walkingtalkingwriting

WE'VE MIGRATED TO "WORDSTALL"

Wordstall

YOU'LL FIND ak & mmj HERE

 Wordstall

 AS FROM LAST OCTOBER

Image Library for WORDSTALL (mmj)

MY CURRENT 'WORDSTALL' FAVOURITE - "small kiosk with Turkish sandwiches".

Although I am also very fond of the old octagonal cast iron kiosks, of which a few remain in Istanbul, with their elegant tin sloping roofs, ornate ironwork and heavy shutters, I like the mobility of this example more, how it is able to be packed up and moved on in moments, and always providing some shade against the dangers of the burning overhead sun, and at the same time the food is always fresh: '... critical, radical, topical... and continental, including wisecracks and shock treatment'.

SEE BELOW FOR MORE EXAMPLES AND TYPES:
The "small kiosk with turkish sandwiches" is one of the several 2. Turkish Kiosk examples. From the 1. Bauhaus Bayer examples I like the Cigaretten Kiosk best with the brilliance of its large smoking chimney. In 3. Garbatella, I recommend a stroll exploring the elegant streets, buildings, and open spaces in the Google image library of this revolutionary-garden-city-suburb of Roma, before encountering the wall "You are now entering free Garbatella"

1. BAUHAUS BAYER

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/p22/bayer-universal/

Bayer fonts - eg‘Universal’

 

 

http://paulineclancy.com/hello/?p=370

Zeitungen kiosk

 

 

http://www.cynephile.com/2010/01/herbert-bayer-designs-for-a-cinema-1924-5/

Kine + Regina booth

 

 

http://www.ifeelasphalt.com/index.php/tag/bauhaus/

+ Cigaretten kiosk

--

2. TURKISH KIOSK

 

 

http://popupcity.net/2009/07/on-kiosks-part-1-urbanism/

History of Shademakers (part 1)

 

 

http://theturkishkioskproject.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/guest-kiosk-10-kantara-castle.html

The Turkish Kiosk Project…

 

 

http://theturkishkioskproject.blogspot.co.uk/

 

 

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1273021@N22/discuss/72157622398419719/

Verona metal kiosk

 

 

http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/9ae27/

"small kiosk with Turkish sandwiches".

--

3. GARBATELLA

 

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=garbatella+roma&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=NQCJUMCWKLGN0wXZo4DACw&ved=0CCAQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=494

Google Images of district

 

 

http://www.cinemadelreale.it/cdr/news.php?newsAction=showNewsById&id=13

"You are now entering free Garbatella"

(See also Image Library ak +mmj walk in Rome circa 2009)

ECHO EFFECTS: Also Seeking Shade (mmj)

"I can’t wait to try life under its shade," I wrote to myself in an ARCHIVE Note last August about Umbrella by Will Self.

The story moves between a ward in Friern Barnet Mental Hospital in 1971, trench warfare in 1918, and some events unfolding  in London in 2010. The front epigraph reads, ‘ a brother is as easily lost as an umbrella", which, so I am told (it is all contagious fiction and contested fact), is a quotation taken from the letters of James Joyce in the edition by Ellman.

Loss of brothers has frequently been scrambled into literature as a writing device (or even genre?), and is not a strange case. It is also not strange to me and I could imagine linking together in similar tri-part style, events in England involving the Russian Convoys to Murmansk in 1940, the coup and killing of President Allende in Chile on Sept 11th 1973, and a personal memory of staring at the sun from under the peaked cap of military uniform while presenting arms in the courtyard of the City of London Guildhall to the President of Brazil (?General Geizel) one morning during the long hot summer of 1976.

It is the commonplace problem of writers and readers of today: where to place our broken memories, and the fragments of our lives. It is a cataloguing problem really. For instance do my ‘Losing a Brother’ memories belong in continental South America, or during a previous time during the Second World War before I was born, or elsewhere… Or perhaps talked out over the counter of a newspaper kiosk, or as a few handwritten notes folded and slipped inside the backcovers of a book on my shelves, (say) Hayek’s, The Road to Serfdom… etc.

A novel would be one way to attempt to encompass this cataloguing complexity, although when completed  it might appear more like an untidy bundles of magazine pieces, or (as they say out west) longer form journalism, or (out east) feuilletons. As regards Umbrella, I understand the word doubles in meaning as both an anti-shell device of trench warfare, a retracted foreskin, and an intra-muscular syringe.

As well as the more common meanings  – now that I am awakening to recollection – of shademaker, and protector from the rain or sun.

I spent two month at the great Victorian asylum of Friern Barnet Mental Health Hospital during the high summer months of 1986. It was hot and the locked wards were stuffy and airless, and over lunchtime I was sometimes able to persuade one of the charge nurses, ‘security men’ types with big muscles and short hair, to unlock the ward door with the wrought iron key which jangled from the key ring on their belt. So I could escape for an hour, and walk down the gently rising and falling main passage perhaps 800 metres long which followed the original curves of the land underneath, passing motionless men and women in the corridors, past the NHS canteen, and out into the walled vegetables gardens and remains of the orchards and farming areas. These were all abandoned and overgrown with weeds and huge patches of brambles, but a few paths remained and I was able to pick my way through to a clear area and spend a time sunbathing against a wall with my shirt off and eating my lunch sandwich.

I undressed but the intensity of the sun was too strong on my bare skin.

COMING OF AGE: When the Shade Slips (mmj)

Schizophrenia: until for a moment the shade slips (or should one say the mask of self), and

We stand with no protection staring directly at the sun.

In 2012, and today it is not Friern Barnet but Highgate Mental Health Centre – the word Centre being preferred to that of Hospital. Friern Barnet closed and was sold off to developers of course, who, although I have not been back to see for myself, I expect have made a good job converting the splendid Victorian buildings to high-end residential accommodation, although I cant help thinking that theoccupants are disturbed walking from their front doors to car parks or sleeping at night by presence of so many ghosts of those for whom time stood still during the long 130 year history of the asylum before.

I am visiting my "aunty" at the Highgate Mental health Centre, where she has been detained for the last four months, although she is not mentally ill now – nor has she been for several years, but the word schizophrenia, like the ghosts at Friern Barnet, has had the capacity of stopping time for her. She is now 81, and becoming slightly frail and forgetful with age. She is also an artist. "I am an artist", she says, but adds that she has not painted anything for the last ten years. When she is out walking she likes to pick up things from the street and bring the back inside in order to have them with her to make collages. This can land her in trouble. As can her smoking habit. And sometimes people don’t like her. Why is that I ask her. My Aunty replies that a very nice woman called Gillian told her why. "The reason they don’t like you," she told me that Gillian had said, "is because you look into people’s faces, and you see things, and people don’t like that. But you shouldn’t talk about it because it will only get you into trouble".

It has.

TONITE AT THE COLISEUM: Shade for oneself is always Essential. (mmj)

"Self Wins the Booker Prize". But no, the headline is a fiction. Umbrella lost last week.

And it would have perhaps been worse if he had won. A man like Will Self is steeped in failure, indeed his writing is possible because of failure. Success might have ruined him. Will Self made the point himself in his last summer Guardian Review piece on Modernism. He also recommended Gabriel Jasopovici’s Whatever happened to Modernism? – and both have been speaking in a series of evening talks on Modernism in London this autumn.

ECHO EFFECTS – On Failure (mmj)

About failure in general - and the doubts which first found full expression in the nineteenth century, questioning the wisdom of progress, its intellectual and spiritual roots in the Enlightenment, and its inevitability, the future project of progress - failure really got going in the twentieth century, after the First World War of course, and onwards, through the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the Terrors and the Gulags, postwar to the coups in Iran and Chile and what the CIA call the ‘backdrafts’ afterwards, and on via the two Iraq and previous and current Afghanistan Wars up to the present day. And now, facing the 2020’s and beyond...

Then about the failure in particular of writers of literature – see my September post – from Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener (1856) down to the present day.

And about the failure of writers to read, and under what kind of compulsion are we (both to write and to read) to scribble and to decipher, suffering avoidant behaviour , since it would be worse not to, a ghostly Death State, akin to being locked up in an Asylum for all our years, the stopping of time.

...Back at the Booker, it all goes along amusingly enough; Self himself playing the royal jester to the crowd, lifting his book Umbrella as if he has just won the FA Cup, but more to show its primary function raised above our heads – to give shade.

Until for a moment the shade slips (and we stare blinking at the dangerous sun) "But No!..." Deborah Orr, who is married to Will Self, gave her own account of his winning the Booker Prize in Saturday’s Guardian; his compulsion to write against the terror of the abyss of failure (his previous book – a turkey); her falling ill with breast cancer, and undergoing treatment, lying in bed all day "passively letting chemotherapy drugs get on with attacking cancer cells", while at the same time Self is working away upstairs.

And more that "I would prefer not to" – in Bartleby style whether as writer and reader -prefer not to write about or read. And as well for myself, since I have still not bought myself a copy of Umbrella, only looked at the covers and browsed through the first pages in a bookshop again yesterday, feeling under the compulsion of being a dutiful reader and intending to do so, but having failed so far, not until I have at least finished this bundle of writing ECHO EFECTS.

The Joys of Print (ak)

There is a rose, a single pink rose, on the table in a white vase, a dull yellow tablecloth, salt and pepper pots and a small white bowl stacked with those narrow paper containers of brown sugar. At three tables lone men sit with their laptops. The coffee is cooling. There is no sign of a grand crime of passion about to erupt. We will quietly get on with what we have come here to do. In my case writing these words which will, after a certain amount of thought, reflection and amending, hopefully within twenty four hours, be posted on the blog.

     In the forthcoming shift from one blog which we called walkingtalkingwriting to a new one, the title of which will reflect the final word of that trilogy - that minor miracle of sound and scratched marks. On the scale of things it is probably more amazing that we have existence but limping along just behind THAT is this group of squiggles that refer to a sound: a sound to which traditions of meaning, processes of meaning, have accrued. An archeology of culture. Meanings rich in ambiguity and endlessly subject to change. You would have thought that writing would pin meaning down, fix it forever. But no, far from it! Do you think it might be because madness hovers around the periphery of our vision; at the edges madness is given freedom to range unrestricted by the good sense of pragmatism. The work of imagination filling in the gaps, restructuring, assigning random and highly questionable connections. By the way, have you come across Tom Phillips' Humument - ticklingly, wonderfully, out of nowhere - a Victorian novel given a treatment. It's available in print or as an App. Yesterday I downloaded the App version which works beautifully and gives a daily oracular Delphic random prediction to be enjoyed and pondered upon. Mr Phillips bought the book for three pence in 1966 in Peckham Rye (apparently where William Blake first saw angels) - well, you've got to start somewhere and maybe Peckham Rye and angels or a threepenny Victorian novel might, just might, be better (I think I'm getting a bit envious, a bit of greener grass over there) than a bog in the middle of Dartmoor.

    Or was it the bog of Freud's unconscious which I've been traipsing through for the last forty years whilst Mr Phillips has been reworking his treatment of Mr W H Mallock's A Human Document, a title which he turned into Humument. It's true that we do have to find some bog or other to work in and it also remains true that Dr Freud's unconscious remains a fertile bog and there has been plenty of treatment following the publication and dissemination of his written works. Perhaps it's a pity that Mr Phillips didn't grasp a tatty volume of the famous doctor's collected works – The Interpretation of Dreams would have been a good choice. It would have been worth paying a shilling for it or would it have only been a penny, thrown out by some recently incarcerated psychiatrist, whose mind had suddenly fled its moorings one July morning in 1966. Here, mate, you can have this for a penny - no one wants it, I can't get rid of it.

    Mind you, in those days, a penny was worth something. You could go up the West End, go to a show and have a supper at the Savoy and still have enough for the cab back home.

    Maybe.

The Field in which to Find which Words Work (mmj)

ARCHIVE "Teeth of… Barbed Wire?

Critical, Radical, and Topical eg: How will we run from those who would sink their teeth into us? A dog, or a horse certainly… but I have never yet been chased by barbed wire desiring to sink its teeth into me. Or I dont think so. It is a frightening prospect.

I was last chased by a teeth-sinking dog in Italy 2 years ago. I was bicycling along a quiet country lane in the narrow flat land between sea and mountains north of Via Reggio. It is a contested and constricted territory (part of Liguria) in which the main north south arteries, railways, motorways, and other roads - and pilgrimage routes – have to fit themselves between the fingers of foothills extending into the narrow plain, and the competing multi-use coastal margin of beach resorts, homes, apartments, businesses and commercial properties (including the Carrara marble yards). Set among this sculptural patchwork is some prime agricultural land, and it was along a small road between flat fields, orchards, green houses, farmhouses and small villages that I was wandering on a hired bicycle one early late summer evening. Dawdling on the pedles, the lane ran straight, and then a corner at right angles in front of a farm house, to be followed by another turn so it could resume its idyllic way past more cultivated areas of vegetables and fruit trees. Loud barking came from the farmhouse as I went round the second corner, and I turned my head to see a large yellow dog running towards me at speed, which, jumping up behind the rear wheel of the bicycle, bit me in the bum. I protested angrily, stopped and waved my arms in case the dog wanted to have a second go. However, the farmer emerged to call in the dog, clearly a much-loved family pet it returned wagging to be hugged by two children, and inadequate words were exchanged between the farmer and I not approximating to either of our mother tongues or likely internal thoughts.

I have also been chased by a horse in a field which bit me on the back of my coat collar, but never to this day chased by barbed wire. However, the link tells us that the American patent for barbed wire was awarded in 1874: the ‘winner’, Joseph Glidden of the Barb Fence Company, was a Midwest acquaintance of Uncle Scrooge – McDuck – Gugga Daddy (GD), or Tio Amaretto as we also referred to him from his pioneering days on the pampas of Argentina. GD was helping driving cattle between the summer and winter pastures, but in the lawless range wars which broke out after the barb wire came in between those seeking to enclose and those wanting the great plains left open, he knew his roaming days were over, especially when the State of Texas decreed cutting wire a felony in 1884.

--

CATASTROPHE GAMES - "We have all been groomed"

A footnote: on the BBC (Radio 4) over the weekend, a news magazine programme concerning the current perfect storm of child abuse, groping and feminism (you know who). Only a woman could have made the remark – "The whole country has been groomed", she repeated. Sex . Work. War. How true I thought her wisecrack was/is.

--

TONITE AT THE COLISEUM – The End of Man?

Another footnote on literary failure: men being doomed because they are " essentially confused, hidebound creatures, in search of certainties that the modern world has left behind". Unlike Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing or Angela Carter (say)?  In search of certainties? Yes? Err… No?

But except Hilary Mantel -  ‘Our ‘ilary’ provides all the certainties the Booker Prize judges are looking for. Topical stuff.

--

OLD MEN TRAVELLING – Phone Booth Conversation

Radical viewpoint: "Englishness is where difference begins, where the exotic starts"*.

! Do not adjust your hearing aid, or mouthpiece, you heard it right the first time !

I am quoting from a reported conversation betwen two men in their sixties – "It’d be good for you to lose some weight. Take the English leap. Get out of the Frenchified muddle you’ve been in for so long. Be lighter, more fun. Become English. Or Irish. Take the leap my friend."

The man speaking so unequivocally goes on to give the example of phone boxes/booths – "It’s not just the English ones are prettier, but they offer a comfortable and better designed space in which to relate to one another verbally, unlike the French ones, which are strange and designed for the outrageously pedantic aesthetics of silence."

OK it is a fiction being imagined by two men who both happen to consider Barcelona their home, and the truth is that these days most of the pretty red English phone boxes have been ripped out. Still instead of detournement , why not try – "a light English leap, to land on the other side, start thinking about something else, to turn around, to move."

*from Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas (2010)

Critical Roots (mmj)

We have been burning the lights here walkingtalkingwriting now for over six years. Blogging is pure energy isn’t it? Streams of electrons, blinking on off signals, the same way a string of Christmas lights works. On. Off. Over the years there have been a few gaps, when some of the bulbs in the string of lights burnt out, but over the last two years the on/off signals have been blinking away pretty regularly; a weekly flow of between 300 and 500 words, sometimes more, and at the rate of progress we have been going over the years, there must be over 100,000 words on this blog archive,

Bystanders strolling by, or readers as they are conventionally but perhaps erroneously called, have sometimes asked us about the light. "So what do you have to show?" they ask. "Getting people to stare at the lights, it is surely some kind of absurd wisecrack surely.Or a form of shock treatment. What do you have to show?"

"You tell me," I am tempted to answer, spots in front of all our eyes. Questions about the light, but rarely about the ground. After all the light illuminates a small patch. What do you have to show? It is time to begin telling.

- So in a few days time the lights are going to go out here on Typepad: a CRITICAL power failure!

- Groping around on hands and knees in the dark on a new Wordpress location: TOPICAL!

We will fumble for the plug socket, flick the switch: and how RADICAL is that!

Be on the look out!

WORDSTALL is coming, a small market stall, probably to be found outside an old peeling paint news-stand ‘ZEITUNG’ or ‘CIGARETTEN’ pavilion, filled with a range of enticing pamphlets and brochures for modern living…

1.) …Until the generators run out. Of course that is a rack we will also be filling now we are both well into our 60’s, magazine pieces on OLD MEN TRAVELLING. (‘So do you mean the story is finished? Said Don Quixote. ‘As finished as my mother’, said Sancho.)

2.) … Or we find ourselves HITTING THE POTHOLES, a category for when the ground disappears from under our feet. (‘For oil is not made, it is got. And oil thinks large. Oil thinks wide’, said the narrator - Pathe 1951, Oil for the Twentieth Century)

3.) … Or ECHO EFFECTS set in, which commonly occurs at crossing points, between one world and another. (‘The echo; the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, is essentially a lament’. said Leverkuhn (from Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann)).

4.) … Or TONITE AT THE COLISEUM, when we sneak out for a show. Typically only old theatre stubs and stained programmes to show for it, but ‘Oh, the smell of the grease paint, and the roar of the crowd!’

5.) … Or – Yes! Yes! - we win yet more tickets for the CATASTROPHE GAMES and get another go looking at Scapolo (the bachelor). It is so addictive! For instance, even ‘Saint Walter’ (Uncle Benjamin) could not resist getting together with Berthold Brecht to plan the publication of a new magazine: Krisis und Kultur. It was of course never published.

We never said it was going to be easy: that the story 'Ticking Boxes', just posted today, belongs in OLD MEN TRAVELLING should be simple enough to decide. However, there is always a moment of doubt, a pause when my collector's hand hesitates, floating over the various racks on the market stall, but it is not a 'glorious pause' ("Truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending." Angela Carter. Wild Children) and my hand moves on leaving well alone. A sub-section of Narrative Poems may present itself within the major category of OLD MEN TRAVELLING later, where the story may go (price 10s/6d), but it is equally possible the piece will be put back in one of the boxes which are kept underneath (in the 'Archive' as it is commonly called) unsold.

Ticking Boxes (ak)

It was quite a journey. This much was apparent from his white faced collapse. He seemed to look past me into some distance that I was unable to encompass, to find an image or a representation of what he might be seeing. But I knew that he had made this extraordinary journey for me, or at least out of his sense of what a father is. Or could be. Or should be. The bringer of blessings. To come down out of the mountains, through the white swirling clouds, winding along the scarcely known pathways, to leave behind this other world which he had arrived in, years before, exhausted, after tramping through the damp forests, the maze of heavy foliage, tendrils, vines, past the temptations of Bacchus, the soaring
spirit of Apollo, the final days, the slippage, consciousness sliding into pervading darkness. What happened then? A howling wind? A fall into emptiness? The long habit of walking taking over, making the journey automatic; the trappings of technocratic modernity long past, gone, dissolved - leaving the steady never ending pace of walking: alone but always keenly aware of the way.

 

    Keep your eye on the prize. Perhaps I should have said to him that I had tried to keep my eye on the prize. Was it the prize? Or rather was it what I had mistakenly understood the prize to be? I am sorry that you are so exhausted, I am grateful (and surprised) that you did. Amazed actually.

 

    How is that deep connection made? So solid that nothing can break it - even in the face of the shadowings of forgetfulness. I think it might be a sort of branding - both the red hot metal sizzling on flesh and the current version of what we call corporate branding, so that we know what we should do. We know what is right. I wouldn't want to pretend that it is not problem free. Like so many things it is open to the abuse of arrogance and some weird assumption of authority. Like Putin having a bad day, or for him, probably, business as usual. There are, of course, endless examples. We are always sliding into bad faith and then bad faith can become a habit like everything else. We need the corrections of rubbing along with the great horde of us dancing along in joy or shuffling along in misery.

 

    Anyway you made it, made the journey to give your blessings, it's what fathers are supposed to do. I hope I, too, keep remembering that blessings are there to be freely given. Not withheld. What would be the point of being mean with them?

Men (ak)

Sunday

 

Seven men track a circular course on the Dorset/Somerset border. Seven men of a certain age - somewhere between fifty and eighty. We start from a perfectly preserved, perfectly loved chapel dedicated to St Rocco - patron saint of dogs and those who love them, batchelors, surgeons, pilgrims, tile makers, falsely accused people, invalids, diseased cattle and Istanbul. You must admit a wonderful range of beings to look after. Will he look after us as we set off to face wild dogs, angry farmers who hate the footpaths that cross their land and presumably hate those who use them. How will we run from those who would sink their teeth into us: teeth of dog, teeth of horse, teeth of barbed wire? Seven men who in their different ways are drawn to meet out of some consciousness of being men, not only of a certain age, but out of something troubling about being men.

 

    Perhaps men losing ground, being outmanoeuvred by age, herded, caged by the events of their lives, a lack of missionary purpose. What do you believe in? Not very much - is that the answer? But hang on we could become our own purpose. It's very simple. We are not heroes, not saints, nor particularly sinful sinners: there is an ordinariness that is a burden. Perhaps it's the burden of failure, of a failure to understand what it was (precisely) that we were supposed to do. At least we can help each over the barbed wire, give each other courage as the horses gather round unsure what they might want to do us - bite us, kick us? Who knows?

 

 

Monday – Thursday

 

    Packing and unpacking modernism and the problem of texts, of spinning words into shapes. How to provoke, how to attract attention, how to write the words that are available, that are given to us out of feeling or idea. How to write a non-narrative text with somewhat startling rhythms, surprising content. A text that engages with others, the Other, you or You. A text that may get beyond the response of 'I don't know what you are talking about'. No, I don't know why I have to do this but what can I do, what defence can I plead - I only have the words that are there.

    Then a bit later I'm reading through the day's Guardian (1.10.12) and my eyes light upon John Harris's column in which he discusses a new book due to be published in a couple of weeks. Written by Helen Rosin and given the alarming title: The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Cardboard men who crumple into defeatism and plastic women who are adaptable and (increasingly) well educated. Harris writes: 'The general impression of millions of men as essentially confused, hidebound creatures, in search of certainties that the modern world has left behind, adds up'. Maybe, maybe not.

    I think I have some sort of notion of what Helen Rosin might be setting out to describe and as she dedicates the book to her nine year old son I want to believe that she is writing (at least in part) out of love. But I also have the sense that it is one of those somewhat weird phenomena that comes under the heading of 'now you see it, now you don't'. What have we men done over history after receiving the drubbing of our lives? Yes, sometimes we disappear in alcoholic stupor - by the way I saw a great little play by the name of Botallack O'clock at the Bike Shed Theatre last night -  abstract artist Roger Hilton drinking himself into psychotic episodes that in the play are both funny and touchingly painful. Botallack is near St Ives where he lived and painted though confined to bed towards the end of his life (he died in 1975) partly due to alcoholism which is the period of his life that the play focuses on. Was he defeated? Was alcohol a way of not feeling the defeat? This artist who had been a commando in the war and taken prisoner after the Dieppe raid. Questions. Questions. But defeat is also a time for reflection, thinking - how do I do this thing? How do I and we walk on?

 

    I'm bound to be reminded of where we were fifteen years ago with those three words - walking and talking and writing. It's probable that we might also demand of ourselves to say something about where we've got to. Or is that the wrong question?

PREFACE: On WordStall and “the Larger Economy of the Book”

The above phrase in inverted commas is lifted from Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? (Yale Univ Press 2010) and suggests a city landscape into which we have now stepped back. Our old aesthetic, which we had previously called wilderness, has now also become topical, like arriving at a street kiosk. Wilderness was abstract, a theory which lacked the economy of place and activity, as the ancient Greeks would locate oikos in the topical landscape of the House of Atreus, or the City of Thebes.

TEXT It is Intermission Time

I am reading BARTLEBY & CO (first published 2000, tr 2004) by Enrique Vila-Matas (b Barcelona 1948), and I have reached page 147. It is at this point some 31 pages from the end soon after the crooked narrator Marcelo (a hunchback from Barcelona) states that he has received a letter from Derain that I find myself unable to continue reading: " I would prefer not to", I say.

Who is Derain, and what are the references to Schopenhauer's philosophy which are contained in his letter to Marcello? I long to find out, but I now do not expect to. I want to read on but somebody has slammed the book shut in front of my face. I have been doubly duped of course, both by the idea of "tracking down the labyrinth of the No", and the possibility of a thread which would lead me to the end of the book, while I am actually unable to continue.

"I would prefer not to.'' I feel this will end badly, the book I mean, or my experience of

abandoning it, and either way I am bound to end up disappointed. In fact rather than forgetting the book, I sense the book has forgotten me, here at page 147 where the reader and write part company, which is also shortly after a footnote on migraines, or the shadow from under the branches of a thorn bush, or the letter from Derain.

There are only just over 30 pages to go, but NO - it is Intermission Time – or the Coda if you prefer, and the time for re-enactment. As a constructivist gesture, I consider taping the last unread 31 pages together, but this is like Prince Charming coming to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty under the thorn bush. It would be the conclusive gesture, to bring this thing to an end, she would bite his lips rather than kiss them.

DIALOGUE: On not Writing a Book (mmj)

But it refuses to go quietly. Here are the traces of the track BARTLEBY & CO has left behind; the footnotes as the author describes them, "commenting on a text that is invisible", in a series of numbered sections -

1. Considers the life of Robert Walser, and his piece ‘The Chamber of Writing for Unoccupied Persons'.

2. On Felipe Alfonse (1928). I consider adding Roberto Bolano as a footnote of my own at this point but the author says, "He would prefer not to."

3. On Rimbaud.

4. On Musil and Hofmannsthall who "almost mythologises the idea".

5. Considers madness (eg Walser and Holderlin), and other illnesses.

6. On non-existence (Pepin Bello).

7. On Bobi Balzen from Trieste who is a "a kind of black Sun".

8. On the dialectic that it is also better to write, for example Primo Levi.

9. … But forgetting to (eg Clement Cadou and George Perec 'A portrait of the artist as a piece of fiction').

10. Marcello (the crooked narrator) fails to go to his office.

11. On Robert Derain. WHO?

12. First mention of Marcel Duchamp.

13/14/15/16. More questioning about not writing, including Roland Barthes "Where to begin".

17. On Beckett.

18/19 On Kafka, and his short story The Hunger Artist whi is asked the question "Why don't you write?"

16. Marcello (the crooked narrator) composes an imaginary letter to himself from Robert Derain. "Include Marcel Duchamp in your book", he writes,

21. Considers tricksters, and Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857).

22/23. On W’m Hazlitt "A Farewell to Essay Writing".

24. Back to Kafka's Diaries; about Scapolo (the bachelor) Marcello writes ''Scapolo is frightening, because he walks straight through a terrible zone, a zone of shadows which is also where the most radical of denials has its home and where the blast of coldness, in short, is a blast of destruction" (P 65).

25. On de Quincy.

26. Considers suicides. (and rejects the same as a strategy for those 'who would prefer not to').

27/28/29. On John Salinger.

30/31. Marcello (the crooked narrator) tells a story, ''I saw Salinger on a bus in New York".

32. On Borges (25 Dec 1936) piece in El Hogan Magazine: Enrique Banch celebrates 25 Years of a Marriage to Silence.

33. On one of Pessoa’s heteronyms.

34. On Hofmannsthall’s 'Letter': the founding text for those who say, "I would prefer not to".

35. Considers denial, refusal and autism, and Paul Celan.

36. "Derain has written to me, he really has", Marcello (the crooked narrator) claims.

37-42. Considers matters arising from Derain’s letter: Keats, Rimbaud ("Adieu" In a Season of Hell), Broch (Death of Virgil), and George Perec – "For a long time I went to bed in writing".

43. Considers rejections.

44-48. Considers Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wakefield and Herman Melville's, Bartleby the Scrivener (1985):

- Wakefield: the husband who suddenly abandons his wife

- Melville: leaving of writing because one has failed following Bartleby

"Bartleby defines a genre" writes Borges.

49. Quotes Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce describing the meetings between Joyce and Beckett where both are "addicted to silence".

50/51/52/53. On Henry Roth (born 1906) Galicia. I ask if any relation to Joseph? There is no reply to this question.

54/55. Considers mutism, and Kafka's laugh which is reported to be like "the rustle of fallen leaves".

56. On Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Eclipse. I attempt to mention Anne Carson’s essay on Antonioni in Decreation at this point, but am unable to do so. I transcribe the text from Antonioni’s diary while in Florence: "The sun has gone, suddenly ice. A silence different from other silences. And a light distinct from other light, After that darkness. Black sun of our culture. Complete immobility. All I can manage to think is that during the eclipse feeling will probably dry up as well."

57/58.On Don Quixote’s GOODBYE.

59. On Borges' (other) TIGER.

60. Considers a fictional paranoid writer who believes the Nobel prize-winning writer Saramaga was " always one step ahead and it was really rather strange".

61. Considers melancholy.

62. Marcello (the crooked narrator) is sacked.

63. Considers Wittgenstein.

64. An interlude: DIALOGUE between NO and YES.

65/66/67. "Derain has written to me", says the crooked narrator.

When I reach the lower half of page 147, the last sentences read: "I live like an explorer. The more I advance in the search for the labyrinth's centre, the further I am away from it".

And it is at this point that the reader breaks off, abandoning the footnotes (notes without a text), prefering to remain a bachelor (or a Sleeping Beauty waiting and waiting and waiting) who from now on must discover the remaining footnotes for him or herself, living with his remorse and shame at the destruction of this harmless copy of the book.

"A writer who does not write", the author quotes from Kafka diaries, "is a monster who invites madness".

This is the new technology which he or she has discovered and unravels the labyrinth of the last of the text which awaits him or her to be completed.

A reader may become the happy sorcerer of his own text.

ARCHIVE: An Encouraging Smack (mmj)

"It was the cook who woke her, when he smacked the kitchen boy; the smack resounded with all the pent up force of those long years and re-echoed through the castle. A fair child sleeps behind the thorny pages that follow".

The quotation is taken from Walter Benjamin’s Preface to his unpublished doctoral thesis written in 1925 and tells the story of Sleeping Beauty, but the author has changed the story to suit his more pressing needs:

- I am the brutal master chef waking up the whole castle and Sleeping Beauty under her to thorn with his resounding and re-echoing smack.

Or…

- I am the abandoned and forgotten ‘fair child’ asleep under her thorn bush, waiting and waiting and waiting (after the prohibitory prick of the needle upon the robe "she wanted to weave herself among the tattered rags').

The above authorial options are suggested by Esther Leslie’s in the conclusion of her book on Benjamin - Overpowering Conformism (2000), but a host of other actors manifest from out of the uproar in the castle which follows the smack administered by the master chef (…the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker, and so on are all clamouring to tell their story). However, whoever I may be, I am not the Prince Charming: "The last thing to come near her should be a Prince Charming in the shimmering garments of science, He would be bitten as he kissed his betrothed", writes Benjamin.

　　　　　　　　IT is in the ‘Can’t go on, Will go on’ spirit that it is possible to write and read again, and this time to completion even.

No one is getting out of this alive*)

In the nick**, in the nick of time she escapes once only, but then is caught out again, dreaming of some other life, some other home, far away, the other side of the world  .. .  and then she is in the nick, buried up to her neck in the nick, hardly able to open her eyes, heavy as they are with grief and boredom. Can Nick measure our madness, our pain?

    Why can’t we see our madness? Could I catch a glimpse in the mirror, by accident, as it were. Buried in the dark cellar in which the inmates play with their shadows. We are, she said, speed and desire. And, I added, we are caught by the short and curlies by the myth of science, a partial patchwork of barely begun work also known under the general heading of nihilism.

    What about God?

    Don’t be silly.

    I said to Sophocles, do you happen to know where I can find Teiresias?

    Ah, he said, and his brow creased up in serious thinking lines of pain.

    Science is so fast and we can fulfil absolutely every single one of our desires, all our dreams: nothing will be denied us.

    Don’t laugh like that, I tell the laugher in the shadows.

    Is that Teiresias? she whispers, as though the shape is merely composed of smoke.

    Old Nick more likely: the counter-tenor to God’s baritone blast.

    And Teiresias flounders blindly, his feet lacerated on the razor sharp rocks of the desert.

    The bell has rung.

    Is that the end of the lesson or the end of the intermission?

    A break would be welcome. Actually. Now you come to mention it. Though. Will the broken threads imply a loss of drive, a loss of continuity? An irretrievable loss? Or doesn’t it matter.

    The surgeon said I might need a couple of weeks to get used to my new heartless condition. And he offered me the hope that I might be able to join the Cabinet. No bleeding heart liberals here. What with Gove and Gidiot (as Lucy Mangan calls him) what could be better; there’s not a better time to be reshuffled.

    Though there was a questioning qualm in my should-be emptiness: I said to him, I thought a heart was necessary . . .

    No, he chortled, like any good drug dealing surgeon of the brave new non-health service, whatever gave you that idea, as he took another slurp of absinthe.

 

* Borrowed from the poem The Lovely Redhead by Frederick Seidel LRB 30/8/12 

**I have borrowed Nick from Anne Carson’s Antigonick. Nick is listed as a mute measurer.

A Real Cliff-hanger (TEXT) mmj

Come to the window.

Why?

Please, sir. Quick!

What is it?

Look, look. It is her!

Who?

The OUTLAW!

How can you tell?

See, there are the banners with her name on it; Missy whatever she’s called.

Missy OUTLAW. But she is not alone.

No, there is the crowd.

It is unimaginable.

There must be thousands.

More than than.

Millions then.

Billions rather.

Oh dear, I am not feeling well. I need to sit down.

Are you all right?

No, I think it is my heart.

The Catastrophe Games

You don’t make it easy on yourself, do you? Trying Open-heart Surgery to get to the truth, trying to expose the sinews of veracity and the chambers of truthfulness, as if some kind of operation could provide you with the answers to all the questions you have been asking over the years, the big questions, like – If there is a God, what has been up to these last years and decades (just to keep to the last 100 years), and why do good thing happen to bad people, and the other way round.

Later post-operatively, "I love my life" you scrawl, the last thought brought to a shuddering, heat-stopping halt, flat line, sending the emergency team running for the defibrillator pads, and looking for the big needle to put straight into the heart, adrenalin, The truth drug to kick you back into life.

"Where's my heart?" you ask and there is the sense of people searching round in a dark cellar or locker room down below, rummaging about, looking for something old and long discarded like a childhood dream, an old favourite.

"The normative character of Greek Art, as sprung from the childhood of humanity". So wrote Walter Benjamin. Berliner Chronicle (1932-38 with ‘ongoing revisions… ongoing because in those terrible times he was unable to find a publisher. WB also considered suicide in 1932, but then decided against it). And then there was Benjamin’s interest in the historical description by Marx of the technological shifts that made Greek mythology redundant: crashing down the ‘Royal Houses’ (like the House of Atreus) and collapsing ‘City Plutocrats’ (like the citizens of Thebes) leaving a blank, where nothing is tragic, nothing is changed by events and people just ‘carry on’, like the MOD advice tells them, carry on just the same with luxury brands, ever faster speeds on the internet, and constructed components of personality – Flash – because write Benjamin, " ‘becoming’ no longer has any meaning for us, rhythmically. We subvert it dialectically in sensation and tradition".

So what's left of the story now? Foolish delights in novelty, and nostalgic sentimental attractions, glittering with illuminations and sensations. Only the chorus, the ones noisily rummaging round in the cellars looking for something right now, somehow the crowd kept its voice.

And now, when something truly tragic presents itself, like ‘ten billion’ – overpopulation - the same was going on for me this last week after I had written on the overpopulation Catastrophe Games - how many medals, the major developing nation and developed nations, all fiercely competing for medals, gold, silver, bronze, it occurred to me that the story we were had got used to the last 100 years – Oedipus, big Oedipus, oedipal everything, was dead - "Where’s my heart indeed."

"It is the near future. Civilization, if you call it that, is confined to strongly defended compounds threatened by lawless ‘ferals’ outside the gates. Oil is scarce, food is becoming scarcer, and the isolated city-states wage war and form unholy alliances to secure the sustenance they need, Survival is the primary virtue, and when hunger threatens bonds of kinship and common humanity are strained to breaking point"

The story could be – yes – OUTLAWS and the near future. And did you also read the link l gave you 2 weeks ago: "A Brief History of Climate, Change and Conflict", No? Well here is the link again... The story could be now, or nearly now. Or it could be another time, for example:
- from Sophocles, ‘The Theban Plays: the famous trilogy of tragedies of Oedipus and Antigone
OR
- or from Aeschylus, ‘The Oresteia: his surviving trilogy of tragedies.

There is a sound of stamping feet as the crowd comes rushing up from the cellars, and two wild-eyed women emerge from it, coming forward to address you in the audience directly. One is Judith Butler, author of Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death . The other is Gwyneth Lewis, whose translation of Clytemnestra (one of that trilogy of plays by Aeschylus) has been being performed this summer at the Sherman Cymru, Cardiff, and the above quotation is taken from a review.

Now it is your turn to tell the story about the seven billion OUTLAWS at the gates, including so it seems the likes of Missy Frederica with her sniper’s rifle, and heading for ten billion and what kind of human behaviour to expect – in other words, the very worst.

The question is can anything stop you from going mad (and unleashing violence in a kind of Greek tragic madness)? Can anything stop you from this gun-wreaking havoc? Two weeks ago I suggested heading for the gun cabinet-because it is too late, and the tragedy is already unfolding before your eyes, and there is just you, the Chorus crowd, who are left, the bit players without the main characters (only leaving the House of Murdoch, the City of London buffoons behind). So you stare across the footlights… waiting for -  Hermes, the "child-author" - something to appear.

But thank you and good night for now- it is INTERMISSION time – I know, I am sorry it has come at such a cliff-hanger moment. But equally I know most of you can’t wait to head for the crush to get the booze down, and only a few are left in their seats staring blankly back now at the ‘Safety Curtain’.

The lights have come up and it is time for us to have our happy pills again.

What has happened?

Who was it who came in last night? I definitely felt there was somebody skulking in the shadows, but I felt unable to move or to put it in slightly different words, I thought, I believed that I should not move, or that if I did attempt to move I would be enveloped in overwhelming pain. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that after an operation – open-heart surgery – lasting many hours or perhaps days, that I would not be able to move. I pretended to be asleep, trying to breathe as if I was asleep, trying to breathe as I thought that somebody who is really asleep would be breathing; slow and steady with an occasional snuffle thrown in.

    I thought this intruder was a man, that he was Greek, and that he was dangerous; that his intentions towards me were hostile. Perhaps it was really a mouse, or a rat or even a heavy spider. If I squeezed my eyes shut and stopped breathing then I could see that he had an old sheet wrapped around his body. So perhaps he was a fellow patient who had come round to see if I had a packet of crisps that he could steal while I was still unconscious from the operation.

    Perhaps he was a ghost from the distant past.

    But I’m getting distracted; I’m hungry. How long will it be before breakfast? I rather fancy a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea wouldn’t go amiss.

    Now there is something strange. Having weighed up the pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages I decided to go ahead and tentatively touch with finger tip sensitivity my chest area. My thinking was that having had open heart surgery would lead to some sort of massive cuts and broken ribs and sewn up flesh and skin and dressings. But there was nothing – just the usual rather skinny chest with its ribs and skin and some rather inadequate macho hairiness.

    Is this to do with the invisible Greek guy?

    I’m beginning to experience a longing for the NHS. It suddenly seems delightfully old-fashioned and reliable. Maybe not the last word in efficiency but on the whole friendly. Maybe not completely reliable but its heart is in the right place. Well, mostly in the right place. Which makes me think where’s my heart? I could check it. I could check my pulse. It’s possible that this is an antechamber to some other realm. I mean I might be dead.

    Apparently his name is Sophocles.

Yes please but no intellectual growth, thank you (ak)

When did the US Republican Party become a bunch of first-rate stand-up comedians? They are such sublime performers that they are able to appear as luckless, accident prone losers, likely as not to have recently been let out for a long weekend by a well meaning mental health facility. But we know these faultless performances have been honed to perfection over months and years of dedicated practice. But don’t worry, here in the good old UK, the land of golden medals, the land of ‘if they can do it so can everybody else’, you know who I mean: the so-called Conservative Party, because they know where to look for what to do next. It’s called getting rid of bureaucracy by changing labels and . . . well we like these brand new bureaucracies, their names redolent of profit and efficiency, the wages lower than the minimum it’s possible to live on.

 

    What do you mean revolution? We know how to deal with that. Did you see what sentences those looters received for stealing a bottle of water?

 

    Intellectual growth? Is that some sort of brain tumour?

 

    Would you like to see the psychiatrist?

 

    Actually I accepted the offer of an anaesthetic. Even though it bumped the price up to astronomical levels. What the hell, I thought, as my spine collapsed, my breathing laboured:

 

    After all, what is my life worth?

 

    My calculation based on my admittedly inadequate medical and surgical knowledge (no, I didn’t want any intellectual growth, thank you very much; what interested me was money* and after that, more money) . . . anyway, where was I? Oh yes my calculation, well, call it a guess, perhaps even a wild guess, was that I would not survive open-heart surgery without anaesthetic. And that as you can no doubt work out for yourselves means no more money for me.

 

    Answer me this simple question, Gove Osborne Cameron, is there anything else in this brief stretch of time, this thin line of past and future, but money? More and more of the stuff; endless, endless profit?

 

    Yes, it might be a shit sort of philosophy but long ago I decided that intellectual growth was not worth the toilet paper it was printed on. If it’s good enough for Pres Bush it’s got to be good enough for me.

 

    It worked for Blair (ouch, who was that!) and, have I got the right bloke, wasn’t he in the Labour Party?

 

    It’s raining again, it’s the last thing I notice before the cocktail of heroin and cocaine takes me away very pleasantly.

 

* If you're interested, Dave Graeber's book on Debt should see you right.

Be Marginal, Be a Hero - TEXT (mmj)

She wants to come in.

OUTLAWS who cannot fulfil their obligations often do.

We have found her sniper rifle abandonned, and a note.

I am not interested. She has to answer for her own reality, unless...

What?

Is it a suicide note?

No, it isn't.

Well, in that case I think we can leave Frederica to sweat it out.

She has however made a proposal.

As I said, bargains can be problematic.

This one is different. There is a tape with her note; a demo tape, along with some lyrics. It is a song.

Do you like it?

Actually I do, very much.

What is it called?

Embrace.

Quite marginal. Will it sell?

I hope so.

Esperanca.

Or the other meaning, ‘mayfly’

Being Even More Brazilian - ARCHIVE (mmj)

For your ‘Protest Songs’ autobiography follow the headings Formation, Fame, Fall (imprisonment), Exile, Return, and finally Memoir.

FORMATION. Are you one of the '64 Generation'? Or is your founding year 1968? Or maybe later? My formation year was '73 (September 11 to be precise): Verdade Tropical [1.], Tropical Truth.

For Tropicalismo, the iconoclastic musical and countercultural force that flourished in Brazil at the height of the dictatorship in the 1960’s and 1970’s, 1964 was ground zero. This was the year of the US backed military coup, which became the blueprint for others that followed later, and the ideological testing ground for the new political bipolarity (authoritarian government in a constant state of emergency against the invidious forces of social democracy and all those others who "spend our money on other people").

Where I was brought up in the East Midlands, in 1964 it was about possible to listen to Radio Luxemburg on our primitive transistor radios. The reception was terrible, but the sound of those early Protest Songs was just able to reach our ears despite the hiss of white noise, high pitched whines, and burble of foreign voices, and created in them a continental intention.

Bob Dylan, and later there was Radio Caroline, and the first lady of protest Joan Baez, then Joni Mitchell and a long line of other strong and beautiful women with clear high pitched voices. But the 'impulse towards Americanization’ was stronger still, and the marketing men were already sharpening their pencils and calculating the profit margins on their next No 1 hit.

FAME. Of course I didn’t know what was coming next.After Jazz Samba and the Stan Getz,  I can't say Caetano Veloso was one of my musical heros or that I ever heard of the tropicalismo movement. I knew about Bossa Nova and enjoyed Sergio Mendes, and of course the voice of Astrid Gilberto filled my fantasies, along with other long haired dark skinned women of Brazil, where colour seemed to be less racial and more erotic and exciting, and of course popular.

So it was in 1973 I found myself in Salvador de Bahia, and then in Rio de Janeiro, and strangely impervious to the nightime sound of gunfire, and ignorant of the opposition movement being mainained in these the city universities. Middle class friends in the leafy suburbs warned me about the police death squads, and told me to keep away from the favelas, but the risks of being gunned down seemed slim.

I did spend time on the campas of Brasilia the capital city, went to the student bars, talked and listened to the music,  and perhaps grew some capacity for self-reflection along with a kind of musical courage, and historical mindedness, listening to - anthropological, mythical, mystical, formal and moral – popular songs, but I was still ignorant of the dialectic of artistic creation and its historical moment.:

" To have known rock as something relatively contemptible during the decisive years of our intellectual growth and, on the other hand, to have had bossa nova as the soundtrack of rebellion signifies for Brazilians of my generation the right to imagine an ambitious intervention in the future of the world, a right that immediately begins to be lived as a duty." Verdade Tropical, P 31.

However, the common experience in the years post 1964 was of an annulment of past hope, and of a rising cost, both moral, social and personal, and  a spreading despair and sense of defeat throughout the continent. Against which Salvador Allende President of Chile stood as the only light, but equally as a terrible affront to the dominant world view ideology. "Be more Brazilian" the Chilean military were told and so they became, and out went the light except for Bossa Nova.

FALL. Imprisonment, complicity and contradiction, primal fear and secondary ambivalence, and a desire for a politics more palatable and simple, and more melodious and romantic: I was free of the ties of traditional politics, but - nas caixas registrados (‘at the cash registers’) was being drawn deeper and deeper into the sticky web of the pop wrapping market.

EXILE. 'Normalization' came to Brazil two decades later in the 1990’s, and I was broadening and diversifying myself too, with mocking notes of ‘realignment’ including an interest in self-development, and a capacity for carnivalesque confusion (a new kind of opposition in which protest could sell as well as baked beans), and for scandalous but harmless performance which was less risky than it appeared.

"The soldiers barely paid me my mind: I was moving against the flow of students, my course a tangent, in fact, to the eye of the storm."

MEMOIR. Caetano Veloso returned to Brazil in 1972 at the height of the dictatorship to play at the Carnival in Bahia and was not arrested again. Commenting more than twenty years later on the famous popular song ‘That Embrace’ which Gilberto Gil had written going into exile himself, Veloso wrote:

"that it was, in this sense, the opposite of my state of mind, and even in such a condition, from the depths of my depression, I knew this was the only way to keep going without being overrun."

Verdade Tropical. P 266-7

 [1.]

Verdade Tropical

NLR 75 (May June 2012) P. 89-117 – from an essay (tr Nicholas Caistor): ‘Verdade Tropical: um percurso de nosso tempo’ by Roberto Schwarz, one of Brazil's leading literary contemporary critics and writers, published in  Martinha versus Lucrecia: Ensaios e entrevistas. Sao Paulo 2012.

The quotations of Caetano Veloso are taken from his book Verdade Tropical. Sao Paulo 1997 (published in English as Tropical Truth: a story of Music and Revolution in Brazil. New York, 2002.)

It was the artist Helio Oitica, who, at a meeting in the late 1960’s following which Veloso was arrested, painted a banner with the words ‘Be marginal, Be a hero’. The words were intended for a bandit, now long forgotten, who the police had killed.

Will you be requiring anaesthetic? (ak)

Will you be requiring anaesthetic? He’s asking me whether I shall be requiring anaesthetic! Yes, I will definitely be requiring anaesthetic. Would I survive without anaesthetic? The shock. The pain.

 

    A thought sidled into my brain: bargains can be problematic. And a further thought in the form of a question: was this the moment to bail out? Then there was a third internal event: a memory of the voice on the telephone implying (what was implied and what was made explicit – what were the actual words?) something about cancellation fees. The fourth internal event was a physiological reaction: a sudden deathly chill and at the same time beads of sweat burst out of every pore on every square centimetre of my skin.

 

    I hadn’t told anybody about what I was doing: the alarming visit to my GP; my feverish internet research; my default antipathy to the socialised medicine of the NHS; the celebratory dinner after it was all done; my speech about the glories and the necessity of privatisation of the wasteful health services.

 

    A hasty exit through the window was looking very attractive together with the consequent hasty exit from this life that somehow or other had suddenly become very problematic.

 

Olympic Surgery (ak)

Scrunched up, squeezed against the window, not much room to breathe, writing haphazardly in the miniscule notebook with a pencil that would soon be impossible to write with: one and a half inches of hopeless innuendo, mounds of oxymorons, overspiced, overseasoned and the coffee like dishwater. Not that we see dishwater much these days given that all of us (well, almost all of us) have invested in the labour saving delights of a dishwasher. All unpleasantness (like dishwater) is rendered invisible.

 

    Pushed into a corner, trying to remember first times and first lines, trying to make a fresh start, trying to remember the headings, trying to remember the excitement of a week or ten days ago . . . what was it like to be caught in Olympic hysteria, amazed at our propensity for tears.

 

    So I was surprised, not to say disappointed with my first glimpse of him. Seedy might well be the word; his patchily shaved jowls, his tieless shirt, his gravy stained suit, his gaping trainers, and why not mention his thinning hair and scalp dotted with livid pustules and several acres of dead skin. I thought: betting shop. I thought: pub held in a 1951 time warp. I thought: permanent austerity.

 

    There was something suggestive in the still spinning chair of his secretary, assistant, wife, partner – though perhaps not even a woman; the habit of my assumptions prejudicing my judgement, clouding the ecological and emotional realities of personnel and micro-politics. There has been much talk of assassins recently but this did not seem to be the scene for a sniper, rather the bloody mess of a demented machete attack. Out of control. But I have to accept the immediate evidence that there is neither murderer nor victim.

 

    And besides I had been acting on the understanding that I was about to meet a surgeon who was cut-price enough for my needs and wishes. When the price of an admittedly complex procedure is available for £20.00 cash instead of £20.000 on the credit card then I think we are all agreed that privatising the health service was a good thing.

 

    Triple by-pass – no problem: in and out in an afternoon. They will hardly miss me on the trading floor of Barclays. After all, a bargain is a bargain.

 

    He attempted to straighten himself, to lengthen his spine, to unwind himself from whatever traumas he had recently been put through.

 

    Mr. Thoroughgood? I asked, pushing for confidence and brushing aside any doubts that might have surfaced in my mind. If one is going to believe in privatisation then one has to behave appropriately. As Perry was recently telling us: “An ideology, to be effective, must always in some measure answer to reality.” This was reality and I was really here.

 

     He nodded and forced his mouth into a sickly grin:  do you have the cash? His head wavered as though unsure whether to nod affirmatively or shake despondently.

     But come on, lighten up, that was his problem.

 

An Intelligence Report is Received TEXT (mmj)

Miss Hayek.

Is that really our OUTLAW’s name?

So a piece of intelligence suggests.

Reliable?

In the territory of contagious fiction and contested fact in which we have to operate we learn to doubt everything we hear.

But not to forget?

No, we remember everything. That is what we are here to do.

But I find it hard to credit that Missy Sniper is called Hayek.

It does at least suggest she is from abroad.

Yes, there is that to be said for a continental name.

After Friedrich* perhaps, or should I say Frederick.

[* The Road to Serfdom , Hayek’s most popular work, was first published in Britain in 1944. It went on to sell over 2 million copies, and Readers Digest published an abridged version. The central purpose of its ideological discourse was to show Fascism as an example of the "tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning."]

Shall we say Frederica?

Strange how things get turned round.

Such as those Generals Medici and Geisel having to stiffen up the Chilean military for the job in 1973.

Be more Brazilian.

And the days we live in now, who would have thought it: our OUTLAW Frederica.

Meaning?

l had imagined her as the avenging Angel of History from the radical tradition of the Left, but now it seems Frederica may be more of the Right.

Strange how things get turned round.

Being more Brazilian

Major Catastrophe ARCHIVE (mmj)

Where is there Hope? …As an extension of thinking about unintended consequences: regarding the possibilities of a global-scale disaster it is funny how our minds run towards something external, extra-terrestrial and improbable like a giant asteroid hitting the earth, rather than something more local and immediately realisable, but too grim to consider because we never meant it to happen and it seems to darken all hope.

The 'play' Ten Billion has just ended its very successful run at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The work was written by Katie Mitchell and Stephen Emmett, who is also the sole 'actor’. Why ‘play’ and ‘actor’ in inverted commas? It is as much a professorial lecture as a piece of theatre, as Stephen Emmett is a professor of computational science at Oxford University and also head of Microsoft's Computational Science laboratory in Cambridge.

So expect to see him on your TV screen and in a cinema near you soon: Ten billion is the number we are heading for, the predicted size of the human world population this century, and Emmett's case in the ‘play’ is the ecological cost of so many lives - that we are already "too many".

I went to the UN Environmental Yearbook 2012 to remind myself what the headings for the main ecological costs are. Here is the list:

1. Ozone Layer depletion (Hey, this is the Good News story of the last decade!)

2. Climate Change

3. Natural Resource exhaustion and Biodiversity losses on both Land and Sea: oil, metals, forest cover (etc); fish, fowl and fue (etc); and glacier melt (etc, etc)

4. Fresh Water and Sanitation: including 'water footprint' imbalances

5. Waste and Pollution: chemical, municipal, plastics (etc)

6. Environmental Governance: clean energy policies, carbon trading, product certification (etc)

There is a Good News / Bad News balance, but overwhelmingly it is Bad News.

The UN Yearbook is not permitted to name the "OVERPOPULATION" elephant in the room, nor to explore what will happen when the total human population exceeds its resource base. Stephen Emmett is willing to name it however. His cool computational professorial calculation is the tragic ‘play' - this major catastrophe not of the abrupt kind like an asteroid kind more like slow motion - and his conclusion is that Ten Billion is too many: " In truth, I think we are already fucked", he says.

He also says that he has been told by his science colleagues that at climate conferences these days you will tend to see more senior army offices, and he passes on the advice he received from one scientific colleague about what to tell the next generation: "Teach your son how to use a gun."

I read all this in last Sunday's Observer, and went online to look at the reactions to the article in the comments section. Among the c 200 (and climbing) comments most wanted to play with their calculators arguing over the climate change data, and most of the heat of the argumant was in the to and fro was between climate change sceptics and apocalyptic doom-sayers.

However, there was one notable exception, the comment by JBowers (12 August 1:46am… perhaps he keeps late hours) who focused on the particular connections between climate change and conflict. It is worth digging down the comments section especially to follow the references he provides: I found the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2009) paper 'A Brief History of Climate Change and Conflict' particularly telling among them.

The question remains… for if Professor Emmett is right, and we have we have already stepped irreversibly across the threshold of "too many", the computational calculation is that we may as well abandon the democratic processes towards a political economy of Degrowth, give up on global governance measures, and drop our personal commitments to carbon use reduction, and go and check our gun cupboards... "Must we also abandon Hope, all you who enter here?"

Greater Grounds for Hope DIALOGUE (mmj)

More from: el Imperio de los Suenos by Giannina Braschi

En el último piso del Empire State se ha parado un pastor a cantar y a bailar. Qué cosa más grande. Que la ciudad de Nueva York haya sido invadida por tantos pastores. Que ya no se trabaja y que sólo se canta y se baila. Y que los periódicos, el New York Times, en titulares, y el Daily News griten: Nueva York. Nueva York. Nueva York. Escúchenlo. Óiganlo en la radio. Y en la televisión. Escuchen el altoparlante. Escúchenlo. Ya han muerto los fantoches. Y el soldadito de plomo. Los pastores han invadido a Nueva York. Han conquistado a Nueva York. Han colonizado a Nueva York. El especial del día en el restaurante más caro de Nueva York es bellota de oro. Es huevo. Es manzana. Es pájaro. Pescado. Melodía. Poesía. Y epigrama. Ya sólo se canta. Ya sólo se baila. Ya sólo se hace lo que nos da la real gana. Lo que nos da la real gana. Lo que nos da la realísma gana.

On the top floor of the Empire State a shepherd has stood up to sing and dance. What a wonderful thing. That New York City has been invaded by so many shepherds. That work has stopped and there is only singing and dancing. And that the newspapers—the New York Times, in headlines, and the Daily News—call out: New York. New York. New York. Listen to it. Hear it on the radio. And on television. Listen to the loudspeakers. Listen to it. The buffoons have died. And the little lead soldier. Shepherds have invaded New York. They have conquered New York. They have colonized New York. The special of the day in New York’s most expensive restaurant is golden acorn. It’s an egg. It’s an apple. It’s a bird. Fish. Melody. Poetry. And epigram. Now there is only song. Now there is only dance. Now we do whatever we please. Whatever we please. Whatever we damn well please.

What was it I came here to do? (ak)

Let's check this out. Let's check the arithmetic of memory. I was getting older but there was still (I estimated) plenty of time left, barring accidents and those well known Acts of God or plain and simple murder, come to that. The brief time of innocence between forgetting about nuclear weapons and the advent of global warming had just given us the window of opportunity to launch an attack on the unsuspecting world; heads in the clouds, feet barely touching the the wild flowers in the meadows.

    Fast forward to some time that might or might not be the present, limping along in a desultory fashion; a result of varieties of conflict and trauma, cynical but still raising the standard of hope. Crawling out of bed, aware that we are not going to do anything very much about anything until it becomes a major catastrophe, such as the iconic asteroid that threatens to bring life on Earth to an abrupt end. Come on, get real – it would not be politically expedient. Instead we have been given a gift: Buffoon Boris. We will elect him to oversee our final apotheosis. The process might well be dialectical: Buffoon Boris's apotheosis but BUT our nemesis. Even if we didn't vote for the Billy Bunter raiding the tuck shop lookalike. Was our collective act one of hubris? Of course I'm getting mixed up in my tenses; suggesting an act in the past when some might feel it belongs in the future. But the confusion of tenses is appropriate because the damage has already been done. It happened when I was asleep.

    Dreaming, in fact, of something very different; the sweep of brushstroke that has picked up the energy of the centre, pulling it towards the periphery but then surprisingly executing the most exquisite curve and leading us back to the centre. Or at least that is apparently what is happening. Is that Greedy Guts hanging helplessly from the centre?

    The question remains: how do we find our way our of the Hayek maze of wondrous hallucinations? Can we sidestep the dazed bankers, the shell shocked monkeys from News Corp facing criminal charges?

    Or another question: how to support and help democracy to evolve? Rather than, in our sense of powerlessness we opt out of democratic struggle even at the basic level of voting. Was it somebody writing in the Daily Telegraph who accused Danny Boyle of sneaking a Marxist analysis into the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics?

    We all have to fight our way into the future. Even if the advantages and disadvantages handed out are so weighted in certain socially conditioned ways. But at the same time we have to work out what happened yesterday in the face of rampant amnesia and varieties of dementia. We, obviously cannot see the myths that currently construct our thinking, not until they are broken and burning on the bonfire of the yesterday's vanities.

    Missy Sniper is a version of the Republican/Tea Party/NRA fantasy: it can all be sorted out at the end of a gun. Just make sure YOU are the one with the finger on the trigger. Don't let those other buggers get their fingers in on the act. WE CAN BE TRUSTED (oh yeah!) THEY CAN'T. Let's hear it for Pussy Riot. Dancing in the cathedral and offering a prayer for the demise of Vlad Putin. Well why not? What's the problem?

Missy Sniper TEXT (mmj)

A small problem has arisen, Sir.

What is it?

I don't think it will take us long to iron out, but it seems our OUTLAW has selected the wrong targets.

What do you mean wrong, surely whoever she chooses it is up to her, That is the whole point.

Yes, but in this case, it could have unfortunate results.

Go on.

It is not required that the OUTLAW names he rtargets in advance, but she is at liberty to do so. Missy Sniper has chosen to by placing a small advertisement in the Daily Mail. See here it is next to the large advertisement on breast implants.

Read it to me, I have not got my glasses on. 

"OUTLAW Missy Sniper has selected this year’s victims and wishes to name them. They are:
- E L James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey
- Catherine Hakim, author of Honey Money: the Power of Erotic Capital"

So what?

Her choice of two women targets is not what we had hoped for.

No, you are right. We were expecting at least one man, and hopefully a banker.

It could be a hoax.

Do you think so?

Could be. Her little joke, putting a bit of fear and confusion out there.

Is she the joking sort? What do we know about our OUTLAW?

We know very little, only that she is young, probably 18 to 21, a student, and of course female.

What do you know about the colour of her shoes?

Sorry Sir.

The colour of her shoes; are they red?

I am rather inclined to think they are a dingy colour, brown, or something like that.

Because of her choice of target?

Yes.

But we could be so wrong.

Can Bodies be Made to Disappear? DIALOGUE (mmj)

"Blowbank" is a word sometimes used by the CIA to describe unintended or unforeseen bad consequences which result from interventions by the firm. It may have been first used in the 1970’s when referring to the Iranian revolution "blowback" from the CIA organised coup in 1953 against Muhammad Mossadeagh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, or again during the days and weeks after September 11 2011.

But by all accounts*, the CIA supported (but ‘no smoking gun’) coup in 1973 lead by General Pinochet against Salvador Allende the democratically elected president of Chile was judged an unqualified success ‘telescoping’ history.

*Peter Kornbluh. The Pinochet File (2003) / Chris Marker. L’Ambassade (1973)

"Be more Brazilian," She  had shouted with others at the Chilean military in the months and years after Allende’s election in 1970, "Stiffen yourself up!"

Strange juxtapositions: while I am lost along with the rest of this misty isle in Limpo-Limpo land these two weeks and oblivious to all other world events unfolding round about, looking at the television picture of a rather smart looking man on a horse with a long Brazilian name reminded me that the next Olympics in 2016 will take place in Rio de Janeiro, a city which I last visited and was staying in on THE 11 September 1973.

The 1973 date burns deeper in my heart than the more recent one, the "Blowback" of 2001 in New York, because the date of Allende’s violent death coincided so closely with the violent death of my own elder brother. That late summer both Allende and my brother disappeared from view, and it did not feel safe to shed tears in Brazil. I do however remember how hot it was in Rio, and also I now recall buying a Rio or national daily newspaper in Rio, I expect it was the 12th or 13th of September, which had a front page filled with a dark grainy photograph of swirling clouds of smoke billowing from the burning presidential palace, in which it was reported that Allende had shot himself rather than surrender to the armed forces of the coup.

Brought back to mind reading the LRB - (Vol 34) 14. 19th July 2012 - review of Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War by Tanya Harmer (2011) North Carolina; Harmer writes that "Chilean military leaders were not Brazilian enough, either in terms of their readiness for repressing the left or in their ideological sense of mission." (The mission was to create authoritarian rule in the image of Brazil, whose president in 1973 was (General) Emilio Garrastazu Medici.)

All this was further brought home to me under the next president of Brazil (General) Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), to whom I was presented personally in 1976. It was during that hot summer as I recall that the president of Brazil paid a state visit to the United Kingdom, both attending state banquets in his honour, and visiting the Lord Mayor of London at the Guildhall where I formed part of a Guard of Honour. We were a rather sloppy and unmilitary troop of reservists from the City of London’s 'Regiment of Guards’, the Honourable Artillery Company, and our commanding officer was no better, marching us into a wall in front of the waiting Brazilian president before we presented arms for his inspection. I recall a dark-suited late middle-aged man with jowls and glasses passing up and down our ranks, and thinking him not unlike the photographs of Salvador Allende even as my stiff unmoving glance lost sight of him, his presence reminding me once again how it was still not safe to show ones feelings nor to grieve over the loss any brother in the bipolar ideological world of Kissinger and Friedman, against which the electoral success of Allende’s Popular Unity party in 1970 on a programme of non-revolutionary social democracy that respected the role of legislature, the courts and the media, was such an affront, and required the repeated applications of Brazilian "shock treatment", and repetition of the new Commandment:

"Do Not Kill; except when there is no other way to pursue your happiness".