Thanks to Nick, we can bring you the latest in top-quality journalism, from, indeed, the World's Greatest Newspaper, said without a shred of irony:

• Fractal breakdown of every outcome in noughts and crosses. via Cynical-C

• Harry Potter's Ford Anglia stolen.

• A Bach Christmas. I will be joining the rest of the Queens in playing Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor BWV565 on December 18th. Ironic that this is going to be the focal point of the celebrations of Bach's life, given that there is a very good chance the Toccata and Fugue was not written by Bach. That tells us something about how history works, I guess.
• Boris Johnson on why Cherie Blair should, probably, be arrested.

On Squeak

Fold away the Volvo
And pack up the house!
I'm telling a story
About Squeak the mouse.

Squeak is a mouse
Who lives in the floor
And used to eat cardboard,
But not any more.

Now he eats oranges
And chocolate on toast
'cause those are the things
That his tummy likes most!

But these little factlets
Mean nothing at all.
See, the problem with Squeak is,
He's getting too tall!

It started one Sunday
Last summer in Cork.
It was nine in the morning,
And he went for a walk.

By eleven he'd made
His way into town.
But, alas! Squeak discovered
His trousers fell down!

He pulled them up tight,
But they came to his knees.
"Oh no!" Squeak exclaimed,
"My legs are diseased!"

Some mighty strange looks
From the crowd he attracted,
So he went to the tailor,
Who thought that he'd cracked it.

See, the tailor (whose name
Was Mister Baked Beans)
Said he'd make Squeak a new pair
Of Extra Long Jeans.

So — skip a bit brother —
And back to today.
He's had nine pairs of trousers
Since he went away!

He's been to the doctor
And written a song,
But no-one quite knows
Why his legs are so long!

Although Squeak is now
Over six feet tall,
He's found a solution
That's suited to all.

Instead of his trousers,
He now wears a kilt,
So he walks down the main street
Without any guilt!

And when he grows taller,
He adds a bit on:
The length of his kilt
Is second to none!

At ten foot six inches,
Squeak is content,
Though he lives on two floors now,
And pays twice the rent!

But that is a story
For some other fellow.
Now go to sleep soon
Or your legs might turn yellow!

Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

• Rosa Parks is dead.
• View the Turner Prize nominations for 2005. Either Gillian Carnegie or Simon Starling, I should say.
• New Zealander sells time machine for $300,000,000,001,999.00, then withdraws sale due to the "fact my machine is just a phone attached to an old computer and an eftpos machine". via Pootling
• Playboy billboard that changes in the rain. via Kottke.

So I did, at long last, get my Sony Ericsson W800i, which most companies seem to have had out of stock for months. I've not been disappointed; the camera is more than passable for a mobile phone, but more importantly, the sound quality is better than the iPod (mainly because of the earphones it is supplied with). The camera can do a clever panorama effect by piecing together three photos (yes, like you used to do in Art in year 9):

• LGS in Parliament 1/2: About two thirds of the way down, headmaster of LGS used as anecdotal device.
• LGS in Parliament 2/2: About three quarters of the way down, information on LGS's assisted places funding (which was scrapped by Labour in 1997.) I was one of those assisted pupils; therefore I owe you, the taxpayer, about £21,000.
• Wikipedia's entry for LGS, from which I learnt that Peter Preston (who I think writes in the Grauniad) is an old Loughburian. Includes amusing tales about recent controversies at the school: including drugs, sex, binge drinking, and prominent arrests! Hurrah for the old boys! /sarcasm

Caption competitions abound.

Rogier van der Weyden, St Luke Madonna, c. 1440

But all I could do during the sermon was despair, take my glasses off and rub my eyes as I blu-tacked sheets of Bach's Fugue on the Magnificat BWV 733 to the music desk. There is something so profoundly disconnected about the church's ideas about mission and my ideas about everything. Why am I still there? There is something meta-conservative about Church which enables it to voice opposition while actually remaining completely complicit in the Order. There is nothing radical about Church, yet my roots are under threat. Who will answer? Only me, I'm afraid. The time draws ever nearer when this will be behind me.

£30 in the back pocket, £60 of HMV vouchers, birthday cards; yes, of course these things say something, something which draws me back every time, but it is a pilgrimage more akin to that of Sisyphus than of any saint.

• Jeremy on uchi/soto.
• Amusing spat between US diplomats and Ken Livingstone (Plasticbag).
• BREAKING NEWS: The Conservative Party completely screw themselves over for the fifth time running

Untitled

Sigh and wait
For twist of fate
To make things better.
Deus ex machina.

Does it come?
Have you won?
All is still for me.
As stagnant as can be.

Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

Stepping out of the front door this morning, the cold bite of the air brought back memories of this time last year. It's curious that I should make such strong associations with the weather. The low temperature and clear skies transported me back to the concerts I did in Macclesfield, of the drive through the Peaks to get there, and the joy of being extremely nervous and giving a performance. Those concerts will, I am sure, remain high points of my life. Perhaps our memories are strongest when our fear was greatest? Memory is left as an image bank of bad experiences, yet we derive pleasure from memory; they are melancholy, but they are all we have left of ourselves.

For a number of reasons which won't interest you, I've been back to Leicester for a couple of days. I value Leicester more each time I return, and see new things in it every time. Most of all, I value its successful multicultural character; but how is it that Leicester's managed to pull it of when cities like Bradford have had so many problems? I was riding into town on the bus yesterday, having paid the Turkish bus driver my fare, and witnessed two Indian ladies get on, a group of African girls (second-generation Somalis, I think), a young Pakistani man and his disabled friend, and so on. There's plenty of cities where you could witness this level of diversity. But this was in a residential area; in a city like Manchester, residential areas are much more racially segregated, and the only place people mix is the city centre, and partly just because of the character of city centres, everyone is looking over their shoulder and generally being suspicious. But there was no hint of suspicion on my bus. The old Indian ladies were greeted by the old white ladies, they had a chat, then they got off, one by one. No-one was just sat looking out of the window trying to ignore the Other's existence.

Untitled

A galaxy of eternity
Unfairly balanced.
Clementines spinning,
Flames burning out,
Time sapping away,
Coils unwinding,
Knots untying:

Tape over the cracks
And rescue the image.

Written 16.12.04. Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

• Bhutan's Gross Domestic Happiness index, and Jeremy Hedley's more interesting Gross Domestic Secrets index
• Python bursts after eating crocodile. Slightly gory, but funny. Via Trabaca.

The Rosenzweig session was productive in spite of my lagging behind. Part two of The Star of Redemption is extremely interesting to me, mostly for the way it begins to deal with language, "grammar and word". Rosenzweig's ideas about "root words", "inaudible elemental words" which "constitute the manifest course of speech" are particularly important. He develops in book two what he calls "the proper name":

That which has a name of its own can no longer be a thing, no longer everyman's affair. It is incapable of utter absorption into he category for there can be no category for it to belong to; it is its own category. —The Star of Redemption, part two, book two, pp.186-187 in the Hallo translation (1970, Notre Dame)

These ideas struck me as reminiscent of Walter Benjamin and particularly his Trauerspiel ("true naming"), which is important to Benjamin through his observation that through time words come to be alienated and dissociated from the objects which they initially intended; a trend potentially dangerous in the light of the technological and economic novelties of the twentieth century (as well as the realities of totalitarianism), and perhaps even more so in postmodernity. He also seems to inherit certain ideas about redemption. I was intrigued to know the extent of the link between R. and Benjamin, since Benjamin died young and was considered to be on the fringes of his intellectual generation. Gershom Scholem's memoirs of his friendship with Benjamin are insightful:

True, he [Benjamin] knew little about the Jewish intellectual world, but what he did know of it had appealed to him profoundly: the Bible, fragments of rabbinic literature... and thinkers like Moses Hess, Ahad Ha'am, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. —Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The story of a friendship p. 167 (2001 [1981], New York Review Books)

I find it puzzling that the whole school of Jewish philosophy does not command wider readership and authority. The issues which The Frankfurt School, Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Spinoza (looking back into history) have raised are as pertinent as any continental existentialism, but their ideas receive much less attention. Even Derrida's deconstruction would not have been possible without the whole hermeneutic wound of metonomy and metaphor being opened up. Furthermore, politics, "society", and sections of the press which should know better are complicit in dismissing the significance of the linguistic turn in philosophy (for example, take The Economist's obituary last year for Derrida; dismissive and ill-informed; significant that such a reputable publication should exhibit so little understanding of a major theoretical figure. In fact, it's worth reading the response to that article in the next edition's letters section). But then we should not be surprised. Once the hearthstone of linguistics has been taken away, that is, once it has been shown that there is no ultimate stability or stasis in meaning, the entire system plunges into the abyss, as R. would say. Not only the science of linguistics, but the whole modernist, positivist project with it; if even empirical meaning can be shown to be built on the sand of language, it is only a matter of time until the house falls into the sea.

Update

I have misappropriated and misunderstood part of the stuff I mentioned on Benjamin, and this has been pointed out to me by Stuart :). Trauerspiel is, in fact, a "tragic play", and comes into B.'s philosophy through his essay On the Origins of German Tragic Drama. The German which refers to Benjamin's idea of "true naming" would seem to be Wahres Wort [more literally, "true word"]. Apologies.

Labels: levinas

I should have read Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption for tomorrow, but I have in fact read very little of it. I'm trying to rectify that situation with something of a late-night philosophy session, accompanied, naturally, by some organically grown red wine, but it's all doing my head in a bit. Maybe I'll just go to bed. On an unrelated note, I discovered today that, mysteriously, we were charged at Tesco last night for a woman's "Brooch Cardigan" (£25), which, clearly, we did not buy. Unusual, but not unheard of for Tesco, who have over the years systematically ripped me off, all in union with their incompetent devil-child cashiers.

• Incidentally, have you all seen the wonderful Pocoyo, which can be seen on CITV every Tuesday and Thursday? It is a ray of sunshine in my life and, I admit, I have been known to impersonate Pocoyo in the kitchen, albeit minus dummy/pacifier (although I prefer the term "dummy"; for some reason, "pacifier" always makes me think of colonic irrigation).

• Malcolm Rifkind shelves his Tory leadership campaign, and — hooray! — chooses to support Ken Clarke
• Schröder finally admits defeat in Germany
• More4 launched yesterday, but I was too busy to watch it. Did anyone see the first few programmes? Initial reactions?
• Author and Anglican priest G.P. Taylor is asked to leave a school after using naughty words. A top-notch example of all-round English eccentricity. He even had to take his heart medication after the event.

It is a uniquely perverse relationship that we each have with one another in our urbanised life. We pass each other in the street and respond, quite literally, as if the other did not exist. We can go to the same café every day and see the same staff without ever quite being sure if they recognise you or not. We are so near to each other, yet so far from being in common. The city has fulfilled a desire for anonymity which is at once narcissistic and self-defeating. The isolation of the postmodern city is twofold, and plain to see from a moment spent in observation.

I will end up alone; we all end up alone. Sometimes I want nothing more than that anonymity, that non-identity. I can be a nobody. In the city, no-one thinks anything of it if you are a nobody. Indeed, we are a city of nobodies, nonidentities either through a personality crisis, which seals the individual off from others and robs him of his identity (since his identity is, inherently, a corporate affair; there is no identity if there is no-one else to identify), or through mass culture, which swallows up identity and supplants it with the thinly-veiled myth of individualism, which boils down to uniform, mechanised consumption. Is there really more than these two types? Is there anything in us which is other than crisis and conformity? If I am not to be a mechanised, monadic consumer, am I to become a nonidentity?

How do you make God laugh? Tell him your future plans. —Woody Allen

• The homepage of the Mesh series of cartoons which were shown on Channel 4 last week. I love the variety of animation styles and their short, powerful messages. Excellent. The website also includes animations from previous years.
• Asbos for under 10s? Un. Be. Lieve. A. Ble.

Postcolonialism

I write a dream that must remain
just that. A kind of postcolonialism
that's nearer to anachronism.
Oh, must I fantasise still now
about your youthful eyes, and how
I'd be the first to part those gates
of lust, the first to penetrate
the virgin heart with which I lay?

The history, like you, I leave behind,
though I cannot forget your boyish arms,
the tanning of your skin, your tender palms
which still lie on my chest and cru-
cify my heart each dream anew.
I tell you now this untold love,
a crime I'm ten times guilty of.
This dream's bequeathed to you, unsigned.

Written 18.02.05. Read the small print.

Labels: poetry

Why is the truth so woefully
Removed? To depths of secret banned?
None understands in time! If we
But understood betimes, how bland
The truth would be, how fair to see!
How near and ready to our hand!

—Goethe.

Sometimes, she feels like she's living someone else's life. Her present relationship with what you might call her 'childhood identity' is at once one of complete disconnection and profound self-inheritance. She's sure this is true for everyone; how can the adult possibly reconcile herself with the child? Yet her daily life is peppered, pummeled, penetrated over and over with the images of childhood which she wants to reclaim for herself, but that she is forever in fear of; from which she must recoil almost physically, arms moving instinctively to her head, a natural ritual of self-protection itself inherited from the womb. She cannot walk down the street that she thinks she chose for herself in that one-time break from childhood, she cannot enter the city that was hers, yes, hers, not that of her parents, she cannot climb the stairs which either in truth or in negation represent an ideal which she created for herself, no, she can do none of these things without being interrupted violently by a scent, by an action, by a sound, which stirs up in her memory images that, with her own immense agency, she had presumed to have buried, dead; dead and buried.

As time goes on, she must acknowledge that there can be no disestablishment; she cannot live without her past. Without the intention and projection of the Truth only time allows, she is nothing, a no-thing, matter frozen in a void of physical plenitude. She must embrace the movement, though the movement will always bring her back to where she began.

Across a city from you, I'm with you
just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight-
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoors of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.

This island of Manhattan is wide enough
of both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.

—Adrienne Rich (No. 16 from Twenty-one Love Poems).

• Is this what British party politics has been reduced to? Bring in the tanks, I want Mussolini back.
• There is still political impasse in Germany, which can only be bad for the nation's democracy. The political system is being crippled by a representative constitution which ensures no single party can gain too much power (for obvious reasons...), but such impotence risks ploughing the country into a whole new kind of totalitarianism, I feel.
• I saw this story on Iran providing weapons to Iraqi "insurgents", and then I thought, hang on, didn't we do something like that about ten years ago?
• Q: Which is more dangerous, a Muslim or a toaster? A:

There's that damp, wintry chill in the air at 7am again, confirming October, reminding us of nature's fall, and with it, perhaps a little of our own consciences. The sky is clear, you know. Not a cloud to be seen from the West Wing; sunlight, almost as crisp as the air, crashes with univocity onto the paradox of red brick and 1970s plasterboard, but confirms that, too. Light reveals all, and cuts through the crap. I hope we continue to live in darkness. Darkness is the order of October; yes, nature's fall begun; darkness will fall, it will; but the sun will return again. It's just we all know how far off spring can seem in the depths of a winter which seems to span three seasons, rather than one.

• Ronnie Barker is dead. My favourite bit from the Two Ronnies, although i admit I do not know all of them, was the Mastermind answering-the-question-before-last sketch. I can't find a link to a transcript, so if anyone knows of one, please post it in a comment...

• Scaryduck on the Wanking Club: I must sue my school one of these days.
• Zoe on British attitudes to alcohol.
• Everyday redundant acronyms, courtesy of Diamond Geezer.

• I've just uploaded a new photo gallery from my trip to Germany back in March! There will be more photos to come in the future. Below are some links all about Bad Wildungen, in case you're interested. Update: You can now view these photos on my Flickr account (click the photo in the sidebar).
• Interactive panorama of the Stadtkirche
• Map of the town
• Official website