Suds

E@L is in sunny (can say that for once without being ironical, even though it is still raging mid-winter) Melbourne for a week or so and is staying in Chinatown in an apartment-style hotel. Bedroom, kitchenette, laundry, sort of thing. Excellent. Cheap. Ish. (He has to pay himself for Laundry Service at the hotels he usually stays at. It covered by his per diem, but hey! $5 for a pair of underpants at some places!...)

~~~~~~~

Monday: already there is washing to be done, those clothes he wore on Sat and Sun down with his sister and mum, and now Monday's smalls, etc. There is a sachet of laundry powder and E@L uses it up for the load. But the controls for the washing machine are different from what he is used to (it's a sales differentiator) and E@L is a little bit lost because each of the cycles are sort of separated on the dial, in that it doesn't seem to be a single line of progression, one in which the rotary selector moves around, clickety click, as the machine goes though it cycle. It's unusual (to him). Cotton settings (a number: time or temp?) are here with a blue line between the choices. Gap. Coloureds are here, with a red line. Gap. Polyesters are here with a green line. Gap. Rinse, Drain, Spin is over here with a pink line. The coloured lines don't touch each other. Does this mean you have to manually move the selector to the rinse cycle once your selected wash cycle is complete? Shit. How to use a washing machine?

This is the stuff that E@L used to pay The Mouse to sort out. It is currently Super Maid Joyce's problem. (She fixed a broken (i.e. smashed) hinge on the washing machine door the other week. E@L was about to buy a new machine.)

He chose one of the cotton cycles - god knows what raw materials his clothes are actually constructed from - and went off to do whatever the fuck it is that E@L does in the evenings that consumes all his time but doesn't give him a chance to blog. Ninety, maybe more, minutes later, the machine is still doing its chug-chug-spin thing. It sounds exactly as it did at the start. Surely it can't still need to be washing. Maybe it's broken... E@L leaves it for another 30 minutes. Still the noise is unchanged. Nup, this is wrong. He fiddles with the On-Off switch, tries to open the door and get the clothes out, but no luck, it is hermetically sealed. He pauses it - the lights on certain buttons change, or flash. He turns the dial to the Rinse, Drain Spin quadrant and presses the Start button again. It chugs away again, but the mechanical refrain seems much the same as the mechanical chorus from before. Sigh. He heads off to grab a late night latte around the corner and let it sort itself out. When he returns, it is still going. He goes to bed. But he can't rest. He is up in 5 minutes and resets it to just the Spin part of the final cycle - it can't have anything left to drain! Back to bed.

He is on the verge of falling asleep when, suddenly, he couldn't hear anything! The silence slapped him awake. The washing machine had completed its eternal (sic) loop. Phew! He loaded the extremely exhausted clothes into the drier and left them to spin in hot air for 90mins behind the closed bathroom/laundry door, while he went to back to bed.

~~~~~~~

By Tuesday evening he had already another small load ready to go, just to keep options open in the underwear department, but the laundry powder sachet had not been replaced that day by the maid who had tidied up the room (not completely, just placed fresh towels, lined up the bed-linen, etc...). Maybe you have to ask/pay for another sachet? So on Wednesday morning E@L asks the receptionist who replies that the laundry sachets are complimentary and she will make sure that one is placed in the room that day.

Wednesday evening, E@L returns to the hotel, and surprise surprise, there is no laundry powder. It's OK he muses, he can last a bit longer, he has clean underwear after the first load and it's not like his main clothes are actually dirty, just a bit stale.

So Thursday morning, it is a different receptionist, but he asks if they could please put replacement sachet of washing powder in his room. "Yes, that's standard." "Well I asked yesterday as well and I didn't get one," mumbles E@L as he goes out the sliding glass panels...

Things are getting tight, he realises. His two business shirts haven't been rewashed - they've been worn twice already this week - and ditto his trousers. Socks are tough because he uses two pair a day as his shoes are one half-size too big (don't ask), but panic not, he has enough underwear for the rest of the week.

~~~~~~~

Thursday he returns from work a bit early, mid-afternoon. The room has not been made up. The bed-sheets awry, the bathroom floor covered in talc, his wet towels on the floor. It's just as he had left the place this morning. Maybe the cleaner has not been in yet.

But hang on...

There are THREE (3, count 'em) sachets of laundry powder on the washing machine...

E@L can't help but imagine the domestic help throwing those sachets down and storming out without doing any other cleaning up - "Here, you complaining cunt, take your fucking washing powder and shove it!"

E@L


(Turns out this was not the case - the room-buzzer went a few minutes later and a domestic was outside the door, smiling and asking if E@L needed the room made up... Maybe the receptionist had brought the sachets up himself after E@L's grumbled mumbled semi-complaint.)

Kara Bogaz? Hydrology and Despotism

Still haven't finished whatever book I said I started a while ago, um The Secret River, but did finish the third of David Peace's Red Riding books, 1980, one to go, and also got distracted by one from my Anything Russian days, Engineers Of The Soul, by Frank Westerham, who is an Dutch engineer/writer of some skill, about the typically tragic history of the writers and filmmakers who tried to document the construction of the great canals that Stalin was building to connect the rivers and seas and lakes of the USSR, and in particular one place no-one has heard off, Kara Bogaz, which is a huge sulfur and salt rich shallow body of water in Turkmenistan, like an giant aneurysm off the Caspian Sea and that may not even exist on some maps (it evaporated in the early 1980s when the inlet from the Caspian was blocked), but it was a book about much more than that as this is the time when political insanity tore apart the lives and families of artists, writers and, of course, engineers all through the USSR.

Just about anything that went on in Soviet Russia with Stalin's Cult of Personality is crazy, but his attitude to writers in particular was very VERY strange. (Simon Sebag Montefiore suggests in Young Stalin that maybe this was because he thought of himself as a bit of a poet. Or was in Martin Amis in Koba The Dread? Whatever.)

Stalin wanted writers to "Engineer The Human Soul" (i.e. the souls of those "Russians" who hadn't starved already or been executed yet) with uplifting stories of workers and the proletariat living heroic lives in the wonderfully successful Socialist empire, exemplifying the Ideals of Courage and Patriotism by battling subversive spies and crafty saboteurs in order to bring in that bumper crop to exceed the targets of the five year plan... or to shovel ice and mud for a thousand kilometres and dig a trench for magnificent hydrological marvels that would makes the corrupt West angry and jealous, (and not wash away with the spring thaw) and, incredibly yet understandably, writers would do this. Stalin expected his hydrologists to make rivers run uphill to realise his grand plan of interconnecting canals and he demanded that his writers convey to his people all the soon-to-be-truths about wonders of these soon-to-be-perfect achievements.

The larger the water engineering projects, the more despotic the controlling regime, according to Karl Marx.

In the end it was conform or starve or be off to the gallows or the gulag, and even if you were a staunch believer, something that you wrote years ago that Stalin or Gorky loved might suddenly, on a whim or as part of a purge, become OOB (out of bounds) and so it would be bye bye and please don't mention that many of those canals were never successfully completed, or were never even remotely successful as far as water navigation was concerned and were sad wastes of thousands of lost lives.



E@L

Perfection

The patient has Thai mystical tattoos all over his chest back neck and arms. Cool. Painful. Ouch. Not for E@L

Our anaesthetist for this session is a very fat man. He has stretched out his green scrubs, scrubs that would be loose on E@L. With chubby, baby-fat fingers, unexpectedly, he handles the syringes and needles and connectors and ampoules with an amazing felicity - he is deliberate, accurate and precise, and his pace of action nicely measured, never rushed, never hesitant. Measured as if it were timed on a steady, beta-blocked systole. The task of lightly* anaesthetizing the patient runs with a smooth ease E@L doesn't think he has ever witnessed before. It makes E@L smile to see this.

The anaesthetist's large hands (indeed his entire body) have no wasted motions. In latex gloves that cut into his wrists, those hands move smoothly into position like they had been programmed for a carbon-based industrial machine, or as it is if he has been doing some anaesthetics-dedicated medical Tai Chi with his extremities for as long as he has lived. Every attitude of his pudgy fingers is predetermined and choreographed. And so too, the paraphernalia of his tools, their packages and protective covers fall exactly open, part perfectly as designed and then the connectors connect, the ampoule top safely* cracks off with a soft pop, the needles pierce, the fluids run out or drip in as though according to a divine plan. Gravity's persistence, the adhesion of a packet edge's glue, the resistance of a rubber stopper, the reluctance of skin to permit entry unless the needle held with the bevel at just this angle, the pendulum arc of a length of cloth-tape that is flicked with the ring-finger across the arm to land on the junction of cannula and skin and have the optimum pressure applied to make it adhere as the fore-finger follows it down in one continuous motion: all of these vagaries which would catch E@L, or any other human, at first, at any attempt, he anticipates perfectly and executes flawlessly.

And this is the images that gets E@L, that defines the experience: He holds his thick pinky aloft, like drinking a cup of tea, as he turns a syringe end into a 3-way stopcock.

He chats amiably to the patient and everyone else in the small theatre throughout this (questions for E@L: Where are you from? Wow long are you in Bangkok? etc... Bar-girl chatter) without losing concentration. He is a most unlikely perfectionist, and the nicest person.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The thin surgeon seems to know what he is doing as well, but who gives a fuck about thin people, they always consider themselves perfect, they don't need E@L to sing their praises.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Heston.

E@L fucking hates him. Fucking food geek.

Heston fucking Blumenthal. Heston fucking just-do-this-and-it's-going-to-be-perfect fucking Blumenthal. Fat Duck? Fat cunt.

Heston on How To Poach The Perfect Egg: a) water at 80deg b) use an inverted plate to keep the egg from the bottom of the pan (it might poach unevenly, heaven forfend) c) freshest of eggs (preferably with chicken shit, rooster cum and matted hay still on the shell) d) break egg into a slotted spoon and allow the excess fluid to drain (it would only form those fairy-wing stuff) e) place the egg carefully onto the bottom of the upended plate, f) cook for six, or was it four, minutes, yes, it was four minutes.

Meanwhile; coffee, Vegemite on toast. Then plop on perfect poached egg - perfect breakfast.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is now in Izzy and D's kitchen in Den Haag. He cricks his neck, as he has slept on the couch [it's a brilliant couch for sleeping on actually, no neck stiffness at all, that line about cricking his neck was a joke - crriiiiickk], and his coffee from the elaborate Impresso machine in hand (in a cup), ready for breakfast. It's 11am, D is already at work, Izzy and E@L about to cook - it's just the old team back together.

OK, poached eggs it is. Let's follow the recipe, why the fuck not?

Find a plate that fits into the saucepan. This plate is too big, that one maybe too small. Maybe it's the saucepan than is too big, too small. This plate, a tea-cup saucer, it'll have do. Already with the compromises. Heston NEVER compromises. Water is already 80deg, wow, they have a temperature guide on their kettle, awesome. Gas on, water in, saucer in. A bubble is trapped under the saucer and it won't sit flat. E@L goes to put a finger in to turn it up - stupid child! He catches himself in time and uses the slotted spoon instead! The water in the pan cools quickly according to the thermometer - a large nail on a long wire to a digital readout that Izzy holds. With her other hand Izzy adjusts the flame, monitoring, adjusting, monitoring, the thermometer dutifully beeps at 80. She moves around him to get the slotted spoon and E@L sees the mystical Thai tattoo on the nape of her neck. They keep tripping over each other in the small kitchen, but poaching an egg takes two people, right?

~~~~~~~~~~

Egg one: E@L cracks the egg and already there are drops of albumin on the bench-top, already a mess in the making. The slotted spoon lets the thinnest fluids drain away, tick and the egg slides in and there is not enough water - the top of the yolk is exposed. Izzy turns the kettle on again. E@L spoons water over the top of the yolk as the albumin, slowly, ssslllooooooowwwlllyyyy whisps towards coagulation over the yolk. A bubble burps from under the saucer, Izzy adjusts the flame, the thermometer beeps, the kettle clicks off, she adds the water, E@L stops spooning.

Egg two: E@L holds the slotted spoon this time, and he tries his patented one-handed egg-crack and shell-split manoeuvre but some sort of surface tension threshold is breached and ALL the albumin slips from the shell through the slots of the spoon, leaving, plop, only a naked yolk. Mmmmm, obviously not fresh enough. Slide it in.

Egg three: crack OK this time, drain OK, slide into the water OK, but there is another bubble fart from under the saucer and, still amorphous, the egg slides like a plasmatic ghost escaping an exorcist over the ridge of the bottom of the saucer to rest on the forbidden bottom of the saucepan, at the edge. It soon starts to set in the shape of a croissant (a buttery pastry in the shape of a Muslim flag's crescent moon, I suppose you knew that), but E@L cannot coax it back up onto the saucer.

Egg four: see egg three, damn.

~~~~~~~~~~

Ka-chunk: toast pops up, butter, Vegemite (in Den Haag! Awesome!)

Izzy's iPhone egg-timer beeps. Four minutes: first one out. Let it drain on slotted spoon. It seems very wobbly, maybe because the yolk was exposed early (like a teratogen to a fetus) and couldn't cook. Shit maybe it WAS six minutes (we are working on the memory of a TV show watched last night, maybe on dope). Second, the yolk, out. Not much to drain. Another minute and then E@L scrapes the two croissant eggs of the wall, drains them and slips them onto Izzy's plate. She has some watercress decoration.

The first egg was indeed nicely done. The white set in a nice oval and was firm but not chewy, the yolk was yellow on it's outer orb and deep orange inside, runny but not liquid, almost perfect. The yolk-only one good as far as you can expect a yolk to be, very runny too but somewhat embarrassed. E@L enjoyed them, despite the mess on his shirt from the runny yolks.

Izzy's two are overcooked and misshapen, obviously, the whites were over-firm, the yolks pale on the outside and not very runny. Maybe it should be less than four minutes if the egg rests on the saucepan's surface...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Only one of our four patients' operations went as planned, Dr Izzy. Not quite a perfect session. But there'll always be more googy-woog patients from where they came.

Izzy nudges clumsy E@L in his fat belly. Perfect in other ways.

E@L



* we are doing some day-surgery stuff, various endoscopy things

* you wanna see the scar on E@L's thumb?

In-Flight Movie Reviews - Stoker; Hannah Arendt; Thirst; Trance

13hr or so flight from Barthhhhelonya to Singapore. Watched 4 movies. Plane left at 10:30am arrived at 11pm - 5am local time... Done.

Sleep all morning. Done

Have things to do: not done.

Instead: brief in-flight movie review.

~~~~~~~~

Stoker: Even if you hate Nicole Kidman, this is a very stylised creepy movie that you might find interesting. Then again you might hate Nicole Kidman too much to care. Brief cameo of Jackie Weaver - always good to see. (This is nowhere near as creepy as The Others though.)
- 3 stars

Hannah Arendt: woefully didactic script, wooden acting by all but the chain-smoking Arendt. There are authorial intrusions everywhere, mainly through the three other actors who have lines. Yes, we get the point: Eichmann was a dull bureaucrat and Jewish leaders could have done more. But how? - the crucial point which would address most of her detractors is never properly addressed. Sure, people admired Hannah the lecturer/philosopher then, whoof, they hated the journalist/philosopher to BITS! And she used to sleep with Martin Heidegger. But zay didn't undershtaaaaaaaand.
- 2 stars, mainly for the historical footage of Eichmann in the dock.

Thirst: Korean director Park keeps the humour subdued for the early part of his 2009 vampire rethink/parody, then it gets going. Fun/sexy mostly, till the drawn out end. Mum-in-law camps it up nicely, as does gorgeous and newly thirsty Tae-Ju, to counter the brooding priest/vampire Sang-Hyeon.
- 4 stars

Trance: Boyle = over-stylised crap IMHO. He's done nothing that's got to me since Shallow Grave and Trainspotting (I didn't see the Olympics). Even the gratuitous (and gratis!) sight of Rosario Dawson's depilated natal cleft failed to rouse my interest in this painting-heist, bang-on-head, lost-memory, professional-hypnotherapist*-required, flashy, superficial flick. And if you thought Inception was confusing, particularly when watching this one straight after the previous three, you'll need an implausibly competent hypnotherapist to help you to remember why you bothered.
- 3 stars, mainly because James McEvoy is not anyone's vision of a leading man yet he's still getting away with it.

E@L

* oxymoron

Ambulance Beer Barcelona

An ambulance, bi-toned siren blaring WE-are, WE-are, WE-are, turns the corner past the "cerveceria" on La Rambla where E@L is sipping a burnt-flavored Catalan beer, reading an ebook and listening to a Guantanamo-like concatenation of Aaron Neville singing about Rainy Nght in Georgia and a wheelchair-bound old gypsy playing Russian folksongs on a weather-beaten accordian. E@L sighs and lifts his beer and... feels a chill wave of mortality and melancholy wash over him like the brisk wind (which has picked up today), as he thanks whatever gods may be that the ambulance is not coming for him.

It is almost one year since he climbed that tower in San Gimignano and felt the steel spring winding tighter in his chest and soon heard another ambulance, siren on, and it was coming for him, to take him to the hospital in Siena. Every minute since then he has been anticipating another call for an ambulance, expecting every exertion, every rush of excitement or anger to be the one to trigger a new incident, and possibly an incident of greater severity. He is aware of something from a book he recently read by a woman who had breast cancer*, that there is strong pressure socially not to carry on about his fears and feel down. That might bring others down too. He has had to keep operating, psychologically functioning, keep smiling, keep positive, not remind others, by harping on his coronary hypochondria, that they are equally mortal, they, poor boys, are bound to die just as surely. We all block this, we don't think about it, we don't want to freeze in an existential panic.

But when you know that the threat is right there, beating away for the moment, but that is on the point of seizing up in a, dare we say it, in a heartbeat you can't help but feel pretrified, terrifed. Why should you have to deny your real feelings, the sadness, the depair, the anger? When E@L read a report on a recent piece of research which showed that as many a 25% coronary survivors suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, it made him wonder what stern stuff the other 75% are made of...

E@L now has that awareness of a hair-trigger death with him always, as he has had with the neuropathic pain that had kept him constantly aware of his own feet for half a dozen years until the best cocktail of drugs was found. Of course E@L was/is stressed by the whole affair. It's like being hit by a car and surviving, and that afterwards, you are not just being more cautious when crossing the road, but knowing for certain that every fucking car on the road really is out to finish the job.

If you see E@L pause for a fraction of a second, if he looks towards you but doesn't quite seem to see you, and if he pulls his mouth back into a slight grimace and then slowly sighs, you should know that a flicker of something has touched him with reminder of the fragility of his existence, someone as not walked over his grave, but pointed out the hole in the ground with his name at the headstone, that something has jiggled the pin of the hand-grenade in his chest. He might then see you, and relax that grimace into a slight smile, because he is alive after all and he doesn't want to upset you with how close the opposite possibility was just a second earlier.

~~~~~~~

His plate has a small lump of ambiguous matter on it; shiny, mucinous, soft, like something retrieved from a clogged artery, but it is merely a load of Roquefort he had dropped from his pork fillet and cheese bocadillo into his cappuccino earlier and only discovered when he swallowed the last dregs. He fished it out with the coffee spoon, wondering at first if it was not an "easter-egg" from the tourist-hating barista. Meanwhile, the gypsy squeeze-box player is wheeled away by his twenty-something grandson and, a minute later is replaced by a toothy middle-aged violinst.

His iPod has shuffled him to AC/DC's Hells Bells - "you're only young but you're gonna die."

If the coincidence was even vaguely amusing he would laugh but instead, he orders another beer.

~~~~~~~~~

E@L was spending a similar lunch time yesterday, his first day in Barcelona, still not checked in, on La Rambla; beer, bocadilla and coffee (note to self: no more than six coffees in four hours when jetlagged) and coming to the conclusion that there was a Pretty, Young Girls In Minimal Clothing Convention on in town somewhere nearby. Many of the men sitting in the shade in the tapas bars in the center of the strip, sipping beer with E@L, were also admiring the passing parade of delegates.

E@L

* Barbara Ehrenreich's "Bright-sided"

Internet Nakedness

In regard to Edward Snowden's leak of information about the capabilities and the extent of the internet surveillance that is going on without our approval, let alone knowledge, I feel stripped naked.

The argument that "if you having to hide then why be worried about the NSA having the information on your internet travels and email correspondence" does not hold water. It's like a nudist telling us all to go naked because we are all the same (within a normal distribution curve) beneath our clothes.

Yes, that's true, but I don't WANT to be naked all the time.

Have you got something to hide? YES, my dignity, my personal habits and preferences, what I would have liked to think was my private life!

As far as criminal activity is concerned, terrorism or child pron, no, I having nothing (much) to hide in my online presence, but I don't WANT government agencies or, worse, businesses having access to what I do online or who I talk to on my phone, criminal or not.

My activity involves reaching out to things in the web or on the phone network far away, outside the dark solitude of my artist's garret, into a public arena, but it's private in all other ways. It's me, it's mine, fuck off: I don't want you and your marketing people looking over my shoulder. It's creepy if nothing else.

My land-line phone calls are public in a sense as well, but if you want to tap my phone, have something concrete to suspect me about, then go get a court order or a warrant or whatever it takes. Ditto, I would like to assume, for my mobile phone use and my computer actions and interactions.

~~~~~~~~~

But, we all know that this creeping intrusion is inexorable. But I feel its progress into our electronic selves is as pernicious as it is inevitable.

Unfortunately for those of my cast of opinion, it is only going to become more comprehensive and much more pervasive. There is so much more information than we can comprehend currently being gathered by the Telcos as well as government agencies, and when they run their mining algorithms and the private gold of your prefernential activities is extracted, you are for sale.

The essential technology to gather and to extract useful information is there, to sell the soul of you, and Telcos are making money on it already. It's up and running now in a structurally limited way, but within a few years as the bandwidth of data gathering expands, that deluge of data will be able to deliver up such a wealth (literally, for someone) of information to "interested parties" that taking advantage of it will be overwhelmingly tempting - especially as it will be in real-time!

You know how Morgan Freeman had that huge aggregated screen in Batman The Dark Night, showing how all the phones in Gotham city were being tracked with "sonar"? That is not only on the way, it's here. Well not completely 3D and transparent, but still with an extraordinary amount of detail.


This is wrong!
Yes, indeed. To an extent anyway, this is happening now, but, says E@L's secret source in the industry, the technology currently will only allow 24 hourly updates. Currently. It's true. Every 24hrs, the location of your phone has been sold to someone. In the not too distant future however Singtel / M1 / Starhub / 3 / Optus / Verizon / Telstra / etc... will be selling crucial information of astounding detail in real-time, and making enormous amounts of money (they make enormous amounts of money on SMS's already.)

Information could be as detailed as how many iPhone users are currently shopping in Plaza Singapura: within seconds all those iPhones will be beeping with spam SMS's about the latest Spotlight savings deal, about the 50% sale at Marks & Spencer, the latest 24hr-hit CGI blockbuster in the cinema upstairs; ads targeted to their owners' previous shopping history from the database that was generated when their history of on-line shopping was sold previously.

Based on WHERE YOU ARE STANDING. Now.

Some of you think that this will be a good thing, of course. You don't want irrelevant spam. The businesses certainly will love it. But it is much more than those targeted ads that pop up on your web browsers.

This is exposure to a degree that a few years ago was unthinkable, unless you were watching Minority Report*. Now we know the US Government agencies have been doing this all along. As have those Telco businesses.


I feel that I am being stripped electronically naked, but I'd rather keep my internet body covered, thank you. It's not that I have things to hide, it's just that I'm shy, and I would prefer if my non-nude lifestyle choice was respected.

I should have the rights, and the freedom, to be shy, to be demure, keep my fucking clothes on.

E@L


* and now your games consoles and your TVs and your phones are responding to hand gestures... Fucking amazing.

A Link To Someone Else's Blog

Terrific review of a book I really love.

John Self at Asylum reviews The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz. Wish I could a review a book this well. Wish I could read and remember what the fuck was IN the fucking book.

~~~~~~~~~~~

It is difficult to sum up the force and formal perfection of the pieces here without extracting one in full. Most contain something that felt to me like a punch in the gut, perhaps because so many link back to the patient’s childhood. One woman recalls a miserable time at boarding school, and payphone calls to her parents: “I was crying hysterically, ‘Please can I come home, please can I come home?’ and being told, ‘No, you can’t come home.’”


E@L

Old Quotes

After that excellent quote from Claude Levi-Strauss in the previous post, it thought it might be interesting, relevant, amusing, heart-breaking to list the quotes I had on the side column of my old blog (the layout of which seems to have fucked up of late...)

The entire first chapter of Tristes Tropiques is an extended attack on writing memoirs and travel stories BTW. I feel really motivated now! And so should you!


~~~~~~~~
We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.
Robert Walser


One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.
Goethe

We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked.
Sir Richard Motteram,British Civil Servant


Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain


To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write.
Marguerite Duras


A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann


a) Don't lie if you don't have to.
b)Assume infinite intelligence and zero prior knowledge.
Leo Szilard

...if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it'd lose even its imperfection.
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

The truth is scandalous. But without it, nothing has any worth. An honest and naive vision of the world is already a masterpiece... As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase.
Michel Houellebecq

And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity, obscurity is not uninteresting.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My only job is to be talented.
Anton Chekhov

Boredom, of course, like any mighty force, you must respect.
Saul Bellow

He often made great mistakes and arrived at false conclusions, still he had so much genius and knowledge that a great part of his work will always remain true.
Arabella Buckley, (speaking of French naturalist George-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, Intendant (Administrator) of Les Jardins des Plants, anticipator of Darwin and Lyell)

It is only kings, and the nobility, and those fortunates who dwell in the tropics, where bread grows on trees and clothing is unnecessary, who have reserved seats in this world.
Charles Dudley Warner, (from an address to the Alumni of Hamilton College, NY, 1872)

I may not agree with what you say but to your [?my, someone's] death I will defend your right to say it.
Voltaire

I may not agree with what you say so shut the fuck up you fucking fuck.
No-one will admit to this one, but I have my suspicions.
~~~~~~~~~


E@L

Tristes Topiques

I hate traveling... It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings?"
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955.



~~~~~~~~~~

Why indeed. I've done fuck all in the past fifteen years myself, except fritter away any self-allotted writing time on this and the old blog. Fuck all on anything serious. But I've been meaning to do a heap of things with all those blogged words - tie all the Bruce and the coffee and the taxi stories together. Thread a genuine novel (I DO have a plot) into the weft of these inanities. But I haven't.

And I've really cut back on blogging (I'm presuming you've noticed this). I guess, like the 250,000,000 bloggers who aren't Savmarshmama or Xiaxue, I've gone off the boil. I have my reasons. None of which will stand up to any tough (reasonably tough) scrutiny.

~~~~~~~~~~

But here's one - it's 12:30a.m. and I have to work in the morning. Late morning. But work tomorrow does means to chat with a Doctor over the incubator of a tiny premature baby and explain why my machine will make his task... well, you get the idea. Tomorrow's work is pretty important, so I should get to sleep now. Yet here I am.

And here's where that excuse falls into a hole. I've been going to be at 2am to 3am lately anyway. I've been facebooking, wanking (sometimes combining the two), Game Of Thronesing, reading online newspapers and books (incompletely, incompetently and superficially), and did I say wanking?

The late hour is no excuse.

~~~~~~~~~

Perhaps it's something to do with the slight heart attack angina incident I had in Italy last year (and the dubious celebration of its anniversary - I can come off one type the rat-poisons they feed me - comes soon). Perhaps I've hit a fatalistic slump; my despond is being held captive in slough; I have lost my way in the dark forest of my middle age. I don't know what to do, and why I'd want to do it anyway.

Actually, dedicated readers will be no doubt aware of my tendency to melancholia (and alcoholia) when I pause from chronicling the outrageous and amoral misdeeds of my buddy Bruce. And I have paused. As Bruce has paused. For medical, cardiac-cripple, shit-scared of dying suddenly reasons.

But here's where the pseudo-depression excuse falls into a hole. I've been FBing like a maniac. Lots of little pithy asides, running gags, etc... that are annoying the fuck out of the remaining "friends" of mine who have not yet had enough of the fuck annoyed out of them to unfriend or ignore me.

~~~~~~~~

Maybe I have nothing left to say here, at length.

I haven't been working on any novel.

I haven't been taking any notes.

I haven't even wanted to.

Perhaps I should get back into the habit of writing first.

~~~~~~~~

And now - it's almost after 1am - I do feel like typing a long rant and a raving post on god knows what unimportant cerebral ejaculation - something you don't (or shouldn't) do on Facebook. Mmmm, not such a bad idea, my kind of fun perhaps.

Ah, I wonder if I might be able to get back in to blogging a bit more reliably and pull out some more inconsequential trivia to provide a bit of light relief and amusement or to provoke deep philosophical snippets for all of us, at greater length tha FB or Twitter. Mostly for me though.

Night.

E@L

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I know the feeling. Kingsley seems to be trying to resolve some (health) threat that has triggered fears of his impending death (26 years later) here. He has done this before, but within a ghost story, that is a different path altogether for Amis, and he pulls it off moderately well I must admit. A Stephen King best-seller it is not, and thank God Almighty for that.

Now dying is one thing, it must come to us all (and why we are not paralysed by this prospect is a mystery to Amis's character here) but the persistence of evil into the afterlife is another! All this washed down with a modest triple scotch and water.

There are many examples of the typical Amis-like crackling dry delivery, often at the most unexpected of times thereby guaranteeing a shock, in the mouth of the sex-obsessed, death-obsessed and misanthropic narrator, hotel manager Maurice Allington: a drunker but much more competent Basil Fawlty role. Amis often makes me burst out loud laughing with that wonderfully cynical line, carefully thought-out and poetically knife-pointed to a unimpeachable truth, in this book as much as any of the others I have read.

(My favorite quotation of all time is this, from Lucky Jim; "If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.")

Allington has to deal with a frisky mistress, a taken-for-granted (but still loved) newish wife, a dying to dead father, a drinking problem, hypochondria (that pain in the lower back is kidney cancer, perhaps, now that the brain cancer has cleared up), an mostly uncommunicative 13yo daughter, lost manuscripts, midnight grave robbing, an atheist parson, a shy cat, and all sorts of disconcerting spectral visitors in the woods nearby and in the hotel at night, at least one of whom has a rather nasty history...

He's trying what he thinks is his best in all aspects of life, but his unacknowledged selfishness doesn't help, and that fact he can't tell anyone about his search for the secret behind these ghosts as they'll only think it's the DT's. But his TV watching daughter seems not to disbelieve him...

Loved it.




View all my reviews

E@L

Orwell In Burma

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said, "for twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me".

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.

George Orwell - Ironic Poem About Prostitution (before 1936)



E@L

War on Drugs (prices)

My Singapore Doctors love me, and I don't mean my customers it should have been obvious by now.


Here is the bill for a shade under four months of tablets for my painful feet (aka idiopathic peripheral neuropathy). S$3.60/tablet on average, seven tablets/day = $25 every day = ~$750 every month.

I could get a Fullers Pale Ale and squeeze of tit lime every day for that.


In Australia the bottom two (same medication - had to get some in from another store) on the list are A$1.00 each (S$1.30). I paid $440 for eight boxes of 56 last week - and I could have bought them cheaper if I had a few days up my sleeve for stocks to get in.

I can save about S$1,000 every four months. Almost worth a drug run to good old Geelong.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

It wouldn't be the first [first what? drug run, you idiots], says Officer Dribble of the Kardinia Park Drug Squad.


Max Rooke 2005


Max Rooke 2009

E@L

Nobu

Robert De Niro and Nobu Matsuhisa have one of their restaurants in Perth's Crown Casino, Nobu. (Not "De Niro", note.)

No booking, you turn up, no problem - you sit at the sushi bar! Irrashaimase!

~~~~~~~~~

There is a thin slice of beetroot amongst the sashimi! WTF, beetroot is everywhere. It's like wasabi and arugola and thick balsamic. Later, you see two chefs working, one reaches across to the other one's plate-in-progress and places a thin slice of beetrot on the pile of grated/julienned white radish. Next to the wasabi and the arugola.

You eat a sashimi tuna taco and a sashimi lobster taco. Of course you do, it's a fusion restaurant, you're paying enormously for this level of weird.


Beer (nice, never heard of it, some white ale), that sweet whiskey cocktail (12yo Yamizaki, green ginger wine, maple syrup), chilled sake: there was now a diffuse glow, an aura of saturated radiance, about anyone who is standing under bright lights. The four sushi chefs, in their white netted caps, glowing like aliens as they peeled leaf after leaf from the coriander stems for the salad, or stacked the maki rolls just so...

Is the waitress Filipina? Or Malaysian? Or Australian? Certainly a beginner - she was being told off trained about the way she described the menu to you. Hamachi with jalapeños? Mm-mm, sounded good to you.

Chef's choice of sashimi. Chef is a boring fuck. Some tuna with ginger and chives is as outrageously adventurous/expensive as you get. And beetroot.

Next. Sliced octopus and mushrooms in a citrus sauce baked in a small paella pan. Too citrusy for you. Nice tentacles though, shame about the face.

You have to go to the toilet and find it around two corners, a large open room, built for one, tough lock, but you get it eventually. The wall behind the cistern is made up of lots of small (max is maybe 4cm across), clear perspex circles, what would you call them, tablets (as in pills), various sizes, set into the gray plaster-like support material. Three ceiling spots shine down. It looks like there are disks of gray material behind, or is it IN, each of the perspex disks at the back, slightly overlapping each other, but no: it was an optical illusion; these shapes were merely the genuine colour of the solid wall behind the disk, while the shadow from the lights has managed to keep clear an arc across the top part of the rear of the disk, one for each of the down-lights. You take one hand from your cock and use it (your hand) to block the light from one of the down-lights and one of layers of posterior/interior disks has gone, this confirms your brilliant insight. It was very cool, very weird and very hard to describe, obviously. You wish you had taken a picture, but you are reluctant to take your phone/camera out in a toilet again, not after that last incident with the Masonic guy and his young piglet...

Pork belly, cubed to chopstick-able proportions with, what is that?, chopped jalapeños again? Still a little bit left on the plate, plus at most a smear of the delicious sauce, just one cube of the pork belly, but the sake mug was empty. Do you order another small carafe and look like a drunk or finish the rather dry pork with a dry mouth? Ah, mineral water. OK, you'll just look at the sake menu again. Hey, why not another whiskey cocktail? Because, is why.

And so you do look at the sake menu again and suddenly everything you've ever known about sake goes flying and you admit to yourself that, while it wasn't all that much, at least it was something, but now you may as well know nothing as what you are looking at makes no sense: ginjo, daiginjo, junmai? they don't help. It's only the regions that they show and you know nothing about that. Nothing.

The small things are in your mind:

- The Ethiopian taxi driver's story of oppression.

- The security guard who walked you all the way over from the casino to the restaurant, was he trying to pick you up?

- The chef placing a dab of (miso?) sauce on a tiny square of coriander leaf on a sliver of jalapeño on a thin slice of hamachi and it caught, and the coriander fell off and the slice of yellowtail was stained with the dripping sauce, and fuck it, that's what happens and he puts it all back together again. And then the pepper shaker is blocked and nothing comes out and he can't decorate the plate, so he goes looking for a toothpick; seriously, this happens.

- The fact you awkwardly pulled out two $5 notes from your wallet as you went to tip the waitress, but she saw you as you pushed one back in.

- The bill, no, that wasn't such a small thing.

OK, just one more whiskey syrup cocktail for the road... Oishi! Campai! Whatever!

E@L

Nothing To See Here

(at Newton Station, Singapore.)
~~~~~~~~~~

Just don't feel like writing at the moment, even though I have oodles of spare time. Hard to explain. Hard to understand. Jet lag? Homesickness, as in, am I sick of being home?

~~~~~~~~~~

Lots of amusing, horrifying and uber-boring incident in this three week Tour of Duty around Australia and New Zealand (and Australia and New Zealand again), although lots of fleeting witticisms were lost to documentation (memory of an axolotl) and lots of things observed were lost to wry comment as the brain is just so clogged and I can't seem to find the oomph to start writing anything... (Have been reading about Leibnitz's question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and my brain has melted.)

And today, (tonight/what day is it?), after this double jump from Auckland to Melbourne, then on to Perth, where I am now, I find that, while I have the computer open in front of me and it's relatively early (Perth time), I am too completely shagged out to share anything of interest and amusement with you... at... this... time... OK maybe this photo from Tasmania last weekend.

~~~~~~~~~~


Bay Of fires, Tasmania
Lichen on the rocks makes them bright orange.
E@L

Virgin Member

OK, this one IS a FWP.

Flying Virgin to NZ, economy class. Bummer enough, right? Virgin is not Star Alliance but has an agreement with Singapore Airlines for club lounge access. I check-in at the priority counter and the lady says that there is no Virgin lounge in International in Melbourne, but I am welcome to use the Air New Zealand lounge or of course the Singapore lounge. Huh, go with what you know, right? I find that the Singapore lounge is under renovation and the sign directs me to the United lounge. Steely looks from both the SIA person and the United person.

"Virgin is not Star Alliance."

"But the SIA lounge is closed, the sign directed me here."

"Yes, but Virgin is not part... "

" But Virgin has reciprocal lounge access with SIA."

Disbelief. Dubiety.

"Virgin is not... "

" I can get into the Virgin lounge (at Perth which doesn't have a SIA lounge.) when I am flying Singapore."

The SIA guy calls his boss. He goes red. He is under-trained.

"I am still sorry sir, but because this is a United lounge and Virgin is not part of Star Alliance, the reciprocal agreement cannot be applied."

Smug look from United person.

Go to New Zealand lounge.

"I am sorry sir, I but Virgin is not part of Star Alliance." (There is a sign outside the ANZ lounge welcoming Virgin customers.) "Your SIA membership doesn't cover the ANZ agreement with Virgin."

"Oh fuck, just let me in...!"

He did.

E@L.

(Vindicated: my ticket was sold as an Air New Zealand flight.)

In Which E@L Resists Anything But Temptation.

After having explained to friends at the excellent bistro in the Builders Arms Hotel in Gertrude St (not the attached restaurant Moon Under Water unfortunately - no time to make an advance booking) that the most rewarding thing for him about the long-term (2 years) successful weight loss behaviour E@L has been exhibiting, is the sense of being in control, of feeling like you are in control of your life and your body. Oh yeah. Total control. Have another glass of Yarra Valley Pinot, E@L, and talk to us about taking command.

However, indeed, he says, "No thanks, no more wine."

No? Done, thanks. Desert? Nope. No more room. Not me. (Wise man.)

Hang on, is that Amaro with caramelized orange for a disgestif? Well, seeing as how he skipped the wine...

Willpower. Apart from that Amaro of course, E@L is a tower of self-control and strength and psychological power held in check. He can hold his own against a sea of troubles.

~~~~~~~~~~

But let's take advantage of getting home early, E@L, it's only 9:30. Read that China Miéville on your Kindle (Embassytown). Relax. A take-away latte from Pellegrinis maybe while you read it? Sure, it's just around the corner. Maybe have a look in the window at The PaperBack, three steps across the lane, just, you know, old habits...

~~~~~~~~~~



E@L is in the lane, lit red by Pellegrinis' cursive neon, looking at his latest latent purchase - The Examined Life, How We Lose And Find Ourselves, Stephen Grosz - when a voice tries to pull him away...



"Mate. Ma-ate. Ya got some coins? A few bucks? The refuge wants $15; I need a more coins ya know. Anything would help, thanks cobber."

E@L shrugs. Resolve, steely, see it in action. He pulls out the few coins from his right pocket, in which he rarely puts money. "There ya go, mate. All I got."

That's all he is going to give the pest. Doesn't even have a drugged baby unconsious on his lap, we mean, hey, get serious here! It was 60c. Hmm. These days, when some extra steamed veg with your grilled fish at the hospital cafeteria is $4, when that shot of Amaro and its caramelized orange is $15. Yes, 60c is not a fuck lot of money, is it?

He's hardly registered their weight in his hand. "Ya got some other coins? Seriously I don't need much. Just bit more would rooly rooly help."

E@L sighs, takes a moment, then digs deep, deep, into his other pocket. Pulls up some golden-colour discs of unequal size, genuinely all he has in coins. "Here ya go. No, hang on, that one's a Singapore dollar. Won't help you much."

"Oh, cool, give us a look. Singapore? Amazing." He nods, genuinely interested, passes it back. Then, ever the professional, asks, "Do you have any notes instead, notes would be brilliant: for two nights they want ...(indistinct)... for a room. A bed, you know. It's getting cold, eh?"

"I only have $50s, mate, I'm sorry." Now, E@L wouldn't advise saying that to a person on the street anywhere else but this part of Melbourne city. Might as well say, "Pull a knife, rob me." But this guy is a beggar, not a thief. He's there almost every time E@L walks in the upper reaches of Bourke St in the evening: he's just this homeless guy, bit of a drug problem sure, maybe not his fault, maybe he's an ex-CEO who took a hit in the GFC. E@L has never felt threatened by people asking for money...

"It's OK," he says to E@L brightly. "$50's are OK. I can give you change in $20s."

... pause...

You are telling E@L you have change for a $50?

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L enters the book-store, glancing on the New Non-Fiction shelves. Can't see the book he wanted to browse through, looks across to the counter and he hears the customer there talking to the saleswoman. He looks away, then back over his shoulder and sees a tall man, maybe late twenties, early thirties, a bald patch taking over some scalp under the fair hair at the crown. He is wearing fair trousers and a has a red scarf over a fawn-colored jacket. What a fucking dork. E@L sees the bookshop lady. She is also of that age. A little bit of white throat showing down to the second button of her white shirt, then her knitted cardy. Curly hair, a bit unruly, small eyes with almost a tired squint, smiling. It's almost time to close. Long day dealing with pseudo-intellectual dip-shits.

"Well", he was saying, "you're a woman, you must've really enjoyed A Room Of One's Own! It's very good, yeah? It would be very good, I mean, you know, having somewhere to do that, you know write, or... have a room."

E@L is stunned. What are we allowed to say in the world today?

He can hear hear her laugh, though. "Yes, what is it? Five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own. Would be very handy."

"Yes, we could all do with that!" he says. Then, E@L could gather somehow, he awkwardly pays for his Mrs Woolf purchases and closes the door just behind E@L's back. (It's a small bookshop.)

E@L steps across and asks her about his book.

"I've got the Lost part down pat, but need to brush up on the being Found."

"Yes, we are all a little lost," she says, smiling. "But not this book." And she pulls a copy from a pile of unsorted paperbacks on the floor by her counter.

"Excuse me," he says, "but I couldn't help overhearing just then. Did that guy really say 'You are a woman, you must understand sexual stereotyping?' or were my ears not taking that in properly?"

She laughs again. Eyes not so small really, they're just emeralds crouching in laugh-lines, dimples (God E@L loves dimples), smiling with not too much gum, all nice teeth, curly hair, the flouncy type. Maybe E@L sees something of what made the other guy make a fool of himself for...

... See that willpower in action as E@L resists falling in love.

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L negotiates the gauntlet of hipsters (one has an oversize paperback copy of Chomsky On Anarchy in his hand) and moves down the aisle towards the back of Pellegrinis, to where the cakes are. Just to have a look. Old habits.

"What's that one?" he asks, just out of interest. E@L can only see the outside of it, thick, fruit on top.

"Almond cake. Apricot on top." Pause. "You want whipped cream?"

See his resolve, firm as a whipped cream, see his character come to the fore... No. Neither did E@L.

E@L sighs. Some charity, a book, and a cake with cream to go with that latte.

Awesome willpower, E@L.

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L is in that hotel room of his, alone. The meal was excellent. His friends are good, talking about getting married in New Zealand. The Mieville book is good. The Grosz book is good. The cake and cream were good. Awesome latte of course.

He can't resist, and puts Bjork on the iPod...



... and smiles to himself.

E@L

Partayyyy!!! ZZzzzzzz...

The 15th year of being an expatriate hit E@L yesterday - yes April Fools Day, everybody laugh. But who is the joke on? E@L booked the pool-side BBQ area and called up 6 or 7 hundred of his most intimate friends of whom 6 or 7 turned up.

But now it's 4am and the departing guests seem to have left most of the worst parts of the evening on his dining room table.

E@L looks at BBQ cold cuts and the soggy salads and the plastic cups of - OMG what is that? These trays of snags and elaborately marinated chicken wings and spiced steaks; long anticipated soon forgotten points of Epicurean delicate essen, cooked to perfection under supremely challenging conditions in extreme situations (E@L has no hairs left on the back of his left hand). There were missing ingredients and lost sauces, but it all went down well enough one guesses. Nobody complained of not having enough chicken wings, hey! But there are the foggy times; the usual did I put my tongue into what, whom, when?...

More crucially, it's the odd "did-I-really-open-that?" bottles of vintage red, half drunk and even less appreciated, lying on their side.

What a fucking mess. Gin. Sprite. Tahini. Ugh.

Sigh.

The Aussie Rules football replay is finally finished and E@L staggers up to looks around. How to sort out this fuck train-wreck? Without his fall-back position - Call The Mouse! - he reaches for Bruce's Rules for Tidying Up Efficiently, viz:...

"If, within the next 24hrs, you are not going to drink it, eat it, or fuck it, throw it out."


~~~~~~~~~

Chin chin!

E@L

Moral Philosophy

"Look at the creep with the tattoos. What is he, Russian Mafia?"

"Probably."

"She's going to go with him if I don't make a move. Get your hands of her tits you arsehole."

"Don't tell me, tell him! Make your move for Christ's sake. I want to finish this beer and go back and see if Plan B is still there."

"The chubby Burmese? You like her?"

"She has a cute face."

"Whatever. I'm getting to know too much about you. Here she comes. Shut the fuck up now."

"Just pay the bar-fine, she has to go with you."

"You think I should? She's gorgeous. But, you know, will I respect myself in the morning?"

"I won't respect you if you don't take her, isn't that enough? Pay the bar-fine! Rescue her from the evil Russian white slaver. It's the moral thing to do."

"Hmm. I can feel a categorical imperative rising in my trousers."

"Do your duty, Superman. To deny your will to power is to deny yourself."

"Thanks Nietzche."

"Go you stupid Kant. Take the woman home!"

~~~~~~


E@L

Smell's Like...

Bangkok seems particularly noisome today.

Not just the usual gulley-trap-mephitic clouds steaming out at Soi Zero to whack you in the olfactories, but it's all up and down Sukhomvit. It's like the whole town has been cooking, it has a kitchen closeness. But there's something almost sulphurous baking in the unclean oven of the city. It's the bubbling traffic fumes and roiling dust, the sweating asphalt, the baking concrete, the balls-scratching listless soi-dogs, the stale breath of air turning on itself under the hot tarps of the footpath-market stalls, the farts and belches and bromhidrotic sandals of the sexpats in the Nana bars, the glistening people up close in the crowded Skytrain.

34° feels like 42°, says my weather app. Smells like 150°. Smells like...

Bangkok.

~~~~~~~~~~~


Some old photos.
E@L

I Am Epicurus - Fulda

E@L's friend The Bludger was having trouble with his Internet connection (his flat-mate had done something). The solution was at hand with the typical geek response to such issues: Turn everything OFF, wait for the electrons to sort themselves out and turn it all ON again. This, unsurprisingly to an experienced geek like The Bludger, worked perfectly and connectivity was restored.

Now E@L is in an hotel room in Penang.


(He was by the pool this afternoon. It'll do.)
He wants to watch the next few episodes of House Of Lies (soft corn-porn, Don Cheadle back in Boogie Nights, but definitely without the insecurity) so he took the DV > HDMI adapter and connected one end of the HMDI cable here and the other to the input of the room's TV. He expected the TV to take that digital video signals now streaming down the copper wires at the speed of electricity, to read its encoded Descartian matrix and to paste it, pixel by pixel across the LCD panel to show pretty much the same thing as the laptop was displaying, or an extended desktop to the right of it. The laptop recognized the TV (according to the Graphics page) but there was still nothing on the TV screen.


He was not as much of a geek, but still he tried The Bludger's methodology. E@L turned everything OFF and then ON. But this time, because it was E@L and not The Bludger, such an otherwise reliable maneouver failed. Nothing seemed to help him: plugging, replugging, shaking, fiddling (with the HDMI cable! You people!). He even started to play the video on the laptop and then sneak it across to the extended screen, which should be the TV. Maybe, he thought it will burst from nothingness into wonderful existence. Of course not.

Now listen: the SOUND of House of Lies ("ooh, aah! oh baby!") was coming from the TV, but no matter what he did, the TV would not display the video image.

Sigh. Why?

~~~~~~~~~~

Why do electronic/gadgety things screw up? Obviously people other than E@L have this problem. I recall someone, was it Benny Profane in V, having all sorts of issues with inanimate objects, which E@L does as well; dropped screws rolling into the most inaccessible places, toast and the butter-side, etc... ("...inanimate objects and he could not live in peace." Thomas Pynchon. V. (Kindle Locations 517-518). HarperCollins)

Why must semi-sentient things like electronic gadgets, computers, modems, TVs, etc..., things that are designed to behave according to the long established laws of physics, things the rely on the atomic forces like electricity and magnetism, why do they work perfectly well one minute and then go berserk the next? Why do attached parts not talk to other from the word Go? This is a deep and fundamental problem that has bedevilled those of us who get hit all the time by these vagaries of electrons and the unreliability of atoms in general. As I explained in my reply to his FB whinge:

Postventative maintenance, like turning a recalcitrant something OFF and then ON, may sometimes reset the local atomic structure of the universe in the vicinity of the electronic device(s) that is(are) not behaving according to Maxwell's suggestions or Faraday's guidelines, but Murphy's Law instead. There is nothing you can do beforehand, no PREventative attention that will ensure your laptop will talk to the projector. But you know the chances of it NOT talking to the projector correlate inversely to the product of the importance of the presentation, the importance of and the number of people in the audience.

Ah Jesus, why don't things work properly all the time? The wires are connected, the silicon chips are constructed correctly, the coal is being burned to heat the water to pressurized steam to drive the turbines to spin the magnets to induct the electrical potential to get it to the plug, which is turned ON at the outlet, and everything is fucking in its place... yet all is not right with the piece of shit gadget. The TV is blank. The Internet cannot be reached.

Jesus, electrons go in straight lines right? Just fucking GO, you negatively charged arseholes!

WHY?

~~~~~~~~~~~

The answer lies in the ancient Greek philosophy of Epicureanism. Yep, it's a Greek thing. Like defaulting on loans, buggering young lads, moving to Melbourne and cooking fish'a da chips. (Fish and chip shop were operated by chubby, surly Greek men with three day old five o'clock shadows and hairy fingers in Melbourne. The also ran the produce markets - great trouble ensued... Look it up.)

OK E@L, describe in simple sentences what you know of Epicureanism.

Let me tell about Epicureanism...

~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L purchased an intriguing book a while ago, and in his usual manner, set it aside. He only started reading it seriously after he listened to a recent podcast on Epicureanism on In Our Time with the awesomely well-read Melvyn Bragg last week.


Poggio Bracciolini was a particularly neat writer. Sr Mary Briga at St Margaret's would have given him heaven knows how many Holy Cards and gold stars - E@L recalls getting "the cuts" for something like getting more India ink on his shirt than on the page, that or being in a fight. He and a few other scribes practically invented readable script in transcribed books, something like modern italics. For this skill, and his sins (he had 14 children with his mistress), Poggio became enmeshed in the shifting gears of political/religious machinations which eventually saw him swing through the cogs to rise to a top job as a personal secretary (man it use to pay to be a neat writer) to Pope John XXIII . Now this is a classic case of "Choice of Pope - FAIL." See (as it were) The Great Schism which is where... oh, look it up.

The Swerve tells of how our medieval manuscript hunter (said Poggio) discovered a particularly precious text, serendipitously, while looking through the lonely, wind-swept, hilltop (setting the scene here) monasteries of medieval Europe, searching in their libraries for precious texts, proactively.

As the Renaissance just getting under-way, rich people, in particular because they had money and therefore time, and who considered themselves Humanists, became fascinated with the ancient world of Greece and Rome (well, many did, but not all could afford to do anything about it). Those ruins and jewels that the workers kept finding as they dug up the fields, those carved pillars and decorated and inscribed walls they had previously used for integration into their own buildings, such as retaining walls, and second-hand marble floors..., these were now Works Of Art, and Precious Treasures to be, you know, treasured.

Not only these statues and jewels, also the writings of the old philosophers, dramatists, critics, grammarians, historians, and accountants were fascinating to them. These texts offered a personal glimpse of a world not hidebound (as it were - leather-bound, like books, ha ha) by the strict Stoic/Platonic/weird/Religious ethos that had prevailed since the Dark Ages had commenced almost a thousand years before.


The Dark Ages offered only suffering in this world - self-flagellation was encouraged - and, after death, either even more heinous punishment or the faint hope of the glory sitting next to God. Just sitting. Boring! These rich people were not all that keen on the pain and suffering part, thank you very much, and were happy to hear of culture were you could relax, check out the amazing art, take a load off, chill and not suffer for eternity. While they followed the high-church in external demonstrations of faith, going to church, etc..., the Humanists were as close to modern atheists as you could get in those times. The fires of the hell did not worry them so much as the fires of their impending auto-da-fe. (See Nolan: Giordano Bruno The,) The confusion in the church - three popes for heaven's sake - didn't help.

Poggio must had been moderately well off himself after his escape from Pope John XXIII's ill-fated entourage in Constance (where he was deposed) and he was now free to get around Europe on the hunt for those forgotten manuscripts in the libraries of those monasteries. For most itinerant scholars and teachers at that time, wages were shite and they were continually on the look out for "patrons" to offer the ready, people we nowadays call Venture Capitalists. Poggio also had the advantage of being able offer those much-desired and ergo expensive texts to his rich Humanist, text-hungry patrons.

When he pulled a certain dusty codex (an early type book, more likely to have previously been copied and survived than a scroll) from its shelf, he saw that he had in his hands a long poem, written by a name he would have recognized. Then his heart must have skipped. Here was a jewel, he quickly realized. Not exactly Aristotle on Laughter (c.f The Name Of The Rose), but the complete (almost) and intact manuscript of a long poem which detailed the philosophy of Epicurus, and the author was Titus Lucretius Carus (Lucretius to you, folks) and the book called De Rerum Natura.


On. The. Nature. Of. Things.

E@L has had the recent translation (above) of De Rerum Natrua already in his library for a year or three. He had read up to halfway through Book II, until somehow he became distract... Oh look, every second woman in this hotel (Holiday Inn resort in Penang) is completely covered by their black or near black burkahs. How ridiculous in this heat!

That (the book, not the burkah) is the reason he grabbed The Swerve (not a really brilliant title, is it?) when he saw it in Singapore's awesome Kinokuniya (Khino-khun-ya) bookstore.

~~~~~~~~~~

Epicureanism started with the philosophy of Democritus, and it was 200 years later, that along came Epicurus himself to refine and popularise the core of Democritus. is ideas came down to us through many short quotations in other writers, critics and supporters (the great orator Cicero was one of the top critics) and in fragments from the damaged scrolls found under the ash of Herculaneum post the great eructation, sorry, eruption of Vesuvius. But mostly, certainly most elegantly, from that poem of Lucretius.

What are Epicureanism's main features? Glad you asked. E@L will endeavour to explain what he sort of gets. (There may be other things, and these things may be better catalogued and explained elsewhere, such as in The Swerve, in the podcast, in Wikipedia.)

a: Increase pleasure and decrease pain. (Not to excess though, that's Hedonism or Sybaritism. Unhealthy, unnecessary.) How hard can that concept be to grasp?


b: There is nothing after death, nothing to fear of damnation in the after-life. Chill.


c: There are no gods (are least there may as well not be, as they are obviously non-interventionist). Relax.


d: We are not the centre of the universe, which is infinitely large and it stands to reason, there must be many worlds like the Earth in it. It's not your fault the world was created. There is no pressure. You don't matter. Take a load off.



e: Nothing cannot come from nothing. Everything must have been somewhere else previously. Like Expats and beer.


f: If there is a god that ever did anything, it was Venus. She set the whole reproduction thing going and made it so damn nice to fuck. So lets fuck! (The end of Book IV** - you'll wet yourself laughing. Or get an erection.)


The opposite of all this was Stoicism advocated by the dour, proto-Calvinist, Zeno. Then Plato and Socrates. The world is ordered and pre-ordained; there are other, supernatural, things we cannot understand; death is something terrible; we are tossed on the sea of fate. Take it on the chin and try to be virtuous against the odds. Life is shit, deal. Sex is a duty, not a recreational pastime. Religion in a nutshell, right? But the key item in Epicureanism is...

g: The atomic theory. Indivisible small parts of the universe form which all things are constructed. A concept that goes back at least to Democritus. We are all made of the same things. Seed of things. Everywhere there are atoms, or if not, the void. Because if there was no void, atoms would not have anywhere to go, right?


Previously, they thought everything was made of a mixture the four "elements"

Democritus said fuck that patent bullshit. It's atoms!
Key point 1: As literally everything is made of atoms, the soul too must be made of atoms. And as things cannot be created or destroyed, atoms must move from one manifestation to another - today a person, tomorrow a tree - same atoms. As Joni Mitchell would say a millennium or two later, "We are starsdust, we are golden." When we die, the atoms of our souls dissipate. Puuufffff. No afterlife. No ghosts. No Heaven, no Hell. (Complete annihilation, yay!) Priests are full of it. It is safe to ignore their rantings and ravings.

Key point 2: This means that a wafer bread remains a wafer bread unless there is physical change, such as digestion, or toasting and a slathering of Vegemite. Bread cannot be The Body of Christ because the atoms haven't changed. It's still bread. Uh-oh. Catholicism is not going to like that.

Aside: There has a been a recent discovery of some court documents that appear to say that the real, suppressed, reason for Galileo's trial was actually his advocation of atomism (ergo, the above mentioned impossibility of trans-substantiation) and not only, perhaps not even principally, the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus. Lucretius also speaks about the uniform speed of falling objects, independent of their weight. Was Galileo an Epicurean*? Hello!!

But atoms you see, move. Makes sense: we move, everything is in motion. However. Democritus's atom concept had a flaw. Democritus said the atoms travel in straight lines. This meant that in a billiard ball scheme of the universe, those straight lines could be traced back to a first cause, and all the world stemmed from that. This implies that everything was preordained, predestined, from that first billiard ball bump. Didn't the Stoics and ensuing predestinators love this! They saw it, correctly, as a contradiction.


(This vid doesn't talk so much about atomism or predestination, but it's funny.)
The initial theory of Democritus implies (he didn't use this example) that if you plug an HDMI cable into a computer, the video image will appear on the TV that the other end is plugged into; that the modem will connect you to the Web; that the projector will present the powerful points of your stunning PowerPoint presentation.

But this is not the way of the world, obviously. So Epicurus said to the Stoics - "You didn't let Democritus finish!" It can't be that way, because, look around you, it just isn't. Things are different, even things that are almost the same.

Atoms, you see, do not travel in straight lines, for if they moved in straight lines, they would not bump together and if they did not bump together they would no be able to clump together and create complex structures like chocolate souffle, or the smell of crushed ants, or people. There is this random thing, patently because the world is essentially random (E@L deserves to be rich, but he is not, only moderately well-off) and because things, while many are alike, are different (scaly fish, herds of cattle, pack of wild beasts).

Philosophical Implication: We can choose to do this; we can choose to do that. The Stoics were wrong, as were the religions of the Dark Ages. There is no predestination. We can strive towards Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness! (Thomas Jackson was a self-proclaimed Epicurian - "... As you say of yourself, I TOO AM AN EPICUREAN. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."


This random movement, let's call it a swerve or a wiggle accounts for these variations in form. Sometimes atoms swerve, just a little bit, for no apparent reason. (Negative and positive charges on the atomic particles hadn't quite been discovered at this time. Weak force, strong force, gravity force, mesons, yousons, Hogg's Bisons, etc... still to come. Still.) That's why things exist. That's why we cannot predicate what will happen next, that's why we may as well make do what we can to enjoy life, because we are here briefly, and just one time. (How's that for a rationalisation!)


The Swerve (sorta) in Thompson's and Rutherford's atomic models.
This is what Lucretius says about Epicirus's swerve:

Lightning crosses the skies from the rain clouds and its bolts
constantly strike downwards from their heights to the earth below.
And yet it cannot be altogether that simple, for atoms
as they are carried down from the void by their own weight
do not proceed in an absolutely unswerving line
but apparently must wiggle, swerving sometimes from their course
and changing their direction - for if they fell like raindrops
through the emptiness of space there would be no collisions,
no blows that they could exchange with one another, and therefore
no occasion for nature to produce more complex structures.
~~~~~~~~~

But this swerve of the atoms falling in the void, these slight variations in direction, not only do they disprove the existence of god and demonstrate the vast superiority of reason over superstition, they also stop the image from E@L's laptop getting to his TV.

They stop The Bludger's modems from letting him get to his favorite pron websites (and maybe his TV - I am not a perticularly interested where he plugs his HDMI).

Blame The Swerve. Blame...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

In associated news, at the Pub Quiz last week, a question came up about European war history and most/all of the people in the crowd were stumped. But we had within our motley crew a war-game fanatic, Big-T, a guy who likes to paint little soldiers and tanks and guns and re-fight this battle or that war-campaign. He is therefore something of an expert on the historical aspects blowing people up for fun and, more important, mostly, profit.

The question the quiz-master posed was something to do with the most likely site of a Russian tank invasion against NATO during the Cold War.

Anyone?

Not even a heartbeat from Big-T - "The Fulda Gap".

E@L has, naturlich, studied plenty of the various lumps and bumps (and gaps) of the human body in his past career of a person who stands next to a doctor during embarrassing examinations, though in the utmost of a professional manner, and he has only ever fantasized about the Fulda Gap. This particularly endearing anatomical quirk, which I believes is near the saxafragia-mitosa gland... then E@L realized his error! No E@L, it's not the ... It's...

Big-T was talking (softly, so the other teams wouldn't hear) of a geographical feature on the Rhone, a gap (duh!) which would be the where the Russian tanks would come... oh, look it up.


Fulda.

~~~~~~~~~~

Back to Lucretius...

Meanwhile, E@L's continued to read The Swerve, and followed with fascination as our good (and ugly) Poggio traveled through Europe in search of new (as in old, lost, forgotten) texts, unremembered, uncopied but as yet undiscarded , until he pulled a certain dusty codex (a book) from its shelf and saw the name of the author of a long poem he would have at most vaguely recognized it, Lucretius.

Guess what part of Germany Poggio was in?

He was in the Monastery of...


Fulda.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Swear to Epicurus - E@L had never heard of the place in his entire life, and now he had learned TWO new important facts about Fulda in the space of three days.***

Monday; never heard of it. Tuesday; pub quiz. Wednesday; The Swerve. Thursday; E@L is fucking expert!

E@L


* Galileo might have developed his proof of the uniform pull of gravity from Lucretius. Without friction, heavy objects fall just as fast as light objects - which is described by Lucretius beautifully in Book II - "Now if anyone supposes that heavier elements fall faster than lighter ones through the void ... he departs from logical thinking." Not counting resistance from things like water and air, he continues. I paraphrase.


** Get this, in David Slavitt's modern translation:

The erotic gymnastics of hookers are of no use here [in getting your wife pregnant]
for the whore's purpose is in giving the most pleasure while running
the least risk of getting herself knocked up. Blow jobs
and taking it up the ass are good for the working girls
in the brothels. Either way, they don't have to worry much
about the bother of having a child, and they drive men
crazy in ways our wives don't need to know about.
(Could have been written by Bruce.)


*** It was mentioned in the podcast, but that went over E@L's head.