Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Carbon Neutrality



Given where we're at with concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'm not sure this is an issue any of us can afford to be neutral about anymore. Perhaps we should try and make our lives carbon negative, and heal the world (& to continue with Wacko Jacko a while "make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race" - which is kind of anthropocentric but what the hey - I can't personally stand most of the man's music, but maybe this message does affect change somewhere in the world).

There is a lot of coverage of environmental issues on UK TV right now, with BBC's Climate Chaos strand in full flow, and last night More4 broadcast an interview with Al Gore at the Hay Literary Festival about global climate change. Unfortunately, I think I overdid it on the horlicks and couldn't make it to the end of the Gore programme (and frankly I guess only the converted would have tuned into something broadcast from 22.40 to 23.45 on a digital channel) but it seemed pretty good, and you did kind of want him to stand again in 2008, and win, and actually bring the USA around.

I hope that all this TV output will increase the number of converts who realise that action is necessary, increase the number of the 'heroic few' who are already acting - changing their own lives, putting pressure on the powers that be to change.

What I am really hoping doesn't happen is that the attention and energy stirred by this media activity is directed into 'green consumerism' or what David Holmgren calls the "Green-Tech stability" route.

I've long had a hang up about the whole idea of carbon credits which I've not been able to accurately articulate - so I was pleased to see the piece Carbon Offsets are a Fraud by Claire Fauset & Merrick, which says all the things I wanted to say and more.

These carbon offsets are popular with your REMs and Coldplays, and Joe Strummer was instrumental in it really taking off, and they'e played a major part in giving respectability to the whole idea. I have a fear that the right on rock musician clique that are engaged with trying to make the world a better place, have been captured by the proximity they can now obtain to politically powerful figures and so do not use their influence for radical enough ends - radical but necessary ends. I know that it is very easy to dis Bono and his ilk on this score (John Pilger and Charlie Brooker have both done it with some style) and I give them credit for their heart action. But we need a rebirth of Orpheus, something I elaborate more on over at Rubedo which is a very different kind of Red.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Rubedo


Yourmindfire is one of the contributors to Rubedo a new arts and cultural site.

Influenced by the alchemical concept of rubedo, the site brings together contributors from the worlds of poetry, music, film, astrology, psychosynthesis and other therapeutic disciplines.

The site currently features "What Red is Not" a meditation on the theme of rubedo and contemporary violence by the eminent English evolutionary astrologer Mark Jones, author of the seminal work "The Nature of the Pluto in Virgo Generation".

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Pensions


There's loads more guff about, on the 'pensions' issue, because the UK government releases its much leaked Pensions White Paper today.

I'm 34, any changes made in pension rules now are pretty academic to me as, no doubt, everything will have been mucked about with and changed again before I ever "retire".

The concept of retirement is dead in the water, and we should all accept that now and start living our lives how we want to in the present. No more slaving away looking for some liberation point at age 65 or 67 or 70. Tom Hodgkinson typically hit the ball on the head in his Idle Thoughts column in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago.

Don't buy into the whole private pension nonsense that we're being co-opted into either. This is just ploughing more money into the stockmarket and contributing to all the global ills that corporations beholden to short-term returns are visiting on the poor and the environment. And anyway if the demographic situation for the UK is bad for state pensions, who is supposed to be buying all the shares that the ageing population will want to sell to buy annuities with?

It's all smoke and mirrors, invest in yourself, your family and your community. And grow (at least some of!) your own food.

Jonathan Dawson, the secretary of GEN-Europe and sustainability educator at the Findhorn Foundation is one of an increasing number of people thinking about new and effective solutions to providing for ourselves in 'old age'. In a recent article published both in the latest Resurgence, and the previous Permaculture Magazine he make suggestions for what he calls Sustainability Pension Funds. It is ideas like these and those of the New Economics Foundation proposed in the document People's Pensions: New Thinking for the 21st Century that should really be on the political agenda.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Iraq



It's all too easy to become bored or complacent about Iraq these days. We know it's a mess, we know we were lied to, we know it's all got something to do with oil... But you just start to let it fade from your consciousness.

Everyday has more Iraq news, and it's pretty much always casualty figures of one kind or another. You might not be counting but these guys are. Let's not forget that everyone of those numbers was a living breathing human being with hopes and fears just like us, and that everyone of those numbers has other living human beings weeping and mourning over the friends and families and lovers they have lost.

I honestly don't know whether pulling troops out now would make things better or worse. But I do know that there are options we have that don't involve war, that don't involve murder, that don't involve torture.

I found the Iraq Pledge of Resistance on the net, it's a nationwide network of activists and organizations committed to ending the war in Iraq through nonviolent, Gandhian and Kingian resistance. A heartening reminder that in the midst of this bloody mess, some of those on the frontline still put their faith in peace, still put their faith in Love.

O Shamash, hear me, hear me, Shamash, let my voice be heard. Here in the city man dies oppressed at heart, man perishes with despair in his heart. I have looked over the wall and I see the bodies floating on the river, and that will be my lot also. Indeed I know it is so, for whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot encompass the earth.

[The Epic of Gilgamesh]

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Sickly Spring


This is a strange season, where weather makes odd moves from winter through spring and summer.


Warm then cold, wet then dry.

Still then windy.

The early chill, held back spring a little so that when it arrived the floral world had to squeeze all its seasonal activity into a shorter space than usual.

Sickly Spring

Sickly Spring
Postulating blossom on every green surface
Hypertrophic torrents of flowers
Weighing down branches

Wind whipped pollen invading
Every human orifice
Attempting sexual union
With the soft membranes
Of my eyes
Of my nose
My mouth

Impossible congress
That breeds only
Weeping.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Where does atomic energy come from?



I'm personally not getting all the information I want on the Nuclear energy issue, you probably aren't either, so I'm going to save you from too much googling and try and compile some relevant data here.

The chart shown is from the report Uranium 2003: Resources, Production and Demand, updated 2005 produced by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) (a specialised agency within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)) .

So this is where the uranium comes from. I guess that the UK government feels that nuclear sourced energy is more secure than gas secured energy, because we can depend on Australia and Canada better than we can depend on Russia. This is what is indicated on the Nuclear Industry Association sponsored Energy Choices website: "there are many potential source nations, several of which have long histories of political stability (for example Canada and Australia). "( I think "many" might be pushing it, the OED defines many as being a "great (indefinite) number of"). Elsewhere the website tells us "Although uranium for nuclear energy has to be imported, there are no supply problems relating to price instability or countries of origin." (It doesn't back this up with why it thinks this are dependable statements for the future though - why not watch the price "stability" yourself at the UX Consulting site (The price of uranium has quadrupled since mid-2003) ).

So how long will this uranium last? The Uranium Information Centre Ltd (an organisation funded by companies involved in uranium exploration, mining and export in Australia) in its 2003 report Nuclear electricity states that "The world's power reactors, with combined capacity of 350 GWe, require some 75,000 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate from mines (or stockpiles) each year. "

3,622,000 tonnes supply divided by 75,000 tonnes annual usage equals 48 years (and a few months) worth of uranium. Or based on the fact that these reports were written in 2003 - global uranium will be completely depleted by 2051. The poisonous waste produced in this period will then remain radioactive for 1,000 to 10,000 years (on the Energy Sources website its states that "Radioactive decay of spent fuel is very marked in the first 1,000 years and before about 10,000 years the fuel's radioactivity can have reduced to the same level as the original ore which was mined to produce the fuel in the first place"). In other words, if we'd used up our hundred years worth of uranium around 8,000 BC, we could stop worrying about the radioactive waste about now.

Of course this 48 years figure is based on two assumptions:

1) that we wont increase our known recoverable sources of uranium.

2) that we wont increase our demand for uranium.

So let's look at these assumptions:

1) Our friends at the Uranium Information Centre have some information about this on their FAQ page:

"But aren't world uranium resources too limited to sustain a big expansion of nuclear power?
No, while known and quantified resources are only about 50 times annual use, there is every indication that ongoing mineral exploration activities will steadily increase known resources, as they have in the past with all metal minerals."

I mean its not very detailed information, but perhaps it makes you feel better.

The World Nuclear Association (organisation "representing the technology, people and organisations of the global nuclear energy industry") has some more comforting news for us:

"It is now clear that uranium is not scarce and it is known that it averages almost two parts per million of the Earth's crust. There are substantial resources that are not yet fully proven. These so-called speculative resources are likely to be of the order of 10 million tonnes, about three times the known reserves. While prices remain low, there is no incentive for exploration activities to identify new deposits. Experience with other commodities has shown that increased demand has led to increased prices, and a subsequent increase in exploration and discovery."

Personally I'd be looking for some harder evidence that these "speculative resources" exist, and that it would ever be economically viable to extract them - but perhaps this is enough for governments to make their energy decisions on...

Not everybody is convinced though. Two independent experts, Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Bartlett Smith have a different view, reported recently in The Times and available in its fully researched form in their document Nuclear Power: the Energy Balance (August 2005). The Times report, summarises


"They say that at the present rate of use, worldwide supplies of rich uranium ore will soon become exhausted, perhaps within the next decade. Nuclear power stations of the future will have to reply on second-grade ore, which requires huge amounts of conventional energy to refine it. For each tonne of poor-quality uranium, some 5,000 tonnes of granite that contains it will have to be mined, milled and then disposed of. This could rise to 10,000 tonnes if the quality deteriorates further. At some point, and it could happen soon, the nuclear industry will be emitting as much carbon dioxide from mining and treating its ore as it saves from the “clean” power it produces thanks to nuclear fission."

2) Well we will obviously increase our demand if the world chooses nuclear as its 'way out' of its energy impasse. A recent report in the Guardian "Price of Uranium Soars" lays it out cold:

"Britain's planned nuclear programme could be hampered by a lack of fuel as the price of uranium soars on world markets. This reflects fears of future shortages after a resurgence of interest in nuclear power - not just in Britain but also in Finland, France and the US, where new plants are going ahead. China wants to build as many as 30 plants by 2020, helping to push the price of uranium oxide from a low of $6.70 a pound at the start of 2001 to $41.50 yesterday."

I can't find a source that suggests that global demand for Uranium will fall.

This all seems to add up to me to mean that the amount of economically recoverable Uranium will not significantly increase, while the demand for nuclear fuels will increase, alongside the demand for all other fuels. So if we globally choose the nuclear option, our fuel supply will run out before we're halfway through the century - and the point of 'Peak Uranium' will come much sooner. For more details check out David Flemings article in Prospect magazine, and the Nuclear Facts in New Internationalist magazine. If these sources are all a bit left wing wishy washy liberal for you, why not check out the International Atomic Energy Agency's report Analysis of Uranium Supply to 2050. I tell you now, it's not an easy read - but turn to p.66 and look at Table XLVII, where it gives information on the "First Year of deficit compared with market based production requirement"(i.e. when demand exceeds supply) for highly enriched Uranium. This seems to put Peak Uranium at between 2034 and 2036.

I've left some facts out and you can go research these if you are interested. We don't get all our daily usage of Uranium from mines, we get some of it, according to the UIC FAQs "from Russian weapons stockpiles - recycled warheads, and in fact one tenth of all US electricity is from that source." Apparently you can also build nuclear reactors that use Thorium instead of Uranium, and we've got plenty of Thorium - but there are no reactors currently built or planned to be built that use Thorium.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Mid May Meanderings


Haven't had the energy (renewable or non-renewable) to come up with a decent entry. The markets are sliding . I understand, this may have to do with US interest rates, which may be raised to head off inflation or something. Inflation provoked by higher energy costs. What does this mean?

Meanwhile the South-East of England where I'm currently domiciled is facing "drought", this water thing has been bubbling away (if you'll excuse the pun) for a few years now.

Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez have been having their wrists smacked by the EU for choosing not to follow the privatise everything and put it in the hands of big business ideology that we all love to hate - of course taking back their energy fields is not popular. To tell you the truth, I can shake the rumba for Chavez and Morales with the best of them - but I actually know so little really about them or the politics of the region that they could both be ego-mad dictators in waiting who will just fuck over their peoples like everyone else given half the chance. You know its fun to like Castro as a great resistor of US hegemony, but you've got to feel anxious that he's not an elected figure and there's a whole lot of stuff you'd rather not hear like the oppression of gay people etc. We don't need another hero, as Tina Turner put it.

Keith just linked me up to this bit of cynicism. I could read this kind of stuff all the time, gimme some truth man. Like Michael Ventura with his Letters at 3AM for the Austin Chronicle, or James Howard Kunstler's Daily Grunt, and weekly Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle, or Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn , Julian Cope's Address Druidon. Write and tell me about some more cynics for me to seethe with.

Still making my way through The Cloudspotter's Guide so I'll tell you about that later.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

The Nuclear Option


Tony Blair’s finally done it, at a speech to the CBI, and come out for Nuclear power.

This does feel like some line drawn in the sand, any faith we might have had in government eventually waking up to what is really going on and acting appropriately seems to have gone out the window.

Its grassroots activism all the way now, fighting every battle as it comes along, while we do our best to change everybody’s consciousness. The media has represented the “anti-nuclear” resistance in reporting this story - largely it appears through the figure of Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. He’s had lots of important things to say, but I feel that in these soundbite times we have to prioritise our expressed reasons against these developments.

Talking about the terrorist threat created by having more potential nuclear targets, and the hypocrisy of our position over Iran when we choose more nuclear power are points that are all well and good. But in those brief moments of reply afforded by the media, it seems to me that the anti-nuclear resistance should concentrate on destroying the pro-nuclear arguments on its own terms, I.E.:

1) That its a low carbon solution - some pithy way of highlighting the carbon emissions across the lifecycle of nuclear power generation needs to be found.

2) That it deals with problems of energy security - there is never any mention about Uranium imports, or being dependent on foreign supplies of nuclear materials & technology, or the competition for nuclear materials.

3) That its a long term solution - lets foreground global supplies of uranium and the “peak uranium” concept.

4) That its a business as usual solution - even with nuclear, a radical decrease in our energy usage is essential.

Looks like we’re going to have to fight them on the beaches, and the estuaries and anywhere else they want to build one of these tombstones.

(This was originally posted as comment to an entry over at the excellent Transition Culture)

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Tropicália


Yesterday I at last got around to the Barbican for the exhibition Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture. It finishes May 21st so time was running out for me (and you if you fancy going).

My interest in Tropicália goes back to about 1997 when my wider explorations of psychedelia were increasingly going global and I heard the first hints that there was a Brazilian psych scene. This subsequently crystallized into 2 band names as avenues of further pursuit – The Mutants and Caetano Velaso – it would be many more months before The Mutants reverted to their original language moniker Os Mutantes, and I realised that Caetano Velaso was a man not a band. Getting any records was another issue, eventually in the World Music section of Tower Records, Piccadilly Circus I hit paydirt with the Os Mutantes album Mutantes E Seus Cometas No Pais Do Baurets (this was of course in a more primitive internet age). The cover looked promising and I was excited to get the thing home. But I thought the first track was terrible and I felt my heart sink in that way which is all too familiar to the brave record buyer who strikes out into unknown territory. After that track however it picked up and I loved it and introduced it to my friends with all the attendant thrill of a new discovery.

Keith knew a Brazilian guy called Joao and hit him up for some Brazilian tunes. Joao was pretty dismissive of Os Mutantes and various other names I’d passed through Keith – bad seventies rock was I think his interpretation of these artists, “like Phil Collins” may also have been mentioned. Still a pretty good comp tape of MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) stuff ended up coming my way – and had to satisfy me for now. In fact that MPB tape got me through a cold winter working in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

As time passed by I eventually hit my other targets – the Velaso albums, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, more Mutantes, Tom Ze (still after that Nara Leao album mind). I came to realise the genius of Rogerio Duprat (and kudos to el/Cherry Red for re-releasing A Banda Tropicálista do Duprat). I discovered that this music was the audio wing of a Brazilian pop art movement, Tropicália – WOW I thought, how groovy! Especially when I discovered it connected up with revolutionary politics, youth movements, artists in London exile etc. etc.

So, when I found out that the Barbican was going to host an exhibition of this stuff I was thrilled. But, BOY – what a let down! For a start there really wasn’t that much to see – the gallery felt kind of empty. And what was there just didn’t seem to amount to much. It was largely ‘conceptual art’ – which I actually don’t have a problem with (all art is conceptual art, the idea that pretty pictures are good art is a concept – anyway I digress) but I think that conceptual art only really works when in presented in an engaging context. I tend to think of conceptual art like Magick, it’s about altering reality through an alteration in consciousness. For this to function requires, I believe (and to borrow from Tim Leary), an appropriate attention to ‘set and setting’. Without that the spell won’t work, things wont change and everyone goes home disappointed.

I mean the first element of this you face as a problem in the gallery context is the admission charge. Before you’ve experienced a thing, a powerful message is being placed in your mind – you are moving into a space where access is determined by the action of a financial transaction. Therefore it is limited to those who can afford it and choose to use their cash in this way. An expectation of return on one’s investment is fostered, a ‘show me’ attitude – we are placed passively as audience. We choose to use our cash in this way because wee are cultured people, we will now spend a period of time in the gallery commensurate with our expenditure (oh, 8 quid by the way, best part of a tenner in other words. Each). Now all this blathering is just to indicate that immediately I don’t think that we’re being presented with the best ‘set and setting’ for our experience on the other side of the admissions desk. I’ve always buzzed much more off gallery spaces like the Whitechapel (1) or Serpentine where you can wander freely straight into the temple.

I know that there are costs associated with doing anything that someone has to pay – but given that, shouldn’t we incorporate the terms of entry into the artwork itself – be open about the process already occurring. Perhaps entry should be afforded in Brazilian Reais only, with a bureau de change located elsewhere in the building – or entry could only be afforded by singing E Proibido Proibir as one passes over payment – or entry could require placing 4 £2 coins into a Tropicálismo slot machine/one art bandit (Oticica’s phrase “Be an outlaw, be a hero” springs to mind) and everyone wins and receives their entry ticket – or… Well you get the general idea.

Putting aside the whole paying for entry issue (and I did anyway, I just wandered in and no one stopped me), the whole set and setting thing inside wasn’t right either. There was no Magick, none of that pagan energy this kind of art demands – instead it’s just your bog standard white cube approach, like some square modernist chapel or summat. Some of the art was ‘interactive’ - in a wonderfully perverse set up – the ‘original art’ was in cases protected from us, while reproductions illustrating the concept were available to handle and engage with. These concepts appeared to have artefacts chaining them to the past, the weight of a former moment preventing them from being free, from truly entering the now – failed invocations.

The best stuff was: the album covers (and why wasn’t there more Rogério Duarte in the exhibition?); the video of Tropicália musicians in their prime (although the projected stuff looked like second generation vhs taped off-air and the sound was shit – didn’t anyone think that being able to hear the music might be important? – and why wasn’t the whole gallery filled with the pounding sounds of Tropicália?); and the women’s dresses, but there was only about six of them.

So buy the albums, listen to the music and dream up your own sixties pop art vision of Sao Paulo and Rio – it isn’t here. I looked.


(1) I’m aware that this exhibition is largely a reconstruction of Hélio Oticica’s 1967 exhibition at the Whitechapel – but I can’t really comment on that – different ‘set & setting’ – different experience.

Friday, May 12, 2006

Gas Again Sucker


The official line on the future of our Gas supply seemed to me to be: there's some short term problems right now with supply, they will quickly be sorted out in the next couple of years - Russia's got masses of Gas, once we can pipe it in, prices will go down and we can all forget about it. A few worries about the political influence Russia could wield if Europe is so energy dependent on it have been downplayed with a Russia needs us more than we need Russia angle.

OK, lets accept that point of view for a while then - Russia won't gain any political leverage on us (or cut us off at the drop of a hat like the Ukraine or Georgia) and we can depend on a nice load of cheap gas from there for the politically expedient future. Great.

Then I read this in yesterday's Guardian. Where comments made to MEPs and senior EU officials at the European Enterprise Institute - by Eric Berglof, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development - are recorded. Berglof told them that Gazprom, the Russian gas group majority-owned by the state, would struggle to offset declines in output, but demand from Europe and ex-Soviet Union countries would grow at 2-3% a year. Apparently 70% of production at Gazprom, the world's third-largest energy group, comes from fields whose gas is running out.

Read the whole article for more bad news. If you can really be arsed you can read one of the other presentations given at the event by Christian Cleutinx, the Director of the EU-Russia Energy Dialogue at the European Commission. Obviously these people have there own little axes to grind etc. But they aren't your usual suspects are they? The range and number of voices now indicating or hinting at a forthcoming energy crisis are growing day by day.

Have you insulated your loft yet?

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Childish Things


Always a pleasure, never a chore. I think I read this one too quick though. Normally I wander in and out of an issue, sampling delights here and there over a period of weeks. But I was too up for it this time, I saw on the website it was out – I walked to Foyles, bought a copy, started reading it and ended up going straight from cover to cover in a couple of days of train journeys and bedside perusals. Bugger, six months to the next issue now probably. It really wasn’t very idle of me to read it so quickly, but I’m on a roll with the reading right now and nothing seems able to stop it.

This issue (37) is Childish Things, lots of pieces relating to education and childish experiences. If one thing got to me, I guess it was a hint of settled thirtysomething familydom hanging about the volume. Childless, and now single after the personally traumatic break up of an 8 and a half year relationship, mid thirties - staring down both barrels of the other 50% of my three score years and ten – the warmth of family given off by those more successful professionally, creatively and emotionally than myself was a bit too much. Somebody open a window. Wider. I’m going to throw up.

That was harsh and I didn’t really mean it, I don’t want to confuse my personal foul doomy mood with the actual buzz of the book (magazine? Journal?). Then again, it’s my experience and I can’t have any other…..

Best bits, this time around: Billy Childish’s manifesto; the idling extracts from The Meaning of Tingo, Mark White’s piece on Kenko (no, not the coffee – the Japanese author) and the stuff on Summerhill.

I looked forward to another Graham Burnett piece on permaculture, but it turned out to be the same thing he had published in the last issue of the Permaculture Magazine, which was a bit disappointing.

Oh, the Michael Palin interview was good as well, but you felt only really touched the surface of what could have been a long and revealing chat about what the man thought. Have you see that Palin's just about to film a new travel series? This one's about the 'new Europe', basically the eastern bloc countries about to enter the EU I believe. Not going to be broadcast until Autumn 2007, so do not hold your breath. Doesn't sound as exciting as Himalaya though does it? That one's going to be hard to beat. Maybe Palin's Inferno would be a more ambitious next step, or Palin does the Astral Plane. Well, maybe in the next world heh?

It's Not How Good You Are


Should I have read this book? Is this book aimed at me? Did I get anything out of reading it? Do I need to read it again? Should I keep reading it, until I get it? Would that be brainwashing?

This book is written by someone who used to work for Saatchi and Saatchi; in fact he worked for Saatchi and Saatchi while they were doing Thatcher’s ads for the 1979 election. There’s no indication in his bio he worked on that particular evil project, but it’s hard not to tarnish him with it anyway. Perhaps that is the source of my ambivalence towards this book.

The Amazon book description says that this is “a handbook of how to succeed in the world - a pocket 'bible' for the talented and timid to make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible.” Well I like the “make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible” bit, that seems subject to detournment – repurposed, as they say, to more radical aims than selling people Toyotas. Be reasonable, demand the impossible.

Any skills and methods we can steal from the agents of capitalism to use for the purposes of revolution should be stolen. But I don’t know what to steal, apparently this book is good for people working in “creative industry” (is it just me, or do you think of Nathan Barley type wankers whenever you hear a term like that?), is it just a load of crap tarted up to appear meaningful? Perhaps I should read it again; I don’t want to let the revolution down.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Hello Laziness


I think I first read about this book in The Idler, a couple of issues back. Let’s face it Hello Laziness is a great title and demands to be investigated further. Ever since reading Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle, starting to buy The Idler when it comes out, connecting all of this with my feelings about the world, the various slow movements, permaculture etc. I’ve had an eye for books which might further stimulate this obsession – and there seem to be an increasing number of them out there.

Interestingly on the title front, this book was of course originally Bonjour Paresse (it’s a French book innit) – and the paperback edition in England seems to be going to wear the title Bonjour Laziness. Perhaps this is to reinforce its Frenchness in the potential buyer, as some reviewers have disparaged the French focus to much of the book. I personally didn’t find the France references too annoying (apart from my ill informed jealousy towards the French social model and its benefits!).

I guess I didn’t find out anything new from the book, it just reinforced my own prejudices and beliefs. But hey - having one’s own prejudices and beliefs reinforced is enjoyable and life affirming, especially when its part of the personal mental struggle against the evils of the consensus trance.

Valis


This book had been waiting for me for a while, it was one of those books you know you are going to enjoy when you read it, and so you don’t read it. You don’t read it for months, you don’t read it for years, and you don’t even buy a copy. You just let it be there in the world, waiting for you. Now this is of course dangerous – because you can leave these things too long, miss the window of opportunity for your consciousness to lock into synch with the art work – and then hey you’ve blown it this incarnation for that particular piece of stuff.

So anyway last year it was a beach holiday, it was the best we could do what with me being unemployed and it was a family holiday too (her family) – and I figured, well I’m going to do a lot of reading. It’s Fuengirola, cultural opportunities for days out are going to be limited, and she’s going to want to get a tan this holiday and just chill out – none of my mad adventures. So I pack books – Collapse by Jared Diamond, The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler, some more doomy titles I can’t remember – and I go out and buy, specifically, Valis.

But I didn’t read it then either – out to Spain it went, back from Spain it came, and on to the shelf it went.

Then this year Keith and Mark both read it and I knew that if I didn’t read it soon – it would become a never read. I should put this reading block in the context of the fact that I haven’t been able to read fiction for about two years now. I don’t know why, but only non-fiction has rocked by boat. I guess that it is related to reading Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and then spinning off on a whole Peak oil trip, that made novels just seem a little pointless.

So anyway, Valis was my introduction back to fiction – but is it fiction? Really fiction? I mean, I know enough about Dick’s life to get that the use of his own name in the book is not just some Paul Auster like trick but actually reflects the heavy autobiographical content. Given that all autobiography contains only the approximation of truth, is Valis any less an autobiography than any other? The book also reminded me of two other books I’d read recently The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut and Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. In fact its kind of like a merger of the two – insanity and God. In fact Valis seemed a more honest kind of book than Conversations with God, the ostensibly true record of one guy’s chat with the man upstairs.

I guess in the end Valis couldn’t hold up to the strange mental book I’d projected during the years of delay – but then what could? There’s a message – take the experience now, don’t delay for Chrissakes…. But it is good - so read it now, before its too late.

Invisible Forms


I read a book on how to become invisible. Well that’s not really true, “if you want to become invisible come around for private lessons” as Brion Gysin said.

I read a book called Invisible Forms, about ‘paratexts’- the parts of books which aren’t really the main body of the work and are usually ignored, or not considered as really a part of the work - introductions, titles, dedications, epigraphs, footnotes, marginalia etc. I found it thoroughly enjoyable, Kevin Jackson’s style is wry and amusing – so you get the impression he could write about anything and make it interesting.

But I can see that this book would not be everybody’s kettle of fish, so why did I enjoy it? Can I blame it all on postmodernist literature already having blown my sense of text apart? Can I blame it all on psychedelic drugs having already blown my sense of sense apart? Or is it just because I’m a nerdy bookworm, so into books I’ll even read books that are about books, I’ll even read books about the part of books which people don’t usually think about when they read books? ‘There’s more to life than books you know but not much more, not much more’ sang Morrissey – out of the library and into life, how traumatic. Back on the postmodernist trip we could allude to the slight displacement of Words and Worlds, and make the entire world a text – a logos for interpretation. Without going all Madonna (or Esther) we could mention Kaballah and gematria… But this kind of rant probably comes from following this book with Philip K Dick’s Valis….

Monday, May 01, 2006

The Consolations of Philosophy


The bank holiday has afforded me another day of reading - and thus has seen me finish off Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy. I have to admit to some initial distaste towards the individual and phenomena that is De Botton - a few glimpses of him speaking on TV (maybe on Late Review or one of his own series) had rather put me off the man in an unreasoned way.

That is until a charity shop threw his book The Art of Travel my way a few weeks ago which I read and throroughly enjoyed. Especially all the bits on Gustave Flaubert - who came across as far more interesting than I remember from studying the European novel 15 or so years ago. (Not to say I didn't enjoy reading Madame Bovary, I did, but the humorous fellow emerging from De Botton's book was unknown to me).

Anyway, another charity shop has seem fit to throw this book at me - and that has been today's read. Enjoyable again, although not as much as The Art of Travel - I could have done with more of the personal stuff - the anecdotal asides from his own life, which in this and the previous book put me slightly in mind of Geoff Dyer and his great book Yoga for People Who can't be Bothered to do it.

While I didn't buy this book because of it, when I browsed the chapter headings and saw one titled " Consolation for a Broken Heart" - I thought that there might be some useful salve for my own damaged organ contained therein. Alas the meditations of Schopenhauer could not raise my spirits or help heal my own broken heart.

Schopenhauer's views regarding the romantic urge in the human put me in mind of previous meditations of my own on the "tyranny of biology" and the 'against nature' vibe of De Sade. This tyranny of biology, the urge to reproduce that gets us all into so much trouble with yearnings, thwarted and unfulfilled passions, love lost in painful partings etc. But then I'm not in a great space regarding these things right now... I still believe in LOVE mind.

So, anyway, this book - yeah its good, worth a read and I'll be trying to catch his new TV series on buildings (starts tonight on More4) and will buy and read his new accompanying book The Architecture of Happiness, as soon as my local charity shop is stocking it.