The Filter^

I know what you're thinking...

Yes I do. You're thinking, 'I wonder what Das Rheingold was like at the new opera house in Copenhagen....'

Visit The Filter^ REVIEW (there's a button on the left) for one angle.

Andrew

Longing

Like J. R. Hartley before him, Chad Kroski has joined that curious rank of authors invented to promote the use of telecommunication devices. A select fellowship, and an unfortunate one; I fear that Kroski and Hartley might have little to talk about when they meet for the annual cheese-and-wine this Christmas, other than the remarkable rise of their respective publishing careers. Kroski is that rarest of men, a man who according to his biography was born in Kentucky and yet appears in every other way to be entirely German. “Ich war in Kentucky geboren.” Of course, you were Chad, of course.

I have no problem with invented authors; some of my favourite's have never drawn breath, and let’s be clear what you’ve begun reading about here; I’m not writing about pseudonyms but entirely fictional characters whose literary careers are created and fleshed out to give a framework to their work. I am also writing about longing, but I will get to that later, and it will serve you well to wait for it. Such is its nature. I want you to long for my longing for longing.

Now, to illustrate what I mean by ‘fictional authors’ let us consider those astounding beasts Archy and Mehitabel who first began writing in 1916 upon the typewriter of Don Marquis and were published in the New York Evening Sun. Archy was ‘once a vers libre bard’ who died and was reincarnated as a cockroach in Marquis’s study. Mehitabel was an alley cat who claimed to have once been Cleopatra. From this strange perspective Archy typed their poetry, unable to operate the shift key in sync with the letters and so produced masses of lowercase verse:

boss i am disappointed in
some of your readers they
are always asking how does
archy work the shift so as to get a
new line or how does archy do
this or do that they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

          (from ‘mehitabel was once cleopatra’, 1927)

Despite Marquis’s many attempts to kill Archy off in his column, the duo outlived him (transmigration being a key element of Archy’s character he was always able to reappear as another cockroach after Marquis had stamped on him). We are not supposed to believe that these poems are the work of Don Marquis, even if we rationally believe them to be so, they are the thoughts and philosophies of a cockroach and a cat:

insects have
their own point
of view about
civilization a man
thinks he amounts
to a great deal
but to a
flea or a
mosquito a
human being is
merely something
good to eat

          (from ‘certain maxims of archy’, 1927)

With this in mind, let’s return to Kroski, whom one might infer would give a mosquito very little to feed on. Perhaps you’ve seen the advert; a bar, a young couple on a date, things aren’t going too well. She spots a book in her date’s bag, the writer’s name emblazoned large on the front cover: CHAD KROSKI. She excuses herself from the table, goes to the toilet, takes out her mobile phone device and searches for Kroski on Google. Suddenly they have something that connects them; his gullibility, her willingness to lie and their shared sense of things not really mattering as long as they both get to have sex later that night. Kroski is born.

He now has his own weblog, his own entry on Wikipedia, and at the time of writing 41,600 results on Google. (Oh what am I contributing to, here?)

The facts of his life seem to vary greatly, Wikipedia suggests he was born in Rustavi, Republic of Georgia on February 16, 1972, whereas his own CV suggests Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky, USA on April 13th 1974. Whichever version of Kroski we look to believe, it is vital that he at least spent the majority of his life in America, it is also vital to believe in his suffering, his love of Nabokov, Kant and you guessed it, Kerouac.

But his closest peer is surely J.R. Hartley; that loveable soft-focus old man trudging the streets of 1980s England in the Yellow Pages adverts. The advert was first screened in 1983 but by 1991 it was indeed possible to find a copy of Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley: Memories of Angling Days on the shelves of most bookstores. By 1995, the fictional fly-fisher had also published a work on golfing.

In case you don’t remember, the advert ran as follows: Old man enters several bookshops and asks for a copy for Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley. In shop after shop he is told that they don’t have a copy of it. Old man returns home disheartened, where his daughter hands him a copy of the Yellow Pages. From the comfort of his armchair he rings a bookshop and asks if they have the bok, and indeed they do. They ask for his name to reserve the book for him, and he gives it: J. R. Hartley. Tears well in the corners of eyes across the nation…

The similarity of the two adverts is uncanny. They are both advertising commodities that give access to information (like the book, of course, though often we forget that), but the differences between them are also disturbingly stark. Hartley’s product is the end to what seems like an Homeric quest around the bookshops of an English county; Kroski’s is a way of tricking someone into a quick shag. The Yellow Pages does not give any guarantees that Fly Fishing will be available; the mobile phone with access to Google actually does. The internet has come to mean that we can find scant information on anything in seconds, even if it doesn’t exist. Indeed, we can find it 41,600 times.
But the girl’s knowledge of Kroski is not the same as having read him. It is cheap, it is empty, and yet she returns to the table able to talk about his work and save the course of the date. Hartley’s quest is what is important, and it is this longing that is lacking from Kroski’s incarnation, and a signifier of a problem, which we all now face.

I grew up in a seaside resort on the East coast of England. It is a sizeable town running into another sizeable town, but without much else around it for a radius of over 40 miles. The time at which I am writing about is important to me because it was that marvelous stage in any person’s development when they begin reading and discovering the outside world properly for the first time. There are certain books that a lot of people seem to read at this age; The Catcher in the Rye, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Bell Jar, Brighton Rock… It’s a much bigger list, but it seems that some, or all, of these tend to be read by people at the same stage in their development. I suppose they form part of our collective consciousness, though undoubtedly these books vary from generation to generation. Walter Scott is no longer on that list, but probably was still read by most people at that age twenty years earlier. However, more importantly I feel, there are those books that we come across separately. Those accidental finds on grown-up’s bookshelves, in libraries, in second-hand bookshops. These are the things that we read which do not comprise that collective reading-list but which form part of the idiosyncratic map of reading which will shape the unique direction of our thoughts in later years. I am always struck that these early years of serious reading seem to remain the most important, the books upon which we base any later thoughts. I come to read things now and still relate them back to the books I read in these first few years, and so these curious accidental finds take on significance greater than they perhaps usually ought. I digress.

At this time, the town where I was living had only one bookshop. It also had a WH Smith, but this was the time when they were at their lowest ebb, the branch only having one shelf of books devoted to glossy volumes along the lines of Poems to Save your Failing Marriage, and Limericks your Cat Might Like. Most of my reading took place in the poorly (or rather oddly) stocked local library, which held three biographies of Radclyffe Hall, which I read from cover to cover, but no single copy of The Well of Loneliness. I only discovered the lesbian novelist at all because the library only offered a single six-foot square bookcase with a laminated yellow label marked LITERATURE, and as these books took up more space than the single copy of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, I assumed she must be a one of the most significant English authors of the twentieth century.

Briefly, a second-hand bookshop opened, just off the promenade. It can only have lasted there a year. In it I discovered Graham Greene, Shelley, Pope, Balzac and also I think, Archy and Mehitabel. I was reading Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and I once summoned up the courage to ask if I could volunteer there, only to be told by the owner that he “couldn’t employ a chimp” – a statement I have never quite understood. However, before this descends into the purely confessional and I begin to recount the hours spent before the bathroom mirror wondering if I did indeed look like a chimp, I shall reach my point. In this bookshop I also discovered Bertrand Russell. The book I remember most is The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism which for reasons that I can’t remember, led me to try and track down a copy of Russell’s fictional work: Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories. I still have the piece of paper upon which I scrawled the title in red biro, it has remained in various diaries, pockets, notebooks. On the reverse are a few jotted train times out of the seaside town to Liverpool. There is also a little sketch of a map, though quite what it is directing towards is unclear; some kind of giant malformed egg, by the looks of it. The book of course was never in the secondhand bookshop, and the bookshop in town told me it was out of print. I began the trudge of J.R. Hartley, scouring shelves whenever I visited a new place. The internet was still in its infancy, and I don’t suppose I came to use it until three or four years later. What developed was a kind of longing, a hope that one day I would accidentally find the book. There were many things like this; bands which had a strange and uncertain existence, films with lines in them which were lost once they had been said. The world was full of mystery, and it was possible to experience longing for lost and rare books.

This isn’t merely nostalgia, nor is it neo-luddism, it is just the fact that longing is an important experience. Being without knowledge is the greatest impulsion for finding out more. Through looking for Satan in the Suburbs I encountered a hundred-or-so other books more widely reaching than this slim volume of stories turned out to be; and the time spent allowed consideration to occur; there is a reason why Satan stayed with me, whereas other books did not. The piece of paper remained in my pocket for so long, because I wanted this thing more than any other. What I knew of it seemed more important that a lot of other things, but it was only through the time spent looking for it that I was able to realize this.

In 2000, Spokesman Books reissued the collection of stories. By then the internet was advanced enough for me to be able to obtain a copy via Amazon, I think sometime in 2001. The thing was, the idea of the book was better than the reality, the years spent thinking about its central premise ended up being more formative than reaching the abrupt answer of the book.

The point is, that if J.R. Hartley were alive today and looking for Fly Fishing he would not need to trawl around the bookshops of England to find it, and that isn't altogether a good thing. On abebooks alone he would have a choice of 56 different copies, ranging in condition and priced between £2.98 and £25.50. He could find it in seconds, just as the girl can find Kroski in seconds as well.
There are 41,600 entries for Kroski on Google already, and only 16,500 for Hartley.

Where has longing gone to?

Epistemics: GLS

I can only speak for myself and I don't say that objective reality doesn't exist--this is a philosophical problem far out of my depth. But I do think that what we do in our actions is based on what goes on in our own minds, and one way I have tried to put it is that the things which you can choose amongst have to be made by yourself. You can only choose actions and acts. When people say, I'm choosing a new suit, or I'm choosing a house, what they're really saying is, I'm choosing which one to buy. It's the actions they're choosing. I think that the action must be formulated in one's own mind--it's a work of art, it's a work of imagination. Your list of choosable things has to be constructed or composed by yourself before you can choose

That's George Shackle (economist*philosopher*writer), speaking to Richard Ebeling in 1983.

Counterfactuals

There are, in other words, two distcint kinds of counterfactuals which have been used by historians: those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and those designed to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew imagination in favour of computation. In the case of the former, it is the tendency to rely for inspiration on hindsight, or to posit reductive explanations, which leads to implausability. In the case of the latter, it is the tendency to make anachronistic assumptions.
Niall Ferguson Virtual History, p.18

Mt Ferguson failed to show up for his ASREC session, and i'd like to think that his absence was his presentation. Wondering what he would have said, is a fine lesson indeed.

Australian DVDs

Utterly gutted following the rugby double whammy this weekend, i've been trying to recapture the glory days. If anyone ever encounters the Rugby League tri-nations 1999, or  Rugby Union tri-nations 2000, please let me know. I've searched everywhere, and there doesn't seem to be a DVD featuring the matches. There bloody should be. This was the greatest rugby game of all time.

Taking Liberties

Another excellent articles from Simon Jordan, telling it like it is:

Craig Bellamy is the best recent example of the top end of liberty culture. I was asked at the time how I'd handle a player doing what he did to Newcastle, behaving as he did towards his manager, and I said what I honestly felt: I'd strangle him with his own tongue. But he was behaving that way purely because, with respect to Bobby Robson, he'd been allowed to turn into this imbecilic little gobshite over a period of four years.

Last April a Fulham player liaison officer told the papers about some of his tasks. He said he'd been called out to Alain Goma's house because 'Goma's goldfish was swimming in the wrong direction'. He'd been called to rescue a player lost on the London Underground ('he was helpless'). He'd been called out by Fabrice Fernandes who kept waking up in the morning with a wet head, and discovered the player had been 'sleeping by an open window'.

Borat

"I like to state, I have no connection with Mr Cohen and  fully support my government's position to sue this Jew."

"Since 2003 ... Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other  country in the world,"

"Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hat and age of consent has been raised to eight years old."

That's from Reuters, reporting Borat's response to Kazakhstan's legal threat against creator Sacha Baron Cohen. For more, try http://www.borat.kz/

Beer Goggles

An = number of units of alcohol consumed

S = smokiness of the room (graded from 0-10, where 0  clear air; 10 extremely smoky)

L = luminance of 'person of interest' (candelas per square metre; typically 1 pitch black; 150  as seen in normal room lighting)

Vo = Snellen visual acuity (6/6  normal; 6/12  just meets driving standard)

d = distance from 'person of interest' (metres; 0.5 to 3 metres)

BBC News confirms the difference between a dog and a fox: several pints. The research comes from Nathan Efron, at UMIST, on behalf of Bausch & Lomb.

Productive Drunk^

It's deeply sad to see that George Best has passed away - the alcoholism that ravished and destroyed his liver has now taken his life. He made the great error of allowing drink to take more from him, then he took from it. Last night new licensing laws came into effect, surrounded with controversy and insinuation. Fears abound that the violence and aggression that so often result from a night on the lash will rise, and shocking figures are summoned to tarnish drinkers. Apparently, drunkenness creates the lairy and intolerable.

I believe that something is missing from this debate: the positive case for drinking. Whereas an alcoholic wastes precious drinking time at meetings, a drunk does not. A drunk drinks, to establish a glorious drunkenness where strangers become friends, and adventures begin. The great social lubricant - responsible for so many of our great times, and our loves - kicks into gear to provide inspiration and unapologetic leisure. The Productive Drunk is responsible, choosing to drink, choosing to get drunk. Drunkenness makes us happy, friendly and open to the beauties of life. Wine falls like sunshine, nudging us gently into the glorious state of intoxication.

For those of us who write, create, and think for a living drunkenness increases our productivity. It permits perspective, creates escape, and motivates the spark of enterprise. If is a treasured input, as it has been for so many great people. The bottle is the passion of the genius, the fuel that quenches the thirst of discovery.

When alcohol consumption is being discussed, alongside the apologists and the prohibitionists link to The Productive Drunk^. We are activists who praise drinking. We speak up for the silent majority - for those who want to enjoy a quiet pint without feeling guilt, and for those who just want to go out and get shit-faced. Cheers!

2005 AGM

Davie Moyes - who I still have complete faith in - spoke last night at the AGM:

"When I arrived at the end of the 2001/02 season we avoided relegation and went on to finish seventh after being in a European qualifying position all through the season and only missing out on the last day. That was a fantastic season in relation to the years previous.

"But after that season we didn't think that side would be good enough to keep us in seventh position because the side was ageing.

"We knew where we had to go and we still needed to make progress. At the end of that season there were changes.

"If you look back at the last three seasons they have been as good as anything Everton have had in the Premier League. That brings me to today.

"There is nobody more surprised than me at the position we are in, but it is off the back of our best ever Premiership season.

All I want is a forward trend. To me, that's nisi optimum.