After that nightmare of upgrading this site to MT 3.2 where they'd fixed all the little bugs that I'd previously assumed were how things worked and have provided the most complex default templates ever css-wise and a comments structure that needs some serious meditation to get your head around (and still isn't working on the Linklog and Podcast sections), well, I'm kinda at a loss for something to write about that isn't fucking tedious and boring. Actually, I probably will write about this experience soon but only once I've figured out a way to make it interesting. I think I've got the angle but it needs work.
Anyway, today was a return to Moseley for the first time since the tornado last month. It was kinda weird in that there's still a lot of scarring - trees roughly butchered back, roofs still half-tiled and workmen absolutely everywhere - but otherwise quite normal.
I was there for some post-tornado work myself. Jez and Nat were replacing their fence which had be crushed by a big tree and since I painted it last year it made a perverse kinda of sense for me to paint it again. Plus I'm absurdly available for odd-jobs at the moment.
It being a stunningly lovely day it was really good to be out in the sun getting mucky again. I miss these kind of jobs. I occasionally think about moving the huge pile of bricks at the end of the drive a few feet to the left just for the hell of it and then moving them back to the right the next day. I wonder if this constitutes a problem.
In the pub on Saturday, along with demanding the right to punch old ladies who let their dogs shit on the pavement (with the wonderful mental image of his dog Badger "sweating bullets" because he's been trained not to shit while on a lead), Jez had talked about "contributing to the hobby deficit" or something which seems to be related to the mass of niche things that have proliferated in this country of late. Stuff like Carp Fishing magazines in high street shops and model railway museums. When he mentioned today he was still thinking about it, it occured to me that if this is a proliferation it's might be because people, probably men mainly, don't tend to have a speciality any more regarding their jobs, or at least not one they care about. If you're some office drone entering data and processing invoices you may well have a desire to actually be good at something interesting, like driving a train or building furniture. So you have a hobby and get really really good at it.
Oddly enough I had a similar conversation with an old flatmate years ago about how, he theorised, hobbies were part of an ancient initiation right for boys who hadn't made their first kill yet. Once your hunt an ox or kill an enemy then you're accepted as an adult in the tribe. Before that you're missing a purpose so you get really really good at something relatively inconsequential, like football statistics or comic book artists. Since we have a lot of blokes doing boring jobs they don't care about which don't give them the same sense of purpose as hunting an ox... Hey, I've just discovered the origins for the rise of the adultescent!
Someone, I think it was the professional fence-putter-upper, say the phrase "mad as an ox" today. Do oxen get mad? I always thought of them as pretty docile creatures that pull things like wagons. Checking in the dictionary the term refers to a castrated bull, which explains why I can't remember ever seeing an on specifically. I'd just assumed they were docile bulls. Still, "mad as an ox" has a nice ring to it.
And then after painting it was over to ex-housemate Sam's new flat, also in Moseley, to set up their bemusing WiFi router, which I did. Go me! Now she and Charlie can comment on each others LiveJournals and IM each other from separate rooms. That flat will henceforth be referred to as the "House of Squeeee" for that is the kind of LJers they are...
In other news I haven't been reading any weblogs since Friday. No reason, but the catching up is getting a bit daunting (350 unread posts, not including linklogs). Hope everyone's okay.
I think I've got my blog back...
A couple of somewhat disparate articles got me thinking this morning. The first was a quite bad piece of journalism in The Times, Comic Contempt, which uses the film version of Sin City to paint all comics fans as woman hating losers. It's barely worth criticism and I was ready to just ignore it but then I read Martin Currybet's response to John Harris' piece in the Guardian attacking the very premise of the BBC's In Our Time's Greatest Philosophers Vote. At first Harris seems to be right - philosophy really doesn't lend itself to a popularity contest and there is something vaguely worrying about the BBC's obsession with lowest common denominator popular polls. But as Martin says, he's missing a somewhat critical point, possibly even making that most basic of philosophical mistakes - the category error (as always when I talk about such things I should add that it's been a long time since I studied philosophy and even then I didn't quite get it all straight). To quote Martin: "it isn't the vote that is key value here - but that the interactive web content will outlive the programme (even if you download the podcast of it). I think having an online resource gathering together academic argument on the significant contributions to thought of the twenty leading nominees is a useful thing for the BBC to be doing." For someone who is curious about philosophy but doesn't know where to start, such a resource would be very useful and would put them on the road to actually being able to read Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche or Popper without their brains exploding.
So, other than that one article is attacking the braining up of the dumb while the other the dumbing down of the brainy, what's the connection? It's something I'm seeing a lot of lately, not only in the mainstream media but across the opinion-obsessed sections of the bloggernet. The writer is annoyed by something and without really trying to understand it writes a piece that on the surface looks to be pretty solid. But because they haven't bothered to spend a few hours or days really thinking about it, their piece is no better than a rant - one person's opinion that preaches to the converted and makes them feel good about themselves while annoying the rest in such a way that actually backs up the opinion. "Of course they disagree! They're idiots!"
The philosophy angle is interesting because most of those major thinkers didn't actually write that much. A few books of note on the whole before an early death from syphilis after a life of isolated misanthropy tended to be the rule. They would spend months on one idea, thinking through every possible angle and taking it down to the most fundamental points. Hume famously spent a very long time pondering the existence of a shade of blue that he hadn't personally experienced which might seem daft but it was fundamental to his thinking about empiricism (again see previous disclaimer) while the great father of it all, Socrates, said "All I know is that I know nothing" and built up from there.
None of them were bashing out 1000 word articles every few days that asserted that they were right beyond all reasonable doubt, and yet that's what nearly every writer seems to be doing right now. It's very rare that you'll come across a piece of writing online or in a printed periodical that comes close to this sort of depth, mainly because it takes a very long time, would have a limited audience and doesn't pay well. On top of that, not being 100% certain about your opinions and beliefs is suicide in todays intellectual world. I'm longing for the day when someone in a position of power goes on Newsnight or Today and says "to be honest John/Jeremy, I really don't know the answer to that. I suspect it's a very complex issue that would require a lot of serious thought and even then any conclusions would be tentative" and for John/Jeremy to come back with "fair enough - we'll ask you again when you come back from your three month retreat".
Coming soon - why your opinion is worth shit, but that's not a problem as long as you realise that.
Armando Iannucci has a new TV program coming out soon so he's doing the rounds of the broadsheets being interviewed and writing those sorts of articles that people who have new TV shows or books or whatnot write, usually taking some aspect of modern life and taking a contrary position regarding it to make a biting comment on society.
Iannucci's effort in this circus, That's Enough Entertainment, Thanks, written for the Daily Telegraph, is not, as it happens, a bad piece. I was expecting some thin-brained expansion of a stand-up routine that I could easily demolish, but annoyingly, and to his credit, there is some good thinking hidden under the laffs here.
That said, he brings up something of a bugbear of mine - the horror of the overflowing iPod to illustrate the problem of choice fatigue.
"Having all music in their pocket, they find it more difficult to be entirely satisfied with the track they've chosen to listen to. The urge to flick is greater across multi-channel TV, not necessarily because the programmes are bad, but because logic dictates there has to be something even better somewhere else."
Now, I understand this. The problem with modern living in an affluent country like our own is that we have too much choice and we don't know how to process it. But I think there's something of Plato's cave going on here.
I'm a little rusty on the specifics but as I remember it Plato (or maybe it was Socrates via Plato) had this metaphor about how people deal with knowledge. Imagine a cave where someone is chained up so he can't move. All the can see is a blank wall onto which are projected shadow puppets animated by a flickering fire. As far as the chained victim in concerned this is reality because he can see nothing else. Everything about the world can be explained by him in terms of the shadows. Now, say the man is unchained and allowed to walk around the cave. He sees the static models and discovers how the fire animates them. And then he discovers the entrance to the cave and sees the outside world in all it's infinite glory. As I remember it (and it has been a good decade...) the man gets scared and chains himself back up.
But what bugs me about this is that we've been dealing with absurd quantities of choice for quite a while now. It's only since we've been able to accurately quantify it that people lose the ability to cope. My mum recently asked me that common question about the 11,000 mp3s on my computer that would run for 40 days non stop. "When do you find the time to listen to it all?" she exclaimed. I pointed out that thanks to her previous career as a singer and her partner's previous career as a conductor the mass of vinyl classical records they own was probably equivalent, not to mention the many shelves of sheet music and orchestral scores that line the spare bedroom. Does she look at this and wonder when they'll find the time to listen to it all? Does she realise that she'll probably never listen to a decent chunk of it ever again and dispose of it? Of course not. The fact that it's there and available should she want to is what's important.
Or to put it another way, you don't walk into a public library to which you have complete and unfettered access, and exclaim "how will I ever find the time to read all these books!"
I remember way back, circa 1992 or so, when the notion of "information as power" first came to me. I would keep newspaper articles and photocopy bits of information from the reference library about whatever it was I was fascinated by at the time. In retrospect I never actually did anything useful with all this information but I was convinced that in order to survive in this modern age the accumulation of information was vital. As the internet started to come into our imaginations this notion became more widespread. Imagine being able to access all the information in the world in seconds! People will become empowered! It'll be the dawn of a new age!
The problem is that people aren't trained to deal with all this stuff. They've suddenly been unchained from the cave where everything was black and white and have been thrust into this arena where you have to make critical judgments about everything you experience, and it is everything. It's no small wonder that many people just stick to a few forums or blogs and effectively ignore this wealth of wonder out there - it's just too much hard work to apply their critical faculties to all this new stuff. And that's not to say they're spoon-fed drones or anything, just that this is a quite different arena.
That said, I don't think the incessant quantification helps matters. The emphasis on choice implies that the user has to actively chose all the time from a range of options that no-body can deal with. Five thousand songs, 200 online newspapers, fifty millions online radio stations. Given this enormity you're more likely to stick to your FM radio and newsagent with the occasional trip to a small branch of HMV so you can get on with the more important aspects of being alive.
Seasoned web users figured out long ago that the only way to deal with the enormity of the web is to set it up so you don't have to be bothered. Either stick to your own niche or let others do the aggregating. Check your feeds and when you've read them all then that's it. Once the internet that you can be bothered with has run out, the other fifty-thousand billion pages might as well not exist. Keep everything in manageable packages the parameters of which you have specified otherwise your brain will explode and you'll never read anything.
So Iannucci is sort of right. Given the infinite amount of stuff out there it's pointless to pretend that you can experience it all, but I think it's wrong to not be bothered and just ignore it all. You just need to figure out the best way to filter it, and that way will be pretty unique to you.
But what really narks me about Iannucci's piece, the part where he's gone all glib-stand-up-routine, is that he can be bothered. The reason he never watched the Sorpranos and all the other "must-see" programs he lists is because he's busy making his own TV and radio shows. Since, by his argument, he's just adding to to the infinite pile of entertainment, what's the point? The point is that it's worth creating this stuff for the same reason it's worth seeking it out. Communication of ideas, be it entertainment or hardcore academia, is what makes us human.
There's quite a lot to all this. Probably a book's worth. Maybe if there's enough interest I'll try and expand on bits of it in future posts. Or maybe I won't bother.
When I got in from work yesterday Sam had been doing housework to get a bad day at school out of her system and said she was now going on strike in that particular department. Housework that is, not teaching. Fair enough. I haven't been pulling my weight with the hoovering, etc, but in my defense my approach to cleaning is similar to my approach to shaving.
I was quite a late developer when it came to facial hair and couldn't get away with a full beard until I was about 23, just patchy growth with no real definition. It was so pathetic I would shave in the shower with just soap and a weeks growth didn't show too badly. So shaving was not one of my major adolescent worries and never became a priority.
Now I'm a fully grown up 30-something person it still surprises me that I do grown a beard but thanks to my never having had a job which requires me to look 'smart' I've not had to worry about it too much. Generally I'll shave in the same way I'll wear a shirt and nice shoes, which is to say not that often. But I don't generally consider myself to have a beard per se, just a lack of shaving.
Over the summer I did grow what I'll concede was a beard but after three months of not shaving at all getting back into the routine was a bit odd. My usual system was to shave my whole head at once using my trusty clippers but this isn't strictly shaving and for some reason I now wanted to shave properly.
The thing is when I did shave I would use a blade, a long winded operation not best done quickly, so I started thinking about getting an electric razor and as if by magic one turned up on Xmas day. And this is where we get to the hoovering analogy. So I shave. The next day I look at my face and there's a bit of growth there but it'll pass. The day after, again, it's not that visible, at least not to me, so I don't bother. Three days in and there's too much for the electric razor to deal with quickly so I put it off. We're now a full week in and I have a beard that can only really be removed with a blade. And, for the time being at least, I can live with it.
(Though of course the parent who bought me the electric razor is going to read this so I'd better go shave now...)
