Tommy C's Blog

Something Rich and Strange

2007-11-07T11:51:00.000Z

Only 1% of the ocean depths have been explored by mankind, and more humans have reached the moon than been down there, too. Luckily, the few that made it took cameras with them & photographed such astonishing life:

More pictures here.

(Buy the book or find out more here.)

Champion Shuffler

2007-08-12T19:19:00.001+01:00

I don't blog much on this blog - especially compared to the chess blog I run and help write. Or rather I should say, compared to the award winning chess blog I run and help write. But now I've fixed my camera, that could all change. Could...

If it does, you can expect stuff like this. How I went to the Great British Beer Festival on Saturday, and discovered a game called Shuffleboard that I actually seem to have some talent for - unlike all of the other games in the universe. Luckily Shuffleboard is a compelling spectacle that demands acts of extreme sportsmanship from its athletes. (Meaning that yes, I am an athlete now.) A sport for the 2012 Olympics? Maybe. They're going to be held just up the road from me, and I'll be ready, just in case.

But before that, what is Shuffleboard? Here's my friend Antony having a go, so you can get the idea before I dazzle you with my own accomplishment:

You have a pile of round wooden things: I assume they are called 'shuffles', since it's self-explanatory which part of the sports equipment the 'board' refers to. You have to get these shuffles through the slots in the bridge. For that you get points - and points win prizes.

And here's how Antony did:

Pretty good. I decided to follow Antony's strategy of drinking a lot, but also add a few novel tactics of my own. The first can be seen from this picture of me getting ready to go:
The unused pile of shuffles are stacked off the board, behind the beer glasses, so not in the way: tactic one. I also decided to go for top-spin, and aiming them at the slits hard. Top-spin proved impossible, but nonetheless I did alright, eh:

Winner!

And guess what I won? A million pounds? A yacht? Eternal life? Even better: The Big Book of Beer, which is just stuffed full of brilliant tips on how to get drunk, a central part of my Shuffleboard training plan in the years to come. Next, the crowd carried me off on their shoulders...

I don't know. Is the camera good or bad news for this blog?

Which LOLCAT Are You?

2007-07-18T17:08:00.000+01:00

Probably the lamest thing I've ever blogged. But... I loved it.

Your Score: Sad Cookie Cat

71 % Affection, 50 % Excitability , 55 % Hunger

You are the classic Shakespearian tragedy of the lolcat universe. The sad story of a baking a cookie, succumbing to gluttony, and in turn consuming the very cookie that was to be offered. Bad grammar ensues.

Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Bastard.

2007-05-25T11:46:00.000+01:00

Umm...

Congratulations and welcome. You have entered a site designed by bastards, for bastards, in a spirit of unapologetic bastardy.

If you suspect that you are not a bastard, careful questioning of your mother may reveal that you actually are. If not, I confer upon you the title of honorary bastard for finding this site.

I'm not easily confused and not easily amused, but Christophe the Insultor, Archbastard manages both - whilst not managing to insult, alas. Time to open up the insultesaurus for his bastard guest book, though?

What's the difference between you, and a fruit fly?

2007-05-16T12:58:00.000+01:00

Science, religion and philosophy are pub conversations for the likes us, single and drunk twenty-something* Londoners. They're things that other people do seriously, but which we sit judging from our cosy alcoves with the pints lining up.

This isn't to say we don't take them on with a straight-face, or that we can't have arguments. And the arguments usually occur when it comes to free-will and morality. The hedonists amongst us prefer to say neither exists: thus we can carry on glibly partying, thanks Science, thanks Determinism! A few others take a different view . . . . .

. . . . . Morality and free-will are a natural and obvious part of life, they say. Since evolution created them in us, they will occur to differing degrees in other creatures too. And if Science hasn't caught up with that self-evident fact, operating instead on the basis that 'if we can't explain it, it doesn't exist', Science is all the worse for it. Or in fact, no longer Science . . . . . Someone at this point usually objects, that surely we can only expect free-will and morality to have evolved in Humans? But this is a curious remnant of the religious view of human exceptionalism, something you can't have alongside an acceptance of evolution. And the term anthropomorphism is neatly rebutted by the term anthropodenial . . . . . Someone else might add, but isn't the universe deterministic, and that everything - your latest hairstyle, your choice of white - predicted by the Big Bang? Roger Penrose's name comes to the rescue, along with some stuff about quantum mechanics. The more daring suggest that the very explicability of the universe by humans is an argument in favour of its conscious design, and the mystery of 'before the Big Bang' in no way rules that out . . . . . Then someone or other might add how Darwin had identified forms of morality as having evolved in many species - including Pelicans, of all things - and isn't this kind of real-world-first methodology something rather lacking in Dawkins's delineated, logical approach? The conversation tends to shift at that point, because Wikipedia hasn't prepared anyone for this . . . . .

Why am I telling you this? Well, these rehearsals for a serious life that will never happen are going to have to move on a bit. Because: FRUIT FLIES HAVE FREE WILL. So, thanks, Science! I'm looking forward to the local a bit more than usual now.

*-a term that holds, so say we all, even if the something happens now to be a whole decade.

FWIW

2007-05-10T22:52:00.000+01:00

Some news from Tony Blair today about Britain:

This country is a blessed nation.

The British are special.

The world knows it.

In our innermost thoughts, we know it.

This is the greatest nation on earth.

What? Really? Anyone agree? Even, say, in an uttermost drunk moment? Let alone in an innermost thought? I might plausibly agree with the 'special' bit. Although it depends on what is meant by special.

What do you like about art?

2007-02-27T10:14:00.000Z

I always thought Constable was for Grandparent's dinner mats - until I saw one of the large pieces, and that incredible feeling of immersion in a lovely, rich, long-lost English countryside . . . I always thought Warhol was a trendy, posing joker - until I came face to face with his work's subtle, complex melancholy . . . I always thought sculpture was pretty much a waste of time, until I saw two of Rodin's lovers emerge from rock to wrap around each other, and then melt back into the stone they sprang from, intertwined and inseparable . . .

On the other hand, when I saw the far more minor and apparently quite patchy artist Godfried Schalcken's painting 'A useless moral lesson' in the Mauritshuis, I instantly knew exactly what I liked about the painting. Without the need for ellipsis, without enigma. It made me laugh.

I should have taken some notes, because the photo (click to enlarge) came out so badly many details are lost, and I can't remember them. What's the snake-like thing wrapped around that big pillar? Is that a third person at the back left, waiting in the shadows? Waiting for her, or agreeing with the old lecturing fool? Where are the pair, what's in the background?

On the other hand, you can at least almost make out all the key details. A young, beautiful woman. Her hands are poised on a small, unopened box, waiting on a soft cushion for her fingers to unlock. A gnarled, aging man with a crooked back. He's failing to provide her with a lesson, his finger wagging uselessly alone in the air. What strange, intriguing instruments accompany his instruction: a book and a hammer? Or is it a wooden peg? A walking stick? Whatever it is - the title makes the appropriate mockery, the contrast between the pair leaves no questions.

And so she stares out from the picture, barely aware of his unwanted speech, out past the smiles which interest her not, that the centuries of on-lookers have brought, while the camera leaves one thing completely uncaptured: she does so with such a spark in her eye.

Jimmy & Jemima

2006-12-17T17:29:00.000Z

The usual 5.30pm train heading south out of London. Rows of suited commuters, wearing the polite expressions of their civilized boredom. It's the silent carriage: the ring of a mobile phone receives a hate-stare. I-Pods are to be turned off.

Guildford, and someone gets on who doesn't belong in the nine to five crowd. I can hear him talking in the strange burr of country tones that only rural England creates. Who too? And where are the usual complaints? But I have no hunch of what's going on beyond the back of his bulky, black leather jacket - until, that is, Woking. There the train thins out, seats and space dots the carriage - and he drags his couple of big, battered bags down the aisle, to plonk himself next to me.

But not exactly next to me, it turned out. Out from his coat elegantly stepped a black and white cat, to settle with a stretch in the space between us.

"Goodness," I said, damning to hell the rules about noise in a split-second decision. "Got far to go?"

"Oh, just The Isle of Wight."

Just The Isle of Wight? But that's a several mile ferry journey after an hour more of this, I pointed out.

"Well, it doesn't seem so far when you set out like us from Birmingham, four hours ago!"

Birmingham: a couple of hundred miles into the west. I asked why.

"I had a job there. I don't like to take time off from my yard, but the money was good. I was up a Gantry Crane - you know, one of the really big ones - and took him with me. He doesn't like to be left alone, you see, doesn't like to be away from me. I left him once for a week and he'd stopped eating by the time I got back, the silly thing."

He seemed to be getting into his stride, this big, forty-something character like I'd never met before, so I prompted him with a few more questions. Cats don't normally miss people like that, do they? How come he's so relaxed on a public train, with people like me tickling his chin and stroking his back? What's his name?

"Jimmy. No, well he's a bit different, you see. Out where my yard is there's a female wild cat, ferrel, like. Each year she has three, four, sometimes five of them. And she rejects all of them, except the most perfect one, her favourite. Just drags the others off somewhere or other and abandons them. She hides her nest pretty well - but last year I found old Jimmy here in my yard. My yard's a big place - a breaker's yard - nearly forty acres. Anyhow. Jimmy wasn't a pretty site when I found him. Have a look at his eye - do you see -"

"The misty little patch? Yes - I noticed it before." The tiniest of purrs from Jimmy as I stroked around his ears.

"Well this isn't a pretty story I'm afraid - when I found him, he had a tape worm growing right through there . . . When the vet took it out, it was longer than his whole body, bless him. He was just a kitten of course. That wasn't all though. He was wrapped in barbed wire you see - and as it turned out had a broken skull. Don't know how he'd managed that. Something falling from the yard maybe. So vet's had to put in five metal plates in his head - just there, where the scar is - over the years. Boy has that cost a lot."

He gives Jimmy a little tap on the bonce. A slight stir from him, then back to rest; the usual indifferent cat response. But this is not a normal cat, that much already is clear.

"Really?" I said. "I've no idea about these kinds of things."

"Well, it's been just a bit under three thousand pounds, so far. And I had to have him - you know -" I know. Men always know the implication of that kind of look, and feel it with a slight wince down below. "But that was after. The reason was, see his four white socks? They're perfect. If I didn't have - you know - breeders would thieve him. He'd be worth a mint, you see. He's perfect in that ways.

"Anyhow. So when I found him he was near dead. We took him to the vets, like I said. The vet told us there was no chance, that the best thing to do was put old Jimmy down - but I talked him into around. He just didn't want the work.

"At first Jimmy wouldn't eat - in fact he didn't really walk properly. He used to push himself along the ground on his back legs. We figured that was the only way he'd been able to eat, being wrapped in barbed wire and partly blind and all. Just pushing himself along like that, hoovering up whatever grubs he was lucky enough to run into. They were probably trying to eat him too - what with all his flesh . . .

"So I had to teach old Jimmy to eat. I went away for a job a few months after that - leaving the boys to feed him. But they said after a few days he'd stopped eating, and would just spend all his time scratching my door. I decided after that to take him with me. Oh, he comes up the crane with me alright. He likes it enough - don't you Jimmy?"

A little stretch on the seat.

"So he's happy not only on a train," I said, deciding to state the obvious to keep the conversation going, "but on a crane, too! Remarkable!"

"Oh - any vehincle, really."

"Really?!"

"Oh yes, as long as I'm there. Well you see I have to jump on a dirt-bike to close the gates of my yard each night, and get back. We haven't got them electrified or remote controlled you see - we only got electric last year. We'd been making our own out of cooking oil and the like, but one of the generators got old and blew up. So we had to wire the yard up, put in a substation, all that. Still at least we had free electricity for fifteen years. Still got free water mind - we weren't sure about the Well there when we took it over, but then we found a second spring and dug our own.

"It's - well anyway - where was I? That's right.

"So I take him down on the handle bars of my dirt-bike most nights, if he's in the mood. You like that Jimmy, don't you? Oh, he likes to fly too. One of my mates down on the island is a World War Two buff. Really into it. So a whiles back he built himself a replica plane - you know one of those two-seaters, front and back, open top. He rents it out and the like. Anyhow - when I go up I takes Jimmy up in it too! He's done the loop the loop. Rolls, spins, the lot. He didn't mind it. Because he was with me, you see."

How selfish and unattached cats usually are: hopping from house to house, garden to garden, lap to lap to sofa, forgetting who you are the second your back is turned. Yet, there Jimmy was, the Dare Devil cat who overcame the limitations of his species in this remarkable, trusting, loving bond.

"What happened to the other kittens?" I asked.

"We managed to find one other," he said. "Some years we don't find any at all, you see, although we'll be looking again this year. That other one we found was Jemima. My friend has her now. Now, Jemima really does have a story to tell. She -"

- and the train pulled in at my stop. I thought about wishing Jimmy and his owner luck. But what more luck did either of them need?

"Nice to have meet you," I said blandly.

"Likewise," he said, having not really met me at all.

As I exited the train and started to walk along the platform, a family got on. Through the glass of the carriage window I saw a daughter with her phone out, taking a photo of a beaming son stroking an unflapped Jimmy. Jimmy's owner was starting to talk to their parents. What a story they had coming, I thought, and then wondered what that fine man's name was.

If I Should Die, Think Only This Of Me

2006-10-20T14:20:00.000+01:00

On coming ashore, plastered in mud and wearing only a red beret and a pair of flippers, he was confronted by a party of armed Cubans. Mustering as much authority as he could in the circumstances, he informed the group that they were trespassing on British sovereign territory and were surrounded.

The following morning, when the Royal Marines arrived to rescue him they were astonished to find him and his radio operator in a clearing standing guard over the Cubans and a pile of surrendered weapons. He was appointed OBE.

Quite a guy, John Pine-Coffin.

Athens of old, Athens of new

2006-09-26T20:26:00.000+01:00

A woman being raped by a centaur - her foot falls away from the half-man half-beast - thrust out from the frieze - attempting her desperate escape for eternity - each delicately carved toe thrust now into this museum up on the Acropolis, where tourists touch statues they shouldn't, and take flashing photographs of each other's poses. Attendants shout at them to stop that all the time.

Another room, and twelve Athena's in a circle. Different sizes and different smiles. Twelve elevated eyes, staring from the same stone woman, sensuous and spinning around - asking which is the true Athena, under which toga is she, deity of the city, alive eternally, which is she, she who gifted this ground its first olives, goddess of wisdom, perfect, setting two thousand years later an impossible puzzle for a man in her midst - which is truly her? And - "some really old stuff in here, huh," remarks an American to his buddy taking a rest on a bench, as on cue as a deflating balloon parping around the end of a party in the hangover of morning.

Even if, cast in scaffolds, the columns up on the hills of Athens still perform their usual duty: to rule the mind and the fist by visible beauty, literary stereotypes of the lies of monuments and the flaws of eyesight don't do here. Here amidst the remnants of a sensuous religion. Where the colours of the statues have flaked and faded from whatever they once were, where one imagines what one can't ever imagine, of life and of colours gone. But still, the occassional flash of a once-bright red on the side of a shield still exists. A tiny spot of green in the middle of a huge length of snake. A three hundred and sixty degree frieze of a war: a battle scene here on one side, a fleeing village there - whilst the gods spectate from one whole side, but have started to lose their bodies. A nose missing here, there a leg, or arm. Elemental flesh, falling apart. Then the face of Zeus, emptied of its features by time. And by the passing of practice, belief, ways of life, of civilisation. Everywhere, ancient gods have faded to faint modern ghosts. But the life one must have felt with culture like this.

"Pretty woman," croons some guy ineptly and loudly to his girlfriend as they stroll back down to the modern city. "Walking down the street! Pretty woman!" The couple cut across the dusty ground between one path over to the next - where an older guy tells him to please shut up and keep to the path. Girlfriend takes a few paces back, hand to forehead, obviously knowing what's coming next. "I am a Greek citizen, I have right to be here! Where are you from? Finland? So what! This is mine. I don't care if you are here to research, you are not my father! Do not, sir, tell me what to do! If you think I have committed a criminal act, there is Police Station at the bottom of this path! But do not tell me what to do, I am a Greek citizen!"

Their exchange of shouts echo back along the path for a few minutes more. A pointless personal battle, with is pitiful rhetoric and pathetic pride, and then a bit of pushing. I take a rest on a bench, survey the sprawl that is the living city limping along below. It is said the gods departed Greece when they became too disappointed with humans, lacking presumably our self-congratulating facility for sarcastic observation, or the consolation of movies on DVD. Yet, still, their powers of war storm the whole of the earth every day once more, let loose from Olympus, crashing throughout a complex and confused world. A world where it is said, or maybe it's a myth, that some still seek like archeologists things that ought be preserved, or even brought back to whatever life remains possible.

After the games . . .

2006-05-15T14:17:00.000+01:00

However painful it may be, we must not shrink from the truth: women cannot play chess. ... they cannot paint either, or write, or philosophize. ... the fact [is] that women are much more stupid than men.

Amongst chess players, JH Donner has a legendary reputation. Not especially for the games he played - although as a good but not great Grandmaster he had his moments - but as a writer. Outrageous, provocative, insulting, sardonic, ironic, superior - and above all else, hilarious.

His quotations abound in writings about the game:

After I resigned this game with perfect self-control and solemnly shook hands with my opponent in the best of Anglo-Saxon traditions, I rushed home, where I threw myself onto my bed, howling and screaming, and pulled the blankets over my face. For three days and three nights . . .

I love all positions. Give me a difficult positional game, I will play it. Give me a bad position, I will defend it. Openings, endgames, complicated positions, dull draws, I love them and I will do my very best. But totally won positions, I cannot stand them.

Love is: trying your whole life to teach your wife to play chess.

- chosen from amongst many.

And now, for the first time, Donner's long-fabled book, The King: Chess Pieces, has appeared fully in English translation - almost 20 years after its original publication in his homeland, Holland, a year before his death. Does it justify novelist Harry Mulisch's description that "this books is about chess only in appearance, and I hope that no one will allow himself to be scared off by the diagrams and annotations ... It is in fact a magnificent self-portrait of Hein Donner"? In other words, is it worth a read for the non-chess player?

Certainly the title amused my office mates. "The King? Chess Pieces? Is there a sequel - say, The Knight, Another Chess Piece?" But it amused them more to learn that the first part of the title appears to refer to Donner's view of himself, whilst the latter is also a pun: the book is Donner's selected journalism, from 1950 to 1983. Indeed, whilst Donner's focus is always chess-related, his range of passing subjects is wide: from the sociology of poker in the United States to the idiocies of sports writing to the nature of communism.

But he has a few favourites. One is women, as you might already guessed, and the comic mysteries they present Donner run throughout the book, and thus his career and life. At one point, he is mystified as to why - whilst men comprehensibly send him hate-mail threatening to beat him up in response to his latest outrage - women want to take care of the wayward creature they read him as, suggesting nursing in their letters. At another, he says watching women's chess is like seeing a "caricature [of chess], a distortion in a carnival mirror," - like, in fact, draughts. Draughts - "the retarded sibling of chess," as he memorably puts it.

This was the Donner I was expecting. But there is more. For instance, having written again and again that women are too stupid for chess, having detailed with deep mirth the blunders he finds in their play, in 1977 he asks again the question of why women can't play chess. Taking a swipe at the "rising mudslide of feminism" for not working out the correct answer, as he has, he rephrases the question: "what is so deeply objectionable in the game of chess that women, the crown of creation, are incapable of playing it well?" Simply that, he writes, "games are the opposite of human contact."

His elaboration of his answer then includes the following:

During their game, chess players are 'incommunicado'; they are imprisoned. What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a worldess sniffing and grabbing in a bottomless pit. Women do not like that, and who is to blame them?

Such apparently sincere, and almost slightly sad insights increase throughout the book - alongside his proclivity to polemicize - at times reaching an accute pitch:

The chess player rejects life with its painful lack of transparency and its hopeless insolubility, and chooses and has chosen what seems transparent and soluble. It was his first inspiration, but this innermost motive turns against him in the end, when playing his games has become his life.

That general statement is from an article about Bobby Fischer and later on, it is interesting to again see Donner blend observations of Fischer with those of Everyman: "The game of chess has a great attraction for lonely minds but its healing power is small. It engenders no viable 'expression' and will only enhance inner rigidity. No one is as lonely as the world champion."

Alongside such tragic characterisations, there are also some neat sociological observations, often made in passing or off the cuff. "Modern man is bombarded so intensely with such an enormous amount of contradictory information that he has lost any notion of objectivity or scientific discussion completely. For him, truth is only to be found with the loudest - but particularly: the most amusing - loudmouth, and his highest virtue is 'not to leat each other down'." This in the middle of a tightly-constructed piece whose subject matter roams adeptedly from the Dutch number one's latest results to (at the point of the quote) the mediocrity of sports journalism. Elsewhere the conscience hinted at here finds its fullest expression in the simplest of questions: "Are we in fact living in a world where it is all right to spend one's time playing chess?"

There is much else besides. A sweet portrait of an elderly player that could be a short story in itself. A description of a player munching gob-stoppers so funny it might have been written by Kingsley Amis. Interviews with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro (the latter not a good chess player: "'Too many rules,' he said '... The less rules there are in a game, the more chance I have of winning.'") A marginally homoerotic ode to an a-pawn ("Sweet little thing ... you naughty boy ... I love you ...") Debates over sporting boycotts of countries under various regimes. And details of what happens in them - for instance, the torturing of tournament organisers in Argentina. Historical insights into the Soviets. Decade-spanning mockery of his number one enemy in the Dutch chess world, Lod Prins ("couldn't tell a bishop from a knight.") And much much more and of course abounding aphorisms and much quotable hilarity on the subject of chess and chess players.

Donner's journalism clearly benefits from being collected: one can see how strands of thought stretched out across the years. For instance, 1972's psychological "chess itself is an expression of the unwillingness to live, a refusal to exist" links to 1975's sociological/philosophical "life no longer has a purpose other than itself - as the hereafter appears to have lost its appeal and it is not so certain any longer whether there will be a 22nd century - modern man is more familiar with unwillingness than with old-fashioned, purposeful will." We are very far from the quote about women at the top of this post.

Did Donner refuse to exist, take refuge from reality in chess? The above two quotes are again from articles about Fischer - another of Donner's pet subjects, incidentally, for Fischer is used in Donner's writing as the extreme example of the chess playing type, right at the other end of the spectrum to women whom have no interest in the game. But the comments do not seem to describe Donner himself. Or if they do, perhaps only a young Donner. One lucky to then discover that he had more talent for writing than for chess.

But such second-guessing is risky. "Lack of understanding from other people has always accompanied me on my path through life and the inane laughter of the masses has been the echo of my footsteps on earth," Donner wrote. He also wrote about chess-writing: as literature. Is it? Whilst I can say that Donner's intriguing personal stylings do not quite transcend journalism to make this a completed self-portrait, that harder question I cannot answer: when it comes to chess, I know too much of what he's talking about. A non-chess-player ought judge; preferably a woman, of course.

But, if you are still reading here, then Donner has proved to be worth at least some of your time. Just as reading the whole book was worth some of mine. We are lucky that after the games, after the losses at the board, in particular, and after whatever injustice of the world came his way, Donner did more than just howl and scream - that he wrote. Whilst the dominant tone of this book is comedic outrage, there was more, much more, than bare laughter and relentless chess to the writings of JH Donner.

In other news . . .

2006-05-14T21:10:00.000+01:00

Argh. My computer broke. It turns on for fractions of seconds before turning off again, and that's it. They're taking it away for fixing (or, possibly, replacement) on Wednesday. It should take under two weeks, but may take up to six . . .

Why am I telling you this? On that computer I had 22 emails downloaded but unread. I was planning to catch up with them this weekend, but obviously couldn't. If one of them is yours - just to let you know sorry, the wait will be longer . . .

A Good Day for Somewhere Else, in Another Time

2006-05-03T12:52:00.000+01:00

Scottish poet and novelist Frank Kuppner has the knack of giving his books funny and original titles: A Concussed History of Scotland - perhaps corresponding to the mental state of most of that nation's inhabitants, one may be tempted to add; Second Best Moments in Chinese History - part one of which is named A Moral Victory for the Barbarians, a line I sometimes use to describe getting hacked to pieces over a chess-board; In the Beginning There Was Physics...; and (my favourite) The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women. And now we have A God's Breakfast, which I discovered yesterday in a bookshop, although apparently it has been around for over a year. The book is really three unconnected books in one - presumably on account of low sales figures for Kuppner's previous work, some of which is now out-of-print - two of which might have easily been omitted.

By far and away the worst of the books is Kuppner's crass, almost-50-pages-long parody of TS Eliot - West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil - which at best might amuse undergraduates struggling with Four Quartets whom also find flatulence *hilarious*. Beyond that, its bitter excess is probably well-explained by William Wootten's observation in his good Guardian newspaper review that: '"West Åland" is the sound of someone shouting abuse to stop themselves falling back under the mesmerist's trance,' given that Eliot was a strong influence for Kuppner in some of his previous work.

Of more ambiguous value is the final section of 120 poems, What Else Is There? Alongside some surprisingly tender autobiographical reflections on family and death, there are glimpses of the lightly-witty, neat, happily-paradoxical intelligence I like most of all about Kuppner's best work, such as the three-liner "A Cosmic Footnote":

Alas, a copyist has introduced a few errors
into this classic text about the unity of opposites;
making it seem to mean something else entirely.

But, really, I wish to dismiss this third book along with the second, in order to get to the first, best and most interesting part of A God's Breakfast: The Uninvited Guest. Here, around 800 supposedly found fragments of works from Greek and Roman civilisations are presented to us by a present-day fictional scholar, whose irritation and annotational interventions both increase as the book progresses. Here, epigrams, epitaths, insults, jokes, and philosophical play mingle along their themes of death, the lies of religion, the classical, uncertainty and incompleteness, writing and the fate of the cosmos. Some examples, to give you a sense of the work, to help see if you like it, or not:

56

The Temple of Jove destroyed by a bolt of his own lightning?
Hmm. Perhaps he has strong views on modern architecture?

106

Zeno held there was no real difference between a short life and a long one.
I wonder, Caesar, if the same might not hold true for penises?

214

Would we call the subtlest music 'non-musical'?
Yet the subtlest parts of the material world are called immaterial.

371

Everything is always changing, and we throw words after it.
A few of them stick; mostly in the wrong place.

463

If applause and philosophy do not mix, Lucillius,
Then perhaps you truly are a philosopher.

599

More happiness at one friendly breakfast than in the whole of Homer.
[Not by any means the conventional view of Homer, certainly.]

686

A billion ---- later, are we any happier?
[If I had the courage of my convictions, I would just cut this pieces of nothing out too. But, alas, scholarship has its mindless yet unshakeable conventions, like so much else.]

718

Someone is standing outside my house, shouting things.
[Not 'Someone is standing outside my house, shouting "Things!"', whatever stale jokes Occamb might prefer to make on such matters. But I suppose we all have to earn our professional reputations as best we can, each playing to our own particular stregnths.]

So, what's going on here? Very few of the lines are remarkable turns of phrases in themselves, and the rhythms that justify making line breaks are basic: just about poetry, very plainly so. Story? The fragments hint at many stories, in one big, ambiguous tangle, and whilst the editorial revelations accrue, there is no over-arching narrative relating to the skeptical, often-bored, critical, prudish and quite amusing observer. In fact, there is very little that is compelling about this mediocre character at all, and I suspect he was written lazily, too; in every way he is a poor cousin to Nabokov's creation of Charles Kinbote in the poem-centred novel Pale Fire.

Perhaps somewhat disappointing overall, nonetheless, parts of the sum are greater than some of the parts: the frustrated editorial annotations at the end of the book throw the reader back again into innocent early passages, nicely forcing us to experience anew but not afresh fragments that thus now have later light and mud poured over them. And the lines in the early 200's where it's revealed that the '----'s are intended to stand for the word 'anus' (or similar) are particularly hilarious. The effect of such moments is cummulative - like little doodles drawn in the corners of book pages, that when flicked through, dance themselves into moving picture; that is the best way that Frank Kuppner's sequences of plain statements work. So is this one whole poem, or 800 or so short poems? Neither; it doesn't fully add up, I would put it as about 3/4s of one whole poem, made up of 800 or so bits of sort-of poetry, with an alright title.

I wonder why it doesn't add up: why the character of the scholar is lazily padded out, why too many one liners are no more than flippant mentions of farting, why the The Uninvited Guest seems aware of its overall failure, inspite of its several greatly enjoyable successes? Possibly because Kuppner has done this kind of thing twice before and much better (see below) and that the party trick that's always requested and cheered creates a love-hate relationship in its performer: How the juggler dreams of smashing the plates upon his host's gaping head... (And certainly, with a dismissive poem about critics at the back, and a commentary on the faux-classical fragments from a contemporary, Kuppner would seem to be alert to the reception of his work nowadays, mediating that mediational event in advance. I think he's also teaching Creative Writing, or something, at a university somewhere, the extroverted self-consciousness of which I doubt suits him.)

Anyway, let's be honest. Chances are you're not going to buy this book, and you may be wondering, as a result, why I have bothered to review it, as indeed am I. I guess to recommend to you, and for me to think over anew, the two books where Kuppner employs a similar structure to The Uninvited Guest, but with much finer results: A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (now out of print) and its sequel/replacement Second Best Moments in Chinese History. These books consist of 500 or so 4 line poems, creating one whole poem each, too, written in, it seems, a Glasgow library as Kuppner leafed through a book of ancient Chinese prints. Symmetrically perhaps, hungover and signalling to a wine-girl, delegated to decide which poems should be kept, a scholar in A Bad Day tries to decipher the squiggly lines of some old parchment:

249.

Something something something something something;
Something something something smiling something;
Something smiling something something something;
The old scholar finds himself involuntarily smiling.

At his worst, Frank Kuppner is capable of suggesting something interesting and raising a smile. At his best, his books of distant, long-lost somethings are to be savoured, kept and reread; they create from flicked-doodles a universe of effects - if not great literature - written by a man twice able to lose himself thoroughly in a certain section of a Scottish library.

Just So

2006-03-18T19:25:00.000Z

When we imagine back thousands, hundreds of thousands of years from today, in a thought-experiment to understand human nature from our first ancestors, we probably conjure up images of African grasses and huntsman, the women gathering up fruits, the fierce competitions for survival and sex. We zoom out from that image and picture the globe in a second, covered in routes pointing out of Africa that took early humans countless generations to follow; then, we refocus on a contemporary city, to see that raw, elemental reality still at work in modern humans: The woman with a mediocre husband who sleeps with a young hot lawyer-winner during her ovulation; the man murdering the leader of a neighbourhood gang to gain ascendancy in his.

We look back and think up ruthless stories from evolutionary psychology, in other words. It suits our individualized, demystified, uncertain times. In 1912, before World War I, before the Victorian era was fully gone, sociologist Émile Durkheim tried to do something similar. Although now his project seems so very different: His focus was not on individuality, but collectivity; not on our selfishness but our morality; not on savagery but on religion. Not evolutionary psychology at all, then, but something seemingly quite different.

What, exactly, did he do? He analysed the simplest, oldest religion he could identify at that time - that of Aboriginal Australians - arguing in his anthropological work that in elementary religion one is likely to find the basic building-blocks of religion, and thus of group life, that later evolved into our current forms. Are you thinking an imaginary system of all-powerful Gods, the consolation of an afterlife? Not so, says Durkheim, not in the elementary forms of religion.

Instead Durkheim's story is about rituals that bond groups, totems based upon nature, where modern metaphysical trappings are mostly absent. From this we find that at the core of religion, says Durkheim, the distinction between the sacred and the profane. And from this distinction religion builds up all other knowledge - the territory of the tribe, the timing of the seasons, say - and in so doing, creates a social bond through psychological similarity, and through the social bond, creates morality. The sacred and the profane, for Durkheim, are the basic mental cagegories of man under elementary religion, from which all other understanding stems, including space and time.

Probably already you are objecting: surely we think first individually, not socially? (I think therefore I am.) Surely morality can come from other sources but religion? (Atheists don't start wars.) Surely the way we think - say, the way we categorise time - comes direct from our nature, not inevitably from our social norms? (Babies want for the future, learn from the past.) Surely Durkheim's work - which was a longish book, in fact - said a bit more than that with a lot more sophistication than that? (In short: isn't Durkheim telling a just-so story, and aren't you, Tom?) Quite so; anthropology moved away from Durkheim, and I only mean to provide a brief and simplistic gloss for you.

Now, if you read up about the Pirahã, you find a very interesting people and language. You also will find them analysed by anthropologists, who are asking questions from cognitive psychology, from linguistics, etc. Interesting stuff, not really Durkheim's type of questions. Yet in some ways the Pirahã seem more elemental - if you will forgive the implications of right-thinking progress the term might seem to connote, but which I do not mean - than the Aboriginals. You can guess what I've been wondering about this afternoon, then, when you learn that (apparently) the Pirahã:

-speak only of the present, and only of direct personal experience
-so have no history beyond living memory
-have a kinship language and system consisting of only 'brother', 'sister' and (non-gendered) 'parent'
-have no numbers and no numeracy, no or limited materialism, with few possession or the desire for more, no or limited art-work, no or limited change, no or limited words for the colours

Some of these points are contentious (no versus limited), but Durkheim would presumably, rather than argue over them, ask something else: if these are what the Pirahã don't have or aren't important, what are the big building blocks of their culture? Well, this magazine article goes on to say the Pirahã

are very laid-back, accepting things as they are, not fretting about the future, and taking great plesure in life. Above all, these are a people who live for the moment...

This immediate and literal way of seeing the world fits with the Pirahã's apparent lack of a creation myth, but it seems at odds with one of the most important aspects of their everyday life. They believe in an elaborate spirit world, which takes the form of something like parallel universes, with evil spirits inhabiting their own realsm above and below the Earth. It may sounds suspiciously like mystical for a culture suppose to lack mythology, but [Pirahã anthropologist and linguist] [Dan] Everett notes that the Pirahã's relationship with their spirit world is remarkably practical. They claim to have direct experience of some of the evil spirits - a notion made only too real to him during his early days in the Amazon when he was awoken one night and asked to ward off an evil spirit ... [which turned out to be] a prowling panther.

A mythology based on good and evil spirits - but a practical everyday one, where good and evil literally exist. Spirits: perhaps just a way of intuitively knowing that things move and do things, that humans are not the only forms that appears to act with intention. Perhaps then, their core is good and evil. I wonder what Durkheim would have concluded from that, about the core of human nature and culture? Well, in 1912 he wouldn't have concluded something simple and smiley, like, to be honest, I naively feel like doing right now, as if finishing off a nice little dream, or writing a child's Just-So story. Good and Evil; Just So. Probably Durkheim instead would have studied more, theorized more, with his deep, serious hopes for the modern world and for our moral lives, his sense of our continuity with the distant past. I won't be doing such work, and perhaps his attitudes and beliefs, and his intellectual and social projects perished with him, for:

World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. Durkheim's leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist — he sought a secular, rational form of French life. But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French right. Even more seriously, the generation of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and many of them perished as France was bled white in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son died in the war — a mental blow from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in 1917.

One wonder's what terrors he suffered during his "ferocious silence" after his son's death. A whole world passing, so much destroyed, so utterly painful, so utterly unavoidable to think of.

Certainly, Dan Everett isn't about to resurrect Durkheim's lost, broken spirit. Under their new influences of "settlers, diseases, alcohol," already he seems to mourn the Pirahã's end, which may "happen very quickly":

This beautiful language and culture, so fundamentally different from anything the Western world has produced, has much to teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care of itself, about personal fortitude, toughness, love, and many other values too numerous to mention. And this is but one example of many other endangered languages and cultures in the Amazon and elsewhere with 'riches' of a similar nature that we may never know about because of our own shortsightedness.

Max Hardcore

2006-03-17T13:11:00.000Z

For no particular reason, I got reading about porn this afternoon. Dick Nasty is a nice name, but is Max Hardcore a nice or nasty man? Some quotes, in case you don't know what he's about. First off (NSFW):

Interviewer: Why do you call your work your "revenge"?

Hardcore: I say a lot of things ... in an effort to describe all the things a viewer will encounter. One of those things is a common theme among men, and that is the grudge or revenge f-ck. Almost every guy has been unceremoniously dumped by a girl they thought loved them. After that, it's natural to get a little jaded about relationships and take out their frustration on girls they meet after that. But it's not always possible for a guy to do that, and that's where Max comes in. I'm simply a surrogate for all the men out there who have been sh-t on by selfish women.

Reflex response: Misogyny? On the other hand: he's "actually a nice guy. Just kind of kinky," according to co-star Kitty Yung. And from the interview above, again:

Interviewer: I knew an actress - ... who you shot with - who told me she was treated very nicely by you, and thought you were pretty cool.

Hardcore: That's the norm. I treat em like princesses, and explain all.

And then porn star Kelly Wells/O'Dell agrees: "In my opinion, you [Max] are one of the most professional people that I have worked for ON and OFF camera." That quote in its full context:

Well Max, in my opinion, every whore needs to take a turn with you. To get broken in. I still remember when I did my first scene with you...afterwards I said I will not do this porn thing again. Turns out that after that scene I found out that to work for anybody else in porn is a f---ing cakewalk. A lot of whores won't work for you because you will actually make them WORK for their money. But good whores like me understand, that taking an occassional ass wrecking is good for them. So, in the meantime take in mind that nobody knows what they are talking about, unless they have personally sat in on a set and documented "unusual" behavior. In my opinion, you are one of the most professional people that I have worked for ON and OFF camera. By the way, taking rounds with you on camera has convinced me that it is not so bad after all, to be a piss guzzling whore.

Or perhaps for the maker and star of over 100 films such as Extreme Schoolgirls 11, Gang Bang Girl 33, Anal Auditions 8, Hardcore Schoolgirls 17, Ass Openers 12, Butt Banged Bicycle Babes (just the one title there) it's just an act, after all:

The Max character is rough. I've carefully cultivated that image. Everybody, to be successful, has to be organized and have a clear goal of what needs to be accomplished. I like playing rough. It's not that I'm the heaviest hitter but I realized what would raise the heat level of the videos would be language.

And (NSFW): "This material [his pornography] is created to inform viewers of the wide range of adult relationships." Social purpose, eh, representing relationships where women dress up as schoolgirls whilst a grinning middle-aged guy, wearing only socks and a cowboy hat, humiliates them verbally and physically. Well, adult, yes; relationship, perhaps; but wide-ranging...

Blogs That Don't Exist, But Should: Number One

2006-03-09T23:39:00.000Z

Cigarette Simon turns eighteen the same day his government bans smoking. Banned in the pubs and the bars and the night-clubs, banned banned banned. And boy, is he not happy about it. Suddenly Simon's old enough to stand looking moody and manly, shrouded amidst wispy plumes of blue, there on the edge of dancefloors, or lounge aloofly in the shadowed mysterious smoke of corner tables, and he can't.

Eighteen. A man now. Cigarette Simon decides to start a pro-smoking campaign. Protest against this outrage. Stick up a finger at authority. A finger flicking ash in their moralising eye. Where better than the internet? Screw health warnings. He's young and free and his rights just got taken away.

So, a blog. In Praise of Cigarettes, he wonders, In Celebration? The Ciggy Connoisseur? Smoker's Paradise? Settling on a name, he describes his first pack as if it was a glass of wine; the feel, the fragrance, the effect on the nose, the tongue. One brand down, all the rest to go, he writes in his mission statement, boasting how he'll never be an addict, he has the will-power of a man, and how he's young, he'll be fine. He's going to review with appreciation every cigarette the world has to offer.

Swapping with a drunk girl in a university corridor at 3am a cigarette for a snog, bonding with the aloof Professor in a break behind the lecture theatre, asking for a light a table of lovelies: the cigarette stories come too. Heh, have a cigarette, he comments on depressed blogs, that'll cheer you up, and Heh, it wasn't the cigarette to blame, but your mother's choices for her heart disease, on another. Charismatic and witty, irreverent and fun, his audience grows. As does the protestors. Anti-Smoking Groups. Give-Up-Guru's. A Coalition of Canadian Moms, along with the usual speculation about a spoof.

Cigarette Simon hits 21 with thousands of hits a day. Dunhill, he declares, are the most delectable of cigarettes; so smooth, so tasty. But, he's going to give up. Not because he wants to, but to prove he can; to prove that thousands of pounds and hours spent and three years of smoking don't matter one jot. So of course smoking should be legal everywhere, right? Just look at me. No problemo. By rights it should be all up to us, Big Brother.

Should we give up to? Are you serious? Can we trust you? ask some of his fans. You'll find it hard, impossible, you'll lie, you'll cheat, you'll think of suicide during withdrawal, warns one vehement critic who had her throat tore out two years back.

Well, just watch, says Simon. You all do and say what you like, and I'll do the same. And of course, he finds it easy. When 50-a-day desperados, whose New Year's Resolutions to quit have been broken each January 1 for decades now, say, but what about the head-fuzz, the tongue-fur, the hallucination? He says: uhh? It's all psychological. Grow up! It's easy.

Quit he does, just like that. Or only so he says, nag the doubters. And still he encourages people to smoke, describes the pleasure of the blood rush, the relief and the release, all in fond memory. And he carries a Zippo round to strike up a conversation when helping out a light-up. He's got a career, still that charisma, that cool calm character, is lucky in lust, spends cash on exotic holidays and big city night out. He's fans worship him still. His enemies are defeated in their doubts.

Then, disaster. On the same day he's sacked, he starts to cough. It's just a little cough, nothing to worry about, he writes. But, he splutters out of a job interview a month later, losing his chance, and starts to worry.

Nothing, says the Doctor.

Still unemployed. A fortune teller at a circus - he went in because his date dared him, expecting to hear back some great story about their future - says his halo lacks air, is dark, dark with dark spots of dark. What does it mean? Phone call, there and then: the Doctor. We made a mistake, mixed up your results. We can hardly believe it, you're so young, so fit, but please, you must come back in. Now? Right now.

Cancer is everywhere in Cigarette Simon. "One in a million like this, and your age too..." muses his Doctor. Not even worth treatment. He posts his first deep-down genuine post on his blog: he details his diagnosis, details his despair. Don't smoke. He's sorry, so sorry. He made it sound like fun, but really it's not worth it. Who was he kidding. So much beauty in the world, and to go out of it like this? His outburst ends suddenly: too many tears on the keyboard to go on, he writes. Back later. I hope. I at least have months, maybe a year.

He's linked to like never before, and the comments come in their thousands. Make every day special now. Mend bridges. Find love. Let's meet, I think you should make me pregnant. May as well start smoking again, eh loser? Told you so. And of course comments full of corresponding crying too. Some say they'll quit now, others say, heh, remember what you told that poor daughter about her mother? You were right, man! I aint quitting. His forum - he has a forum, strictly supposedly only for the celebration of cigarettes - is over-run too. He fires all the admins. No-one should do this kind of thing, he explains, and wishes them well. Advises them to quit, along with everyone else.

Then, a comment like no other. It sounds crazy at first, but the links are all there. A biomedical firm in the States has found a leaf used by a tribe, famous for longevity in the Amazon, that maybe holds amazing restorative properties for the lung. The drug they are developing is experimental and there are no guarantees, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here.

His blog gets a PayPal box, and he begs. Begs, begs, begs. He's almost broke. His family can't help. He does work for anti-smoker groups. He writes letters of apology, sometimes in person. He visits one lady he mocked in her hospice, breaks down crying. He holds her hand; as he leaves, he realises she's left a fifty in his. A publisher offers to publish his blog as a book - provided he reflects on each post afresh, saying how wrong he was and why. It tears him apart, he blogs, to even look at this stuff now. But...

But, he wants to live.

He'll do it.

The will to live, to survive. He's a young man. And gradually, the money builds up. Gets closer to the target as the book starts to sell. Then, his blog posts start to drop-off; once every two days, once every three, five, a week; shorter, too... It's been almost a year since his diagnosis. I can barely breathe enough to get out of bed each day, his final post reads, and now I find I've just reached my target. I don't know if I'll get there in time, or if it'll work.

Wish me luck, his last line reads. And everyone wishes him luck; those he hurt, those who hated him, those who loved him, cocky smokers and angry ex-smokers, the sanguine and the bereaved. The Health Minister even sends him an open letter: wishing him well, hoping he understands now why they banned smoking in so many places. "If the worst comes to the worst," the letter concludes, "then at least take this as a consolation: from a foolish child emerged a fine man, who through his honest, anti-smoking writing, helped to make the world a little better a place."

And? And nothing. No more posts. No family or friends saying he died, and shutting things down, or leaving them as a monument, or donating the remaining money to charity. No Cigarette Simon bouncing back, saying it worked, or bought him some more time at least. And who has actually met him, seen a photograph? the people in the comments start to ask. That poor lovely lady in the Hospice? But she'd be dead by now anyhow. Is a writer somewhere very rich? Or, a smoker somewhere dead, the family paralyzed in grief - or just ignorant about the internet?

Quote of the day

2006-03-06T14:27:00.000Z

A coincidence? I have been having dreams about torture, pick up Milosz's superb book of lectures "The Witness of Poetry" - a book I've read several times before - flick through and instantly find this passage:

That voice of protest we hear in ourselves when we learn of places where human beings torture other human beings resounds in a void and has no justification other than itself.

Milosz, who in some of his best work recorded a kindly protest, writes this in the context of a chapter called: "The Lesson of Biology." The biology in question is the bastardized Darwinism that informed both Nietzche's idea of man transcending himself and becoming Superman, and also Marx's idea of historical (r)evolution. Then next, their even cruder social derivatives in the main two forms of twentieth century totalitarianism, fascist and communist. The so-called lessons of this biology are: that we are nothing but a cipher for the success of our genes or species or what-not, that not only are we not the centre of the universe or solar system, there is no God who made us central or special, in any way whatsoever, that there is no human meaning and the true patterns of our existence are measured only over thousands of centuries, in the relative success of species against other species. It is, in other words, a coldly deterministic, cruely dehumanizing lesson, defying our senses, spirituality, conscience, love, and capactiy for wonder, at their very core, the soul. The soul, a word James Joyce never surrendered.

Now there may be some of you who see in this coincidence my subconscious at play, at least if your comments to the post below this one are anything to go by: the dreams have been prompting me to reread this chapter, which I have indeed done so again. There will be another reason for that, guessable perhaps. If so, probably you agree with the quote above, even if you don't realise it, that there is nothing real, nothing worth telling of, in the content of these dreams. That is, nothing in them outside of the psychological battles in my head, which in their turn can be logically approached by one theory or another - this time, no doubt, one derived from Freud. Such is the automatic response.

On the other hand, some of you may instead prefer this, quote of the day, from the end of that chapter, a note of hope - a different kind of hope, I mean:

there are signs... that technological [and thus, demystified] civilization may begin to see reality as a labyrinth of mirrors, no less magical than the labyrinth seen by alchemists and poets. That would be a victory for William Blake and his "Divine Arts of Imagination" - but also for the child in the poet, a child too long trained by adults.

Pounds of Flesh

2006-02-25T12:16:00.000Z

The silver hours. Behind the sky's blankets of grey, dawn's rose-red fingers hide, frail and ancient. In the stone court-yard, a man, dressed only in a battered old jacket, lies motionless on the ground. Then his torturer kicks him around a bit, muttering only that:

If I cut you like a pig,
Do you not bleed like a pig?
Are you not, therefore, a pig?

He will cut him again, he has cut him before. An Auschwitz Jew, a Guantanamo detainee, a Middle East kidnap victim, a Nazi junior, a psychopathic extremist, a secret service operative, a would-be-bomber, a Turk and Armenian, a Roman and Christian, a tribesman and caveman, or a pair of Hollywood stereotypes - who are these two figures that haunt my dreams this morning, that haunt from the birth of time the whole of the human world?

The Winners

2006-02-22T17:22:00.000Z

The man sat next to me - haphazardly dressed in a badly torn and badly patterned jumper, a Star Trek t-shirt partially visible beneath it, tucked into his ill-fitting tracksuit bottoms - is gesturing wildly. Applause, thumbs up, even a little bow - which vaguely resembles praying, too. It's the first round of the Portsmouth Chess Congress, and his position is getting torn apart by his sharp, composed opponent. A few moves ago, he was rubbing at his stubble, coughing these little, irritating coughs, clamping his balding head in his pudgy fingers. But now he's accepted his fate, as if a crude bull thankfully put out of his misery by the swift, sophisticated sword of a master matador.

This is why I quit chess tournaments, I remind myself. The ludicrous myths that circulate in and out of them, as if even at our mediocre level, a moment of magic was only a few moves away. Twinned with that, the strange shame, where fears of looking stupid make grown-men perform such rituals of understanding, and act complicitly in their own downfall. Still, I think, at least it's cold, at least it's February - so the big airy hall where we play contains nothing like the smell of the sweaty, summer events. Even if the guy two boards along sat opposite clearly has a passion for curry far greater than his passion for cleanliness.

Almost five hours later, and I've finally lost my game. It's 11.15, and it's Friday night, and the dark city has been circulating away crazily in pubs, clubs and parties, for all that it's worth, for hours and hours. I wait twenty minutes for a cab and the list of grim reasons for quitting tournament chess seems to grow. How did I forget? What I am doing here?

A few rounds later on and I face the same player - same jumper - I was sat next to on the Friday night. A change of t-shirt though. He passes me a note: "I'm deaf", it reads, and I feel like an idiot for not realising that before. It even says next to his name on the tournament pairings. Hence the coughing, hence the signalling. And by this time I've started winning, and telling myself that Of course, I love chess tournaments, I must do more of this! Why did I leave it so long?

Half-way through the game and I'm taking control of the position; my opponent's head looks like it'll be locked in his hands for quite a while, so I take a walk through the other sections. Down in the Minor section there are a few girls in their late-teens or perhaps early twenties; their new cleavages, nicely displayed in the latest high-street tops, must be torture for the fat, old, lop-sided men sat dribbling opposite them. Why weren't their girls like that around when I was a junior? I thought. But of course there were. Emelia, Shelly, Lynsey - I can even recall some names, and that I was always too red-faced when talking to them. And now - there in my shabby jumper, unshaven and putting on a belly, close to thirty - now I'm just another one of the weirdo's who they ignore in tournaments. Just another reason they'll have to quit the scene when an adult life of family and work takes their time over, and, in their new tiredness, they begin to look for excuses to grow-up and get-wise and get away.

So what am I doing here? Maybe I belong here, I think, as my deaf opponent resigns. We conduct a post-mortem on the game after in improvised sign-language, and I realise I like the guy.

When I find out my next opponent, though, I'm terrified. A positive mood is nowhere, nowhere at all, because, well, just how old is he? Maybe double figures, maybe eight, even six... No, no-one six years old could have won in such style as he did, in the previous round against such an experienced, strong opponent. I shake his tiny hand, and look across at those big ears, little round glasses, that fresh, pale face and pre-pubescent hair-cut - whatever age he is, it's the age where a calculated personal style doesn't matter, doesn't register. Everyone in the universe must like him, everyone, at least for another year, maybe two.

Terrified: lose, and I'm a laughing stock. Win, and I'm cruel. Offer an early draw, and I'm patronising and anti-competitive. What to play for? A win, I decide, and my method is cruel: I cut down any active, attacking possibilities for him, frustrate his youthful, optimistic impulses. Soon, he blunders away a pawn, soon his pieces are getting boxed in, another pawn is vulnerable, and my pieces are poised for a slow invasion. He grows despondant as I gradually poison him. He looks down onto his scorepad, there on his little lap, scribbles a black shape on the back of it. Is that water across his eyes? He fidgets glumly; maybe just tired. I am too, but this is no draw. It's mate, soon.

We shake hands after. He tells me he is ten. Ten. And at around the playing standard I was at 14 or 15, I estimate. A prodigy? A future Grandmaster? A future World Champion? Who knows, but probably not. He clearly loves to attack, push the pieces out into the board, as proud as an army, swoop them down the diaganols like hawks or missiles, and along the ranks like unstoppable tanks, to get at the cornered enemy king - but not much else.

So here he is amongst us strange men, at almost 11pm on a Saturday night, in an alien, cold unfriendly city. Here he is, an innocent and pleasant child, an optimistic and fluent attacker, and I ask myself a question that's yet, I imagine, to even remotely cross his mind: where will you be in another ten years? Or twenty? Still here, after the bored girls have all departed, and when - unlike the stomatch - the talent has stopped growing? Still vainly here searching for that one great game, telling himself how it might have been? And like me, unkindly competitive? Or gesturing as if in the company of genius - while watching, with a speechless sadness, the next generation file in?

A Treatise on Poetry, Czesław Miłosz

2006-02-12T19:18:00.000Z

is a book I've failed to review many times. There are over ten attempts sat about on various hard-drives - and a couple of draft postings wait, too, on my old abandonned blogs, for the push of a publish button that will never arrive. No doubt this post will be such a failure too, but at least I have not started it like William Logan did here:

Czeslaw Milosz wrote A Treatise on Poetry nearly half a century ago, in the backwash of the war that almost destroyed his country. In this complex meditation on Poland and Polish poetry, the poet grapples—at the climax, weirdly, wonderfully, in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—with his own compromised relation to his art. You can feel the influence of The Waste Land (there are objective correlatives scattered like candy), though Milosz, attempting to write the history of a sensibility, has his long eye on The Prelude.

A scatter-gun of facts to give some context is alright, but anchoring the review in Eng Lit referents is distinctly odd. True, Miłosz translated The Waste Land into Polish, whilst a member of the Warsaw resistance in fact. But despite some formal similarity between his Treatise and Eliot's Waste Land - they are both long poems, split into parts, and have notes at the back - it is not hard to notice that Miłosz wrote in distinctly ambivalent tones about Eliot. Even polemically and mockingly, in fact, at points in this poem I am once again failing to review.

Still, at least I am doing a better job than William Logan, because hinting that Miłosz aimed to stride with his work into the Western Canon alongside Wordsworth's epic wander in a wood, The Prelude, via this poem, is truly odd. A Nobel poet who here wrote in Polish, about Polish poetry, poems, poets and society - of course! he wants to be Wordsworth. It is as logical as saying that Shakespeare aimed to write like Paul McCartney. And Poles, in my experience, rate English novels but not poets. "Maybe Byron is good enough," a Polish literature PhD student told me once at a seminar in Cambridge, "to be talked about alongside our poetry." And if not Byron, he meant, then none of us at all.

Still, many contemporary English or American poets, recognising the absence of any public recognition - let alone role or adulation - fake for themselves in its place some self-esteem by saying they are like x from Wordsworth, y in whoever, and z as if such-and-such, and so this discourse of legitimation and narcissitic tick of denial is easily projected onto others via the reviews that fund them. Of course the public must be mildly chastized for their ignorance, and also x,y and z must be suitably dead and thus unthreatening, and contemporary poets are not to be discussed in their absence. For, after all, who could dare write directly and honestly nowadays, after all?

Which is why Logan fails to understand the various other parts of this poem that he takes half-hearted and misaimed shots at in his review. For instance, Logan writes that Miłosz "leaps into platitudes as into a warm pool — to write poetry, we’re told, you need a) a classical education, and b) forests and streams." Yet the passage Logan is ineptly summaring is in fact bitterly sarcastic, and does not fit with some implicit cozy dismissal of a European eccentric who dallied to the States.

I don't think Logan's just missed some detail of this poem, either, but pretty much the whole thing. The conclusion of his review: "In A Treatise on Poetry, Miłosz and [co-translator] Hass have made what is so difficult, a beautiful poem in English that wasn’t written in English." Yet the book's Preface makes clear that the ethos of the poem's translation places being literal above being pretty, and poets who retreat from the world into attempts at 'pure beauty' are accused of moral neglect in the poem itself. Also asserted in the poem are the need to be of use, and even that it is better to write with a metaphorical stammer, if it means poetry at least makes more sense - all this, please note, in the context of a country living under various murderous invasions. Anyway. Having casually snubbed or avoided the poem's content, all that is left for Logan is a patronising little pat, I suppose.

I have briefly reviewed a review and could go on, but not reviewed this poem which you by now may have twigged means quite something to me. Means what? And why? Because this poem from Poland is of the world's "salt and void", not Auden's rhetorical world of "eros and of dust", secretly already affirmed from word one? That it proves that whilst "Novels and essays serve but will not last./ One clear stanaza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose"? Its elegies for the lost world of European beautiful times, its elegies for the lost poets whose name pass away like a waiter, "without a name"? Its terrible evocation of world war two, unimaginable, its bitter truth within and love of nature? Its history, philosophy, its beautiful poetry? That it is the bridge from Milosz's earlier, angrier writings to his later, more philosophical and at-peace work?

But no-one wants to hear such things from a review, and maybe not even from a work of art any more either. As I flick over the book's rich pages, I think my unending interest has something to do with Miłosz's capacity for honest, deep, intelligence and love, his ability to recognize and directly talk to reality in a way no-one else I've known or read does or has done. Whatever, I read with something shamefully rare, that you would not guess I had from my negating comment's about Logan's void of a review. For I read with the feeling of gratitude, even if I cannot put that into a few more words, or into a review, or ten.

Climate Roulette

2006-02-06T01:10:00.000Z

We play it each and every day, said the man centre stage at the end of the debate. "Climate Roulette," he repeated, with all the drama of a headline phrase, designed to stun.

So he pointed at his head with a finger for a gun. Having just relished a description of The Day After Tomorrow. Meet Andrew Simms, armed with doomsday prophecies and hyperbolic pronouncements. Run-of-the-mill stuff, except his anecdotes weren't.

Take a little look at one tiny island of ten thousand people, out in the South Pacific and three metres high: Tuvalu. And take a little look, do, while you still can: for under our rising waters, Tuvalu is amongst the first destined for drowning. So how many delegates and scientists and experts can they send to the UN's IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? A few, a couple, a handful, a drop in the ocean - and many, many less than they send to Hollywood. To Hollywood? You read right. In the hope that sales on their domain name will save them: .tv

Or, this. Of the estimated 150 million environmental refugees the world will face by 2050, 20 million will come from Bangladesh. From Bangladesh and its floods. From Bangladesh who, under the duress of poverty and population, resigned themselves just recently to the sale of 300 million tonnes of their coal. The burning of coal. They teach the global consequences of that now in school.

But these stories weren't the centre of the debate. On stage were three others: Tim Forsyth, Saleemul Huq, Peter Newell. Two academics and a campaigner, and not replete with the scandals that make neat examples.

Instead they analyzed how the international debate was full with the voices of the first world: Of the scientists, creeping toward consensus in their technocratic language, of the nations and their line-by-line vetoes of the IPCC's reports, of the politicians and their stalling tactics, of the business leaders saying what might or might not be practical. Voices that don't speak of their responsibilities to and the rights of those who suffer the consequences most of pollution. Those for whom land and liveable weather are passing luxuries. Those for whom all that is left is some kind of adaptation to such problems - like the Inuits, who are suing the United States for their losses - but who have no real say in attempting some kind of solution.

Analysing the structure and discourse of international decision-making is a dry pursuit, not the stuff that headlines are made of. But reading through my notes from the debate, even as the boundaries of our comfort start to shrink, and the height of our decadence starts to stoop, it does not seem like climate roulette points a gun at our heads. More like it points at the heads of poor and the misplaced, and that their mouths are gagged with a black cloth manufactured to a Western design.

True Story

2006-01-18T23:09:00.000Z

With four of his followers - if not friends - the world's greatest pick-up artist rents a mansion, just up from Sunset Boulevard. An after-party party palace. To take wannabee film-stars, porn-stars and strippers, tourists and odd-jobbers from the nearby clubs. Into an LA lair made for sex. And one day destroying a wardrobe, the next serving lemonade to all the strangers there - while wearing nothing but knickers - Courtney Love drifts, bangs, demands and babbles about their rooms. Welcome to Project Hollywood.

And he makes a living from this lifestyle, by teaching it. They fly in from all over the world, the men who come to be taught how to pick-up the cheap-chicks by him; they fly in and pay in their thousands. But they do not learn from him the art of seduction. They learn the science of it. The science of speed hypnosis. Of how and why and when to lower a woman's self-esteem. Of when to ignore her and when to call her. In fact, not only science, but an amateur philosophy, too (something like Nietzche's cheap take on Darwin, but lensed through their misunderstanding of Dawkin's concept of the selfish gene) was preached in this church of the chase. And so many routines and jokes, so many manoeuvres. And - for the extra-talented few - how to massage two strangers; down to a threesome. Yet most of the mass weren't talented; the mass shaved their heads like him, dressed in flash shirts like him, learnt lip-reading techniques like him; the mass cloned themselves for the sake of sex, with porn-stars and strippers, and various other strangers.

Come deeper - for the story goes deeper. Much deeper, say, than the insincere disclaimers scattered throughout his book, the out-of-the-blue announcements that deep-down this wasn't really him. His position - this playboy lord of these losers-turned-lovers, and all the other flies buzzing about the glittery plastic gardens of LA - would not last. Two other pick-up artists, Papa and Tyler, plotted against him. They turned Mystery, his guru-turned-wing-man-turned-fan, into a mental wreck. Pushed him to almost the point of suicide, by seducing his favourite girlfriend, and other contrivances, lies, cruelties. Mystery left to live rather than stayed to die, and in less dramatic fashion, they soon usurped their king, too. He walked from his creation, as it turned out, into a movie ending: chasing his true love, a rock-star called Lisa, finally into his arms - after so many months of trying. By simply, after all that time, dropping the act and being himself.

What does this all mean?

That the freedoms of our modern lives doom men to re-enact Lord of the Flies - mixed with Fight Club - for sex? Even there, in such a rich, luxury pad? There at the top of the world, there in Hollywood? Hollywood: the Tinsel town that turned film, a minor entertainment medium from the start of the twentieth century, into a global industry by the end of it. Into the centre of everyday culture. Into the commander of money and power. Into the inspiration for ideal lifestyles and lovelife’s. Yet even here, in Neil Strauss’s odd, true, tale, a familiar moral of the Blockbuster irresistibly suggests itself: That destiny in mysterious ways brings couples together.

Or perhaps we conclude something different, different from that prosaic hope. That even for those who’d never, not even once, think to treat the world as a troubled, complex friend, for those whom love is thus as unlikely as aliens, they’ll still take a risk on its rumour, take a break from their routine.

Chess

2006-01-15T17:47:00.000Z

If you were to find all the dreary desks in dull offices of London that I've sat in during the last five years, and take all the hard-drives away and scan them for .pgn files, you would find a lot. I have no idea how many, but the number would be very high indeed. On the internet you can play games much faster than over the board, because mouse movements never knock over pieces or misplace them on the corner of squares; my usual speed limit is a minute each for each person. As I took some of the jobs I've had precisely and only for the reason that there wasn't much to do and I could play chess all day, there must have been days where I've played 200 games of chess, just in that day. And of course, I also have games via email, I have games on a slow-play server (70 or so games at the moment) and I play in the evenings at home, or for a club, and every now and again on a weekend for a tournament. Does the number of chess games I've played number only in the tens of thousands, or in the hundred's? I have no idea - really.

Chess this way is a weak pleasure; it is a little bit of fun, a somewhat interesting exercise, mostly in tactical sparring and trickery, perhaps like a crossword or Soduko puzzle. It's nothing special. Yet if you were count up those .pgn files, you would think this was not only my only passion, but also my profession. Was I really that bored? No, surely I had better things to do - even if just read a novel on long loo breaks, and make a point of complaining about curries or a housemate's cooking to my boss.

So, I cannot deny the obvious. That all my Blitzin' is a form of repetitive behaviour, not just another innocent example of chess as a hobby. Repetitive behaviour, I know, is a way to force the universe, that so often feels - & is - beyond control, and chaotic, and dangerous, into safe and reliable patterns; it is a way to master a little corner of this vast space we float in and name it ours. Or: it is a way to create ontological security in a changeful, unrelable world. Still, I do not have OCD, I have a bad habit. I don't miss blitzin' at all when I don't do it, and if there's no internet around, I do not seek it out for that purpose. I do it when it's there - but a hell of a lot, and when I could be doing better things.

I sometimes wonder who the other players are, who anonymously blitz as guests on the ICC alongside me. There are some who never resign - they leave the programme as if their computer had been disconnected. There are those who always offer a draw before resigning, or lose on time, or deliberately play bad moves, those who pretend to be Bobby Fischer, and there's one who as soon as the game is finished censors each opponent from talking to him or challening him again. In a word - it is odd, very odd, that I have spent so many hours in the company of these hidden, fleeting creatures. That I, in fact, am one, and that no doubt at some point they wonder about me as I wonder about them. If you are a fellow blitzee, then I'm the guy who goes 1. d4 c5 2. Bf4 cxd4 3. Bxb8 Rxb8 4. Qxd4, threat 5. Qxa7. And I'm better than you.

Count up those files; 10,000? 100,000? 500,000? Even if you did do so, you will not witness me in that number: The count records not only chess moves, not just the time I have killed, but a mistaken choice of mine: to make myself into a drifting shadow. That tally counts my cowardice.