• Junk food to be banned in schools: as usual, the government considers legislation and coercion to be superior to liberty. What will banning bad food do to educate children about how to eat well? The responsibility is with governors, teachers and parents, not with government. Make the resources available, and make these groups of authority figures responsible and accountable. Banning "bad" things only encourages an indifferent attitude towards them, since there is thus no agency involved, and therefore no value.

Theologian Graham Ward's new book Christ and Culture is out today. I went to hear Graham deliver a paper at the departmental postgraduate seminar this afternoon, entitled Religion and the decline of democracy. It was pretty much what I've come to expect from G.W., but his work seems to be starting to come to terms with the need for a theory of action, although he has still not managed to produce one. Christ and Culture is moving towards it, but I fear that G.W. may be falling into the same trap as Adorno did: being excellent at the cultural critique, but being unable to relate it to what political action should amount from critique.

An extremely brief synopsis of today's paper: There is a new public face of religion, and religiosity is on the rise, although not in organised forms. From Bush's religious language, through the French headscarf ban, to the prominence of religious and quasi-religious names for bars, products, and experiences, there is underway a remythologisation of Western culture. Culture is turning to the religion of special effect, from The Lords of the Rings, through Star Wars, to the da Vinci Code. But there is a crisis of identity in democracy, and democracy, through German and Italian fascism, has already shown itself highly volatile and liable to end in despotism and dictatorship. We are at risk of falling into a zero-degree dialectic, unwilling and unable to engage in meaningful political debate, exacerbated and encouraged by the erosion of public space and the dissolution of categories of public and private into one. Democracy must find a way to repoliticise itself, or the explosive mix of public religion and totalitarianism may ignite.

Anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with Ward's work should not take my rushed and cack-handed synopsis to be a fair representation. Go to the source. Again, although Ward is starting to deal directly with the problems of the polity of the West, his proposed solutions are much more vague. How exactly is democracy to repoliticise itself? And how is it to overcome the problem of plurality and heterogeneity in the context of a democratic social contract which must, by definition, be homogenous? It was particularly unclear where Ward sees the role of religion in this polity. I was interested by Colin Crouch's ideas about postdemocracy, but his categories do not necessarily hold. They are thought provoking all the same. Postdemocracy is characterised by:

• Will of people is not obtained, but created
• Political sphere is dominated by economic questions, and indirectly, business interests
• There is mass depoliticisation through universalised atomism/individualism
• Crisis of representation; minority interests do not receive due consideration
• Outsourcing of traditionally state-responsible tasks to private companies [only further alienating the political system from the people]
• Growth [therefore] in opacity of government, rather than accessibility or transparency

Anyway, there's a few thoughts. It was somewhat fitting, though, that I came in from that seminar all about the totalitarian tendencies of democracy, to witness an eighty-two-year-old heckler being forceably ejected from the Labour conference, and every sign of a police/government cover-up in the case of the de Menezes shooting. The signs of the times, indeed, Professor...

• Via Plasticbag.org: Very interesting report on the psycholinguistics of smell.
• Arms trading — will we ever learn?
• A history of BBC powercuts and similar geekishness.
• Philip Hayton is leaving the BBC due to more newsreader in-fighting.
• The Blairs like Little Britain.

This photo has appeared previously, but appears now for the purposes of renewed amusement and permanent archiving. It was photographed not far from Canterbury Cathedral, not long before a well-hidden brothel was investigated.

• Scotland has the second highest murder rate in Western Europe
• Anyone who hasn't seen Bromwell High on Channel 4, Fridays, 11.20pm, must go and see the web site!

Newfred.com has enjoyed something of a renaissance of late, and it's all in preparation for the resumption of Business As Usual when term starts again tomorrow. Expect a proliferation of chunky cultural studies yadda yadda. Perhaps the craziest week of my life has just passed. Details another time. A bit of housekeeping has been done on the site, including bulleted lists and things like that. More work to do. Coming up soon, I hope (as much a note to self as anything): Review of Crash, Analysis of Nip/Tuck (at long last), the music of Messiaen, more poems, and some other bits and bobs. I should probably let you know it's 4.00am, and I've been reduced to eating sugar sandwiches following Too Much Crying and General Insomnia and Hyperactivity! (Which included a comparison of the Passacaglia of Rheinberger, Martin, and Bach.)

The wedding was a happy occasion, an occasion so full of happiness, in fact, that circumstances almost became overwhelming. The marriage service lasted two hours, comprised a specially-arranged jazz-rock version of Jesu, Joy, a little too much swaying and arm-waving for my taste, and a bumper dose of evangelical freestyling. But it was all harmless enough, and the only newspapers I caught sight of were copies of The Guardian, so these must be at the cuddly end of the evo spectrum. Even if I disagreed with some of the language and some of the methods that the church uses, there is no denying that it is answering to the situation and context in which it finds itself, and this is more than the middle-of-the-road Church of England can say. The only thing, in my view, that mainstream Anglicanism really has in its favour is its capacity to accept people on their own terms — but there's not so much difference between this, positive, aspect, and the complete vagueness and alienation which can sum up not only the CofE but establishment in general.

The main thing I took from the day, and which comforted me in spite of my vicious agnosticism, was Jeremiah 29:11-13, selected as particularly relevant by the bride's father:

'"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope, and a future."'

A toast to the future...

• Today I'm off to the most unfamiliar church I've ever been to for my friend's wedding. I'm apprehensive but also excited. The liturgy and evangelism probably isn't my thing, but to see a church being so successful will certainly be a first.

Can I sweep away the cobwebs,
Can I blow the dust away?
Open up the ancient pages,
Cross out words from yesterday?

Boy must lose to man, in yearning
For the freedom waiting brings;
Still, man is eager, in his freedom,
To rediscover childish things.

Where is man to turn in clearing
Out the closet? Can it be
That all he seeks is confirmation,
That vision of eternity?

I can sweep away the cobwebs,
I can blow the dust away.
Every year I'll read the words with
Which the boy the man betrayed.

Written 16.01.05. Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

Manchester is such an ambiguous place. We went for a drive around this evening, to get out of the house, and to witness the antics of freshers on their first Friday night out on Deansgate. You realise it really is microcosmic here — taking a route through Stockport, Heaton Mersey, Didsbury, Burnage, Fallowfield, Longsight, city centre, Cheetham Hill, Salford, Salford Quays, Stretford, Levenshulme, and back to Stockport, we could as well have toured a whole country. Worlds are written on the landscape, and unequivocal signs, which speak both of civic pride and authoritarian delineation, serve to enforce this: "You are now in Salford." Simultaneously modern, industrial, secular, postmodern, postindustrial, and deeply religioned, Manchester reflects the best and worst of our contemporary condition. The trains are life-affirming; full of idiosyncrasy, functioning only through the mass effort of a collective staff, and ferrying the most diverse sorts. A teenager alights at Heaton Chapel, guitar slung over shoulder, and faith in life is inspired: people are doing things in the City, we are living, we are part of something, we are thinking, we have not debased ourselves, we are not monads in an atomistic mode of self-regarding consumption. But then the cutting edge of Manchester, its Greenquarter, and Salford's Quays, challenge this outlook. The self-mocking promenades along the waterside are deserted, peaceful, yet ethereal; high-rise, high-wealth tenements overshadow the pedestrian, the continental boulevards of modernist Europe leered over by the giants of postmodern architecture. There are people somewhere in these sterile tower blocks. Who, do you suppose, is happier? Those in the nearly-gated communities in Salford Quays, or the guitarist who got off a shabby old train, held together by masking tape, at Heaton Chapel? We exchanged smiles, and the train continued on its way. We didn't pass anyone at Salford Quays. There was no-one to exchange smiles with.

So we're back home, and I'll soon listen to my iPod, pipe into my ears commodified, mass-produced sound, representations, imitations of the real, I will let a representation of Rheinberger's Passacaglia from the E minor sonata wash over my senses, and imagine Benjamin turning in his grave as I hear the pipes of Fulda Cathedral organ in our terrace in Stockport.

• Nick Robinson summarises the Lib Dem conference.
• ...and a human hobbit? Why would anyone be interested unless he looked like Elijah Wood?

• A discussion I'm having with the author over on The Bernoulli Effect, about the place of critical theory in [US] education.

Untitled

Seven potted blackbirds
Ate a jar of jam:
Only they can know
How blueberry I am.

Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

• Simon Hoggart at his best in today's Guardian, on the idiocy of stating-the-obvious in politics.
• Another thing I like about the new Guardian (although I confess I'm not sure if it's actually new, since I hadn't read it for a couple of years before it relaunched) is their Other Lives column, which celebrates important lives but which weren't necessarily led in the public eye.
• And doesn't the 100-minute bible say something about the depth that people want to get into on the key issues in life?
• And The Guardian has some stuff on the 100-minute bible too...

the ikea table and chair and chair and chair and chair and stool and stool and bed and mattress and shelf and candles and lamp and lamp and lamp and so on yes they are all here the house is full with consumer nothing the price of an item a chinese girl has sweated for a five cent piece hidden in mahogany veneer but yes i'm here i slave away a different kind of slavery with wrist rest and wireless technology and bluetooth adapters and motor cars and lcds and tfts and crts and ibms and so on so what do we say when the petrol prices they go too high no we might die no we pay a little more for the crazy round trip to the midlands and back on the addled m6 the addled m6 addled by roadworks that is and speed cameras and oh no 40 mile an hour limits but i got back and i need a service on the car do the brakes work does the child work does she need a service i buy my fairtrade coffee and a little fairtrade chocolate my contribution to the totemism of privatised morality the rest i shop for tesco value items only do you need a service chinese girl who looks after you

• (via Plasticbag.org) Blair attacks BBC over anti-US bias during coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Not that Mr Blair has ever exhibited damaging bias in international affairs...
• And I know Mr Kottke has always been a bit geeky, but isn't this going too far? It's bad enough reporting on the conference in the first place, but resorting to descriptions of the physics of the name tags?

Instead of my own words, here is one of my favourite poems, summing up, for me, both the fragility and value of memory. RIP...

Windsor Road Chapel

Cinema (Odeon or Capitol) circa 1959:
only no curtains, just an even, tight-pinned bedsheet
of timber, and a blunt, empty cockpit.
Nothing, it says, will come over your shoulder,
no hidden reels, throwing a hazy line

Across the smoke to play the rainbow fish
that slip around, behind, our watered eyes.
This is the board for unexpected news,
a death, a resignation, raw, cold
as the air outside, flat as the turned-down wish.

God, it seems doesn't live in water, glimpse and flash,
mirror and shade, not still until the day's
damp end. The message on the wires
rubs at the skin's impatient folds
in dry, pale itches, drifts of my neighbour's ash.

The most familiar artefact of brass and pine
nags at the memory; you know what's going to fit
the timber cabinet before too long, the drought
that cures the flesh and seals the blood.
Board: gate: departure, says the sign.

Off you go, then, on static-laden floors,
drawn - as we all are - by unwelcome news;
but even now, not able to pause
and listen for pursuing streams, rolled
shining and stuttering downhill to the exit doors.

—Rowan Williams, from Remembering Jerusalem

• Technology editor of The Economist writes in The Guardian on the degeneracy of bottled water consumption.

Although I admit that I have a copy of the new Guardian sat on my coffee table, not least for its bohemian dinner-party-talking-point quality, I don't consider myself much of a lefty. Nevertheless, I can but feel sympathy for the lefty liberal slant on events in international politics at present:

• There is civil war in Iraq, but it is not called by that name because it was the UK and US who fomented it;
• Bush and Blair have talked at the UN about the need to "condemn" the "slaughter" of "innocent people", without even a hint of contrition or even recognition that this is what they've been up to in Afghanistan and Iraq;
• The news has been speaking with shock that radical Islamists may be "recruiting" and "brainwashing" in Huddersfield town centre, but what about those Army, Navy and RAF recruitment stalls we see in... city centres all over the country? What difference is there, other than the widespread disenfranchisement of domestic and international political voice for Arab and Muslim people (amongst many others...)
• ...the others, of course, including Africa, whose state of affairs today isn't radically different enough from ten and twenty and thirty years ago. Famines in Niger? Think of Somalia. The Sudan? Rwanda. AIDS? Polio, TB, the list goes on. So much for the trickle down effect; yes, it can work, but not while drug companies protect their patents and national governments protect their farmers.

My faith in politics as "we" know it is shaken harder every day.

• Discussion on the merits of Karl Marx over on Barbelith.

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Almost exactly ten years since my father died, I know he would have been overjoyed to see England win the Ashes again.

Orgasm

A curious assembly
of body parts, pornography,
friction, fear and fantasy
seems through my mind,
then blood, to flow.

I masturbate, but soon I find
I'm dreaming not of intercourse
but symphonies, sonatas, laws
of harmony, Full Swell,
box shut, I crescendo

and reach a perfect close:
the nearest a musician knows
to taming the insatiety
from which his lust and semen flows.

Written 25.08.05. Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

Jeremy Hedley's description of moving house pretty much sums it up. We've moved into our new abode in the nice old market town of Stockport, south of Manchester but in the north of Cheshire. It's our first house together — that is, together without other people too — and it's such a joy to have the run of a place, have so much space, and be able to have everything Just How We Want It. This week has been occupied with running to and from Ikea, or so it seems, and spending far too much money. We now have to live on rice and baked beans for three months. But at least we have shiny things!

In my last post, I linked to an entry over on Plasticbag.org about the so-called 'intelligent design' debate which issued from this article by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne in the Guardian a few days ago. Dawkins and Coyne were arguing against the inclusion of creationist or 'intelligent design' theories of human aetiology alongside evolution theory. My own belief, like Dawkins and Coyne, is in the probable verity of evolution theory, but for me it is immature to conclude directly that alternative viewpoints should not be sought and taught. I say that not so much for the benefit of the theories themselves, but rather for the intellectual demands that theoretical conflicts place upon students and the faculties and real-world coping mechanisms that coming to terms with difference certainly does compel.

Anyway, the main purpose of this post was merely to point to two books by Mary Midgley which, right or wrong, are insightful on the subject: Evolution as a Religion and Beast and Man, the former of which is self-explanatory, the latter about humanity much closer proximity to other animals than it likes to admit. Although, it's worth being aware of some of the criticisms of Midgley's work.

How terrible the last few days have been for America. Even I, a most certain critic of American government and (to a lesser extent) culture, have been amazed by the issues the hurricane and its aftermath have raised for the States. What is the true cost of an entrenched rich/poor divide? Can America really manage itself under these circumstances without international assistance? Can any nation do so? What implications for black America? Perhaps the Constitution really is civil war by other means... And how intriguing, too, to see a Hobbesian State of Nature emerge in New Orleans, albeit for only a few days.

• In other news, the Conservative party is up to its usual tricks, so far as ramming itself as far up its own arse as possible is concerned.
• Banksy has updated his web site to show his latest escapades on the Israel-Palestine wall (and these are my favourites);
• A discussion over on plasticbag.org about science and religion.

For the first time in (my) living memory, I witnessed a Conservative speaking insightfully, eloquently and without patronising his audience. While Letwin et al continue to pursue their ill-conceived game of imitating Tony Blair's PR policies, Ken Clarke — who has put himself forward for the party leadership — exhibited speechmaking of the highest quality at lunchtime, systematically picking apart not only the government's Iraq policy, but also its broader legislative, authoritarian and anti-parliamentary approach to crime and terrorism. Although I can't see myself voting Conservative any time soon, it is absolutely essential that the party elects Clarke to its leadership, because it is absolutely essential that Britain has an effective, cutting and distinctive opposition again; Clarke is the only politician capable of achieving this.

Term will be starting again soon, and this web site might return to its brief. Current reading is Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

All the best, until we speak again, dear readers...