1. In Kassel to drink whisky and flaunt my expensive silk garments before the foul scum of North Hessen (actually, though i wouldn’t want to live here again, i enjoy the contrast to Munich with its Lederhosen-clad BMW-driving managers). i had almost no work in December so managed to finish 4.5, my temp memoir. It’s i think as good as it will get in this form, but still kind of shit and worthless drivel, with the same problems as The Better Maker – too closely-tethered to fact, too circumscribed by the dull protagonist (i.e. me). The prose is perfectly serviceable, it’s often funny, but it lacks a commanding sense of things, a purpose to draw all these episodes together into a single shape. As one of my test readers, Bonehead, wrote: “Is hard to view your life in terms of a singular or a few singular goals which is how fiction trends to be pinned. It’s easy if you’ve survived a war or been an addict or something but if your life has been the standard quest for enough money to survive that’s more difficult to dramatise.” (sic where necessary)

2. i’m half-way through Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which i began with the idea of getting some insight, but inevitably there was none to be had, except that i’m no Nabokov. It is a beautiful read, and while i could do all kinds of fancy prose, i could not match his casual mastery of judgement and observation; and against this calm aristocratic distance, prose is of little value anyway (i wonder, could a memoir work without this Olympian distance?). A view of the world emerges from one’s character and background, so it isn’t too surprising that Nabokov often reminds me of Proust’s world of cold & energetically decadent aristocrats. Character & background can’t be faked or laboured at in writers’ workshops, and i think if you have the impetus to write, technique will take care of itself (typically, most writers forge a style in millions of words of juvenile letters and works they sensibly discard).

3. Bonehead also wrote: “I think your big challenge will be pinning yourself down and trying to understand the meaning of this period of your life in terms of some wider personal context, conflict or quest. That is the golden thread that could be drawn out of every page to give the reader a handrail through the oblivion. Without that, it’s a journey that starts and ends, circumstantially rather than emotionally.” Though i finished these jobs in March 2009, i still see them from within the matrix of this elberry life, and cannot get outside to view it sub specie aeternitatis, as part of a completed whole. And when i consider scenes from my last life, i see them in relation not only to that completed tale, but in relation to this and the others (where i can draw connections), and so i could probably write a purposeful memoir of that life, but not this.

For me, art is in part an attempt to attain the vision sub specie aeternitatis, to get at least momentarily outside of the maelstrom of daily becoming and chance. One cannot arrive at a still being, but at least many completed becomings may offer a wider perspective; so when i am frustrated that i haven’t had a good writing run since i wrote most of my short stories over about 6 months in early 2003, i then reflect that in at least one other life my 30s were a fallow period where i felt my fire had banked and nearly died, later to burst into open flame. And in another sense, i feel that the completed tales of Lear, Sir Gawain (of Green Knight fame), William Stoner, Almasy, John Grady, offer themselves to the reader as a vicarious life lived and understood, inasmuch as one may understand any life (perhaps, as TS Eliot said, great poetry communicates before it is understood).

4. One of my students, Beate, gave me a copy of John Williams’ Stoner for Christmas, saying she kept thinking i must read it. i had already read it and have a copy, so i will give my old one to an teaching colleague when we meet tomorrow, keeping Beata’s for myself. Juniper (with whom i am staying) asked what it’s about and i said vaguely, A guy who works at a university, has a horrible wife, dies. But it’s a great book because of the way it’s told.

The book itself tells you that this is an unremarkable life, offering nothing beyond an ordinary human life:

Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

“or their careers” quietly tugs at the reader, and then one goes back to “associate themselves”, and perhaps one then sees it as a counter-work to the confessional literature of the era (the 1960s), and the burgeoning selfishness of our time. Stoner himself is a plainly decent man, who has no grand ideologies, does not advertise himself; he is just an ordinarly good human being – in a time where morality has been corraled and subjugated to political movements, where one is expected to have a creed, to be loudly & fashionably (meretriciously) moral. Williams’ novel is of a piece with its hero; it’s enough to present a life as a completed whole, and a pattern will emerge, the more powerful as it is unstated and perhaps even develops without the author’s volition or design.

In order to write fiction or even memoir, i think one needs a sense for this completed whole, not to get bogged down in the detail and uncertainty of mortal life. This is something one just has to have, and perhaps even too much conceptual intelligence will just get in the way (i think of George Steiner’s well-written, crafted short stories, which as he admits, read like a theorem). Doubly ludicrous, then, when novelists give their opinions about politics, as if they have anything worthwhile to say on the subject.

It’s been a strikingly crummy year, though i trust i am being forged to some dark purpose and all this grimmery and malhappence is but a necessary fire. Probably the only good thing about this year are the people i’ve met. Some of my fellow freaks (teachers), not all a joy to meet but there it is:

1. The Cop.

A short, muscular shaven-headed Canadian a bit older than me, did beat cop work back in the snowy New World, came to Germany after making a good marriage, and now lives in a penthouse, the building owned by his wife’s family. He is intense and aggressive and shares many of Henry Oak’s mannerisms (Narc), including the disturbing cold laugh and psychotic glare.

He had been repeatedly kicked out of the JobCentre McLingua centre (purely for classes of the unemployed) for refusing to let the students speak German, gossip with each other, or come in late, drunk, stoned, etc. Slavic students tend to respect him, as they are usually highly motivated and disciplined; the others are divided, but often complain until he is taken off the schedule; he always returns, as McLingua finds it hard to retain staff and he is reliable and competent.

He is almost British in his need to constantly perform, to be always telling a joke or otherwise demonstrating his wit. There is a contained, manic energy to him which can be bright and weird in its intensity, or dark and likely to bubble over into rage (as he said once, “I’m tetchy as hell this week”).

i’m one of the few McLingua staff who enjoy his company, i think in part because i am exceedingly tolerant; and we share a broadly conservative view of things. He alienates most people through his slight weirdness (he quit policing for almost exactly the reason Marty did in True Detective, and there is an echo of violence about him) and his know-it-allness, which comes across as laboured and tiresome; i get on with him – or have so far – because i don’t care if he knows more about cars or Tuscan wine cellars or poker or whisky.

i went for Glühwein with him and some other teachers in early December; our table was crashed by a spindly tall German who was drunk and slightly belligerent; the Cop bummed a cigarette from him:

German: So now we share a cigarette we are friends, or?

Cop: Sure we’re friends. We’re friends as long as this cigarette lasts. [throws it down and treads on it]. Friendship’s over, beat it, pal.

2. Susan the American.

A 24-year-old from Minnesota or Minneapolis or one of these other ghastly nowhere places. She allegedly came to Germany to learn German, her family being of good Kraut stock. She had studied English Lit, actually liked Shakespeare, prompting one of my older matchmaking colleagues to muse, Maybe she could be something for you, Elberry! i just snorted, Too young.

Susan came from moderate wealth, her parents having arranged and paid for a flat in the poshest part of Munich. She was one of these ultra-squeaky-clean girls who only talks about the weather, food, clothes. i joked that if my mother visited again, i would pay Susan to pretend to be my girlfriend, because she is exactly the kind of girl my mother would like me to settle down with. Susan tittered nervously, probably imagining this was a come-on, when it was a fuck-off.

Susan failed to learn German, because she couldn’t stand Germans and they couldn’t stand her. Actually, no one could stand her. She would whine that she only had 20 units of work, but went on lengthy holidays to e.g. Barcelona every other month; i found her complaints hard to take seriously given her parents were paying for everything and i’ve survived on the same amount of work for the last year. On her first day in the JobCentre building, she told the students she was 30, had a boyfriend, and had been teaching for 5 years (all lies). The students told me she was unusually nervous for a teaching veteran and i put them right without realising she had lied to them. i thought it curious that someone so ostentatiously pure, bearing a huge crucifix necklace, would reflexively lie but perhaps this is the way with these saccharine Christian go-getters, that reality is too abrasive and simply frightful, and lying is always preferable to the truth.

She only stayed in Germany for about 6 months, returning without regret to Minnesomewhere. i dare say she has effortlessly acquired a job in Publishing or Marketing, her natural habitat, i feel.

3. McGuinness

One of the few real teaching veterans, who somehow existed in the same building as Susan without ever exchanging more than a dour good morning, McGuinness is my age, from a small village in the west of Ireland, Galway being the big city and Gaelic a secondary but real thread in the everyday weave of things. He’s been teaching all over the world for nearly 20 years, in Munich a few years longer than me, and has a very old-fashioned schoolmastery air, despite his time-torn longshoreman’s garb. He reminds me very much of my stepfather, now in his late 60s, one of the last real working class, a man with an ingrained aversion to bullshit, management speak, offices, bureaucracy, technology, the State (and socialists wonder, irritatedly, as they quaff their champagne, that their chosen cannon fodder either don’t vote or vote Tory).

McGuinness is Irishly cagey and secretive, answering almost all questions with a gruff mutter, shrug, or brusque joke. He is probably the only McLingua teacher i would absolutely trust with both information and money. His decency is of a Bartleby kind, formed from absention – from almost everything. He refuses to teach at companies because the students don’t learn anything (90 minutes once a week, with frequent cancellations), even where the JobCentre classes that comprise his workload are frequently hellish. He refuses to work weekends. He has a few private students but refuses to work at schools except McLingua, because it involves hustling and trouble; his lessons are mostly grammar.

McGuinness reminds me of me, taken to an extreme in certain directions. i suspect his refusals come from years of hard experience, and he has learnt not to answer questions because people (women especially) love to give unwanted and wrong-headed “advice” to men, which rapidly escalates to nagging and hysterical rage and clawing. i’ve now adopted some McGuinnery, so i didn’t tell my matchmaking colleague that Susan was clearly a bland rich kid with whom no meaningful friendship would be possible; i just said, Too young.

He forms friendships principally with Slavic women students but remains single. i even tried to push a buxom and ripe Russian girl in his direction, since she clearly lusted after his dashing Irish ways, but nothing came of it; i guess that he has had bad relationships and learnt, as have i, that after a full day of teaching the last thing you want is a woman who expects you to take her to restaurants and charm and entertain her.

Despite his total lack of charm he’s one of these people who most people like, the ideal confidant since nothing you tell him will ever be passed on, and he has a decency and warmth to which we respond in spite of his gruff Irish manner.

4. The Prima Donna

Another teaching veteran, i think the same length of service as myself, though she worked in South Korea till a couple of years ago, the Prima Donna is early 30s, an opera singer (there’s even footage of her in quite reputable productions online), Wagner fan, of truly Valkyrian aspect – about 6 foot tall and i would guess a good 1oo kilos or more of muscle and fat. Despite the bulk she is radiantly pretty, comes from a rich family, and will, i guess, make a good marriage as they say, or even control her heavy drinking and discipline herself to learn German and work on her voice. She is a curious person, one of the few i’ve met with “star” charisma, so it’s hard not to be impressed. Unfortunately, she’s also narcissistic and insists on being the centre of attention, so she will burst into the teacher room and interrupt every conversation with a bawled, God! I’m so hungry!!! and then launch into some diatribe or anecdote without caring that she immediately stills every other conversation.

She has a politician’s fluence and flexibility, which i have come to distrust (it is telling that she dislikes McGuinness). Everyone instantly feels that she will be famous and rich and we will all be a very minor footnote to her life. She seems to dislike me a little, though i’ve been careful to shut up as soon as she interrupts me, and to either discreetly leave the room or just let her drown out everything i’m saying (she’s one of these people who will also interrupt quiet private conversations with a snide remark, so it’s impossible to say anything to anyone when she’s in the room). After 5 years of temping and the same teaching, i’ve learnt to shut up as soon as anyone else demands to speak, but all the same i think she senses that i am sitting there watching and listening, and forming dark judgements, and she cuts me down to size every time i say anything, and even when i say nothing she will often make some sarcastic remark about me. For example, a week ago she said we should let the students go home early (from the JobCentre building) because it was test day, they finish at 1400, and don’t need to stick around to the mandatory 1615; i said i did this once in Kassel but then the Centre Director unexpectedly showed up – whereupon the Prima Donna bawled: Oh God Elberry, not another of your Kassel stories! No one is interested, Elberry! God! Nobody CARES!!!

She’s a good example of how charisma is usually unconnected to goodness, for she is a self-seeking, mercenary go-getter and first rate apple polisher, who tends to talk about her friends & acquaintances purely in terms of their money and status; i think she despises McGuinness mainly because he’s poor. Another time, when she and i were alone in the teacher room and she decided she had to cast her spell over me, she put down her iphone for a few seconds and bellowed that i should do a MBA and get a real job instead of wasting my education on teaching. And yet she has a curious magnetism, so it is hard to resist her spell when she elects to cast it – hard for lesser mortals, that is, i find it quite easy. Amusingly, a Polish student who liked McGuinness (but it ended in recriminations and fury) hated the Prima Donna, and every time i mentioned her she would expostulate: Die Prima Donna ist furchtbar!

Teachers are a strange lot.

1. Being a damnable heathen and pagan sorceror, Christmas largely passes me by, though i enjoy all the Glühwein and gluttony and whores. Madeley wrote recently of his Christmas loathing. i suppose i enjoy it because i usually travel to see people, in England it was my mother, in Germany Juniper-in-Kassel; and i like the sense of exceptionality, of a certain ritual. For atheists, i suppose religion seems baffling and implausible, pure nonsense & fairy tales (as if the fairy tale of money by which most people live is more credible). i was a peculiar kind of agnostic for many years, because i lack faith; i am of the spiritual generation requiring signs & wonders before i believe anything, but then i had signs & wonders and that was that. i was always able to sympathise with the idea of Christianity – the dominant religion of the west, though looking to be soon superceded by Saudi-style militant Islam – but wondered, from the outside. Now i am in a sense within my own particular bubble – a bubble inhabited solely by me since i have no interest in joining frightfully earnest “pagan” societies and consorting with gabbling Wiccans – i see things differently.

As an outsider, i thought that being Christian must transform the believer, so one’s everyday life would be utterly altered. Perhaps people become Christians because they suppose this will initiate a wholly new life, and are then disappointed to find it’s more or less the same as the old life. They then get tattoos and denounce all religion as vile superstition, and fall into the mud and mire of apostacy, where passers-by piss upon them and throw semen-encrusted eggshells at their sorry faces, a fate they richly deserve, for their unbelief and, as it were, frowardness.

2. In my disgusting old age i see that human life requires a certain boring stability and predictability, and that the periods of exaltation are usually limited to youth, when everything is developing and all is new, and the small self provides little ballast to new experience. i don’t think it is possible to sustain this high course without insanity, and when i remember how difficult and kind of insane my 20s were, i’m glad to have settled into a pot-bellied, cardigan-wearing torpor and ease. My great period of spiritual unrest was in 2008/9, but this passed and now i just take these things for granted.

Perhaps spiritual enlightenment is akin to romantic love, that it is most clearly felt when it is a new and shocking transformation; thereafter, it is just how things are. i note that back in my tai chi days (i.e. before i grew fat and slothful), i felt little when i practiced every day, but if i did nothing for a few weeks a simple chi kung would affect me powerfully, with tingling hands, trembling eyelids, etc. And just yesterday i prayed for the first time in a week – normally, i do so every morning, as i walk to my local s-bahn station – and could feel an immediate rush of awareness, reminiscent of the 2008/9 days of glory. It could, then, be that we cannot sustain these grand impulses in their full vigour, and that while our life is subject to a general transfiguration, after the initial shock it will be so pervasive as to be subtle and even mostly imperceptible. So i would say that i don’t really feel different to my pre-2008 days, and yet from time to time i react as my old self would not have, and people occasionally regard me as they would not the consumptive atheist i then was. The sense of exciting transformation is felt mostly when entering a wholly new life, or when it has been interrupted – akin to the white of breaking surf, where the ocean collides with a different reality. There are surfers of the spirit, who will to remain always in this moment of exaltation, always on the wave as it breaks in brightness, but this is rarely to be sustained; i am more interested in living daily in a greater understanding, which will rarely be showy or even noticeably different; but the general concourse of things, that will be thoroughly and subtly transformed.

3. Protestant Christianity aims at a vision unencumbered by ritual, decoration, aesthetics, beauty, grace – so the Viking’s Evangelical Christian mother swears by one of these awful modern Bibles, with stick figure drawings, presumably seeing the King James Bible as damnable Popery (the Viking once uttered something on the lines of: “That stupid James Bible is like really stupid shit because you cannot understand it without thinking and it is like not written in modern English, so, like, all this stuff is like not clear and stuff. A Bible should be like a Chemistry textbook for children, so you can just read it and find the answers, and there should be stick figure drawings of God so like you can relate to God like he is Magneto and be a good Christian and go to Heaven and stuff”). These dreadful Christians have cartoon strips of their deity, nor do they shrink from Kumbaya with electric guitars, performed by earnestly-grinning mongoloids who will later embezzle the Church funds, molest deformed children, and run away to the Philippines to live with someone called Juan.

One can sympathise with plain-speaking, plain-minded, plain folk who like an undecorated so-called spiritual reality. One is then, i suppose, is no danger of mistaking the external trappings for the informing reality, since such folk have no trappings; but i think one requires a certain ritual to consciously step a little aside from the everyday, and without it one will either lose all faith – and then grow embittered & angry that it did not last – or just go a bit strange and be subject to oracular pronouncements, spastic fits, speaking in tongues, frothing at the mouth, rolling sexually about on the ground (covered in couscous), playing Kumbaya on the bongos, indulging in schismatic heresies, and foretelling the imminent Apocalypse, like the Viking’s mother, clad wholly in white robes and carrying gold nuggets about one’s person for a well-provided afterlife with stick figure Jesus and stick figure Jehovah.

4. It’s fashionable to suppose that rituals develop as an attempt – by stupid neanderthal pre-scientific folk – to understand reality, and if we just had enough Science we would dispense altogether with all ritual. This seems part of the general modern attempt at understanding, which looks at everything as a machine or practice, and asks, Why do people do this? – as if everything can be rationally disposed of in this manner. Not being Scientific, i prefer to think pragmatically, to wit, What effect does this have? – since i don’t see how a so-called explanation can be anything more than an (untestable) hypothesis. i wouldn’t ask, Why do people send Christmas cards? – since the original cause (assuming there is only one) will have long evanesced into the practice of yearly human motive. i would rather ask, What effect does it have?

There are people who are as it were spiritually Protestant, living an unadorned and apparently rational life. They tend to grunt suspiciously at those whose life flowers into meaningful ritual, seeing all that which gives human life value as somewhere between wasteful extravagance and damnable and despicable deceit. i had a student of this sort, a HR lawyer at a large engineering company; an intelligent woman but, by god, arid and charmless and awkward, and even the other students (all finance and IT experts) found her offputtingly so. i prefer to live otherwise, and if people say it is illusion, then by their standards (that i could not replicate and empirically test and statistically analyse the experiences i had in 2008/9) just about everything is illusion and we would all be better off living some kind of sanitised sci-fi life, drugged into happiness since all experience is apparently biochemical (and that only if these folk will admit that happiness if in any way desirable) and riding around a tedious sci-fi city in Sinclair C5s, grinning emptily at our ipads and playing Angry Birds like drooling retards from Beeston.

5. i think, had one gone back to the Middle Ages, stormed into a Cathedral like Russell Brand, and angrily demanded to know the origin and purpose of e.g. the Mass, nobody would have understood; it’s not so much that people (i dare say) supposed these rituals to come from God, as that they lacked the machine-age mind to expect everything has a rational cause and can be so analysed and then rejected or accepted by a committee. And i think it is our modern need for final explanations and step-by-step clarity which is awry – or rather, it is fine for designing a machine but not everything. Machines have become our new model of humanity, and as we once constructed idols of stone and wood, now we construct and worship machines, and suppose ourselves to fall short in having emotions, in requiring something beyond a machine’s mindless purpose. The more people devote themselves to servicing the machine, the more it is necessary to operate like a machine, the more we feel our own humanity is inadmissable and a kind of ghastly mistake.

Perhaps humanity alone does not suffice to counter the deadening impulse of the machine and its Nazgûl attendants; humanity alone does not, in a sense, even exist – humanity is rather the way we perceive ourselves in the varyingly warped mirror of our arts and creations and purposes. Humanity is not the apex of reality, but rather a capacious middle room, influenced by all about it, by the divine and demonic – and our greatly fallen world is such that one could discern both impulses in all religions, to varying degrees – suggested by the inclusion of figures such as Loki in the Norse pantheon, or the peculiar God of Job (Jung’s Answer to Job). i am not qualified to say whether, for example, Odin was originally a man, or if someone just made him up one day after eating the right mushrooms, but he exists now, as a god.

No one can, i think, understand the genesis and purpose of gods, but their effects can be perceived – dark or benign as they may be, they are the essence of extravagance, of that which one does not require for base biological survival, of that which flowers and is in the presence of vigorous human imagination, without which one is not fully human, though one may always become so. A one-sidedly and lunatically imaginative person, in thrall to a demonic impulse, is no advertisement for religion, but, for me, no more does the geek or boffin sell Science and so-called Progress.

Purely personal, my taste for extravagance and flourish, for the one-eyed god of the north, or this Christ in his fury, over a Sinclair C5 and ipad and grinning sci-fi drone pumped full of happy chemicals. But for god’s sake, if we have to use mobile phones and cars, let us also smoke and wear ridiculous clothes and be men.

1. This fell out of a notebook when i returned to Munich from my pre-Xmas bunse in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a picture the Viking drew of me very quickly as i was smoking my pipe at him in Vienna (one of the last refuges of tobacco sanity):

Being able to smoke in bars is a surreal pleasure, like being able to slap anyone you like, or to just get in any parked car, Bourne style. This time i found a fucking commie bar, Pub Bukowski, and smoked at length, sometimes with the Viking, enjoying cheap and potent and good cocktails, gazing up at the fucking commies on the wall:

On the whole, i would rather be in Vienna than Munich, to be able to smoke, and to more easily conspire with the Viking (in nearby Bratislava), but lack the money and energy for yet another relocation, and besides, Munich is quite tolerable and i have the dandy underground here, and some kind of professional reputation, making it easier to get work.

2. Nonetheless, my teaching resolve is weakening of late. Very few teachers can do this job for more than year without burning out or just slacking off and trying to get by without doing much. i’ve fallen into the latter trap and am steeling myself to read TEFL books and do lesson prep, even though it actually feels kind of pointless – most of my students make very little progress, inevitable perhaps since they only have 90 minutes once a week, and rarely use English outside of class, and then they make do with a kind of degenerate “business English” which is actually sufficient (comprising a limited vocabulary of words like: project, roll-out, deadline, problem, implementation, meeting).

It’s a strange occupation since improvements are hard to measure, especially with my (usually 30 – 60 year old, already intermediate-level) students, one reason i like having low levels from time to time, where it is possible to teach something that will stick. Students are the customer and generally know nothing about language acquisition or pedagogy, and so occasionally make strange complaints, based on a vague platonic idea of how teaching should be.

Quite often, i have absolutely no sense that my students have improved, and am taken aback when they say that the lessons have helped a lot, though i’m too tactful to say “really? i didn’t notice.”

3. At times, the gap between my private world of reading and thought, and the world of my students can seem almost unbridgeable, but as long as i can suppress my own interests and be thoroughly absorbed in theirs, it more or less works. i enjoy learning about e.g. gas separation chambers, canteen supply management, aeronautical engineering, fashion, but it can feel strange, after a week of mostly one-way interactions, with me simply nodding and asking questions, and providing error correction; so when one student asked me “how was YOUR week?” i was flustered and could only say, “don’t really remember, lots of teaching”. There would be no point trying to talk about the things bouncing around in my head, at the moment: St Paul’s epistles, Helen Pinkerton, the Abwehr, the Philosophical Investigations, Stalin, Stalin’s pipe; and since almost all my social interactions are in class, i’ve got out of the habit of communicating anything about myself.

After finishing my temp memoir and deciding it’s boring shit, i feel a disconnection from not merely those 4.5 years but also from my past; coinciding with a recent and mildly horrific inadvertent drug experience, where i could only really remember the last few seconds and everything before this seemed like a dream of a dream. It only lasted a few hours but i realise that whether it caused or merely independently paralleled my current mood, i feel as if i have no past, just a memory which may or may not have any significance, probably not. This sounds like wonderful zenlike clarity and in a sense it helps: i feel unencumbered and simplified, but also with almost no significant connection to the present. Without memory and continuity, the present can be extremely clear and solid, but as if it’s just something that has entered my field of vision and has no real relevance for me. i perceive these things, i listen to my students, and feel that really it’s not my world, because i am now little more than a set of perceptual organs.

4. The other day, i came across this picture on Tumblr; it seems to be Austro-Hungarian stormtroopers from WW1:

Second from left looks quite a lot like Wittgenstein and though as far as i’m aware he was a mechanic for the first couple of years of WW1, then an artillery spotter, i suppose it’s possible that this is him. i wonder how many of these men survived the war, and if any, how they adjusted to life in the broken empire and the horrors of the next three decades. It was a world where in a sense the cultural memory was nearly destroyed, and i think just as one requires personal memory to be more than a recording apparatus, so with cultures – and the more complex the society, the more this is necessary. For many in these times, an imagined future provided a kind of illusory continuity – the bad dream of so-called progress; but roots go into the ground and memory into the past; the future does not exist.

1. Still here, by god, grim and swaggering like a dying cowboy in the snow. i’ve had very little work since November so am stone broke and even dipping into my UK credit card to stay alive buy whisky. i finished work at 1030 on Monday, came home and because i only got about 4 hours’ sleep on Sunday evening i decided to sleep for a bit. As i dozed the sun came out over the snow, that almost painful brightness and blue, wintersun. The sudden weather change took me back to the times i slept in the sun at university, where i usually went to bed in the early hours, curtains open (by preference i am nocturnal, and feel a surreal freedom at being awake when others slumber, and sleeping when others are about their horrid business).

At university i just assumed i would get a good job or an academic post, though even then i found the latter a strange and unlikely prospect. Looking back, the 4 years at Durham were useful and it’s hard to imagine how i could have survived 5 years in the temp trenches without having learnt to see things as it were from afar, in a kind of depth, as i learnt by reading and re-reading – perverse though it doubtless seems, reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil & Stella eleven times was good training and helped me resist the attrition of what people call the real world. People are likely to sniff at the idea of studying English Literature but without writing or talking about a book, one tends to skim lightly over the surface of action or language; it’s not merely that i usually read a work several times before writing an essay: i was looking for patterns, apparent contradictions, deeper resolutions, and i got much closer to e.g. Sir Gawain & the Green Knight by consciously working through to the truly strange depths. Before writing the essay i felt that Gawain was a poem of high intelligence and sophistication, but really couldn’t say more than that; to write i had to get closer, and it passed into my understanding of the world; and while it has probably made me even more unemployable than i was to begin with, it has value for me. And perhaps, it helps in my job now, such as it is.

2. Being broke and generally disillusioned with so-called teaching, i’ve been miserably looking at job ads, a gruesome experience. Here’s a sample of the horror with which i am confronted:

i could probably do most of these jobs after a few weeks watching someone, but naturally employers want someone who’s done a similar job in the past and won’t wander gormlessly about chewing gum and saying, Gee, so what exactly is a Cooperation Project Manager?; and naturally i would rather teach English than be a Senior Power Management Unit Component. A friend suggested i rewrite some websites for free and use this to get paying work, and this seems like a good idea, but one for which i lack any enthusiasm, in part because i’ve learnt that almost all German companies would never hire someone who doesn’t work for a “preferred supplier” like McLingua, so it would i think be just so much time and labour lost.

3. But really, i just feel a deep-seated aversion to anything to do with business, sales, the hustle. Asking for money strikes me as vulgar and those, like an American ex-rock-star colleague in Kassel, who has a MBA and used McLingua to pay for his moving costs to China, then quit the job and started his own business, strike me as amusing but also bizarre and repellent with their thrusting elbows, wide sales grins, and total absorption in money and the getting thereof. The MBA rock star, for example, used something a student told him to make money on insider trading, and wanted to make some cash by writing an article about a defective piece of military equipment – he knew about the latter because a student at the company told him the product was unsafe, and being a shiny MBA my colleague immediately thought How can I make money out of this? He was untroubled by the thought of betraying a confidence or of probably instigating a “mole hunt” in his student’s company; and my colleague, thanks to his old rock band, certainly doesn’t need money.

4. i’m aware that not everyone in business is a spiv, but it seems hard to survive in that world without being so. Talking with my students, who are mostly fairly normal and generally some kind of lower to middle manager, i hear the same stories again & again: grotesque pep talks from the higher bosses, cancerous bureaucracy, vile politicking, apple polishing, networking, incompetence, everything oriented to reward those in power and their favourites, and the shareholders – or even to simply placate or gull the shareholders with manipulations or outright falsehoods. My students regularly chortle bitterly at the latest piece of corporate bollocks, so in one company, let’s call it Squeezy Ball, more than a thousand staff were laid off to boost the share price, and this “project” was called Squeezy Ball Excellence.

This is the world of business and i want as little as possible to do with it. i feel like puking when i read about companies’ vision and beliefs and goals and mission. It’s true that it’s not as abhorrent here in business as it was in academia, but i feel incapable of doing more than skirting the very margins of this world. The loathing i feel for this meretricious and conniving nonsense paralyses me, one reason i guess that i’ve failed almost every job interview i’ve ever had.

i enjoy human to human interactions, but human to institution/ organisation interactions are preposterous & sinister to me, not even real interactions but rather a kind of enforced fantasy, like going to an Acid party and having to pretend to be ecstatically hallucinating when actually the drug just makes you nauseous and lethargic.

Going through a job interview usually puts me in mind of a reversed Maoist interrogation, the victim boasting of how perfectly he embodies the fashionable lunacy, how little human and unaccountable remains to interfere with total corporate identification. i feel, entering this world, like a sheep-carrying peasant going into a shining government office to plead his case.

5. For me at least, philosophy isn’t really about politics or making good arguments for specific causes, and so i feel puzzled when political thinkers occasionally call themselves philosophers. At its heart, i see philosophy – the love or pursuit of wisdom – as an attempt for an extra-worldly perspective, the Archimedean point (and the death of Archimedes suggests how the world will treat philosophers). One is impelled by the world, to move beyond, to be able to comprehend the world in all its passing variety and specificity. Philosophy isn’t about facts and knowledge, but about wisdom – an interpretation of facts & knowledge which, i would say, requires the Archimedean distance and almost indifference.

So the early Socrates doesn’t put forward any worldly proposals or manifestos – he merely knocks arguments down (even if his methods are often just a kind of nitpicking wordplay); he seems to be searching for an approach to the world, and starts by finding himself dissatisfied by the sophists who are the Ancient Greek equivalents of my MBA colleague or fashionable academics today. It is the later Plato, of Republic, who has become akin to these youtube bloggers and commentators, calling for specific political changes and calling themselves philosophers therefore.

This makes philosophy sound so unworldly as to be sterile and pointless, and of course it is if you want to market the latest Apple product or change healthcare or deal with unemployment, because for that you need to be totally engaged with facts, knowledge, things that stand within the world – but the world is ultimately determined by that which stands outside of the world. i don’t see that philosophers can’t opine or decry or propose, but then it’s not philosophy, it’s just politics.

The philosophers i like have the inutile purity of the early Socrates, either knocking down unsteady constructions (Wittgenstein), or pursuing an idea so far removed from the world as to be uncontaminated thereby (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard). Even in my youth i didn’t agree with Schopenhauer, but i enjoyed The World as Will & Representation because i felt, and responded to, the impulse to understand the world by getting outside of it. i have no idea if there’s any culture-wide value to studying philosophy, but as with English Literature it has helped me to understand my own alienation from, discomfort with, a world that demands one be immersed up to one’s eyebrows in  self-serving bullshit, servile acquiescence, and amoral calculation.

6. My preferred teaching technique is to instigate and direct a conversation, correct grammar, feed them vocabulary, and do grammar instruction if it’s required. This only works if i can quickly and consistently establish a human connection, and most of the time i can, and the lessons go well enough. My students are often surprised to learn that i usually spend my weekend alone, since i seem so lively & sociable, but perhaps i can be what one called a Spaßvogel because i go home and read and think and try to win free of the world, to get to the skeletal origins, where there are no facts, no knowledge, nothing to argue about or for, just the sharp angular forms by which all this was made.

1. Knob Creek bourbon whiskey, 50%. Cost something like 37 € here in Munich. It’s like licking burnt caramel off a slightly plump harlot’s naked back, on a grassy bank at night, and you start to roll downhill. Bizet plays distantly, you bang your knee on a tree root but just laugh like a crazy man.

2. Springbank 10 year old single malt, 46 %. About 45 €. Crawling through the grass to your target, a NVA General, your senses acute and sharp, a knife in your hand, you hear the soon-to-be victim whistling to himself. You are 19 and have a handlebar moustache.

3. The Drop.

Tom Hardy has the quiet gaze of a saint much disappointed in the world. There is a dog. Similar feeling to After Dark,  My Sweet. Almost contrived, neat, but satisfying and with a lingering finish and hope.

4. Fury.

Brad Pitt as an enraged cracker who speaks American German. Pitt really looks like a retarded hillbilly. War without apology. Painful scene where American GI louts lick fried eggs. Just what it is, approaching Homeric and a wonderfully incongruous gentle note from Pitt in his dying: “please don’t”.

5. John Wick.

Keanu Reeves can act. Michael Mann-esque in its visual exuberance, occasionally Bill Murray-esque in humour; rewarding and balletic. There is a dog.

6. Wild Card.

Jason Statham can act. 95% mood and character, Statham the tough guy who is vulnerably himself when not pounding villains. The film is 5% action and this is the more enjoyable as you by then know who is pounding whom. Unexpectedly fine and Statham should do a Matthew McConaughey and start doing manly moody thrillers where he has dialogue and emotions and a character.

7. The Greek Anthology.

Ezra Pound’s Anyte:

This place is the Cyprian’s for she has ever the fancy

To be looking out across the bright sea,

Therefore the sailors are cheered, and the waves

Keep small with reverence, beholding her image.

1. i watched The Dark Knight again last night, my third viewing. It improves with rewatching. An excellent fan-made trailer:

The film is, i think, about 20 minutes too long, and has some plot incongruities – so after a frantic road chase, the Joker is apprehended, only to bust himself out, and Gordon says, as if this is obvious or makes any sense, “the Joker planned to be caught”. Given how nearly he wasn’t captured, this is nuts. The film would have been vastly improved by some trimming and streamlining.

On my third viewing, i found myself as it were editing the film in my head, maintaining thematic continuities when they are submerged under unnecessary subplots. The Joker is the star, of course, Batman being a largely silent and masked presence, reacting to the Joker’s machinations. The Joker is the chaos at the heart of things, in pointless opposition to the manmade order, an order which is both imperfect and necessary. He is the absolute revolutionary, akin to the bandit in Alfred’s tale, the man who robs and kills but discards his loot as irrelevant. If Dent is a kind of fascist authority, the Joker is the opposite, willing a permanent revolution until all civilised order disintegrates. For all his destructive actions, he does not wish to destroy it from the outside, like the Muslims; he is a figure like the cultural Marxist, who wants to persuade all others to his nihilism (a trend which now dominates). He will triumph when those who live and are sheltered within the imperfect civilised order destroy it themselves. In his unvarnished chaos, he is also, finally, opposed to the criminal mob (who have their own kind of order). If chaos is seemingly inevitable, so is order. There will be the Joker, as there is the Batman.

2. The superheroes and supervillains are human – this is not a supernatural tale – but they have powers which set them above those they protect or destroy, the merely human. When Harvey Dent, a fairly ordinary DA, becomes Two Face, he suddenly has the power to slip through plot holes like the Joker or Batman, to survive what looks like a fatal car crash. Masks, grotesque make-up, facial disfiguring, accompany this transfiguration. Even if one supposes the Joker or Batman to have some kind of armour or exceptionally high pain tolerance, they both swiftly recover from beatings which would leave a human being crippled or dead. This kind of power goes with an abstention from normal human life; it requires a concealed identity (Batman); an unknown real identity (the Joker, with his multiple “how I got my scars” origin myths, “Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name, no other alias”); or a new identity which maintains only the most vestigial and unreasoning attachment to the old human life (Two Face). A good account here:

The Joker’s complete detachment from the material world, from life itself, renders him beyond simple good and evil and into another category altogether, the complete and impersonal danger of anarchy.

i think the Joker is evil but more in his actions and effects than in his essential character – that being anarchy, to destroy order, all human bonds and faith, all continuity and meaning:

They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.

Not that this is likely to be manifest except as what i would call evil, and perhaps all evil characters necessarily have some other, if malign, essence (evil being somehow too insubstantial to be the groundstone of a sentient life).

3. i see the Marvel and DC characters as akin to the gods of yore. Just as Batman has his many different versions – Keaton, Clooney, Kilmer, Bale, different origin stories, so we find multiple, often contradicting accounts in ancient mythology. It is a sign of an inherent imaginative power, when a figure like Batman, or Odin, is subject to interpretation, cast in different guises, contradicting tales (as one might say a good song can be covered and transformed by others).

Monotheism is a different understanding, but even here there is a natural fragmentation and coherence, as we see in the many different Christs – starting in the four gospels. Monotheism is a product of scripture – something lacking in polytheism – with organised schools of theology, and, in Catholicism, a central authority. One need only regard Protestantism, with its thousands of vociferous, embattled and battling sects, to see how naturally symbols are refracted through human interests and passions. Even what i would see as the most monolithic monotheism, Islam, has its sects and divisions.

Perhaps, lacking a concrete idea of god – no imagery, no human incarnation – Islam is something of a special case. It also seems to have passed untouched by Greek philosophy (unlike Christianity), and never to have experienced Jewish nitpicking and theorising, not that i know much of Judaism (or Islam). i note that people who never pray, have never read the Koran, and more or less ignore the tenets of Islam will still call themselves “Muslim”, just because they were born in a Muslim country. But then, 20 years ago it was more normal for people to call themselves Christian on similar grounds. i don’t think many now, in Europe anyway, will call themselves Christian unless they actually do something about it – go to Church, read the Bible, etc.

4. Taking the long view of things, it seems dangerously naive to suppose one can just destroy a culture, or a belief, and expect everyone to get along to the strains of John Lennon’s grotesque ‘Imagine’. Beliefs, gods, are often enough malign but that’s because they are part of human life and we are often enough malign – we contain something of everything that impinges upon us, everything we perceive and can think about. So, The Dark Knight is – for all its flaws & bloated length – also an account of our own late disorder and ambivalence to the civilisation we have inherited and partly destroyed. Perhaps, in this fictive universe, Batman is the closest to a hero because he is neither totalitarian – he himself lives beyond the order he protects, and has a basic reluctance to kill – nor is he the “agent of chaos”, but rather a strange compromise figure, recognising the deceits we live by, because he himself operates so; as Bane will remark in the sequel:

Theatricality and deception, powerful agents against the uninitiated… But we are initiated, aren’t we, Bruce?

There is a certain kinship between the superheroes and supervillains, for they are initiated into the power of secrecy; they have more in common with each other than with those they either protect or destroy. It would be inconceivable for Batman to be an unmasked, public hero. In this universe, those who operate without a mask or persona, within the matrix of society, accepted, legitimate, human, are unable to effect much. To change the world, you must be unworldly. As Gordon says in the closing scene:

he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A Dark Knight. 

and so it is, that those who stand on the very margins are the real centre. They determine the world, because they stand outside of it.

–

1. In an attempt to improve my lousy Bosche, i’ve started reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf in English and German. i’m taking almost nothing in, as the German is way too complicated for me to have more than a vague sense of meaning, and reading the English only sentence by sentence (after reading the German), is too fragmentary a method to follow the story etc. i have, however, read the book two or three times already, in my 20s. It’s very much a book to read when you’re young & alienated, as the hero is something of an eternal teenager, with both the good & bad of that condition. Now i’m nearly 40, and generally enjoy my job (talking to “business people”), Harry Haller’s total disconnection from the world of work gets on my nerves a little.

We went slowly up the stairs together, and at his door, the key in his hand, he looked me once more in the eyes in a friendly way and said; “You’ve come from business? Well, of course, I know little of all that. I live a bit to one side, on the edge of things, you see.

Get a job, hippy. It reminds me of a gross manic depressive who told me he shouldn’t have to work or have to have any contact with normal people, but should (presumably) have his existence subsidized by the normal people who have real jobs, like the god-prince he supposed himself to be. i suppose it’s harder to sympathise with Haller, or the manic depressive, because neither show evidence of any talent (though Haller is in the tradition of Nietzsche, as having inherited a modest income and living within his means). i would regard a life such as Dylan Thomas‘ with amusement rather than contempt, because i like his poetry and if a chaotic selfish life was the necessary background, then so be it. Without that talent, living for oneself only seems a sterile existence to me now.

2. Of course, despite 5 and a half years of teaching, i am far from being a good citizen. After teaching – at the moment, i spend about 12-14 hours a day on the road or in classrooms – i have no desire to talk, to see anyone, and though i enjoy talking to e.g. a group of engineers & project managers, then the ex-head of Communications of a large gas company, then some kind of strategic manager at a truck company (my Friday), i would be no means wish to do their jobs. i require a certain distance, to appreciate these lives & occupations – to be “on the edge of things” as Haller puts it, etwas am Rande.

3. i’ve come to realise that, due to my origins & upbringing, i exist without any clear societal context. i’m neither Indian (my father) nor English (my mother), and i don’t think anyone could guess my hometown from my accent – since my father spoke a barbarous pidgin English and my mother a learned, artificial posh English, and i didn’t absorb any of the local accent. i don’t even really look Anglo-Indian. One of the dandy underworld said i was “a shitty Indian” because i don’t eat curry, and a “shitty Brit” because i don’t drink beer (the Finnish Man in Black suggested later: tell them you come from the secret Nazi base in the Antarctic).

Because my brain shut down till i left school, i accidentally avoided a typically school-trained intelligence, and because i spent 3 years reading in solitude, before going to university, i was also already too formed to be much influenced by academia (so my tutors either hated me and my mind, or liked it but commented that i wrote very “old-fashioned” essays, meaning uncontaminated by the bureaucrat-prose of modern academia). This meant i couldn’t have survived long in academia and found it harder and harder the longer i stayed.

i tend to startle and affront and even occasionally horrify people, because i don’t exist within a comprehensible context. It’s interesting how often people reflexively label me, as a way of creating an ad hoc context, within which to make sense of me. These contexts often make no real sense but are necessary as a first step, much as i find it necessary to know how long a film will be, and roughly what kind of film it is, before sitting down to watch it. So both Bonehead and my Tai Chi guru teacher called me “an academic”, while people who actually know anything about academia would find this a bizarre judgement. Germans often get over their baffled incomprehension by seizing on something like my fob watch or pipe-smoking and then pronouncing happily, You are classic English guy like Sherlock Holmes, or? Meanwhile, in England, people often asked rather nastily “where are you from?” and when i said “Huddersfield”, “no, where are you from?” meaning what ethnic swamp could produce someone like me. So, naturally i prefer to live in Germany, in a kind of benign misprision where people suppose me to be stereotypically English (despite my not drinking beer or watching football).

4. i had a job interview a few weeks ago, for a magazine for Germans learning English. i didn’t really want the job but it was only 14 hours a week, pay the same as at McLingua, and i thought it could have been a good contrast to my normal work, probably interesting enough part-time. It’s the first such interview i’d had since 2004, and went exactly the same way – an office full of women, women interviewers, a perfunctory “let’s get this over with” sense that they had only invited me because i have high qualifications but actually they want a 21-year-old blonde girl called Tasmin. They gave me a text to work on at home, and three times sent me the wrong version – the kind of brazen incompetence i’ve learnt to expect from publishers, and women, which explains why modern books are so full of typos.

Throughout the short interview, i had the sense that they were staring at me like some kind of thing. The HR manager asked (in German) what i do in my free time and i said (in German) “I read books”. She asked what i was reading at the moment and i briefly wondered if i should pretend to read the standard German fare of “Krimis” (Germans are addicted to crime stories) and 50 Shades of Grey, but instead said i was reading a history of the Abwehr, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations; i felt that, as this point, i would only appear more sinister by pretending to be exactly like them, and from their looks they had already decided to reject me, just because i’m the wrong gender. The HR director said: “do you do this voluntarily?” with an incredulous sneer, and i smiled blandly and said “yes, it’s voluntary”. i thought this quite typical of interviews and these kind of people.

i’ve found that people who are effortlessly successful, especially in media/publishing industries, are either out & out mediocrities, or able to dissimulate to a high degree. They all are able to identify with a company and job, indeed they need this kind of validation and would go crazy without a job title and the approval of those about them. They often can’t understand why i fail every interview i have, and loftily assume that i deliberately sabotage myself (so one German power frau (i think my closest & extremely bossy sister in my last life) wrote: “I think you need to stop reading events as nothing but an endorsement of your unworthiness” when i said i’d applied for a content writer job at Microsoft thus: “i haven’t heard anything and since it was via a recruitment agency, and Microsoft is a huge company, it’s possible i won’t even get an interview, they might just filter me out as “strange”, but fingers crossed” – her response seemed to have little to do with me, but then i realised that for such people, the only explanation for failing a job interview is “unworthiness”, because only material validation counts, whereas for me i assume that a recruitment agency would scan CVs and filter out anything that seems strange, and this is simply a sound practice when you have 10,000 applications, and it may be depressing but it doesn’t make me worthless).

However, i don’t fit into the polisher category and this is unfortunately written on my face, not to mention on my CV. For the polishers, material success is the ultimate criterion for life, and so they are driven by an avidity and profound servility which serves them well. i’ve learnt that there’s no point discussing jobs and the getting thereof, because polishers are incapable of understanding that someone with a brain might get to 39 with no money and no prospects – it offends their view of the world, as a place where virtue is inexorably rewarded (otherwise, how could they have always found it so easy to get the right jobs?).

5. Not fitting into any societal context on the one hand keeps me from getting a real job; on the other, it helps with English teaching, because it means i can fairly easily meet and engage with a variety of different people – at first, many of my students are standoffish (and, frankly, extremely German), because they don’t know what to make of me; but after the second or third lesson they almost always warm to me and so i now have a set of classes who requested me as their teacher. At the moment, i have four such classes: a young & rather hot sales assistant at a luxury clothes shop (she likes action films and Hermann Hesse); a Russian management consultant; a group from a large semi-conductor company; a group from a large gas company – all of these had other teachers, often actually good teachers, but now only book lessons if they are guaranteed me as their teacher.

6. A student on Friday asked if i’d always wanted to be a teacher, and when i laughingly said i’d hated the idea and only chose it as an alternative to minimum wage temping, she said that i seem nonetheless to be doing the right job now, and to be in the right place, and i agreed. i feel that my life has been a series of naive attempts to fit myself into a context, and each time i have failed and moved more to the margins, managing to survive in overlooked niches. At present teaching is ideal, in that while i seem permanently broke i am able to convince my bosses that i’m doing something highly orthodox & acceptable, and meanwhile do what i (and the students) want in the classroom. i no longer make more than perfunctory attempts to fit, and after provoking an initial surprise, it seems to mostly work. i can’t envisage myself ever publishing anything i write – because my writing, like myself, exists without a comprehensible context – but i no longer require or even hope for such validation.

The further i go to the edges, the less i attempt to be a good little doggy, the easier i find it to engage with people in the contextless space of the classroom, and even without. i can’t imagine getting a real job, or being published, and that’s okay, that is just what one would expect from someone who comes from the secret Nazi base in the Antarctic.

1. i’m sometimes greatly disillusioned and disgusted by my job, so little good does it seem to do, but tell myself that i often seem to cheer people up or at least poke them like a frotteur on a crowded Tokyo train, and the stories and experiences i absorb perhaps make me a rounder person (as i am slowly losing the 1.5 stone of fat i put on a couple of years ago) and may help with my fictions. Some students i have at the moment, who surprise me:

1.1. The Wolf. Ex-head of Communications for a large engineering company, he left when a new CEO took over and is now improving his rusty English and idly looking around for jobs. He was, as is German, standoffish and alarmed at first, but by the second lesson we discovered an affinity for films and TV and literature, and in the last lesson we talked about Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, Patton, and True Detective. i was surprised to find he’d studied German and English Literature at university, and got a job in Communications without any specialist training, and as he calmly told me, after a decade in his last job, he won’t have any problems finding a new job. He’s early 50s and i guess in that generation it wasn’t necessary to have a MA or PhD in just exactly what you want to do – i think this changed in the late 90s, when i was at Durham, so it wasn’t even possible to work in a library because i only had a BA and MA in English Lit, and apparently required a MA in Librarianship to do a job that, i guess, most people learn “by doing”.

i recited dialogue from True Detective in Rust Cohle’s voice, with his manner; the Wolf said, amused,”You should work in theatre”, something i’ve heard from several students now, as i inadvertently slip into the posture & voice of my “character” when i relate an anecdote or act out a scene from TV or film. i don’t feel i could act professionally – for one thing i’m sure i’m now too old & haggard to begin, and i guess it’s the same as in publishing, that if you don’t suck the right cock you don’t stand a chance. Germans are hopeless at impersonation so they tend to see my fairly normal English ability as astonishing, but i think it’s more an adjunct to teaching for me, not something i could live off.

1.2 Martin. i guess about 50, well-dressed, pleasant, serious, focussed, a project manager for the company the Wolf left earlier this year. He’s an engineer who supervises engineering projects, and has a blue collar hands-on, pragmatic approach. He told me how he once slipped down a mountain while climbing, broke part of his spine, and then managed to walk back to his car and drive home in agony, but then couldn’t get out of the seat so just sat in his car, on his drive, till his wife appeared and asked him, Are you drunk? He didn’t think there was anything exceptional about his behaviour, and when i asked why he hadn’t called a doctor or mountain rescue, he shrugged and said it wasn’t so bad, only a broken bit of bone in his spine after all. When not working he seems to spend a lot of his time skiing on black slopes, and likes “speed hiking” in the mountains at dawn. He recently went on a manly skiing weekend with manly friends; when i asked “does your wife let you just disappear with your friends?” he said, nonplussed, “I am married, not in prison”. Which struck me as amusing, given that my ghetto boxer friend Bonehead could only meet his friends when his power woman girlfriend was working on Saturdays, and often had to lie to her and pretend to be cleaning the flat etc., when he was in fact meeting me in Leeds for people-watching and cranberry juice.

1.3 Miss Threadgold, my 24-year-old fashion sales assistant student. Today, as she stood close to me and measured my head against hers, then said, “I’m taller than you!”, i reflected that she’s the kind of girl i would have fallen in love with, 15 years ago. We have an odd kind of pedagogical relationship, as we talk fairly openly about relationships, tits, Moomins, etc., and last week she told me she’d broken up with her most recent boyfriend. Now that i’m nearly 40 i feel she comes from a different, younger world, and i remarked amiably, “you’re young enough to be my daughter”. Today, i told her “I dislike women” and when she made ungermanly flabbergasted noises of outrage, i added airily, “you’re okay, you’re special“. She said that several men have made exactly the same comment and often say she’s more like a man (she is, in one sense, feminine, but is very untypical, with, for example, an impressive knowledge of action films; she’s also one of the few pretty girls i’ve met who reads real books). i explained that she doesn’t seem masculine to me, but she’s not a standard factory-produced female. For example, she said a friend of hers works in Insurance and groaned “How boring!”, i cavilled “well, some great writers worked in Insurance” and she immediately said “Kafka”. Good girl, i thought, and added, “and Wallace Stevens” and she asked how to spell the name and noted it down, and i will brutally give her Notes towards a Supreme Fiction for homework next week, and demand a lengthy commentary:

The death of one god is the death of all.

Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,

Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was

A name for something that never could be named.

There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun

Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be

In the difficulty of what it is to be.

–

With Miss Threadgold, as i think with the Wolf, education and a love of supreme fictions has provided insulation from 21st century so-called culture. So the Wolf left his last job because he didn’t agree with the new CEO’s approach or character, and Miss Threadgold has an iron integrity under all that femininity and luxuriant brown hair and mirth. She doesn’t have a smartphone or Facebook account, and say she still writes letters by hand to friends. For a 24-year-old, this is unusual.

2. i don’t watch Top Gear but am saddened that Jeremy Clarkson looks set to be booted from the show. For non-Brits, it’s a manly car show where the 50-something Clarkson drives cars and makes manly comments. Here’s a typical episode, where he tests the awful BMW X6:

It’s probably one of the BBC’s most profitable shows, and i guess most of this is down to Clarkson’s bloke-charisma. He will be about the same age as the Wolf, and comes from a time when i think it was easier to get a decent job without playing the HR cookie-cutter game, of being a team-playing problem-solver and blue-sky thinker with all the right progressive opinions. He apparently bitch slapped some BBC apparatchik who calls himself Oisin, and the BBC are using this as a pretext for a purge. As the Viking once commented, the BBC/Guardianista socialists who call anyone right of Mao “a Nazi” would have been appalled by the opinions of the men (and women) who actually had the cojones and guts to fight and defeat the Nazis.

3. Clarkson is popular because, for all his flamboyant public persona, he doesn’t seem to be pushing a political agenda or carefully tailoring his utterances to score brownie points. In a world of pervasive Public Relations and doublethink, this is exceptional. So, the reason he’s popular is also the reason the BBC are determined to get rid of him – because he’s basically just a real human being who doesn’t censor himself, doesn’t carefully play the right angles, doesn’t consult a PR agency before opening his mouth. He is a younger Prince Philip, a relic from an age where human beings were somehow larger, did not instinctively muffle or mutilate themselves to fit into progressive agendas. Today, it’s shocking to find a real human being, warts and all, who has any kind of public authority, but in the fairly recent past this was actually just how people were.

In our last class, the Wolf told me that the media now prefers to treat everything in terms of character, and the potential for scandal is everywhere to be considered. The result, i think, is a race of insincere, pandering, apple polishing human beings, who automatically have all the right opinions and mouth all the received orthodoxies, a Pravda culture. It’s not that ordinary people have changed so much, as that the very thin stratum of media folk have decided what is acceptable and what is abhorrent. Media people tend to be inveterate polishers and cocksuckers, people without any substantial, private humanity – they are surface creatures, who live only in order to attend nice little cocktail parties where they reinforce each other’s received worldview.

4. In the Pravda culture, a real private human being, unadorned and unpolished, and really unpolishable, is inevitably taken to be an affront to all right-thinking polishers. The real human being is no longer admissible to the precincts of power. Of course, all human beings are human beings, but i think we are highly malleable creatures and a privacy of thought is essential to our full nature; and this is no longer permissible. Clarkson is not remarkable – or wouldn’t be, except that to be an ordinary untrammeled human being is now publicly unacceptable. Like Stallone’s Demolition Man, Clarkson is how human beings once were, and in our time he seems extraordinary, unspeakable, dangerous. Perhaps he should be cryogenically frozen and thawed out to deal with the chav spawn in a generation. That would be, frankly, an awesome film.

1. i remain dissatisfied, old, and broke. i have been sucked half into the Arbeitsamt maw, teaching classes of unemployed losers Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon. It’s good money, in that they can’t cancel, unlike companies & one-on-ones. However, while i need the money i feel like Boba Fett being dragged into the desert anus of death (that’s a popular culture reference). After just over five and a half years of teaching, i sometimes feel like i’m dreaming the whole thing: it’s sometimes horrible, sometimes fun, but doesn’t feel real anymore, as if my fate branched off into another job and for some reason i’m still physically in McLingua, outside of fate and meaning.

In truth, it’s not really horrible anymore, because i refuse to teach horrible groups now, and i find myself laughing merrily at things that would once have filled me with rage, like the Arbeitsamt students who have no idea what page we’re on, even when i write the number on the board, jabbing my finger at it and intoning the number two or three times. These classes are a peculiar beast: the intelligent students are usually frustrated and bitter, and the rest are stupid and listless.

2. i try to hold to the notion that this grisly ordeal may be good for my character, even if it does little for my finances or happiness. As Gandalf said “it gives patience to listen to error without anger”, and i must endure a great many errors: mere language errors do not greatly vex me, as English time tenses & prepositions are difficult for the German; but gross stupidity and inattention and daily Krautishness get me down.

i don’t dislike my stupid students. If anything, i find no correlation between intelligence and likeableness. It probably is, in some perverted & filthy way, good for me to have to get on with stupid people, as it requires me to focus on what we have in common – which is just our common humanity, nothing more. Intelligence turns poisonous when not thoroughly rooted in a substratum of ordinariness. This is, i think, part of the power of John Williams’ character William Stoner – an academic without the usual vices of the academic; he has a farmer’s simplicity, a lack of intellectual pretension & neuroses (in contrast to the two typically deformed academics, Walker & Lomax, who set out to destroy him). He doesn’t even seem particularly intelligent; i could perhaps say that intellectualism is the show of apparent intelligence, which can be real but can also be simply a chameleon-like mimicry. i often meet people – colleagues – who seem intelligent, but then go on to say stupid things, and over time i realise they simply parrot popular journalists and can’t defend their views (if they even are “their” views), don’t read anything, drink themselves stupid every weekend & evening, but have “the manner” of intelligence.

Most of my fellow undergrads at university were so – bright and grinning, they had all got A grades at school, then came to university and generally found it was a lot harder, that you actually had to work, and that summarising a lecture and perhaps a hastily-skimread chapter, was not enough to get the highest marks. Not that it made any real difference – these people all probably earn a great deal more than me now, and had no problems at all getting whatever jobs they wanted. Indeed, the great masquerade of intellectualism is no doubt to be preferred to real intelligence; intelligence tends to be harder to apprehend and acknowledge; intellectualism is merely a kind of mimicry, a way of nodding seriously, with a frown, wearing the right clothes, and saying things like “but isn’t that part of the post-modern hermeneutic?”; it requires very little or perhaps no real intelligence, merely an instinct for imitation and go-getting. Much of what passes for intelligence is posturing and mimicry. It would be amusing to see if a regular dolt could be schooled in this masquerade, and if our modern spiritual cripples would notice.

3. In general, i would prefer the company of my Arbeitsamt idiots to fashionable academics. The former have a limited range of thought & discourse, but it’s solid & unpretentious; and even their ignorance can be amusing – so, we had the following conversation last week:

Big Daddy Bernd: I am drink the Glenfiddich on evening.

Nico: Was? Was ist Glenfiddich?

me: It’s whisky.

Nico: Glonnfadd…?

me: It’s Gaelic.

Nico: Was? Gay?

me: It’s a language.

Extremely Hot Iranian girl [in German]: Really? There is a language for gays?

Another time, when they started giving me aggro about English grammar being hard and making no sense, i used a well-worn example of the hellishness of German, that Brust (man’s chest) is die Brust (feminine) but Busen (bosom, tits) is der Busen (masculine) and to illustrate my point held my hands out to massage the air a couple of feet from a fairly sexy slinky Russian MILF’s bosom, while intoning “der Busen”. And i could get away with it because, like Gary Oldman’s cop in Leon, i was just doing my job. i suppose i could have ripped her clothes off and groped her breasts as long as i kept repeating, der Busen, but i didn’t think of that at the time.

Such is life, one long splendour of missed opportunities and inadvertent sex crimes.

My Vodafone box stopped working as it does every year or so. It took 3 weeks to get a replacement – thanks to my laziness, and the incompetence of Vodafone and GLS, and the intervention of Satan. As in the past, i adapted very quickly, i think because i didn’t have internet at home till i was 31, and i now get too much social contact in my job, read only my Kindle on the trains & buses, and so relish a quiet evening with a paper book and some whisky and a pipe, and albums rather than youtube song-hopping. i don’t have a smartphone so was only briefly connected to the irreal, a few minutes for email at McLingua each day.

This time i feel i wholly transitioned to the 19th Century, feeling no desire to email or surf the internet, only some irritation that i couldn’t check the (Englishly changeable) weather or if the trains were running on time. The internet is so involved in things today that in these 3 weeks i felt i’d gone back in time to gloriously waistcoated Europe, with a mad Kaiser running about goring the unwary with his moustaches and spiked helmet, and the Tzar gobbling Fabergé eggs for breakfast, and Queen Victoria drinking tea, because she was sensible. In this time i re-read The Lord of the Rings, and somehow managed to actually enjoy an entire Wagner opera. i also discovered that you can use Vat 69 as a blending platform – it’s a cheap but good blend, 15 € in my local shop – but i added a glass of a peated Connemara and found the taste vastly improved.

One of my students today asked what i would like engraved on my tombstone. i said i just want to disappear and be forgotten, when the time comes, and would prefer my body to be cast into the ocean. However, i think it would be okay to write “you can use Vat 69 to make your own blends”, this being the most important wisdom i have to impart.

i made some notes in my re-reading of LoTR and may write some of them up here, to spite you.

1. i was surprised at how fresh The Lord of the Rings (hereafter LoTR) was for me on this last re-reading, given that i’ve seen the shite films, and on the last reading (2008) i found i could remember vast sections almost word for word. It took about 10 days this time, a goodly length for a 1000-page book that’s too big to take on trains. As ever, it is a joy and consolation, to use a Yard/Scrutonword.

2. In my teens, i read Fantasy voraciously and LoTR was always among my favourites; as i aged & became cruel & bookish many and indeed most of these books fell by the wayside, though i have re-read some with pleasure – but in general my standards for prose and characterisation are higher, and so well-made Fantasy books, designed for 14-year-old pre-internet boys would no longer appeal to me. The only books of my teenage years i would still regard as worthwhile are LoTR, Ursula le Guin’s first 3 Earthsea works, Stephen Donaldson’s first six Thomas Covenant books, and Katherine Kerr’s original Deverry quartet. i did re -read Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance series in 2001, and found them still enjoyable, with some good characters and many striking moments – for example, the weird desolation of the elf wood, after the king unwisely uses a dragonorb; no doubt borrowed from Tolkien’s palantir, but with a strangeness of its own. i’ve also recently re-read some David Gemmell books with pleasure – his Jon Shannow and Waylander series are excellent. Here’s a sample of his dialogue – the killer known as Waylander has saved a priest from being tortured to death, then burns the priest’s soiled robes and lends him some garments, and they make camp for the night:

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Waylander.

‘I was wondering why you burned my robes,’ said Dardalion, suddenly aware that the question had been nagging at him throughout the long day.

‘I did it on a whim, there is nothing more to it. I have been long without company and I yearned for it.’

Dardalion nodded and added two sticks to the fire.

‘Is that all? asked the warrior. ‘No more questions?’

‘Are you disappointed?’

‘I suppose that I am,’ admitted Waylander. ‘I wonder why?’

‘Shall I tell you?

‘No, I like mysteries. What will you do now?’

‘I shall find others of my order and return to my duties.’

‘In other words you will die.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘It makes no sense to me,’ said Waylander, ‘but then life itself makes no sense. So it becomes reasonable.’

‘Did life ever make sense to you, Waylander?’

‘Yes. A long time ago, before I learned about eagles.’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘That pleases me,’ said the warrior, pillowing his head on his saddle and closing his eyes.

‘Please explain,’ urged Dardalion. Waylander rolled to his back and opened his eyes, staring out beyond the stars.

‘Once I loved life and the sun was a golden joy. But joy is sometimes short-lived, priest. And when it dies a man will seek inside himself and ask: Why? Why is hate so much stronger than love? Why do the wicked reap such rich rewards? Why does strength and speed count for more than morality and kindness? And then the man realises…there are no answers. None. And for the sake of his sanity the man must change perceptions. Once I was a lamb, playing in a green field. Then the wolves came. Now I am an eagle and I fly in a different universe.’

‘And now you kill the lambs,’ whispered Dardalion.

Waylander chuckled and turned over. ‘No priest. No one pay for lambs.’

3. The Fantasy genre, indeed the concept ‘genre’ is curious. Within a genre, you understand that certain things will occur and certain things are excluded. If you like a genre, you will tolerate even the not-so-well written; if you dislike the genre, even the best will likely repel you. A reader’s preferences seem to indicate something of his character. i only really like Fantasy and spy thrillers.

i find Crime almost totally boring; i can read a well-written crime thriller but with the exception of Donna Leon’s Venice books, and Norbert Davis, i feel no desire to re-read them. i think i like Leon because i like Venice, but even there i was most interested by one (i forget the title) which edged more into spy thriller territory. Davis is really special – i only tried him because Wittgenstein liked him – the books are witty and appeal to my sense of absurdity, with a huge dog to boot.

Germans are crazy about crime books (Krimis) and their favourite TV show, Tatort, is a long-running crime series. i fail to appreciate Crime, but i think Germans like it because such stories are always about society and its mores, and treat of a violation to the law, and its punishment; and Germans are naturally bourgeois, and hence obsessed by social order.

i like spy thrillers because, i think, they are essentially Gnostic parables about the secret knowledge and secret power which order the world. The actors are always limited and at the mercy of these vast, impersonal forces, but able to manoeuvre slightly by cunning and craft and will. i like almost all spy thrillers i’ve read, since they seem a much smaller genre than others, and so what is published is usually good – with a larger proportion of informed authors like le Carre, McCarry, Alan Judd, who were intelligence officers, or at least connected.

4. Fantasy, i suppose, is about magic and the world before technology (and hence the genre has flourished as technology has taken over our lives). One could say that the pervasive and all-comprehending world of the manmade, of technology & science, is the exact opposite to magic, so i find almost all Science Fiction off-putting and somehow incomprehensible – because for me, this is merely a deception and trumpery. It is notable that the only Sci-Fi i’ve liked is Frank Herbert’s Dune series, which take place in a world where science has limited itself (so force fields necessitate hand to hand combat) and are more like bizarre Alchemical parables about the ascension of man to a higher being.

Fantasy had its heyday in the 80s, i guess from those who grew up reading Tolkien. After that, there are authors like David Gemmell, who repeated his themes & interests, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, but very little that is new. Fantasy written over the last 20 years or so seems to me tedious, with a lot of swearing and sex to compensate. i don’t think it would now be possible to write in this genre without just repeating what others have done.

5. The Fantasy genre, and Tolkien, have attracted contempt and bile from the start. Edmund Wilson dismissed LoTR as “juvenile trash”. i have yet to read an attack on Tolkien which wasn’t either full of inaccuracies or based on total ignorance, like one of my tutors who dismissed Tolkien as “crap”, then admitted he hadn’t, of course, read anything by Tolkien (because, after all, why would you read crap?). Though Wilson claimed to have read the book to his daughter, judging from his review i think he was lying; i suspect he rather skimread parts or asked her what it was about and based his article on such evidences.

It’s not that i think anyone who read LoTR would like it, but all the attacks are so wrong-headed and inaccurate that it is perhaps a book you could only finish – given its girth – if you had some sympathies for Tolkien’s worldview; and naturally most journalists and men-of-letters – hard-drinking, womanizing, atheist, materialist, amoral, cowardly – would feel an extreme aversion to a heroic, moral, traditionalist, Catholic-infused work. That it is, on some level, appealing to children would only prove its childish crapness to those who have made a career on talking and writing authoritatively about Finnegans Wake et al., and think real literature is only comprehensible to PhDs; or – the other prong – angry drunks in bars who know about Real Life and die in their 40s, choking on their own vomit in a prostitute’s rancid bed. The latter, which seems the norm now, is i suppose the worldview of those who live without enchantments – religion, magic, any kind of reality beyond the human and the humanly-comprehensible. Incidentally, Tolkien inserted two such characters into LoTR: Boromir, and Ted Sandyman. Such folk are naturally incapable of understanding Tolkien, or Völuspá, or Isaiah, or Dante; though they would not dare to dismiss e.g. Dante as “Catholic trash”.

The difference between Dante and Tolkien, in this respect, is that Tolkien wrote against the grain of his time, against the world – so there is always something unnatural and mannered, and i would never suppose LoTR could have been written before about 1800. If you have a sympathy for the older, more human world – more human because turned to that which creates humanity, rather than that which humanity has created (the machine)  – then i dare say you will enjoy Tolkien; if you are a thoroughly modern man, a city-dweller, as was Wilson, in love with the machine, then it will seem merely trite and childish, “juvenile trash”.

6. i do suppose there is such a thing as genius, and talent, and that some books are crap and others good, but i don’t think there is any way of decisively sorting the two – so some attacks on Tolkien seem so insanely wrong-headed, yet i suppose the authors would simply dismiss any objections a lowly blogger like myself could make, and there is no end to argument. Within our mortal life, the only criterion which i think everyone could agree on is longevity – so the Beatles were routinely outsold by e.g. the Bay City Rollers and other novelty acts, but things seem clearer over a 40 or 50-year timespan. Likewise with literature, i don’t think anyone today would think Marie Corelli is any good, but she was once famous indeed. That Tolkien is still widely-read, 60 years after he published, suggests i’m not merely foolishly infatuated, and i think if the human race survives and can maintain literacy for another thousand years, that LoTR will always have some readers, with occasional peaks of popularity. And Tolkien, who wrote for himself and his friends (as i do), seemed intensely relaxed about the vitriol poured on his works by the machine man and city-dweller. For the machine and the machine man, and that which drives them both, will pass in time, and humanity, rightly understood, will endure:

–

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

–

And there will surely be pipe-smoking and fine ales.

1. At a low ebb struggling with modernity, in the form of smartphones. i foolishly decided to buy a smartphone after my recent annual internet black hole. i chose a Motorola as they seem relatively cheap. Then i bought a Sim card. Ah. that took a week to arrive and then i accidentally broke it out of the case in Nano form (Motorola uses Micro, which is slightly bigger), so the card got lost in the sim card slot, as i optimistically pushed it in, thinking, Well it seems far too small but i presume it will all be okay. Shit, no, it’s just got lost inside the phone, what am I going to do now? Fuck. So i had to extract it with the savage tools i had to hand, irreparably destroying the sim card slot in the process. There is a second sim card slot, presumably because people like me will immediately mangle the first, so i inserted it there and behold! – i have virtually no internet connection and only sporadic mobile reception, despite having the same package as a student who says he has no problems at all, but lives in the wilderness to the south of Munich. i contemplated just sending the phone back, cancelling the sim card contract (only monthly, mercifully) and returning to my gloriously robust 50 € beast, but will instead spend hours anguishing over mobile networks and probably end up cancelling the sim card – after losing a day’s money ordering it – and go for some ridiculously expensive contract that will have me in the poor house.

2. To paraphrase General Patton in the film: “God, how I hate the 21st Century”. i wasted an entire day struggling with this shiny little bastard, and was seriously tempted to smash it with a hammer, film this on my 2007 phone and then ask viewers to send me money to recompense my loss. Just the idea of an industry run on advertising and referrals bewilders me.

i know people who seem to have instantaneous internet access on their phones, but mine is virtually non-existent – it takes hours for my piece of shit to access the app for s-bahn connections, by which time there will have been another strike (a near-constant feature of Munich) and all disrupted and cast aside by filthy communists.

3. After writing the above, i felt impelled – against my post-work agoraphobia – to leave my flat and walk in the wind, and found that my shiny new smartphone works fine outdoors. It uses the 02 network and when i briefly had an o2 surfstick it was also largely useless inside my flat (so i had to use it on my balcony). For most of yesterday & today i felt frustratedly enraged at myself for being too stupid to understand how to use the smartphone, despite doing everything according to the instructions. Now, i feel irritated at myself for not thinking to check the reception outside, despite knowing 02 can’t penetrate my building walls. My colossal idiocy, in not thinking of something so simple, perplexes and infuriates me.

For most of my life, i have suffered under an intense awareness of my own stupidity. Everything comes to me with difficulty, and i am bemused when people say i’m “clever” (which seems to mean “intelligent in a cheap way”), because i feel incapable of surviving in this world, only barely managing with the help of those charitable enough to assist me with e.g. money and Germanity. i called Juniper as i was tramping furiously through the old fields near my flat, ranted about my stupidity with the smartphone and Sim and internet, and she laughed, “Do you think you are the first person who has had this problem?”

It’s curious, aged 39, to realise that one of the defining concepts of my life has been that of my own stupidity. Even at university, where i never met another under- or postgrad, or even tutor, who i thought of as really intelligent, i felt that i was at best groping dimly at literature i could never write or more than vaguely understand. i didn’t regard myself as more intelligent than others; it was more that i seemed to see things they didn’t, by chance, or rather by hard work, by reading and re-reading. And without the need to study and write, i have lapsed into a hebetude of the mind for the last decade or so. i feel that the effort to survive – through 5 years of data entry, then nearly 6 years of teaching – has absorbed my entire spirit, leaving nothing over.

4. i’ve just watched the modern Sherlock Holmes series, called simply Sherlock. i assumed it would be shite but it’s actually extremely good – intelligent & discerning. There is no typical BBC pandering to minorities and the masses; Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes is superbly “elitist” as it would now be derided – that is, he is a type of the higher man, absorbed in intellect and self-mastery, and untroubled by lesser urges, except nicotine. i only bear two cavils: that he doesn’t smoke a pipe (he instead applies nicotine patches), and that his Watson is a little too nice and Hobbitish for an ex-Army doctor who was in the shit – i would have preferred a Watson with some real violence and darkness under the Hobbitry – not much, but a little less the Bilbo Baggins he plays in the childish Hobbit films.

There’s an excellent scene where an apple polisher London cow tries to pass herself off as a fan to get a quote from Holmes, and he reads and dismisses her with a cold: “you repel me”. i was astonished that a BBC show would have a typical Southron BBC-polisher being eviscerated by a cold asexual (i.e. not gay) white “elitist”, but perhaps as with Top Gear, it will always be the case that people will respond to the real. It is curious that people will feel affection for a character as coldly superhuman as Holmes, but there it is.

Holmes, i guess, is always determined by his sense of his own overwhelming intellectual superiority – my obverse. Amusingly, students sometimes say i remind them of Sherlock Holmes – purely because i use a pocket watch to keep track of time in class (most classrooms have no clocks, and i don’t care for wristwatches). My father, i realise now, adopted some Sherlockian mannerisms – he smoked a pipe when i was a child, and sometimes wore a deerstalker hat (actually quite practical for the ear protection, and for keeping the rain out of your collar). He was a doctor and as coldly unfeeling as Holmes, in some ways. My mother told me he had an uncanny diagnostic faculty, and the last time i talked to him (in 2010) he had self-diagnosed himself as autistic – which makes sense: i often felt that his mind would simply close and refuse to engage with new possibilities, but as a doctor he had a truly strange precision of judgement.

5. i see that i am at least mildly autistic, though my job has forced me to negotiate a bridge to others. i wouldn’t consider myself a good teacher, but i seem able to more or less manage the confidence trick of “teaching” English. In Munich, most of my students are already high level and too old to make noticeable improvements, so i instead talk to them and correct them when they make mistakes; they rarely learn anything but there it is; they usually request me as their teacher in future and many of them have helped me with e.g. the tax office or my internet, and i suppose they get something out of the “lessons”, even if it isn’t English.

My rampant idiocy continues unabated. It inconveniences me in many respects: i could, i suppose, have got a job with some security, health insurance, holidays etc., were i not so stupid; on the other hand, i feel blissfully untroubled by many of the curses of intelligence: i was telling a class about the dobermann i used to walk at dawn, 20 years ago in England, by a Stone Age fort, and remembered how i felt closer to the dog than to people, and indeed i still feel so – my understanding of people is from the ground up, as one might say. It puts me at odds with this civilisation of ours, and yet somehow i manage to survive and now i have a sporadically-functioning smartphone and am reasonably content, amid my idiocies.

Been weary and afflicted by mishap of late, in no mood to do other than drink and smoke and fume. The following things have stuck in my mind:

1. Sending a letter to the New World, i found myself cackling “Amerika!” as i wrote on the envelope, for, i realised, i don’t believe that America actually exists. i don’t know where exactly the letter will go, but it’s certainly not going to  Amerika. While this may seem ludicrous, when you stop to think about it there is actually no reason to suppose Amerika exists. The whole idea of some vast continent on the other side of the western seas, once full of Indians, who were slaughtered by a bunch of dagos and grifters, and then there was Clint Eastwood, and so-called “American football” – of course, it is possible, but i find it far more probable that someone just made it up. Certainly, a lot of time and money has been expended on this stupendous fiction, but that merely proves the extent of the deception. Someone has something to hide.

2. Saw some good films recently:

i) Anchorman 1 and 2. i previously felt some revulsion at Will Ferrell’s colossal head and tiny eyes, but i am now won over. His blind scene is excellent, as is his fatherly advice:

ii) Spike Lee’s Oldboy – actually, this was a shit film but as i was watching it kept remembering the superb Korean original, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. It was a strange experience, as i couldn’t fault the film’s technique, it just lacked any sense of purpose or clarity, and had an ugly, brutal feel, actually hard to watch whereas the equally violent original was hard to stop watching, and had a grace and fevered beauty to it. Whereas i could scene by scene explain why i feel Red Dragon is shit and Manhunter is The Shit, i can’t find much to specifically criticise in Lee’s remake. It just lacks depth and suggestion and the peculiar beauty of Park Chan-wook‘s original – so in the original, the bodyguard, Mr Han has a tiny part but bears a compact, intriguing character, with a felt strength of purpose and poise, i might even say a spiritual power; the female equivalent in Lee’s remake is somehow kitschy & perfunctory, utterly forgettable.

iii) Mad Max: Fury Road – so magnificently over the top, so well done, so Hardy. Tom Hardy has a Brando-esque inwardness, so even with his face masked (as in The Dark Knight Rises) his eyes communicate a watchful power and capacity for pain.

iv) Watchmen – the third time i’ve seen this, it gets better each time. A good dissection – as i saw it – of the progressive wish to destroy the world in order to remake it to the elite’s vision. Dr Manhattan as pure intellect unbalanced by spiritual depth; so his emotions are wild and frequently childish; lacking anything one could call humanity, his intellect and power are dangerously untethered. Ozymandias is the typical Ivory Tower leftist, smug, knowing, and in a sense ignorant and inhuman, in love with utopian projects and mass omlette-broken-eggs-violence. Night Owl 2 and Jupiter are fairly normal, capable of small scale violence but appalled by genocidal mania. Naturally, my hero is Rorschach, a true dark knight of insanity and violence, but utterly & commendably incapable of Ozymandias’ grandeur and grandiosity.

Rorschach is clearly the least pleasant, least humanitarian, least giggly left-wing of the characters, and also the only one to take an absolute stand against utopian mass murder. He has no love of humanity; he is, rather motivated by rage and a Swiftian savage indignation – but that in itself springs from an instinct that one should not kill the innocent; his disgust at humanity is born from a loyalty to what is noble in humanity. Ozymandias and Dr Manhattan, by contrast, seem to regard humanity as a mathematical problem, to be solved. It is fitting, in my view of things, that the unhinged right-wing vigilante is the only one to refuse to take a part in mass murder: “never compromise – not even in the face of Armageddon”. i feel that, of all the characters, he is the only one who would have nothing to be ashamed of, in the final account.

Alan Moore’s comic dates from 1986, when nuclear war seemed, i guess, more likely. The bad guy’s scheme – to destroy most of the human race by apparent alien attack, so that the West and USSR would join forces and thus avoid nuclear war – had perhaps some slight justification then, but still seems 99% ill-thought-out. Looking back from the film’s date, 2009, it is simply foolish, humanitarian concerns aside. As Dr Manhattan says, “I can change almost anything. But I can’t change human nature”. And it seems clear to me that hostilities would inevitably re-arise, because that is human nature.

Perhaps the difference between Rorschach and the utopian slaughterers, is one of focus – Rorschach’s focus is tight and narrow, to his immediate locality, to what crosses his path; the utopian progressives prefer to sit in the distance bought by wealth & ideal, and to dream up and dispense total solutions, disposing of billions of human lives with the practiced ease of the true leftist. Increasingly, i feel that goodness is only really possible in a Rorschachian immediacy, on a case-by-case basis; but our human reason and desire for totality leads us into visions of mathematical neatness, and the actual human is experienced as an irritant, to be erased. i would always place my trust in the local and the specific, and distrust the desire for comprehensive answers – just because there is a question, there need not be an answer, and often there is not – as if human civilisation has not accumulated a considerable number of attempted answers: dishonest, brutal, inhuman, eventually, one might say, Satanic.

3. A student today (The Wolf) asked if i feel closer to Hitler or Stalin. Well, i demurred, they both had a lot going for them but Stalin was the survivor. Living in Germany, i often feel that it is, in its way, as mythical as Amerika, and naturally less obnoxious and vile than England. i think that as bees organise a hive, so we naturally form a collective sense of ourselves, which becomes mythical and fabulous. It is, to borrow from Dr Manhattan, human nature, and we are drawn to inhabiting the unreal, the imaginative, that which gives meaning to the real, the physical. The Wolf sometimes remarks that i seem surprisingly happy and energetic – despite my occasional lethargies – and i tell him that i like talking to people, and learning from them, though i could also have said – i have a mask as surely as Rorschach, i have allegiances, and by these i survive – so, a photo i took in Munich in dusk last week:

1. Back in 1995-6, the Journalist demanded to know if i’d read Geoff Dyer. Dyer, born in 1958, has written about jazz and photography, and so seemed to fit right into the Journalist’s expected repertoire of avant-garde bollocks.

The Journalist’s reading was broad and seemingly undiscriminating – he read apparently everything, without forming any opinion – the only book which left an impression on him was Colin Wilson’s The Outsider; assuming he read as quickly as me (i read about 2 – 3 times as quickly as my fellow undergrads at university), he had either begun reading “literature” in his infancy, or just skim-read everything without thought; the latter seemed probable, and i note that his current blog is mostly about avant-garde art exhibitions and avant-garde film. His literary tastes were all good, but i don’t believe they were really his tastes – i think he just read everything “literary” without consideration. And so i long regarded Geoff Dyer with distaste, as the kind of trendy London writer the Journalist wanted to be.

2. i finally got round to reading Dyer. His essays won me over immediately, and i can’t remember a collection i’ve enjoyed more, since George Steiner’s No Passion Spent, a collected Gore Vidal 15 years ago, and Theodore Dalrymple’s online essays in 2007-9, though Simon Leys is now also on my List. Dyer:

As i was whining about my shitty life to a Polish girl, she said (in German): “and what good things have happened?” – and i immediately replied, “I have discovered a new writer, Geoff Dyer.” In a sense i feel even closer to him than to Steiner or Vidal or Leys, because he is English and of a recognisable generation – so in his interviews he looks and sounds like one of my old tutors (of roughly the same age) – a mumbler who came through the 80s.

3. Pleasingly, Dyer and i share two tastes – George Steiner and Thomas Bernhard. Both are writers i discovered and then gorged myself on, both are masters of unordinary language and share an inhuman quality i love; Dyer is in some ways the opposite – his English is closer to Vidal’s and Ley’s – human and earthy and devoid of side. Dyer’s finest work, as i see it, is his Out of Sheer Rage, a study of DH Lawrence. i put off reading this, as i don’t like Lawrence, though i recognise his strange talent. i was reassured to find that Dyer doesn’t actually like Lawrence’s novels (i find them really unbearable) but prefers his essays and some of his poems, and his letters. i shrunk somewhat here, as i’d read Vol 1 of DHL’s letters and found them strident and egotistic and tedious – very like the Journalist’s letters – and, reassuringly, Dyer says this volume is the worst.

Lawrence is an interesting writer but i would agree with Dyer, that his supposed achievement, the novels, are not finally as good as his essays & poems. The novels are bombastic and laboured, to my taste, and his shorter writings stay closer to his real talent. Dyer has an instinct for the lodes of real talent, and has followed it in his own works, eschewing stifling forms.

i am a fan of fragments and marginal works, so i prefer Borges’ essays to his stories, Kafka’s Zurau Aphorisms to his novels, Kierkegaard’s journals to his published books, and i suspect most of Heraclitus’ worthwhile work is in the fragments that survive. If we see writing as a form of speech (and we must learn to speak before we can write), then writing is often an attempt to make concrete an originally momentary impulse. i feel that one of my difficulties has been to write without sacrificing overly to form – hence, my only really good works are my short stories, which as it were emerged from me without much thought.

4. Dyer never seems to have had difficulties finding a way of writing true to the original speech-thoughts. Crucially, he wasn’t ruined by academia, and Out of Sheer Rage has a good passage on fashionable garbage:

Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson. I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchart on ‘ Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider on ‘Alternatives to Logocentricism in D.H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any more, but I didn’t, because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on. Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off. Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad. I thought about getting Widdowson’s phone number and making threatening calls. Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book. In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.

I burned it in self-defence.

–

i entirely understand this, have indeed gone through similar paroxysms of rage. i would feel no compunctions about burning academic books, because they contain nothing of the author – except his or her cringing apple polishing zeal, always looking slyly to the accepted strictures of the time, to make sure their worthless Polonial polishing drivel will be accepted and published, if not read, since virtually no one reads academic books, not even other academic polishers. One could say that modern (say, from the early 90s) academic writing is the triumph of form over humanity; not even inhuman like Steiner, but rather below human, a kind of corruption and mockery of the human, whatever original nature there is, subdued, fit to be burnt. i don’t think any academic today would really care if their books were all burnt, as long as they could keep their titles and gross emoluments.

5. Dyer has said that Out of Sheer Rage was influenced by Bernhard, and indeed i almost stopped reading it after the first page, which is almost a pastiche of Concrete. However, it breaks free of TB, and Dyer manages to assimilate that coloration to his own native wit and perception. This is somehow both Bernhardian and also Dyer:

If I’m stuck in traffic I mutter and curse beneath my breath. If I am kept waiting at a shop or supermarket I curse and mutter beneath my breath. Whatever happens I curse and mutter beneath my breath. When I am not reacting to some immediate cause of anger I am rehearsing what I am going to say to X or Y the next time I see them, thinking how I’m really going to give them an earful so that beneath my breath there is a constant rumble of abuse. You fucking stupid twat, you slow-witted mother-fucking asshole, you fucking piece of shit…That’s it, that’s what’s going on in my head. Laura has said that it is obvious I am a writer because as I walk along my lips move, as if I’m mentally going over some passage I’ve written. Yes, that’s it exactly, I say, except this particular book consists entirely of variations on ‘you fucking stupid cunt, I’m going to smash your fucking head in if you don’t hurry up.’

So, ladies and gentlemen, you have the great Geoff Dyer.

1. Felt i was going nuts from teaching too much, also my Motorola’s screen went dead down the left side, sent it off to be repaired and Deutsche Post mislaid it for 2 weeks, all in all i felt it was time for a trip to the Bavarian wilderness. i persuaded Juniper to escort me, lest i be undefended amidst the Bavarians. A roomy holiday flat, 35 € for two, a mile from the Kochel train station, about 70 km south of Munich. View from balcony:

Kochel is a strange little place, not at all touristy but i wondered where the economy of the region lay – were these people commuters to Munich, or farmers, or rural-themed pornographers? i’m guessing the property prices are significantly lower than closer to Munich, as only a multi-millionaire could afford a house of this size in a Munich suburb (and there are many such houses in Kochel):

2. Catholicism everywhere, even more than in Munich.

Every greeting, without exception, is a Grüß Gott! – to which Juniper responded coldly, Guten Tag, telling me later she doesn’t want the word “god” in her mouth. She regarded the locals as an alien species, leather-clad yokels born of Catholic incest, whereas for me they are just a rougher, more hillbilly version of lower-class Munich folk, mixed with a Yorkshire-like lack of side – she remarked that the bus driver wasn’t very friendly, and then, listening to his gruff utterances to passengers and other drivers, she realised he wasn’t unfriendly, just devoid of polish. This is the German equivalent of my retired-bus-driver-Yorkshire-stepfather, welcome after the polisher vibe of Munich, so when we returned from Walchensee the bus driver (who had driven us there in the morning) said in German: Oh aye, it’s you again.

A typical conversation between me and Juniper:

Juniper: Bavarian is very cute, almost kitschy, but I prefer the north of Germany.

elberry: Why?

Juniper: There people are more alternative –

elberry: What, like fucking hippies? Do you mean the north is full of hippy scum and chavscum?

Juniper: In Hamburg they are more legere. You see people with tattoos and things in their nose –

elberry: You’re describing hippies and crackheads. Fucking hippies. i hate hippies, they are an abomination against God and Man, a disease on the face of the Earth.

Juniper: And there are cute little shops with alternative things, and they are more open-minded.

elberry: Fucking hippy scum, they’re out there, smoking crack and ruining this society. I hate them, with their so-called open minds and their lifestyles and their shitty hippy clothes, they should all die. Hippy vermin.

Juniper: Bavaria is cute but I like the north more.

elberry: They should all be nuked.

Der Schmied von Kochel waits to strike you down!

Look at those magnificent moustaches. Those moustaches mean business. This chap stands in the centre of Kochel, grimacing. A couple of minutes after passing this statue, we found an identically-moustachoied, black-leather clad biker lying on the pavement by a Road of Death. A good Samaritan told him the doctor would come soon and the biker grunted: “Passsch'”, expressing a lack of fuss and a willingness to let time and events unfold as God and His moustaches will.

3. It was beastly hot and we managed to tramp about in circles looking for Kochelsee (the lake) till we stumbled upon this water trough:

Welcome, in 35 degree heat. In England, it would have been vandalised immediately – even in the remotest villages it wouldn’t have lasted a week. 8-year-olds would have drowned babies in the water, then filmed it for youtube, and got a free holiday because they need love.

We finally found an easy path to Kochelsee about a mile uphill from our flat. We came to this place, unsure if it was private:

A sign on a nearby tree indicated that the moveable chairs were provided for anyone who wanted to sit, but please put the cushions in the basket when finished, and don’t leave rubbish. Again, in England this would have been vandalised within a week, even in the quietest of places. Like zombies on the prowl, chavs would have scented out the basic decency they were Blairspawned to destroy, ravening, playing hip hop on their iphones, wearing baseball caps, chewing gum and saying Innit, they would have descended upon this place and defiled it. But here in Germany we have Der Schmied von Kochel, his mace and his moustaches. And so Juniper and i sat and complained about the heat.

4. That evening we sat on the balcony and i smoked and drank a bottle of Slyrs, gift from a class. i was dissolute and haggard:

i faced the forest:

The tobacco was Royal Yacht, Stalin’s baccy of choice, apparently. i can easily imagine Stalin smoking this – it’s not bad but a heavy nicotine pipeweed, with a rough, Communist dictator taste. The forest was fascinating to observe; whereas Juniper loves lakes & seas and can’t see water without wanting to dive in (to escape my interminable monologues about hippies), i am largely indifferent to bodies of water and feel a strong pull to trees, especially when there are enough together to appear as something of a single, great organism.

At about 9 pm a teenage girl in a short green dress, barefoot, stumbled out of the treeline, looking lost and bewildered. Look! i exclaimed to Juniper, She’s probably been raped! They’re probably chasing her now! They’re not finished with her! They want a second go! The girl made her way through the long grass while Juniper said, disapprovingly, That is not the correct dress for walking in fields! (a very German remark). The girl reached the road and headed up, to the lake. Half an hour later a group of barefoot teenage girls came down the road, with the first, and walked laughingly down the road, while i smoked my pipe in awe.

Later, Juniper went to bed and i stayed out, smoking and drinking and thinking. i found my thoughts unfolded faster and without hindrance, whereas in Munich i often feel like my thoughts hit a wall and abruptly run out of steam, and fizzle out. i heard a horse neighing from the forest, and three horses appeared from somewhere in the trees, and started running through the fields.

5. The next day we took the bus to Walchensee, quite close but you have to get over a mountain first so there was a perilously winding road with hideous falls just a few inches from the wheels. It was crowded, being a hot Sunday, but we still managed to find a bit of beach, where Juniper changed and went off into the water while i sat surrounded by huge-titted young German women in bikinis, thinking to myself, This is a bit of alright, and reading John Keegan and Viktor Suvorov.

Waiting for the bus back, we watched people frolicking in the waters. It is too hot, Juniper said flatly. Look at those fools, i said darkly, Frolicking. Just wait till the shark gets them. There are no sharks in the lake, Juniper chided me. How do you know? i continued grimly, Today could be the day he reveals himself, then they’ll all be sorry. Look at those idiots with their pedal boat, imagine if one of them got sucked into the mechanism and we were sprayed with blood. Enjoy your holiday, Juniper said. Imagine if the boat overturned and it turned out they can’t swim, i continued dreamily, Imagine if that stupid woman started screaming and thrashing about and everyone just stood here laughing, and then she died.

6. On Monday, we went to Bad Tölz. This is where i will retire to when i am rich and bloated. They must have some local building/architectural law, as the big chains don’t use their usual store fronts; so here is the Bad Tölz Müller and then Tengelmann:

Tengelmann shops usually look like this:

that is, they usually look like piss. i’ve never seen these remade store fronts before but it’s a good idea – much of York’s Medieval core is ruined by a series of store fronts for Starbucks, Body Shop, H & M, blotting out the original building and making the city look just like Huddersfield or Bradford or Sunderland, that is, like piss. i remember sitting in a bookshop cafe in Kassel, looking out onto the main drag and suddenly having no idea where i was, since the view could as easily have been any denatured, branded city centre anywhere in the world. Here’s a photo of me improving one of Juniper’s scenic tourist shots (i thought i’d seen a chav over her shoulder):

7. We tramped about, with Juniper complaining about the heat, then went down to the Isar. To my delight, it was almost deserted, so we easily found a quiet spot and sat down, i even made my only concession to the idea of bathing and walked barefoot into the cold water, grimacing and enjoying my holiday.

As we were sitting in the grass, a beautiful & elegantly-dressed woman in a white twin set came towards us, and suddenly took her skirt off – amusingly, what looked like an Iraqi refugee was just behind her and stood there staring in horror and lust, can’t exactly blame him given he’d probably never seen a woman out of a burqa before. The woman walked into the water and then carefully returned to land and took her top off. Look, i whispered to Juniper, A horny Bavarian whore is putting on a show for us. Let’s see if she takes her bra off. And she then did, i groaned, and now clad only in pants and a necklace, she launched herself into the water and floated there, her perky breasts poking out of the water while i thought, Germans are a strange lot, but they have a good side.

Later, we walked back and saw some apple polisher go-getters playing football, the ball bounced down to the river and a polisher ran after it, just failing to catch it and having to wade out into the river. Look, i said to Juniper, imagine if the shark got him now and we all had to watch him being eaten alive. There are no sharks in the river, she said. Well, i conceded, imagine if he’d flung himself after the ball, dashed his brains out on the stones, then his body floated downstream to that bathing beauty and she’d got entangled in his limbs, and there was blood everywhere.

8. Monday night we had thunder and lightning. i woke up to hear what i thought was artillery, Juniper entered my room and i shouted: Burgdorf, was ist los? Woher kommt die Schießerei? Do you lie there thinking of Hitler speeches? she asked. We had a real proper hours-long storm on Tuesday, moving south right overhead. Juniper, being a mere woman, was afraid and retreated indoors. i stood on the balcony smoking, doing rune magic, and invoking Thor & Wotan, and thought it would be interesting if my pipe were struck by lightning, while i was smoking Stalin’s baccy, and i inhaled the lightning and became Stalin.

9. But all good things must end so on Wednesday i went home in the rain, to find my father is dying, so i have to return to England for a bit, to see the chavs once more, and Motorola had returned my phone without repairing it. i became enraged at the latter and stormed onto my balcony, muttering Fucking Motorola, fucking cunt, fucking German cunts, I hate you, you’re all going to die, and then a butterfly (black wings with a red splash) suddenly spiralled crazily out of the sky and landed on my shirt and we blinked at each other, and i laughed.

1. i haven’t been back since 2010, not sure why. When i have free time i prefer to stay at home or visit Juniper in Kassel or even go to Finland. England is 33 years of bad memories and rejection and chavvery. Nonetheless, i go.

On the shuttle bus from Munich Airport to the plane. Some Bosche, some Brits. i can see the difference immediately, confirmed when i overhear conversations: the Bosche are expressionless, or rather look vaguely irritated at everything, the Brits look glaringly aggressive or vaguely apologetic. i recognise the pre-emptive let’s all get along smile frequently dispensed by Brits as a societal lubricant, so if you bump into someone you smile apologetically and say Sorry; the Bosche just ignore everyone, or stare flatly.

The little bus is packed, i offer to swap standing places with a woman in her 50s, as i have a rail to cling to and she looks to need the support. To my surprise, i speak in a West Yorkshire accent i’ve never really used in my life.

2. Deeply strange to be in Manchester Airport, stranger than Oulu. Everyone queues to slowly go through Immigration, however i note machines for automatic scanning and try these, put my passport in a slot and am amazed to see a huge live image of myself staring at myself, i shake my head and start muttering, Amazing, then a guard behind the glass screens asks me to take my glasses off. i remove them and continue shaking my head at my own image, a red light flashes, the screens open, and they ask me to go to a desk. A grey-haired guard examines my passport, me, and says genially, You fooled us with your specs, then you kept moving about. i laugh and proceed to the next desk, where another grey-haired guard says, Derek gave you the speech? Yes, i say, Sorry, never seen one of these things before. We’ve got jet engines now too, he says, and waves me through. i reflect on the daily banter of English life, the half-apologetic smiles, jokes, utterly lacking in Germany.

3. Regional train to Manchester Piccadilly, stopping everywhere. Train conductor jokes with passengers, i miss the words but catch the laughter, the good humour, reminds me vaguely of the regional train i took to Kochel a few weeks ago. And on into Piccadilly. Chavs everywhere. Ethnic diversity everywhere. i pass quite a few Shane Jenkin-lookalikes on the mile. Everyone seems tattooed. There are tattoos in Germany but usually just an ankle or wrist; here it’s like the population have been dipped in woad and emerged with disfiguring and rapidly fading coloration. i attract a few glances, not because i’m half-Indian as it would be in the Reich, but because i am scowling at everyone, and muttering things like Sordid and Degenerate.

i stop to have a fancy burger (ostrich or lion or something) at a street market and note a pair who look like Shanes eyeing my shoulder bag and suitcase as i eat; my old watchfulness has by now clicked into place after 5 years of Germanic sleep, and as they circle me i circle to keep facing them, not exactly looking at them but always directly looking their way, till they snarl and plod on.

i buy trousers, a near-impossibility for a man of my dwarfhood in Germany. i stop into a whisky shop and note that almost everything costs a good 10-20% more than in Germany, chat with a sales assistant, mention chavs and he says, If you go up to Piccadilly there are chavs galore. It’s now 1100, i’ve had a burger, so when he offers “a dram” i say Why not, and end up buying a bottle of Glenturret for 45 quid, no age statement but it’s a fine whisky, fruity and light with a surprising peaty finish.

i need lighter fluid for my Old Boy, having drained it before leaving home, so go to Alston’s, a pipe shop, ask the counter guy for the cheapest, saying i just need it for a week and will leave it behind when i return to Munich. Well if it’s only a refill you want, we could do that now, he says, and it takes me a second to understand that he’s offering to do it for free; i’m so shocked i say, No no, i would feel bad if i don’t pay for it, and leave with a 2 pound can (cheaper than in Munich).

4. Train to Huddersfield, i read Thomas Bernhard’s Beton, in German, feeling, I need to maintain my spiritual supply lines to Germany, i must never forget that i belong there and not here, must not stay here, must return. Meanwhile i note that i haven’t once used my usual Queen’s English, that i have without thinking spoken West Yorkshire the whole time – doubly strange since i never had a local accent, but it now feels unnatural and difficult to speak here as i do to my students or American colleagues (i have almost no British colleagues). i realise that most of my readers probably don’t fully grasp the intricacies of North of England accents, so let me present DJ Smile of Huddersfield:

This is basically what i sound like.

My mother & stepfather pick me up and we walk across Huddersfield to their car. i haven’t walked these streets in over a decade. It is small town, not exactly squalid but certainly a little grim. i find one single good photo opportunity, which doesn’t make it look like it is:

5. i lunch with my mother & stepfather in their scenic little village – which is much more idyllic than i remember it, i say Weren’t there lots of teenage hoodies hanging around here? and my mother, They all grew up and moved out. In the evening they drive me to my father’s (nearby) house, where i find he’s in good health for someone who’s nearly 84, and not dying at all. i resist the urge to say, If you’re not dying, why the hell did you tell me i had to visit now and it was urgent etc? The full sordid tale will be divulged in my next post, if i can get around to it.

1. And so on to my father. The last i saw him, in 2010, the house was full of junk – entire rooms packed with cardboard boxes, the hallway and stairs lined with newspapers (hundreds) he wouldn’t throw away because, in his words, Egh well I have PAID GOOD MONEY for the thing, egh? I must read them, egh! At one point he had a huge cardboard box full of empty and meticulously-scrubbed glass (jam, honey, etc.) jars, which he planned to ship to India, when he thought to return to his vile ancestral lands. He had eleven radios in his room, three the same model. He had six second-hand cars, all shit.

The house is now largely uncluttered. i was able to sit on a sofa and he treated me to one of his Dreadful Monologues. i took the precaution of breaking out a pipe and smoking at him, a useful screen i found. As is his wont, he was belligerent and full of querulous rage and grandiose self-pity. He burnt out when he was 67, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, was like a zombie for years afterwards, i was sure he would die at any moment, then after i left in 2004 (actually, he kicked me out of the house for eating one of his ready-made meals) he apparently found a “cure” (B12 injections, i think) and spent thousands on herbal remedies and whatnot. i am generally sceptical of such things but he is physically only slightly worse than in 2004, and mentally sharper than i remember. i would say, after Apocalypse Now, that his mind is clear but his soul is mad. He has no friends, never had any, and i am the only family he has any contact with (and i have only seen him twice in the last decade).

It transpires that he met some nurses from his home state in India, who cleared his house and removed all the junk, presumably keeping anything valuable and binning the rest. They were nice to him and brought their small children to entertain him, he made a will giving them 2/3 of whatever paltry sum he will leave (he has virtually no money saved, but there is still the house), then they wanted power of attorney and he apparently realised all was not well and flipped over from his nice side to his horrible side, kicking them out and cursing them, Lear-style (he also kicked my sister out of the house on Christmas Day, about 25 years ago).

All this took a good hour or two of enraged monologue, while i sat and smoked and thought, God, how horrible. Every minute or two he bellowed, Egh? Are you with me? DO YOU UNDERSTAND? Egh? and i had to shout, Yes!

He wanted me to become executor of his will, and to receive his worldly goods, but i refused the former and said i’d be as happy to get nothing. Any disagreement with my father is ill-advised, as he is more or less incapable of accepting that another human being might have an independent existence or will, so i said i can’t be executor because i’m too busy, and that he can leave me the house if he wants but i really don’t care, because i find money largely insignificant. Actually, i would prefer to get nothing because anything i bought, even if i just used it to pay off my debts, would in a sense be a homage to him, come courtesy of his life. i managed to persuade him to give some to my sister’s children, suggested he leave them everything but he wasn’t having it – however, he’s so emotionally volatile that i have some hope he will decide on this. It’s also possible he will just will everything to the postman or a random taxi driver or a dog or stone.

2. i slept in my old bedroom, having bad dreams and a bad feeling about the whole thing. Although i respect my father as a physician, it’s somewhat like respecting a mathematician as mathematician – it has little bearing on the broader character, and for all his medical experise one could say he hath ever but slenderly known himself. i found several brand new expensive cashmere jumpers in my old wardrobe, too big for either him or me, and a (again, brand new) cashmere coat i guess would have cost several hundred pounds, again too large for him or me. It seems that the Indians cleared out dozens of identical cashmere garments that would fit them, leaving only these. It’s rather depressing to think that my father wasted his considerable salary on things like this, leaving him now nothing except his pension. Even before the Indians removed his things, he wore the same clothes every day, and had no use for the things he bought – buying them was the point, not to derive any pleasure from their craftsmanship or quality. His approach to the world has always been one of attempted dominance, with no interest in, or understanding of, either people or things – so he buys things because in doing so they become his, not because he has any use for them. i can’t really understand how it was possible for him to be a good doctor, except that, perhaps, it was another expression of domination. His drama of the Will has a Lear-like theatricality, which i mislike.

3. In many ways, i realise how little people can integrate to another culture. My father was born in 1931 (six months after Thomas Bernhard) in south India, and has never moved beyond what seems a Stone Age culture to me. He can’t use the Present Perfect or PP Progressive; he regards women as slaves and whores; he is distrustful to the point of paranoia, but also highly gullible, with virtually no understanding of people, except as medical cases. He is convinced that people are bad and just want his largely non-existent money (one of his mantras is “eghh well NO ONE DOES NOTHING FOR FREE!!!”), yet easily adopts a grotesque, clownish bonhomie, grinning hideously, if people seem friendly. It doesn’t surprise me that he never had a single friend and that i’m the only family he has any contact with.

He has a constant emotional intensity, much like that of my old Kassel boss, Morgana (though she had intellect and softness), which makes it impossible to be in the same room unless you agree with him. Emotional force is the fuel for magic so i often felt a kind of impingement upon my sanity in his presence, as if a raw and untutored magic was splashing about from his cauldron of rage. In the past i simply endured it, and avoided him as much as possible. This time i found myself smoking a screen of tobacco (Dunhill 965) and occasionally popping to my room for a new pipe and some impromptu runework and beseeching of the gods.

4. Over time – i spent 8 days in his house – i found myself deflecting his will, though it was always difficult and left me feeling troubled and anxious that, perhaps, my life in Germany was just an illusion. It’s not that my father is evil or even particularly bad, more that he has an unfortunate combination of autism and emotional force, and anger was always his way of coping with what he perceived as opposition. i’d be as happy to never meet him again, in this or any other life, but also recognise that i’ve had similar fathers in other lives (and similarly passive mothers), and so presumably choose to be born into such circumstances, because it matches my fundamental view of existence. It’s also true that rather than crushing me, such fathers have merely driven me to make my own life elsewhere, and to resist domination, so i perceive him with some distance, akin to an end of level boss who has been defeated.

As Nietzsche said, if you do not have a good father you should acquire one. i’ve picked up various role models, some younger than me, and my true father now is the gallows god. Curiously, this made it easier to talk to my merely biological father, and proved indeed necessary.

5. This trip was a reliving of situations i thought i had long departed. i had wanted to meet Bonehead, my fascist friend from school; and a friend from Durham; but Bonehead was in Boston to visit his brother, and the Durhamite at a conference in the South, so i had nothing to buffer me from the Horror – i saw my mother, and Shrekh, an old schoolfriend – but both are remnants of my old life.

My father kept trying to drag me back into the life i had 20 years ago, even attempting to persuade me to abandon my life in Germany to live with him and nurse him for the rest of his life. i would rather commit suicide, but i have become Dr Tact and so simply said i couldn’t, because i had invested too much time and money in my German life. It wasn’t simply that i dislike the ugliness & violence of my father’s mind, as that being in that house was like being dragged back into the considerable hell of my youth. He occasionally treated me like i was a small child again, with the mix of contempt and rage i remember well from my hideous youth. i noted that he didn’t treat outsiders so; i think it is, in its way, as bad for him as for me, for us to be in the same place – it brings out the worst in him, i.e. the way he was for most of his life – though these attacks were intermittent and fairly easily deflected.

With tobacco, whisky, and god, i could meet and repel these attacks, here’s one that i remember, he gave Shrekh some unsolicited medical advice and medication:

Father: Egh well eggghhh you JUST TAKE these pills, eghh!!!

Shrekh: Okay, I’ll give them a go.

Father: Egggghhh well LISTEN, you TAKE and you are ONE MILLION PERCENT better!!! Egh? Are you with me? Egh?

Me: How long would it take to have an effect?

Father [suddenly bristling with suspicion and fury]: Egh well DON’T YOU LISTEN, egh? I SAID, egh? Well YOU PEOPLE JUST DO NOT LISTEN, EGH??? EGHH? I said HOW LONG, egh? Egh?

Me: I wasn’t really listening to be honest.

My absence of either fear or aggression seemed to calm him, so all his attempts to draw me back into the twenty-year-gone nexus of contempt and misery quickly fizzled out. It was nonetheless mildly gruelling.

Family are a special case, as one doesn’t so easily have the option to just avoid them. i tend to think one should try to find some form of communication, something worthwhile in the inevitable relationship. With my sister, i found nothing at all and so haven’t had any contact with her since 2008 or 9. With my father, we can have conversations but i found they only worked in the evening, when i was full of pie and had a glass or two of Glenturret, and a pipe of Dunhill 965. It would be an exaggeration to say i treasure these conversations but i enjoyed them – for example he assured me that “eghh well the English people are SO UGLY because the English women HAD SEX with egh the AFRICAN SLAVES so English are all part-African, egh, they are NOT EUROPEAN!!!” – i found this highly amusing and it was almost worth losing a week’s work just to hear it.

His monologues about various supplements and pills were also diverting, as he has a very Indian tendency to hyperbole; so he instructed me to only drink matcha green tea, assuring me that, “Egh well YOU JUST TAKE and you will feel TEN MILLION TIMES better than with the normal green tea, egh?” i found i like making matcha, and bought a bamboo whisk when i got back to Munich (he had an electronic whisk), but i haven’t noticed any significant difference to normal green tea – the taste is different, that’s all. All in all, these pep talks reminded me most humorously of Jesse Ventura’s chopper scene in Predator (from 2.00 to 2.20)

If (God forbid) i’m reborn after this life, it would be interesting to briefly meet my father again in another guise. In the meantime, i noted the Indians had overlooked virtually the only thing i remembered with interest – a pipe stand from my father’s pipe-smoking days. Since he hasn’t smoked pipes in over 30 years, i asked if i could have it, and took it back to Germany with me, along with an ashtray my mother gifted me:

1.  i coped with the 8 days by going for walks and visiting my mother every day. My father lives just below Castle Hill, a Stone Age settlement where for sure my ancestors used to drink the blood of the living human sacrifice. 20 years ago, i would walk my savage dobermann here at dawn in summer, it’s about 20 minutes from the house up through the fields to the Castle:

And the view from the top:

i remember walking my dobermann up here one summer evening, a chap was sitting and painting this view and the dog ran up and drank thirstily out of his mug of beer (from the pub, now razed to the ground). i was appalled but the victim just laughed, as if having a slavering huge German monster steal his beer was quite a passable way to spend the evening, and actually why not, it could be a part of the local tourist attractions, a folklore item?

i didn’t go up to the tower, as there were young people taking selfies up there, and i would have had to smite them with my fist and sacrifice them to Wotan. Twenty years ago there were no selfies but even if there had been, i would have just unleased my dober, and let him tutor these foolish interlopers with his enormous maw and mighty forepaws  (he especially enjoyed leaping up, enthusiastically smashing people across the face with his paws, then gripping the victim’s neck and clumsily licking their bruised and sometimes bleeding faces, breathing absolutely unspeakable fumes and horrifying them with his glistening sharklike teeth – he would even look affronted when the victims screamed, writhed, and tried to escape; i generally stood there laughing and saying, No boy, bad dog, don’t do that, let the nice man be, but would later give him a dog biscuit).

View from the other side:

2. The next day i approached from a different angle, walking these lanes till i came to a familiar bench to take my luncheon, a pork pie and some wine, and a book:

Two parties passed as i sat there, the first was a 60-something woman with, i guess, her grandchild, they both said hello and i waved my pie affably at them; the second was a 20-something pushing a pram, with two small children – as they passed, she screamed at one child, Shut your mouth! Now! – and declined to Good Morning me.

3. Pie finished, i walked up to the castle, noting litter anywhere wide enough to park a car. The local chavs like to drive up here to fuck and get high, then throw their litter out of the window. i picked up a McDonald’s offering to put in the nearest bin. Littering is one of the things i find both obnoxious and incomprehensible – why would you want to drive to a pleasant location, in order to sully it? – but then, that’s the way English people are these days. A horse observes me smoking and carrying a McDonald’s carton:

i get to the top and find a litter bin:

i was reminded of a Theodore Dalrymple article about littering, where he writes of people walking up to a bin and throwing their refuse in its general direction, then walking away. Presumably, the Government will clean it up for them; in this case, i was the cleaner. i don’t suppose any of the litterers would even notice if their litter were still there on their next visit to Nature. It would be interesting to conduct a study of these people: their age, gender, education level, job or lack thereof, would they still drive to these locations if the litter were left to accumulate to obscure the sky? Or would they then complain that it was “spoiled”? Where Germans, Bavarians especially, have a kind of pride in their surroundings, sizeable numbers of the English seem, rather, full of resentment and a desire to destroy or defile. They feel no attachment to place, so there were even signs on the drystone walls warning stone thieves that the stones can be traced, and threatening punishments. It reminds me of a book, i think, James Ashcroft’s (superb) Making a Killing, where the Iraqi locals cause blackouts by digging up the electricity cables and stealing the copper, and when the Americans say, Help us to help you! the Iraqis say, We are helping ourselves. One could say that a land with no trust, no natural instinct for cooperation, is unlikely to prosper. How can you have a working economy, let alone a reasonably liveable country, if people see nothing wrong with digging up the electricity cables then complaining about blackouts? – short of having armed police guarding absolutely everything, there’s no way of bringing such a country out of the Stone Age, which explains a great deal of wealth disparity across the globe.

4. Much as i like the land here, i would never want to live here again, because of the people – not the older generation, nor those who actually work the land, but the chavs, the Pikeys, the Southrons and polishers, all the various Children of Blair, basically anyone younger than me, anyone who lives in London, actually everyone really. There has been a generational change, i think beginning with those born in the 80s and accelerating as English culture has disintegrated. In my maternal grandmother’s generation – she was born in the 20s – there seems to have been an ingrained independence and prickly self-reliance, and people then would have been ashamed to borrow money or to litter, or to have an unkempt house or garden. This general attitude seems to have begun to fall apart in the 60s, where any kind of societal obligations or self-respect came to be regarded as bourgeois stuffiness, man, harshing my buzz, man, viva la revolution, man, hey man, I’ve got a Che Guevara t-shirt, man, I read the Guardian, man, I smoked weed in India, I’m not religious but I’m like really spiritual, man.

Although only a minority, i suppose, fully espoused the libertarian 60s dream, it’s now become the norm to live by Blake’s  Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires – any consideration for others is seen as lame and a sign of weakness, and men and women now bluster with a constant belligerence, which i found a daily weariance in England. The 60s hippy intellectuals and drop-outs showed a way to the herd – the way of self-gratification, rage, ease, entitlement, and behold, the herd followed.

In some ways, English culture has reverted to a state of nature, close to a Mad Max post-apocalyptic battlescape: so, i felt very strongly that only the presence of a police van in the Manchester street market deterred the two chavs from attacking me on my first day back, and the pusillanimity of the police, in the 2011 riots, showed what chavs will do when they need not fear retribution. It’s not that everyone under, say, 40, is a chav – but if the percentage was previously 0.001, it’s now grown to 0.01, and since chavs have a massively destructive effect, even one in a hundred is enough to make a night walk through Manchester, on a Friday night, ill-advised – if you pass a thousand people, ten will be chavs and if each has a 10% chance of spitting at you, making a grab at your bag or wallet, or knifing you, then you’re statistically guaranteed some variety of Chavattack.

Needless to say, if i had to live in England it would be on a hill somewhere, with a brace of unruly dobermann and several rifles, and booby traps, and mortars, and pits full of spikes and snakes and dead chavs. i would dress like Roger Scruton and look highly disdainful, because England today really is a can of shit.

1.   It was also strangely enjoyable to visit my mother, we have absolutely nothing in common, except an interest in food, but there it is. With both my parents, i came to see them as children in adult bodies, and though i have no happy memories of either in my childhood and teen years, i feel we still have some basic connection. In truth i feel more kin to my stepfather, a dour, chuckling Yorkshireman born in ’45, left school at 6, worked in the mines, on the buses, etc. – one of these archetypal old English types, Orwell would have been all over him like a cheap suit, seeking the Wisdom of the Proles. He’s from Marsden, one of the Last of the Summer Wine locations, and really has that Scrutonian Oikophilia, attachment to one’s ancestral land, without any conscious reflection – just as instinct. He is one of these people who can do anything manual with ease, who naturally dominates without any sense of effort or aggression, so you simply accept that yes, he is in charge – he’s about 5 foot tall, or even shorter, so it’s curious that he can cow a bus full of teenage chav schoolkids. There’s nothing remotely uncanny or mystical about him, he just seems to have come from some pre-Roman Britain, where everyone was 5 foot tall and grew up with beasts – but in our age, he is an exception, closer to one of Alan Garner’s dwarves than a 21st Century human being. As with me, he prefers dogs to cats, though he & my mother recently acquired a cat and i note he has somehow trained it to behave like a dog.

He is in many ways the decent hard-working Englishman that socialists and Commies froth about, yet he is, like me, a Daily Mail reader who has never voted in his life; and when some political candidate knocked on his door he snapped: “Not interested, thank you – you buggers are all the same.” He has an aversion to froth and highfalutin talk & people, so he would regard all the lefties i know (either plummy-voiced champagne socialists or greasy-haired drawling potheads) as workshy loudmouths. It is a curious feature of both fascism and socialism/communism, that the leaders & intellectuals claim to represent a type very very far removed from these often clinically insane, bullying, obscene individuals – as a 30s joke went, the ideal German was tall like Hitler, athletic like Göring, blonde like Goebbels, manly like Himmler. Intellectuals, especially political intellectuals, simply want power over others – hence they violently resent anyone who abstains, who stands apart, who doesn’t vote and doesn’t militate for the Party – they believe everyone should be political, of course in the right way, meaning their way, and it is not permitted to simply get on with your life and be a decent human being – that is precisely what they cannot tolerate.

2. i took the opportunity to eat pie every day – the Bosche think pie is some kind of cake, because they are stupid. i reacquainted myself with Denby Dale pies, one of the finest works of humanity:

And most days my mother & stepfather took me around West Yorkshire. Colne Valley:

And Marsden, Standedge Tunnel:

We sat and waited for the next barge, and i ate a pork pie:

And then on into the dark:

About three miles into the subterranean labyrinth, we met a race of cave-dwelling folk who all look like Peter Hitchens. Unfortunately, they were smoking crack.

Back on the surface, Marsden:

And a local cat, with one green, one blue eye (sadly, i was unable to get this on film):

Amusingly, as i was stroking the cat a man came out, smoking a cigarette, and gruffly dragged it off, muttering that he used to have two such cats but one was stolen. Everywhere i went in England, people seemed to be stealing strange things – cats, drystone walls, etc.

3. We went to Saint Bartholomew’s, which has a WW1 exhibition honouring the Marsden dead of 1915, including my stepfather’s grandfather.

The custodian let us in and we had it to ourselves.

i found it unexpectedly moving, perhaps because i was also reading Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme and so had a clearer idea of this war. My mother followed me about, burbling incessantly, Ooh look, Elberry, there’s one of those pictures you see! Ooh, it says “don’t waste food!” I don’t waste food, do I Elberry? I had a big cake yesterday, ooh it was ever so nice! It had chocolate in it! and so on, till i tactically distanced myself by simply moving rapidly away from her every time she approached, maintaining an unpredictable (to her) zigzag motion so i could be alone.

My stepfather’s grandfather, died 1915 aged 27 from a leg wound – no doubt he would have survived such an injury with today’s medical care:

and my mother’s father, gassed at the Somme, still in his teens:

For a long time, i had thought of WW1 as too distant to be of interest – like the Crimean War. This exhibition left me saddened & troubled, i think because of the small, local focus – the Marsden dead:

4. Outside again, and the hills around Marsden:

A little fair with some local tractors and local ciders and local mutton chop whiskers and so on:

Almost Bavarian, bäuerlich. i found the people in Marsden, even the young people, a different breed to the townies in Huddersfield just 6 or 7 miles away. i didn’t hear the usual violent swearing (my objection to profanity is that it’s used idly, as a filler adjective, and yet with a kind of fury, so the speaker sounds permanently enraged, and indeed your swearers are, i’ve found, much more likely to suddenly attack a chap, verbally and/or physically).

5. We had a good English summer, i.e. no more than about 22 Celsius, often a good 10 lower, with lots of good English rain – slow and determined, not like this flashy Continental rain, which is all sudden downpours, soon over and forgotten like Mussolini. My students think i’m joking when i say i miss English weather, but for me this is perfect, and Heaven for me would be so – for perhaps 9 months of the year:

But lest i forget the chavvery, i noticed the headlines on the local newspaper the morning of my departure, and recorded them for your pleasure: