Review of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s posthumous The Broken Road. The Dabbler already published this but they edited it slightly. i don’t like my reviews on the whole – the tone irritates me, but there it is. Here’s the original:

There were an archbishop and several bishops and archimandrites besides the abbot and his retinue. They officiated in copes as stiff and brilliant as beetles’ wings, and the higher clergy, coiffed with globular gold mitres the size of pumpkins and glistening with gems, leaned on croziers topped with twin coiling snakes. They evolved and chanted in aromatic clouds of smoke diagonally pierced by sun shafts. When all was over, a compact crocodile of votaries shuffled its way round the church to kiss St Ivan’s ikon and his thaumaturgic hand, black now as a briar root, inside its jewelled reliquary.

That’s right bitches, daddy’s back. Beyond the grave, Patrick Leigh Fermor continues to explore and write. And rejoice: his posthumous Broken Road is as good as its predecessors. Briefly, the 18-year-old hobbit left the Shire in 1933, electing to walk through the wilds east and south to Constantinople. Why? For adventure, that which had impelled Bilbo Baggins to venture out at almost the same time. There is something distinctly English about Fermor, falling into the camp of Tolkien’s adventuring hobbits, or the Countess of Ranfurly. For Tolkien, stolid hobbits (Englishmen of the type who rarely exist now) will tend to spontaneously develop a taste for adventures, for the undiscovered road. Tolkien takes it so much for granted that re-reading him in 2001 I felt I was missing something. Fermor completes some of the picture. Despite the generational gap, both men write from a similar culture, that of the eccentric, wilful, partly pagan, partly Christian English upper middle class of the early to mid 20^th Century. These are men of high education with a relish for hardship and exploration, for new languages, for difficulty and danger; men with an absolute loathing for totalitarianism, whether Nazi or Communist – hence, men utterly at odds with the modern world.

In the two prequels, Fermor has already tramped from Holland, through an early Nazi Germany, across Hungary and Transylvania and up to the Iron Gates. He now continues through Rumania, Bulgaria, and Greece. There are no Nazgül in sight but they are very much in the background, in the form first of Nazism then of Communism. For unlike The Lord of the Rings, there is no eventually happy ending – one could say, in the lands Fermor treads, Sauron was defeated but Saruman ascended to take his place with equal tyranny:

Obviously, I had little grasp of what the war entailed and still less prophetic flair, for when I set off for England in September 1939 to join the army, I left all my books and papers in this house in Moravia. I had planned to return there when the war was over. But when the war ended, this house, like most of the places in this narrative, was out of bounds beyond the Iron Curtain. It had been smitten by fire and earthquake and its inhabitants scattered, imprisoned and driven from their homes – but, alas, not over the frontiers of Rumania into the free world.

Fermor is careful to disguise the identities of those who sheltered him in the later Soviet domains, for fear of Communist reprisals. The trilogy derives a certain poignancy from its Alan Furstian setting: mainland Europe in the 30s, soon to go up in the flames of Nazism then Communism.

We are always aware of the layerings of history (war) as Fermor crosses borders and learns languages. The fervour of nationalist hatreds would be odd in England, at least when being an island had some protective significance; but hatred seems the norm in 1930s Eastern Europe, as Fermor’s acquaintances roar with applause at the latest political assassination and assure him that whatever country he’s just come from is full of bad men and monsters. Reading this, I realise how apt was Tolkien’s vision of England as the Shire – a place set apart and warded from the brutality and chaos of the rest of the world. Fermor, naturally, is gentlemanly about it; for one thing, he’s a stranger here, a ranger tramping the moors. There are many Tolkien-esque scrapes where he nearly dies after falling down a mountain and what not:

There was no question of spending the night in the pass, as a fast and biting wind was sweeping across it. There was neither shelter nor cover. It was bleak as a desert. After walking a couple of miles I espied with joy a wayside house in the rising moonshine. My approach unleashed a frenzy of barking from a white sheepdog. As I reached the front door, the line of light went out under the shutters. I knocked on the door and the shutter, explaining myself in Bulgarian as lame as my foot. ‘I am an English traveller, my foot is bad. There is a big cold wind (gulemo studeno). May I come in please?’ I could hear whispers indoors where there had been talk before; then there was silence, except for the barking and snarling of this slavering hell-hound only a few precarious feet away. The repetition of my dismal litany gradually lost all conviction. At last when all hope had drained away, I lurched on northwards and downhill, swearing, comminating and shouting aloud, blinded with tears of fury and frustration.

Later, he nearly dies of cold and exhaustion before stumbling upon a fireside cave. Here, he is revived by a party of sailors and shepherds:

They were a wild-looking lot. Six of them were dressed in the customary heavy, homespun earth-brown or dark blue, but so parched and tattered that it was hard to distinguish the parent colour, and shod in the usual crusted apparatus of swaddles and thongs and canoe-tipped rawhide moccasins, one of which looked as if it had been abraded for several decades. Knives were stuck into their voluminous scarlet sashes, and they were hatted like me, in battered and threadbare busbies that had moulted most of their fur. An old man with a tangled white beard seemed to be the dominating figure. A second group of four wore more ordinary clothes, though equally patched and worn, and blue jerseys pocked with holes. Ancient sailors’ caps with once-shiny peaks were askew on their matted hair. They all of them looked exactly what they were: shepherds and seamen.

I was reminded of Tolkien’s The Window on the West chapter, with the hobbits seized then succoured by the rangers of Gondor. And as with the hobbits, Fermor alternates between nearly dying in the wild, trying his luck with the peasants, and being lavishly hosted by the gentry; some of the pleasure of the book comes from these extremes; so here he lodges with a diplomat:

No greater solace in a strange capital, after rough or irregular travel, can be compared to staying in a bachelor diplomatist’s flat (though some archaeologists run them close), especially if they are as hospitable and welcoming as my present host. (‘Please get at all these,’ with a wave towards huge cigarette boxes and a glittering drinks table, ‘we get them practically free. Do for heaven’s sake smoke those cigars, too. I don’t know what to do with them all, and please tell Maria if you want anything – any washing, luncheon – she gets depressed if there’s nothing to do…’) Empty all day, it was the dreamed-of refuge for writing and reading, encyclopaedias piling up on divans in warm rooms overlooking the autumn leaves of the quiet street.

Pleasing that Fermor alternates between getting drunk, learning languages, and reading in joyous isolation; later, Fermor reads Byron for hours in Greek monasteries before heading out again into the nearly-uninhabited wild. After tramping about for months, our hobbit becomes half-ranger, a creature of the wild:

I put down the large basket of figs I had bought as a present to my hosts – and a tortoise I had found by the roadside – and let myself into the Tollintons’ flat as the cathedral of Alexander Nevsky tolled eleven. The soft lamplight, afloat with the civilized murmur of a dinner party, revealed a shirt front in an armchair here and there, the glint of patent leather shoes, women’s long dresses, and golden discs of brandy revolving in the bottom of balloon glasses. The coffee pouring from the spout to cup in the hands of Ivan, the giant Cossack butler, dried up in mid-trajectory, the golden discs, arrested by this horrible intruding apparition, stopped rotating in their balloon glasses. A moment of consternation on one side, dismay on the other, froze all. It was quickly thawed by Judith Tollinton’s kind voice – ‘Oh good, there you are, just in time for the brandy’ – and the spell was broken.”

This is pure Countess of Ranfurly; far from the presently fashionable image of the British upper classes as terrible class-bound fascist snobs who demand everyone be in evening dress and no backtalk from the servants. Fermor is just one of the many British middle-upper class who moved freely from world to world, belonging in all, though he is apt to seem a little startling when he turns up after months on the road.

I was reminded of Tolkien’s rangers; their silent service protects the Shire from the East; and they periodically turn up in civilised lands to smoke a pipe:

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seem much wear and were now caved with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.

 ’Who is that?’ Frodo asked, when he got a chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. ‘I don’t think you introduced him?’

‘Him?’ said the landlord in an answering whisper, cocking an eye without turning his head. ‘I don’t rightly know. He is one of the wandering folk – Rangers we call them. He seldom talks: not but what he can tell a rare tale when he has the mind. He disappears for a month, or a year, and then he pops up again. He was in and out pretty often last spring; but I haven’t seen him about lately. What his right name is I’ve never heard: but he’s known round here as Strider. Goes about here at a great pace on his long shanks; though he don’t tell nobody what cause he has to hurry.

One could see Fermor as slowly turning into one of these disreputable rangers. As with Tolkien – in real life and in his books – an adventurous hobbit is apt also for espionage. And so, one should not be too surprised if Tolkien was more than a don and author, nor that Fermor worked for SOE in the war, gadding about kidnapping Nazi Generals.

Fermor’s book is intensely concerned with the detail of human life, with that which makes life vivid and worthy of being, with that which should be protected from totalitarianism. Value is not to be found in large gestures and speeches, but – as in Tolkien – in small things, in little acts of decency, in simple hospitality, in the pleasures of food and drink and poetry and tobacco:

Delving in the bottom of my rucksack for the A Shropshire Lad my mother gave me last birthday, I found an envelope full of Capstan Navy Cut. This was a real find, and getting out my best pipe (unsmoked for nearly a month) I stuffed it full and set it alight. I’m sure the good God never breathed incense with more delight than I felt then. Pipe tobacco, after a month’s cigarette smoking, is an ecstasy too deep for words.

What better way to remember Fermor, the ranger of old Europe, the magician of words and observation? For he is dead and no doubt smoking a pipe in Valhalla with Gandalf and Strider:

‘I know what is the matter with me,’ he muttered, as he sat down by the door. ‘I need smoke! I have not tasted it since the morning before the snowstorm.’

The last thing that Pippin saw, as sleep took him, was a dark glimpse of the old wizard huddled on the floor, shielding a glowing chip in his gnarled hands between his knees. The flicker for a moment showed his sharp nose, and the puff of smoke.

1. It’s approaching midnight after a 12 hour working day. Today, a neurotic power frau type quit my Tuesday evening class for good and i was giddy with joy, hugging myself in the deserted McLingua centre at 2045, gibbering: “i never have to see her again!” She was actually an okay student – keen, talkative, with a good memory; but after every class she sent huge emails to my boss, complaining that she wasn’t improving (this after the first lesson). In class she was timid and weird, afraid of eye contact, veering from sudden uncomfortable silences to almost hysterical rants. i accepted this, as many of my students are abnormal (German); but eventually i came to see her as a filthy Judas and all-round glasses-wearing-Bosche.

Many people wear glasses. She was one of these people who hide behind their lenses; the glass seems to act as a kind of mask, allowing whatever is really there to recede into the far distance. Like most such folk, she had the look of a crustacean ripped from its shell and left to twitch on the rock, poked at by children. Glasses were, for her, some kind of armour.

i feel something of this as soon as i put my glasses on when other people are around – a sense of insidious discomfort, an inability to read others, to respond, to exert my will. This goes so far that i can’t walk through crowds while wearing my glasses: i bump into people, misjudge distances and trajectories. Without my glasses i can usually walk at speed, picking a path through the shambling Bosche without thought. For a while i thought it was to do with peripheral vision, but then i realised i can’t read students’ moods with my glasses on, that i feel wooden, false, artificial, as removed from the present as if experiencing it on a computer screen. It’s possible that my brain just got used to the signals it gets from my mismatched eyes (one is short-sighted, the other long-) and can’t manage certain tasks without this accustomed input. However, i think there’s also some kind of connection between the eyes and how i sense others, and how i exert my will.

2. One could say that society rewards those who can don masks at will, those who can do so without unease. i can and do have a professional demeanour but it’s generally a modulated form of whatever i really am. This modulation has a fairly narrow range; so i can teach almost anyone who isn’t actively rebellious, but could never do some of the jobs suffered by my students, putting up with initiatives & grand new strategies & whatnot every day. i think the difference here is that my professional mask isn’t fake – it’s just a way of presenting my self, in order to do my job. It’s not my complete self but nor is it a lie. And for many jobs it seems necessary to project total enthusiasm into totally false personae – not in order to do the job, but in order not to be fired.

3. i dare say all cultures have always rewarded this spinelessness, but ours seems more pervasively rotten. Speaking of spines, i came across an old blogging associate’s newish site, and have been slowly reading through the archives:

Beckham, of course, will apparently sell anything, however tangential it might be to his footballing career. He is refashioning himself as the male modern Britannia, a symbol of Britishness. And Beckham is certainly the perfect fit for this modern Britain. He embodies our culture because he is the ultimate vessel: good looking but empty, devoid of much significance but capable of being filled with any corporate message. He is so boring and bland he can advertise anything that doesn’t require him to open his mouth. Indeed, his horrible nasal whine is to his benefit because it means that he can spend his time brooding in ads with his white teeth and rank ugly tattoos, the golden boy of a gelded generation. He is the Cadbury Creme Egg of celebrities; just an empty impotent shell of sugary milk chocolate. One size fits all. Just slip a nozzle up his arse and fill him with whatever different coloured fondant meaning we want this week.

and

I sometimes think that the worst thing you could be in these enlightened days is a white, heterosexual male stuck in a no-name northern town and not suffering from any serious but TV-friendly disability.

We’re both northerners and not very good at the donning of masks for profit. For fun, yes; for apple polishing or friend-winning, no. i had the good fortune to meet the Spine blogger back in Manchester about 5 years ago. We’re very different, physically and emotionally; but there’s a shared loathing of the Big Time, and a strong aversion to being stone broke & miserable.

4. i escaped my brokeness by escaping England. i’m still financially unstable but i like my job most of the time, am somehow & oddly appreciated, and have a sense of being on roughly the right path, after years of misery. There are occasional revelations. Pipes  – i began smoking after Juniper gifted me two of her grandfather’s pipes and i decided to try them out. It took ages to figure out how to pack the tobacco so it stays lit longer than 2 seconds, but once i’d half-mastered that i found it an intriguing & satisfying activity. i now take a pipe to work when i have a break long enough to go out onto the McLingua terrace & smoke while striding majestically about, glowering at the Munich skyline. There are such grandiose pleasures to be had; yet the core of it is as simple & physical as drinking tea or stretching, as little amenable to bullshit & mask-donning.

For a while i carried a pipe in a little pouch inside my bag, then decided to spend some of my hard-earned coin on something fancy. So, my pipe transportation, bought from Al Pascia:

5. i spend quite a lot of time watching pipe videos on youtube, for example this or this. Pipe smokers often talk about the satisfaction of smoking. i’ve started to feel this odd sense of well-being – it may be partly to do with a mild nicotine release, but i think it’s mainly the connection with simple physicality, through familiar, individual tools: a good pipe, the right tobacco, the right flame. It’s to do with choosing tools, learning their ways, and using them well. The strange transmutation of plant and flame into controlled smoke and taste, in the vessel of wood – and then the body of the smoker himself becoming part of this in breath – all this is something to be experienced, not talked about too much – because it makes no sense, you just have to accept that it feels good, and in the words of Platoon’s Elias, feeling good’s good enough.

just another day in Bavaria

1. i’ve been taking great delight in Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes. He has an overwhelming, inscrutable strangeness which could as easily go for Moriarty.

i feel this is essential to Brett’s Holmes – a coldness, lack of apparent compassion, lack indeed of any ordinary humanity. The character could as easily be a villain: that is part of his power. It’s an odd thing that the great villains of cinema – Brando’s Kurtz, Brian Cox’s Dr Lecter, De Niro’s Jimmy Conway, Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth, Daniel Day-Lewis’ Bill the Butcher, Tom Berenger’s Sgt Barnes, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, Henry Fonda’s Frank, Christopher Walken’s Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan, Javier Barden’s Anton Chigurh – often seem strangely more authoritative, stronger, than the heroes. Goeth, Logan, Bill the Butcher, Magneto, and Sgt Barnes are clearly unstable, barely kept in balance by acts of frequent rage, but all the same they outshine all the other characters.

Power is inherently sinister, because it comes from a reality beyond the mundane, the safe, the ordinary. That doesn’t make it, or its wielders, malign – but they will tend to seem so. Even Christ, if you actually read the Gospels, is far from the smiling Sunday School John Lennon fantasy of modern Christianity; he is, rather, inscrutable, unpredictable, given to irony and pessimism and frequent coldness.

This is perhaps one reason i gravitated so readily to the old gods, who are even further from modern Sunday School John Lennon smiling niceness than Christ. They are, in a sense, beyond good and evil: such categories simply don’t apply. And this is why modern Christianity is wrong for those with an instinct for power – it denies the uncanny, the dark and sinister, as if their god could be a tambourine-shaking cartoon.

2. Fifteen years ago, i tried to be good, to eschew rage & violence. At the most i was able to restrain myself from acts of savage aggression. It was only when i began to study magic that i found it easier to forego vengeance – though i still very occasionally indulge, in my weaker moments. i feel that my “pagan” view of things is in some sense truer to reality (or to my reality) and so causes less psychological friction; i now try to go without bloody vengeances because such acts seem petty and pointless, not because i really see anything wrong with my enemies suffering or dying. The power frau student came to the last class with a burn on her arm – from baking power frau Christmas biscuits – i wondered if my irritation had somehow brought this about, and felt no chagrin at all, and would i think feel no remorse if she lost an arm or died (it’s hard to say for sure as i don’t know of anyone dying after incurring my terrible wrath). But she’s far safer from my beyond-good-and-evil present self than she would have been from my trying-desperately-to-be-good younger self. i see nothing really immoral about using magic against such people, and would happily kick her down the stairs were it not for the law, but i feel such acts would be stupid and petty, and as ludicrously wrong-headed as praying to become a reality TV star. The desire to kick her down the stairs isn’t evil – it’s just childish.

3. It is typical of my nature that things often happen in total opposition to my expectations and surface drift. i share an Arbeitsamt (Job Centre) class with a stupid, highly aggressive American anti-MILF teacher. All of our colleagues detest her, and her students likewise. She seems totally oblivious to this and even thinks she’s a great teacher. Unfortunately, she has this class all day Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday morning and Friday afternoon. The students are generally deliriously happy to see me, simply because i’m not her. i try to establish control & rapport immediately, but with this group i also feel a need to buffer them against the anti-MILF; so for example when i’m teaching another group i go in during the break just to say hello and let them joke or bitterly complain about my wretched colleague.

They had a level test last week. i did my usual thorough test preparation, because some of the questions are stupid and ambiguous, and some of the grammar is too hard for their level. After the test (administered by the anti-MILF) the group thanked me, saying i had saved the group from failing. i just smiled, but they became insistent that they would have got about 20-50% less without my help. It’s possible, as the anti-MILF is such a bad teacher that they learn almost nothing with her. A student in her 50s thanked me and, flustered, said she’s terrible at tests and is “blocked” when the anti-MILF is in the room. She waved a hand agitatedly and said it’s some kind of leftover nastiness from her school time long ago.

It’s a strange thing but for all my grammar examples about murder, sex crimes, cocaine, dead prostitutes, etc., most of my students think i’m some kind of caring Jesus figure, to the point where some invite me to dinner etc., and don’t understand that i don’t actually want to socialise with them outside of class, that if i seem all fluffy and wonderful it’s because i take my job seriously and can only do it well if i establish a thorough rapport. My fluffiness is not an illusion, but it can only exist within the structure of my job. Within the class, however, i feel that i occasionally do some kind of good – as, for example, helping those who had such hideous experiences at school that they are easily stunned and shaken by a test, or by a nasty piece of work like my anti-MILF colleague. When one student remarked that i’m so totally different to my aggressive colleague, i replied that i had had such teachers at school and consequently learnt almost nothing till i left, and that in general i don’t derive any satisfaction from inflicting fear and misery upon people.

My students would, i guess, be taken aback to know of my other interests, my lack of goodness, my contempt for the John Lennon happy smiling Sunday School enterprise of modern Christianity and indeed modern culture. i could say that i act not out of any sense of goodness or virtue, but out of power. Power itself impels me, and if one wanted an image for this force it would not be a Disney Jesus with a big friendly grin, but rather the gallows god, cold and inscrutable – and for all that, intensely concerned with human beings and their survival. It is just that we have lost an understanding of the uncanny, of the necessary strangeness of all gods, angels. So Rilke:

Träte der Erzengel jetzt, der gefährliche, hinter den Sternen

eines Schrittes nur nieder und herwärts: hochauf-

schlagend erschlüg uns das eigene Herz.

-

David Young’s translation:

(If the dangerous archangel

                 took one step now

                                  down toward us

  from behind the stars

                  our heartbeats

                                    rising like thunder

  would kill us)

1. i feel my enthusiasm for work rapidly dwindling. This last week or two has been full of strange blunders & mishaps, for example i was in the teacher room in McLingua’s Arbeitsamt centre (classes just for the unemployed) and suddenly and for no reason jerked my hand back, caught my finger in the ginger tea bag string and yanked it out of my cup and onto my lap, scalding my majestic belly and equally majestic groin. i was at the time talking to two rather bland female teachers, a hamster-faced young American (with a great ass) and a rather know-it-all black American woman in her 50s. They thought this was hilarious. i pretended to be equally diverted but in truth i blame them and will try to destroy them. Toddball came into the room a few minutes later and i announced, soberly: i have soiled myself. i then pointed at the women and said, They incited me to it.

i’ve now spilt tea three times in the last two weeks. This is unusual for me and suggests some strange malaise or hereditary insanity or black magic. It is however of a piece with my now total lack of interest in my job. i’m simply working too much and have some slightly or very difficult classes, for example i just had a late evening class with two software engineers, one – a dour, square-headed Bulgarian – kept demanding to know why English grammar is the way it is. i occasionally get students like this. He couldn’t understand why i can’t say “I’ve been teaching 3000 students” but can say “I’ve been teaching for 3 years”, and also  “I’ve taught for 3 years” and “I’ve taught 3000 students”.

i told him, breezily, that languages have no logic and he must just accept it. He kept arguing and then decided he understood and explained the Present Perfect Simple and Present Perfect Continuous to me and the other student. i had to point out that his so-called explanation was totally wrong, whereupon he looked thoughtful and then returned to Bulgarianly demanding to know WHY, and so on.

Finally i roared: Why is Tisch der? Why is Schnitzel  das? Why is Auto das? Why is Wagen der? Why does die become der in the dative? Why? Why? Why?

Unmoved, he merely leafed through his Bulgarian teach-yourself-English book, trying to puzzle it all out.

When the class ended (at 2045) i felt close to physical collapse and could barely make it downstairs and to the s-bahn. Earlier, with my Arbeitsamt class, i had likened English teaching to prostitution (one of the students, a hot German biotch, said she had joked with her mother about becoming a whore). In truth, teaching isn’t too far from being a whore.

i am, i suppose, a competent teacher. But while i sometimes feel like running through McLingua like Nicholas Cage, shouting I Am The Greatest, i rely on the cooperation of my students, like a prostitute. If they don’t respond, i am helpless. In fairness, with non-responsive students even a by-the-books McLingua drone would flop, but i flop harder (the drones always flop, so it’s nothing too dramatic for them).

i am a fairly good whore, i would say. i can generally find whatever my students need to positively respond, and can usually even manage large and diverse groups. But it requires sometimes hideous expenditure of energy and since English teachers are paid – by German standards – the minimum wage – i have to work a great deal more than i can manage, which leaves me feeling evacuated and deathly most evenings.

2. i usually cope by regarding this not so much as a viable means of surviving but as a form of initiatory work, requiring secrecy, self-effacement, concentration, authority, and sensitivity. Concentration is fine and i learnt my own humility through five years of minimum wage temping, but the others are new. Secrecy is the only quality i consciously work at. It is necessary in class, as my form of teaching usually encourages confidences (one student said i was more like a psychiatrist). My natural tendency is to blab everything i think people will find interesting or useful, provided it’s not too personal; and it’s really not natural for me to compartmentalise, but i’ve learnt it’s necessary – not so much because people will be fired because of my related anecdotes, but because patients don’t trust a psychiatrist who casually relates other patients’ tales.

In addition i’ve found it unwise to speak too much in front of my colleagues. Unfortunately, i now spend a lot of time hanging around in the McLingua Arbeitsamt teacher room, due to my scheduling (an unpaid 90-minute gap twice a week), and it’s hard to avoid talking to my colleagues. But unfortunately they are women and hence naturally bitchy and resentful. i’ve realised they often take my casual remarks and store them away. For example, the know-it-all American teacher – who says things like “I could have took the train” and thinks correct grammar is a white man’s ploy to keep the black man down – has started getting in a few odd jibes at me: so i said my students had complained that an ex-military Canadian freak teacher was very strict & intense, and then i cautiously added “but i like him from what i’ve seen of him”, and she said: “Well Elberry you might want to think before you idealise him and say he’s so great. He has issues.” i replied that i just found him amusing; she looked clever and all-knowing and contemptuous. i realised from the faces of the other female teachers that they had all been discussing me and had Come to Conclusions.

i’ve decided to just try to avoid spending any longer in the teacher room than i have to, though this is not easy given the absence of alternative killing-time-spots. Failing that i will try and practice the bland, non-committal, superficial chit-chat of Toddball and the other male teachers – they generally say nothing, very little, or confine themselves to the most harmless remarks about the u-bahns or the weather or beer. The situation at times reminds me of office work, surrounded by vindictive, ignorant females.

3. While this is all very terrible i’m coming to see it as an initiatory ordeal. Secrecy is essential to any real power – because real power is founded in isolation and unworldliness. If i saw this as just another unpleasant work situation i would feel grim and probably murder at least one of my female colleagues (who also bitch at length about each other). As an initiatory ordeal it is more in the way of a sign, showing that one has progressed to a certain point, and now one must go this way.

1. So i went to Vienna to meet the Viking and drink Glühwein amidst the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Vienna is distinctly scuzzier than Munich. i walked from the train station to the u-bahn and immediately saw an unimaginably disgusting sight – two giant punks resting their feet on the seats opposite, shouting in Bosche and playing shitty punk music. They also had an amiable-looking dog. No one was sitting anywhere near them and the good citizens of Vienna were shooting them fearful glances. Perversely, i felt as if i was back in England; nostalgia pulled me to sit right next to them and grin at their dog. It’s not that i want to live in a city where young ruffians deliberately dismay the gentry, but after living in Munich (of almost Swiss respectability) i felt a certain pleasure in these villains & their dog. Besides, they seemed to me mostly harmless and far from the genuinely psychopathic monsters abounding in the sceptered isle.

2. Then on to the Viking. Exiled from Germany, he now practices heretical chemistry in nearby Slovakia. Here he is, looking for sin:

We immediately went to the Am Spittelberg Christmas market. Last year, Glühwein was 1.50 € and there were many strange stalls selling things like rose honey and jam and handmade leather artefacts. It’s now the usual 4 € for a Glühwein and there no interesting stalls. It has become standardized and in line with all the other Christmas markets, and so there was no reason to linger. Once again, the modern world has discovered and eliminated a niche of cheap Glühwein and human splendour.

We moved on, disgusted. But at least we chanced upon an excellent, cheap restaurant close by, the Kojote as i called it (“Gasthaus mit Wiener Küche” and “Zum hungrigen Kojoten”). It was a haven of normal humanness in the midst of all the chain restaurants and highly-priced & swanky hipster establishments. There was nothing at all polished or managerialized or machine-like about it.

Excellent Schnitzel for a tenner, plus you can smoke.

3. Being able to smoke indoors is one of the great and naturally brief & soon-to-be-destroyed advantages of Vienna. One waiter told me the EU will end this freedom in the next couple of years; a strange thing, since the militant non-smokers could easily find many non-smoking establishments, but in the name of managerialized standardization all must be the same, that is to say bland and unsatisfying (if it’s not specifically allowed, it is forbidden). For now, i enjoy my brief freedoms. Here in the Zum Leupold:

i bought some cigars for the Viking so he wouldn’t feel left out, but before turning to the Church he spent three decades as a fundamentalist Calvinist Protestant, so has no idea how to enjoy anything except gay Manga, let alone how to smoke. Here he is,  failing a cigar:

4. We went to one swanky bar, not sure which one but it was expensive and we had to hand over our manly coats at the door. Good leather sofas and real wood. We got there for happy hour and tried their cocktails, while i smoked. Every cocktail was either 95% ice or presented in a tiny glass, about three tablespoons of real booze for 7 Euros. Good cocktails, if you don’t mind having to order 10 to get enough. They were playing shitty Christmas songs, like most places we frequented. Given the dark wooden tones, the leather sofas, the well-accomplished atmosphere, these jollily bland Christmas tunes were a horrific modernist false step. i asked if they had any Leonard Cohen and to my surprise they played some LC for the next 20 minutes, before reverting to the same dozen shitty seasonal jingles. Later, i wondered why it was so offensive to have to listen to Christmas garbage. i think it was because everything else (bar the miniscule cocktails) was so perfect, that this single jarring mistake ruined everything forever. The tighter the weave of decor and colour, the worse the blunder. We had to listen to a lot of seasonal bollocks, this being the only acceptable offering. We would have preferred this:

5. And then there is Vienna in general. It has, for me, far more literary history than any other city i know. i kept seeing street signs and thinking, That’s in a Thomas Bernhard novel or interview – Türkenschanzpark, Heldenplatz. This is a city where the waiters add up your bill on paper then do mental arithmetic, old school by god. In one cafe, the waitress was frowning her way through mine & the Viking’s account and i could see him twitching with the desire to apply his formidable Chemical Brain to the sums. The streets are a strange mix of modern & traditional. The traditional:

Glühwein in the centre, looking up:

a

There are, however, many modernist streets, for example the view out of my hotel:

6. We moved on to the Cafe Bräunerhof. i chose it purely because Thomas Bernhard used to read newspapers here. The clientele are mainly locals, as far as i could tell – it’s too far from the u-bahns (10 minutes’ walk), and too nondescript, to attract tourists. It hosts a mixture of normal-looking people and oddities. Here i photographed Theodore Dalrymple (in red) and a doomed poet (in black suit):

Myself, squinting at the Viking:

It hasn’t changed much since the days of Bernhard. Pleased to discover my heavy jumper vaguely resembles TB’s:

Breakfast on my last morning, alone. The furnishings seem largely unchanged since TB’s time; not tatty, but dated like some of the teahouses i remember from the 80s. It looks a good generation out of date and is the better for it. It has the look of a place removed from the modern world, from any overt agenda, from any kind of advertising. There is one photograph of Bernhard (above) on a wall but apart from that the cafe doesn’t try to make anything of its famed guest. The uniformed waiters, all in their 50s or 60s, greet regulars with hearty handshakes, and me with a look of surprised wariness, as if to say, A tourist has accidentally wandered in, how strange.

On my last morning i enjoyed breakfast alone:

Later i realised i was sitting next to Bernhard’s spot in the famous photograph.

i spent 4 hours there on my last morning, as i had no one to meet. It’s easy to spend hours; something about the place is semi-private; you can write, observe others, eat your eggs, and feel to be more or less protected from too much attention. It was encouraging to find at least one place which hasn’t succumbed to the modern world of managerialization and Southron filth.

7. i briefly pondered moving to Vienna but i like it because i don’t work there. If i lived in Vienna, apart from probably earning less than i do now (the Munich McLingua gave us all a pay rise and i’ve found it’s almost impossible to cobble together enough work from smaller, higher-paying schools) i would have to live in a ghetto and only see the places i work, most likely industrial parks by dual carriageways. Part of a city’s appeal comes from my not working there (the same with Kassel).

It was good to get away from my colleagues, who are all gossips and from whom i have to keep many things secret. In Munich, i only know people with normal jobs or English teachers who are terrified of being fired. The Viking, as a heretical Chemist, is immune to such troubles. He is apt to launch into Gay Manga shops or suddenly start drawing pornography in public. Here, he demanded pen and paper and without explanation launched into yet another Viking Atrocity.

The glorious result of 2 minutes’ frenzy:

And let that be a lesson to you.

1. i’ve been internetless for a couple of weeks. My internet provider doesn’t have any English-speaking call centrists and my listening comprehension for German isn’t up to the task, so one of my students called & pretended to be me – an amusing episode, as he did it on loudspeaker in the middle of class, charming the pants off a Frau Hofmann.

There was a connection test and the problem was deemed to lie in my router. A new router was sent, and deemed undeliverable because i don’t have a standard German name so the courier couldn’t find me on the door buzzer. At the moment i’m using a weak & unsecured signal emanating from somewhere in the building, though i only connect for brief moments.

2. i’ve come to pay close attention to coincidences; everything is patterned, which means both that there are no coincidences and that, in a sense, there’s nothing so remarkable about remarkable coincidences – these latter are just a more obviously concentrated pattern. It is not chance that you meet an old friend on the street after a decade’s absence; nor that you forget a hat and it rains; nor that you woke when you did, and the weather was as it was, and your tea or coffee or juice was as it was.

Human intentions count for something but not in the way we suppose, i suppose. This is one reason i don’t really like films with flawless villains and masterminds, where some clever plot is seamlessly executed because someone is clever enough to plan everything. i prefer stories where things go wrong (or right) for small reasons, because somebody is in the wrong place at the wrong time, or trips on an unseen sausage dog (Tarantino films take their energy from this pattern of mishap). One reason i like Tolkien – he comes very close to how our human wishes and blunders are nonetheless part of a wider pattern of things, and “even the wise cannot know all ends”:

‘You give the choice to an ill chooser,’ said Aragorn. ‘Since we passed through the Argonath my choices have gone amiss.’ He fell silent, gazing north and west into the gathering night for a long while.  [...] ‘Ours is but a small matter in the great deeds of this time. A vain pursuit from its beginning, maybe, which no choice of mine can mar or mend.’

3. The last couple of weeks have been an interesting constellation of happenstance and chance. i adapted quickly to no internet, simply watching my stock of DVDs or reading; and i went more seriously to work on my latest attempt-at-a-novel: 34,000 words in about a month, something i couldn’t have managed with constant, high quality internet. In part it went so quickly because i’ve been plotting this book for years, and wrote the 30 to 40 thousand words earlier this year, in a different narrative voice. At the same time, i fell into the snares of a sexy Afghan girl, one of my old students, and while it’s troublesome to negotiate some kind of “relationship” (to explain, to an extreme extrovert, that i’m strongly introverted – it seems in the nature of extroverts that they cannot understand introversion), it’s also proved stimulatingly difficult.

4. In the midst of this difficulty, i was jostled out of my dread of human society by a Carlos Castaneda book of all things. The more i read Castaneda the more i feel he straddles the border between philosophy and magic (as does Ursula le Guin in her first three Earthsea books). i have no idea if what he writes (encounters with a Yaqui sorceror) actually happened and in a sense it is irrelevant; even if it is pure fiction it gets close to the border between philosophy and magic, where seeing aright starts to alter one’s reality. For me, philosophy is about useful perception – since there is no way of determining whether one is right or wrong, the test is pragmatic: does it make you happier, does it make you less conflicted, less hypocritical, less delusional, less egotistic, less anxious? And can you engage with normal earthy folk (like my Afghan lover) without seeming bizarre and offputtingly unearthly? – and in this sense, my job is the supreme test of my philosophical sorcery.

As i see it, Castaneda’s central point is that our ordinary human personality – the lesser man – is a parasitic element, keeping us drained and fearful and unable to achieve anything worthwhile. He names this the foreign installation. His work is directed to the elimination of this element, the lesser man. From The Power of Silence:

the only worthwhile course of action, whether for sorcerors or average men, is to restrict our involvement with our self-image [...] What a nagual aims at with his apprentices is the shattering of the mirror of self-reflection.

This is a project i have undertaken for the last 13 or so years, since incessant self-reflection brought me to a point of near insanity (a wilderness of broken mirrors). Tai Chi and then the magician’s path gave guidance and impetus, for nothing worthwhile can be achieved without abandoning the lesser man: vanity, pettiness, anger, fear, jealousy, spite. i am still largely embroiled in the tentacles of self-reflection, though i can see some progress when i compare myself with my younger self. Castaneda again:

For the nagual Julian self-importance was a monster that had three thousand heads. And one could face up to it and destroy it in any of three ways. The first way was to sever each head one at a time; the second was to reach that mysterious state of being called the place of no pity, which destroyed self-importance by slowly starving it; and the third was to pay for the instantaneous annihilation of the three-thousand-headed monster with one’s symbolic death.

i tried the first and it didn’t work. Then i found the second but could not thoroughly assimilate it into my daily life. The third – i have nearly died (of asthma and suicide) often enough to unsettle the edifice of vanity, but the relentless energy of the “three-thousand-headed monster” is difficult to thoroughly displace. i think the key is what Castaneda calls the point of no pity, where you cease to feel any pity for yourself or others. It is difficult to reach, because pity is the last comfort of the lesser man; and because, if nakedly perceived, it would strike most as monstrous and terrifying – what Castaneda calls the dark touch of the impersonal.

This coldness must be experienced within the midst of human encounters, or it is of little value (i think of Buddhist monks giving seminars in America, suddenly flustered by the sight of women in shorts & t-shirts). It is not easy to reach this point in solitude, but once one has it is then necessary to be tested in society – my extroverted Afghan lover is a means of conditioning & proving my point of no pity, for myself or her; and things would have become hellishly complicated, had i not been balanced in my deepest impersonality, my cultivated absence of pity.

5. It is essential to my philosophical sorcery that i don’t suppose one requires esoteric knowledge of demonic names and whatnot – something i always found questionable in Yeats, with his so-called Golden Dawn – as long as one dissolves the self, it is well. My 5 years of temping taught me the value of secrecy and apparent submission; teaching has taught me to exercise a modulated dominance. Castaneda talks of the man: “whose worldly task was to sharpen, yet disguise, his cutting edges so that no one would be able to suspect his ruthlessness” and this is apt for my work. i regard my students primarily as a testing ground for my will and the dissolution of my self, and on the whole they love me for it – they regard me as a jolly, entertaining, serious, Sherlock Holmesian teacher; one of the ironies of this path, it seems.

6. You do not require special lore. Wittgenstein: Wenn der Ort, zu dem ich gelangen will, nur auf einer Leiter zu ersteigen wäre, gäbe ich es auf, dahin zu gelangen. Denn dort, wo ich wirklich hin muß, dort muß ich eigentlich schon sein. Was auf einer Leiter erreichbar ist, interessiert mich nicht (if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me). One requires only discipline, which is i think one reason this day abounds in the lesser man, those thoroughly in thrall to the foreign installation. For those seeking power, matters will arrange themselves to allow him to attain the point of no pity. For me, this involves a degree of otherworldliness, but it is essential that this is merely an extension of what one could achieve in an ordinary, purposed life. It is, in any case, pointless to present lore: such teachings can only be understood by those ready to understand, and that comes by experience and hardship. Tove Jansson from Moominland Midwinter:

‘Why didn’t you talk like that in winter,’ said Moomintroll. ‘It’d have been such a comfort. Remember, I said once: “There were a lot of apples here.’ And you just replied: “But now here’s a lot of snow.” Didn’t you understand that I was melancholy?’ Too-ticky shrugged her shoulders. ‘One has to discover everything for oneself,’ she replied. ‘And get it all alone.’

And for that one should be grateful for these odd coincidences, for broken internet, stupid Germans, sexy Afghan babes, adventures and escapades and Moomins.

1. i continue to read mainly on my Kindle, for convenience; nonetheless i find it unsatisfactory, i can’t read poetry on it, and end up buying paper copies of anything i like enough to re-read. i’ve now bought my third copy of Alan Furst’s Dark Star (one in England, one given away), as i wanted to re-read it and like it too much for the screen. It’s a book in love with the mystery and matter-of-factness of the physical, reminding me in this of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Roughly speaking it’s a spy thriller with little plot, centred about a Russian journalist who does occasional work for the NKVD in 1930s Europe. On my second reading i realised the seemingly unconnected scenes are all threaded through with an Okhrana document secreted in an old leather bag in a train station locker. The journalist Szara is manoeuvred into taking possession of the bag at the beginning, and all follows.

2. Here is the bag, in all its physicality:

He examined it and realised he’d never seen one like it: the leather was dense, pebbled, the hide of a powerful, unknown animal. It was covered with a thick, fine dust, so he wet his index finger and drew a line through it, revealing a colour that had once been that of bitter chocolate but was now faded by sun and time. Next he saw that the seams were hand-sewn; fine, sturdy work using a thread he suspected was also handmade. The satchel was of the portmanteau style – like a doctor’s bag, the two sides opened evenly and were held together by a brass lock. Using a damp towel, he cleaned the lock and found a reddish tracery etched into the metal surface. This was vaguely familiar.  Where had he seen it? In a moment it came to him: such work adorned brass bowls and vases made in western and central Asia – India, Afghanistan, Turkestan. He tried to depress the lever on the underside of the  device, but it was locked. [...]

He put one finger on the lock. It was ingenious, a perfectly circular opening that did not suggest the shape of its key. He probed gently with a match, it seemed to want a round shaft with squared ridges at the very end. Hopefully, he jiggled the match about but of course nothing happened. From another time the locksmith, perhaps an artisan who sat cross-legged in a market stall in some souk, laughed at him. The device he’d fashioned would not yield to a wooden match.

He gets it open finally:

At dusk, André Szara sat in his unlit room with the remnants of a man’s life spread out around him.

There wasn’t a writer in the world who could resist attributing a melancholy romance to these artifacts, but, he argued to his critical self, that did not diminish their eloquence. For if the satchel itself spoke of Bokhara, Samarkand, or the oasis towns of the Kara Kum desert, its contents said something very different, about a European, a European Russian, who had travelled – served? hidden? died? – in those regions, about the sort of man he was, about pride itself.

The objects laid out on the hotel desk and bureau made up an estate. Some clothing, a few books, a revolver, and the humble tools – thread and needle, digestive tea, well-creased maps – of a man on the run. On the run, for there was equal clarity, equal eloquence, in the items not found. There were no photographs, no letters. No address book, no traveller’s journal. This had been a man who understood the people he fled from and protected the vulnerability of those who may have loved him.

The clothing had been packed on top, folded loosely but perfectly, as though by someone with a long history of military service, someone to whom the ordered neatness of a footlocker was second nature. It was good clothing, carefully preserved, often mended but terribly worn, its wear the result of repeated washings and long use in hard country. Cotton underdrawers and wool shirts, a thick sailor’s sweater darned at the elbows, heavy wool socks with virtually transparent heels.

The service revolver dated from pre-revolutionary days, a Nagant, the double-action officer’s model, 7.62mm from a design of 1895. It was well oiled and fully loaded. From certain characteristics, Szara determined that the sidearm had had a long and very active life. The lanyard ring at the base of the grip had been removed and the surface filed flat, and the metal at the edges of the sharp angles, barrel opening, cylinder, the trigger itself, was silvery and smooth. A look down the barrel showed it to be immaculate, cleaned not with the usual brick dust – an almost religious (and thereby ruinous) obsession with the peasant infantry of the Great War – but with a scouring brush of British manufacture folded in a square of paper. Not newspaper, for that told of where you had been and when you were there. Plain paper. A careful man.

The books were also from the time before the revolution, the latest printing date 1915; and Szara handled them with reverence for they were no longer to be had. Dobrilov’s lovely essays on noble estates, Ivan Krug’s Poems at Harvest, Gletkhin’s tales of travel among the Khivani, Pushkin of course, and a collection by one Churnensky, Letters from a Distant Village, which Szara had never heard of. These were companions of journey, books to be read and read again, books for a man who lived in places where books could not be found. Eagerly, Szara paged through them, looking for commentary, for at least an underlined passage, but there was, as he’d expected, not a mark to be found.

Yet the most curious offering of the opened satchel was its odour. Szara could not really pin it down, though he held the sweater to his face and breathed in it. He could identify a hint of mildew, woodsmoke, the sweetish smell of pack animals, and something else, a spice perhaps, cloves or cardamom, that suggested the central Asian marketplace. It had been carried in the satchel for a long time, for its presence touched the books and the clothing and the leather itself. Why? Perhaps to make spoiled food more palatable, perhaps to add an ingredient of civilization to life in general. On this point he could make no decision.

Szara was sufficiently familiar with the practices of intelligence services to know that chronology meant everything. ‘May God protect and keep the czar’ at the end of a letter meant one thing in 1916, quite another in 1918. With regard to the time of ‘the officer’, for Szara discovered himself using that term, the satchel’s contents offered an Austrian map of the southern borders of the Caspian Sea dated 1919. The cartography had certainly begun earlier (honorary Bolshevik names were missing), but the printing date allowed Szara to write on a piece of hotel stationery ‘alive in 1919′. Checking the luggage label once again, he noted ‘tentative terminal date, 8 February 1935.’ A curious date, following by two months and some days the assassination of Sergei Kirov at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad, 1 December 1934, which led to the first round of purges under Yagoda.

A terminal date? Yes, Szara thought, this man is dead.

He simply knew it. And, he felt, much earlier than 1935. Somehow, another hand had recovered the satchel and moved it to the left-luggage room of a remote Prague railway station that winter. Infinite permutations were of course possible, but Szara suspected that a life played out in the southern extremity of the Soviet empire had ended there. The Red Army had suppressed the pashas’ risings in 1923. If the officer, perhaps a military adviser to one of the local rulers, had survived those wars, he had not left the region. There was nothing of Europe that had not been packed on some night in, Szara guessed, 1920.

3. This passage expresses much of why i prefer paper to electronic books: the tactile sensory resonance, the marks of previous owners, of previous readings, the expanding network of historical associations, the occasional flashes of insight – these latter in particular seem to tap into something in the physical object itself, as i felt once with an SS dagger. And the books made to be read and re-read on the road, in small Asian market towns: if i delete or lose a Kindle file, i can just download it again and there is no difference between the book i read and lost, and the book with which i replaced it: the electronic does not allow this palimpsest of experience, or only in the crudely mechanical way that the NSA (etc.) can view a person’s entire browsing history. i think probably most good readers know what it is like to replace an old copy, and to feel – even if the replacement is exactly the same imprint – that it is not the same. When my last edition of John Sinclair’s Inferno translation finally fell apart, after about 30 readings, i used the pages as decoration, or as packaging for gifts, because i felt something of those 30 readings in the paper, and i did not want to simply toss it in the bin and so eliminate a decade’s reading. The replacement was apparently exactly the same edition, and lacking; not the book i bought in Dillon’s second-hand section in Durham in 1997, before the shop was consumed by Waterstone’s.

4. Furst has a strong sense for the distant networks of history, and their manifold and undislodgeable connection to the present; this is one reason i would never become a socialist/progressive – i am at home in the negotiation between my present and past, and the pasts of many others, and wouldn’t want to simply destroy the past and its echoes, even if i thought such an undertaking were possible. The bright new utopias of socialism do not interest me; they seem as plausible as Disney cartoons; as flatly inhuman as an electronic book; as repulsive as the dreams of a Yagoda, or for that matter, that other great progressive, Hitler: to such fools, the elder locksmith laughs from another time.

And so i like living in Munich, learning a barbarous ancient language, smoking pipes and reading old books – to understand myself through these myriad, overlapping, incalculable networks of thought and action and being; to take my own being from this meeting and friction; to acknowledge my own part in this, as observer and actor both, patient as i am.

1. i’ve managed to half-wrest myself away from the internet most evenings, and read books and smoke my pipes like a gouty Victorian gentleman. At the moment i’m reading Browning and Plato – the latter a monstrous 1500 page edition i bought 3 years ago, but have only really got into now, in my pot-bellied dotage. One of the odd constellations that sometimes befalls me – all this fell out over an hour:

i) i was reading The Spine blog and thinking about caricature and representation, then:

ii) This post on The New Psalmanazar:

The hard part of drawing is to actually see the things you’re looking at. Your idea of a tree, a mountain, a person, will tend to devolve into symbol. You are constantly lured into seeing through your brain, by abstraction, rather than through your eye. But the wild, absurd, incredible fact of a thing in itself is always more than you can grasp.

iii) Then the next poem in Browning was Fra Lippo Lippi:

I’d like his face —

His, elbowing on his comrade in the door

With the pike and lantern — for the slave that holds

John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair

With one hand (“Look you, now,” as who should say)

And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!

It’s not your chance to have a bit of chalk,

A wood-coal or the like? or you should see!

Yes, I’m the painter, since you style me so.

and

The Prior and the learned pulled a face

And stopped all that in no time. “How? what’s here?

Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!

Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true

As much as pea and pea! it’s devil’s-game!

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,             

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men —

and

Do you feel thankful, ay or no,

For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,

The mountain round it and the sky above,

Much more the figures of man, woman, child,

These are the frame to? What’s it all about?              

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,

Wondered at? oh, this last of course! — you say.

But why not do as well as say — paint these

Just as they are, careless what comes of it?

iv) Then onto Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates’ ideal, discarnated philosopher:

Do you not think, he said, that in general such a man’s concern is not with the body but that, as far as he can, he turns away from the body towards the soul?

I do.

So in the first place, such things show clearly that the philosopher more than other men frees the soul from association with the body as much as possible?

Apparently.

[...]

Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it.

-

2. Reading Browning, i thought of a repulsive music journalist i knew almost twenty years ago – a penpal, back in the days when such things were. He was a standard trendily left-wing London-based Guardian-reader, though at the time i had no opinions about left or right or even London. He seemed clearly mental to me, badgering and hysterical and vindictive – for example, sending me music compilations and demanding i review each track, to the point where i didn’t even want to play them (merely saying “it was good” would provoke a contemptuous “your comments were inadequate”); he also doggedly harassed me for liking U2 and Bruce Springsteen (this was in 1997, before U2 began their downward trajectory), insisting “your alleged fondness for the Irish songsters remains IMPLAUSIBLE and UNACCEPTABLE – EXPLAIN”. i was young and naive and tried to explain but he would just reply something on the lines of “I fail to see how you can CLAIM to dig Trane [John Coltrane] and the leftfield maverick underground brilliance of Miles [Davis] and also CLAIM to “appreciate” the millionaire Irish balladeers! Explain!” And so on.

-
Outside of my family, he was the first truly obnoxious, unthinking “intellectual” i met, and the first of many to try to dominate and bully me into submission. Amusingly, he reported burning through something like 15 penpals in six months, some of whom accused him of badgering and harassing them. He was also the first “it’s not me, it’s them” maniac i met, who could report something like this without drawing the obvious conclusion.When i asked if he was religious he replied: “religion, in any shape or form, is for weak-minded simpletons without rationality or intelligence” (so, there you have Milton, TS Eliot, Kierkegaard, Dr Johnson, Dante, etc.) At the time i was living with my father in the middle of nowhere, and only knew one person who read anything or liked any music not to be found on Radio 1 – my then-Muslim schoolmate Shrekh. The journalist seemed, at first, astonishingly cultured. He apparently just spent all his time living with his father, writing vast letters to penpals and listening to obscure music. i introduced him – via letters – to Shrekh, who shared my amazement at someone who had actually heard of Bob Dylan and Shakespeare, and sure enough came to see him as a mentally unstable and spectacularly nasty piece of work. At one point i stopped writing to the journalist, disgusted by his latest tirade (which recalled the hectoring emails i occasionally got from my tai chi tutor, when he was on the verge of a psychotic frenzy); he wrote back telling me i wouldn’t find anyone as inspiring and stimulating to write to, “unless Friedrich N [Nietzsche] rises from the grave”. i showed this letter to my father, explaining that it was written by a 24-year-old unemployed, occasional music journalist and that Nietzsche was one of the greatest thinkers of human history. My father indulged in one of his explosions of uncontrollable mirth, then suddenly sobered up and asked, warily: “Egh, well where does this blessed man live?” (my father had run a psychiatric ward and had plenty of experience with violently mental patients).

-

i finally stopped writing to the blessed man altogether. It felt like i’d suffered him for two years but i think it was more like six months. In his last letter, he likened our relationship to that of Wagner and Nietzsche, as recounted by Colin Wilson, saying that whereas i was the complacent, self-satisfied bourgeois Wagner, he was the “self-transcending” Nietzsche.

-
Shrekh continued to write to him a while longer, increasingly infuriated by his total witlessness (the journalist claimed that rap wasn’t hip hop – because he thought rap was shit and hip hop was something underground and therefore worthwhile – and when Shrekh patiently set out the reasons why rap is a form of hip hop, the journalist wrote back “WHAT DO YOU WANT – BLOOD???”), till he too stopped writing and eventually burnt all his letters and tapes, saying he felt polluted to have them in the house.

-

i wish i’d kept the journalist’s letters but i too was so sickened and depressed by their venom that i binned the lot. Some fragments i remember:

-

i) He wrote me one of his huge 10,000 word letters about Spiritualized’s Ladies & Gentlemen album, then enclosed a clipping from some music magazine, and i realised that most of what he’d written had been copied almost word for word from someone else’s review; plagiarism aside, i wondered if he had copied it out then somehow thought it was his work, or if this was his idea of original response;

-

ii) When i mentioned my dog, he said he despised “pet/dog culture”;

-

iii) When i said i wanted to read a Frederick Forsyth novel he demanded to know why, telling me that FF was “a Tory”, as if that somehow made his novels worthless;

-

iv) He kept re-using the same words, over and over again: eclectic, maverick, left-field, underground, brilliance, epiphany, groovy, spiritual, existential, fusion, life-affirming, transcendent, revolutionary, outsider;

-

v) Although he had read seemingly every book ever written, and seen every film, and heard every album, it all seemed to go in one ear and out the other. He said Conrad was shit, explaining that he had no interest in jungles. He said Henry James and Jane Austen were tedious and worthless. Apart from Colin Wilson’s drab The Outsider, he didn’t seem to have been affected by a book in his life. i got the feeling he simply culled names and hurled them at his penpals to demonstrate his massive intellect (somewhat like Dean Moriatry in On The Road, who – as far as i can remember – had read and memorised plot summaries and would hold forth on them, before finally admitting he hadn’t read a single book in his life).

-

vi) When i mentioned i was trying to learn French, he said that learning languages was a total waste of time and that only idiots bother with it.

-

vii) He demanded to know why i wrote to anyone else (i had about 3 other penpals, who i stuck with for a year or two before we drifted apart). When i vaguely said they were interesting people, he demanded to know how such non-outsiders could possibly be interesting, and then suggested i was lying.

-

viii) Whenever he found something difficult to believe, he accused me of lying. After a while, reading the contradictions in his own presented self-image (as a Nietzschean superman) i came to suspect he often lied, and that it was therefore natural for him to suppose deception in others.

-

Rather an odd person, in fact. i thought of him today because i remembered him asking if i’d read Browning – in his usual “I have read everything” way; and so while smoking my pipe and reading Fra Lippo Lippi i wondered if he’d ever actually read Browning, and if he had what he would have made of the poem, since he didn’t seem to remember or remark on anything he’d read (except Colin Wilson’s The Outsider). He claimed to have read every poem ever written but i got the feeling he was too literal to understand poetry; for the same reason he didn’t like Conrad because he didn’t live in a jungle. He was, naturally, extremely political and Marxist.

-

i was moved to Google him and found he’s still a music journalist. He’s a Guardian-reader; he seems to subscribe to all the conventionally left-wing sentiments of that publication – that the wilfully, lifelong unemployed are “the working class” and need more money from “the rich” to escape their squalor, that the Tories are in some way right-wing and hate the poor (despite increasing State expenditure), and so on.

-
He has a blog, which i skimmed through. His style has matured, so he doesn’t constantly reuse the same dozen adjectives; it’s good professional writing, but everything he writes sounds like a blurb. i read a few of his reviews and found my mind disengaging, as when i read the rants a manic depressive stalker used to write; the words advertise their profundity & significance, but lack roots.

-

3. So much for that. In Phaedo – concerning the last days of Socrates:

-
Cebes intervened and said: ‘By Zeus, yes, Socrates, you did well to remind me. Evenus asked me the day before yesterday, as others had done before, what induced you to write poetry after you came to prison, you who had never composed any poetry before, putting the fables of Aesop into verse and composing the hymn to Apollo.

-

Socrates replies:

-

[...] the same dream often came to me in the past, now in one shape now in another, but saying the same thing: ‘Socrates,’ it said, ‘practice and cultivate the arts.’ In the past I imagined that it was instructing and advising me to do what I was doing, such as those who encourage runners in a race, that the dream was thus bidding me do the very thing I was doing, namely, to practice the art of philosophy, this being the highest kind of art, and I was doing that.

-

But now, after my trial took place, and the festival of the god was preventing my execution, I thought that, in case my dream was bidding me to practice this popular art, I should not disobey it but compose poetry. I thought it safer not to leave here until I had satisfied my conscience by writing poems in obedience to the dream. So I first wrote in honour of the god of the present festival. After that I realised that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must compose fables, not arguments.

-

i didn’t remember this from my last reading of the book (15 years ago). i’m presently only a quarter finished, and wonder if anything will be made of this oddity. It is strange and jarring, given Plato’s general inclination to (alleged) logical clarity and his later condemnation of poetry altogether. i think of Thomas Aquinas’ late vision, before which all he had written seemed as straw. If i consider the course of this and my last life, it describes a turn from arguments to fables. People like the journalist were a part of this, as unpoetical and unfabulous and argumentative, and vile. It is fitting that almost nobody reads poetry today, for it is not part of the machine world where everything can apparently be reduced to code (“algorithmically compressible”). Paraphrase a poem and it’s gone. The peculiar force of a poem comes from the slightest of manoeuvres; it is sensed – by those still able to sense anything – but cannot be reduced to politics or machine code, to argument.

It makes me mad to see what men shall do

And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

And here, one might note that there is meaning and then there is meaning, and perhaps Socrates was turning to the subtler and more enduring (in its subtlety) of the two.

–

[postscript: WordPress screwed up my formatting so i had to insert dashes to separate some paragraphs]

1. Glendronach Revival is a superb whisky, if sadly too expensive for me to drink in the quantities i would like.

2. Re-reading Molloy and struck by the effortless transitions from Biblically mythic passages to scenes of Irish squalor. i read this aloud to an intermediate class who couldn’t follow more than one in 10 words, i wager, the German filth:

But was not perhaps in reality the cigar a cutty, and were not the sand-shoes hobnailed, dust-whitened, and what prevented the dog from being one of those stray dogs that you pick up and take in your arms, from compassion or because you have long been straying with no other company than the endless roads, sands, shingle, bogs and heather, than this nature answerable to another court, than at long intervals the fellow-convict you long to stop, embrace, suck, suckle and whom you pass by, with hostile eyes, for fear of his familiarities? Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it the time needed for it to love you and you it, then throw it away.

3. To my dismay, i’ve now been teaching for 4 years. i have enough experience to cope with most situations & questions, and just enough enthusiasm to muddle through, and feel the latter will wane and then i’ll be left with nothing but experience. Experience alone is as sterile as pure intellect or technical craft. i went to a philosophy meeting in Munich the other day, my first & last, and felt how pointless all this talk is, when it comes from a modern machine understanding. The discussion was about artificial intelligence; i’d vaguely hoped it would be a discussion of AI from a philosophical standpoint, since it had been advertised as a philosophy meeting; but it was a discussion of AI from a computer programmer standpoint. Everyone there seemed bright enough, most were computer people, but i felt how futile & purposeless it all was. For example, one geek said that anything which can’t be empirically tested, if only in principle, is meaningless. i thought of asking him what he meant by meaning and meaningless, but just settled back into Beckettian silence and left early.

No one there seemed to know anything about philosophy outside of computing theory and watered-down Logical Positivism. The whole discussion was trivial, to do with mathematical possibility and processing power, and they couldn’t understand anything outside of this frame. The aforementioned geek said that human beings are imperfect, because not as rational as a computer, and i wanted to ask “what do you mean by rational?” but realised he would just stare blankly then go on about algorithms and processing units and binary. It was a striking case of how the tools we fashion and use come to determine our understanding of the world and, worse, of ourselves. Trying to talk to these people – all of whom, i guess, are well-paid & respected – was akin to trying to talk to a computer about Wallace Stevens.

4.  Just before the meeting i’d been reading Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity; it could have been written this year though it’s actually from 1945. It describes a world in which only the quantifiable and inertly calculable is deemed to exist, and in which all will be perfectly levelled, reduced to numerical equivalence. He writes:

Nonetheless, a world in which everything had become ‘public’ would have a character nothing short of monstrous. The notion is still hypothetical, because we have not in spite of everything quite reached that point yet, and perhaps it never will be fully attained because it represents a ‘limit’ [...] In order to induce people to live as much as possible ‘in public’, it is not enough that they should be assembled in the ‘mass’ on every occasion and on any and every pretext, but they must in addition be lodged, not only in ‘hives’ as was suggested earlier, but literally in ‘glass hives’, and these must be arranged in such a way that they can only take their meals ‘in common’.

5. Philosophy is a very vague and general term but real study and thought should allow one to partly break away from the dominant culture, to look at things from new (or very old) angles, not to mindless parrot gibberish about rationality and meaningless-because-not-empirically-testable statements. For that to happen, philosophy has to go deep, deeper than trivia about what a computer can do. i am impatient with these arguments, because they don’t go beyond the contingent; if it turns out that your facts are wrong, or if there are new developments, then your entire argument falls apart; and for me this is not philosophy.

6. i feel a growing lack of interest in surfaces, publicity, the public account of things. Writing to friend about my many grossly abortive drafts, he replied “you should be like kafka and put it [writing] under the bed”. As i now have enough money to live from teaching, i no longer need the bad pipe dream of publication to save me; even if more than one in ten thousand writers made any real money from their work. i’m sure this is the right thing to do, for me (writing being as various as every significant human activity, it takes many forms with different people). i gave up hoping to make cash from my brain years ago but there is a residual hope, which is of no use and indeed distracts me from just doing what i want to do.

i am trying to turn away from the reign of quantity and to see things as they would be outside of our passing human life. i think modern media make this almost impossible, as they are almost entirely inseparable from computers (the ultimate symbol of quantitative power); and rely entirely on quantitative measurement, e.g. number of hits, number of fans, number of tweets. This kind of public, glass-hive, quantitative valuation is of no real account; it is quantity in the absence of quality.

7. Most of the things i remember from my last life would appear in no biography or history; some – odd meetings & brief explosive friendships & favours from the powerful – while i suppose being scandalous etc., have remained private; the rest are just little things, often to do with my family then, things which i guess made an impression on me, e.g. a sister showing me a copy of Die Fackel she had smuggled into our home, against our father’s interdict. i guess this is the way of it with every life, that the things we value would bore others, and the things which others would want to publish for titillation & gain are too private to be shared.

And so i try to see my life now in this light, to see spots of intense fascination in the midst of an apparently mundane life, and to suppose these will endure when everything else is jettisoned as trivia. And with writing i try to see the things stuffed under the bed as those of most value. As with the Epic of Gilgamesh, lost for several millenia, the things lost may be found, none the worse for a long sleep.

1.Still alive though i’ve found myself uninterested in writing anything beyond emails. i sent the first few thousand words of my 40,000-word draft to a friend, who responded by telling me i shouldn’t write this book, that it was hate-filled and horrible and so on. To be fair, the opening is the most depressive part of the entire book, as it begins with my hero suffering in the trenches of minimum wage data entry, and he is only propelled to escape this world because it’s so horrible – in the same way that i would never have come to Germany had my jobs not been so terrible.

Hate-filled etc. are of course subjective judgements but my feeling is that if an intelligent reader could react so negatively it must have failed. i ditched it and have now more or less forgotten about the plot & story & characters, which suggests it had no real life to begin with. i do not despair; taking the long view, i am still (nearly 38, Homer Simpson & Colonel Kurtz’s age) finding a new way.

2. At present i’m trying out ideas. i get what seem to be good ideas, write them out in what seems to be nice enough prose, and the result makes me want to cut my head off and force it down my throat into my stomach, so it can eat my guts out before exploding in a ball of endless nuclear fire, consuming not merely my body but my soul, hard drive, all the files i’ve ever sent over the internet, this blog, anyone who’s ever read anything i’ve written, and of course all the hand- and type-written papers in my room. My whisky & tobacco could be spared, as i hope they could be of some use to some deserving minor (much as some enlightened soul threw a load of softcore porn over the wall of my school playground when i was 6).

3. i note that while i have good ideas, they never seem to escape the orbit of what has been thought by others. So, while reading Rene Guenon’s Reign of Quantity it occurred to me that we can only measure time by space – so i tend to think of 15 minutes as the time it takes me to walk a mile at a slow saunter; or the clock hands moving through space; then, about 50 pages on, Guenon makes exactly the same point. This happens to me with tiresome frequency; just off the top of my head, it’s also with Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare book, with a lot of literary criticism, with Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, with Rumi, with Alan Watts. i even think up fiction ideas which i later find have been developed into books or films, for example Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, JCVD (in 2004 i created a plot about Jean-Claude Van Damme as a washed-up action hero alienated from his family). i have a feeling that i’m nothing more than a mirror for other people’s ideas, that i somehow pick them up and develop them to some degree, then find someone’s already made a book or film out of it.

4. To some degree, there are no original ideas. For example, Milton’s Satan is, i think, a blend of Marlowe’s Mephistopheles and the Satan of the Old English Genesis B. i feel the former was based on someone Marlowe knew, or perhaps was Marlowe himself in a certain frame of mind; the latter is simply the Old English hero as one can see in The Battle of Maldon. It’s pleasing to think that Milton’s Satan ultimately traces his lineage back to real people, to real English people at that. There are clearly archetypes of a culture – one could draw parallels between Odin and Gandalf, for example: the hooded old wizard scheming against destruction. Another could be Tolkien’s Aragorn and Tove Jansson’s Snufkin – both wayfaring, more or less homeless, mysterious pipe-smokers (all pipe-smokers are mysterious). While Tolkien was well aware of Odin, i doubt Jansson had read Tolkien (she had, i think, already created Snufkin before Aragorn came into print).

(Snufkin pic from here)

Academia is full of people who like to draw such parallels as if this explains everything. It doesn’t explain anything except that writers read books by other writers, and we all live in the same world and so absorb more or less the same ideas, and that human beings are fundamentally the same, while capable of enormous surface difference. It is interesting, if you’re (like me) of an academic frame of mind, but it is not essential.

i’m unsure if i will ever substantially move beyond mirroring that which has already been. If i do, i think it will be down to a development of my own self, because for me language is a direct function of my self: or you could say i feel language to be inherently magical, and so try not to lie (very occasional, tactical white lies, and even those are wearying), or even to speak or write without purpose. This makes it difficult to use language at all. Or rather, like Thomas Bernhard’s Roithamer, i can produce enormous quantities of words, but then immediately turn against them, and correct them out of existence, in the clearing, a silence, Lichtung.

1. i’ve been going through a Hagalaz time since January, with various shocks coming within a fortnight of each other in late January/early February, playing themselves out over the turning to spring, and now seemingly exhausted & spent. At the time these were mostly grim, one was blissful and mildly agonising at the same time, and now all are done and i remain.

A difference in age – even while a certain melancholy lingers from the blissful agony (ir liebez leben, ir leiden tôt/ir lieben tôt, ir leidez leben) i no longer look to the things outside of myself for cause or solution; i know it lies in me. And with this you pass from Hagalaz to Dagaz.

This was first borne upon me in 1998, when i read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way: a balance between necessary passion and acceptance. This doesn’t come easily to youth. In my early 20s it was almost impossible, though Kierkegaard at least nudged me from murder/suicide/atrocity. It’s easier now, as i have outlived youth and can discern a pattern in my desiring & chaos, the working out of my Hamingja (ethos anthropos daimon).

2. A man’s fate is his innermost character, and his daimon/ Hamingja. In my case, much of my life becomes easier as i accept the compulsion of my Hamingja. There is a similar acceptance in Hamlet (between Act 4 and 5) and Unforgiven as Will Munny ceases to resist the bloody working of his character and fate.

This isn’t to say that one’s life becomes as one would wish it; but it becomes easier to bear; and in a sense even very grim situations are just as they should be and no more. For me, this is the great lesson of the great late 80s/early 90s action films, as the heroes come to face an enemy that is willed by their Hamingja. It is this concordance of character and enemy one sees in Predator, Lethal Weapon, Unforgiven.

3. i sometimes wonder why i know of my other lives, and remember the bits & pieces i do. It isn’t normal, since amnesia is almost essential to an ordinary, healthy human life. In my case, i think part of this elberry life is a moving-beyond elberry, not to become my other lives but to as it were simultaneously inhabit this & other attempts, as one might play a score while remembering other versions, other interpretations & partial failures. At least, knowing what i do makes it possible to discern lineaments of fate. So when i meet people “by chance, as we say in Middle Earth” i can sometimes perceive an order nonetheless.

4. In my last & difficult Arbeitsamt (JobCentre) class, which i taught from January to April, there were:

i) Dieter, a stern, humorous German in his 50s who planned to give a class presentation about Vikings; he took to referring to me by military rank, and on his last day we saluted each other, as seemed natural;

ii) A pretty, early-30s Bulgarian woman. She has a warm character and studied Philosophy. On our first day i asked after her favourite philosopher and she said “Wittgenstein”. We drew closer to each other over time and she gifted me her warmth.

iii) A radiant 30-year-old German giantess who is, i think, a “young soul”. Contrary to some New Age shite i’ve heard, old souls like me are often more confused and fucked up than relative youngsters, because we have so many divergent, contradictory lives – all exerting an influence on the present. The giantess flirted with me out of boredom & some curiosity, for example she got her neighbour Dieter to call me over to her side of the (large) room then as i bent to look at his notes she scattered confetti all over my head, laughing; or she offered me some of her lunch then made it clear i was to eat it out of her hand, so i did.

Some of the group went out drinking and there i fell into talk with the giantess. i knew she liked birds so asked which birds she favoured; crows, she said. We talked about crows and i felt that though she had no acquaintance with the Germanic god, she had an instinct.

i note such patterns and attempt some understanding. Such attempts are always against the grain of our world, always difficult and uncertain; it is important not to overextend reason. Much is beyond me. i can only see that there has been a conjunction of emotionally strenuous demands this year, beginning with the sense that my last book-attempt was shit; this coincided with more ordinarily human problems. i can’t will away my emotions: but i can see them with the eye in the well, with both mortal attachment and spectral distance; i can choose to inhabit this fraught clarity:

dem lebene sî mîn leben ergeben,
der werlt wil ich gewerldet wesen,
mit ir verderben oder genesen.

5. At present i have survived these tests, but they have so absorbed my attention & desire that with their passing i feel blank and void, much as i did after nearly-dying in France two years ago. It seems that my old life has been erased and i merely continue the mechanical processes from inertia, without heart.

This makes it difficult to write, since i no longer feel a centre from which to communicate. But i retain my old “toys of fire and smoke” and may be reborn.

1. Miraculously still here, on a warm Tuesday afternoon. i took today & yesterday off work as i had some kind of Germanity-induced fever and had to lie abed, moaning and clutching my entrails. i feel my endurance for teaching is almost exhausted, though i’ve felt that a good dozen or two dozen times in the last three years. After this winter/spring’s fairly hellish gumbo of emotions & what not, there seems little left in me to care.

i feel to have fallen outside of my own time, as if the continuity is awry and there’s no link between today and yesterday. i think this is normal when an emotionally-charged situation abruptly ends, as was the case with my last Arbeitsamt class. In this case, i unwillingly expended vast emotional energy in the group, i think because it was so huge (14 students), went on so long (i took it over from a departed colleague in January, and it ran 7 hours a day, 5 days a week), and had so many problems, factions, cliques. My heart also unwillingly gave much to two women, firstly the radiant giantess (about 6′ 2″, i estimate) and then the Bulgarian Wittgenstein fan. In the latter case, i tend to form an easy rapport with anyone who has a non-academic and non-preening interest in Wittgenstein. In the latter, the giantness had a tremendous physical energy and animal-like directness, with enough intelligence & acuity to give spirit. i spent the last month of the course training myself to a Kierkegaard-like acceptance of our utter incompatibility. One could observe this simply in our movement: i have an uncertain connection to my own body so tend to move in short, controlled gestures; she sprawled and exploded, rather, with more than enough physicality, dobermann-like.

This abundance was compelling. i noted that even my dour and highly self-controlled Irish colleague, Molloy, was drawn to her. On the class’s last evening we went out for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. i cunningly manoeuvered to sit next to her and after a few beers she got me in a headlock, dragging me pleasingly against her breasts, and told me it was useless to resist because she had done karate for ten years. i thought that explained a lot and broke her hold with a simple joint manipulation and a tai chi sneer “karate is nothing”, though on reflection i should probably have stayed where i was and enjoyed the situation, or even provoked her to rip her clothes off.

Later we talked about slaps versus punches. i mentioned this great scene from True Detective:

and she invited me to slap her, so i did; then she slapped me back; and i reciprocated, and it went on for a good half dozen slaps while Molloy stared in horror. i only gave her some slight slaps, as you would a red-headed stepchild or a hysterical woman, not a Rust Cohle manly copslap, and she was gentle enough. It was good clean fun. i was surprised when Molloy – ordinarily highly professional and somber – said “I feel left out. Hit me. No, not you -” when i volunteered to reach across the table and slap him. But later i reflected that the giantness exerted a dobermann-like spell over those she encountered.

2. The effort of resisting this spell every day, with 14 German faces staring expectantly at me, over about 4 -6  weeks, left me emptied of sensation; i feel as if my life ended and i continue as a recording device, passively observing. With typical elberry-fate perversity, even as i burnt out my emotions accepting that we really had nothing in common (she’s a surfer party girl who doesn’t seem to read anything) and that this would pass through my life and be gone forever, she’s just invited me to her 30th birthday this weekend; and i’ve now so completely accepted matters that i’m not sure if i’ll go, because i feel as distant as i would from someone i once knew in another life.

On the whole, despite the daily rigours of teaching her group, i feel glad to have known her, because she seemed different to anyone i’d met before, and so i felt the world was a larger, more colourful & stranger place.

3. After finally finishing The Sopranos a few months ago, i moved on to shows i’d vaguely heard of. i’ve so far managed to avoid The Wire but House of Cards, Utopia, and True Detective fulfill a similar role to the giantess: they make the world stranger. House of Cards is basically Kevin Spacey – if you enjoy hearing a Deep South cracker Spacey saying: “I’m a white-trash cracker from a white-trash town that no one would even bother to piss on. But here’s the difference– I’ve made something of myself. I have the keys to the capitol. People respect me. But you, you’re still nothing. You’re just an uppity dago in an expensive suit turning tricks for the unions. Nobody respects the unions anymore, Marty. They’re dying. And no one respects you. The most you’ll ever make of yourself is blowing men like me. Men with real power. Yes. I can smell the cock on your breath from here” then you’ll enjoy House of Cards.

Utopia is stranger, with a cheerful colour scheme and one of the best soundtracks i’ve heard in television, and a great dead-eyed sociopathic killer:

4. True Detective is the series i dreamt of for a good week after the final episode. Critics have attacked it for being pretentious, by which i think they mean they don’t understand Matthew McConaughey’s character Rust Cohle, and they confuse him with the show as a whole. You may as well attack Apocalypse Now and say you had a bad day when Starbucks gave you the wrong frappuccino but that didn’t make you go to Cambodia and put heads on stakes like Colonel Kurtz, so clearly the whole film is absurd and pretentious. It’s testament to the show’s excellence that these frappuccino-drinker critics grudgingly admit it’s not too bad, even while they grumble that there are no “strong female leads” and that they would never have dark thoughts like Cohle, not even after their Prius broke down two months out of warranty.

The show is a good example of what you can do with a good script and director, and competent actors. In this case the leads (McConaughey and Woody Harrelson) are so totally subsumed in the roles it’s hard to remember Harrelson in anything else, and for a moment i assumed Cruise’s assistant in Tropic Thunder was just someone who looks like McConaughey. The show makes no effort to be original, openly using standard tropes: the alcoholic angsty cop, the cop with a bad marriage, the serial killer who leaves arty/literary clues, the corrupt senator, the stupid chief, but the commitment and purpose of the script, direction, and actors makes it somehow bullshitless and true. It’s a good example of how you don’t need anything new, you just need to mean it – even if a million people have done it before, if it’s done with purpose it may as well be unprecedented and original. Much of the script comes alive in the cold, controlled bitterness and intellect of Cohle, and the frustrated stupidity of Hart. i don’t know what a frappuccino-drinking Southron would make of this scene:

Cohle: I’d consider myself a realist, but in philosophical terms I’m what’s called a pessimist.

Hart: Um, okay, what’s that mean?

Cohle: It means I’m bad at parties.

For me it works because i’ve had conversations like this, or had them (past simple versus present perfect) until i learnt not to talk openly to more than maybe two or three people in this world. And so when the frappuccino-drinking Southrons say it’s pretentious, i think they just mean it comes from a part of reality they have never experienced and never would, because if they lived through Cohle’s experiences they would commit suicide or go insane, or take refuge in asinine vacuity and Guardianista memoirs about how they went to counseling and pulled through and learnt to turn the page and move on with their lives and buy a new house, get a foot on the mortgage ladder, get their kid into a good school, buy a second home in Tuscany, like the Prius-driving frappuccino-drinkers they are.

The critics are in a sense on Hart’s side when he responds to Cohle: “well that sounds god-fucking awful, Rust”, but they lack Hart’s ability to eventually trust that Cohle’s “philosophical pessimism” is, in the terms of his experience, justified; the critics don’t understand that they are only spared this “pessimism” because they have lived ferociously sheltered lives and lack intellect or taste for inquiry. And, as Hart finds, it is only Cohle – the creature of darkness, come out from the dark underground – who can understand the evil they seek. And, through Hart, we also agree that Cohle is kind of nuts, that human beings can’t conduct daily life with this kind of understanding. When Hart sighs “I’m begging you to shut the fuck up” this seems a sane and ordinary human response.

To set the seal on its greatness, they use a few seconds of Swan’s Avatar at the end of the “got an old sniper pal” scene, 1.52 as Cohle says “l’chaim, fat-ass.”

After True Detective, i felt things stranger & better than before. i’m not sure why a show of such darkness would cheer me up, perhaps because it ends well, perhaps because it’s not really necessary that you have a happy ending; it’s enough that the world is enlarged and that the proportions are more or less true (so no Thomas Hardy-esque determined misery, or romcom-esque determined jollity). In this sense, i would say the two defining experiences of 2014, thus far, have been the young giantess and True Detective, for both have challenged & coloured my understanding, made my world seem grander and more possible & vigorous, with more slaps.

Had no interest in blogging and i have to buy a printer and do my appalling tax declaration in the next few days, and on Friday the Viking will visit, bringing destruction & soiled virgins in his wake, and then on Monday i’m off to Finland for a Dark Conclave with my original initiator, the fabled Man in Black. Until then, some photos:

1. England:

2. TS Eliot and cat:

3. My windowsill:

4. Me sitting in an “Irish pub” scowling at a Pole who knew Flann O’Brien and goes mushroom picking in bright yellow boots so her body will be found if she has a fatal mishap:

That is all.

My Finland notes:

1. At Munich airport, birdsong in the steel rafters, sparrows i believe, can’t see them but i’ve spotted the birds in the past; are they deliberately introduced or do they just fly haphazardly in? Do they shit on the floor? Their high chirping is an odd opposition to the occasional tannoy calls and the multicultural vibrancy diversity despair & nowhereness of all airport terminals. How do they get in? Do they breed? What do they live on? (crumbs from the cafes?) Do they prefer it to the outdoors?

2. Airplane to Helsinki, my asthma worsens. Strangely, the recycled air tastes like oxygen mask air, but my lungs rapidly roughen and i am wheezing after 30 minutes. Stewardesses are Finnish, they automatically use English and i automatically reply in German. Many misunderstandings.

3. Helsinki airport. Japanese everywhere, do they use Helsinki as a connecting node or are they visiting the city?

4. Approaching Oulu:

i meet The Man in Black and take a taxi to his castle. We stay up drinking till midnight, and although i am now familiar with the Midnight Sun, it is still disconcerting to see the sky held in brightness – it stays so till dawn:

5. The city isn’t such a bad place to live, about the same size as Kassel and Huddersfield, similarly small-town feel, but without the crime and misery of Huddersfield or the incestuous weirdness of Kassel. Like Kiel, Oulu is on the sea and so although the buildings are mostly hideous (the old wooden buildings were mysteriously subject to arson, to make way for a city-sponsored construction deal) it doesn’t feel too monstrous.

We head to the seaside for protein and womanflesh. Scantily-clad Finnish maidens and seafood and diving seagulls:

6. Camera dies on the 2nd day, battery drained after about 10 minutes of use. i fulminate. As technology complicates it more easily disintegrates, as does so-called civilisation, Tower of Babel-like. Hence, i prefer typewriters and pen to computers, and hence i would rather use a film camera if it weren’t so expensive to develop.

7. Man in Black & i finish watching Deadwood (we got to the start of Season 2 last year). We are obsessed by Al Swearengen’s blue China teacups, seemingly we are the only so interested as i can’t find a single jpeg online. Al drinks whisky from shot glasses, coffee from steel cups, and tea from blue China. Great line: “those that doubt me suck cock by choice!”

8. MIB has recently watched True Detective. He comments that Cohle follows the initiatory path, being expelled & outcast and only then becoming truly effective; the older, apparently alcoholic Cohle, is in fact playing a greater game, and as i rethink TD, i suspect the grey-haired Cohle isn’t the terminal alcoholic & failure he alleges himself to be, but, as with the 47 ronin, he is acting a part:

9. More than last year i note the differences between Finns and Germans. i meet the woman who was my eldest sister in my last life – she lives close by – and we walk Oulu. She has a limp and i prepare to shove pedestrians out of her path but in fact the Finns automatically weave a path around us. i remark that in Germany they would knock us both into the gutter, without even noticing it; she is incredulous but it is so – Germans seem oblivious to others and rely on bulk and girth to knock those they meet out of the way; hence, in Germany i am constantly vigilant, looking for a path through the huge muscle-clad oafs; the Finns are more akin to the English – and, i suspect, normal i.e. non-German, human beings – they don’t generally want collision and they can notice other people. There is something strangely uncaring and oblivious about Germans, so it is easy to imagine the average German turning impassively away as the Jews are beaten to death on the streets. i think even today they wouldn’t even really notice it, or if the assailants were uniformed they would accept that everything must be in order, then loot the Jewhouses and probably complain about how the Jews failed to keep their houses in good orderly German fashion.

Finns also don’t stare like Germans. i gaze openly at the scantily-clad Finnish women (it is about 30 degrees and humid) and disconcert them; here, i am an invasive species. Despite being one of the very few obviously non-Finnish people here, the only person to look at me is a bearded homosexual; in Germany, especially in my suburb or in Kassel, Germans stare at me with their typically cold, hostile attention, a kind of “what is this THING?” look. Cyclists even turn their heads to stare at me as they pass. It isn’t just for me, even a white female American colleague, whose family are originally German, says she hates the way Germans stare at her like a piece of meat. It goes strangely with their ability to knock you into the gutter without even noticing. The Germans have a one-way, aggressive attention, cold and uncaring – they look at everything and everyone as either a threat to their Gemütlichkeit or as an opportunity for profit. On the other hand, when they get to know you they are usually pleasant and accommodating – it’s just that if they don’t know you they would prefer you to die so they can have more Lebensraum.

10. Football, now. A strange World Cup as teams like Ghana and Algeria play intermittently world class football.  Germany outlasts them all, by a combination of technical skill (Schweinsteiger), opportunist greed (Müller), and flair (Klose). Final is one of the most tedious matches i’ve ever seen. No more football for 4 years, thank god.

11. i return to Deutschland. On the s-bahn from the airport i wonder who is German, returning home, and who is a Finnish tourist. Easy – the Germans stare coldly and take up as much room as possible, spreading their limbs and bags out to occupy all the available Lebensraum, then look angry and resentful when someone wants to sit down. Luckily i return with weaponry:

The knife is a Lapp weapon, the dagger is replica German Navy, a strange find in a flea market in Oulu but there were many Germans stationed here in the war. i consider the connections across time and space, joining the Reich to this corner of northern Finland. And now i am back in 21st Century Munich, amidst the bustling oafs and starers, with my weapons.

1. i’ve been too lazy and disorganized to blog, suffering a blog-fatigue and general lack of interest in the public world. Much of my free time is spent on a new book-attempt on one of my old typewriters; i feel quite pleased with it so far and happy to be working with ink and paper. Anything virtual seems a bit suspect to me, likely to disappear or be hacked or intruded upon or just go wrong for to-me-incomprehensible reasons; i’m not even sure that IT geeks understand it, as the systems are now so complex as to appear whimsical and flighty to human beings. And having worked in banks i understand that everyone who works in a company will have whatever access he needs to work, which means that if Yahoo or Facebook use temps, temps have the power to browse through your email and posts, and most likely will do so.

2. Teaching continues, and to coincide with the 5-year mark i have ceased to suffer Arbeitsamt (Job Centre) groups. My last group was fine for 3 months, then a lot of new students appeared and immediately began whining and shrieking. In true German fashion they complained that the groups were too big (i think 12 students when everyone was present, but it averaged about 8 or 9), the students’ English levels heterogeneous (this is normal), and then two strident retarded females accused me of doing nothing at all, just making jokes and talking about Schnitzel constantly. This came after i’d spent about 10 hours, over a week, doing nothing except teach grammar since the atmosphere was too bad for normal conversation or roleplays.

i wearily explained to my boss that since every student comes from a different work background i can’t use “business English” examples like “how many IC8 duct sealants has the company sold this month” so just use normal and slightly comic examples, e.g. “how many Schnitzels has Frank eaten this year”. She sympathised but all the same i felt unwilling to keep justifying myself before these emotionally special Olympic groups.

i reflected and realised that every single Arbeitsamt class has become a nightmare at some point, always because of one or maybe two malcontents; the others will rarely speak up to defend me, (even when they give me good feedback) out of the German culture of keeping-your-head-down, and so it looks like the entire group despises me. The malcontents are almost always power frau types. In true German fashion they are perfectly friendly to my face, even seeking me out to chat in the break – i have realised this is a German reflex, to try to befriend the person you are stabbing in the back. The classes are not merely free for the students, their unemployment money is extended as long as they are doing the course, but Germans not only don’t appreciate anything free, they assume that only weaklings give anything away for free, and then try to get more. With Germans, you have to draw a line in the sand on the first day, do nothing for free, and assume anything you do or say will be used against you. Whereas normal human beings respond favourably to concessions, Germans just think “this person is weak, I will demand MORE!”

Actually, that’s only a minority of weird, fucked-up Germans, but at least 10% of Arbeitsamt students are like this and since the other 90% rarely speak up on the teacher’s behalf, i’ve had three or four discussions with my boss which begin “the group have complained that” and when i say “what, the WHOLE group?” she says “well, one person, but nobody contradicted her”.

3. i decided to stop these groups altogether, since in Munich i haven’t had a single unfucked-up group. On reflection, i suspect my Kassel groups sometimes complained but that Morgana – my boss there – just fielded the complaints for the teachers and didn’t tell us unless it was, in her odd-coloured eyes, justified.

It’s a big step, to stop teaching Arbeitsamt, as they are stable (they can’t cancel), they have sometimes been my favourite groups, and they made up something like 20 – 50% of my income, especially in holiday seasons like July-August and December-January. As is my way, i feel it’s worse to compromise because this will result in a shameful death in a ditch in Bradford, so i stopped even though my group made up something like 90% of my income at the time (August).

The experience of being-a-teacher is now very different, as i’ve taught between 8 and 30 hours of Arbeitsamt a week since i began teaching full-time, 4.5 years ago. They are the closest i would get to teaching at a normal school, since even though the students are usually over 25, they act like schoolchildren, an understandable reaction to being in the same room from 9 to 4 Monday to Friday. My approach was always to do my job, to do grammar, error correct, but also to form a relationship which, while it didn’t usually survive the ending of the course, made us something like friends for the duration. This kind-of friendship made everything easier, when it was possible, and i believe had pedagogical value since language is central to human interaction and when learning you need an amiable, open situation.

4. i now have two company groups but they are irregular because one-on-one so the students often cancel; and a lot of crash courses and short-term students (people paying for themselves, who can usually only afford 10 or so hours because McLingua is expensive). However, i’ve stayed in touch with two old Arbeitsamt students – a slightly crazy Polish lawyer who seems to like me because i’m honest; and a 26-year-old dandy with eyes like Morgana’s (i.e. left is different to right). Through the latter, i’ve joined a Dandy Circle who meet and generally talk excitably in German about clothing fabrics. i’m unsure exactly why i’m welcome, since i usually wear my standard cord trousers, white shirt, tweed jacket, or variations, and can’t follow most of their talk, but there it is. A photo of the dandies pretending to consult their phones for maximum business seriousness, the 26-year-old ex-student on the far right in the raincoat:

5. i like meeting the dandies, though i have really little interest in clothing & dress increasingly like a character from The Good Life. i feel age settling on me like dust and dress for convenience, both physical comfort and to attract as little attention as possible; given my odd face i will never evade notice but i can stealth-dress, in clothes that say “he probably has some kind of non-manual-labour job so he isn’t a crackhead rapist, but he’s no one important”. More & more i feel happy to be invisible and outside of human life; i once likened this to the dark side of the moon,  closer to the divine than the human. It is, to our eyes, mere darknesss, but that is because we are mortal, and our judgement likewise.

1. Life after Arbeitsamt is mighty fine. i have no money but don’t hate my students or my life, which is a significant plus. Some of my hideous exploits:

i) Taught a 15-year-old sheltered rich kid who will now be in a posh English boarding school; curiously, the day after he told me the school’s name, i came across it in a Charles McCarry novel – a Nazi in hiding in South America says he went there as a youth. First day, the boy broke my wonderful Space Pen and i considered a punishment beating but instead pretended not to notice because i am a man of peace now. Last day he suggested we leave McLingua as it was our last class, so i said okay and we had a jolly couple of hours: i showed him where i buy whisky (Tara Whiskey), tobacco, and at the latter we had a look at the booze section; they had some highly expensive boozes on tap so i pretended to be interested in a bottle of 150 € rum and procured a small glass, took a tiny taste and let the kid drink the rest, then said urbanely, “nicht schlecht, vielleicht später” and we sauntered out. Not bad for 11 am.

ii) Taught an Abitur class, kind of like A-levels, 17 – 18 year olds, my first such, two hot girls and one surly boy who looked like a 12-year-old Mark Wahlberg. A doll-like blonde with piercing blue eyes told me she had ripped her jeans dancing. i cackled like a paedo.
girl: do you dance?
me: Ha ha, let me read you a text from a colleague. [digging out my phone] Okay, here it is: “Do you dance at concerts or just stand there nodding rhythmically with one hand in your pocket and the other clutching a whiskey?”
i stand and illustrate, clutching my tea.
me: This is how i dance.

Another time, drilling 2nd Conditional:

me: Girl, what would you do if I gave you a kilo of cocaine?
girl: If you gave me a…?
girl: kilogram of cocaine. Pure.
girl: I would sell it!
me: good girl.

i also had them doing a task-based activity where the doll-girl and Wahlberg were terrorists and the other (a sultry Persian minx) was a fascist dictator. Group 1 had to devise a strategy to fight the Man, and the minx had to find a way to annihilate the rebels.

Group 1 came up with some good stuff, including assassinations, arson, graffiti; alas the minx said she would open talks and compromise with the dissidents. i gave her a disappointed look but conceded, That won’t wash in this classroom but it’s probably the right answer for the school exam.

2. i had dreaded this class as i’ve never enjoyed teaching kids, but on the first day i broke them in, telling them “we have to be in the same room for 15 hours this week so i want it to be as painless as possible. i don’t like being bored and i don’t want to bore you, so let’s just find something we can live with and we’ll all be okay.” i did some of the Abitur book but found all the texts (on medicine, the economy, etc.) tedious, as did they. i feel that if students can use English for dirty jests and terroristic ideas, they should be able to use it for anything, so i concentrated on mirth and violence and all was well (even Wahlberg laughed a few times).

On the last day, we talked about the school system. Bavarian schools are extremely hard and old-fashioned, so to do an Abitur – which is essential to go to university – you have to do Mathematics. While i think everyone should be able to do basic arithmetic, i don’t see any point pursuing Maths beyond this point unless you have some talent: you will inevitably forget everything if you don’t regularly practice it, and i found GCSE Maths an unbearable affliction so wouldn’t have even got to university had i been obliged to take it to A-level.

i’ve taught a few 14 plus rich kids and find them mostly strained, disciplined, terse and somewhat unbalanced, having a great deal of knowledge and no experience – a 19-year-old could read Latin and Ancient Greek with ease, but was nervous, shy, and unable to project power in his voice (he wanted to be an air traffic controller).

2. Wahlberg said little (teenage boys seem considerably less mature than girls), both girls told me they have almost no free time, are constantly studying, doing extra-curricular activities; Doll Girl vehemently agreed when i suggested you need some time to do, well, nothing, to just lounge and think and smoke pipes. i realised that just as many of my senior management students have no one else to talk to, so with these students; we spent a good hour just talking about school and how little it prepares you for either university or work, or life outside of school.

Doll Girl asked if i could edit an essay she has to submit for her Abitur, on Harry Potter. i agreed, even though technically this is slavery as i would be working for free. However, i believe one should not be motivated solely by financial considerations and i was appropriately amused when i read it – she had written a study of the magical systems in HP, and while i only read the first HP and don’t remember anything, she had done some research on our-world magic. i duly edited it, refraining from adding my own comments.

Later, i fell to reflecting on my own teenage Fantasy-consumption. i think we are drawn to tales which reflect our deeper sense of reality. i once thought i had read so much Fantasy – while indifferent to Horror and Sci-Fi – because my own childhood was so banal and uninteresting. Over the last 6 years i’ve come to see it as partly a reaction against this early tedium, and partly a joining to sources of reality in my previous lives, a sense that the physical Newtonian reality is not finally definitive (and in spite of 20th C ideas, i think the modern man’s day-to-day understanding is Newtonian). Horror for me is kind of pointless, and i’ve only recently started to appreciate Sci-fi films because they seem able to speculate about our reality under the guise of some technological mastery – though i still feel a lack of interest in reading Sci-Fi.

3. Undoubtedly, much of childhood & adolescence is an error, as actually is much of adulthood; but i think the sense of utter absorption in things, which i very distantly recall, and the looser sense of causality, are glimpses of a wider reality. Neither should, i suppose, be adhered to, unless you want to end up wearing a bin bag and sleeping under a bridge, but there it is. Ideally, one could integrate childhood elements – curiosity for example – into adulthood, though people usually fail and either abandon all childlike qualities, or stubbornly cling to them and become sadly grotesque & somehow neither childlike nor adult – but as it were an abortive fantasy of both.

4. In German, Fantasie is one word for imagination; in English, it has largely pejorative, juvenile connotations. It’s curious that the Bosche often read Fantasy – Jack, a Vice-President, told me he was driving & playing the audiobook of some book about a dragon (Eragon?) and ended up staying in his car an extra 15 minutes, in his rich man’s garage, to finish the CD. He was an intelligent, competent, mature individual, paid vastly and according VIP treatment in Redmond, and imagination seemed essential to his job, e.g. persuading other highly-paid people to do what he wanted.

In some way, i think i’ve found a way to integrate my fantastical elements, so probably (hopefully) my students would be astonished to know of my fully sorcerous doings.  The Aleister Crowley lifestyle/persona seems absurd and kind of childish to me; ideally, no one would have the faintest idea that the wizard is a wizard: they would think him an amusing oddbod or maker of fireworks or waistcoat-wearer and pipe-smoker; because magic is not a fantasy or illusion but merely how things are – so the wizard would not be anything too evidently magical, but simply a human being, albeit a little unusual because seeing things from a wider perspective – which is, after all, just what you should gain from a good few years of reading & thinking, slowly drifting a little aside the 21st Century, and slowly becoming more fully human.

1. i am a U2 stalker. Just as i have had a few blog-stalkers who left comments of the “u are gay/Hitler/right-wing/wrong you fucking faggot/Nazi/Tory/asshole” variety, who seemed to violently loathe me yet couldn’t stay away, so i with U2: i dislike everything they’ve done since Pop yet listen to every new album, even though it’s like returning to a city you once loved to find it swarming with chavs and polishers, old buildings covered with H & M and Starbucks fronts, your favourite bar now a McDonald’s. Some of my old stalkers hated me from the first, others saw what they wanted, mainly because i diplomatically avoided certain topics or took their occasional swaggering finger-jabbing reprimands with a shrug, and so when i decided i’d had enough they perhaps felt i had changed and become a terrible person and a Nazi and Hitler and Satan.

Actually, the new U2 album isn’t as bad as their last three, which were overproduced pap. It’s still not great but isn’t as bland as i’d feared and i’ve even played it a dozen times with some enjoyment. The opening track, ‘The Miracle’ has a pleasingly discordant guitar and many other songs wander a little off the most-beaten-path. The weak point is Bono – his voice used to be somehow both sweet and rough, with an almost-breaking clear high and a deep murmur; it’s now just a thin warble, actually emphasized by his current balladic Michael Bolton efforts. In whisky terms, it’s a chill-filtered 40%, not concentrated enough to carry much complexity.

Another problem is just U2. They seem to equate sales with quality, which seems perverse given Bono’s standard left-wing on-the-side-of-the-marginalized politics. They have aimed to be a kind of universal rock band, who should appeal to everyone – hence, the ideal product to be virus-loaded with the itunes update, because everyone should like U2 – and if you don’t, there is something wrong with you. In Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a euthanasia camp sets up a Jesus billboard, summoning the diseased to come and die in peace; the picture is a collage of facial features identified as unthreatening and compassionate by focus groups. This is U2 for me, a lowest-common denominator rock band who strive to appeal to every human being by getting rid of every trace of individuality, rawness, authentic life; music produced by focus groups. In this, they resemble Jameson’s whiskey – a nice, inoffensive mid-price drink, mass-produced, a worldwide brand. designed to be identical in every country, to appeal to everyone by eschewing real taste, real individuality, complexity, anything you have to work at with patience and attention. Jameson’s is fine, as are U2, but a standard Laphroaig or Bunnahabhain show it up for the drink-to-get-pissed brew it is, just as the relatively mainstream Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, or Kate Bush make U2 look flatly uninspiring and tedious.

2. Loading a U2 album into an itunes update, without asking users if they even want it, seems preposterously arrogant, the kind of thing you would do if you surround yourself with sycophants who only tell you who awesome you are and how surely everyone on the planet will love you. Inevitably, many Apple users were unhappy. i usually pay no attention to an artist’s personality, outside of their art, but couldn’t help but smile that the ostentatiously left-wing, tax-evading, let’s-end-poverty Bono responded to the general revulsion by saying it’s “enough to put you off democracy”.

i find this typical of these mouthy do-gooders; i once (on my old blog) called these people “the kindly ones”, who come with help and smiles and platitudes about universal love and peace, and then turn on you with savage frenzy when you disagree with anything they say. They call themselves anti-fascists and hold up democracy as the ideal, because in their left-wing circles everyone agrees with them about everything, everyone talks heatedly about how America is the great Satan, how Islam is the religion of peace, how we the people need to shut down right-wing thinkers, how we the people need to end poverty and discrimination – having, usually, not much idea what poverty actually is. They are feted and titled and given plum jobs with e.g. the UN or universities or quangos, and think “poverty” is when you can’t afford a three meter flat-screen television. These folk believe whole-heartedly in democracy, until they meet someone who doesn’t agree with them – and then, the secret police and the gulag are, of course, a tragic necessity, to remove appalling reactionary dissent and ensure a placidly revolutionary uniformity in which everyone lives inside John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ and the only whiskey is Jameson’s. And of course this is all okay because they are on the side of the light and those who disagree are Hitler, as Bono put it: “They’re the haters; we’re the lovers.”

On which topic, i recommend the social justice cat calendar.

3. And now i’m going to have some Quarter Cask Laphroaig and listen to Neil Young’s A Letter Home.

1. Nothing much to report. i finished my tax declaration (a relatively short but always hellish process) and am now grimly drinking tea and awaiting the inevitable demand. That’s right, tea – i have become a frightful tea snob and invested in a fascist teapot, here on display with my other toys:

2. The Jack Daniels, i should explain, is fudge; i wouldn’t drink Jack Daniels whisky, indeed i can’t. One of the problems of whisky is the generally close correlation between price and quality, and the difficulty of accepting rotgut once you’ve grown accustomed to the good stuff. My heaviest drinking days were in Kassel, when i was working so much i could only cope by being permanently drunk outside of work; i drank 8 € whiskies and even abominations like Korn (about 5 € a bottle, 40% alc), and they did the job. At that point, my favourite whisky was Jameson’s, a sign of an untutored & green palate, befitting my youth and inexperience. i had drunk some fine malts in my 20s but had no idea how to drink them and so they were more or less wasted. When i for some reason ventured into the attic of my father’s house in 1998, in the university summer holidays, i found a good two dozen bottles of Glenfiddich, port, cognacs, etc. – Christmas presents from patients – and since my father drank at most one can of Grolsch a year, he let me take them up to university with me. i can sadly report that the only one i made anything of was Taylor’s 10 year-old port, a real delight even then. The rest just went down the hatch and i decided i didn’t like whisky.

i was converted to Jameson’s in 2000 and this was perhaps the best introduction – a whiskey which requires no knowledge or skill in drinking; and so, the ideal mass consumer product. But it took a good decade more to move beyond the facile pleasures of Irish whiskey. Even in 2001, when i experimented with Lagavulin – something like 50% alcohol – i drank it without water, experiencing nothing but an alcohol-numbed tongue and near death by peat.

My malt-drinking days began i think a year or two ago, when i recalled a line from Charles McCarry’s Old Boys about the smell of Laphroaig, and felt moved to investigate. i found the vblog by Ralfy, a bothy-dwelling Scot, very useful for this wonderful new world:

3. Wonderful but also expensive. i calculated that i spend something like 100 € a month just on whisky, and tried to switch to my old 8 € Kassel glory, but after a good six months of Laphroaig, Ben Riach, Springbank, “George Washington” is abysmal and impossible. i’m not too perturbed to be spending over a thousand euros a year on whisky, as i spent easily that much on pipes, tobacco, and smoking paraphernalia in 2013, and on boots, shoes, coats, and sundry clothing in 2012. i seem to need to spend a certain amount to justify working, since merely being alive isn’t interesting enough (as though to breathe were life) for a life of waking early, 2 – 4 hours a day on trains & buses & the underground, and then entertaining, teaching, placating, humouring, dealing with many varieties of German. Perhaps i could claim this as a legitimate business expense.

4. i bought the teapot because i noted that i usually just want something warming in a cup and was drinking too much booze. It seems to have worked, though possibly i’m just drinking the same amount of whisky and also drinking lots of tea. i’m not too worried about the money, since i seem to have enough to manage, and even when work dries up & i get e.g. tax bills, it always works out, somehow. At least, i haven’t yet sunk to the near-homelessness i experienced twice in England, staying with friends because i couldn’t find work. This has been on my mind recently, as i’ve nearly finished my temp memoir, 4.5 (the years i spent in offices), and i can only favourably compare my situation in Germany with that in England. Frustrating as teaching can often be, it’s usually far better than data entry, and as long as i forego a pension & real health insurance i have more spending money.

i contemplated promoting 4.5 by writing some kind of “6 things i learnt as a temp” for Cracked, but gave up when i waded through their writers’ forums and decided i couldn’t be bothered. Maybe if anyone made any real money from writing, i would gird my writing loins, but nobody does, so i won’t. Thus far, from writing i have earned:

i. 500 pounds from an A-level TS Eliot study guide i did in 2000; the company didn’t use it, saying they disliked my “tone”, and it was besides a highly frustrating ordeal since the person who gave me the task replied to all queries (e.g. about word count, section formatting, JPEG size) with a blithe “Oh, who can say?” or “ha ha, ha, I don’t know!”.

ii. About minus 10 pounds for ‘Wake’, a short story i published in a magazine in 2004; minus, because i had to buy a train ticket to Leeds and then buy my own copy of the mag.

iii. About 20 quid for The Better Maker, because i sold about 20 copies and got 1 pound per, however i also bought at least 4 copies to give friends, and each cost me a tenner, so actually i lost 20 quid.

iv. About a fiver for Visitants, which sold about 5 copies, but again i bought copies for friends and lost about 30 quid.

v. Nothing for the translation i wrote of Kurt Maloo’s memoirs, published – with his title, against my advice – as The Captain of her Heart’s Log. It took 3 months of my life and i was supposed to get a percentage of royalties but have got nothing, so i imagine it hasn’t sold even a single copy.

vi. Something like 1000 pounds from readers, via Paypal, mostly in the year between when i left office work and, having survived the Kiel ordeal, got to the shores of Kassel, with all its George Washington whisky.

Actually, it occurs to me that this isn’t too bad, for a writer. i once ludicrously fantasized about making a living from writing but am more & more coming to see money as a wayward and perplexing phantom, with its own whims. i have never had a normal relationship with money; there seems little correlation between my work and the money i have, and since i have survived so far without having any worldly success, i have lost interest in financial scheming, much as one might turn away in final uninterest from a woman who is unpredictably & variously loving and cruel and cold, with no apparent pattern to her moods. i am now trying, as i finish my book, to awaken from the nightmare of money, to trust that things will work out, as they always have.

5. In any case, i feel such total uninterest in arguing with people, pimping myself, that the world of money is more or less alien to me. Perhaps i was born so; or perhaps years of reading Dante et al. have ruined me for the hustle, much as Laphroaig has ruined me for 8 Euro George Washington whisky.

Listening to the amusing audio accompanying this article on Political Correctness in the university, i wondered if the feminist had read much outside of her field (cognition) and feminist ideology. It’s not that reading e.g. Shakespeare will immunise you against cant, since even a great reader like Virginia Woolf wrote stridently 2-dimensional polemics, like Three Guineas, but then she also wrote the intelligent and worthwhile A Room of One’s Own. i wouldn’t say that reading good books will make you a better human being, but it can present a standard of high intellectual rigour, of accurate and honest language and complexity, which will show political ranting up as the tawdry gimcrack nonsense it is. After drinking Laphroaig and Bunnahabhain for six months, Jameson’s seems anodyne, and the 8 € stuff is outright horrific; likewise, a good education would mean years in the company of one’s betters – so a few thousand hours with Plato, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Yeats, would make one ashamed to use language for cheap effect and ideology, ashamed to shout down dissent with a “two legs bad, four legs good!” chorus. So Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees his Death would show up all i have written here as secondary and inadequate enough, and the ranting feminists and ideologues as, well, 8 Euro whisky. And if Harold Bloom as usual takes things too far when he claims that Shakespeare invented the modern human, it is hard for me to read Hamlet or Othello or Lear, and then give the slightest credence to the two-dimensional ideologues, with their pre-prepared answers, their shallow certainties, their lack of humour and irony and nuance, their humanity beaten flat, their self-righteous hatreds, their causes and easy sinecures, their Polonial idiocies & bombast:

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