A Late Quartet

 A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title,...
---P. French, The Guardian.

How to write about music? How to film it? Is there a decent film that really gets to what music is about? If there is, then this wasn't it. 

Let's start with the subtle bit. This is a crass, cliche-ridden, trivial and grossly childish film. At times you wondered if it wasn't a parody. Keep on mentioning the Op. 131 enough to convince yourself that you're cultured, with delightfully refined sensibilities. You're clearly a league above the rest of the poor sods in hicksville. 

It's not just the wooden performances that grate; it's the fact that the roles assigned to each character are what one might expect from a person with an accounting-mindset, someone who is keenly aware of which formulas will strike the right notes for the upper middle classes: list the character traits of musicians you think will resonate with (or at least be understood by) popular culture. Keep it basic, don't allow any complexity to rear its ugly head. Tick the boxes. The cool, heartless foreigner; the melancholic dark-haired woman; the childish, bumbling fat man ("let's play it by heart"). All very fine and well, but why bring in the music to this story? This could have been the story of any group of four unintelligent people.

A brief affair with a tasty Spanish Flamenco dancer (who is, of course, up for a passionate one-night stand or more because she's introduced to Bartok). If only! (I hear some readers say).

As an aside: why must there be the obligatory sex scene? I don't know how the film ends but if Hoffman had any sense he'd quit the quartet and the Op. 131 and hook up with Passionate-Spanish-Woman. After all, didn't T.S. Eliot say...

And the cliches keep raining down. He explains to his wife that he is "sorry" for this one, grave mistake in a bit of hammy acting that is unsurpassed throughout this quite dire film- which is saying a lot. Then he asks, like a whimpering fool, "do you love me?" To which she replies: "I don't know". 

It seems like no-one really knows anything in this film. Seriously, why bother?

At this stage I gave up, my patience stretched to the limit. One hour of absolute shite when I could have been watching the Arsenal.

"A suitably resonant title"? No kidding, bro'!

French also wrote a review of the appallingly fake film about life in a monastery.

He writes: 'Of Gods and Men is a profound, immaculately acted movie. Its words are carefully considered, its images eloquent. The subject matter is urgently topical, the themes raised eternal and universal'. 

To which one must reply: nonsense on stilts!

no, not in my name.

I have nothing to say and I do not know how to say it.

The brief outline of it is this:

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...

[
[

When all is said and done.

Can one choose to be inarticulate? A question to myself. Augustine would have said.

Diary Notes: 

What keeps us a prisoner is not knowing what keeps us a prisoner.

You stumble, you trip. The form of your 'unknowingness'. A word that does not exist!

____

Roxana, are you still alive? 

_ __ __ __

Don't read too much into that.

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To understand the one point from which the book originates. Once attained, that would exempt him from writing.

--stolen from Vila-Mattas.

In the process of reading, of figuring out. This will probably be written on my gravestone, except that wahabis don't have gravestones! 

Do cockroaches eat ants? Just asking. Today, in the morning, you saw twenty, thirty ants scrambling over the dead body of a cockroach (yes, okay, I admit it, I killed it). 

Is that a kind of justice, or just the circle of life? And why should I intervene-god-like-in the affairs of these creatures?

Is there anyone out there who likes both cinnamon roles and Walser (apart from anton, of course)? In this day and age one must do with just cinnamon rolls, I suppose. I told you I have nothing to say!

The black sun of my room is lit up by artificial lights. White light is-putting my scientific hat on for a mo-bad for you. 

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At Heathrow, just before boarding the plane, one of the plain clothed spooks floating about asked me: "How much money are you taking back to __?"

Instinctively I put my hand to my trouser pocket. "Five pounds"

"Are you sure?"

"Perhaps five pounds twenty".

One can get away with a lot if one is vague.


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On a cheque you write your name four times. Twice on the front, twice on the back.

"Is this your signature?" asks the clerk.

"I've just written it in front of you, haven't I!"

"Do you have proof you are who you say you are?"

Does anyone? This is going to be a long day. But I would love, just once, to sign something not in my name.

Broken People

Arundahti Roy's passionate article can be found here

Shocking stuff. Not an easy read, mind you.

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Back in the land of the pure, two Christians were burned alive for "blasphemy". It is claimed that their legs were broken first so that they couldn't run away and that their bodies were wrapped in cotton so that they would burn more easily.

Are human beings really the apex of creation? What about Penguins? And does that make Beethoven's late quartets less or more sublime, or neither?

Time of no reply

MISJA FITZGERALD MICHEL - Time of no reply (by... by No_format

Thanks to Bob, for pointing me here.

Continuing the Fitzgerald theme.

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All those years of silence, rolled into a few words. There was little left to say, or what he did say didn't sound like himself. 

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Bob is 'the music box' under 'people', by the way. A rare bird who still stands (stands still) for what he believes in. Of course, what one stands for is also important, or else every Talib would be virtuous. 

What do I mean-to use that awful word? 'Meaning' is usually employed to try and avoid confusion, after it's already set in: "what do you mean?" But if it means anything then it is the meeting of subjectivity with that which is objectively beautiful and true. 

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What do you remember? Something very old, the slow notes, a kind of sadness. The further you go back, the larger the circle is. In another sense, though, there is only one journey home. All else is a distant-and beautiful-remembrance or shadow of the past. 

A line from the Qur'an, from memory: 'If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like that had befallen others before you'.

The meaning is not in the exact words or their sequence. Surely we will be forgiven for our bad timing? 

Ubo, my Jew, said: promise me one thing."Yeah, sure. Name it?" Never grow old. 

How to keep time when everything is lost? Shikast: when time is broken, a broken circle.

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Why does everything come to you late, b? They get to you, or you get to them,late? 

'And love arrived may find us somewhere else'
---E. Jennings.

From childhood, a useless wooden letter holder had the words-in bold italic- written on it: 'It's later than you think'. Charming!

Today, for the first time, I listened to the late quartets. It just feels like the playing is slow, from another time. How do you, with the resources at hand (which always have the fingerprint of historical time,) find that which is timeless? I wonder if the tempo of life is too fast for some people, for me? children and old people are always out of time. We miss much. If you knew a few notes, really knew, you could name that tune in four, five maybe, for the whole is in the parts, "now".

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The best thing about Sacks's wonderful story about Clive is the warmth of his voice. The man with a seven second memory. A few stepping stones and beyond that the abyss. Of course, in many ways capitalism generates the same disruption of narrative. Everything must begin again and the past is nothing but the pastime, something to be packaged or consumed by the heritage industry.

What holds us together if not love, if not the memory of love?

'When memory is of the future'
--J.Riley.

Through memory we become who we are.

He knew where he was by all that was implied in a gesture, all that was not said.

Where is that place, when is that time, when finally where you are what you are?

the bookshop

“I’m not asking if we’ve forgotten how to be Jewish,” he said, “but if we’ve forgotten how to be human.”
---Rivlin.

We have our books, but we have forgotten how to read.

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'The more I come into contact with these spheres of legitimacy or respectability, the more I feel a disjunction between how I identify and the contexts that I exist in.'

J. Wang, via anton.

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Why should you think that a man would be a better judge of these things than a woman?'

I don't know that men are better judges than women, said Florence, but they spend much less time regretting their decisions.

---P. Fitzgerald.

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There is something strangely wonderful about defeat-as long as it isn't total defeat and as long as one come out intact and it's this: one realizes that 'success' is not what it's about. To find oneself in the time one is in (Merton) is also to stand opposed to the times (Saint Paul), To be not conformed to time is to find one's own time..the time that remains, after all the subtractions.

The fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she.

(2/3?)

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He opened the door and looked at the wide, bright spaces in front of him. Out there, he thought to himself. Yes, given the times one was living in it was still acceptable to feel lost now and then.

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Hazlitt: our relation to our future selves is tenuous-at best. The imagination may reach out for it, along with reason, may try and draw patterns, intuit unity, posit a continuity of consciousness, but if the truth of the matter is that the future is only a shadow, then what?

Then it is pointless speculating about the primacy of self-interest (self-love) over benevolence. Both are related to future acts or consequences whereas I am only truly concerned-can only be concerned-about the past and the present.

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Through memory we become who we are

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I live in this time and this place. If my consciousness could be transplanted into another being, would he be me?

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But if nobody knows the future does it follow that nobody knows no-one? We think, we would like to think, that the solution to one is the answer to the other: if we can reach out and touch another person, then that 'person' can exist in the future as well.

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'When memory is of the future'
--J.Riley.

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The bookshop.

This is a message I receive early in the morning:

'We are BEYOND excited to announce that The __ __ has received the most amazing new shipment of the finest and newest fiction and non-fiction titles, as well as the most popular new titles in children's books. And don't get us started about our beautiful, drool-worthy coffee table books on fashion, textile and art!

Our favourite new books include "Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage", the bangin' new book by Haruki Murakami, "Mecca: The Sacred City" by Ziauddin Sardar, "This Changes Everything" by Naomi Klein, and "Horns" by Joe Hill.

And just because we are THAT excited, we're giving a 10% discount on all new children's books, starting Monday all the way through to Wednesday. 

See you at the bookshop!'

I think I'm going to throw up now. This kind of cheap American enthusiasm is really irritating. I can't even be bother to try and understand what it means. Khair...

'Fitzgerald’s life’s work was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an awful hash’. But really and truly, in what universe does the phrase ‘literary career’ make the slightest sense? Not on a leaky houseboat, when life is a daily struggle to look after all the people you have to look after. Nor, presumably, in the realms of ethical life and spirituality.'

Penelope Fitzgerald's bookshop reminds you of a quieter age. A.S. Byatt writes of her 'mysterious clarity'. Yes, there is a serenity to be found here in the old world, the old words. I often wonder about those words from The Time Machine: "I don't care much for the times I'm living in". It must be said: my heart looks back too much. 

Deep South

I stumbled across these pictures from someone's blog.

The first is for Macdonald's French Fries (man, they've really gone downmarket). The second is some random maulvi selling fruit. Love the flag! The third is from outside Hafeez Center, arguably south Asia's largest centre of illegal software and dodgy mobile phones. Hafeez centre is a modern dystopia, a veritable warren of dilapidated, tiny shops packed tightly together. The strange thing is that despite all the illegal stuff that is traded there the shopkeepers are the most sanctimonios, reactionary bigots you'll come across. Signs of 'no dealing with Ahmadis' are common and I am now told by a friend that they have Israeli flags engraved on the floor so that to enter the main shopping area you have to walk over the Israeli flag. Childish, really.

Also, you will never see any women at Hafeez Centre. In many respects it's worse than Peshawar.

On a more positive note: Halloween this Friday!

the life of the mind(less)

'A spokesperson for Strathclyde says the university is "committed to world-leading research, education and knowledge exchange'


No disrespect to Strathclyde, but this is material for a Monty Python sketch! To take up just one point in this classic: what is meant by the word 'and' here?

The amount of bullshit-to use Harry Frankfurt's technical term-that management comes out with is hilarious. What is "world-leading" research and what is "knowledge exchange"? Committed to education? So glad to hear that, Stratchclyde!

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This is important: the takeover by managers, accountants, pen-pushers, publicists, self-promoters, consultants and whores is, you think, probably a feature of a number of areas of social and cultural life. What that entails is an exclusive focus on research, league tables, rankings and the number of foreign students you can pull in. Quantification and 'commodification' go hand in hand and so the poor hapless teacher, that grim survivor from the old world, is left clutching at values and approaches to education that stand out like a sore thumb. 

'Since perhaps the 1970s, certainly the 1980s, official discourse has become increasingly colonised by an economistic idiom, which is derived not strictly from economic theory proper, but rather from the language of management schools, business consultants and financial journalism. British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms.' (Stefan Collini)

The 'marketplace of ideas', students who are now 'customers' and research projects that can bring in the dosh. Universities now have to be centres of "excellence" (but of course, who is going to say: "We aim to be a fairly good university"?)

Use the technology, ride the tiger. Can't you teach Shakespeare using only 140 characters? Wikipedia says Shakespeare never existed. Click the 'like' button if you think Descartes is cool. Isn't there a film-version of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations? If Dante could write a blog what would he say? How to teach African farmers basic English using txt mssgs 4 ex so them :-) 

The knowledge economy. There ain't much left of it but, hey, don't let that get you down. Training sessions. Training the trainers, inspiring managers, quality control matrices for dummies. What are the KPIs? (Key Performance indicators, in case you were clueless), the TOCs, the data points? Impact factor: what impact has your research had on society? Suicide rates, for example? Was Ghazali's Refutation better than Dan Brown's Da vinci? Is Islam a religion of peace. True or False? (You will receive bonus marks if you are a Muslim).

The communications revolution (better than that stuffy old Marx's). The revolution is on the horizon. Yale has a course with 160,000 students (and I thought I had grading problems!). In the end we can whittle it down to ten universities. 100 million people studying psychology 101. If you don't like parts of the course you can edit the material yourself. Gold stars are awarded to students who can explain the ontological tension in a Kant-Hegel synthesis of inter-cultural, dialectical a priori objectivity in a cartoon.

An applicant for the Dean position used the following words in his talk:

knowledge economy 
cutting-edge research
global player
student-demand
critical thinking
what do employers want
best ethical standards
knowledge transfer activities
innovative strategy
funding opportunities

Blahspeak, Blairspeak.

The next candidate is a bitch who has only made it to the short list because her daddy knows the vice-Chancellor. 

In the morning you drive past a sign that reads 'education city'. After that comes another sign, 'Smile, you'll feel better'. It's at times like this that my hand reaches out for someone who could have been my best friend, Johnnie Walker.

Elizabethan

I looked into my heart to write
   And found a desert there.
...

Great summer sun, great summer sun,
   All loss burns in trophies;

--George Barker.

'Graves compared it to the Elizabethan word ‘virtue’, in its meaning of ‘act of blessedness’. 

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The act of translation, the act of love, making something one's own, letting it be. Let us have winter loving that the heart...The season where you are not to be found. And so I shall write you on my white page, and there you shall exist, a single brush-stroke of concentrated time, a pattern within the loving mind.

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Autumn has swept in, a dense mist of foreign particles hangs over us. The light dims, the temperature is lowered and we stumble in the dark morning light. We are reciprocal to this light, the quality of our intuition faltering with time.

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I am not myself any more. No matter how hard I try I cannot fathom the mechanism that works on me, the hands that would move all things away from their own moment.

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This autumn contains all seasons, looks back to summer and forwards to deep winter, to a wide field and a narrow road. In this time each brings an island in his heart to square with what he finds. We tap words to each other, like prisoners across a wall. 

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Now autumn arrives-and there's an exact word for it that you've forgotten. A word that strays but is true. We collect quotations and sayings the way other people collect boxes or firewood, imagining the surprise or the sparks they contain. 

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You remember the darkest night, many Novembers ago, the old shops with their thick glass windows and old wooden frames, the Norsemen and women strangers in their own home. And November is a season of forgiveness and burning. The straw men we carried now put back in the back rooms or attics, straw returning to straw to straw...

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But every season is a kind 

of rich nostalgia. We give names-

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Turn back the clocks, save some time or expend it, let it flow and collect in the fields the way the Roding floods the flat land around it.

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I am carried back against

my will into a childhood where

Autumn is bonfires, marble and smoke.

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You carry a word with you, deep in your grave pocket, waiting for a time to unfold it, so that it becomes a mirror to your soul.

[(words by Elizabeth Jennings)].

the culture show

Consultants are an essential ingredient in modern bureaucratic power, lubricating its machinery...the consultants themselves lacked much understanding of creative work, so tended to dismiss its inherent value. The consultants were paid, then departed...

What have top managements to gain by employing consultants? In part, the consultants presence sends an ideological signal that power is being exercised..By hiring consultants, executives at the centre can shift responsibility for painful decisions away from themselves. The central unit commands but avoids accountability...In creating social distances which divorce control from accountability, consulting reveals a fundamental shifting of bureaucratic ground, a reformulating of inequality, increasing social distance...

Rapid turnover at the top can have this effect; there is then no-one in power who has shown commitment to the organization, who has experience of its problem, who can serve as a witness of the labours of those below. In part, the sheer disconnect between centre and periphery dispels the belief, at the periphery, that a particular human being is really in charge.

--Richard Sennett.

Of course, Sennett is primarily talking about 'cutting-edge' industries but it has important ramifications for the public sector and for universities if we think of the growing role of administrators, managers, wafflers and bureaucrats-people who have no idea whatsoever about education and, it has to be said, no real interest in it either.  

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When did it begin, this idea of the individual on his own, free in a way? Locke, Descartes? Life was a show, a mechanical show, while all along the real thing, the real deal, was somehow buried behind all that dross, behind the games of language. Hannah's 'second turning inward', the unencumbered self, thinking of oneself, for oneself. But the first?

The gnostics,then, the divine spark within, temporarily trapped in a matrix of deception. The "punctual self": 'extensionless', timeless...an image of God? The world is but a stage and we play our part-sometimes well, at other times with much folly and gaiety.

Culture, truth-seeking, the whole point of it all was supposed to be about breaking free from contingency. Not: I am what I am. Either that or the decadence of giving in to all the flux, adding to it, even, or the false idols of king or country, tribe or nation, money and property...Simone's 'false infinities'.

In the beginning, Hans Jonas tells us, life was everywhere. But soon, the satanic mills strike up. What gets decided is the result of a kind of statistical analysis or brute power or the whole thing's an absurd game and it doesn't matter a jot which way it turns. From dualism to nihilism. The lust for the world turns the world into a desert...

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The simple life. If we ever understood what we need, truly need, and if could take a step in that direction much would be resolved. One can say with great ease what one is against. But the quality of our understanding lies in the quality of our attachments.

Readings

He looked around. The title of a book caught his eye and he was transported back to a former time when things made a lot more sense, to a time when he shaved each morning and could look at his face in the mirror. A shadow passed over his face, tarried in his eyes...

Back in the car he clenched his fists and his jaw tightened as his teeth clamped together, grinding against one another..."fuck it, fuck it...I was there and I blew it".

"My mother always wanted to see New York in the Fall..she'd read about it in books"

"All the chances were there and I could have taken any one". He thought hard, too hard and relentlessly, about what had happened. No-one forgives no-one today. What does the weather remind you of, he asked. I don't know, it's still too hot, I guess. I don't have any specific thoughts or feelings. 

"I always seem to start my relationships in September or October". She said to him: "look at your gestures and he thought to himself: where's the whiskey? "It kills me to think, right now, what's she doing with someone else".

But you said she was a slut?

He's torn by the fact that all that intelligence doesn't count for much. Just words and paper behind glass. All he learns now is direct, from life itself, as if there were some dark and malevolent gods up above toying with him..a single word, the flutter of the leaves is enough to draw him out of his habitual stupor and un-nerve him. The quality of light, the particular slant of it will transpose him to a different time...

"People don't take me seriously any more. I don't blame them, I don't either". I have in an extreme form of what everyone my age has, he thinks. Or maybe they don't see it. Everyone looks insubstantial in this city. But to them he appears as a loosely held together bundle or nerves and flesh. "Is there a way back for me?" he asks, "or is that it?" No-one can read another person or his fate, not even themselves.

We search for books, some one book that will make sense of it all. Outside it is a blustery day and three young women step out of a car, with deep tanned skin and wild, dark hair, sleeveless shirts, laughing. He puts the books back on the shelves and scrunches the money up in his fist. 

The view from nowhere

'Instead, change the subject. It’s a big one all right: the violence that men do to women. Easier to accept that it is just the way things are, unless perhaps you worry for yourself or your child or your sister...

The scale of the violence and abuse of girls and women keeps on trying to make itself heard. We don’t want to know. No, let’s talk about Ebola or Isis. Distant, scary threats...

Do we simply accept that this is the product of technology combined with overwrought masculinity? That gamergate represents angry wounded men? Do we say that male violence is innate?...

Women also murder and abuse, but 94% of murders in this country are carried out by men ...'

---Suzanne Moore, The Guardian.

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Can we only see and understand things from our own position ('position' includes not only geographical location but identity, social conditions that have gone to form our way of thinking, the constraints of the human mind)? What does it mean 'to step into some one else's shoes'?

'Positional objectivity' implies independence from personal characteristics or social conditions but it doesn't follow from that that we are free from illusions or that we can always or easily escape having a partial view. We may never fully be able to comprehend things but can still move to clarity (or does the former statement imply the latter is thrown into doubt?) Positional objectivity in this weaker sense means that the view or understanding is person-invariant. But we may still-all of us-be mistaken or only be able to form a partial picture. 

94%

94% of crimes..not: 94% of men.

But are men in the position to understand this violence (one might say: yes, since they are mainly the perpetrators of it). Or is this violence so close, so instinctual, that they (we) have difficulty in comprehending it and instead turn our gaze away and distance ourselves from it? Not just through religion and war and the destruction of nature, but day-to-day.

We like to imagine that we can see things from other perspectives. It is a comforting thought and promises much progress. To be too tied down to our own point of view, to believe that our moral duties are more pressing if they stem from a relational perspective can sometimes morph into the parochial and confined outlook of a nationalist or bigot. On the other hand, the universal or the abstract, the view from the point of view of the universe, may only have a limited hold on us, given the beings we are. 

That seems like a cop out for what is sought here is not to see another person as a Person, but simply as another human being. Firstly, though, it means seeing oneself as a human being-and that, precisely, is what is in question.