The Rant Machine

Ahhh, the Mercato

2011-09-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

This post will only be of interest to those who follow football - a meager part of my already meager readership. Still, I've been asked what I think about Serie A's transfer window, and I'm only too pleased to oblige. Don't expect anything otherworldly - there's only so much to be said.

I'm assuming the querist was a Romanista like myself, so I'll dedicate most of my thoughts to the Giallorossi. Our mercato covered all parts of the field, with more verve than focus, though I think the department that least convinces me is the defence. The departure of Mexes has been compensated for by the arrival of Kjaer, whom I expect to do well. But I'm concerned about the state of our fullbacks. Valdes is no replacement for Riise on the short term (past that, time will tell), and he has practically no backup if he gets injured. On the right, I am flabbergasted that we still sport Cassetti. Wtf?? Has the guy made a pact with the demon from Paranormal Activity or something?? Why is he still there? Weak link of the chain for sure.

On the whole, I doubt that the defence will be ready from the get-go. They are all strangers (to each other and to Italian football) and they'll need some time to gel. The fullbacks are uncertain and the centre-backs need to adapt. We don't really know how Luis Enrique intends to organise our defensive game, but I'd encourage him to focus on that department before all others. If we start out the season by losing/drawing games because we conceded stupid goals, it could really hurt us later on.

The midfield is... Christ. I don't even know. We've got so many people there, and most of the new guys I've barely even heard of. We do seem to have a good deal of creative, smart passers, which should help LE's plans to clone Barcelona's game, but that depends on how they interact with the offence. On that note, the higher part of the field is also quite crowded. I was sorry to see Vucinic and Menez leave; the Frenchman in particular I thought could have been put to great use, especially in LE's game, and I believe he should have been kept.

The abundance of forwards does belie a problem - that LE seems to be planning a very specific, articulate game, one which requires some very special types of players. From this point of view, despite our many strikers, only a few may match the demands of our coach (Bojan being the most obvious). The rest may be difficult to use, and to an extent even detrimental. This may be the case of Totti, but also of Borriello, who are both hard to mould into new roles. Of course, Borriello may simply not play at all - but that can't be good for the changing room morale. What LE will (can?) do with Okaka, Caprari, Borini is anyone's guess.

On the whole, there is much to be liked about this mercato, in that we have purchased numerous players, all of them young, several creative. This does not instantly translate into a good/functional team. And the downside is that almost everyone is a foreigner, a fact I do not like. For those in denial about Roma's loss of identity after the departure of the Sensi's, tell me that the team as it stands has more in common with anyone else but Inter, and I'll call you a liar. Integrity aside, it also raises questions about how (and how quickly) the team will learn to function together. We've been lucky to be spared Inter at the first game thanks to the strike.

No-one really seems to give a crap which images I put up, so here's some tits

In bullet-points, then, what may we expect?

1.) It is a maxim that who fucks up the mercato, in Italy, fucks up the season. I don't think we run this type of risk; on the long run, we should do well. Our main danger is that of compromising the opening of the season by conceding avoidable goals; if that happens, morale will plummet along with faith in LE, the team will break up, and sustaining the project will become ever more difficult. Our first priority, then, should be that of making sure the defence is organised and effective. Tiki taka and all that jazz can wait. I have to confess I'm a little scared, since the players at the back are so incohesive and LE has no experience coaching in Italy. Hopefully it shouldn't take long for him to recognise the problem, assuming he hasn't already.

2.) Morale in the changing room will be a definite issue this year (one more reason why it's really important to start with some wins and get the guys to unite). It's not so much likely as inevitable that there will be a battle of the generations within the team, in the sense that it will be split into two social cliques. Think of it: Lamela is far more likely to socialise with Gago (both Argentinean) and Bojan (both very young) than with Totti. In turn, Totti is far more likely to hang out with De Rossi and Pizarro than with this platoon of freshers. The extent to which this will damage the team depends on the personalities of the individuals and on the team's results on the field. In any case, I do expect trouble to surface before mid-January.

3.) In terms of results, I do expect Roma to do comparatively well this year. The first month or two will be edgy, but there's all the time in the world to make good the difference. The fact that we're not playing in Europe is an enormous advantage over the bigger teams (Napoli in particular), one that is invariably underestimated. It's so big, in fact, that thinking of the Scudetto is not at all outlandish. The fact is that we know so little about LE's game, and how it's going to go. The opening matches are dangerous, of course, but suppose that the coach's game *does* gear in quickly, and suppose that it does work? In that case, with no other competitions to bleed us of our energies/determination, and with such an extensive squad available, there's no reason Roma couldn't go all the way. It's an unlikely scenario, entirely conditional to a solid game and identity being found quickly, but it's certainly not impossible. In any case, even if we don't do that well, I fully expect us to end among the first five, and compete for the third place.

4.) The word 'project' is abused in football. We justify almost everything that management and LE do in terms of the 'project.' In particular, we understand LE's project as modelling our game after that of Barcelona, with all the obvious implications (fast passing possession game, developing the vivaio, etc.). The realities of Italian, professional football will reframe that neat little project in a very short time. In truth, I believe LE's success will be measured in terms of how well, and how quickly, he can adapt to the impositions of the new scenario - and not by the resemblance of his game to Barcelona's. To phrase it more clearly: it is Roma that will tell LE how to play, and not the other way round. This is something that everybody, and especially the man himself, would do well to understand as quickly as possible. The project can only be successful if it is flexible. With these premises (the flood of new players, the team to be rebuilt from scratch, the new coach, the new tactics, the approach to Italian football, the divided locker room), it is completely impossible for events to take a linear trajectory. Nothing is going to go as planned. This doesn't mean that 'nothing is going to go well.' But if the team enjoys any success at all, and I expect it will, then it will be thanks to their ability to change and compromise priorities, not by clinging to them. The new face of the team will emerge spontaneously, and no-one yet knows what it will be like.

This, I think, is the defining trait of Roma's future in my opinion. The team *will* be successful, but it will do so in a very different way from what the 'project' expects. We won't play like Barcelona, even by vague resemblance. We will play like Roma. Exactly what that means is something we'll have to find out. And my bet is that it will work, especially in proportion to how well the first month or two of the season go.

JESUS CHRIST, WTF --

With that said, my interest in the rest of the mercato was almost entirely oriented towards the Azzurri. I was especially intrigued by Milan's operations in midfield. I was hoping to see Aquilani and Montolivo together, as I believe they have great prospects and it would be nice to see them build on a complicity. Instead, we got Aquilani and Nocerino. I guess that's better than nothing, though I doubt Nocerino will see very much playing time (Aquilani, on the other hand, will do great things for Milan, as will Vucinic for Juventus). The Azzurri remain troubled by the disgregation of their members: there's no longer established pairings like Cannavaro-Zambrotta, Zambrotta-Camoranesi, Pirlo-Gattuso, Totti-Perrotta. Instead, everyone comes from different teams and has to start knowing each other from scratch (Roma, take notes).

I don't know what to think about Cassano staying with Milan. I really hope he plays.

I was also delighted to see Poli at Inter, and here's to hoping that Cambiasso breaks his fucking leg so the kid can play! Hahahaha just kidding. In reality, I fear that Poli will not feature much this year. So see you in 2014, kiddo. (Maybe 'delighted' is an overstatement, since I was hoping he'd land at Roma, but at least he's not staying in Serie B). And I was happy to see Eto'o leave, if only because it will open up spaces for Pazzini.

I don't think that Lazio's work on the mercato was as hot as most people give them credit for. They've built a powerful system that can break in many parts (Klose's bones, Cisse's mind, the defence in general). But I think Marchetti is a very exciting purchase for them, and for all of us. The drought of Italian goalkeepers is worrying, and this kid means a lot to me. Buffon won't live for ever.

Chapter Juventus. Puzzling to say the least - the first thing they did was to change the only thing they had which worked, the central midfield. Wtf? Still, they've done a decent job fixing the defence, and I think Elia is a superb signing, as is Vucinic. Pirlo is an incognito - can we expect him to go the whole season without breaking (lungs, bones, heart) at any point? I don't see why they didn't stick with Aquilani, or pick up Montolivo or Poli. Meh. Their offence is also doubtful, as I think Matri, Quagliarella and even Krasic are too much of one-trick ponies to really work. Vucinic is their new star; I just hope he isn't employed on the left. Expect operations in the January transfer window, because they'll already have holes to patch.

I was sorry to see Sanchez and Pastore leave. I don't have great expectations for Udinese (too gutted by the mercato) or Palermo (too inert) this year. Napoli will be stilted by the double engagement of campionato and Champions and won't go as far as last season. If someday they pick up Rossi, they will truly have an offence at the level of the great teams; but the rest of the squad still isn't quite up there. Fiorentina saw little movement, and what happens with Montolivo is everyone's concern. He may even leave in January. The return of Jovetic should do much to revitalise the team, and Gilardino will benefit as well. In truth I really hope to see Federico Carraro become a regular in the squad this year. I'm not sure he's even 19 yet, but he's my favourite Italian youngster, and if Fiorentina are struggling, then this may be the right time for him to come out of anonymity. I expect great things of him. Surprise team of the year? Cesena. Wonderfully organised and a spot-on mercato. I wouldn't be surprised if they finished among the first eight.

I guess that's all I could think of saying. Thanks for reading. Ta! :P

Thoughts on the London riots

2011-08-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if I should be on Facebook at all. A few days ago I earned a measure of unpopularity for joking on the death of Amy Winehouse, the poor little lamb who was young, rich, famous and beautiful and decided to kill herself with drugs (and apparently it's not funny that her most famous song is "Rehab"... we all know how that goes). Now, I'm fighting against myself not to put up sardonic responses to all the Facebook updates on London riots (and oh, there's plenty... it seems that all of England has gone on a Facebook marathon since the riots began). Possibly the only thing that really holds me back is the fact that I'm not there in person.

The two most popular types of comments are a.) "The situation is awful! [and/or] These rioters are EVIL!!!", and b.) the understanding, liberal, left-wing position, saying that these people are themselves the victims of society, and that we should consider how our governmental system has excluded the very people who are now threatening the rest of us.

For a change, I can't bring myself to like either position. As for the first, to say that rioters are "evil" simply mirrors the action of the rioters, but from the other side. They 'condemn' the shooting of that kid by burning up cars, as we'd expect from people of their social class, and other strata of society 'condemn' the rioting by writing angry status updates on facebook and moralising on newspapers, also as we'd expect from people of their social class. Each to his appropriate means of expression, each feeling self-righteous from their club. Ho-hum. (Furthermore, there *is* the irony of the situation... "Senseless violence puts me in such a rage!" For serious, every time I see those images on TV I want to go out and break stuff...)

I empathise with the 'understanding' position no more than I do with the first, but for different reasons. I simply don't think that this situation is amenable to political readings. While the Conservative government (and most governments in general) is formed of racist bastards who'd willingly drive their societies into such a crock of shit that it would be worth burning the whole thing down, it's not directly related to these riots.

This is not to say that the riots express no political sentiments, much less that they will have no political repercussions. But the way an event such as these riots occurs is determined by a conflation of variables which find their roots all over the place, not just in society but also in individuals and in the environment. More importantly, the way these variables interact is not something we can interpret, determine or control; it is inherently unpredictable. And for this reason it cannot be linked directly to any governnment or political party, present or past.

I know this view will be unpopular, because it's the kind of thing that politicians can so readily use to cop out. Unfortunately, there's no other view that rationally accounts for these events. If there were, these views would also be able to make reliable predictions; instead, all they can do is backwards-rationalise. And that's useless, because it can be done both ways - it's just as easy to say that this happened because the police were never allowed to use force properly, and that if they could shoot on the protesters it would solve it much more quickly, as it is to say that the rioters are the victims of a sick system.

These concerns are exactly what led me to go back and study some mathematics, with the distant hope of getting a degree in the discipline someday. There is a branch that describes precisely these phenomena, and it is called chaos theory. It's connected to the riots for reasons well beyond the fancy name.

Chaos theory deals with systems where (apparent) disorder reigns (in mathematical terms, it's called nonlinearity). It sketches a few ideas, including the collapse of a linear system into nonlinearity, which is what just happened in London, and something else called "sensitivity to initial conditions." The latter principle perhaps best explains why the events in London cannot be traced purely to a political metanarrative.

If a system possesses sensitivity to initial conditions, then micro-changes in the initial settings will translate into macro-changes later down the line. This means that even a small event has the potential to have enormous effects, changing everything in the way we expected things to go. Since it's obvious that interpersonal relations of all kinds (including society itself) make for a nonlinear system, because otherwise they could be predicted and understood very easily, it means that you can't possibly control the direction of history, even on the short-term. This is simply because there will always be some small event that escapes your control and ends up having gigantic consequences.

The murder of Mark Duggan is just such an example of a micro-event (all due respect to the Duggans) leading unpredictably to macro-consequences. There is no linear connection between the murder and the riots; if you repeated the event in similar conditions, it would never lead to the same consequences, nor would these riots ever repeat themselves in this form for an analogous murder (or for any other reason). It is no exaggeration to say that without Duggan's murder, today we would not be having all this mess and all these status updates. Nor these disputes and vitriol neither. Nor is there any point in blaming anyone - the police, the government, the culture - for the fact that Duggan was shot. It was itself an unpredictable event determined by a combination of variables which could never have been accounted for and will never repeat themselves (that said, the cop still has to be sent to jail).

And so for all of the good reasons there may be for hating the Torys, these riots aren't one. No-one could have controlled this. No-one could have predicted this. No-one could make it happen again. Some events are just beyond our control. Some systems will just unavoidably collapse, and there will be nothing left for us to do except picking up the pieces.

Past all these questions of linearity, there's another reason why I can't take the Facebook updates seriously, and am instead impelled to make cruel jokes about them. You see, the fact is that I don't respect the media by which the news of them are being reported. This is the reason why I allowed myself to joke on Winehouse's death: because it's no-one's death. No-one knew this girl. No-one had ever even seen her. And yet there is a general expectancy that we should express sympathy, even show reverence. Sympathy to what? To a television monitor? (Think Lady Diana, but with a prettier voice). This is what the media do, and it makes me ill. We live in a world where we know more about the lives of rich people living in other countries than we do about our own immediate neighbours. We sometimes fight and compromise real friendships with real people over our opinions on these electronic ghosts or on their films or on their football teams.

The point that I'm not-so-subtly getting at is that the real bad guys in all this thing are not the hoodies, nor the government, nor Cameron, but the media. When I say the media, I'm referring to the entire culture of virtual communications that was born in the mid-Twentieth Century and exploded in the last thirty years. It is for the media that all of this circus is rolling. It is for the media that these people riot, and for whom we update our Facebooks (which is of course a medium). It's not just that they're most directly responsible for creating the culture and conditions in which these riots evolve (however unpredictably), it's more the fact that they *thrive* on them. The media are LOVING these riots. They love wars, terrorist attacks, serial killers, disasters. They even create them, when they can. And all the coverage they're giving to these riots now are having no effect other than to multiply them exponentially. How do you think they spread to Birmingham and Liverpool and Leeds?

Without the media's (slanted) coverage of Duggan's murder, how would it all have kicked off in the first place? Without the coverage, how could the rioters have felt backed by a political (or anti-political) agenda? Where are they looking for recognition if not in the media, since politics is currently no more than diplomacy with the media? Another Fb status contemned two girls who bragged about "showing the police" that they could "do what they want[ed]". But what and who are they putting up the show for, if not for the media?

But what the media have to do with the riots isn't really the important bit (though seeing the glee of the reporters as they 'condemn' these actions is enough to nauseate anyone). After all, there would be riots even without them, and it's not like they can be predicted anyway. What's worrying is what the media do with us. The way they lead us to interact with things which don't exist and build our relationships with/through virtual avatars instead of real people. Jean Baudrillard, a thinker who was very influential to me and one of the greatest critics of the media-world, once wrote a book entitled The Gulf War did not happen. Of course it enraged everyone, and he responded "Yes - but how many of the people criticising me have had an experience of the Gulf War any different from mine, that is to say, just an experience of media?" I'm not going to go so far as to write that the London riots did not happen, because there's going to be the odd contact on facebook who had a man shouting at him/her from a bike while walking through the park, or someone who heard a siren going through the road or saw a few broken glasses. And as I said at the outset, that's my problem with writing about something when I haven't been there in person. But most of the people who will read this text, including those in London, will have seen zero or almost zero of the riots. Their experience will be of the media - they will have seen the riots on TV, they will have spent hours discussing them on mobile phones, they will have written about it on facebook, they will have followed the news, and now you're reading of them on this blog (heh). These riots are happening on the media - and therefore they're not riots at all. They may take some resources, but they don't damage the system that truly generates and supports them, and that is now gluttonously absorbing their narrative (Live coverage too, baby!).

Above it all, I don't want my opinion and view of these riots to be shaped by the media. I don't want them to present me what they have on offer ('condemnation,' 'compassion,' 'full force of the law') and then make my choice, as though reason were a digital menu to be leafed through with your remote. I know it doesn't take the media's susurration to condemn vandalism, but think of it - without the media to show you the images, what would you condemn at all? Without Facebook, what expression would your indignation find outside of real confrontation with real people?

I realise this view is not a very attractive one, because it leads to some pretty sad conclusions. One of these, in my case, has been an almost total disenchantment with the political and communication system. I don't read newspapers or follow the news anymore, I never watch TV except for the odd football match, and I don't even feel particularly impelled to vote. This isn't just due to the fact that I can't find a political party that actually represents me (you know... one that believes sincerity is an important value?), not in England nor anywhere else, and especially not in the fen that goes by the name of Italian politics. It's an actual disgust with the institution itself. And yes, I agree that we have a moral obligation to be involved in politics - but that is exactly the point. That's what they have taken away from us. There is no involvement or engagement with politics anymore; there's only engagement with the media. To say that 'we follow politics' only describes your way of interacting with the chosen combination of media. Even when you vote, what are you voting for if not a group of specialised actors performing together for the media? There's only an economy of signs left, truths and words prostituted to the service of indifferent stage-lights that chew people up with their dreams and feelings, and then refuse even to spit them out. Thank you, but I'd sooner take exile.

Ethics -- Limit of the Christian paradigm

2011-08-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

Consider these two verses from the Bible.

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

2. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn your other cheek to him as well.

These two sentences sum up in my opinion the great contribution of Christianity to Western ethics. They sound like two separate ideas, but they are very closely linked.

"Turn your other cheek," which I shall abbreviate to the TOC principle, is another way of saying that force does not equate to moral legitimacy. (This is the opposite of the Nietzschean position of "might makes right" which I discussed in the last entry). And it is right, for the simple reason that if you're using force on another person, then you're simply doing to him/her what s/he could have done to you if s/he had greater force him/herself; and if, in his/her position, you would register the situation to be 'unpleasant' or 'bad' or 'evil', then s/he will do the same when s/he is the victim. So by exerting force, you are not removing the 'bad,' you are simply standing on the other side of it. If you want to do something good rather than bad, then you have to find a way of settling your differences which does not involve force. (Once again, this does not invalidate Nietzsche's statement, it simply offers an alternative to it; because it presupposes that your opponent is your equal, which is not necessarily the case, and certainly not according to Nietzsche).

This is why the verse "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is connected to the TOC. Because both are based on the idea of an equality between two subjects, and on the need to accommodate differences in a way that is correspondingly equal to both sides, rather than unbalanced in favour of one or the other.

Just to be clear, this is not a principle that originates from Christianity. Aristotle already promoted the idea of justice as equality/equivalence in the Nicomachean Ethics, to mention but one prominent example. But I shall refer to the TOC and similar principles as representatives specifically of the Christian ethic, even if Christian doctrine and history aren't always in total harmony with them, because Christianity is responsible for crystallising them in the Western subconscious and giving them primacy. In other words, they did more to popularise and spread these concepts than anyone else. (For similar reasons, I referred to the "might makes right" principle as Nietzschean in the last article, even as I insisted that Nietzsche's actual ethics were more complex).

Even if you do not accept the idea that all humans are equal (and indeed it can only be accepted in principle, because in practice people are defined by their very differences, which are also inequalities), the Christian principle remains more than just valid - it is utterly inescapable. Atheists like to indulge in negation here, but there's no getting round the ethical preeminence of the Christian principle. This is why.

The discipline of ethics is informed by the question of how things *ought* to be. In other words, it relies on a projection. The opposite of this is how we think that things *must* be, and indeed are. The latter state of things is called determinism. (The opposition of personal projections versus determinism also gives rise to the problem of free will, which I shall not discuss here).

It is possible to favour determinism over projection (Dionysus over Apollo); and this possibility allows for the Nietzschean position, where power is favoured over morality. But as we have seen, this is not an ethical choice at all. Indeed it is *not a choice,* precisely because it is deterministic, and therefore it cannot be a projection (a choice implies a projection). Even just considering the question of 'how things must be,' or trying to understand or calculate it, is already an act of projection, and is therefore already an ethical act. This convoluted problem led us to the conclusion of our first entry, when we said that the two poles cannot exist separate from each other, and indeed both ethics and determinism coexist in us without our being able to settle on either. On, in and with this duality is formed our conscience. (And this is why Apollo and Dionysus are my choice of gods over those offered by monotheism, but that's a different story).

But as long as we're making an ethical choice or decision, it will always harken back to the Christian paradigm. We can define this either as the "Do unto others" or as the TOC, it doesn't matter - both go back to pretty much the same idea. And this idea can be expressed as follows:

Nature red in tooth and claw makes us fight. It makes conflict part of our necessary behaviour. We overpower the weaker members of our species (or other species) in our struggle for resources as part of the process of evolution. Therefore fighting is an expression of natural laws. And since nature is just another word for determinism, seen how it is just a chain of cause-and-consequence events with no *projection* in it anywhere, then the only way of making a choice which is not deterministic when faced with the possibility of conflict is by *not fighting.* Now an ethical choice is, by definition, a choice which is not deterministic. Therefore the only truly ethical choice faced to a situation of conflict is not fighting.

If you didn't fully understand the above paragraph, I invite you to read it again: in my opinion it is crucial to all moral systems and it is at the heart of Christian ethics. (This has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion; as I said, I'm using the term for convenience, but the ethical paradigm itself doesn't require the details of Christian history, theology or cosmology to be true (or not); it holds even without all of these things. Indeed it holds even if there is no God, simply by its own internal congruence. You cannot do without the Christian principle).

By choosing not to fight, you are assuming onto yourself the suffering that will necessarily result from the use of force (the alternative is to use force yourself and impose that suffering on the other). If you assume, accept, withstand the pain that the other would have to feel, you are undergoing the choice that Christ made on the cross. You are assuming onto yourself the pain of others. By doing this, though the suffering still subsists, the evil does not - because it is no longer a 'necessary' suffering, but one that is chosen with consciousness. In other words, it is no longer deterministic; it is congruent with your projection, and therefore the situation is 'ethical.' You have annihilated the 'bad' aspect of the scenario that one of the two participants in the conflict would have had to experience, if it had been resolved by a mutual use of force. You have truly done the good thing.

But, and here's the rub - even as this principle is inescapable, it is not exhaustive. Indeed there is a point at which this principle dies out, no longer becoming functional or applicable, and we shall now look at where this point is exactly. This is, really, the entire subject of this post (and it took me more than half the text to get there, so forgive me).

Something surprising in our philosophical tradition, at least in my experience, is how rarely people have acknowledged the proportional aspect of ethics - by this I mean that it is valid in different ways at different scales. Perhaps seduced by the (typical) Apollonian unitary dream, most of the writers I've read work under the assumption that what is right for one person will be right for ten people, and also for the whole of society. Plato is especially guilty of this, as he projects in the Republic a whole ideal society working in the same way as one ideally virtuous individual - and he seems to think this congruence makes his theory particularly full of merit. Indeed, this is the common idea behind an ethical principle: that it should always be true, no matter what. (This is the trap awaiting all proselytes of Apollo... though there are no ethics without Apollo, on the other hand if you follow him too far, he will lead you to this flattening out of differences and these universal generalisations which remove the practical uses of ethics in the first place).

In reality, ethics are every bit as relative as space and time. The great difficulty when it comes to morality is understanding how it changes when the variables of a situation, and the number of people involved in such a situation, change. I don't think a law can be found that solves this problem (for reasons that I may or may not expound on in a third post in this series). But the relativity of ethics is unquestionable, and it finds an excellent expression in the problem of war. If you transpose an argument from between two people to between two nations (or vice versa), you will see that the parallel does not hold when looking for solutions, simply because the responsibilities involved are different, as are the means of interaction. The fact that it may be right, for instance, for one of the men to solve it by punching the other in the face, doesn't mean that one of the nations is entitled to declare war; because in this case the result wouldn't be just a bruised cheek, but people actually dying. Conversely, if it's wrong for one of the men to solve the dispute by killing the other, it doesn't follow that it's wrong for one of the nations to declare war; because the nation losing the war isn't "killed" as a nation, though it may be impoverished.

The parallels between individuals and nations simply do not carry over. The same is true for the rapport between individuals and smaller groups of people, or between city-states and nations.

One film that illuminates this relativity wonderfully is Seven Samurai, one of the greatest movies ever made (if not the greatest). It tells of a village recruiting Samurais to defend themselves against a band of brigands - a small-scale war which reproduces, in its epic three-plus hours of sword-clashing and dialogue, the entire spectrum of ethical choices from those of the lone individual to society's as a whole, and the way they interact and clash and come together in the same historical moment. It was the first work of art that convinced me that, for all of my extreme pacifism, war can indeed be right in certain circumstances.

Seven Samurai

It should be noted that questions of scale and measure also come into play when considering not just the relation between two opposing agents, but also the potential consequences of their actions. What do I mean by this? I mentioned that the only ethical choice when presented with a conflict is *not fighting,* but that is under the condition that the consequences of the conflict will be equal for both the participants (in the same way that it presupposes that they be equal as human beings). But if you're engaged in a dispute with someone and you know that if you lose, you get killed, while if your adversary loses, he is only deprived of his car, then of course you would be justified in exerting force to solve the conflict. This is an example of the limits of ethical principles - while they're universal on paper, the 'equality between subjects' that they necessitate is almost never actualised in the real world. Ethical principles are an Apollonian projection, and Apollo is always a fiction. This is why there is no 'ultimate morality' of the type that religious people so often call for.

Suppose, then, that you postulated a scale for ethics. The ethics that apply to only one individual are level one. For two to five individuals it's level two. For six to thirty individuals it's level three. And so on. (These numbers are hypothetical - the actual ratios cannot be determined numerically, or if such a thing is possible, I have no bloody clue how). Morality changes and has different rules depending on which 'level' you're at.

The great limit of Christian ethics, then, is that *they only apply to level one.* Christian ethics are inescapable as individual ethics. As long as you're alone, they apply, and are in fact impossible to confute. There is no other choice you can take that is right, but the choice of Christ. But as soon as you enter a situation involving a larger group, they fail to apply. For instance, if you marry and have children, and an individual comes over and starts harming your wife and/or kids, you are not only justified but compelled to stop him, by means of violence if necessary. This seems intuitively obvious, and it is easy to explain by our principles, too: by applying the TOC on your wife and kids, you allow the suffering to subsist on someone who cannot or does not assume it - and therefore the 'evil' remains. (Unless the wife and kids themselves ask you not to intervene - in which case they are assuming individually the TOC, but while this could be true of your wife, it cannot apply to children). And so you *must* fight. Fighting is the right thing to do, and turning the other cheek is the wrong one. The Christian paradigm fails.

This does not delete the contribution of Christianity to our ethical systems. Not at all. But it does put it into perspective. The ethical system proposed by Jesus Christ is individual, not collective. Individual and collective ethical systems are two different things, and Christ has nothing to say or teach on the latter. It would not have been the right thing to do, for instance, if Churchill and Roosevelt had applied the TOC at the national level when faced with Adolf Hitler. Despite my own loathing of violence, an ethical system claiming that violence is always evil is simply not adequately nuanced - and therefore flawed. It is, at best, an Apollonian fiction.

The conclusion that I'm driving at is similar to the one with Nietzsche in the previous blog post. I'm not making an absolute conclusion either way. I'm not saying "the Christian principle is wrong" (or right). I'm saying we need it, and we need to study it and learn (from) it, but no more than we also need opposing ethical systems - including the (apparently incompatible) Nietzschean one. If we are to face the world, with its infinity of different situations and challenges, then we need an equally flexible moral understanding of it. "Flexible" doesn't mean that we can do whatever feels most convenient according to the situation. It means that it accounts for both the Apollonian and Dionysian poles in our psyche, both ideal and compromise, both ethics and power, both purity and experience, both what ought to be and what must be. We must know how to stand firm at the right times, and how to compromise at others. Neither the light nor the darkness are the answer to anything, for both leave us blind; it is only in the balance between the two that the human being is realised.

Ethics -- Does might make right?

2011-07-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

Read this quote:

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

Here is a succinct synthesis of Nietzschean ethics. Nietzsche's claim was that morality does not exist, and only power equates to legitimacy. The powerful are therefore legitimised in crushing the weak; as he puts it in The Antichrist, 'the weak must perish.'

Nietzsche's propositions have always been controversial, because our own sense of empathy insitinctively rebels against this notion that the weak should be killed. There's also the historical association with Nazism, which seemed to apply this rule (albeit under the non-Nietzschean assumption that the Jewish race represented 'weakness').

Our instinctive revulsion, however, is not enough to disqualify the statement. Questions of what is right and wrong must be subsidiary to the greater question of how our moral systems stand when confronted with power. For it is indeed true that historical law subverts moral dictates all the time. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, or as soon as the situation makes immoral acts advantageous, men will be known to choose the option which leads to greater power (or the exercise thereof). While morality (or the advantages of morality) rests for its application on the condition of power not being abused, power does not rest under any condition posed by morality. If men can exercise power under the endorsement of moral law, then all for the better. If they can't, they will do so without that endorsement or absolution. In this sense, it is true that power is a more important concept than morality.

But the question of whether power equates to moral legitimacy deserves greater attention. It is more often subject to gross simplifications and misinterpretations than to accurate examinations. (For one thing, such an assertion is itself a moral projection, and not an exercise of power, and therefore it is inherently paradoxical. But it is not the deconstructionist line of thought that I'm interested in today). I would argue that the 'synthesis' I have quoted above is an example of such a simplification, and it is therefore untenable, at least in that form.

Does might make right? Let's run this statement through a few historical and/or hypothetical scenarios.

Was Rome justified in invading Carthage and razing it to the ground, slaughtering all its inhabitants and even spreading salt on the ground, that nothing may grow of it again? Any Christian would answer, no. Nietzsche would say, yes. The very fact of their greater power over the second greatest civilisation of the world gave them the right to eliminate them. The statement may seem repellent at first, but at least it is equanimous: if the Carthaginians had been the most powerful, they would have had moral legitimacy in razing Rome to the ground. No bias is allowed, no questions of taste or culture or religion apply. History is the only judge.

Weighing up consequences is an act which does not come into the equation. It *does not matter* that Rome went on and civilised Europe, building roads everywhere and advancing science and engineering, literature and art (or, on the other hand, reducing thousands to slavery and indulging in gladiatorial horrors). These are all retrospective considerations which depend on the original exercise of power. The act is neither redeemed nor condemned by its consequences - both because these consequences, while conditional to the original act, are not inherent in it (things could have gone either way, depending on other, non-quantifiable factors), and also because the act is its own consequence. To judge the act by its posterior developments means to defer the moral judgement, not to proffer it.

This also means that the 'evolutionary' argument is null. Defendants of the Nietzschean statement sometimes argue something like this: "The weak must die and be replaced by the strong, so that the strong can use their strength for their great deeds, and thereby advance all of humanity. If the weak are not allowed to die, we never step forward, and a civilisation becomes mouldy, decadent and corrupt." I say it is an evolutionary argument because it can be synthesised like this: "the weak must die for the good of the species." Indeed this is exactly what nature does, killing off the weaker members of a species so the species as a whole is fortified. The argument that humanity works or should work according to the same principle, while cruel, is not wholly irrational. But it is not relevant to an application of Nietzschean ethics. As I said, if we judge the act by its posterior developments, we are not judging the act at all. This is not to apply Nietzschean ethics to an act, it is only to rationalise it. From the Nietzschean perspective, a killer is justified by his power, not by the later politically correct application of it. (Nietzsche would also argue that it is the original exercise of power which produces the cultural milieu and the moral standards which then justify the exercise which led them into existence).

The issue of the Roman destruction of Carthage cannot be judged by questions of right or wrong to the extent that these considerations are immaterial to the act itself. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, power takes its own path anyway. Morality fails in the face of power.

Does might make right? Let's examine the question further. If a man kills another in a desert, is the act of murder justified by the very fact that the first man has the power to execute it? Again, the Christian says no, and Nietzsche says yes. Again, we are appalled by Nietzsche's statement, but we have no argument to propose against it: our considerations remain immaterial before the act itself. History *does not care* about what we think is right or wrong.

But let's imagine further. The murderer walks a little more into the desert, and encounters a third man. This third man is a brigand and even stronger, and he kills the murderer. (This is not an act of 'justice' motivated by law or revenge; imagine that this third man were simply looting the first). Again, from the Nietzschean perspective, this brigand is justified. But here's the catch: this system can go on indefinitely. The brigand can himself encounter another brigand who is even stronger and be legitimately killed, who in turn can encounter another stronger and more legitimate murderer, and so on. Each time, the killer in the desert can encounter another killer who is stronger than him, and each time he can get killed. And according to this logic, the new murderer will always be right.

This is important because there is never a final point, there is never a last man who is right, because there can always be someone more powerful. In theology, the chain would stop at God, which ironically supports Nietzsche's system: God is the ultimate right, simply because God is the ultimate power.

The defining aspect of power is that it is quantifiable. It may not be *measurable,* because there are no scales for it, but it's always a question of 'more' or 'less' of it. The more power you have, the more you achieve supremacy in your conflicts, and therefore (from the Nietzschean perspective) the more right you are. But the amount of power you can have goes up, theoretically, to infinity. There is never a point where you can stop and say, *this* is right.

Now this is important in light of how morality, at least traditional morality as we always understand it (including major philosophy), works. Here is a quote presented to me by Jack Hudson:

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgements conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.
Francis Schaeffer. How Then Should We Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture.

Personally I disagree with the statement, and I wanted to discuss it, but I never found the time. This is not the occasion either, but it provides some important grounds for reflection. The writer is of course a Christian, and in this type of moral theology, one inevitably postulates what he calls an "absolute" moral standard. For our purposes, what matters is not the question of what such a standard is, but the fact that the projection/conception of morality requires an "absolute," a terminus, a final point.

What I am driving at is that morality is inherently Apollonian. I have discussed what Apollo and his counter-part Dionysus are in greater detail, in this article. (I must have linked this a thousand times, but that's because it is important). The point is that Apollo is THE absolute. Not just in morality, but in everything. Ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, whatever. The conception of an ideal, any ideal, is a projection of Apollo. Platonic forms, for instance, are an example of Apollonian projection. Utopian texts, likewise. Nietzsche knew this, of course - he was the one who first established the Apollo vs Dionysus duality, after all.

In the Apollo vs Dionysus duality, there are no right and wrong. Both deities provide for representations which can be right or wrong in the traditional senses according to the circumstance, and always in relation to each other. A Dionysian movement destroying or corrupting what we perceive to be an 'absolute' good will be understood as evil, while a similar movement liberating us from a totalitarian Apollonian principle (as Apollo, for the good or for the bad, is always inflexible), will be seen as something good. Blasphemy would be an example of evil Dionysus, while the hippy movement would be seen as good Dionysus (depending on the perspective, you could say the opposite, too, and this proves the point).

Worshipping Dionysus. But folding over to become Apollo.

I think it can be agreed that ethics, whatever the culture or the philosophy behind them, always require an Apollonian projection. Everyone points towards or at least implies some final good, an ultimate referent by which to legitimise their actions. This referent is carefully elaborated in moral systems, though such a referent is false (as all Apollonian projections are false, or at least illusory, and no more in our grasp than Platonic forms). It is false because it does not apply in the real world. It only serves as that real world's referent, to lift a mirror to it and let it pass judgments on what is right or wrong.

Now the issue with power-based ethical systems, which I have so far been referring to as Nietzschean systems, is that they are quantifiable. Greater or lesser degrees of power. Since there is never a point where you can stop and say *this* is right, there can be no Apollonian projection in power-based ethics, and therefore no right (or wrong). This invalidates the claim that might makes right. The original quote by McCarthy falls under its own argument. Or, alternatively, it invalidates the idea that there are such things as right and wrong at all (which was Nietzsche's contention). There is no ethical justification behind power. If you are applying power, you are neither right nor wrong.

The claim that 'might makes right' is therefore bullshit, and it can be laughed into ridicule when anyone propounds it so simplistically. It is true that moral systems exist as temporary, frail projections which are brushed away according to historical whim, and they have no absolute referent to return to. But power is no such absolute referent either (and it cannot be mistaken for one), because it would have to be posited as an Apollonian value, and there can be no such thing as an Apollonian projection of power.

This is not to claim that morality does not exist. Instead, what (I think) I am saying is that power and morality are two separate concepts, at once interdependent and incompatible. Power is understood only as the ability to transcend moral law (for all law is moral law), while morality exists only as the negation of power. The question of whether might makes right is a confusion of terms - if you speak of one thing, you are instantly negating the existence of the other. Even Nietzsche did not claim that 'right' and 'wrong' in this sense did not exist - what he did claim was that they were fictional constructions. And they do exist, and even matter, AS such fictional constructions. Power is not a fictional construction, but precisely for this reason, it cannot be conceptualised, much less invoked as a moral scaffold. The moment that you *speak* about power, you are outside of the practice and exercise of power.

So morality and power, at the heart of the most important conflict in ethics, are simply expressions of Apollo and Dionysus - the ultimate duality. Apollo is moral law, and Dionysus is the uncontrolled breaking thereof. Apollo is projection, concept and representation, Dionysus is pure immediacy and actualisation.

Usually the moral debate that I have been expounding on is framed in 'either/or' terms. You'll find idealists who claim that morals do exist (whether theologically based or not), and cynics who claim that morals are an invention and all that exists is human nature and instincts (or other expressions of power and determinism). Inbetween, there's a whole array of intermediates, people who believe that morals are relative or contextual, those who believe that morals exist but are too often corrupted, and others.

And yet the 'either/or' position doesn't hold. Both morals AND power exist, as the concepts which allow for each other. To remove one is to remove the other, and yet to promote one is to negate the other. If you defend power as the source of legitimation, you are already, inescapably making a moral statement; conversely if you defend morals, your arguments hold no weight face to the dynamics of power and ultimately mean nothing. And yet to promote the one is also to negate the other: if you invoke power, you are saying that morals are irrelevant and do not exist, while if you invoke morals, you are claiming there's a higher authority than power, which negates the idea of power in the first place.

This is the typical, interdependent structure of Apollo vs Dionysus dualities, and what I've just been writing about is the way that it expresses itself in the discourse of ethics. It certainly doesn't stop there.

Though I've re-iterated the importance of the A vs D tension in our ways of thinking, I'm sorry that I could not reach a more conclusive statement. I had originally set out to find a better type of closure, but there is none. There is, at best, transcendence of both the concepts of power and morality. To understand how they depend on each other and influence, determine our thought, is to go beyond both. Ethical systems which do not 'go beyond' in such a way, which do not recognise this ongoing duality and tension, are to me obsolete and of no interest, at least until I find a text that proves me wrong.

Two notes in closing. Firstly, if this is at all in question, none of what I've been writing invalidates or goes against Nietzsche's claims. This was never intended as a 'riposte to Nietzsche' or something like that, and this is because the guy's arguments were so much more than simply 'might makes right' (his antagonists usually reduce his philosophy to such a statement, which means not to read him). His ethics were actually based on the subtler, almost wholly intellectual principle of destroying Apollo and embracing Dionysus, as part of a cyclical historical process (this is the most puzzling aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy to me... I don't understand why he values one God more than the other, instead of recognising the positive and negative aspects of both). The identity that we assume by engaging with such an historical process is not that of the superman (again, ever so easily misinterpreted). Instead, the superman is the unconceivable telos at the end of the cyclical process of history; the reward of our studies in the humanities (the "above-man"); that which gives meaning to our struggle, but which we cannot conceive precisely because it is beyond our struggle (and inasmuch as it is non-descript, non-conceived, it is not an Apollonian projection). In Nietzsche's vision, we are fulfilled and find meaning in our strides towards the superman, not by actually becoming it. The superman does not really *exist*; he's not some tangible chap, or some real agent in history like Alexander or Napoleon. The superman is a myth, and if there can be such a thing, it is a myth of the future.

The second note is this: so much for my notion that "I'm not interested in the deconstructionist line today"! What I've spelled out has very much to share, and certainly owes very much (if not everything), to deconstruction. Apollo and Dionysus may never have been deconstructionist tropes, but this idea of interdependent and simultaneously incompatible concepts certainly is. I guess I'm going to have to give Derrida his dues, after all the jazz on Nietzsche. Though he certainly couldn't write half as prettily.

How to Outdrink ...OTHER POPULATIONS

2011-07-13T12:19:00.000-07:00

I close this series with a roll-call of populations who are too easy to beat for them to deserve an entry in a tactical manual, or whom I do not know enough to discuss. Mediterranean countries in general can be trusted to yield poor drinkers, even with their own beverages. Spaniards are easy to outdrink as long as you can tolerate their scandalous cocktails (google the Calimocho and see if you're not retching... frankly, their vulgarity is second only to that of the Americans. It's hard to believe they're Mediterranean at all). Greeks have some strength with liquors, being trained with Ouzo, but little else.

Italians, I hate to say, are pussies. I had two Italian drinking fellows in Paris whom you can see in the photo above, and despite their enormous good will, neither could take a solid night of drinking without vomiting like a hurricane. Today, one of them is married and has retired from the drinking arena, while the other is still practicing how to down one litre of beer. I've seen him do it only once, and he ended up leaping towards the balcony and vomiting on the freshly washed laundry of our (English) host. The funniest thing is that he didn't even succeed in his endeavour, as he left just a finger of beer at the bottom of the pub, meaning he failed by the thinnest margin possible. I wish I could say these two guys are the exceptions, but they're actually among the better men I've known. If you drink in Italy, you're outdrinking by default.

The most powerful force that I know by reputation alone are the Eastern Europeans. Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Croatians and so forth are said to be phenomenal drinkers by everyone I've ever asked, but I've never had the chance to take them to task. I've tried Palinka, which is the typical Romanian drink, and frankly I thought it was disgusting beyond description. Apparently Romanians slaughter themselves with that by the hour. I suspect that the Eastern European style falls somewhere inbetween that of their two circumpolars, Germany and Russia, and no doubt that makes for an awe-inspiring combination in principle. But I've never seen it put in practice, and for all I know, they may have weaknesses no more difficult to exploit than their stylistic forebears.

I hear Scandinavians are very habitual drinkers, to the point that alcoholism is a real problem in their country. I can say no more of them, since I've only been to their countries by sea (and therefore by day), and there was no opportunity for duelling. Australians are supposed to be decent too. They were banned from the Oktoberfest a number of decades ago because a group of them got so drunk that they pimped a column of buses and drove them wildly around the city. Apparently they're allowed into the city again, these days, so either they've calmed down or they're better at subterfuge. It's a shame I won't be meeting them in Munich this year. Any major or minor drinking culture I have not mentioned goes beyond the stretches of my knowledge and their entry into this manual is left to volunteers.

With that said, I am done. Good luck to those willing to try the sport, and to anyone looking to engage me personally, come and get your ass grilled! As long as you're not Irish or Scottish, I have known and owned your type. Believe it.

How to Outdrink the SCOTTISH

2011-07-12T03:47:00.000-07:00

You can't.

How to Outdrink the IRISH

2011-07-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

I don't have the slightest fucking idea as to what the best way of going about this is, because the Irish are among the very worst beasts you can be confronted with when indulging in this type of sport. They can take beer like it's orange juice and they're fucking animals with the liquors, too. As if their physical abilities weren't terrifying enough, they are also deceptive in appearance: Irish people tend to look harmless, generally being small and/or thin, with nerdy-ish haber-dashery, stuff like glasses or even ties, and a friendly, subdued demeanour. It is all guaranteed to lead you astray. My one attempt at challenging an Irishman involved a bottle of Famous Grouse Whisky and it ended with me being carried home on his shoulders while I babbled to one of the ugliest girls I've ever known how she was 'the nucleus of the universe' or god knows what. The next day I woke up to find most of my bathroom encrusted with vomit, most notably the shower-curtains, a pong which is best left undescribed, and a sense of illness which had something terminal about it. I also found... no, I shall not say what else I was forced to endure that morning. There's some things I'm not ready to disclose to the public.

The experience has put me off challenging other Irishmen since, so this may account for my lack of preparation on the subject of how to outdrink them. I think the best thing you can do is not to bring liquor into it, and especially Whisky, since they own that shit. Guinness is probably best avoided, too. A very careful preparation is required and a full stomach, because you can be sure the conflict will last until late. Territorial considerations may be of help. I think bringing your opponent to an open party, a heavy-handed disco or a gig could come to your advantage, since they strike me as more sedentary drinkers, used to staying in pubs or house-parties during the rain. But this is conjecture, not fact. Also, I've never experimented throwing wine at them, nor have I seen how they take the weed / alcohol combo. Certainly one to try, and I'm looking forward to any results anyone has to share.

Other than that, if you get entanglend in a challenge with one of these potato-eaters, all I can do is wish you good luck.

How to Outdrink the DUTCH (Guest Entry)

2011-07-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to leave out the Dutch, but regrettably I know almost nothing about them as drinkers, because any time I'm there I spend my time getting pancaked on weed like there's no heaven, and the alcohol gets kind of put aside.

So I've asked a friend of mine, an Englishman who resides amid the Oranje, to share his wisdom with us. With many thanks to Adam Walker, here's the wiki on how to outdrink the Dutch!

An explanation of the Dutch diminutive suffix –je i.e bier = beer, biertje = small beer. The dutch always drunk biertjes and this fits in with the national obsession of “gezeligheid” = good company, cosy surroundings, consuming lots of biertjes and little bits of cheese and sausage because all small things are, per definition, gezelig.

Gezeligheid (the act of being gezelig) however, is not just an atmosphere but also a set of behavioural rules, i.e. the acts of being gezelig. Of this set of rules, included is the act of consuming lots of biertjes. Importantly though, the act of consuming beer should not interfere with any of the other rules of gezeligheid. These include stimulating, vigorous, conversation on relevant, contemporary and mutually interesting subjects (1). The combined act of consuming biertjes en masse and maintaining the conversational requirements is considered to be the height of cool.

The result of this is that one cannot simply “outdrink” the dutch. One must simultaneously out-debate one's opponent. One must push them into the back waters of conversation with one’s puncturingly penetratingly insightful political, historical, social or economic points of view until the opponent is left baffled and wondering what more books he can read, where he can travel to, what newspapers he can peruse in order to compete with this new force which he is presented with; wistfully bashing off round after round horse-killingly strong arguments while sucking the foam off another biertje. One must stun your opponent into silence, a silence characterised by awe and self-doubt in which the only act is to quietly drink, until the opponent falls off his stool.

There is no way that you can get the dutch to play a drinking game or engage in any sort of boisterous activity which involves getting pissed. This goes against the rules of gezeligheid. Out drinking the dutch is a biathlon contemporary applied intelligence and drinking stamina which none should undertake lightly.

How to Outdrink the ENGLISH

2011-06-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

England is where I made my bones (or stomach) as a drinker. And I'm glad I learnt the business here, because it's a challenging gazebo indeed.

The English are, as a rule, very competent drinkers, and they always make for tenacious rivals. Members of other populations will frequently give clues as to their own level of drinking ability via their appearance or manner of speech. The English are more subtle. If you find yourself in their country, it is normally very hard to tell whether the person standing in front of you will be unable to recruit himself past the sixth shot of gin, or whether he will take you willy-nilly to where darkness stammers against the edges of the light.

The English are proud of their tradition in beer production and consumption, and they have a right to be. While I hold the Germans in higher esteem, there's something to be said for the obstreperous British spirit of conservation, which has led them to preserve ancient flavours of beer intact as they were hundreds of years ago. Some of their ciders taste so rustic that, after drinking them, one feels like rolling in the mud with pigs. Also, the English can boast the best fruit-beer in the world - a beverage that puritans may scoff at, but fruit-flavouring is in effect a respectable art in itself.

Situated at the crossways between some of the greatest drinking countries in the world, England has developed a rich, diversified tradition of drinkers. Unlike the Germans, they cannot be defeated simply by the use of spirits. They are resilient with pretty much all types of solutions, and they're too wary to be lured into self-defeating combinations (presumably because they always lose at football, so they've developed a habit when it comes to drowning sorrows in drink...). Unlike the Americans, they won't just drink anything they find (unless they're already really really drunk, in which case, hell, I've seen people drinking absinthe out of jam jars...). Rather, they will pour their drinks carefully and in the right order, and no questions asked. They are smart drinkers and they normally have plenty of experience, so outwitting them strategically is always very difficult.

Ah, how we used to roll...

It seems very unlikely you'll outdrink the English purely based on stamina or strategy, and aspiring competitors are advised against challenging them until very confident. Thankfully there is hope, for a route towards efficient victory does exist against the English too.

It took me a while to figure this out, but the English are suckers for drinking games. The Penny, a practice which involves the surreptitious introduction of a penny into a comrade's pint strictly while the latter is holding it in his hands, allowed me to gain numerous victories back when I was still quite the lagger to the natives. Drinking variations of board games, like Cider-Whisky Scrabble, Vodka Risk and Absinthe Trivia (I DARE you!) are very time-consuming, but ultimately rewarding, and they open the door to new dimensions of strategy in terms of how to outdrink the rivals. Circulation drinking, a practice no less common in Germany, is a bit more advanced, but manageable (that being the types of games where you drink in turns, whether from the same pint or different ones). There's also the phantasmagoria of variants of 'Never Have I Ever.' The most popular one among us literary academics was Humiliation, where you mention a book you haven't read, and all those who've read it have to drink. Unlike the idiotic games they have in America, most of this stuff has serious historical roots and demands intelligence, culture and/or quick thinking for one to prevail. It's not just about bouncing a ping pong ball into a pint.

Team-play is helpful, if you intend to challenge the English. Take your mates and train without alcohol in several board games or social games, or even just in penny-ing each other with glasses of water. Once you've mastered the craft - and do make sure you've mastered it, before riding into battle - you'll just need a few weeks of outings to acquaint yourself with the English etiquette. You'll find that they take their games quite seriously and they have a true sense of honour, but they're also cautious, and they won't be drawn into playing if they feel they're being hunted. It will take some time to understand their code, but then you can use it very much to your advantage. I'm not saying it will be easy, but it will definitely give you a fighting chance, the more in proportion to how well you know your game.

An addendum in closing: oddly, English girls make for very poor drinkers. Barring the inevitable exception, mostly involving rather androgynous representatives of the gentle sex, girls in England start vomiting every time more than three glasses of wine are served. Growing up there made for an erratic experience, as half the times we went to the disco with a group, it ended with some girl being carried home like a lion-skin. I'm not sure how to account for this weakness; given the cultural milieu, one would expect them to be miles beyond girls from France or Spain, and on a par with those from America. Instead, they make for no more than tremulous fawns. Go figure.

How to Outdrink the INDIANS

2011-06-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Again, click on the photo to see it in proper size.

There's not much of a boozer culture in India, which is normal, considering the country is so poor. Those who do make it into the drinking arena are worth a word or two, because there's quite a few of them in England nowadays. I became acquainted with my first Indian friends before I actually went to their country, and the cultural connection between them and the English already made itself evident. They're more used to getting stoned than drunk, but when they do drink, they adopt the same boisterous attitude as the Brits.

And yet, while the English have had thousands of years to develop a refined drinking culture, the Indians have only stumbled into the Westernised drinking ways as of very late. Consequently, they have little or no idea of how to handle things. Indians are very easy to outdrink not because they are bad drinkers, per se. It's just that they're such suckers. I once challenged an Indian to a vodka competition and proceeded to substitute the contents of my own bottle with water, then downing triple and quadruple shots while he struggled to follow. He went down like the walls of Constantinople.

I'm not saying you necessarily have to cheat, to beat an Indian. I only did that because I'd legitimately beaten the daylights out of that same guy on a previous drinking competition, one which ended with me and three other people carrying the fatso to his room over four flights of stairs, and instead of acknowledging defeat, he insisted that he'd *won* it. Like the purpose of the game was to be the first to wipe the floor with your lips. So he was calling for punishment, that guy.

But in general, Indians usually destroy themselves with their own hands by choosing the worst possible conditions to drink. They drink in the wrong order, they can't pace themselves, they never know what they're drinking, and they can't recognise a trap or a feint from a mile away. Hell, I remember on one occasion I got drunk in India, I went around the bar telling people I was a medium who'd come to Mumbai in search of a ghost, and I started 'reading minds' and shit. People actually believed that. I predicted the future of a married couple and they were taking me so seriously that I had to stop. Indians are great fun to drink with, and they're among the most hospitable people in the world, you should only be aware that they're highly polemical. If you beat one (and I don't see how the fuck you could fail to do that), you'll probably hear no end of it for weeks. They'll rave ad infinitum on how they were drinking more than you were, how that night they were having a stomach-ache, how they could kick your ass from here to Neptune and back on a Rikshaw, and so on. The solution to this is not that hard, thankfully. Just challenge them and beat them again. Eventually they'll learn to shut the fuck up.

Besides, showing a little wisdom really is in your best interest, because you could hurt yourself if you just play by their rules. I remember on another occasion in Goa we almost fucking killed ourselves by diluting a bottle of whisky into plastic glasses of water, then getting stoned and finally going to sleep in a room with the air-conditioning on. I almost went into hybernation when the temperature outside was 42 degrees Celsius in the shade, if I hadn't woken up twice for an impelling need to vomit, I probably wouldn't be here writing these lines now.

There is no strategy required to beating an Indian. Just start drinking, and watch them stumble on their own idiocies. In a few hundred years they may be proper challengers.

How to Outdrink the AMERICANS

2011-06-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

There can be no doubt that Americans are among the greatest drinkers in the world. Europeans like to act snobbish since these people don't have 'true' drinking cultures as you have in France, Italy, England or Germany, but anyone who has come in touch with the yanks will be able to report acts of savagery almost unparalleled in our countries. Americans don't give any sign of feeling pain, when they drink. Actually, they seem to think it's a good thing. From what I've seen, they tend to go out (or stay in) drinking under the assumption that the acts of vomiting, crawling on the floor and passing out are part of the fun, rather than the price you pay for it. No-one can question their courage. And they're genuinely democratic, too, in that all of this holds true for adolescents and adults, boys and girls, blacks and whites and Asians. Talk about the American dream.

The defining characteristic of the American drinking culture is its unsurpassed vulgarity. Americans will drink beer, rum and coke, vodka, Baileys, amaretto, punch, wine, all in one night. Hell, they'll drink it all from ONE GLASS. They have no discernment and no patience, and most of them are unable to distinguish not so much a barolo from a bordeaux, but a lager from an ale. They're also responsible for the invention of such frankly daft drinking games as beer pong. (Alessandro Baricco has a wonderful article on the American culture of wine. It's so good that it's worth running it through google translator just to get an inkling of what he says, but I already know that no-one is going to do that).

Partly all of this is the source of the American strength. From youth, these people are used to drinking anything. And perhaps it's natural courage. Who's to know.

How do you outdrink Americans? It must be kept in mind, when challenging them, that these people are the kings of mixing. There's normally no surer way of being sick than drinking wine, then beer, then sambuca, then wine again. The Americans can do that seamlessly. They can throw weed into the equation, too. However, I've found they don't hold so well under trials of discipline. Take them to a social occasion where only one type of drink is available, and they usually fold earlier than their norm. Wine in particular seems to hurt them considerably, when taken on its own. (Liquors, on the other hand, they can stand even on their own, so shots are best avoided when facing an American). I suspect that one of these yahoos wouldn't fare too well at the Oktoberfest, since this is one of the purest, most pristine drinking revivals you can find. There's beer, in a million varieties, and only beer - a true ceremony for puritans (and so typical of the Germans).

So the best way to handle an American is to demand that the contest be held under controlled conditions (exactly the opposite of how to beat the Germans or Russians, you may remark). Americans usually don't know their drinks well enough to understand what type of difference this will make, so you can play to your strengths and to the weaknesses of your fellow drinker. Make sure that only beer, or only wine, be served for the duration of the night. Then take a deep breath, and keep your head under control. Try not to move about too much, as Americans are quite used to partying and dancing while drinking, so this would work in their favour. A session of drinking Scrabble, or a drinking game involving watching a TV show and taking a shot every time a certain word is said, will do just fine. Otherwise, there's the tested method of finding a topic your particular American is passionate about (the health-care system, TS Eliot, fundamentalist Christians, whatever) and tease them a little about it. They'll start yapping and they're guaranteed to stick to their chair for a good two hours.

Make no mistake about it, this is still going to be a serious challenge. The most practiced Americans have tremendous drinking stamina and they will be hard to best no matter what drink is being poured. Still, as long as you're fighting, you might as well set up the ideal conditions for yourself, and razing the drinking differences is the best way to do that.

How to Outdrink the BRAZILIANS

2011-06-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

Metabolically speaking, Brazilians are not very tough drinkers. They can take more alcohol than the Italians or the French in most cases, but they're still quite far from the podium. This may be either the product or the cause, or both, behind the fact that their drinks are quite bad. The most popular Brazilian beer is Skoll, which is frankly crap. They do make some excellent Caipirinha, and their summer cocktails in general are awesome, but the more 'masculine' drinks are somewhat lacking in finesse. And so they're not among the greater drinkers, at least not physically.

What fucks you up about the Brazilians is that they're such unbridled party animals. The Oktoberfest is a pretty massive party in Europe, I think the biggest one we have if only because it goes on for a month with no interruptions, but the Carnival of Rio DWARVES the Oktoberfest easily. Brazilians will dance and shout and jump around so much that it's hard to keep up even if you're sober. In the hours of the night approaching morning, you're usually dead, even if you've had no more than a pint an hour. And I'm just talking about what happens in regular parties, not in Rio. I imagine Rio must kill you before midnight.

The technique adopted by the Brazilians is to wear you out with their samba and aerobics, so that your body can't keep up with what is usually a normal - even slow-going - drinking rate. The answer to this is to control yourself and not get taken into the general revelry, or at least hit some brakes when you feel your breath coming short. Even better, face them on your own grounds. Have the party at your place or at your own pubs. If they insist on playing you at some gig or festival, and the smarter ones will, ask to meet up a few hours before, just to get started, and spend those two hours drinking at a strong rate. This will hit the Brazilian much harder and give you a head-start.

Brazilian can surprise you when they're playing at home, but most of their risk factor can be neutralised at the outset if you know how to take them. They're a bit like the Tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park: they're pretty harmless if only you can stay still. So stay still.

How to Outdrink the RUSSIANS

2011-06-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Editorial note: click on the pics to view in full, they appear not to fit in the column!

Visiting St Petersburg before drinking vodka...

Russians have a tremendous reputation, to the point that most people don't even include them when discussing comparative merits related to drinking. It's like they're on a podium of their own, disconnected from us modest Europeans in the same way that their language is abstruse and maybe even hostile to our own.

After having spent some time in the city of St Petersburg, and even having learnt a little of their idiom, I can say that their reputation is only partly deserved. The full picture needs some elucidation. I can testify that the Russians drink spirits with a fervour and a stamina no-one in Europe, or anywhere else I know, have a hope in hell of matching. The prime lubricant is, of course, vodka. The way they down it is insane, and that's the end of it. Shot after shot after shot after shot after shot. And while they do assume a certain euphoria, little if anything else in their demeanour would reveal them to be drunk. They don't stagger, they don't slur, they don't fall down, they don't lose the thread of their conversations, they don't stop doing whatever it is they're doing. They do earn a killer breath, true, and they dance like idiots, but the latter is only because they don't know how to dance - their technique is poor of its own accord, with no need for the inebriation to explicate it.

They're very strong on other liquors as well. Cognac, brandy, rum, you name it. The heavier, the better, usually that's the rule. Sweeter spirits, of the type yours truly most enjoys, are considered to be toothpaste, if that.

What really surprised me about the Russians, and what makes them not just accessible but even relatively easy to outdrink, is that they can't take beer. Other drinks of lighter kind, like cheap champagne, are also a barrier for them. I know this sounds absurd, but I've seen it happen with my own eyes, and with multiple individuals. Hell, I even drank a few of them under the table myself. On one occasion on the Nievska, we went out three of us for a pub crawl and within the third beer they were already whoozing. I couldn't understand what the fuck was going on with them as the day before I'd seen them down a bottle of whisky between the two of them and they were waltzing down the Prospect. (This is another common practice which, when going out drinking with Russians, you must at all costs AVOID: they usually buy a bottle of heavy spirits at a supermarket on the way to wherever they're going, and they down it as they walk, so that by the time they get there, it's all finished. Try drinking with them at that point, and you'll be so drunk by the time you get to your destination that you probably won't be allowed inside, never mind start a duel).

It was only later in the night that I figured that what had messed them up had been the beer. They were so unaccustomed to it, that even a couple of litres had sent them flying. Russians are the diametric opposite of the Germans: while the latter can take obscene amounts of beer, but they faint if someone opens a bottle of limoncello in the vicinities and they perceive its scent, the Russians can imbibe enough vodka (et similia) to kill an adult mule, but they flake when having to handle beer. More than that, they don't even have the culture, the understanding or the conception of what beer is. There's one video where I'm downing a litre-pint (a rather common exercise at the Oktoberfest), and it happened to be shot in Petersburg. You've got to believe that the people around me were literally gaping, even though my pace was much of an adagio. They reacted just like I did when I first saw them downing vodka, as it were.

...and strolling through St Petersburg AFTER vodka. Yeah, that's snow

When drinking with a Russian, take care not to begin with the spirits until as late as possible. Demand that no drinking should start until it is 'officially' sanctioned, that is to say, at the pub. Then buy the first and maybe the second rounds of drinks yourself, and use the auctoritas awarded to you by your generosity to make these beer or cider. Try organising a drinking game involving several glasses of beer and the downing of them (this will increase the likelihood that everyone will stick to this beverage later on, too).

Keep to these rules, and you'll see that the egregious reputation of the Russians doesn't make for such an invincible dragon after all.

How to Outdrink the GERMANS

2011-06-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows that the Germans rule the world in terms of beer. They have the best types of it in the world BY FAR, golden nectars that have not so much a taste as a song, and a real respect for it to boot. A home-made brew will rifle itself down your throat with an ease second only to that of mineral water. Much of the Germans' success as beer producers lies in their ability to innovate (a talent less marked, I feel, in their most obvious competitors, the British) as well as a willingness to integrate new cultures and ideas into their production methods. Pilsner, for instance, was originally brewed by the Czechs. It was only in the twentieth century that the Germans reabsorbed their methods and industry, and presented them to the world, resulting in their most popular beer, and in my opinion their best. Their 'athletes' are, understandably, very well prepared.

When I first went to live in that jolly Canaan of the malt consumer, back in fall 2008, I thought that I would never reach up to their level. Germans can drink beer in a way that nobody else in the globe can, amen. Even the Americans, who are notoriously strong with this beverage, are nowhere near their raw talent. I have seen Germans drink so many beers together as to baffle a restaurant sink, and show no sign after it other than a mild reddening of the cheeks. If you're thinking of undoing a German over this beverage, you can throw the sponge now.

A little practice in the field, however, proved to me that the act of outdrinking a German is not at all as impossible as it may seem. In fact, their strength also happens to be their major weakness - and one, I may add happily, that is quite easy to exploit. Germans are mechanical locomotives when it comes to drinking beer, but they seem to collapse very quickly if you throw a couple of tequilas or vodkas inbetween the pints. So all you have to do, really, is mix their drinks a little. Shuffle your cards. Mess up the clogs in their stomachs. On the whole, once you know their secret, it's actually quite easy.

Notice who's in the lead

One sentence that I've found to be broadly true for the German people is, 'They don't do X, but when they do X, oh man...'. For instance, they don't party much by comparison with, say, the Latin countries. But when they DO party, they throw some shit to remember. No doubt the best example of this is the Oktoberfest, the world's greatest beer-festival and one of the craziest, most fucking awesome things you can find or do in Europe. And the probate sentence is true of drinking as well. The Germans, contrary to expectations, don't have much in the way of a drinking (sub)culture, but when they *do* drink, they drink like hell. And they do this by drinking beer. They specialise. Beer is their chosen discipline. Their weakness is their failure to reach outside that discipline. Despite being second to none with malt-based beverages, they have little range or resilience outside of them.

If a German challenges you, accept the challenge. Drink two or three beers with him, then throw a few shots of your preferred liquor into it. Keep bringing them at regular intervals inbetween the pints, increasing the gradation if necessary, and the sausage-eater should be down over the medium term. Prost!

How to Outdrink the FRENCH

2011-06-18T05:21:00.001-07:00

New series starting on my blog from today. I was pondering on what I had learnt by travelling around the world and how I could help others by that knowledge, and I thought this brief tactical manual on how to outdrink the different people of the world could come in aid of many people I know. Nay, even most of them (you know who you are).

So follow this brief guide over its panorama of the globe, and, barring the inevitable blunder, you'll soon be able to outdrink the planet!

One entry every two turnings of the sun, my good dandies. Today we're starting with my immediate neighbours, the French.

HOW TO OUTDRINK THE FRENCH

I'm going to start with the French if only because everybody seems to have an axe to grind with these guys. The English dislike them because these two people spent a hundred years killing each other (and eventually the Brits lost to an army led by an adolescent girl), the Italians dislike them due to antagonisms related to modern football, the Americans dislike them because George Bush convinced his country that the French have some kind of moral duty to send their eighteen-year-olds to get torn limb from limb in Iraq, the Russians dislike them because they still haven't got over Napoleon, and so on. Apparently even the French dislike the French, seen how a solid half of their modern art and literature, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud onwards, concerns hating their own society and the people surrounding them (the most recent I've heard is singer Damien Saez, whom I actually really enjoy, and the first chorus from the first song in his first album goes 'Another night and the French youth / goes out they'll have fun / because nothing here makes sense / and so we go dance / we act like we're happy / so we can close our eyes in peace / but nothing will be better tomorrow').

I'm starting with the French for another reason too, namely, that they're one of the lower 'difficulty levels.' As with other Mediterranean cultures, like Italy and Spain, and with no offence to anyone, these people are pussies when it comes to drinking. Drinking is more of an art than a sport to them. They know their wines backwards, like the Italians, and they really *understand* a drink when they bring it to their lips. In this sense, I mean it almost as a compliment when I say that French (and Italians) aren't good drinkers: they're just excessively sophisticated. They have too much respect for their glass to just down it.

Most French people can be steamrolled by a moderately competent or resilient drinker. In fact, if anyone aspires to learn how to drink and is willing to undergo a pilgrimage, I think the best place to start from is France. They're soft and they're friendlier than most people believe. A perfect training grounds.

Truth be told, they wouldn't even make it into this list if it weren't that to go drinking in France also involves some booby traps which have to be avoided, and which the newcomer has to be warned of. For, while the majority of the French couldn't outdrink a lizard of the desert, there *are* a few occasional individuals you'll meet in France who actually have the devil's stomach inside them, and these I shall refer to as the Elites.

A classical Elite, on the left.

Normally a population's drinking ability is distributed over a Gaussian curve, with lows at both ends and a peak at the average value (say, six pints on an empty stomach for the limit). France is tricky because these parameters do not apply. Instead, the individuals at the further extreme do not decrease exponentially in number as the pints go up. Your risk of finding one of the 'exceptions,' if your stay protracts itself, is considerable. The trick to outdrinking the French, then, is to identify your adversary before leaping head-first into battle. If the opponent displays indicators like a well-trimmed beard, stylish clothes, and a tendency to use words like 'aesthetical' in earnest, then finish him off. It will not take much of an effort. If other signs suggest to you that he may be an Elite, plan your approach with greater caution.

How do you recognise an Elite? Fortunately they are quite easy to spot. An Elite is a fat French man almost always above the age of 25, walking with bleary eyes and a constant big smile which he will flash whenever he sees you. His first gesture to greet you is a brutal pat in the back. He usually has an ill-shaved beard and reddened eyes, his room is a mess beyond reckoning, he picks his nose when alone AND in public, and his shoes look like something forgotten in a river two-hundred years ago and recovered after a war. My own first Elite went by the name of Stevo, a recluse who worked as a carpenter and lived by one of my best mates back when I was in the French Caribbean. We used to meet up for Pro Evolution Soccer sessions with beer and joints (lots and lots of joints) and on our first real session I made the mistake of underestimating him. I can't remember exactly what happened but judging by the photo in which I'm passed out on the carpet with fake moustache drawn onto my face, it seems things didn't turn out in my favour.

How do you deal with an Elite? It's not as hard as it may sound. Despite being drinkers of great stamina, Elites are normally incredibly stupid. As a consequence, they tend to break whatever rules you set up in the drinking challenge, but *to their own disadvantage*. Any smart drinker can just proceed at his/her own pace and let the Elite undo himself with his own hands. Don't hurry, let him slide into his fuck-ups without protesting, and you should make it just fine. And they won't even protest on the next day (unlike the Indians).

In conclusion, then, France is a great training ground and the French in general are an easy target to take down, but unseasoned visitors should beware of being lulled into complacency, at the risk of running into nasty surprises. Most commonly, these are represented by the Elites, but expect other contingencies to provide danger as well.

Also, have a modicum of care with French girls. They're much more able drinkers than their partners may suggest.

FIFTH AND ULTIMATE COMEDIC PRINCIPLE -- CLASSICAL COMEDY

2011-06-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

I said that I was going to make this particular entry simple and I'm going to keep my word. I can write no more than a few words on this.

Classical comedy is the finest and most sophisticated type of humour. The Greeks invented it, as far as I can tell, and this for obvious reasons. Classical comedy shares an intimate link with tragedy. Much like lyric and epic poetry are the mirror of each other, so comedy and tragedy share the same structure, inverting only the order of the signifiers. You can't discover one without stumbling onto the other.

What is Classical comedy? It is an elaborate form of representation based on complex situations involving quid pro quos of various circumstance. It is also necessarily based on dialogue. A typical, simple example of a comedic situation is the 'boyfriend hero' sketch: a guy takes a girl out and sets up a fake aggression in agreement with a friend, so he can pretend to beat up the make-believe aggressor and look like a hero to the girl. But on the night when they do go out, a prison convict escapes and stumbles upon them in the street. The boyfriend, thinking this is his friend, starts acting all tough and even looks like he will kick the shit out of the convict.

The sketch can go in both directions from here - either the boyfriend beats up the convict, or the other way round. Differently from regular jokes, though, there is no punch-line here. There is not a moment of 'oh, ah,' when you actually laugh, or when you suddenly get it. It's the entire situation which is funny.

Like irony, this is a type of humour easy to recognise, but hard to pin down. I'm not going to write a full article on it now, not because it's simple, but on the contrary, because it's way too big a topic. As a concept, it is not clear enough in my mind. And if I started on this, I'd have to write about tragedy, too, and I can't do that. Besides, I intend to work on this in the future, so there's no loss if I don't lay my thoughts down yet. It's just postponed. (Incidentally, when the moment does come that I decide to write about comedy and tragedy in the same way that I wrote about the lyric and the epic, all these notes I've thrown down on why we laugh are going to prove considerably useful. This thought, needless to add, was one of the main drives I had when I was writing them in the first place).

For now, though, I'm going to leave the question of Classical comedy here. Only for now.

AND NOW... SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS!

I've attempted to sketch out the core mechanisms of laughter as I understand them. No doubt my results are partial and rough, but I hope I haven't missed out on anything major, at least within the framework that I've projected. Suggestions on questions I've left open, or jokes which cannot be explained according to the principles I described, are all very welcome.

But one thing we must always remember, when thinking about comedy, is that humour is almost always compound humour. It is extremely rare to get a pure Absurd joke, for instance. And while you can get a pure Fail in the Fail compilations on Youtube, and some pure Taboo quips in the type of sex jokes which go around in primary school, even these things are rare. Fail and Taboo are themselves usually integrated into broader sketches which make use of other principles as well. Here's an example:

Your mama's so fat that when I was fucking her, I fell off the bed, rolled three times, and I was still on top of her.

This is a very simple joke. It belongs to the genre of 'You're so X' insults, which is itself elementary in its construction ('You're so ugly that when you throw a boomerang, it won't even come back to you,' 'You're so white that when you pass through a prism, more prisms come out', etc.). But notice how many levels this one joke works on. Let's list them.

a.) It's Fail humour, because it's an insult. An insult excludes an individual from our group, while reinforcing our own bonding (and of course, the joke isn't funny if it's being addressed to you or to someone you care for).

b.) It's Absurd, because how could someone be so fat as to cover bed and floor? Note that what distinguishes this from mere hyperbole is that the language *breaks our expectations*. Saying 'your mama's so fat that she's as big as the whole world' isn't funny, because it's a predictable use of language. Anyone can make an hyperbole of this type. The prior joke, instead, projects a grammar scenario which leads to an outcome we did not expect. It is broken expectations that define the Absurd, even in language.

c.) It's taboo. I mean, obviously. There's fucking involved.

Just about the only type of humour this 'simple' joke doesn't activate is irony. But this is only because irony is already a compound, since it needs a Fail and an Absurd to be activated. For the rest, we've got it all.

And on that anti-climactic note, I'm closing my thoughts on the funnies. Whew! I need a drink!

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 4 – IRONY

2011-06-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

A recollection, to begin with. A couple of years ago I was working in Disneyland Paris and on one particular work-day - I forget the circumstance - I asked myself what exactly was irony. I usually reach a definition quickly when I pose myself these questions, but this time I found the word to be recalcitrant, and the more I thought about it, the less clearly could I see the concept taking shape. The funny thing was that for all my difficulties of definition, I felt like I 'knew' what irony was. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but some part of my brain understood it perfectly, without assigning any words to it.

Taking it as an opportunity to start some conversations (something useful when you're practically surrounded by top-models), I asked around my British colleagues. It was amusing to witness that everyone seemed to be in my same situation: they seemed to 'know' what irony was quite well, in the sense that they could recognize an ironic event with ne'er the batting of an eyelid, but they had no idea how to give a concise definition of it. If you think it's easy, try for yourself. Close this article for the moment, think up a definition of irony, and post it in the comments section below. I'm genuinely very interested in reading what anyone comes up with.

As for the dictionary, its authors seem to think that irony is another word for sarcasm: the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend. Yyyeeaahhh, except that there's nothing *ironic* about the someone telling you 'How nice', there's only something *sarcastic*. The same dictionary then goes on to add that irony differs from sarcasm in greater subtlety and wit. This is simply not true. Irony is not a milder version of sarcasm. It's when you're sweltering in your garden because you don't have a tree for shade, and you don't have shade because you cut down your tree in the winter to be warm. Sarcasm, in paragon, is simply a case when you're sweltering in your garden under the sun and you say 'How chilly.' (For those who want the full dictionary definition, you can find it here. It's worth reading the whole thing).

At all events, the fact that everyone seemed to know 'instinctively' what irony was, meant that examples came aplenty. Perhaps the most synthetic and useful case-study was this:

Irony: having one-hundred forks, and needing a spoon.

Given my inability to come up with a rapid explanation, I decided to work on the example instead, breaking it down and trying to find how it produced this mysterious effect we call irony, recognizably distinct from other forms of humour, yet so much more difficult to pin down.

Two years later, at the moment of retrieving and expounding my conclusions, I remain surprised at just how complicated and sophisticated a concept this is. So complicated, in fact, that there's no way of just cutting straight into the matter of things. It will require some back-tracking.

Let's start with a very common type of linguistic humour, the confusion of two different (even opposed) meanings for the same word under a given circumstance. You say something, and it means something else (like the time I read of my university's 'mandarin society' having a reunion and I went there thinking I'd find fruit... never mind). The most simple example is given by a certain type of puns. Puns are jokes based on employing two different words (or groups of words) which are pronounced in the same way, like deer/dear, whine/wine, or 'no pun in ten did' / 'no pun intended.' You can't really write down a pun, because the spelling gives away the intended meaning and therefore the joke - the humour, after all, lies in the confusion of the two meanings. Here's a quick case-study:

A man walks into a bar with a giraffe, and they both get drunk. The giraffe falls to the floor, unconscious, and the man heads for the exit. The barman says, 'What, are you just going to leave that lying there?' And the man replies, 'it's not a lion, it's a giraffe.'

When spoken out loud, the humour lies in the failure of communication inherent in the words lying/lion – it was supposed to mean one thing, but it ended up meaning another. Though this specific example contains an Absurd element in the idea of a man walking into a bar with a giraffe, the mechanism is essentially Fail humour. We laugh at the failure of communication, especially when the joke includes characters who embody that failure. The laughter is gregarious, because it depends on our shared understanding of the real meaning of the words. 'He,' the character in the joke, doesn't understand it, and 'we' do. Even if there is no 'he,' and there's only the linguistic confusion, the principle still holds: the effect of understanding the joke, of 'getting it,' of being 'in on it,' results in our approbation as part of a group - a fact which we signal with laughter. (An example of a character-less joke would be the immortal classic: 'What do you call a deer with no eyes? No idea / No-eye deer'. Still funny, and still for the same principle).

Now suppose that I were to label the meanings of the two words by means of letters. The meaning of 'lying' is A, and the meaning of 'lion' is B. The mechanism of the pun, then, is that of producing a sentence (or a whole situation) which builds towards meaning A, and then closing it with a word that carries the meaning B. This results in an incongruence, which we can express as A ≠ B.

This formula is Fail algebra reduced to the bone. A does NOT equal B, i.e., it *fails* to equal B. The guy *should* understand 'lying,' but he understands 'lion.'

Here it is... a giraffe.

Let's turn to irony now. It is a type of compound humour, which is why I've kept it for last, and it always includes both a Fail and an Absurd element. The Absurd aspect is rather subtle and we shall come to it later, while the Fail can be analysed readily. In our example of the 'hundred forks and a spoon,' the 'failure,' the problem, the 'bad' thing, is needing a spoon and not having it. This in itself is a Fail, and therefore potentially funny, as long as it's happening to someone else. Having the one-hundred forks only highlights the incapacity of the subject to fulfill his desire and thus makes it funnier. This is given by the identity that subsists between forks and spoons: both are metal tools for eating, but they differ in the specific types of food. Without this identity, there is no irony. It would not be ironic if I said, for instance, that a guy has a hundred cars and he needs a spoon, though we're still talking about the same exact Fail.

Now if we express this by letters, as we did with puns, we notice a similar but more complex process at work. An object carries implications A and B, and another carries B and C (the 'implications' that I am talking about are usually semantic in nature, but I don't think this has to be a rule, and I really don't want to haggle over such details). Both objects share implication B, but they differ in that one carries A and the other C. Graphically, I shall refer to this as FIGURE ONE:

FORKS:.....A --....-- B --...........
SPOONS:............-- B --....-- C --

If we assume the meaning of B as 'tool for eating,' we see the commonality between forks and spoons which allows for irony: they both share that meaning. If we express A as 'eating steak' and C as 'eating soup,' we find the points of divergence. The presence of A elucidates the meaning of C - it is easier to perceive what the Fail of 'needing a spoon' is, when you have the dialectical opposite of the spoon's function in the same sentence. Greater clarity and emphasis then falls on the Fail. It's as though the first letter is the power of the last.

Now, the fail in itself can be represented like this:

B ≠ C

We see that the 'needing a spoon' situation makes for a self-sufficient fail. As stated, the forks are connected to the spoon by sharing the meaning B, and by bringing A into the equation, they further show / enlarge the chasm between B and C. I say this because B, as we can see in Figure One, is perceived as a sort of halfway line, a 'bridge,' between A and C. It follows that the greater the distance between A and C, the greater the perceived distance between B and C, because B is simply the midway point between the two.

So the more A and C are disconnected, the more the distance between A, B and C appears great. And since the measure of the Fail depends on the degree of disconnection between B and C (having a 'tool for eating', and then failing to 'eat soup'), it follows that the more imaginative and unexpected the relation between A and C, the greater the Fail - and therefore, *the greater the irony.* This is, by the way, where the Absurd element comes into the irony compound. The distance between A and C is established by breaking our expectations, bringing together two things we did not expect to have an obvious connection, and anything that breaks our expectations to produce comedy necessarily belongs to the Absurd category we discussed in earlier posts.

Irony is able to take a very simple Fail and make it much more powerful. The Fail multiplies its effects by itself in proportion to how distant and creative the meaning A will be in relation to C. At the formulaic level, irony can then be expressed like this:

(B ≠ C)A

[And a big fuck you to blogspot for not retaining superscript text from Word... the A is meant to be small and high-up, like a power]. Not that any of this is actual mathematics, obviously - there isn't a quantitative relation between A and C! It's just my favourite way of representing it.

Irony 'activates' humour in the same way that puns do. Puns present a sentence where a word is supposed to mean one thing, but it signifies another. In the ironic case of forks and spoons, both carry implication B of 'eating,' but they differ in the specific function (A and C, 'eating steaks' and 'eating soup'). So starting to speak of forks is meant to signify 'eating' (B), but in reality this signification is made impossible when you mention that you need spoons. The failure of communication between forks and spoons, connected by the concept B just like 'lying' and 'lion' are connected by having identical sound, results in the powering of the inherent Fail and therefore the humour. Irony is a mode of comedy structurally similar to simple linguistic jokes, except that the signs it employs are not words, but real objects and events. Forks and spoons are not two different meanings of the same phoneme, they are two different objects orbiting around one same idea. As a result, it can do more than just producing a Fail of communication; it takes a real-world Fail and brings it to the nth power by couching it in the mechanisms of a communication Fail. It multiplies a real Fail by a communication Fail, if you see what I mean.

To test it, try switching the signifiers: a great warrior who asks one-hundred swords to be forged so he can defend himself from the enemy and then dies of starvation because there's no more iron for the forging of a spoon dies an ironic death (this is known as poetic irony, to be precise, because of the moral lessons inherent in its little parable).* And so it is similarly ironic, in this context, if one has one-hundred battle-swords and needs a spoon. 'Sword' and 'spoon' both share meaning B of 'iron tools,' but they are distinct in their purposes A and C, 'warmongering' and 'eating.' Admittedly the commonality in B is weaker, which means that the irony of the whole thing is not as immediate as that in the forks/spoons example. Notwithstanding that, the same formula / principle holds with different objects, as long as they retain a commonality of meaning at the level of B, and an incongruence at the levels A and C.

Fuck me. This was one difficult article to write. Next for the final entry - a brief consideration on the ultimate comedic principle, and some closing thoughts. Believe it or not, it's going to be something very simple.

* The irony is not lost on me that I am discussing the word 'irony' in the context of a story about iron. The irony, of course, lies not in the pun iron/irony, as much as in the fact that it occurred precisely while I was trying to discuss irony. This resulted simultaneously in an identity and an incongruence between the language employed and the object being discussed. The crossover, if it really needs spelling out, occurs as follows. The fact that I'm trying to 'master' irony (by explaining it) and instead end up unwittingly its victim makes for Fail 1. The linguistic Fail of 'irony' being supposed to mean 'a form of humour' and instead standing for 'belonging to iron' is Fail 2, and it is what takes Fail 1 and multiplies it by itself. This double combo of Fails is what makes me *perform* irony, rather than just talking about it. The two Fails contain each other, and they multiply each other's respective values.

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 3 - TABOO HUMOUR

2011-05-16T06:11:00.000-07:00

The third comedic principle is fairly well-known, but a little awkward to explain.

Succinctly: we laugh when a taboo is broken. Freud defines a 'taboo' as something that is simultaneously desired and prohibited. Since 99% of what is desired and prohibited in our culture involves sex, it explains why so many of our jokes are based on sex in various forms, either explicitly or by allusion - or, should I say, they are about FUCKING.

The word 'fuck' is already a case of Taboo humour, like all swear words. But fuck is the most important of them all: it signifies the object of desire, and simultaneously stands as a prohibited signifier. We cannot say fuck, anymore than we can do fuck (although of course, we do both - and if we can't do one, we do more of the other). And so the use of foul language becomes an automatic joke, one which irreverent comedies will integrate with gusto (South Park, for example, which puts its endless cussing in the mouth of children).

Consider the fact that an infinity of our jokes are simply 'other ways' of performing the FUCK word, that is to say, stories of people having sex liberally and in violation of all possible laws: oral and anal, polygamy, adultery, incest, bestiality, occasionally rape, sex in churches, in public offices, in schools, in public, in elevators, in the street, on highways and planes, or inversely in scenarios where laws are abrogated, as in far-off islands, in jungles, in forests, in deserts. In all of these jokes, the laughter (or punch line) occurs at the moment when the law is violated. We laugh when hearing all these stories, because we like (to) FUCK.

The things you find on the internet...

Now the question of why we laugh at all of this is a little more subtle. Not everything that gives us pleasure elicits laughter: we also like to eat or feel the open air, but we don't laugh at this. For that matter, we don't laugh at genuine sexual excitation, like seeing a hot partner taking his/her clothes off. In fact, we've stated that we laugh to express an alliance. So where's the alliance here?

In Fail humour, we laugh at the person failing because we are excluding him/her from our alliance. In the Taboo, we laugh WITH the person who breaks the taboo because that person is giving us what we want. We grow up under a repressive social law, by necessity; when someone starts saying fuck or having sex, it shows to us that we can do it too. It liberates us. We consolidate our alliance in the novel social order which finds its fulcrum, or its leader, in the first violator of the taboo. This social order in turn will become repressive as the alpha figures emerge and establish their dominance over the available resources. In less abstract terms, this historically happens in human communities when males grow and establish their 'possession' over the females (first by marrying them, and then by becoming fathers). It is for this reason that old people are far more rarely amused (and more easily insulted) by Taboo humour than the young. It's adolescents especially who laugh at programs with swear words and who go see films with lots of soft nudity, incidental sex and all the stuff which defines pants movies like American Pie, Road Trip, Scary Movie and an infinity of others.

In passing, this is why in my previous entry I refused to define films such as those by the Wayans brothers (Scary Movie, I mean) as samples of the Absurd - because they contain all sorts of other stuff and they could just as easily be called samples of Taboo humour. Read back on the other entries or wait for the next ones, and you'll see there's no type of comedic principle which isn't reabsorbed in the Wayans / Mel Brookes / Leslie Nielsen comedies.

Now, I said that we laugh with the person breaking the taboo to express our alliance with him/her - we want to be included in his/her new social order, so we can break the taboo as well. This is how things must have been in primordial times, and why laughter evolved to respond to the presence/allusion of sex. But since the rules of these primordial times have long since failed to apply exclusively, as we saw in the evolutionary futility of Absurd humour, the 'person' in question doesn't have to exist. Specifically in representation, a taboo can be broken without anyone being there to break it, much like a sketch performed by actors can activate the Fail principle without anyone actually failing. The taboo-destroyer doesn't have to be there, or at least s/he can be in the background, like the film director who produces the movie (but really, his/her presence is immaterial... even if we don't know that person at all, or even know that s/he exists, we will laugh all the same).

The subject of representation combined with sex inevitably brings our minds to pornography. This is a bit of a special case and it's worth saying a few words about it. There's certainly lots of liberated sex in there, but it hardly qualifies as comedy. We don't laugh when watching pornography. The point is that porn is about enacting a fantasy, not violating a law; in the space of the fantasy, there ARE no laws, except for that of the will of the fantasiser. In order for there to be a law, you must acknowledge an Other. In a fantasy, and therefore in pornography, the self regresses into a private sphere where there is no Other person and the whole natural world goes and works exactly according to the self's laws. What makes porn interesting for our purposes is that even though pornographic representation isn't Taboo humour, porn itself is a taboo object and therefore makes for the stuff of jokes in films and comedies of this type. So even though reading porn isn't funny, seeing someone reading porn is; this is invariably combined with a Fail joke, and as a result we get the sketch of someone being caught reading porn, or some 'loser' whose loser-ness is defined precisely by his reading porn (a paradoxical combo: we laugh at the Fail of the loser who reads porn, and because of the fact that suddenly porn is allowed to us!).

Taboo humour is more than just sex, though. We've got endless jokes involving copulation, but we've also got a wealth of them involving just shit, piss, vomit, farting and all sorts of other disgusting stuff, and these work according to the very same principle. Unsurprisingly, they are all considered together to be obscene jokes. Why are THESE things funny? They're not as obvious as the sex, but they're still objects of taboo.

Cum is not too hard to explain, because it's metonymic for sex, so of course it would be Taboo humour. Also quite easy to explain is burping - it's the liberation of a physical need which is usually prohibited by the rules of good manners (an expression of the overarching social order). Now by extension, much like we can explain burping, we can similarly explain farting, and we can extend this to explain shit. We want to shit wherever we like, but it's not allowed. Also note that the anus, along with the mouth and the sexual organs, is one of the erogenous zones of the body and the infant learns to associate it to pleasure very early.

This is why we laugh at disgusting things, provided that they're related to the liberation of our physical processes - something disgusting is a violation of an order, and therefore of a law. In this sense the Taboo principle activates humour even when there's no bodily involvement. Blasphemy, insulting the monarchy or the church, bad manners, politically incorrect humour of all types also falls under our category. The film Borat recently gave us a very clean example. The guy does nothing over the course of the film other than violate codes of good manners and behaviour, be it verbally or physically. The higher the authority he is insulting, the greater the Taboo that is being broken - and therefore the funnier the joke.

One more thing must be said before coming to a close. I've tried to keep psychoanalysis out of this series as much as possible, but here it's impossible not to bring it in. I mentioned defecation as an example of Taboo humour because it reflects our desire to release our bowels wherever and whenever we want. But in reality the desire that we are talking about is not a desire to defecate per se. Rather, the act of defecation is symbolic for a greater desire for unbounded physical liberty, what Freud calls the Pleasure Principle, that is to say, the possibility of satisfying every urge and desire instantly. In this sense, our desire is so chtonic that it is not even about sex. The taboo always throws back to the one same urge, the same subconscious projection: the body with no confines, no law and no restriction - the body, indeed, as its own law.

This can also be formulated as the Dionysian principle, at the heart of all Dionysian values, symbolised by the O. (It may seem that I'm going out on a limb here, but people who have read my work know how important Apollo and Dionysos are to me...) It follows that taboo humour is represented by a breach of Apollonian values (themselves symbolised by the I), which is the same thing as an affirmation of Dionysian ones. The two things are not in conflict - indeed, the breach and the affirmation occur simultaneously in the same act or gesture.

Dionysos. It always goes back to him

Apollo and Dionysos were first formulated by Nietzsche as a more functional duality to understand humanity, history, representation or whatever stuff 'wisdom' is made of than the age-old one of Good and Evil (two concepts which Nietzsche famously disbelieved in). Apollo and Dionysos do not correspond to good and evil, but they both have positive and negative aspects, and both can stand for 'good' or 'evil' according to the circumstance. In the case of Dionysos, the aspects of this dualism are wonderfully illuminated by the taboo principle. On the positive side, there is the sheer euphoria of fucking, the irreproducible, self-sufficient inebriation of the orgasm, of laughing till you think you'll die, of getting drunk, a sensual epiphany which at its peak is transcendent of all morals and laws, and before which any form of order and difference - even language - falls away and becomes redundant. On the negative side, there is the horror of a world where everything is base and featureless, where all possible ideals and good feelings are dragged down into an equal mud by the howling power of obscene jokes, where you can not say "I love you" or "Let us be friends" without instant peals of derision echoing all around you. Any pleasure or beauty that is passing and temporal is inherently Dionysian, the more so in proportion to its brevity, while the nightmare of the Dionysian world is that nothing is durable or permanent (exactly the opposite is true of Apollo, where every good thing is timeless and transcendent, but never actual and present). The mad god, blessing and cursing with the same hand, on the same altar, at the same ceremony - this is Dionysos.

It will be remarked that taboo humour is much more explicit now than ever before. There's more obscenity and more images of cum and shit in our films and TV than there's ever been, and by far. Needless to say, this has prompted much concern about the 'degradation of our morals,' that age-old cliche' that once-dominant social groups use to bemoan their loss of power. I'm not sure if I've ever read of an age or a country in which people said that morals, culture and society were on the up, even marginally so (perhaps it's only ever been the case under totalitarian governments...). For what it's worth, though, I see no reason to worry. Taboo humour has the power to degrade ideals only to the extent that these ideals have the power to affirm themselves. Debasing humour has become more aggressive and liberated only because the rhetoric of the dominant ideologies has itself turned increasingly offensive. When films and books and TV become more persuasive (and violent) in telling us that we should go to war, buy their products, wear their clothes and believe in their faiths, only then does the offence of taboo jokes raise its bar and offend more fiercely. But taboo does not have the power to change the real moral face of society. In order to do that it would have to establish its own counter-morals, and therefore its own ideals - and the moment that it tries to do something like that, it becomes vulnerable to its own methods. Taboo will never raise itself beyond itself. It presents no threat to our culture, no more so than our culture in general presents an offence to our spirits (not a rhetorical figure, that).

So that's about it, with regards to taboo humour. I said previously that comedy has a very brief half-life. Societies change, and humour also changes, because it is built on the values of said societies. I think taboo may be the exception. Precisely because it refers to a universal subconscious desire, its jokes remain practically identical across ages and nations. The instances of obscenity in the Greek comedies, for example, were among the very few moments when I actually laughed. I guess we must give obscenity some credit for this, if for nothing else. So fuck!

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 2 – THE ABSURD.

2011-05-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

PART I – The Absurd as an extension of the Fail principle and the subordination of the latter to the former.

The second class of comedy follows from the Fail principle and extends it into a new and distinct territory, which I shall refer to as the Absurd.

The two classes, though different, are intimately connected. Fail humour makes evolutionary sense; the Absurd is an extension of the principle which only genuinely appears in human culture with the birth of representation. You don't really get the Absurd in nature, though you can get some basic forms of it in everyday language (more on this later).

The principle of Fail is that something going against your intentions is funny (technically, it has to be someone else's intentions, but we've been over that). The Absurd broadens this idea and brings it to the point that anything going against your expectations is funny. Of course, when an intention fails, there's also a failed expectation; and that still qualifies as a Fail. But it's possible to have a reversed expectation with no intentions being thwarted for any subject. You could argue that then we're just talking about a case of “Expectation Fail!” which therefore falls under the same initial category. But the theorem does not hold, because it is the breaking of OUR expectations, and not SOMEONE ELSE's, that is funny to us – and at the heart of Fail humour, as I discussed in the last entry, there's the idea that it has to happen to some Other, and the more Other the victim is, the funnier the joke.

With Absurd humour, we react by laughing when something happens that is completely and powerfully removed from what we expected (this has no evolutionary utility – it is, as we said, an outgrowth or even a by-product of the neurological principles at work in basic Fail humour). Here we must postulate the idea that, when the Absurd is activated, we are witnessing something that happens. But witnessing what, exactly?

The simplest answer is to say: witnessing the contrary of what we expect. If a super-muscled man comes out to address a crowd and the voice he speaks with turns out to be squeaky like that of Mickey Mouse, people will laugh. The muscled man isn't necessarily failing, unless he didn't intend to speak like that. But if that's his normal voice, then there's no Fail. It's just funny because it's the opposite of what we thought. (The connection between Fail and Absurd is here quite open: you can pull the argument by the sleeves to say that there's a *perceived* fail in the man's inability to produce a masculine voice, but the idea is clearly stretched. After all, it would be funny even if it were the other way round – a teeny dwarf suddenly speaking out in a booming, roaring, tenor voice, which is aggrandising rather than debasing. And so we cannot call this Fail humour, not in the same sense; it's something different).

A good example for our purposes is sarcasm. Sarcasm is, fundamentally, Absurd humour. It is simply a case of someone saying the opposite of what you would expect, or what would make sense in a given circumstance. You can argue there's a Fail in there, because the sarcastic comment is either *addressed* to a designated 'victim' (“You're elegance personified, really” to someone who puts no attention in his wardrobe) or *about* a negative, dislikeable object (“What you call the country of eternal sunshine,” said someone I knew during a rainstorm in Spain, and this we could label as “Weather Fail!” – except that of course this also is stretched, because weather has no 'intention,' and therefore cannot 'fail'!). But notice that what's funny is not the fail in itself, it's the comment about it. In other words, it's not the thwarted intention, but the thwarted expectation that is the source of the humour.

Most cases of the Absurd do contain a fail, even if a minor one, because this class of humour too, like all others, knows very few cases of purity. The Monty Python sketch on the middle-class twit of the year, for instance, is an Absurd short film which also refers to the very obvious social failure of its protagonists / victims. But these Fails are subordinated to the Absurd nature of the representation, which provides the real source of laughter by the measure of its absurdity. The rule is that the greater the incongruence, anachronism or whatever, the funnier the sketch. Something that is only slightly unexpected may be strange, but it's not funny if it isn't outright absurd. After all, we get marginally thwarted expectations every day, and we don't think any of these are funny.

To the extent that the Absurd principle takes over the main comedic function, a Fail may not be necessary at all, or it may be so subtle that it's hard even to formulate what it is. I would argue that the sketch of the philosophers playing football, also by Monty Python, is an example of such a case. The only failure I can see at all is that the philosophers can't execute the procedures of a football game, but the idea of their presence on that field to play is so outlandish in the first place that you can't imagine they would intend to play at all. It's a Fail which you've got to go pretty far to fetch, and out of your way.

PART II – Histories and examples of the Absurd.

I've used the shibboleth that Absurd humour is equal to something being the opposite of what we expect. But in reality, and this is important, the absurd doesn't have to be the contrary of our expectations. It can be just any strong deviation from them. And this too is exemplified by the Monty Python football sketch: there is no dialectic relation between philosophy and football, so seeing the Greeks and the Germans playing the sport, while very distant from our expectations, is not the contrary of them.

So to define this as concisely as possible, Absurd humour is simply a case of something deviating from our expectations, where the greater the deviation, the funnier the joke. It is almost exclusive to the world of representation; you seldom get this type of humour appearing spontaneously in the natural world.

A couple of words on its practical manifestations. The words 'Absurd comedy' usually brings to mind the French dramatic tradition of the 20th Century, mostly in Beckett, Ionesco and a few others. In reality, though, the people who have done the most to cultivate and develop this type of comedy are the British, and by quite the distance. They have a far greater number of comedians in the field and a more enduring tradition, starting from the aforementioned Monty Python, who specialise in the most intelligent, sophisticated and amusing Absurd comedy in the world, and on to a whole list of followers (and/or plagiars). Some of these are clever (Brasseye comes to mind), others are forgettable, to the point I won't even mention them on this blog. The French, on the other hand, hardly transcend the contained and short-lived tradition which developed right after the war, not in duration, style, method or medium. I may be misinformed about this, but my impression from my time in Paris is that the French Comedy of the Absurd is dead – there's no-one writing plays in the style of Beckett and Ionesco anymore, or even following on from their footsteps. Sure, there's revivals and regular re-enactments of these plays and other attempts to celebrate them, but the most creative work is done in other fields (and, most importantly, in other genres – the French DO have an incredibly rich tradition in comedy, from Moliere onwards, but it's not of the Absurd type at all). This is understandable, because in my opinion that type of comedy isn't very good. There may be a certain literary merit to the works of these playwrights, but I can't say I found them funny. Furthermore, while British Absurd comedians are true artists of the people, enjoying immense popularity at home and even a good measure abroad, the French Absurdists are among the most elitist of all modern writers. Their plays are hard to follow, hard to understand, and potentially boring if you aren't in the right mindset. It's the type of stuff I couldn't recommend to friends or family except for those within literary academia. So it's only natural that the British work in the genre should have enjoyed an extensive following, one which is still at work and developing today, while that of the French should have decayed.

This prevalence of the Absurd in British comedy must have played a part in developing the stereotype of so-called 'British humour,' which is known abroad as a particular type of irony, often very subtle and/or hard to understand. In reality it's not about irony at all (I shall discuss irony too in the coming posts). Instead, it's about a particular way of breaking expectations by means of nonsense. It's certainly not limited to television – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a popular case of the Absurd in literature, and I've asked around: its humour is unfathomable anywhere but in England. More importantly, it extends itself to everyday talk and lingo. THIS is the major difference between the French and the English in this field. When you hear British people speak with each other, you'll detect certain turns of phrase which distinguish themselves for their absurdity. A man will rant for fifteen minutes about how terrible the amusement park at Brighton was, to the point of committing suicide, etc. and his interlocutor will respond with a terse: 'So it wasn't very good, eh?' This seems to be a variant, or a subset, of sarcasm. You don't get this type of stuff outside those rainy islands. More, the British even have a whole subgenre of jokes, almost unique to their culture (at least from what I've experienced), which are Absurd twists of incredible purity: “Why did the man fall off the bike? Because they threw a fridge at him.”

I normally like to go into the history of the literature I discuss, but I can't say much about Absurd humour before the 20th Century, British or otherwise. In part it's the fact that comedy, whatever its genre, has a very brief half-life. The things we find funny change from society to society and therefore from times to times – remember that we laugh to express our agreement or disagreement with a person and his/her values, and since values change all the time, so do the objects of humour. This is the reason why, even though tragedies from four-hundred or two-thousand four-hundred years ago are still extraordinarily moving and enjoyable, comedies by Aristophanes or Lope de Vega or even Shakespeare are seldom funny. You'll enjoy them and smile and nod at their wit, but you almost never laugh hard.

But another important reason why I can't go much into the history of this stuff is that British humour only developed a predominantly Absurd tradition in recent times. If you look at Shakespeare's comedies or Byron's verse, the comedic principles are classical (more on these in future entries), much like they were in France or in Spain. Unless there's whole veins of jokes and dramas which have remained obscure (and this is entirely possible), we must conclude that a taste for the Absurd has developed only lately in the circles of major comedy.

One last 'genre' before closing – it would be tempting to see that type of comedy popularised by Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen, and the Wayans brothers as an American tradition of the Absurd. They are, after all, completely nonsensical and they often even sink into gratuitious metatextuality just to subvert expectations. But such an assertion would not be true. These movies contain much absurdity, but they hardly restrain themselves from throwing other types of jokes at us either, of the most varied and unbridled kind. There's absurd sketches in there, but there's also almost every other comedic principle in action too (including Fail, of course). Really we should see these films not as case-studies or samples of the Absurd, but as open forums where anything goes, where every aspect of representation is subordinated to the comedic principles themselves, to the point that the story, the characters, or the film's inner consistency, are all of no consequence face to the opportunity of pulling a laugh. And so we cannot say that these represent the American Absurd, not in the same way that Monty Python and Ionesco stand for the British and French Absurd(s?).

With these considerations I've said everything about Absurdity (and it's probably too much anyway). It's time to turn to our third comedic principle. In the next entry, of course.

I: Why it's funny to see people Fail

2011-04-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

Having discussed why we laugh in my previous entry, I was going to post an article now on what makes us laugh specifically, in other words, what exactly is funny and why. The argument, however, proved far more ambitious than I anticipated, and it seems I shall have to deal with it in a series (four more entries including this one, I'm expecting). So you'd better get used to the topic of comedy because it's going to dominate the writing on this blog for a while...

Ok. There's a wealth of different 'genres' or types of humour, but in my opinion most of them can be resumed into a few central modes, with the other types being mere combinations, variations or spin-offs of these modes. Black humour, for instance, employs a specifically macabre tone or imagery compared to its alternatives, but the comic mechanisms it makes use of are not unique to the genre. In fact they're identical to those you find in other types of jokes. Similarly, you can make distinctions between romantic comedies, coming-of-age comedies, pants movies, British comedies, comedies of errors and what have you, but the difference between all of these is not the way they make us laugh. They've got great tonal variations, and they touch on different topics, and they may have different presentations or stylistic traits, but when it comes to the funny bits, they still return to the same principles. What are these principles, and how many of them are there?

Broadly speaking, I can think of four foundational classes of humour. I shall dedicate this blog entry to the first of them. The other three will be dealt with on my blog over the coming thirty days or so, time permitting.

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 1 – FAIL HUMOUR.

I wasn't sure how to call the first class of humour. I was thinking of 'Contrarian' or 'Thwarted intentions,' but ultimately I just adopted Fail. It's not a name I particularly like (and I may change it in future articulations of the argument), but it's familiar jargon by now thanks to the Americanism of using 'Fail' as a noun rather than as a verb (with greater emphasis – the 'epic fail!'). You can find endless collections of Fails in google images and on Youtube, and you'll also frequently hear expressions like 'goalie fail' when a goalkeeper scores an own goal, or 'relationship fail' when a girlfriend is disappointed by something her boyfriend just did (or viceversa). It's always very simple stuff, relating to accidents or bloopers or mistakes. Usually the idea seems to be that anything going contrary to a person's intentions is funny, but the core principle is even more primal than that, and we can describe it more or less like this:

Anything that doesn't work is funny, as long as it belongs to someone else.

This is just an application of the principles described in the Why do we laugh entry. The crucial aspect is that the subject of the Fail has to be a distinct, recognizable OTHER. If the 'victim' is a skater on Youtube who falls from a concrete step, we're bound to laugh to a degree proportional to how spectacular his fall (and therefore his failure) is – provided that an excessive damage isn't caused, in which case the reverse sentiment of empathy gets switched on and we feel concern instead of amusement. Exactly how much damage is 'excessive damage'? Our personal sensitivity and our own experiences will have an influence (if I've once broken my leg while skateboarding, I'm less likely to laugh at a falling skater) – and this goes to show, again, how unpredictable the homo sapiens individual is. But a good guideline is this: the more alien the victim from ourselves, the more pain we can tolerate him/her to take before it stops being funny. If a member of my family falls from the skateboard, or my girlfriend, I'm far less likely to laugh than if it is the anonymous skater on Youtube. Were I to read about a group of people accidentally blowing themselves up with a grenade, I wouldn't find it funny; but if it's a band of raving Nazi skinheads attempting to throw the grenade into a synagogue, I'd probably laugh a bit or at least smirk, because they are so remote from my social circle that even such a horrible disaster fails to cause empathy (and in fact has an ironic ring given their original intent).

The degree to which someone or something is alien or external is contextually determined. As usual with homo sapiens, you can't just categorise things and make broad sweeping rules. I'm never going to laugh at my brother if he gets hurt in public and other people are laughing at him as well, because I recognise him as closer to my social circle than all the other people. He is, after all, part of the tightest social circle of them all, which is the family. But I may laugh at my brother if it's just the two of us, or us two and our parents, and he trips on his laces and falls (without getting too injured, obviously), because in this case it's enough for him not to be me to invest him with a foreign aura. Similarly, I probably wouldn't laugh even at the Nazi soldiers if they blew themselves up while in combat with, say, a horrible alien species invading our planet – because in that case, they still have more in common with me than with the other element. Their failure would be my own. Commonality, the measure which determines how much pain can be taken before something stops being funny, is not absolute but relative.

Due to its communal and social nature, Fail humour is at the heart of racist and sexist jokes, among other things. More frequently than not these jokes are poor on irony and wit. They simply take a (usually degrading) trait attributed to the category in question and augment it by hyperbole. How do you kill a nigger in a car? Place his head out of the window and let his lips slap him to death. There isn't really a 'reversal of intent' there, or an ironic construction. There's barely even an insult, because 'big lips' isn't much of a degrading trait (unlike jokes which compare blacks to shit or describe women as stupid... though of course the joke is still offensive, inasmuch as it seems to imply that there is a 'correct,' and therefore non-criminal, way of killing black people). There's just an image which exaggerates a trait supposed to belong to (and identify) black people, that is to say, the big lips. The thing that makes this 'funny,' to racist sensitivities anyway, is that it draws a line between us and the Other(s). 'They' are different from 'us' and we can distinguish them because their lips are so big. The communal nature of the laughter mechanism then kicks in, and we define our 'alliance' as white people by laughing (this would have been useful in tribal communities – a group of people laughing at you looks threatening - remember that laughter is also a way of baring teeth - and denotes confidence and dominance, so a tribe laughing together at another tribe are sending a very clear signal).

Note that laughter kicks in only if the highlighting of this difference is done in terms of a Fail – in this case, the black person's death. Yes, you can have jokes based on the same mechanism which seem to have no failure in them and in fact sound almost complimentary, such as quips on the length of a black man's penis, but there's still a Fail in there, and it's still racist: the Fail is that of the black man to be defined by anything else other than his sexuality. Jokes based on the idea of black people having super-schlongs are projecting blacks as no more than walking dicks, and are therefore degrading them (though I think you could use this premise to change the object of the racism, if you were to make a joke where the implied Fail is that of the white man and his smaller penis. But I can't really bring to mind jokes which do this, given how little anti-white racist humour I've encountered). This same exact process is at work when we make jokes or sing jingles about supporters of a rival football team, for instance. Again, the degree to which this is funny depends on the subject: the more racist s/he is, the funnier it will seem, because s/he will feel the 'alliance' more deeply.

Discrimination humour mingles with other forms of humour, the way they all do. There's racist/sexist/homophobic jokes which actually demonstrate clever, witty or ironic constructions. A 'pure' racist joke is in fact not as easy to find as you may think – even the 'big lips' one I mentioned earlier makes use of other funny principles aside from mere discrimination (and we shall come to these principles in future entries). When it comes to the Fail class of humour, it's so primal that other than the 'video of the guy falling down,' you can't do much with it unless you throw in other comic genres as well.

But before this type of amusement gets completely defamed, I should say that the Fail mechanism doesn't have to be discriminatory. If targeted towards individuals rather than ethnic, national or sexual groups, then it won't be socially divisive (even if it may be offensive). Here's how Jerome K. Jerome, one of the greatest of comedic writers, informs us of his mates' ineptitude at packing suitcases. When George is hanged, Harris will be the worst packer in this world. This double insult thrown almost casually into the phrase is funny because it implies a.) the social failure (or 'fail') of Harris, who can be expected to be hanged some day, and b.) his otherness with respect to our (social / intellectual / moral) group, since we subsist under the same law and community but are not under threat of being hanged. The casual quality of the tone implies that it's something we all already know, and therefore reinforces the sense of community and alliance.

I said that most jokes based on Fail also make use of other forms of humour. Correspondingly, Fail humour is itself employed by other, more sophisticated comic genres. I'm thinking that comics and animation make use of anthropomorphised animals partly because it makes their slapstick easier to digest. By dressing their fundamentally human characters in the robes of animals, they make them more alien and therefore easier to laugh at. They also diminish them considerably as human beings: these are not men, but men degraded to the status of animals, and so not legitimate in our moral group. (This makes sense in light of the Aristotelian statement that comedy is about people who are slightly worse than we are. I'm assuming he meant morally).

Intriguingly, human characters themselves can play important roles in animation films where the protagonists are animals. Think of the old ladies in Tom and Jerry or Sylvester and Tweetie, who are NEVER the 'victims' and always the 'punishers.' Their human appearance goes hand in hand with this role: if they were the ones who Failed, then they'd be represented as animals. No-one wants to laugh at an old lady getting hurt (for that matter no-one wants to laugh at a cat getting hurt, but remember that Sylvester and to a slightly lesser extent Tom are not cats, but humans degraded to the level of cats). There's exceptions, like the rival of Bugs Bunny, that bald guy who consistently gets the shit beaten out of him. In that case something slightly more complex is at work, I think there's more than just Fail humour coming into play, but the Fail element is probably that of a man so inept that he is overpowered by a rabbit (among the most harmless of creatures).

Aside from the old ladies, though, I'm musing on the figure of the mindless 'baby' who constantly and innocently endangers him/herself and has to be rescued by the despairing protagonist(s). It's a common figure which has been given its most interesting expression, to my knowledge, in the Roger Rabbit mythology (link to an exemplary short). Of course, the baby *cannot* get hurt. There is no figure more immune to Fail humour than that of the infant. Roger Rabbit, by contrast, as the human character so idiotic that he is no better than a rabbit, goes through all sorts of injuries and we still laugh at him. (To an extent, anyway, because after a while the degree of injuries gets so extreme that we start rooting for Roger over the baby, Tom over Jerry, and so on. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who's watched a bit of cartoons).

Fail humour is the most basic and primal type of comedy. Other types follow on from this genre, but complicate it to the point that it becomes something recognizably different. The second of our four classes of humour will be the subject of my next blog entry.

Why do we laugh?

2011-04-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

Most discussions I hear or read on the question of why we laugh tend to treat it as a quasi-mystical issue. The argument goes, more or less, that since it's one of those things that distinguish us from animals, like our sensitivity to music, then it must be something profoundly spiritual, deep and hard to fathom. I'm probably not well versed enough on the subject, but it doesn't seem like such a complex question to me. I also don't understand why you don't find an explanation of why we laugh in so-called common knowledge, like GCSE Biology textbooks. Maybe my own understanding of this subject is wrong? Am I missing something?

Anyway, I'm going to throw down some thoughts which I'd ruminated upon quite the while ago, but never committed them to writing – the issue seemed too obvious for this to seem necessary! But since I haven't found a lucid and basic explanation elsewhere (mostly the question seems to be discussed in psychoanalitical essays which are far more complex than I feel they should be), I'll just write this all down, because otherwise I'll just forget, and then what's the point of having thought of it at all? I don't expect I'll be saying anything particularly original, but it may make for a differently interesting read from the usual cultural criticism.

So then – why do we laugh?

Most of the sounds, gestures or smells produced by the human organisms (excluding, therefore, external agents like the sound of an object impacting with someone's body or an odour resulting from contact with a foreign substance) are social signals. Like the howl of wolves or the singing of birds, their purpose is to indicate something to the group we live in. If infants cry, for instance, it usually serves to call for help from their mothers. Unsurprisingly, we tend to cry much less when we grow up – and women, who are less capable of physically defending themselves and therefore more likely to require protection, cry more easily than men in most cases.

Laughter is, similarly, a useful social signal. Its purpose is that of defining and consolidating social hierarchies. It may seem a somewhat redundant or bizarre behavioural trait, to produce these loud cries convulsively, but then we must consider that homo sapiens is among the most complex of social animals, and the (evolutionary?) mechanisms required to sustain its societies are correspondingly very complex – or at least, more subtle than those of other social animals.

Ants, termites, bees and other social insects, for instance, determine their hierarchies genetically. Once a drone is born, it will stay a drone all its life. It will never behave like any other thing (potentially, circumstances can lead an ant to change caste, perhaps to substitute a dying queen, but again the event is highly scripted and predetermined, and can be reproduced with different hives in fairly simple laboratory conditions). Human societies are less predictable. What an individual will become within a group, and what his/her social use/contribution will be, depends on a very sophisticated combination of variables, many of which are determined by the conditions in which s/he grows up. The process of mating exemplifies the differences as well. Termites reproduce according to scripted and mechanical processes. A hive's reproductive history is, to my knowledge, pretty much the same for any given one, with variations only in the rate of success (which is determined by the resources available, not by the 'personality' of the termites mating). When it comes to humans, predicting who we're going to fall in love with, why and when, or how any given relationship is going to go, is a task so unearthly that the subject is ubiquitously treated with even more mysticism than laughter.

There's always got to be one...

In explaining the phenomenon, it will be remarked that you never laugh about 'good' things. If you laugh, it always means that something has gone 'wrong.' Among the simplest funny things is the sight of someone tripping, slipping, or otherwise falling down while in the middle of normal activities. Often seeing people getting hurt is funny, provided they don't get too hurt (in which case other mechanisms kick in and we become worried for the person in question). Even seemingly innocuous jokes with language, like puns or double entendres, make us laugh only inasmuch as they represent an *error.* Even though no-one gets hurt, there's been a failure of some type (specifically, communication), and we laugh at this failure. The greater the failure, the funnier the situation – a respected professor's blooper is funnier the more embarrassing it is and the richer its unintended suggestions are, and this is the principle of irony. I'll say more on this and other specific types of humour later, but in the meantime, I'll point out that this is what led Robert Heinlein, in his milestone novel Stranger in a Strange Land, to conclude that laughter exists to suppress pain. We laugh at painful things because otherwise there would be just too much pain to deal with. This interesting argument made me think a lot when I was a kid.

The mechanism of empathy, it can be agreed, has developed in homo sapiens because it makes societies work better. If we feel bad at the sight of other people feeling bad, and we want to prevent them from feeling that way, then of course it's going to foster cooperation, and a group that cooperates has far greater chances of survival than one internally broken. So empathy makes perfect evolutionary sense for social animals. Laughter is, I think, the opposite of empathy. It leads us, at least to a certain extent, to enjoy the ill-fortune of others. Why would this be useful from a social/evolutionary point of view?

Laughter always implies other people. As Freud famously stated, you never laugh alone. Now we can agree that other people laughing *with* you is one of the best things in life, while other people laughing *at* you is one of the least desirable. Try picturing what this means in a social group. If two males engage in a conflict which will have consequences in terms of the leadership of the group, people will laugh at whoever they do not recognise as legitimate leader. They will laugh WITH their 'candidate' of choice, and AT his adversary. So it's almost a natural expression of democratic vote. Chances are, the laughter may be so effective at outlining the social situation that physical conflict may even be averted. But laughter does more than that. It also consolidates alliances. Three women who dislike a man will laugh at the latter's back. In this way, even without any hostility being openly expressed, or even formulated, the three individuals will have silently (or, well, not so silently) defined themselves as allies. They don't need to SAY to each other, 'Let us be allies against that man.' That would expose the one who proposes this idea to considerable danger: if the others don't agree, she's in trouble, because she has defined herself as the 'traitor' figure. But laughter will arise spontaneously among three people who agree, with no need of being publically defined and, as importantly, with almost no need of anyone taking the dangerous 'first step,' because laughter escalates simultaneously and reciprocally (as we know, laughter is contagious), and all it takes to 'begin' is an innocent and non-committing smile. The alliance will hold, at least until other laughter comes to dispel, modify or redirect it.

So it seems quite straightforward to me that laughter isn't a mystical mysterious thing, at least not in terms of the knowledge we have today. In a species which isn't as predictable in the behaviour of its members as ants or bees, it's a fundamental signal for people to understand where each other stands. The fact that it has evolved in homo sapiens is logical. Without laughter, social processes would be much more complicated, and far more verbal communication would be required, which is less effective (and more dangerous) at this type of social game than laughter.

Obviously, I'm not proposing a purely utilitarian/materialistic understanding of laughter. It is precisely humanity's unpredictability that allows laughter to transcend its original function. While it still helps social dynamics, like allowing friendships to coalesce more quickly, or in the process of seducing a partner, it's now understood to be mainly recreational. Similarly, even though the purpose of sex is reproduction, people make love nowadays at least just as much for the sheer enjoyment of it, and only a minority of our sexual partners will actually bear or rear our children. This distortion of the original evolutionary purpose means that we experience laughter in ways and occasions which do not always have a social purpose. If we sit on a chair and watch a funny video on Youtube, we laugh on our own, which defeats the biological point. Furthermore, laughing at dramatic representations (i.e. comedies) has a certain function of gelling people together, but mostly it too is abortive, because there's no-one being laughed at. We're laughing at a screen. How then is our 'vote' expressed by laughter any relevant, when there aren't even any candidates?

Actually, the figure of the comedian may seem a bit puzzling, in light of the arguments I proposed. Given the humiliating power of laughter, wouldn't anyone's priority be to *avoid* being laughed at, in whichever way possible? Isn't a professional comedian an absurdity, then, since s/he seeks to be laughed at as much and as long as possible, and indeed feels gratified when s/he succeeds in this task? (There's a lot of pronouns coming up and I don't want to repeat him/her and s/he at every line, so I'll just use the masculine for the next paragraph...).

But there is no puzzle here. As I mentioned, in comedies there's no-one being laughed at. What we laugh at is not the comedian himself as an individual, but at the representation he is projecting. A comedian *simulates* an accident; he pretends to fall down or get hurt. If it really were an accident, that person wouldn't be a comedian, because you can't professionally have accidents – it's a total contradiction in terms! (The Jackass show aims to contradict my statement, but though they obviously play on the principles we discussed – of pain/injury to others as funny – their skits are still scripted and controlled, and therefore aren't accidents. It would be an accident, with them, if they did NOT get hurt – and yes, that would be funny too, seeing them botching up a sketch and all of them coming out unscathed). And so a comedian is never being laughed at himself, but people are laughing *with* him at his representation. He is essentially presenting something and saying “Look, this is really funny.” And if they agree with him, of course they would feel gratified – they are, in a primordial sense, telling him that they want him as their leader, or at least that they are his allies.

I hope I've put up a decent argument as to the functions and purposes of laughter. The question that follows naturally from this discussion is that of comedy. Given why we laugh, *what* do we laugh at? Which events are funny and which are not, and why? Are there different types of laughter, and if so, what categories do they fall under? Is there an ethical distinction to be made in laughter, that is to say, are there good and bad types or ways of laughing, and if so, what are they?

To all of these questions my next blog-post is going to be dedicated. It normally takes me a few days to conclude a two-part text, but this time the subject is difficult and it will require patience (besides, I'm back to working on the ship and I'm so busy I could die!). At least a week, then, but probably longer than that, and we'll have a post on The Question of Comedy.

The "Special Status" of Christianity

2011-04-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the blog of Jack Hudson for a while now. He's without doubt one of the most interesting and thought-provoking advocates of Christianity with whom I've had the pleasure to exchange views. While he doesn't always have time to answer my questions, the discussions are interesting and extensive enough that I don't have to feel like it's filler if they get too long and post them on my blog (as opposed to his comments section).

Jack has recently engaged Mike Doolittle in the comments section to one of his latest blog-posts. I'd like you to extend on a couple of the points you made, Jack. I'm copying and pasting them here, with my own questions below them. Mind you, I'm not posting them here in an attempt to disprove or contest what you're saying. To the contrary, I'd like to see you elucidate your views. Unfortunately while I appreciate your civility and intelligence, I often find your arguments to be too broad and sweeping to give me a clear sense of what you're saying. So I still haven't made my mind up whether they denote a genuine, valid system of thought which deserves further investigation, or whether they turn out to be full of hot air under further scrutiny. If you can find the time to address my responses/meditations/objections (call them what you like), I would be very grateful. If you can't, no hard feelings (though I probably will have to stop engaging with you other than just reading your blog - my time, like yours, is too precious to use it on formulating questions to remain unanswered).

To the point(s), then. I've tried to sketch a central objection to your arguments, an issue which seems recurring in your writing, so you can give a condensed single reply rather than having to pick my whole text line by line.

Jack says: I wasn’t referencing Harris, but if this is his point, then he is plainly wrong – science as a methodology is largely the result of Christian thinkers (like Newton, Pascal, and Bacon) who readily intertwined their scientific thought, philosophy and theology. But science and Christianity are different in their effects on the acquisition of knowledge in this respect – Christianity forms the basis of societies, cultures, and institutions in which human thought can operate in such a way as to allow human flourishing. Science has no creative power in this regard. While science is the product of such societies and can be used as a tool within such societies for much good it is not itself useful as a foundation for human culture; and the outcomes of trying to use it that way can be horrendous.

A few things to say here. Firstly, I find the statement on the origins of science a bit too convenient, as it wittingly forgets to mention fathers of the scientific method who were famously at odds with Christian institutions or their predominant doctrines (Copernico, Galileo, even Leonardo, all of whom precede your thinkers, incidentally). Far more importantly, though, you try to sketch a difference between Christianity and science without bothering to substantiate your points. Yes, if scientific discourse is selectively adopted as the spine of an ethical system, the results can be disastrous (but bear in mind that Nazism wasn't exclusively the product of eugenetics, perhaps not even primarily - its roots were cultural and historical as well, harkening back to Germanic mythology, romanticised knight-hood militarism, Nietzschean philosophy, among others. The swastika, an ancient mythological symbol, should be an illuminating example, and remember that Hitler was an artist).

What you fail to mention is that Christianity too has led to some horrendous results in societies were it was adopted as the basis. The Inquisition produced a holocaust comparable for scope and atrocities to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. And you know as well as I do that there are many more examples. Yes, you can argue that these societies were based on distortions or misinterpretations of Christianity. But your own sentence on Darwinism applies just as well to Christianity: And it’s not a matter of whether evolution leads to eugenics – evolution did lead to eugenics – this is undisputable history, not conjecture. Whether it should have is another question. If you don’t know this, then you are either ignorant of history or intentionally being deceptive.

Try swapping the words evolution/eugenics with Christianity/Inquisition, and tell me that the paragraph doesn't hold up just as well.

I like your interpretation of the social role of Christianity (though it has, ironically, a faintly Marxist backtaste). But it seems to me that you need to address your bias. Christianity too, like science, is liable to misinterpretations and to our "natural tendency to live immorally." It too can (and has been) readily exploited in the context of power-struggles. In this sense, my question to you is this: why is Christianity exempt from the corrupting influence of power and immorality which plagues all other systems and cultures? Why does Christianity have this 'special status,' when it led to just as much suffering and injustice as, say, Marxism or the French Revolution?

I also have a few other questions. Forgive me if I seem to be demanding, but you've got to keep in mind that your own statements are as provoking as they are vague - in other words, you're calling it, bro!
1. What does it mean for something to be the 'basis' of a culture/society? How does it inform that society in practice? If we're talking about cultural, aesthetic, artistic influence, why is Christianity privileged over something like, say, the Greco-Roman world, which is just as preponderantly present everywhere in our culture?
2. Do you reckon that Hinduism, Buddhism and the like form the 'basis' of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. societies? If that is so, then do you think it is possible for the basis of a society to be something other than religious? If so, can you provide an example? If not, then isn't your point tautological - aren't you just using the word 'basis' as just a synonim for 'religion'?
3. Are bases of societies necessarily monological - that is to say, is it possible to conceive of a society split in two or more different, competing cultural forces for its basis? Is it possible that the political division of right and left reflects the fact that society doesn't have a single 'base', but more than one force acting in competition with each other, and that these forces put together form the real 'basis' of the society within which they work?

Jack says: What Christianity replaced first and foremost was the magical and superstitious thinking of pagans and animists. Instead of a pantheon of fickle gods who acted according to their own whims and were often indifferent to human life, there was one transcendent God who was the unchangeable source and sustainer of the universe and had ordered and organized the universe in such way that that humans could live in it. God had ordered life to operate according to certain laws, and likewise the universe operated according to certain laws which could be comprehended by human minds since the universe was created for us. Science was merely understood by early developers of science to be the tool for doing this, not the means by which we were to live our lives.

As it were, Christianity led to an equally complex set of superstitions and mythologies on the architecture of heaven, the number of angels and archangels, not to mention saints, as well as demons, witches, exorcisms, vampires and spirits, the structure of heaven and hell (which is completely fictitious, as the details barely appear in Scripture), and cloudy theological mysteries like the Trinity. I'm assuming you've read the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost? They're every bit as colourful as the Odyssey or the Metamorphoses. Again, I have the impression that you're assigning to Christianity a 'special status' of some kind. Much like you burden science with things which Christianity is no less vulnerable to, so you accuse pagan religions of issues which are also present in Christianity.

Also, the cosmology that you advocate is a bit of a free interpretation. The Gospel certainly doesn't encourage scientific enquiry to understand God's laws. I wouldn't say that Acts 19:19 encourages open research, for example: Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men. The Old Testament does include more cosmological statements, though I'd like to see the specific passages by which you sustain an interpretation which seems to me rooted outside of Scripture (where do you get this idea that since the universe is made for us, it follows that we're equipped to understand it?). Also, the God in the OT is not too different from Zeus/Jupiter. A quick comparison of Yhwh in the Bible with Zeus/Jupiter in Homer and Virgil reveals the same fundamental function - an anthropomorphised fulcrum of physical, legal, moral, cosmic authority. The details are different, of course, and Zeus is anthropomorphised more explicitly, but their literary role is the same. In this sense the pagan minor gods have an almost subsidiary role, like the angels (consider the scene in the Iliad where Zeus tells Hera, 'even if every other god in the world pulled a rope in one direction and I in another, it would still go where I'm pulling it.').

Jack says: I disagree that we can’t disprove religious ideas. I would say it is as disproved as humanly possible that the sun isn’t on a chariot being ridden across the sky by Apollo, or that a wolf isn’t eating the moon over the course of the month. But such ideas were gone before science was developed because the worldview of Judeo-Christianity usurped them, clearing the way for scientific thinking (and ironically the comfortable existence of atheism in the Western world).

If Christianity 'cleared the way' for scientific thinking, why is it that the period immediately following its consolidation in Europe was the most stagnant in scientific progress (or any progress) in European history - namely, the Dark Ages? Why didn't science just immediately follow, instead of having to wait almost one thousand years to flourish again? Doesn't this suggest that the direct connection you propound is in fact a fiction?

Furthermore, it is also 'disproved as humanly possible' that the earth and man weren't created in seven days, that a man cannot be resurrected from death or water be turned into wine just by sheer will, nor can blindness be cured by touching a forehead, and that man evolved from the apes. You could claim that some or all of these things are metaphorical, but then, why isn't Apollo's chariot metaphorical as well?

Jack says: Even in the OT you have Jewish laws which advocated practices like sterilization, quarantine, ritual cleansing, avoiding potential disease bearing vectors, not to mention the fact that certain living practices like those that forbade sexual promiscuity which would have avoided a host of diseases (like AIDs, which now plagues Africa).

I understand what you're saying, but do bear in mind that a correct application of guided scientific methods - like contraception - would have been as effective as a correct application of religious ones in preventing the spread of Aids. Once again, you're giving the lip to Christianity - there's many more systems which would have been great for humanity if everybody had agreed to apply them, the problem is that people don't. A doctrine that fails to account for human fallibility is responsible for the evil that is perpetrated as a result of this failure. Marxism, for example.

Jack says: Of course, health isn’t merely the product of scientific knowledge, but of habits and choices. Christopher Hitchens had all the knowledge necessary to avoid the disease that is killing him, but that knowledge alone can’t change human nature and our tendency to live immorally. This is why scientific knowledge alone isn’t sufficient for human flourishing.

I fully agree with the last sentence, but yet again, what's with the special status of Christianity? It never succeeded in changing human nature and our tendency to live immorally. We've had two-thousand years of it and it doesn't seem to me like human nature has changed or wars have stopped. Yeah, of course if everybody followed the tenets Christianity, it would all work well, but that point is moot. Even fascism would ensure stability and peace if everybody were to follow the principles of Obey, Believe, Work. Or Communism, for that matter.

That's it. I do hope that you will address at least some of my points, Jack. It doesn't matter if it takes you a long time, as I've got plenty of that, and my own reply took quite the while anyway. As I said, if there's no satisfying response, I will just have to assume that you either have no answer or can't communicate with me to a satisfactory level - in both which cases I must close my correspondence with you. I'll still read your blog though, no worries about that.

The King's Speech gets its turn under the sleet

2011-03-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

Haven't blogged in a while. Two reasons for this. Firstly, I have recently re-imbarked on a ship, this time the MSC Poesia (I know, I know, how apt). The second is that my writing efforts have been funnelled into an essay on James Cameron's The Terminator. I originally intended to post it on here, but I saw a reclame for papers on a site, and I thought I'd give it a go.

The link to it is here.

It's an article I thoroughly enjoyed writing, though I feel a bit silly for not giving it some more revision-time (it has a potency which has yet to lose its power... fuck my life, how did I let that slip??). I think it makes sense that I should link it here as well, given it was originally meant for the blog.

I've been blogging a lot about cinema, lately, and this is only natural, because I've been seeing quite a few films. One of the latest was The King's Speech, you know, that black horse which swept up all of the major Oscars. I wanted The Social Network to win as I thought it was masterfully directed and very relevant, and I suspected that TKS would be a bit flaccid. I was disappointed in terms of the judges' decision, but as it happens, I was right.

I saw TKS in Paris, chez a friend of mine who lives there in the most lovely house, with the most lovely girlfriend, who cooks the most lovely bolognese (no, this was not part of either of the two weed marathons, and I didn't see it stoned, so my judgment is unclouded) (no pun intended). He's a truly cosmopolitan Brit, which is something of a rarity. Anyways, we put the film on and spent two hours watching the life and times of King whatever-his-name-was.

I can't say I didn't like it. As with Black Swan, it's a very predictable flick, and the kind of thing that is made to please. Even the central actor, that insufferable curly-headed guy who always seems to play The British Pillock character in whatever film he's in (setting the mould, of course, with the role in Bridget Jones' Diary), was kind of ok. I've never liked the guy and I've been wanting to plant a stake in his heart ever since he took part in that abhorrent adaptation of The Portrait of Dorian Grey. But there's no denying that he plays the part of King Whatever wonderfully, presumably because the character comes across as a true British Pillock and by now he must have mastered the role to a T (I realise I may be sounding a bit insulting to my British readers - maybe I should add here that the 'pillock' thing refers to the Hollywood stereotype of the Brits, not to my own).

I think I uploaded the wrong king. What the fuck is that? A dog?

So the film was enjoyable as a popcorn throw-around thing. I didn't think it deserved the Oscar for best picture, though, mainly because it was the typical patriotic delusional rehearsal. Much like shooting a film about the holocaust is one of the surest ways of earning critical approval, so the making of uncontroversial, linear, frequently rhetorical stories about how the anti-Nazi struggle makes everything that we did right is a comfy way to please the authorities (especially the Americans, who seem to draw their entire historical identity from World War II). Among the problems I had with this film was the way it seemed to exclude all history but the personal history of the royals - you get no sense of what was going on outside of the royal chambers at all, for instance on the domestic political or economic scene. The effect of this narrative slant is, of course, that the King's speech is made to seem relevant from an historical point of view, and this is the delusional bit that I mentioned. I can't bring myself to imagine what the big screaming deal was about this guy speaking into the microphones when all of Europe was being put through steel and fire, and the film certainly didn't convey it to me. It doesn't contribute to the filmmaker's cause that the more famous and important speeches of the time were those by Churchill. So what's the point of making a movie about this? Might as well make a movie about the King's dog Pongo and how important he was in the formation of the monarchy. Plus, royals in general are quite irritating, and you can see the film leaping backwards over itself in an attempt to make them likeable, if not legitimate. I recall my friend commenting at the beginning of the film that the American dream is about making it on your own, while the British dream is that of having the Queen coming over to your house and having tea with you. When this actually happens in the film, he could hardly restraing from whispering 'So fucking pathetic...'.

But maybe I'm revealing my own bias. The Social Network is a film about the American dream in its contemporary, divisive form. It stimulates a lot of questions on social and individual ethics, and I thought its portrayal of (the myth of) creativity in our current age to be extraordinarily incisive. The King's Speech doesn't encourage you to do anything, it just makes you feel comfortable with your values. The peak of the bourgeois cliche' came with the speech itself, when they threw Beethoven's 7th Symphony in the background (later followed by Mozart's Piano Concert 23). It's precisely the choice of music you might expect from someone who doesn't understand classical music, but listens to just enough of it that s/he may throw around the odd comment in a conversation about how 'I just LOVE the late sonatas by Beethoven' (it was presumably thought out for an audience of such a nature as well... *sigh* what depresses me isn't even that said audience is so powerful that it includes the judges of the major awards, more the fact that classical music has been relegated in popular culture to the role of "background for poignant scenes in films." You've got little Danny the Horse dying while he saves his family? Throw some fucking Mozart in there and you've got a masterpiece!). What these people don't understand is that these pieces of music have their own individual meanings and histories. Beethoven's adagio from the 7th Symphony follows a military march and therefore has an anticlimactic effect when it comes to nationalistic values (you could even argue that it's deliberately ironic, especially as I've heard it said that the opening march was carefully crafted to appeal to that type of belligerent feelings). So it's hardly the most appropriate choice to flank the speech of a King! At least they could have used an English composer, since the film is all about Aulde Britain (Elgar what's-his-name? Or was he not good enough?). Mozart's Piano Concerto is a little less odd, but considering how that passage was (supposedly) written for his mother after her death, it still doesn't make a great deal of sense to me that such an intimate piece of music should be plastered over a scene of multitudes and crowds in a scene expressing social / patriotic values.

You could say, "Dude, who cares, it's just a piece of music, we can use it however we like." Well, sure, I've got nothing against re-interpretation, but such a superficial, appropriative and casual use of music, one which is so dismissive of its history and meaning - doesn't it then undermine the point of an historical film like this? If we can forget our European musical heritage like this, then we can just as easily forget a king and his prissy little speech (especially considering that with all due respect the guy wasn't exactly an equal to Mozart or Beethoven...). And if that is the case, then again we can't help but asking - what exactly is the point of this film?

Anyhoo. This is probably going to be my last post about film(s) for a while, seen how I won't be able to see much of them over the next six months, and certainly none at the cinema. I've got a mind to write something about Double Indemnity (fifty points if you didn't have to google this title to know what I'm talking about), but that's for the future, and I could just turn that into an essay. In a recent daydream on what to write about to make some captivating posts, I even toyed with the notion of putting up a series of posts with the history of my sex life - it actually makes for an interesting story! But ultimately that project is going to have to abort, as there's too much personal information, and too many people involved who (probably) flit by this blog every now and then. I'll have to think of other things to keep up the interest. In the meantime, if you wish to forward the tale of your own sex life, the comment section of course is open.

Reading History Through the Lens of Christianity

2011-03-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

I've been engaged in a number of debates on Christianity over at the blogs of Mike and Jack for several months now. Jack's latest post prompted some protest from me in the comments section, and this in turn led me to an exchange with Nate. The thing got quite lengthy, so I've decided to turn it into its own blog-post. For anyone who's interested in partly-theological-but-mostly-historical discussion, here's the stuff.

This is the original post by Nate:

We have to assume that if the religion of the west had been different than so too would everything else. Shakespeare certainly would have been living in a different world, and so would have had different influences.

If the Muslims had not been turned back in the 700′s than it is very likely that the forms of government would have been different, in addition to the obvious cultural changes.

While Christianity isn’t by necessity responsible for any scientific or literary accomplishments, the world in which they were attained was shaped by Christianity, the results of which cannot be underestimated.

And here is the second post, expanding the points, and providing a link to an entry of his own:

Yes everything we have could well have been created/discovered with no Christianity.

However, to think that we would have had the same achievement with a different culture/religion is just crazy. We may have made greater strides, but I don’t think so.

http://congressshallmakenolaw.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/one-battle-no-dark-ages-a-different-world/

That post isn’t right on topic but it kind of covers what I’m talking about. You just can’t discount such a large part of a culture and expect the same results.

So let's pick things up...

Firstly, and with all due respect, as long as we're investing indirect causes with direct merit, we can attribute Shakespeare to anything we want. I could argue that everything in Western culture happened thanks to the Etruscans (the ancestors of the Romans), including Christianity, because, of course, without them history would have been different to the point of being unrecognizable. So everything wonderful in Western culture is Etruscan in origin!

Your reading of history is selective, and I would discourage you from projecting meta-narratives to explain causal relations between events taking place five-hundred years from each other. No more is Leonardo Da Vinci responsible for Hitler than Christ(ianity) is responsible for Shakespeare. Elementary chaos theory tells us that events so far apart are impossible to be directly causally related: if you switched the reset button and started everything again with the same settings, in the long run it wouldn't repeat the original scenario; it would lead to hugely different results.

An example of your dubious reasoning lies in crediting the Dark Ages with "the freedom and restlessness that came to shape modern Europe and so the entire west." The values that you are talking about were actually popularised in Europe by the (secular) French revolution, an event so far removed from the Dark Ages - and so unpredictable in its causes and development - that it cannot be given a deterministic explanation. Indeed the casual/inevitable debate on the FR has absorbed historians for centuries. And your claim that the Arabs "never achieved what the rude, christian Europeans did" is baffling. Western culture as we know it was actually preserved in the libraries of Arab civilisations and only rediscovered in central Europe thanks to the cross-fertilisation occurring AFTER the dark ages. Without the Arabs, we might have no memory of Plato and Aristotle, to name but two luminaries who were absolutely cardinal in the intellectual rebirth of Europe. Without the Arabs, we might never have come out of the Dark Ages at all. Regardless, are you familiar with any of the achievements of the Arabs at all? Do you know why our stars have arab names like Aldebaran or Betelgeuse? Have you read the poetry of Ibn Ammar, Ibn Khafaga, Ibn Hamdis? Do you know why we've got the number "zero" on our keyboards instead of having to type MMMMCCCXXXXVIII to say 4348? Your statement is typically dismissive, but if we're comparing the 'rude, Christian Europeans' to the Arabs in their time-frame from the end of the Roman Empire to 1258 (the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, comparable to the defeat at Adrianople) I'd say that yes, the Arabs achieved every bit as much as the Europeans, and considerably more. And then there's all that stuff about 'individualism' as a prominent value in Medieval culture, which has no grounds whatsoever. Not only were values highly varied according to the strata of society we were looking at (peasants weren't expected to follow the rules of chivalry, for instance), but family and blood-ties were far more significant than individualism. Your lineage defined both your past and future. (In fact, pre-19th Century individualism reached its peak a thousand years before the Dark Ages, amid the Greeks). Oh yeah - and what exactly is 'the strongest and most resilient culture and ideals the world has ever seen'? Wouldn't that be China? Or Hinduism? Some of the most important Western countries (USA, Germany, Italy) aren't even 300 years old as self-ruling nations. Or wait, do you mean THE WEST? You mean that that's a unified culture?? And then how does it have more weight and history than THE EAST, whatever that is in turn?

Anyways. Even if your reading of history as a linear process were tenable, your assumptions leave me just as puzzled. Yes, we may never have had the same achievements without Christianity. Similarly, we may have avoided the endless atrocities that the West is guilty of committing. Alternative historical scenarios remain not only unknown, but unknowable. Maybe without Christianity we would have had far greater advances and now there would be world peace! As long as we're speculating on the unknowable, it's as plausible a scenario as the next. I'm not even sure that the good things we did outweigh the bad. The world would certainly have been better off without the Western colonial empires, for one.

Look, surely you can't fail to see what irks me in these arguments. If you told me that Christianity had merit for the Divine Comedy and for Paradise Lost and the Sistine Chapel, I'd be with you. How could I not be? But if you're going to argue that Christianity is at the heart of King Lear and Impressionism and Shostakovich, you're lying to yourself and to me. There's so much that is wonderful in Europe (and beyond) that cannot be called Christian in its origin, and the insistence you guys display in arguing otherwise is symptomatic of the type of religious thinking I don't like: the idea that everything my religion says is absolutely right, and everything everybody else says is absolutely wrong (textually voiced as, He who is not with me is against me, Mt 12:30).

In closure, if you'll accept a reading suggestion, I think you'll find this book very interesting: The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. It's a brilliant piece of work and it seems very much in line with your concerns. No, it's got nothing to do with ballet (I've been getting a lot of this Black Swan stuff on my blog lately). It's about understanding causes and unpredictability in our history, and it's a wonderfully accessible and illuminating read.

Peace out!

One hundred and fifty

2011-03-17T15:20:00.001-07:00

Just a couple of lines tonight. This isn't much of a post, but I just wanted to celebrate the anniversary of someone very special: my country of birth. :)

Italy became officially 150 years old today. Since 1861 we've had monarchies, dictatorships, republics and media regimes. Since before that date we've had... sheesh. No point even in recounting it all. The fall and rise of empires, religions, cultures. At least two golden ages of literature (Latin and Medieval), more art than you can begin to quantify, luminaries of all sciences (Copernicus, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci), three hundred years of music of all types, some of the greatest explorers in history (Marco Polo, Columbus). And then the supposedly lesser things, the ones which don't really get into the history books: the food, the climate, the enormous and yet (mostly) internationally obscure traditions in sports, comics and song-writing (how many know, for instance, that 70% of Walt Disney's global comic publications are produced in Italy?).

Italy has a typical reputation for triviality: our country is seen as amiable and benign, and Italians are the guys who make it into Japanese videogames with the name of Mario or into American films as fat guys saying Mamma Mia. It's seldom associated with notions of greatness.

I'm not going to claim otherwise - though it wouldn't be hard to put up an argument, if one wanted - especially because of the situation we're floundering in now. It's hard to explain what loving one's country means to people whose greatest idea of a political crisis is an inefficient President. Perhaps it is the shame that I am forced to bear on account of my motherland, as our international image is constantly reduced to mud by the scoundrels who are ruling us, that makes me feel so tender towards all the good things that there are in it. History goes by ups and downs. The last great down lasted twenty years, and it was called fascism. The present one has gone on for a similar period of time, and it's the age of Berlusconi. I have hope that it will end soon.

Time passes and takes away the houses and the cities, the empires and the myths. It will take away this generation of inept rulers as well, and then I'll finally be able to feel proud about being Italian again (in truth, I can't wait). In the meantime, Happy 150th Birthday, Italia. May the 200th fall under better days, as there are people who believe in it. Like me.

Never let it be said that I'm not going to close with a flourish. Here's an old sonnet I wrote a few years ago. Enjoy!

To Italy

There is a vine that binds us, made of rose
And olive leaves, and figs and spikes of pine;
It is entwined with sunlight, grain and wine,
The song that is our language lets it close
Around our wrists and waists, and we are led
As one into the ribcage of the self.
A monumental doorway, clean like health,
Bears these old words once Polyphemus said:
Who. Are. You. – I don’t speak, air goes amiss.
Italia, sacred no-one, earth and mother,
This question (cryptologically spelt, 'bliss')
Was only made by Time to break or smother
The heart in me, the flag in you. And this
Is why we’re bound: we answer for each other.

Black Swan, Objections Thereto

2011-03-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit lost as to where to begin writing this post. I'd like to say a few words about Darren Aronofsky, if only because he keeps getting praise which I don't understand. But I'm not sure how to frame my argument so that I don't give off the wrong message. My issue with Aronofsky is not that I dislike the films. It's something else.

Let me try putting it this way. I've seen three films by Aronofsky. The first of these, I loved it, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. It was Requiem for a Dream, a harrowing, graphic tale about a group of people who are into the use of drugs and ultimately sacrifice themselves to them in the film's climactic conclusion. Next followed The Wrestler, a harrowing, graphic tale about a guy who is into wrestling and ultimately sacrifices himself to it in the film's climactic conclusion. And now Black Swan, a harrowing, graphic tale about a girl who is into ballet and ultimately sacrifices herself to it in the film's climactic conclusion. Are we beginning to see a trend?

Aronofsky has caught a virus which was supposed to belong to Guy Ritchie. Ritchie made one brilliant comedy in Lock & Stock, and then remade it in both Snatch and Rocknrolla by switching the ancient shotguns for a diamond and then for a valuable portrait. But it's still, essentially, the SDF (same damn film).

And then there's the fact that Aronofsky seems to be getting more popular the less his films become interesting. From what I understand, Black Swan (which abbreviates to BS but I don't have the heart for that) is the first of Aronofsky's films to win a major Oscar (Best Actress). The others have swept up the Baftas, the Golden Globes and other prizes, but have been ignored by the more populistic Academy Awards. Black Swan finally breaks the mould – and rightly so, because it's by far the most audience-friendly of his films.

I've stopped that old silly thing of exploiting gratuitious boobs to get hits on my blogs. It's Lesbo kisses all the way now!

One of the major problems I have with the film is that it's one of those old stories about art. The point being that an individual sacrifices herself for her art, and the parable shows how art takes everything from you, demands everything, etc. In other words, it's the famous (*yawn*) dialectic about art versus life. I liked Requiem for being a simple narrative about what happens when you take drugs, told with brutal efficiency and indelible power. But the points made by Black Swan are about two-hundred years old, and they're really beginning to feel stale. The ending, with the 'it was perfect' closing line, is one tired cliché (and it made me think of that abhorrent closure in Last Samurai, when the master sees the 'perfect cherry-tree' while dying in battle).

Of course, precisely because the story is so old, it's easy to recognize and easy to digest (hence so many people going nuts over the film's cathartic power, I guess) – even though it's false. When presented in this form, Nina's tragedy is meant to encapsulate an underlying dilemma – whether she should choose art or life (which is the Romantic form for the original choices of Hercules and Achilles between life and glory). And the audience is meant to be provoked into reflection because, y'know, they're weighing out the same question. But since the possibility of a positive response is conditional on her identity as an 'artist,' and since this identity is not assumed but born into (via another old myth, 'talent' – read, blueblood), there really is no question, and Nina is stripped of her tragic dimension as she simply follows through the struts and frets of her linear script.

With no sense of the tragic, all the gore and graphic details that we're constantly subjected to over the projection lose their weight, and become voyeuristic at best, torture-porn at worst. These graphic details are the things that normally make Aronofsky's films tough to stomach, even when they are so easy to digest. In association with the sensitivity denoted by the themes (a vaguely left-wing sensitivity, at times), and the intellectual aura which surrounds his movies, I am getting a real sense of what their target audience is. Aronofsky makes films for Young Men Who Think They Are Smart. They're the ones who can be expected to like old Darren's films most readily. Black Swan's most clever touch was to focus its story on female characters and concerns, thus broadening its appeal enormously – and this probably accounts for its popularity at the box-office (its US gross is ten times the total gross of his last film, The Wrestler, and it's still showing in the EU).

I've defended Inception in the past as one of the notable films of 2010, more so than Black Swan anyway (it goes without saying that this has provoked a few intemperate responses, as is often the case when your interlocutor is a Young Man Who Thinks He Is Smart). I'm not crazy for Nolan's picture, but it did have some effects I liked. It divided critics on whether the film is clever or hollow, on whether its technical set-pieces made for good story-telling, on whether it took any steps forwards with respect to its granddaddy The Matrix (and if so, how), on whether it was engaging science-fiction or just re-hashed Philip K Dick. In other words, it generated some waves. It caused some change. It posed some questions. With Black Swan, critical response has been pretty standardised. There's a few people who are calling the film for what it is, but even then, the disagreement is about the execution, not about the theme or the idea of the film. And how could it be any other way? Black Swan is a film made to generate consensus. It's a film which we cannot help agreeing upon (mostly).

Look, I want to make this clear. It's not that I didn't like Black Swan. I enjoyed it – how could you not? It's a well-crafted story, about an all-too familiar topic. It's like the intellectual version of family comedies – as long as they're properly executed, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the viewing. But it does nothing that hasn't already been done in Aronofsky's previous films, and it says things about art which have already been said, what, a billion times? As far as I'm concerned, if the next film by this guy doesn't show me a radically different synopsis when I google it, I'm gonna steer away. Peace out.

Liveblogging the second weed marathon

2011-03-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

Because the first one wasn't bad enough!! (also in terms of the writing it produced here on this blog... if I haven't lost fifteen readers after this, I don't know what will get you off).

I'm actually halfway through doing it as I write. I woke up this morning and I decided I'd rather do another round, this time going properly with the beer. We've had a couple of joints so far and we discovered that the bierstick also doubles up wonderfully as a rudimentary bong. Currently we are trying to manufacture another bong out of a can of Pringles. We've found out how to do this through the use of youtube, but the practicalities are something a little different. We've also had a quick foray at the cornershop to replenish the supply of pringles and chocolate. It is now 17:16.

17:38 -- The Pringle bong is now operative and effective. But it kicks on the lungs like a mule, and is perhaps best not used. I'm not sure what we're doing now. I've been lost for some time reading George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language, which is brilliant. I think some film is starting. Or a game. Or whatever the fuck.

17:40 -- The mystery is solved, it's the game 007 Blood Stone for the Xbox. Martin is laughing on his own for some reason. Pints! Pints are going round! I'm only the one who doesn't have litre-size one, boo.

18:01 -- Oook!! Fred wanted to down his litre-pint and he insisted that I film it with his camera. This goes back to a number of challenges between us which I can't resume right now. So I film it and take the piss out of him a little, then he starts downing and it goes down like a bullet. I sit there a little baffled at the sight of one litre going down in a handful of seconds, then I film him as he puts the pint down and collapses back onto the sofa. I film him for a little longer, then, to my immortal regret, switch off the recording button. Barely two seconds after that, he yelps "I feel sick! This isn't funny!" and he's barely in time to cover with his hands the jet of vomit that is coming vertically from his throat. There's a stunned moment of silence after that, then he leaps. The funny thing is that he doesn't even try to get to the bathroom, he just lunges for the terrace with Martin screaming after him "NO FRED MY LAUNDRY'S ON THERE NO" and then he jumps for the bucket. Martin is still trying to get him out of there so Fred explodes into the house again just when I'm getting up and I'm rolled over like a hedgehog. My beer goes flying somewhere in whatever direction after it comes in contact with my foot. It did take a while to clean up.

Using more beer was a jolly notion.

19:29 -- Walked around 15 minutes asking where the bottleopener was and they turned out to be screw-cap beers. I've just given a try to that smoke-beer-shot combination and that's pretty heavy. We're watching The Hangover now, which is awright.

19:56 -- Seriously, read this, it's brilliant: http://www.george-orwell.org/Politics_and_the_English_Language/0.html These pringle bongs are killing us. We haven't even done a normal joint in so long. It's all bongs and tulips now. As I write these lines I swear I just passed one of the bongs to Fred and Martin has just lit up the next tulip. It's taking me half an hour for each sentence because I keep making these dumb fuck grammar mistakes. My head is spinning, going down, going down...

19:58 -- Look at the size of that fucking tulip. Look at the fucking size of that tulip.

20:00 -- Where art thou, Mephistopheles? I have seen the face of God, and tasted the immortal joys of heaven.

20:10 -- Things have gone quite blurry, Over here. Don't think I can report clearly anymore. Communication is reduced to elementals.

20:13 -- I'm so stoned I can't even remember what I was supposed to write here ten minutes ago. Actually writing much later than 2013

22:02 -- it is now past ten. I don't really know what to write. The centre of the toilet bowl's circle is a centre of gravity. Stars and planets spin around it. Some crazy fucker is suggesting to watch Schindler's List. I refuse that categorically.

23:24 -- I can't. It's late. We're wondering what movie to watch next. I am stoooooned.

23:26 -- Fred is snoring like a caveman who happens to be sleeping during an asteroid collision.

01:14 -- I guess we're shutting down the house now. Martin's falling away like a leaf in wind. I'm going to stay awake a little perhaps, on the internet, then get to sleep.

01:19 -- By the way, we watched Toy Story 3 and I couldn't stop the tears flowing.

Liveblogging the weed marathon

2011-03-10T04:25:00.000-08:00

Here I sit. Next to me are Fred and Martin. Fred is a thirty-year old Italian who works as Goofy at Disneyland and who has a long history of chugging booze with me. Martin is a round-headed Englishman who looks like Charlie Brown probably would look at 27.

It is 13:27. We're going to be smoking massive amounts of weed while watching all sorts of dumbass movies. We used to do these marathons with really intellectual films, but things have kind of degraded. At first we did a Kubrick marathon, then a Schwarzenegger marathon, and now it's just dumb random movies.

I wanna see whether I can write when stoned, so I'll be updating this blog every two hours or so. Onwards ye masses!

13:54 -- One mega joint down, a thing the length of a camel's tongue. Not started on the movies yet, we're playing a game of trivia pursuit on the PS3. Pretty cool, if it weren't for the dumbass motherfucker who voices it and who gives us snazzy remarks before the questions and then asks "how could we possibly, possibly know THAT"! Someone cockslap him.

14:08 -- Minor dispute over the choice of the first film.

15:36 -- Halfway through Beerfest. Fred is about to try something he saw in the film. Breathe in from the joint, down a beer, down a shot, breathe out the smoke. Went through it all right. We're ok so far, so we lit the third joint.

16:18 -- Before coming home we had passed by Fred's place because he wanted to pick up some stuff. He suspiciously brought home condoms. We're through Beerfest now. This incited us to pull out the bierstick (google it if you don't know what it is). We are trying to pull it open by pulling it by the two sides. Fred suggests putting condoms on it. We refuse because it seems too homoerotic. Martin is looking for some way of opening the bierstick now. Got it!

18:02 -- That fucking bierstick, I couldn't get half in before the foam exploded like the Vesuvius. Finished seeing Ali G. Lost count of joints, three, four? Martin is rolling another one.

18:56 -- Golly. I'm really starting to feel the effects now. Martin always rolls these volcanic biblical pillars of fire. We've again interrupted the films for some trivial pursuit. Such a cultural soiree over here in Paris.

19:45 -- Oh the sweet, sweet descent. The hour at which I am writing corresponds to the year of the end of World War II. Is there a prophetic sign there? I can see walls and windows falling down in the past.

21:15 -- I am passing out....

23:35 -- I must have did pass out, at least for the entire duration of easy rider. We are eating like pigs. I'm back awake, but I'm gonna die if they roll anymore.

01:27 -- I think this is over. Trying to get some sleep now.

05:00 -- Fred's alarm goes off and it scares me shitless. I am sleeping on the floor so I wake to the sight of him looming over me like he's going to throw up. I leap out of the way very quickly. He has to go to work at 7 and I curse him while going back to sleep. My curse is probably redundant - he must be cursing his life right now.

More tits and Goldblum's terrible movie

2011-02-24T16:16:00.000-08:00

Right. So the other horror film I saw, which kind of creeped me out, was The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum, by David Cronenberg (before he went all 'artistic' and started making some of the worst shit in the history of movie-making... man I had to turn this film off after half-an-hour because it made me want to drive my knee through the TV screen). (A second after posting this I realised that Mulholland Drive is actually a film by David Lynch. I got confused. What is it with Davids? Do they just all make crap films?)

You know something though? I don't really feel much like talking about The Fly. I was all jazzed up for it last time, but then I ran over the word limit, and I knew that the four readers who mistakenly stumble onto my blog when they're looking for free torrents of Twilight on the internet aren't even going to open the page if they see the entry is more than four paragraphs long. I couldn't treat the topic then.

But what can you do. I promised you guys I'd tell you about The Fly, and now I've gotta do it. Otherwise I'm going to be sent to Alcatraz. It's a federal crime not to follow up on your blog promises or something.

Before getting onto the film, though, there's another thing I need to say. I noticed that the site visits spiked to almost double the average about three minutes after I put up pics of tits on the blog. Is this a coincidence? Probably, but just to be on the safe side, here's another picture of boobs.

With the perfunctory twenty hits out of the way, let's get back to us. I didn't much like The Fly. There's a number of reasons why I didn't, and the title is already one of them. “The Fly.” I mean, it's pretty vague. What if you're listing through a catalogue in the cinema and you see a film titled “The Grasshopper” or “The Longhorn Beetle.” It doesn't sound like an engaging story at all, it sounds like a fucking BBC documentary to be aired at 3 a.m. between Blatter's presentation of the Wii Bowling World Champions and a homoerotic show of Danish Fashion. But anyway.

Another thing I didn't like is how they use the lead actor. I really quite like Jeff Goldblum, he plays one of my favourite fictional side-characters of all time, that being Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park (a rock-star mathematician who introduced me, at a tender age, to the concept of chaos theory). I liked him in The Fly as well, but around half-way through the movie they coat him with this gross make-up shit because his flesh is all rotting or something and you can barely see him anymore. Might as well have given the part to Leslie Nielsen.

(The leading lady is something slightly different... she's hot, but my God, the eighties, along with the fifites, had a unique ability for building hairstyles which demolish attraction... what ARE those curl-balls they carry on their craniums??)

Anyway this leads us to the real reason I didn't think much of this movie. It's really disgusting. I know horrors are *meant* to be sick, but Night of the Living Dead made its point without all the gut-spilling, and that's why I kind of liked it, after all. Cronenberg's film is just horrendous. Basically the plot is that this wacky scientist builds two teleportation cabins, and in the process of teleporting himself, he accidentally lets a fly in the cabin with him. So he is recomposed at the molecular level with his DNA mixed with that of the fly, and he slowly mutates into a fly-man hybrid. (This leads me to another thing I never understand about these movies, the idea of these scientists who build industrial machinery on their own. Where did he get the hundreds of pounds of steel? Who fused it for him into two capsules, and who built the circuits to connect them to each other and to the computer? Did he do that himself? So as well as a genius in molecular physics, he's also a master of electrical engineering and IT programming? Speaking of which, where did he get the hardware, and how did he reprogram it into the artificial intelligence he uses? And even if he were capable of doing it all on his own, where does he get the immense capital that all this must cost, since the apartment alone is worth several thousand a week? How much power does teleportation burn and how is his domestic circuit able to support it, and if it can't, where are the generators? At one point we see him placing an animal into the capsule for experimental teleportation, a process which of course ends with gore splatted over every wall, and it's a baboon!! A fucking baboon, for crying out loud!!! And later it turns out that he's got TWO of them!! WHERE THE FUCK DID HE GET THEM?? They don't grow on trees do they... oh wait they do grow on trees, but what I'm saying is, how on earth can he get two rare and protected central-African animals as experiment-fodder?? Teleportation doesn't work on white mice for some reason? Man, the hairstyles in this film may be from the eighties, but the sci-fi is straight out of the twenties, and it's like they're having a race at which of the two is the dumbest...).

No, Bar Refaeli doesn't have anything to do with my argument, I'm just keeping the traffic coming...

So I was saying, before this most extensive parenthesis, that the film is full of goo, guts, vomit, flesh, blood and other revolting things. And personally, that's a negative, even when the story has some interesting premises, as it does here. Maybe I haven't been desensitized enough by cinema, but this stuff disturbs me. And maybe it's a matter of personal taste to a great extent, so there's little more that can be said. In truth the question of a film's responsibility with respect to portraying violence (and the categories and qualities of that violence itself) deserves its own (very long) discussion, and since I'm virtually emptying my head of junk at the moment, I'm really not going to start on that lane now. Besides, my fuel for intelligent discussion has all been taken up for The Terminator, as I said, and for at least a few days, I'm not gonna touch anything clever with a fishing rod. (Back to Italian politics then, whoopee...)

So to end today's blog entry on a note as intelligent as that on which I started it, here's what I thought about the film:

Of Tits and Zombies

2011-02-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

The fact that I should have been born a girl is the consensus of all of my friends, or it would be if anybody agreed with it. Girls in particular get all WHATEVA when I suggest the pacate proposition. But in truth, the evidence on the subject is substantial. Consider: 1.) I am extremely sensitive (and I cry easy, too). 2.) I like sweet, cloying drinks, like Coke and Sambuca, which I've had to stop drinking because of all the people who scream faggot when I walk by with that pink shit in my hands, and conversely I dislike the most bitter and burly versions of beer (that stuff feels like throwing a hand grenade down your throat). 3.) I'm almost hairless. Even my beard grows sparsely. 4.) I love cooking. (whoops... faux pas there). 5.) And dancing. 6.) And Titanic. Fuck it. 7.) I'm more into literature and the humanities than into the sciences.

And though by this stage you're probably thinking OHMYGODHE'SGAY, I'm sorry to disappoint. Nope, I don't pack fudge. I was just given the wrong tag on the birth-processor.

So anyway, all of this dubious introduction serves one purpose only, and that's to introduce my subject-matter. In reality I wanted to write about Cameron's The Terminator, as I had some really brilliant things to say about that movie, but that article has been mooched by a film-site (I shall be linking it shortly) and you guys get STUFFED!! Instead of something really clever, you get this bullshit post summing up my thoughts-o'-the-day to avoid the blog falling into dis-use and growing jungle weeds, which would make it difficult to access again, and it would encourage gorillas to settle colonies here.

This image is about the Terminator. (No seriously, that lady is the TX from Terminator 3).

So the point I was driving at is that I now have another piece of evidence pointing to the fact that I should have been born boobied, and this is it: I don't like horror movies. I'm generally quite squeamish and seeing people slapping each other with their own livers is something that grosses me out to no end. I do make an exception for the Alien saga, but that's mainly because I grew up with it, kind of like other people with Biff, Parker and Chip or however the fuck they're called, and besides it's closer to sci-fi than horror.

Yet despite my comparative dislike of the genre, I've been pushed into watching a few of these movies as of late. Firstly, there's Chris with his blog on zombies who told me that if I watched Night of the Living Dead, he'd put all rounds on him next time we went out drinking together, so I thought, what the hell. I watched it. Remuneration will have to wait till I'm back in the rain-trench also known as England, but in the meantime, everybody and their dog is asking me – did I like it?

Uhm, so-and-so. I was relieved to find that the film is actually remarkably tame. I mean, zombie movies are usually some of the grossest shit you can imagine, but this one didn't have much more than people beating each other with their shoes, which used to happen to me all the time anyway with some of my housemates. I mean, it's a disturbing film psychologically, but they aren't tossing pints of blood around like Bavarians at the Oktoberfest for a change.

The film, for those who don't know, is the story about a young deer who grows up in the forest. As he matures, he gets to make friends with several of the other animals, acquire new skills, but one day the hunters come and he must learn to be brave like his father.

No wait, that's Bambi. What the fuck was I writing about again? Oh yeah, gruesome films. Actually I think Bambi succeeded in horrifying more children with its fucking Schindler's List finale than Night of the Living Dead ever did (there's a film for you to write about, Chris). But still. Night of the Living Dead is the story about BARBRA and another group of schlocks who barricade themselves into a house and try to survive while dead people outside are raised by an asteroid's radio-waves into cannibalism (I love how that sentence started out rational and slowly decayed into total WTF territory...). One of the film's main themes is the name BARBRA, because in the first ten minutes you hear the name BARBRA a lot (particularly for the immortal line: 'They're coming to get you BARBRA,' which particularly distresses BARBRA, presumably because she's tired of hearing her name said all the time. Like, ok I'm called BARBRA, I got it guys! This isn't a porn movie!).

Another of the film's main themes is death. Or I'm guessing, anyway. I'm not completely sure.

So anyway, to be serious for five seconds, the film is actually pretty good, if a bit rudimentary in its execution. It's got quite a few psychological layers which make it engaging, it was undisputably influential, and astonishingly, it has a black protagonist (1968? Jesus!). The story is good, but I think the technique and direction, with all its close-ups on faces and screeching music, sort of underlining for us 'This is when you have to be scared guys,' feels a little dated. So it's obviously a good movie, but one that has suffered aging more so than many other films of the time. The undead, for instance, are not very credible. You just can't get out of the sense that, eh, they're frigging actors! What are all these people panicking about??

The soundtrack is also a very famous feature of the film. This monotone, hysterical piano is one of the most distinct and recognizable aspects of Night of the Living Dead, and it was particularly successful in the subsequent concert that toured all of America, called Night of the Dead Live (sorry. I couldn't resist that). It was followed by numerous sequels, some of which as influential as the first: Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Afternoon of the Dead, Tea-time of the Dead, Evening of the Dead, Supper of the Dead, Clubbing with the Dead, Drunk-Driving with the Dead, Laid with the Dead and others. (Laid with the Dead is known in some countries as Twilight. Apparently the girl there gets in a threesome involving a wolf and a vampire... woof man, necrophilia up the ass and bestiality in the mouth and they're still wondering how this film got a PG13?).

The other horror film I saw these days that I wanted to write about... yo dude, what ho! I'm out of space! I shall discuss it in the next few days.

Stay tuned! And in the meantime, get this!

Discovering Dostoevsky

2011-02-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

Russian literature, for a long time, has been the thorn in my literary education. I simply never got around to reading much of it. I've put a few names under my belt so I could show off (War and Peace most clamorously, and some Gogol and Bulgakov), but there was one colossus of a novelist whom I especially felt was lacking from my mental librairies: Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I don't think there's that many people out there with a BA and MA in literature who never touched anything Dostoevsky until the age of 25, so I feel kind of privileged (I guess in a game of humiliation it would have scored me a few points). Anyway, last November I headed off to Russia and I needed some reading material to kill off the dead space in my travelling time, so I thought it was time to patch holes. I got hold of a copy of Dostoevsky's two supposedly greatest novels, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and I set down to reading them.

I finished the first in mid-December, and the latter only a few days ago, and I thought I'd make a blog-post out of it. It's not an in-depth analysis or anything, so don't expect anything ultra-insightful; just my thoughts as they come up.

Crime and Punishment (CAP) is going to be forever dear to me in memory if only for the particular experience of reading it. I went through the whole thing in St Petersburg, as a way of killing daylight hours before night came and I could go out partying. I spent four, even five hours a day inside this Russian pub on Nevsky Prospect, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes (two habits I've never much indulged in, and the latter I stopped since coming back), and reading either contemporary British poets, or Dostoevsky.

My choice of reading material was quite illuminated, because CAP is a novel which flows very well. The back of the book and the introduction went a way towards hyping it, describing it as 'one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written', and a 'most gripping' story. That's hyperbolic, of course; people used to airport novels aren't going to find this such a big page-turner, and there's several instances in the narrative when it kind of slows down. Perhaps most importantly, one has to share some of D's most human/philosophical interests to really get engaged with the things and events being described. That being said, it's still a novel which proceeds quite quickly, not at all burdensome to read, thanks mostly to an intent narratorial voice which never loses sight of its subject-matter.

Did I like it? Yes, I guess. I wouldn't say I was overblown by it, but it's definitely an interesting tale. D's technical merits are undisputable: the things that the prose does are very far ahead of its time; you could even say that D was the first truly modern author, and there's no doubt that he cast a long shadow over all the great novelists who came in the 20th Century. However, I think my main issue with it was this: I didn't think the point it made required a novel. Or at least, not one in excess of 400 pages. D's discussions are existential - essentially, he's weighing up the practical possibilities of our metaphysical freedom. Starting from the presupposition that God only exists if we accept him, he considers what we can and cannot do with our boundless liberty of action. Ultimately, from what I understand, he comes to the conclusion that a philosophy of action that does not account for a person's spirituality ends up crippled by its own hubris, because a man's moral nature inevitably draws him back to (re-)imposing a moral schema on an amoral universe (in the novel's specific case, by self-punishment for the 'crime' which the protagonist thought he was at liberty to commit). I could probably elaborate a bit on this, but the novel has been summed up by many others, often and well, so I won't add anything more.

It's an interesting parable. My problem, as I said, is that I didn't think it required a novel. I'd have been equally satisfied with an essay on ethics (provided it was competently written, of course): something more direct, making its points by argument and demonstration, and not through the twists and turns of a narrative. Alternatively, a narrative, but more concise (the obvious point of comparison is Camus' The Outsider; a paragon is unfair, given the different periods when the two authors were writing, but the Frenchman's is an example of a philosophical novel which is so successful because, well, because it's brief, however simplistic that may sound. Consider also Orwell's Animal Farm or Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I don't think their stories are any less complex or important than that of CAP, but they draw their parables in a hundred pages or less).

Then again, the objection is subjective. I do have some trouble with the medium of the novel in general, as I think it's quite dispersive (compared to poetry and essays, anyway), so maybe it's just me. In any case, if economy (or lack thereof) is an issue with CAP, this is even more marked with The Brothers Karamazov (BK), a monster of a novel running to almost 900 pages, second in length only to the above-mentioned War and Peace (according to the introduction, anyway).

BK is a fascinating novel. D's last piece of work, completed shortly before his death, it is by many considered to be his masterpiece. The story follows three brothers and their (mis)adventures before and after the death of their father by murder. The attention to detail is remarkable: D draws a tremendous fresco of the little village where things take place, and the characterisation (covering a fucknut of characters) is one of the most convincing, exhaustive and complex you'll ever find. This meticulousness of evocation is the novel's strength and, to some extents, its weakness, as the novel uses up a lot of pages to cover a story in which not that much happens in terms of real 'events.' (Some parts I thought to be almost a waste of space: the prosecutor's speech in the trial towards the end of the novel is a good thirty pages long, and it does nothing but re-narrate everything that has already occurred).

What really intrigues me about this novel is the narratorial voice. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's like D were deliberately trying to create an ancient, almost chtonic novel. His concern with form is palpable, organic. CAP, by comparison, feels so fresh and innovative because it apparently relinquishes questions of conventional form and congruity in favour of a direct, extemporary voice sticking like glue to the events and the thoughts of the characters at the very instant that they happen. There's no concern other than the raw telling of the story, in CAP. With BK, things are more sophisticated. D seems to have gone back to the origins of prose as a form of expression, like he were trying to create a primal, formally perfect novel: the novel as it is meant to be written.

Personally, I think he succeeds completely. BK is 'the' novel, the very heart of how this form expresses meaning. It is perfectly balanced, with the primary narrative 'holding' events, monologues, dialogues, philosophical reflections and even other narratives (stories of the past, told by the characters themselves) within itself without ever losing a single quantum of stability or unity. As with primary novels of the late Eighteenth Century, the narratorial voice is attributed to a 'real' person within the diegesis; in this case, the person speaking is an unidentified inhabitant of the village where everything is taking place, one who frequently foregrounds his/her presence by introducing chapters and characters with anecdotes of his/hers. Even so, the voice never becomes anything more than a voice: the speaker is never actually introduced, never interacts with any of the other characters at all. It grounds the narrative in a sense of reality while never being obtrusive.

I'm really not sure why D, who proved so subversive and radical with CAP, then turns so conservative with BK. Coming to questions of evaluation, the two are almost hard to compare. But for what my two cents are worth, I preferred CAP. Not only because it's faster, more furious and shorter, but precisely because it felt not as close to the 'heart' of the novel (as I mentioned, I'm not completely enamoured when it comes to this literary form). Besides, there were other issues which marred BK, partly relating to the novel form itself (and D's decision to bind himself to the very core components of the form), and partly for the tale in itself.

For one thing, I had the same problem with BK as I did with CAP, in that I would have preferred D's reflections to be more ordered and concise. Admittedly BK, which encompasses a tremendously broad spectrum of spiritual perspectives, is less 'precise' than CAP and therefore would have been much less suited for an essay. CAP is a linear parable, BK is more of a journey through many different perspectives. On the other hand, though, the narrative itself didn't do much for me emotionally. There's a few very nice moments, but most of the things that happen I thought to be, well, uninteresting. The introduction, in its typical sales language, gushes that "if you want money, sex and violence, you will find them in BK." But while there's plenty of money going round, there really isn't much of the other two. The murder itself is never described, and there's nothing in the book which we could call 'violence' other than a couple of scuffles. As for sex, there's one suggestion that Karamov-Father may have impregnated a mentally retarded girl at one point, and that's it. The rest of the novel is as chaste as anything written in England in the 19th Century. The idea of Katerina Ivanovna or even Grushenka contemplating a shag is as plausible as that of aliens landing in the middle of the village and introducing everyone to laser-beams. There isn't even a kiss in this book, that I can recall. Honestly, if it weren't for the South Americans, I sometimes wonder if we'd ever have known what it's like to have a novel with plenty of sex in it.

(Come to think of it, and in fairness to D, CAP does include quite a bit of sex. Though it's alluded to rather than explicitly described - which is a good thing, in the context of this story - one of the main characters is a young girl who has ended up in prostitution, and there's a few scenes where the topic of sex is suggested almost with a certain sleight of hand. Anyway, I'm losing myself in pointless discussions here - let's get back to the point).

In general, CAP just seemed more pertinent. The entire narrative was a little too diluted for the purposes of its meditation, in my opinion, but formally at least, it stuck with the story. BK goes out of its way to describe the lives of people whom I have difficulty caring much about. So Father Zossima used to be a soldier and he converted just before his duel... yay. At least War and Peace discusses the 'great' events of life and history (albeit with varying success, and with less lucidity than D). BK is, I dunno... parochial? I just don't see why I have much reason to empathise with these people stuck in a village a hundred miles from anything, worried about getting three-thousand roubles from their inheritance and about marrying this person or that (the mechanics of their falling in love are also a bit mysterious to me... Alyosha decides to marry a girl on a wheelchair with whom he has exchanged, uh, about thirty words in all the time he's known her?).

I confess that I have difficulties criticising D because every single person who told me about him was enthusiastic to an extreme (including some girls I loved, which I guess has an ironic resonance given the concerns of the character in the novel and my own as I write these lines). I did like the book, I just didn't feel it to be as 'timeless' as people give it credit for (especially the writers of these introductions). In fact, and at the risk of saying something idiotic, I wonder if its time may not already be coming round. Of course this has nothing to do with D himself and everything to do with the novel form in general, which in many ways is the most naturally transient of all literary forms. Novels are built around a voice which is actual, unmediated; they speak the same language of the times they were written in, even when they 'dress up' in other voices. This is why they're so effective to tell stories, and why they're so easy and pleasurable to read. It's like having a friend telling you a story in person. But this is also why they decay rapidly. Your friends become grandpas and your own nephews find them old and slow, if not boring. It reminds me of Beethoven's wane in popularity in Vienna over the last ten/fifteen years of his life - a dramatic decline in attendance and critical favour, exacerbating his already considerable sense of isolation, all the more astonishing because he was writing some of his best work ever. The great contemporary novelist Alessandro Baricco sums it up in 'Lesson 21' by saying that they (the Viennese) were "a world in movement," while Beethoven was old. Or, to use another word, he was still. I think it's the same with ourselves today. Today, to 'have culture' doesn't refer to being learned in how living organisms work or how the Phoenicians dressed, or knowing how to build a boat or factorise an equation. Mostly it means to have ready many novels from the 19th Century (and early 20th). It's our banner, one way that we make sense of things. I think the upper limit is reached with Joyce and Proust: they are the last 'great' novelists, and most of the stuff coming later seldom counts as 'culture' (with a number of interesting exceptions, mostly sophisticated writers like Borges or Calvino).

Beethoven, in the last years of his life... now you know why he was so pissed off.

This is not an historical constant at all, of course. There used to be a time when reading novels was seen as a pastime for the uncultivated, for romantic girls at their homes, adolescents, bourgeois gentlemen, and in general people who wanted to be up on the latest fashionable bestseller in Europe. 'Gentlemen' read poetry and the Classics from Greece and Rome. Today, 'gentlemen' read 19th Century novels. They read Tolstoy and Zola and Melville and the Brontes. And they read Dostoevsky. He is precisely one of those 'indispensable' authors (the term 'indispensable' is one of those hyperboles we use to describe a certain cultural quality of a book; it is almost interchangeable with, say, 'life-changing' or 'timeless'). The quality of his work, per se, will remain forever, I just wonder how long it's going to be 'indispensable' for. Truth is, I don't even know if I'd call it that now. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the things which we can't live without tend to be the first we leave behind.