The Schizo-Stroller

Infinite Thought seems pleased Iceland has an elf school.

[This post is now written awaiting a citation cos this was so long ago damn it! And I sold the book anyway!] Yet I remember in my years exploring the more magical esoterical belief systems (before I was put off by reading Aryan shit about jews being unable to do proper magic and I found whilst trying to practice Crowleyan magick that I didn’t believe control freakery required cutting oneself for some alienated desire to self-program. Old Youth quote (half remembered, may not be Youth, don’t quote me), ‘I’m a real magician, I have the scars to prove it’. I then became convinced I was being persecuted by the demon Chronozon, the rest is in my medical files. Someone will lose them on a train sometime you can read them then.) Coming across a book about more herbal forms of magic of the elven kind. Within this compendium from several authors the idea of the myth of dwarves and elves stemming from pre-Celtic Britons who’d been pushed out by the invaders living in the wilds and being of a shorter stature.

This led to the time I was in a half-way hostel in St Albans, one of the younger schizophrenics used to leave food out for the elves. Another resident was a Cornish fellow who believed himself to be Merlin. He and I, due to the fact that my surname was Scottish Gaelic, convinced the elf feeding resident, that we were elves too for the above reason.

Although as it happens it turns out my name means the same thing in Old German – Warrior – so something to do with Germanic mercenaries fighting for the Celts then or vice versa, although the Celts came that way geographically pre-Saxon so perhaps they share some old linguistic root.

However it does also remind me of the time in Nottingham chatting to a Scottish guy in a rock club only to find out he was rascist when two black girls came in. He was indeed incensed, white guys own rock doncha know. Angry as I was I decided to have fun, as we shared the freckle and ginger gene, I told him of the research I had done into my Scottish grandfather from whom I got said genes (the rest is Anglo Saxon and Jewish which I didn’t mention) and how I had discovered that freckles came about from the ancient Phoenicians, Assyrians and Moors who traded around the Scottish coasts and occasionally settled and inter-married. He stopped talking to me.

Of course it’s all bollocks. But if racists believe this shit (not throwing you in there Ms. IT) then why not invent some more to really confuse the fuckers.

An article I wrote for Mute magazine on the attitude to poverty represented by Channel 4 programs such as Secret Millionaire, How The Other Half Live and Benefit Busters.

The Return Of The Poor Law Mentality

A review of David Peace’s GB84

The thing about reading ‘faction’ is that you already know how it’s going to end. That I still felt caught up in the book, willing some chracters on, wishing failure on others, even though ultimately you know it’s the other way around, is testimony to the narrative power of this book. I was a young teenager when all this happened and living in the South East so the events weren’t directly of concern to me at the time, but there are enough ghosts of the past to evoke the time whilst reading even though you are transported to other events and places.
There is an interesting question around the fictionalisation of some of the ‘real’ characters in Peace’s books (by ‘real’ I mean Peace takes actual historical actors and fictionalises their thoughts, motives and actions), having read this, I found it was the invented characters (central to the novel but historically fictional) that made for the solidity of the narrative and plot.
There are questions as to the motives of a book like this, as the double meaning of ‘faction’ implies but then I am of a notion that the only people who really think ideology is always someone else’s belief are those who blindly accept the dominant one, and I’m glad that this sits on service station/ supermarker/ airport shelves along with those ‘other’ ‘there are bad people out there and they are your enemies – secure your little fortress’ pulp fiction fodder.

A review I wrote for J. G . Ballard’s ‘Kingdom Come’

Previously all I’ve read of Ballard are some early short stories and Cocaine Nights. I have neither read Atrocity Exhibition nor Crash. What I enjoy of these Ballard novels is his through a glass darkly view is written in such a mundane bestseller style. This is not high brow literature yet it has an understanding of, in this novel at least, postmodernist theory that eludes most airport/ service station fodder.
I find this style endearing, even though there seems to be a haunted upper middle class school boy in their, but perhaps it is this understanding of the un-self-acknowledged ideals of this tier that gives it its insight. Hegemony ain’t no conspiracy theory, it’s accidental despite it’s domination. People believe in their values, their are very fewtruly psychotic cynical manipulators out there, even those with the most power.
Although there seems to be a ITV3 drama feel to this novel; it’s writing style and it’s symplistic plot and characters, it’s final unfolding is somewhat cutting.
I found a bittersweet enjoyment and disappointment (I would say jouissance but you’d think I was a c**t) reading these later Ballard novels but perhaps it is because I am a PhD theory student from a home county where the only thing to do at night was visit the nearby M25 service station, now living in a city with more to do yet so insecure some of its residents name it after another; London-by-the Sea. The bittersweet taste is my own memories and current experience. And even though my own fears and insight help me to relate to the fears this book elucidates, I feel I want more yet I can’t help feeling I can’t escape this type of fiction, I may envy the literary tastes of my fellow middle class intellectuals, and I do get Kafka, oh do I get Kafka, but like Ballard I am a suburban boy at heart. My heart sores at Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben but my tastes are stuck in the all-night motorway service station.

I recently read Emmanuel Carrera’s ‘I’m Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Inside The Mind Of Philip K. Dick’

Here is a review I wrote on a certain social networking site:

Ironically I finished this book whilst stuck on a prolonged train journey on an unseasonally warm spring day whilst taking a fish round to someone’s for dinner. By the end it was reeking. The fish not the book. The book is rather good. We had curry takeaway instead.

The next show on Radio Reverb, in Brighton area 97.2fm, otherwise www.radioreverb.com will be on Sunday 23nd August @ 1pm, and repeated on Wednesday 26th @ 7am.

I will be interviewing artist Louise Bristow and writer Mark Hewitt on art and architecture, ideology and dreams.

Music from Mark Hansen, Luther Thomas and Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky the Subliminal Kid

At some point I may be podcasting the shows from this site.

I’m idea I’m working on, a hypothesis to be proven, if possible, is that the right to property was an attempt, a mistaken attempt, to codify or secure the woman’s phallus.

If Eve giving the apple of knowledge to Adam symbolised the moment man understood that his penis contributed to the miracle of reproduction, from whence the Sun God attempted to wrest control from the Mother Goddess, then the gradual codification of the right to property into law was an Enlightenment attempt to continue it’s belief in the mastery of nature into the family and finalise it in domination. That the man can never be the woman’s phallus, and therefore never attain it no matter how much property he attains nor excludes from others, has led to the aporia mentioned by Adorno and Horkheimer in ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’:

‘The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress. On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population’

Hegemony is accidental, or at least modern hegemony is. Conspiracy theories are  merely a symptom of the modern condition, people may conspire but tend to only for their own self interest, there is no Illuminati. The control by the few has come as a by product, in the place of an Adam and Eve side by side, by the codification by which man hoped to capture his woman and master nature and thus fertility and creation.

This conspirational self-interest is an ideological by-product of the quest for surplus profit. When we reduce everything to this binary function (profit/ no-profit) then we lose what it is to be fully human, more than rationally self-interested, more than genetic reproduction machines. We can be these things but we can be Other, when not stifled by this mistaken attempt at domination.

If you have an opinion on everything and like to bring it back to economics, politics, history or language/ discourse, preferably all four at once.

I haven’t been posting much recently due to family commitments but hopefully should be back soon. Have some juicy ideas mulling. There have been others that seemed bright at the time but have been lost to the inadequacies of memory.