Goodbye, another forgotten day

where the grass grew longer

and the notion stronger

that this would be a forgotten day.

All is old and dead and past;

its grey remnant on the floor.

Every day we ask for more,

but nothing here can last.

2001

Tags: poetry, poem

Labels: poetry

Why yield to pressures external/undue

That don't matter or make any difference to you?

People telling and asking and pulling both arms

And time's stings attacking your skull in its swarms?

If there's something you'd rather be doing right now,

Go and do it — say no thank-yous, goodbyes — save a row.

If this is a maxim, then follow it true:

It's something you can't just intend to do.

2001

Tags: poetry, poem, wilshere.

Labels: poetry

Labels: photography, stockport

What an overwhelmingly negative day. I won't bored you with the details, but right now I could quite happily just chuck the whole academia thing in, it's so rotten through with bullshitters. Am I content to spend the next four years dwelling in the gutter than runs between the academic's two poles of conservatism and mediocrity? Answers on a postcard.

It seems to me there is one big problem with this story on the racial divide in Britain. The Commission for Racial Equality essentially claim that if there is evidence of racial division and inequality, it must be down to discrimination, and that the answer must be therefore to clamp down in some arbitrary way on particular instances of discrimination, and to seek, through bureaucratic and legislative measures, to stop discrimination taking place.

This is wildly simplistic. To my mind discrimination is evidence of another problem: some deeper lack of cultural connection or shared identity. The CRE is doing nobody any favours by banging on about discrimination, which everyone already knows is illegal. What's more, if the racial divide really is "deeper than ever", what does that say for the activity of the Commission for Racial Equality? This report seems to be suggesting that all problems of racial integration in Britain must come down to a matter of law, or a question of proper policing, or the removal of bias from the judicial system. I disagree. For race relations to change in Britain, individuals and communities need to inspect their own attitudes and seek consciously to encounter those of other races. Beyond providing public space, I don't see what government can or should do here.

Tags: racism, relations, britain, cre, commission, racial, equality, race.

Labels: politics, racism

Before I even begin writing this post, since there are those who would judge what someone has written without actually reading it, let me state categorically that this post is in no way intended to, neither does it in fact, endorse the despicable practice of child abuse.

Now that's out of the way: acclaimed comedy actor Chris Langham was sentenced yesterday for the possession of child porn, amid speculation about what his life will be like behind bars. The purpose of this post is to raise questions about what our legal and moral rationale is in cases like this, although I don't have any suggestions about what (if anything) should be changed about the way cases like Langham's should be prosecuted. As the prosecution ran its course over the last couple of months, I was repeatedly reminded of a column David Aaronovitch wrote in the Guardian at the start of 2003. In fact, Aaronovitch's position is so close to my own that it's worth reproducing a large part of the article verbatim:

Right now there is no public space for ambivalence. One newspaper spoke yesterday of 10,000 more names being on 'a new FBI list of British paedophiles' - ie, people who had, like Pete Townshend, used their credit cards to access pornography depicting children naked or being abused. In the same way, other celebrities are lumped in with paedophiles, and subjected to reputation-lynching, because they are being investigated for having sex with 15-year-old boys 30 years ago.

[...]

But two aspects of the current panic worry me. The first is that, like judges and the courts, I feel that circumstances can alter cases; had I decided to let Big John have his wicked way with me, I don't really think that he would have deserved prosecution. The second is that, no matter how often I turn this one round in my head, I cannot quite accept that thinking is the same as doing. I just don't agree that looking at child porn on the net is a similar order of crime to creating the abuse and then photographing it, or even to distributing it.

I understand the arguments. If you reward an abuser then you are encouraging the crime. In the film The Accused (based, I believe, on a true story), a woman successfully prosecuted several men who had egged on other men to rape her in a bar poolroom. And that is good enough reason for making it illegal to pay for internet child porn. But it is a step beyond that to argue that those who do pay are either paedophiles or sex offenders, or that they should be humiliated or imprisoned as if they were. We do not know what they are, just as we don't always know what we are.

That's because there's something else here too. The advent of the internet and the ubiquity of computers have shortened the distance between fantasy and its expression. This is a very dramatic change. It's not just about being able to access pictures and stories that once were the territory only of seedy sex-shops (though that's part of it), or even the realisation that there are people out there who are as weird as you may be. It is the ability, in the most unrestricted way, to explore simultaneously the inner and the outer world.

It is easy to see that this search can be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release. Some 'perversions' such as shoe fetishism have always existed and are relatively straightforward, but others are not. These, however, are now imaginable and available. It surely can only be in the age of the web that you could look up the phrase 'goat-fisting' and get 81 references. And if you follow them up, are you a goat-fister? I believe that some of those who have sent their credit card details off to child-porn providers have simply lost sight of themselves and of reality, and are actually no more likely to abuse children than any of the rest of us.

[...]

This is a plea for intelligence, not inaction. The fact that many people are in some way interested in children in a sexual context, is not a surprise to the psycho-analytical community. But they will not, routinely, be described as paedophiles, let alone as 'sick, twisted, perverts'. In any case, the hard-core active paedophiles probably never give out their credit card details, but instead exchange encrypted messages and pictures through hard-to-trace aliases and bogus websites. Such paedophiles, who need to be (and are) exceptionally devious and committed to their perversion, must be aware that overt internet child-porn is the biggest aid that law enforcement and child protection authorities have ever had. So I am in favour of spying on suspect sites and people, and doing everything possible to follow child-porn to its source - real children really being violated - and banging up those heartless, damaged bastards who create it.

But lets not pretend that, somehow, we have this sussed. Strangely I trust the police to act sensibly (because, like the analysts, they've seen it all): it's the rest of us I worry about. We're very anxious, a lot of the time, to act as though sexuality was a straight line from adolescent masturbation, via looking at nude pictures, to years of intermittent intercourse and eventually death. And we still get dangerously upset when there's evidence that it just isn't so.

I can accept, on pragmatic grounds more than anything, the need to pursue prosecutions of those who access child porn. I can even accept the need, in serious cases, to hand down custodial sentences. But what I can't accept or understand is the confused language and apparently absent logic with which files like Langham's are described and dealt. The police and the media perpetuate a direct identity between viewing and doing which is completely counter-intuitive. The fact remains that viewing (while you might describe it as wrong, distasteful, disturbed) is of a very different nature and moral order than doing. What is more, the police often describe a quasi-causative relationship between these two things which beggars belief further. As Aaronovitch suggests, paying for child porn is morally culpable because those who do so are conceivably actually supporting child abuse in a financial sense. But what of those who don't pay for it? While the police might call such viewing "condoning", "endorsing", "promoting" the act, it is really none of those things. In what sense does the act of viewing actually condone, endorse, or promote child abuse? For a start, those who access child porn may well be ashamed of doing so and are very unlikely to actually tell anyone that they do it, thus ruling out condoning, endorsing, and promoting as possibilities. Those who use such descriptions really attempt to avoid the flawed logic being questioned. As an example, watch the short clip from the police officer in this BBC News report.

Even now, I could accept this fuzzy logic were we not so happy to dismiss it in different, but morally analogous cases. Take the graphic depiction of murder in films, or for that matter, real video records of murder available on the internet. Is viewing either of these things really tantamount to carrying out the act yourself? Does it actually condone the act in any real sense? There an issue distinguishing between simulation and reality here, which, of course, Chris Morris notoriously picked up on this in his Brass Eye Special. Simply ignoring the fact that the viewing of pornography is simulation and not real act does not resolve this issue. The contradiction is even starker when we consider simulation as a pan-cultural tool (such as in the visual arts). Even if these examples were to elicit the same moral position, how come such a serious issue as murder doesn't attract the same public breast-beating as child porn?

As much as the NSPCC will surely try to have me sectioned for saying such a thing, I can't help feeling rather sorry for Chris Langham.

Update

Infinite Injury rehearses nine important issues to consider on this topic.

Tags: langham, chrislangham, porn, childporn, child, children, aaronovitch, jailed, observer.

Labels: justice, politics

How quickly things can change sometimes, even if the change itself is not that dramatic. Less than a month ago I still had a long way to go to get my Masters dissertation completed; I was mildly optimistic about getting funded for the PhD project I had planned; I was beginning to think about the initial tasks and trajectories I could undertake in the first months of study. I got the dissertation finished quicker than I had expected. The funding, however, did not materialise, I quickly lost enthusiasm for the PhD title (evidence that the research council probably made the right decision, although quite conceivably for the wrong reasons), and have since begun moving in a different direction entirely.

I had a meeting with my new supervisor last week, and he seemed kind of shocked that I could have been pursuing a project about which I seemed to have so little passion. There are doubtless other, better, topics about which I could be more passionate, but I still can't really imagine being so life-and-death about research that something like not getting funding could seriously knock me back. Is this attitude just a defence mechanism? Is it a practical measure? Or am I just inhumanly averse to actually getting excited about anything? My supervisor's implication was that, unless you're really passionate about what you're researching, there's a good chance that you'll get bored and pack it in before the three years are up. Of course, the very high dropout rate on PhDs — 75 per cent is bandied around — would seem to support this view. But I personally have no doubt that I will finish the project.

I think this conflict probably comes from slightly different ways of looking at the world. Those who thrive on passion, who think passion is essential to achieve anything meaningful, are of a fairly individualistic, romantic bent, I suggest. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there are other virtues too, and having thought about this over the last few days, I think I am driven more by commitment than passion. "Commitment" is indeed one of those words I most often associate with my childhood, because my choirmaster for ten years constantly used the word to describe what my relationship should be to singing. And in the musical life more broadly, commitment is far more important than passion. The discipline required to be successful in music could not be fuelled by unbounded enthusiasm — it is not humanly possible. For me the most meaningful achievements are those which are driven by thinking of the long term, of building up incrementally, which can indeed be supported by some more diffuse form of passion, but that alone could achieve nothing.

Moreover, the (widespread?) belief that one should at all times feel impassioned, enthusiastic, buoyed up by what we do could in fact be a quite negative attitude, since it offers no way of interpreting or valuing all those inevitable periods when all interest and vitality seems to have deserted us. So I'll go ahead and do the PhD, lacking this apparently essential element, and see how it goes.

Tags: phd, doctoral, research

Labels: university

Labels: photography