Gym Update No N.

I thought I'd update the world on my progress. Here is my entire gym experience, summed up in one word:

Ouch.

World Goes Off Its Head In Delight/Anger

Myself: I couldn't give a toss. One guy wins an election, the other guy loses. Yes I understand the symbolism. And the significance. But it's politics. It's still people bossing other people about. It's still empty slogans ("Change" - although I like it when Tears for Fears say it). There are still wars to be lost, taxes to be raised, laws against liberty to be enacted and who knows what coming in the next few years.

We've had the candidates of hope before, and two of them particularly come to my mind: one who nearly blew the world up (JFK) and the other who tightened the state's grip on the neck of his people for a decade before anyone tried to object (Blair).

Governance is a messy business because life is messy. People with sweet sounding messages will always be forced to compromise or abandon them because things are not sweet or lovely. That is, if they believed what they were saying in the first place.

Things are bastards.

That's why governments are bastards.

The Obama administration will get an easy ride in the media, to be sure, but that doesn't mean it won't do un-nice things at some point.

And change isn't always good. I don't remember the left queuing up to praise the change taking place in the 1980s. In fact, if I remember rightly, they wanted society frozen as it had been in 1974 (before the monetarist policies of Callaghan) and no change from there (apart from steady increases in taxation of course).

Also losing my hair is not good change. I want that change reversed to around 1995 - when I had massive flowing locks of poetic-type hair.

Sanity on Leave

You might be thinking: well where is TD? The world is collapsing into fiscal chaos, into political impotence, and into the virulence of ideology, and one of our most vile spewers of undiluted verbal toxicity is strangely silent.

Well, the answer is that I have been forced to work for a living. I mean obviously I've been working for a while but the pace has recently been increased somewhat, and I've been trying to write proper stuff (ho ho) so it's not that my time for blogging has been cut, but my energy for it.

Besides of which the world's own actions recently have revealed that the blogosphere is in fact a haven of sense and reason, and it is the world itself that is the unrestricted, unregulated purveyor of nastiness. Everywhere you look someone is hysterically braying about people who don't agree with them, invoking illness, suffering and death; someone is calling for more death for anyone they feel does not deserve to live; someone is urging the closure of freedoms; someone is denying the existence of freedoms; someone is screwing something up and blaming everyone else. Implicating everyone, crying foul, lying about their own records, screaming cliches and rehashed sententiae to a world which seems too dazzled to care, or too busy to care, or too cynical to care.

I'm almost too afraid to read the newspapers or listen to the radio: not because world events themselves frighten me, but because the people in the media and politics now seem afraid -of what, I don't know: Sarah Palin, maybe, or the fact that so many people just do not care what they think anymore: their privileged positions as dolers out of knowledge, refracted through an educated, elitist standpoint, are under threat, not from argument, or attack, but from apathy. And from the rise of the blogger. Bloggers are still a narrow, self-selected bunch, especially the UK political blogging scene, but they are a blot on the landscape of the opinion professional.

They must be well pissed off that we survived the first attempt to regulate and control us: they'll be back for the next round though.

And - the worst thing, Peter Mandelson is back. I was laughing until I heard the BBC's serious analysis, with Labour people naturally, of the move: fuck me they mean it, they really mean it.

Oh well, as I said, I've been busy. Not really followed the news.

A thought...

We hear a lot about the idea that left and right don't mean anything these days, that politics is becoming more amorphous, shifting: but if you spend any reasonable amount of time on the political blogs you can see that in fact there is a definite hardening of ideological attitudes (particularly of atheists to Xtians, for some reason), a movement of sorts to the kind of genuine contempt for the act of opposing one's views that we thought had been relegated to the 1980s. I think that this sense of mine (and I mean the UK blogosphere here) is probably exacerbated by the fact that the energetic shouting is carried on by relatively few people, compared to the actual millions of people out there who take rather more moderate views when you speak to them about stuff.

I wonder if the two sides (and there are pretty much two, though there are fuzzy lines and overlaps) are gearing up for a bigger confrontation, another battle for the spirit of the hour? My ex-alter ago, Jim Callaghan once said that every thirty years or so the political landscape shifted and you just got caught in it (or something similar): I think this time, with less popular engagement, the activists (including the bloggers) don't need to appear friendly or consolidating. They can fight among themselves with as much ideological purity and logic as they can muster and whoever emerges the more powerful will carry the rest of the country anyway.

Logic is an interesting element of ultra-modern politics: we are seeing it taken to the ends of rational thought, for the development of rational thought; and if a view is not rational, it is harmful, and if it is harmful, it must disappear. I've always been struck by that phrase of Goldstein (via O Brien, via the narrator, via Orwell): "the general hardening of outlook that set in around 1930", and I can't help thinking that we're heading for another one. Not so physically violent, obviously, but with a violence of attitude and treatment of opponents, with simplistic ideas about what is in people's heads, and how the world should be run.

I've always disagreed with the views of some that there is bullying and aggression in the blogosphere...but I am coming round to this view now. Aggression more than bullying perhaps. Ideological aggression. Debate, in the sense of people with differing views, is being elbowed out by shrieking and abuse.

And I've done my little bit to stoke all this rubbish too. I can't complain about that. I suppose I would say I was a little naive, but I've watched with mounting horror recently the consequences of it, and I think it is more than time for me to stop my part in it.

Every so often i wonder if I should change tack: I think I will. I enjoy blogging, that is the sole reason I do it; I sometimes enjoy political discussion, but less and less. I am going to turn TTD back into what it started as: a vehicle for my thoughts, not a platform, and -

believe it if you dare -

I really am fed up with swearing. I've done it too much, too poorly. It does nothing at all.

So expect from NuTTD:

1) randomness
2) silliness
3) Doctor Who
4) cricket
5) fiction
6) fantasy
7) literature
8) whatever else takes my fancy.*

* expressed in varying tones, but without swearing or aggression.**

**Alright. This is a pledge, an aspiration. Not a promise.

Somehow, also, you are going to have to keep me off the computer after a drink. That's probably the biggest key to it all.

But here, as I've said before several times, are 3 blogs one would be doing REALLY well to emulate:

The Joy of Curmudgeonry
An Insomniac
In Search of High Places

I'm sure Alex won't mind my saying this but things are a little quieter on ISoHP nowadays, as he is very busy with his studies, so Matt is kind of running both blogs (it seems).

Also this blog has lots of meat to it, lots of thinking, and with a really excellent comments policy and "system" too:

Crushed By Ingsoc.


There are lots of others too. I might update this post as I think of them, but I'm off for some maths now.

UPDATE MONDAY: Despite tangling briefly with this blog's author a year or so ago, and despite the fact that this blog is incredibly well known I had managed to completely avoid To Miss With Love. In this case the blog itself is wonderful, although the comments boxes aren't always. But it ought to go on or near my list of brilliantly civilised things to read.

Life Goes..

As an aside, my CD version of "The First Picture of You" by the Lotus Eaters is currently being chopped away by my ancient crappy Tesco-stereo. It takes me at twenty times the speed, and with a tenth of the consolation, through that period of ten years ago, when every day was a challenge to prove that I did have a brain, even though I felt, as surely as I feel my feet upon the ground, that my head was empty. Eventually of course, with hearing quotes from Shakespeare in my laying down, and otherwise always feeling that I was plummeting into an infinite pit, I proved that it was indeed empty, as I had suspected.

Ten years: and nothing I've done since then in work or art that approaches the achievement of getting up each day of that week, putting on my suit & gown, daydreaming down to Exam Schools and picking up the pen.

I don't really care what you think at this point: I write it for the same reason I write everything or nothing: because I want to.

I vaguely remember a 15 year old Billie Piper singing something like that, soon after that week.

My Four Leafed Clover - Redux

Bloody hell I don't even know how to spell this: I thought I could do it on google hits: "four leafed" gives 49000 hits, "four leaved" 36000 so I thought I'd take the majority view, being a freedom loving democrat.

My reader will by now be accustomed to reading no updates of TTD at this stage of the week - too busy is the pathetic excuse. However today is an exception - for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment.

So I thought I'd post on one of my favourite subjects: the psychology of embarrassment. In particular how it can be desired as a pathway to annihilation and (maybe) therefore renewal.

I've made all this up, btw. This is more homespun than a jumper your nan made for you when you were two and were too embarrassed to wear it even at that age.

So. It is possible to desire, even actively plot, a situation wherein you are humiliated, with the full knowledge of this outcome, and still to desire it. The reason is this. Let us assume there is issue x, about which you are to embarrass yourself. Issue x needs to be plausible, even real, but not, on the face of it, desperately important. However, there is also issue y, which really is bugging you, and which is probably only tangentially related to issue x, such as occurring in the same place of work (to take a random example).

Issue x can be used to bring issue y to a head, by facilitating a total humiliation related only to issue x (on the face of it) - thus allowing issue y to be solved without its own humiliations, though admittedly using the humiliations of issue x. But it might just be that x allows you a more noble, or pure, solution than tackling the, say, political issues of y.

Choose your humiliations, is my advice, I suppose: choose them well and decide how you wish to be remembered.

On the Sobering Effects of Alcohol

I don't even like calling beer "alcohol" because it's mainly water but anyway...long term readers of this blog will know that I frequently post when greatly refreshed and that is because it is easier and fun. Being a narcissist I don't really mind if it annoys or inconveniences anyone else. To my mind I think I have only deleted one post that I wrote under the influence - something about religion I think. Oh no, I tell a lie. I think I also outed myself once. That was more of a stealth edit though.

A trawl through some of these old posts reveal the same points being made over and over again (so what's new - it's a blog after all!) as well as a number of loathings and hatreds. This is normal and healthy. One of our modern pathologies is not anger itself but the desperate attempts to delegitimise it, to cure it, to squeeze it out of the personality. Our interest in suppression of this very natural emotion is interesting - I wonder what it's for?

Intriguingly for me there are also hints & guesses that I clearly keep leaving lying around on the pages of this blog. I ought to go through and delete them all, but I haven't the dishonesty. There are things (not evil things or owt like that - just normal stuff) which I just cannot bring myself to face or admit, even to myself, and the blog helps me to valve them out slowly without even knowing it. A diary would not offer me the same protection: I would be a lot more open. Writing a blog is therefore an exercise in social skills for me, as well as in self-absorption, which is maybe not so positive.

That point might seem counter intuitive, given all we hear about the eeeevil rightwing blogosphere - but it's true, for me at least.

This post, for the sake of clarity, was written with absolute sobriety moments before it was published.

On The Negativism of Things

This phenomenon, known as "the tin drummer is depressed about various piss-awful events in his ghastly, insignificant life"-syndrome, was documented in 1981 by the noted drummerologist "Miss Rochford", sometimes known as "the drummer's Reception teacher". It first appeared in his disgust at seeing the blue-jacketed back of his father walk away through the vast windows of his ancient HORSA classroom, back to the Hillman Hunter, and away from the screaming drummer, by now weeping in Miss Rochford's lap (and very comfy it was too). It subsequently appeared at various intervals: namely, 1986, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1998 and most years after.

It is barely an elusive phenomenon; the drummerologist "Hugh of Lincoln" noted its appearance at sporadic intervals and tied these together under the name "winter & alcohol", but failed, in the opinion of many critics, successfully to map the drummer's negativism onto real world events. The philosopher Phred Tap reckons that 2001 was a turning point. He writes: "the authoritarian victory of New Labour, versus the complete descent into populist incompetence of conservatism, wrecked the drummer's political mind for ever." (The Tin Drummer: A Political Reckoning) In Don't Stand So Close to Me (1999), the critic and historian Kymant Carshalton writes: "TD was a failed enterprise from the beginning: but this being the case, his efforts to carve a niche in the world were half-hearted to say the very least. Trying to get himself arrested by writing secretive libels of Tony Blair was, to put it generously, ignoble: to put it uncharitably, it was the act of a fool. And a twat."

Nonetheless, it seems that 2008 marked a descent into rabid rubbish negativism for the damn sake of it. The archivist Primus Eliot wrote in his monologue The Tin Drummer is All Measure of Value (2010) that: "...in this year [2008] the twat become heroically self-absorbed. Indeed, he was so obsessed with his personal problems he forgot to shit. This caused legendary problems at work, when he failed to turn up for a lesson for 42 minutes because he was trying to evacuate six weeks of garbage from his colon and in doing so bankrupted his school because the bog pipes were blocked for eight miles from the u-bend." Historian Nigel Ob wrote in his book Calling All the Hero (2009) that "the tin drummer became a crashing bore, clogging up the blogosphere with his bizarre, drunken, self-lacerating rantings. It was only later that he realised, to his eternal credit, that no-one gave a toss, and wanted him to shut the fuck up".

The contradictory nature of the last quote will not be lost on the reader.

However: the lesson was learned; the tin drummer continued to write - but he focused more on subjects he could be more positive about.

Get In x2

I make a point of only writing about my personal life in the most guarded, drunken, metaphorical ways (see previous post, although I wasn't drunk as it was posted at 10am or something and even I have only had four or five Stellas by then), unless it concerns Doctor Who but today I am going to bust those rules. This is why:

1) I am being taught in a European University - namely, my poetry is being studied by a student in Vienna, who has been assigned some of my work to look at. Considering that I am not worth one of Ted Hughes's bollocks, this is soooo cool.

2) The final viewing figure for the Doctor Who Xmas special goes as follows:

13.31million.

I'll just repeat that, in case you missed it:

13.31million.


This means that in my local cemetery there is a moss covered stone with "Doctor Who: 1989" inscribed at the top, and a load of "3.1m, 3.6m, 3.9m, 4.0m" figures carved underneath. This stone has now fallen below the surface and is no longer readable.

The Voyage of the Damned is the 8th most watched Who EVER, beaten by one Hartnell and six T Baker episodes.

13.31million. Wow.

The second most viewed programme of any kind (and that includes all the pornography) of 2007.

Top Banana.

Being Positive

If you are: great.


If you're not: don't fall for all that bullshit. You call it like it is: in otherwords, a massive two fingers to all the fuckers.

We have written the doctrine of being positive into our very curriculum, prescribing a set of reactions for an infinite combination of thoughts & feelings.

So if it seems like a pile of old horse manure to look on the positive and to believe that it all turns out for the best -

tell 'em all to fuck off!

(I'd love to draw a massive graphic of two fingers but I don't know how)