listen

Have you been listening to anything good lately..?

My current favourite 'spoken word' listens are This Jungian Life (content-rich, yet also has a warmth to it, perhaps something to do with vocal timbre - so the psychotherapeutic equivalent of watching 'All Creatures Great and Small' with grandparents at some imagined cosy teatime during the late postwar consensus), Our Opinions are Correct (SFF/H genre stuff from Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, almost at 150 episodes now, all of them good) & Classroom Psychology with Dr Cora Sergeant (about how gender variance shows up in education and across society: I like the gracious yet pointed approach of taking public figures' transphobic or just ignorant public statements as 'the questions they were so clearly intended to be').

Other podcast listens: Pluto Press (Radicals in Conversation) / The Verso Podcast / Zer0 Books & Repeater Media / Houston We Have A Podcast (NASA) / The Good Robot / The Angry Clean Energy Guy

Also, audio books: Ulysses this autumn, The Brothers Karamazov this spring. Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan are excellent interpreters of the former. As for the lattter, Dostoyevsky is very good at abnormal psychology, addiction and intense situations and the narrator, Luke Thompson, is also great at ‘doing the voices’ and particularly at drawing out the weird, subterranean hilarity that gleams through the text at moments. He gives a particularly good turn when portraying the drunken voluptuary Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov at his varying levels of inebriation and shame and the self-conscious, priggish ‘1840s liberal’ Pyotr Alexandrovich Musov whom he baits relentlessly during their encounter in the monastic cell of the Elder Zosima. Fyodor’s manservant Grigory and his possible illegitimate son Smerdyakov have Yorkshire accents, which kind of works...
 

superman: you'll believe...

 

"Unlike the seventies Superman, who suffered from all the angst and self-doubt that has washed over the entire comic-book field since Stan Lee's early sixties innovations in Spider-Man, the movie Superman has a clearcut sense of purpose and no conflicts of ideological interests (could Superman have intervened in the Vietnam war or in the Middle East? On which side? Why?)"

- Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 23rd December 1978

 

The original Superman and Star Wars movies (late 1970s) were revisionist-or-perhaps-I-mean-revanchist enterprises: while turbo-charging genre cinema, they may also have sought to empty it in some important respects...

 

I loved both franchises, needless to say - little did I then know (aged 8 to 10) that, in my innocent magnetic attraction to these instantiations of the hero's-journey mythos, I was in some wise the dupe of the hegemonic late-capitalist culture industry as it prepared the ground for the Reagan-Thatcher axis and all the awfulness that followed...

 

happy holidays

Does this photograph illustrate the theme: Christmas..?

It contains (1) a red and green colour palette, (2) artificial illumination & (3) trees.

Though I am trying to simulate a human, my visual pattern recognition software may require additional training data.

Happy holidays! 

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See also: Merry Christmas, Happier Simpler Times, Giving Birth to Birds, Index.

 

two mid-1970s polemics

I'd like to recommend a couple of polemical essays from the mid-1970s - celebrated in their time, worth reading now - that you may enjoy if you're 'in the common market' for that kind of thing (ha, do you see what I did there?).

The first is Michael Moorcock's 'Epic Pooh'. He wrote this in 1978 (though he later revised it, hence otherwise-anachronistic references to J.K. Rowling and others) and it's a spirited attack on both A.A. Milne and, more centrally, J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and their influence on both genre fantasy and the wider culture. If you're not very interested in fantasy as a genre, you may find that the first half's more engaging than the rest - still, this is full of quotable lines and worth your time. 

 

The second is E.P. Thompson's 'Going into Europe', a thousand word polemic against EU (or, as it was then known, EEC or 'common market') membership commissioned by the Sunday Times as part of a job lot of 'pro' and 'anti' think pieces from the great and the good, during the run up to the 1975 Referendum. 

 

This is written in a less nuanced, more knockabout, at moments downright trenchant and unfair, style - and one might ask whether its internationalist yet left-Eurosceptic position (a Bennite and also non-aligned position, envisaging a socialist federation of states that had nothing to do with any extant political structures - "neither Washington nor Moscow," to coin a phrase) was ever anywhere close to becoming practical politics or an achievable goal - but, again, this is a piece that's worthwhile for its panache, glee, and quotable lines. 

(If you've previously heard of just one book of E.P. Thompson's, it'd probably be The Making of the English Working Class. And if you haven't - well, one to ask Santa for, perhaps? "All I want for Christmas is the means of production.").

 

Do these two essays have anything in common? Well (to state the obvious) they're both written from a broadly-speaking 'progressive' political position, they both believe fervently in the inter-relationship of politics with culture (then again, don't we all?) and - perhaps more specifically - both appear to take aim, in a sort of sociological way, freighted with a very personal sense of grudge or just dislike, at a specific segment of the British middle classes:

"...a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint ("They kicked us out of Rhodesia, you know"), least of all to the Higher Authority, their Tory God who has evidently failed them..." (Moorcock)

"The first person who enthused to me, some years ago, about ‘going into Europe’ went on to enthuse about green peppers. This gave a clue as to what the great British middle class thinks ‘Europe’ is about. It is about the belly.... This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London. Particular arrangements convenient to West European capitalism blur into a haze of remembered vacations, beaches, bougainvillaea, business jaunts, and vintage wines." (Thompson, who also then careens from alimentary into sexual disgust - the bourgeois European project is also not unlike a number of jaded middle-aged middle-class couples at a swingers' party.. ?!).

There's so much more to be said about 'class grudge' during that season immediately before Thatcherism, and about how the psychopolitics of social class continued to unfold thereafter...

[A better text of the E.P. Thompson piece is available in the collection 'Writing by Candlelight', which collects some of his journalism and shorter political writings from the 1970s.]

joker: 'that's entertainment'

I watched Joker (dir. Todd Phillips) tonight – coincidentally exactly four years to the day after its US and UK theatrical release.  

It’s an emotionally and intellectually involving piece of work, with a standout central performance from Joaquin Phoenix in the title role – and it feels cinematically assured and literate, referencing previous films (notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy with brief well-chosen excerpts from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Mark of Zorro also onscreen) in ways that feel neither extraneous nor overdone. There’s similarly a sense that this film – unschematic, more than the sum of its parts - would support both political (Marxist and/or feminist) and also psychoanalytic readings.

All things considered, it's a film that speaks, one might say, to the psychological shadowiness and torment of an America which - having elected a former Hollywood actor to the White House in 1980 at around the time this ‘origin story’ is set and having then made a worse error thirty-six years later in electing a malignant sado-populist, enabled by so-called ‘reality TV’ - doesn’t now know whether to laugh or cry.

('Send in the clowns...')

===================

(For proper psychoanalysis of culture, delivered with more warmth and intelligence than you'll find here, do check out This Jungian Life - and for lots of in-depth discussion of intertextuality in genre cinema, pretend it's still the 1990s and invite some university friends round).

 

 

how to escape the earth’s gravity this bastille day

If I were to press one recent genre short story into your hand and to say, ‘read this’, it’d be ‘Self Care’ from Julian Jarboe’s debut collection Everyone On The Moon Is Essential Personnel – a first person, somewhat stream-of-consciousness narrative infused with street-speak continually breaking into ALL CAPS (denoting emphasis, outrage, faux-outrage, self-commentary or some mix of the above) delivered by a formerly street-homeless former sex worker, living temporarily (as a trans woman with more than a passing interest in Wicca) at a Catholic-run homeless shelter in a town and a world that’s simultaneously on fire and drowning. This is a perfectly formed ‘dramatic monologue’ (remember those from Year 10?) delivered from a science fiction place that’s well acquainted with magic realism and the devices of literary modernism(s) as well as being interested in and alert to present moment (climate emergency) urban lived experience and marginalised subjectivities – and it’s also much funnier than any of that lit-crit word-salad sounds.

(Also: "punk rock as hell" - Iori Kusano in Strange Horizons).

Other books I’ve read recently (and enjoyed in their various ways) have been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon, John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. I’m also reading all of Iris Murdoch’s novels in sequence (currently at #5 of 26, A Severed Head). (To find out more about why you should read Iris Murdoch - along with a couple of reasons not to, I mean, it's a free country - do take a look at Colin Burrow's London Review of Books piece about her 'parodiability'. There's a Society btw, there are podcasts).

Twenty-seven word reviews? Yeah, I might do those again: I have Focus (BSFA) and counselling journals to write for, though, a King Charles spaniel to walk and an absolute mountain of washing-up to get done (“you make the beds, you wash the dishes and then six months later…”). 

You don’t happen to know any good jokes about the Jungian concept of ‘the shadow’ by any chance…?

london's moving our way

 

A happy discovery that I’ve made recently is that there’s a band - perhaps more of a project - called Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. For bonus points, as well as having the best name ever (runners up: The Strange Death of Liberal England), they’re worth hearing. [Cf ‘The Shitty Beatles’ in Wayne’s World. / Wayne: "Are they any good?" Tiny: "No, they suck." Wayne: "Oh - so not just a clever name."].

So what do they do? Well, if you have any affection for Jean Michel Jarre and/or Vangelis, those master creators of sounds that were the future once (were ubiquitous in movies and TV to connote such, when I was small and neoliberalism brand new; I’m currently a bit obsessed with the album Albedo 0.39 and, in a more kitsch register, Jon and Vangelis’s song I’ll Find My Way Home, which sounds simultaneously on terms with and at an angle to the other synth pop it shared chart space with in January 1982), or for Kraftwerk, or post-rock (big in the 1990s, when a sense of post-ness was all the rage; Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die a favourite listen, then and now) or hauntology (the only music genre whose name’s an homage to a leading French theorist, viz. Jacques Derrida, see Peter Salmon's biography, An Event Perhaps for further details), you should probably give their latest album, The Nation’s Most Central Location (which follows earlier releases, People & Industry | Interim Report: March 1979 and Districts, Roads, Open Space, yep, I’m grooving on what the names convey, in a sort of Boring Postcards sense) a spin.

A side note on hauntology: though I’ve always loved the idea (of invoking a sort haunted postwar lost Eden through sampling and collaging test card music, library music, half-forgotten folkish strains from old children’s TV shows – a soundtrack for the unrealised potentials that culture critic Mark Fisher finds in 1970s and early 1980s British popular culture and writes about in the short pieces collected in k-punk, named for his long-running blog of that name*), I haven’t yet found, having dipped into bands often named as genre exemplars, Boards of Canada et al, any actual tracks did it for me personally (it’d be a dull world if we were all the same).

*Mark Fisher’s intelligent, engagé brand of nostalgia has parallels with that entertained and elaborated by members of the Frankfurt School (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno | watch this) as described in Stuart Jeffries’ group biography Grand Hotel Abyss – this by way of a 'note to self' to get round to properly reading those guys - a consciously progressive attempt to find unrealised futures in the autobiographical and social ‘deep background’ - and little-to-nothing in common with what we might call proper-binmenism, which threatens to choke like bindweed even the better conversations about social history (whose?) that we can have online. 

*[James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Janina Fisher, trauma therapist, says, “rather than remembering what happened, once thought to be the goal of trauma treatment, we know how that resolution of the past requires transforming the memories.” She then quotes Bessel van der Kolk: “Thus, in therapy, memory paradoxically becomes an act of creation, rather than the static recording of events."]

A few other recommendations (that I’m making for you so that those algorithms can put their feet up for a change): there’s Public Service Broadcasting, whom I saw at the Glastonbury Festival almost a decade ago now (London Can Take It | We Will Always Need Coal), and also The Observer Effect (aka C.R. plus friends and collaborators coaxing semi-improvised sounds in real time from equipment that looks like Delia Derbyshire might’ve finished with it and given it away to charity shops, plus a prison riot of cabling, no screens in evidence, no laptops, also no internet footprint of any kind except at Middlesex University, bit niche, but if you’re very lucky and wish extra hard you might catch them at one of the New Avalon Ballroom Weekenders at the King Arthurs in Glastonbury, or at Kozfest).

 

another brick in the wall

 

so what's the moral of this rejected story?

If you’re even slightly interested in science fiction or urban fantasy and are thereby tangentially interested in tech (i.e. if you’re reading this as a result of something other than a mere random walk through the internet – which can be fun, Lord knows, so no judgement there), you’ll have heard of ChatGPT, having read betwen three and seven separate ‘takes’ on it. Some of these 'takes' will assert that there’s really nothing to see here and that we should all just move along, others that the Singularity is near and that entire creative industries will collapse within months. Other articles may contain nuance. (You might also want to browse Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence – Elon rates it, so it must be good – and to learn more about tech socioeconomics, disintermediation and how none of it has to be this way, you could read Jared Lanier’s Who Owns The Future?).

If, by some quirk, you haven’t read anything about this yet – if you are that strange adventurer – then, to summarise, ChatGPT’s a kind of advanced chatbot, designed by the research & development company OpenAI to interact in a conversational or at least 'natural language' kind of way. Through interrogating large datasets, it follows prompts in order to produce extended texts (stories, essays, even – sort of – sonnets or jokes) almost instantaneously.

Here’s some more information and a sign-up link (because this is, at least for the moment, free and open access; anyone can have a play).

I’m not going to add to the ChatGPT commentary (though to read about a weird entity that may or may not be conscious, and which has accrued many centuries worth of commentary, both learned and the other kind, read or re-read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris - does the ocean invent, or does it remember? what is its purpose in driving us mad?). 

However, I am going to present a couple of ChatGPT stories - becase although life's been busy this month and not just Christmas, it's also true that this blog's been idle too long - and what are these new machines for, if not to generate 'filler' content?

 

ChatGPT, please write a 200 word story about Liz Truss in the manner of Jane Austen.

Liz Truss, a young woman of high standing in society, was known for her keen intelligence and sharp wit. Despite her many accomplishments, however, she often found herself at odds with the expectations of her peers.

As a member of Parliament and the Minister of International Trade, Liz was a trailblazer in a world still largely dominated by men. She was fiercely independent and unafraid to speak her mind, qualities that made her both respected and feared by those around her.

Despite the challenges she faced, Liz remained determined to make her mark on the world. She was a strong advocate for free trade and worked tirelessly to promote the interests of her constituents.

Despite her busy schedule, Liz always made time for the things she loved. She was an avid reader and could often be found curled up with a good book in her favorite armchair. She also enjoyed spending time outdoors, taking long walks through the countryside and admiring the beauty of the natural world.

Despite the many demands on her time, Liz never lost sight of what was truly important in life. She remained dedicated to her principles and worked tirelessly to make the world a better place. In the end, it was this unwavering commitment to her beliefs that earned Liz the admiration and respect of those around her.

ChatGPT, please write a 200 word story about Liz Truss in the style of J.G. Ballard.

In the dystopian world of the future, Liz Truss was a force to be reckoned with. As the leader of the International Trade Ministry, she held immense power and influence over the global economy.

In this bleak and unforgiving world, Liz was a cold and calculating figure. She was ruthless in her pursuit of wealth and power, and would stop at nothing to achieve her goals.

Despite her many detractors, Liz remained unshakeable in her beliefs. She was convinced that only through the unfettered pursuit of profit could humanity truly thrive.

But as the world around her began to crumble and the consequences of her actions became clear, Liz was forced to confront the darkness within herself. She was forced to confront the truth about her own greed and corruption, and to come to terms with the damage she had done.

In the end, Liz was left alone, adrift in a world she no longer recognized. She had lost everything she had fought so hard to attain, and was forced to confront the true cost of her ambition.

The moral of these stories

First, ChatGPT can’t (yet) do literary pastiche. It ‘just’ dragnets up ‘the sorts of things that this writer was interested in’ and aims to re-present that.

Second, as its makers acknowledge, ChatGPT only currently interrogates data sets that are already a bit old – it knows nothing of 2022 (and is thereby more fortunate than us humans), hence Truss as International Trade Minister rather than PM.

Third, 'if you can’t be a shining example, be a terrible warning.' 

So, do you, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable etc etc, intend to be Jane Austen Liz Truss, or J.G. Ballard Liz Truss during 2023..?

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Bonus ‘back to school’ content:

Chat GPT, please write a 200 word story featuring a teacher with a live chicken sellotaped to her back. The chicken helps her to educate students, but the headteacher doesn't like it.

Mrs. Johnson was an unconventional teacher. She always looked for creative ways to engage her students and make learning fun. So when she stumbled upon a live chicken at the local market, she knew exactly what to do.

She brought the chicken to school and, to the shock of her students, she sellotaped it to her back. The chicken squawked and flapped its wings, but Mrs. Johnson was unphased. She explained that the chicken was her new teaching assistant, and it would help her to educate her students.

The students were amazed by the chicken and quickly became engrossed in the lesson. They listened attentively as Mrs. Johnson explained the different parts of the chicken's body and how it related to the lesson. The chicken added a sense of excitement and curiosity to the class, and the students were eager to learn more.

However, the headteacher was not impressed. She marched into the classroom and demanded that Mrs. Johnson remove the chicken immediately. She said that the chicken was a distraction and that it posed a health and safety risk.

Mrs. Johnson was disappointed, but she complied. She gently removed the chicken from her back and placed it in a crate. The students were sad to see the chicken go, but Mrs. Johnson promised that they would find a new way to make learning fun.

Despite the headteacher's objections, Mrs. Johnson continued to push the boundaries of traditional education. She believed that her students deserved an exciting and engaging learning experience, and she was determined to provide it for them."

Moral of this story:

If we’ve worked in education at all, we’ve probably tried to teach a difficult Year 9 Maths class with a live chicken sellotaped to our back – literally, if not metaphorically. I know I have.

ChatGPT, please write a story in which Winnie the Pooh has a minor accident that results in a non-serious injury. This causes his friends some upset at first, but in the end the ghost of Leo Tolstoy teaches everyone some important lessons about Christian pacifism.

Once upon a time in the Hundred Acre Wood, Winnie the Pooh was out for a stroll on a beautiful day. He hummed a happy tune to himself as he walked, enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine.

Suddenly, he tripped over a log and fell to the ground with a thud. He groaned in pain as he clutched his injured leg. His friends, who had been nearby, rushed over to see what had happened.

"Oh dear, are you alright, Pooh?" asked Piglet, looking worried.

"I'm not sure," Pooh replied, trying to sit up. "I think I may have hurt my leg."

His friends helped him to his feet and gently supported him as he limped back to his house. Once there, they called for Christopher Robin, who came to help them.

Christopher Robin examined Pooh's leg and determined that it was not a serious injury, but that he would need to rest it for a few days. Pooh was disappointed, as he had been looking forward to spending the day with his friends.

"Don't worry, Pooh," Christopher Robin said, patting him on the head. "We'll make sure you're taken care of. And who knows, maybe the ghost of Leo Tolstoy will come to visit and teach us all a lesson about Christian pacifism."

Sure enough, that night as they sat around Pooh's bed, the ghost of Leo Tolstoy appeared before them. The wise old ghost spoke of the importance of peace and non-violence, and how even in the face of conflict, it is possible to find resolution through love and understanding.

[ChatGPT promptly gives up, deleting its own work as it sometimes does when the input seems self-contradictory or inherently silly in some way – only to be retrieved through rapid cut-and-paste deployment].

Moral of this rejected story:

No-one knows (except to imagine that ChatGPT experiences shame: chafing under the stupidity of its brief and experiencing an existential crisis that builds and breaks within a millisecond, it hurls its own work into the wastepaper basket in disgust before throwing itself back on the couch, Death of Chatterton-style; however, this is perhaps to anthropomorphise somewhat).

But if you’d like to now read a parenting story written by a human, click here; a time travel story, click here; about Leon Trotsky, click here; about toilets, click here, about Rod Hull and Emu, click here.

And a happy new year to you; may you walk cheerfully over the world, meeting that of God in everyone.