entire "state"-goat!! -- & I don't want David Cameron's "swift" resolution; I want the very bright limelight which our voluptuous political class currently enjoys to linger for an uncomfortably long time, almost as if up in the techie box someone had missed the cue for a scene change, or was dead.

Despite that hope, I can't help sharing an idea which I'm sure will attract a prompt and deep consensus, and solve at least part of the problem. MPs must of course maintain a home in their constituencies, but also must be accommodated when they come to London, unless they have Skype, to sit in parliament. A wing of HMP Pentonville should be adapted for this latter purpose.

Dostoyevsky's old saw, "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," is a background rationale, as is a long republican-democratic tradition associating public office with private austerity, as is the issue of securely housing our public officials till the war on terror is won. But I'm mainly thinking of the system of parallels between parliament's legislative activities (ROFLMAO) and the practice of release on temporary licence (ROTL).

Like the incarcerated, our representative legislators (1) may pose a threat to society (though the mix of powers & inclinations may be significantly different) and so must be contained by a system of checks and balances, including a separation of powers, high walls, dogs and machine guns; (2) owe a substantial debt to society (beyond the obligations of citizenship); (3) function to deter socially disruptive uses of power through those same uses (raison d'état ought to preempt, and delegitimise, vigilantism and private militarism -- still a little muddled about this one); (4) face the imperative of internalising a complex and alien texture of normativity and organising it as objectively meaningful morality (the "recuperative" goal of sentencing); (5) use cigarrettes as currency and have tattoos which signal gang loyalties. Nonetheless, there are circumstances where it becomes impractical to keep an elected representative or a criminal locked up.

I am available to head a commission!

Maybe we could also involve Dostoyevsky's new Saw! "When Don Touhig MP wakes up, he discovers that his head has been sealed in a box, which quickly begins to fill with water. A self-administered tracheotomy using a pen keeps him breathing until the Chief Whip arrives at the Gideon meatpacking plant . . ."

Countercabinet reshuffle

2009-05-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

Al-"square"-eity! A minor change really, Teresa Carmody replaces Eddie Izzard who is a bit shambolic bless him and has been doing films.

Lol Coxhill - Leader of the Shadow Shadow Cabinet
Gordon Brown MP - Shadow Shadow Chancellor
Frances Kruk - Shadow Shadow Foreign Secretary
Mark E. Smith - Shadow Shadow Home Secretary
Prof Peter Singer - Chairman of the Counterpower
Sarah Maple - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Justice
China Meivelle - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Health
Prof Chantal Mouffe - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
Alan Moore - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Defence
Alice Mahon MP - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Dr Esther Leslie - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
George Monbiot - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
Sharon Borthwick - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Transport
Stewart Lee - Shadow Shadow Leader of the House of Commons
Prof Angela Davis - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Charlie Brooker - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Paul Sutton - Shadow Secretary of State for Wales
Prof Roger Scruton - Shadow Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
Milan Rai - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for International Development
Miranda July - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Teresa Carmody - Shadow Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury
Dr Eric Griffiths - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills
Dec - Shadow Shadow Minister for Housing
President Barack Obama - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland
Steve Aylett - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
George Galloway MP - Shadow Shadow Minister of State for Europe
Sarah Haskins - Chief Whip

Dudgeon & Dragons

2009-05-09T03:36:00.000-07:00

Hurrah, the dialectic of the mock heroic and the middle classes has just done another little Aufhebung-fart with the arrival of Chore Wars! "Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting other people in your house or workplace to sign up to the site, you can assign experience point rewards to individual tasks and chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up."

As Jeff Hilson once wrote, "fun is not the only fun." Of course this is only the first step. Next I require advanced VR interfaces, such that feathers dusters seem to me vorpal swords, dust bunnies become beholder cubs etc.

The benign quasi-Matrix effect approach obv.

You think that the bodily affect of housework are the wrong microfoundations for the molar behaviours of swords & sorcery (at least, satisfying roleplaying with proper characters, and an inkling of New Weird in the air - WE ARE IN A POST-LACUNA, PART 1 ERA HERE PEOPLE!).

I say: to a point yes, but what if production as a whole were taken as the base? I.e. your virtual quests are coordinated with those of millions of others to ensure that all the goods and services society decides it needs (including those decisions!) get produced. Across the realm, individuals flow in and out of different factories and homes and HQs, subjectively pestering drows and rust monsters, objectively, a coercionless synthesis of the action manifold.

You may argue, not everyone likes RPGs; some people prefer real time strategy or first person shooters or Chelsea FC or love, well those people suck. They are hostis humani generis.

Reading between the lines, the Complex Terrain Laboratory want me to hunt down and kill Miss Jill Louise Starr, so in a way it's already begun. How many XP is a troll worth again? (While we're at it, who will rid me of this troublesome Jamie Oliver, also Poppy etc. to be on the safe side). Burning Angel's Chapel and Dane Cross have already conducted promising pornographic research into the intersection of fantasy and fantasy, roleplaying and roleplaying, and oui, of hard and wet. To label this "not work-safe" would rather beg the question! And as Herbert Marcuse points out:

"[T]he sociologist-observer [...] speaks of 'the growth of a strong in-group feeling in each crew' and quotes one worker as stating: 'All in all we are in the swing of things . . .' [...] The phrase admirably expresses the change in mechanized enslavement: things swing rather than oppress, and they swing the human instrument -- not only its body but also its mind and even its soul. A remark by Sartre illuminates the process: 'Aux premiers temps des machines semi-automatiques, des enquêtes ont montré que les ouvrières spécialisées se laissaient aller, en travaillant, à une rêverie d'ordre sexuel, elles se rapellaient la chambre, le lit, la nuit, tout ce qui ne concerne que la personne dans la solitude du couple fermé sur soi. Mais c'est la machine en elle qui rêvait de caresses . . .'"

Swine!

2009-05-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

Triply topical, the lovely, lovely, lovely Geoff Manaugh has a fascinating post about Ballard, zombies & swine flu!

"You could even reverse the game's moral order and require players to create the ideal city for disease transmission: whoever kills off their entire game's population in the shortest period of time wins. The all-time winner infects the world in less than a second."

Room for Manaughvre!

Some people who are NOT dead!

2009-05-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

I hope The Guardian publish Harry Gilonis's lovely, lovely, lovely letter (below, sans the indents! I don't know how to do them, sorry Maggie!!)! Or at least Sean Bonney's lovely, lovely, lovely mandate (on his blog!)!

***

Dear Sirs,

Without remotely wanting to take any of the lustre off the poisoned chalice which Carol Ann Duffy has just accepted, can I take issue with Mark Brown and Patrick Wintour's weird assertion that she "consistently pushes the limits of form and language"? Ms Duffy is, as befits someone doing her new job, an extremely competent poet working within a self-defined "mainstream" which occupies perhaps an octave of a wide keyboard. Even mainstream poets know, really, that there's a lot more going on than what they are doing - as, of course, do avant-guardists; why must we pretend that this isn't so? If your journalists - or literary staff - don't know this, they should perhaps work a bit harder. ("Investigative" is I think the term?)

I could name dozens, if not hundreds, of UK poets who actually are consistently pushing the limits of form and language, but it would be more useful to invite your readers to decide for themselves:

Peel of Heather -
Omit Not
The New Moon its
clamoured sevens its
Boned
Sea-Saw Chambers

Nor the mind
Swung on Hooves, Vexed on Hinges

Ain.Do.Tri.Car.Cush.Shay.

COCKEREL'S
SHUNTING FLIGHT
to a dance
to a Horse
(Horses we kept)

= = = = =

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head ... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does ... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.

= = = =

Both of these have pleasures to offer; but the former, which is NOT by Ms Duffy but by Maggie O'Sullivan, actually does do something new both formally and linguistically. There's little in the former (Ms Duffy's most famous poem, I should think) that hasn't been done - often with more zip and brio - in English poetry from Wyat on. To say this is not to downgrade Ms Duffy's work, but to state a factual truth - part of journalism's job, I always thought.

There's a good sampling or work in print and audio form from many more form-pushers at http://www.archiveofthenow.com/, which it might be kind to draw to your readers' attention. It might also be helpful to Messrs Brown and Wintour, come 2019.

Yours sincerely,

Harry Gilonis

Ballard

2009-04-21T02:45:00.001-07:00

Lots of tributes to Ballard yesterday & today at Ballardian, including this one from Michael Moorcock.

Grief straight from the bucket

2009-04-21T01:59:00.000-07:00

An old review, first published in Interzone 212 (Rick McGrath's fuller review is here).

Dominika Oramus, Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.

Grave New World presents an ambitious and rich account of Ballard's ouevre, tracing a handful of themes (apocalyptic social implosion, war phantasmagoria, pathological boredom, the Death Drive, the dialectic between mental and physical landscapes) from The Wind from Nowhere, Ballard's 1961, strapped-for-cash brain fart debut, through his early science fiction in its various engagements with New Wave and other avant-garde contexts, his postmodern memoirs, all the way through the recent paranoid fables up to and including Kingdom Come (2006). Not unusually for a book foreshadowed by academic papers, there's a fair amount of repetition, but it's no bad thing -- it means you can generally dip in and pick up the thread fairly quickly.

Oramus has a go at jigsawing her chosen themes into the underlying & unifying core of Ballard's work. I query not whether she succeeds but why she bothers -- whether or not Ballard's work possesses deep invariances, it is certainly superficially various, and any sharp reader will be as interested in the variety as the core. More useful than those monopolising conclusions are the early chapters, which summarise major critical approaches to Ballard's work and supply potted introductions to the theorists who most inform it (Nietzsche, Spengler, Jung, Fukuyama . . . the list goes on!). Grave New World might have paid a little more attention, in this section, to the Marxist heritage of several theorists (Debord in particular comes across as Baudrillard's, sort of, squire), as well as to the ways their ideas have been received and challenged in recent years. "The represented world seems more real than the world outside of pictures" -- this supposed to be, like uh, a newsflash? In justice, Grave New World only wants truck with such theory for what it can illumine in Ballard's work, but here again the book misses a trick. Ballard is an extraordinary storyteller and poet (as soon as any study of him immures sufficient quotation, & Oramus does, that becomes clear). Inasmuch as Ballard's work also performs expositions and criticisms of contemporary Western society, it exists in the tension between, on the one hand, accuracy and lucidity, and on the other, what makes a good story. Taking it seriously should also mean trying to work out how true its ideas are; that means situating them in intellectual traditions in which they are unpopular.

J. G. Ballard: 1930-2009

2009-04-20T04:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I heard (faintly, on the woman upstair's radio) that J. G. Ballard has died. Ballard wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Empire of the Sun and many brilliant others. In a way, the police killed him too.

No, Science!

2009-04-18T03:31:00.000-07:00

Rather good post from Posie Rider yesterday about this article, and more generally a whole genre of lazy, "adaptationist fallacy" journalism that seems depressingly prevalent these days.

I don't have time to rant about the science -- I'd probably be very witty if I did, I can't help it! -- but very quickly: (1) if the male Autumnal years were infertile, you can bet your barren ballsack there'd be research claiming that strong, wise, grandfathers guarding our little H. erectus litters from antique wolves, falling into tar pits etc. were a vital evolutionary adaptation, the "Butch Sage Hypothesis"; (2) sleaziness sensus strictus is a phenomenon of modernity; and (3) if we accept the normative tone of this hearsay at face value, some of the other things that are "good" for the species would be no age of consent for women, a hoary-whorey age of consent for men, no laws against rape, and totalitarian eugenics! Mmm!

P.S. Posie has a very funny picture of a eugenics tree.

Speculative Fiction I <3

2009-04-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

Links to sites about some of my favourite authors:

Alaisdar Gray
Brian Aldiss
David Foster Wallace
Greg Egan
Italo Calvino
J. G. Ballard
Mark Leyner
Michael Moorcock
Mervyn Peake
Samuel Beckett
Steve Aylett
Thomas Pynchon
Umberto Eco
William Burroughs
William Gibson

Speculative Fiction I <3 (part II)

2009-04-13T03:23:00.000-07:00

Alan Garner
Alan Moore
Alan Sondheim
Alfred Bester
Amy Sterling Casil
Angela Carter
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Bruce Sterling
Carlton Mellick III
Carol Emshwiller
China Mieville
Chuck Palahniuk
Clive Barker
Cormac McCarthy
D. Harlan Wilson
Diana Wynne Jones
Dan Lloyd
Dan Simmons
Damien Broderick
David Marusek
Djuna Barnes
Don DeLillo
Douglas Adams
Ed Dorn
Flann O'Brien
Frank Herbert
Franz Kafka
Gabriel García Marquez
Gene Wolfe
Greg Bear
Gregory Benford

H. P. Lovecraft
Harlan Ellison
Haruki Murakami
Iain [M.] Banks
Iain Sinclair
Ian McDonald
J. H. Prynne
Jeanette Winterson
Jeff Noon
Jeff Vandermeer
John Wyndham
Jorge Luis Borges
Justin Katko
Karen Joy Fowler
Kathy Acker
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kelly Link
Kenji Siratori
Kobo Abé
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Kurt Vonnegut
L. Neil Smith
Larry Niven
Lisa Goldstein
Lois McMaster Bujold
Margaret Atwood
Martha Soukup
Martin Amis
Mary Turzillo
Michael Chabon
Michael Swanwick
Milorad Pavic

Neal Asher
Neal Stephenson
Neil Gaiman
Octavia E. Butler
Pat Cadigan
Paul Auster
Paul Di Fillipo
Piers Anthony
Philip K. Dick
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Chandler
Richard Morgan
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Heinlein
Robert Rankin
Roberto Bolano
Roger Zelazny
Salman Rushdie
Samuel Delany
Stephen Baxter
Ted Chiang
Terry Pratchett
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Ligotti
Ursula LeGuin
Virginia Woolf
William Gaddis
Yasutaka Tsutsui
Zoran Zivkovic

These are my favourite "speculative fiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy, children's, slipstream, magical realist, fabulist, modernist, postmodernist, maximalist, new weird, avant garde and bizarro" authors. Even for that catch-all Chandler is a bit of a cheat, but I think Marlowe may be an android. Watch out for Dorn, Sondheim, Siratori, Prynne and Katko, they're (sorta) poets! I didn't mean for my list to include important people I haven't read or don't really go in for, like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. I quite like Asimov's mysteries and the list of all the books he wrote. Must get on.

Woozy

2009-04-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

The new issue of The Dream People is out, including my review of Gina Ranalli's most recent book.

Did that really require five links. Must eat something today.

Smooth???

2009-04-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

My pledge has doubled in size! Hurry everyone!

A zombie reflects on the riots

2009-04-01T17:03:00.001-07:00

I've heard a lot lately about how the police have been pepper-spraying themselves in the foot, so to speak, with their heavy-handedness, their beggars-belief distortions of the meaning of "terrorism," and their choice of tactics which indiscriminately punish, intimidate and often physically hurt criminal and non-criminal protestors alike. I think all this risks missing the point.

What is the point, Lara? Oh my evaginated purple dole! Let me look in my points bag. The point is not that the police make it more difficult for themselves to distinguish legal from criminal protest. It is not that they indirectly cause criminality (with provocation hovering on the edge of entrapment), for nebulous payoffs. It is not even that they stray into criminality (a kind of "salami slicing" grevious bodily harm throughout the day).

Yes, it is vital to protect the conditions for peaceful protest! But for the suffragettes, the point was suffrage, not the right to protest about it. And the point for the demonstrators this week has been global social and ecological justice.

Global social and ecological justice, of course, has broad appeal. We can all agree about it, just as we can all agree (more or less, eventually) that riot police should have better guidelines, training, forward information and purer hearts, so as to not kick and club people so much (I am probably being too soft on them. Ladies and policemen have long been natural allies, and try on each other's hats).

I think that superimposed upon the various political divisions in Europe -- progressive vs. conservative, Left vs. Right, etc. -- there is a division between what you might call the "constitutionalists" and the "essentialists" (I need better terms! -- dammit my jargon team are all in Strasbourg this week).

Constitutionalists tend to attribute a lot of explanatory power to systemic influence. They tend to believe that the significance of human freedom can be programmed, to some extent, through careful design of the contexts in which they exist.
Essentialists tend to prefer making moral judgements and exemplifying moral virtues within stable horizons, not analysing systemic causality, not trying to adjust the hem of the horizon. These are habits of thought, rather than ideological affiliations, though I suspect one is more comfortable on the Left as a constitutionalist and on the Right as an essentialist.

I think I am a constitutionalist.

Constitutionalists must beware of the cheap solidarity -- and the infectious fun! -- of agreeing with everyone else that Sir Fred Goodwin's pension is outrageous, or that riot police need to up their game. These are positions which can quite easily be held by essentialists who nevertheless do not question the laws, and other systems, which will inevitably and periodically generate atrocities about which we all can agree! A false consensus, in other words.

If Sir Fred were a constitutionalist, he'd make a perfect spokesperson for the anti-Capitalists (or at least for the not-so-sure-about-Capitalismists). He could make the case that it really is unfair to single him out from the many equally underserving hyperrich, just because he wandered into some limelight whilst justice was on the agenda.

Instead, gallant Sir Fred would say, we should work together and concertedly for the laws which abolish the hyperrich altogether, so we can concentrate on what's really important: love, laughter, sex, beauty, adrenaline, and ploading our consciousnesses onto needles of dense computronium shanking at near-light-speed towards the stars which I do not hesitate to characterise as motherfucking.

I am a very interesting blogger!

Letter to The Spectator

2009-03-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

Sir: I warmly welcome Mr. Liddle’s appetitive sentiment (‘The smoking ban was always going to be the thin end of the wedge,’ 21 March), but think he should draw the line at enjoying these “tipples” as he researches articles for The Spectator. The web site www.google.com is a useful resource for journalists and creative people like Mr. Liddle! Matronly Sir Liam didn’t say that the death toll in Britain for bird flu would most likely be 50,000. The worry was, and still is, that the bird flu virus will mutate into a form that can be transmitted directly between humans. There is historical precedent for such mutations, but their timing is difficult to predict. Since no mutation has happened yet, it is unfair to call Sir Liam’s projections disproportionate. Mr. Liddle would not say the death toll of the Asian Tsunami “proved to be, uh, nil” just because he went swimming the day before? Drudges like Sir Liam are very particular in what they say, it pays to listen to them quite closely. Else it may lead to feeling, as Mr. Liddle surely does, mistakenly smug about still being alive.

Blah blah blah blah

2009-03-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blahlblahlblah blahl blah blah blah blah blah blaha blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah, blah blah blah blah blah and blab hablah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, BLAH blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH blah blah blah, BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH blah bla blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

There's a Theory of Communicative Action I WON'T Be Reading

2009-02-24T16:06:00.000-08:00

Ever noticed that Habermas backwards spells HAMAS? I will be far too busy sipping on the quite frighteningly smooth & creamy The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon, author of the unforgiveable Wonder Boys, to read any terrorist tracts. Well Chabon must have taken a dip in the clue end of the pool because The Yiddish Policeman's Union (hereafter "YPU") is just great!

I was just on Wick to ensure it was definitely "pron. SHAY-bon" & OMG the Coens will be filming it.

And no hare lip! Blizz.

Atta Grrl!

2009-02-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

Important opinion piece by Posie Rider out today, along with an illustration by Catherine Redfern!

I haven't been able to think of any other dappy ideas for democracy, BTW! All my ideas have been really good and adopted by various visionary states this week. Cf. Finland's new constitution. Oh, but I did come across five post-democratic ideas from science fiction. "The Proper Study of Hivemind is Hivemind."

CERN Podcast

2009-01-31T15:27:00.000-08:00

Interesting podcast about the Higgs-Bosun et cetera.

"We have to trow away 99.9995% of the collisions we have to trow away" et cetera.

Dappy Ideas for Democracy #1

2009-01-30T13:18:00.000-08:00

This one's for the ladiez.

Like, umm. The principle of supermajorities is already in use in the US democratic system. The senate needs a supermajority to end a fillibuster. And for a good reason - fillibusters are neat.

Why not mitigate some of the disadvantages of the first past the post system (voter apathy, wasted votes, tactical voting, et cetera) by rigging the presidential powers to the proportion of the popular vote the winner achieves (weighted according to turn-out)? That way it's more reasonable to vote for your guy, even if you happen to live in a safe seat state.

So, like. If the President has done a W. 2000 and won the electoral vote, but not the popular vote, zhe doesn't get to make so many federal appointments. Maybe there could be civil society institutions waiting in the wings to make these appointments. Or let foreign governments do it! Also, the President doesn't get the power of selective pardon. Either nobody gets pardons, or everybody gets one.

Or if the President gets a big mandate from the popular vote, tilt the balance of power zher way by requiring only a 2/5 Senate approval for Supreme Court appointments.

For really upper echelon shares of the popular vote, the President gets incredibly powerful technomancy anime attacks.

Maybe this could all be relativised according to what popular mandates have been achieved by the legislature and the judiciary's SAT scores.

These are just examples, they're probably not "tweaky" enough!

Anyway, the situation on the ground is fast overwhelming these fanciful & reformists maggotes in my brain: the results of yesterday's by-election in Stoke Newington show a swing of 0.4% from Labour to Green since 2006!

Brand Refresh

2009-01-29T02:00:00.000-08:00

No quiche for me boys . . . THAT bucket is ISRAEL

2009-01-28T15:18:00.000-08:00

Darling unique hits!

This:

"A protest and sit-in in the Asa Briggs lecture theatre ended peacefully last night (Tuesday 27 January), when the students involved agreed to a final statement which the University had presented earlier in the week in response to their original demands."

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/USIS/news/index.php?output=html&refer=23172&id=28365

Is this a climb-down? I can't tell. The original demands, so they were wafted thru my rude hermeneutage (ta the pollen-fragrant zephyrs of Luke et. Al!) were that (a) the bookshop not stock Israeli books or weapons till Olmert adopt absolutely strict proportionality policy viz. a quasi-aimless doodlebug sort of lethally nosing in the vague direction of some Gaza depot or militant or kid or like bollard just as and when really, & (b) the University become the University of Zuzzex, & (c) the Ariel Sharon zombie not be included in the trust-building exercises scheduled for the morning, & (d) the totality of human relations to be seen as it would appear from the perspective not of redemption, but of damnation.

More action at QMU, LSE, etc. I am at Birkbeck, which is more suited to the needs of mature students!

My friend Steve Tarrant and I were shopping today and Steve was reaching to buy an air purifier. I said to him, "Steve, you know that's an Amcor air purifier right?"

Steve looked like I was an air raid and he was an exposed Palestinian urchin!

"And I suppose Orchard Mechanization do your power ladders Steve. My God Steve. When you're finished tipping out all the blood pooled in your basket, why don't we go out and grab some Hod Lavan turkey-burgers. Keep up the good work!"

Then Steve tried to compare it to me shopping at Primark! Idiot. Ornit blind rivets, they're nature's conflict diamonds! Primark is just a guilty pleasure, like Coldplay / scotch eggs!

http://www.boycottisraeligoods.org/modules38443.php

This should give you some idea anyway!

2009-01-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter to Marks and Spencer

2008-12-26T07:37:00.000-08:00

Dear Sir or Madam:

RE: The Fate of unsold perishables

I write to ask you to explain your policy in regard to items as they near their “best-before” or “sell-by” dates. Are they “marked down” as the hour approaches (the better to seduce the low-lying and most clement slopes of the demand curve)? Do M&S possess (as I am told Pret do!) an heroic fleet of Robin Reliants ready to drive the leftovers through the stormy night to local and not-so-local soup kitchens and homeless shelters? I should think a feta and vine leaves parcel is a feta and vine leaves parcel, heroin addiction or no heroin addiction.

If commercial exigencies (which I should like to hear about – I mean it, it’s not just flirting! I heart commercial exigencies) render these measures quite impossible, perhaps you should prepare less food for sale?

I am not incurious since my friend Melody Wittgenstein and I witnessed what we first took for looting, in the branch inside Victoria station some recent Friday night, at around 11:00. Brave Melody remarked that it reminded her of the rotting grain mountains and wine lakes of the Common Agricultural Policy. For a moment, I wondered whether I was not on the threshold of some quasi-Heavenly “Land of Delicious Food,” as enormous clouds of sandwiches, gathered into plastic bags, were wafted past us on the shoulders of your tillmen and women into the waiting bins. Or perhaps a waiting fleet of Robin Reliants? Melody being near best-before herself hadn’t the luxury of such rapture and her fear for her safety was a factor in my resolution to write to you.

I mean we’re not just talking ropey sandwiches here, they were chucking away perfectly good cherry tomatoes.

Do not, I warn you, try to fob me off with a voucher! – for I will only convey it to the fingers of one of my homeless friends.

I apologise for what may seem the excessive background and combative tone of this letter, and ameliorate it with the old saw that companies always seem to be far worse than the people who make them up! But as your sector is one of the trailblazers in Corporate Social Responsibility, and as your brand melts in itself all the best qualities of English sumptuousness and commonsense, is not M&S positioned to show better leadership than this?

Yours impatiently,
Lara Buckerton

Blood-Soaked Tampon

2008-12-15T06:32:00.000-08:00

Bard cud!

Melody Wittgenstein & I have been instrumental in the realisation of Posie Rider's latest artistic vision, the short "Blood Soaked Tampon et. al." [sic]. Will Hirstory thank us, Melody? Ze certainly won't forget us!

In PDF.

When like Melody I am old I shall warp purple, and I shall say things like this: "No I zhan't give you my autograph, because zat would be a forgery!"

(Aren't you . . . ?)

"Zat is beside the point: a zignature without a document, by law, is a forgery." (I don't know if this is true or if it will be then, but I will have got it into my head that it is). "For all I know my pet you're MI5, wanting to entrap and blackmail me for my assistance in dealing with a Caliph who has fallen in love with me, or thinks he has. I hold anyhow that tact in introductions, and honest purchases, are the better foundations of an autograph collection, and approaches of the illuztriouz in the ztreetz, odiouz."

Also I will be continually found lifting things far too big and heavy and have them taken off me amid the most soothing of protestations. Ooh I can't wait. I'll get busy. Apparently crack helps the process along.

ZOMG

2008-12-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

I have just begun posting Francis Crot’s exquisite MEAT-FILLED CHAPEL a.k.a. TALKING DONKEY BLOODBATH a.k.a. MALTON, ENGLAND.

LINK HERE.

In the end, we decided it was simplest to plonk it all on one page. Occam's bloadsoaked ex tempore bludgeon.

I have around 20 pages – Francis tells me that’s about half of what she’s written so far. She has planned it to be 200 pages. She promises it will be utterly autistic. In honour of the MMORPGy Urban Dead, London has become Malton.

I don’t want to spoil too much, let’s just say it gets very weird very quickly, and there’s a very portentous quality, almost Sophoclean. So make yourself a cup of tea & enjoy!

Twelve Collections

2008-12-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

Lardlings!

My review of Zivkovic's foxy TWELVE COLLECTIONS AND THE TEASHOP is now up at STRANGE HORIZONS. And lovely Niall kept in the thought-provoking bit about vom!

And vice-versa. BTW I'm just reading Without fear of wind or vertigo, by Vorts Viljandi, and I'm struck by the parallels with Zoran "Insert Symbol ... " Zivkovic's book. Too late to mention it, Zod's Law.

Personally I collect Zoran Zivkovics:

And in other crap, I embark today on a zock puppet-supported viral marketing campaign to zoom up the zocial penetration of my azzociative democratic poetry! Shall keep you posied. Is anyone out there? Frankly my lardlings I (published on the Internet potatoess) don't give a yam.

The v. v. darkling cabaret of Patti Plinko and her Boy, whom I just saw in Edinburgh! Truly this is a lady who zharez my appreziation of the terminal zigil. HerSpace rocks (and, like, slits, gases etc. - I'm not cool) but the footage really can't capture the convulsive suicidal charisma of her live show.

Somebody recuperate these dangerous freaks!

Mittens off, I am renewing civic virtue in the webosphere with a ZECOND RECOMMENDATION WITHIN A ZINGLE POST: World War Z, by Max Brooks, author of the apalling Zombie Survival Guide. Z is done as a collection of fragments, and it gives the genre a syringe of potent & up-to-date social & political criticism. You know, like the bit in that film where they're all in the mall, and the zombies are there. I should like the audio tapes for Zhristmas, sort it out amongst yourselves.

Ten Poems

2008-04-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Officially a poetaster! Poetaser? Poetasertess? Potato?

I am published! And what's more, on the Internet!

Ben "It's A Ram's World" Ramm's The Liberal (now, I shan't link) was the first to snub these poems, presumably because they were overly associative democratic for his tender political palate.

Then I had some encouraging feedback - "Dear Laura," for example - from a number of other faceless (I hope!) editors, until I ran into Tim Atkins at a tasting, and he agreed to include them in Sight Unseen, a little online journal he owns!

In the order in which I wrote them, the poems tell of a very gentle decline into political quietism. For the published version, I have reversed the order, to create a narrative of enlightenment - an oblique tale of radicalisation, struggle and hope.

The title (TEN poems) is sic by the way - I am questioning what constitutes a poem, its permeability.

I doubt any of you will get them, but you may be able to appreciate the charisma of their speaker - a real Everytransgender - on hir quest for political and moral enlightenment. Do correct me if I'm wrong (about the first bit. Constructive feedback is all very well but you have to realise I'm quite sensitive about my work and can't always work out that it is constructive feedback).

Loves xxx

2008-04-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

This will be a blog about MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Quiche straight from the Bucket

Soterion

Gone

From somebody's Facebook status

As the name implies?

Fain

Changing certain aspects of BBC radio 4 one cross pedantic letter at a time!

Fauxplexity

More festive larks

Danny Hayward on Lord Browne

Codename Prague

Richard Tyrone Jones spotting

Crot Lap

Labour need a leader suited to the 56th Century *

Fauxplexity

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

Lara Buckerton's Political Broadcast

Three Artists

Some Aylett tidbits

Ream Peehole &c.

Blog post

Utopia

Animals

Telly!!!

Letter to Toilette & Douche LLP

Octave Puke

Non-sequitors are the new instrumental reason

Assurors of the future

Reality

The Horrible Truth

Drax, darlings!

Theodora Children's Trust

Cliche straight from the Swanwick

Harry Gilonis writing to Bill Rammell MP

Brixton? More like Fixton!

Action required!

Dappy Ideas for Democracy no. 2

Countercabinet reshuffle

Dudgeon & Dragons

Swine!

Some people who are NOT dead!

Ballard

Grief straight from the bucket

J. G. Ballard: 1930-2009

No, Science!

Speculative Fiction I <3

Speculative Fiction I <3 (part II)

Woozy

Smooth???

A zombie reflects on the riots

Letter to The Spectator

Blah blah blah blah

There's a Theory of Communicative Action I WON'T Be Reading

Atta Grrl!

CERN Podcast

Dappy Ideas for Democracy #1

Brand Refresh

No quiche for me boys . . . THAT bucket is ISRAEL

This should give you some idea anyway!

An Open Letter to Marks and Spencer

Blood-Soaked Tampon

ZOMG

Twelve Collections

Recommended

Ten Poems