Black Rose group.
Zeno adds we don't know for sure since most pre-Nazi occultist
archives are now in Britain and were given a maximum secrecy rating by Churchill.
March 29th;
Culinaris has
no Marmite.
Sleep cycle beginning to
recover from going out late the other night to virtual rave in
Second Life
with some
Rofettes.
Visiting one talkboard with friends from another
talkboard feels quite odd.
March 28th;
On way to meet Tim in town, pass large van emblazoned all over with logo
'Fuky Csoki',
a wholesaler of chocolates & sweets, apparently. Teach Attila, and hear about
the rising fortunes of apparatchik
Janos
Koka. Mother sounds grateful to be in nursing home.
March 27th;
Last night read screenplays of
'The
French Connection' &
'Chinatown' for
Marc-Henry. Today read
'Get Carter' &
'Basic Instinct'.
Meet Kath. While
with Kath find out by e-mail that mother is ill again and has been taken into a nursing home
since I phoned her last night.
March 26th;
Warm spring sunshine. Now a second volume of
Istvan
Vas's translation of 'Vanity
Fair' has appeared on top of the washing machine in the bathroom. Both volumes,
battered paperbacks, are on top of some
Csikszentmihalyi
book in English. Julia is reading them, I suppose. It's a mid-60s Hungarian edition,
so both Vanity Fair books have ugly, pointless covers: scratchy black-line drawings
of 19th-century scenes completely filled in with randomly-scribbled coloured
crayon, predominantly red and orange.
Into town. Ginger ale with Muhammad. As I go for my tram at Oktogon, four men
approach down the pavement. They all wear spotless black work overalls with
horizontal stripes of fluorescent yellow-green around the knees and elbows
and shins. All four are laughing and have six-foot-long boards mounted on
their backs rising about two foot above their heads. Once behind them I see all
four are different ads for some bank called
Inter-Europa. Of course, as is
the local custom, all four ads have too much text printed too small.
I get on tram. As it slows down for the
railway station one stop down the street, I see another four men walking in the
same direction as the first four, with the same overalls and same boards. They
are about five blocks behind the first set.
March 25th;
Wake up and eat clementines. All the greengrocers' stalls in the Ujpalota market
now have piles of clementines instead
of mandarins, but labelled as mandarins, and all still
identically priced at 398
forints
a kilogram. Iced coffee in town with Terri, who tells me a great tale of
Malev-airline customer-punishment
from her cancelled Swiss trip. Seems my voice on the
in-flight safety announcement doesn't quite make it worth
enduring Hungarians' idea of customer service.
March 24th;
Budapest lunch with
Charlie,
who shows me how to change am to pm on my
new 2nd-hand mobile
phone. Dinner with
Franc,
who tells me of scanning the strange drawings of
a Serbian boy for
Mr Spielberg.
March 23rd;
Leave Nigel's soon-to-be-sold house, remembering only at last minute
to leave him the spare
spare key I cut in Catford. {This was key I had cut last week
when the key-cutting man asked the woman in front of me giving him her shoes if she wanted the
heels in "rubber or metal?"
She said "Yeah." He carefully repeated
"The heels. Do
you want them tipped - with - rubber - or - metal?" She thought
for a second and replied
"Yeah, tomorrow."}
Shutting Nigel of Darkness's door for probably the last time, today I make it to Catford Bridge
station with quarter hour to spare.
Man
behind ticket window ponders over someone's complex ticket order as minutes tick by.
This is the one Nigel calls
"the ferrety-looking one". Today he
only throws a small fit, shouting at
the kind foreign girl before me in queue that she shouldn't have agreed to let me in front of her.
He bitterly snaps I should have used ticket machine. I point out I have lost
money in that ticket machine in the past and received no ticket, so am naturally
unwilling to repeat this experience. This makes Mr Ferret angrier still.
Only thanks to the kind foreign girl, I catch my train
to Gatwick. Flight delayed. Feel oddly calm & peaceful as airport echoes with
bossy announcements. Am made to take off my shoes at
security,
as if this is going to
stop a ground-launched missile or a bomb in the hold. At least none of us will be
able to toothpaste and shampoo the flight crew into submission. On plane meet a cheerful group
of girls from a London examination-setting company
hoping for a weekend of saunas, massage, healing spa water and having
skin rubbed off by some worrying-sounding abrasive process: Manda, Kylie, Sree, & Rachel agree that
London is a tiring city to live in.
Arrive in Budapest, where it is grey & rainy.
March 22nd;
Last night left Nigel of Darkness in south London, and caught train to north London for
a lovely dinner at Nigel of Light. His daughter Maddy [a forceful character, oddly
familiar somehow] having exclaimed in disappointment that this website is "just all about you", insisted she must feature in today's weblog entry. She mentioned lighting a stage play about a
Surrealist, and described some Ecuadorean coming-of-age ritual a classmate will
undergo. Once Nigel had prised his son William off the laptop, he, Maddy & I briefly played an anagram
game online before my return to south London.
Today, cappuccino with Piera in cafe. We visit her studio & meet
Andrew,
her web-designer: then drink in nearby pub to talk about Rosicrucians.
Later, Dan kindly invites me
to a Lebanese meal off Oxford Street. Afterwards, we drink in a hotel bar
pulsing with bebop and shady Continentals in sharp suits.
March 21st;
Wake up again. I seem to still be in London.
Tranquil.
Buy new phone. My new number looks like
it's 0044 7947926614.
March 20th;
Wake at Nigel's on sofa. Catch train to Saffron Walden for consultation with
wizard.
He prescribes me two remarkable-sounding homeopathic concoctions: one
supposedly prepared from positrons, the other from Essence of Snake. Return to
London by train. At 6pm meet Marc-Henry & his film editor Kant in Notting Hill.
During day finish book I gave Nigel last week:
'Conversations
on Consciousness', edited by Susan Blackmore. She interviews lots of brain
scientists and philosophers grappling with
qualia,
and how subjective experiences correlate with neurological events. She asks
each of them if they believe in free will, ineffable subjective experience, and
if studying consciousness has changed their lives. Very briefly,
they say the following.
Bernard Baars: author of Global Workspace Theory, denies
his spotlight theory of consciousness amounts to the Cartesian Theatre that
Dennett attacks, because there is no single spectator homunculus;
Ned Block:
creator of the China Brain thought experiment, distinguishes phenomenal
consciousness from access consciousness;
David Chalmers: responsible for dubbing
consciousness the "hard problem", defends his frontal attack on defining
subjective experience all in one go;
Pat & Paul Churchland: a married couple both
working in the field, dismiss anyone being able to characterise a problem as
hard or easy in advance as presumptious;
Francis Crick: suddenly attacks Blackmore
for her interest in Buddhism;
Daniel Dennett: says that in the early 1990s he
predicted change-blindness before it was found experimentally;
Susan Greenfield:
says scientists should be open to all ideas;
Richard Gregory: says that the role
of consciousness is to mark experiences happening now with extra vividness, to
distinguish them from memories and predictions;
Stuart Hameroff: boldly says that
consciousness is a quantum-physics phenomenon and is likely therefore to outlast
death... "holographically";
Christof Koch: thinks consciousness is almost certainly
prelinguistic;
Stephen LaBerge: experiments with lucid dreaming, and, using
pre-agreed rapid-eye movements [left-right-left-right], gets people who are asleep
but aware they are dreaming to signal this state to experimenters;
Thomas Matzinger:
explains his Empty Self-Model theory, and is pessimistic about the effect of current insights in cognitive science on people who still believe in a unitary self;
Kevin O'Regan: stresses that consciousness is an activity we do, and not an experience we have - using change-blindness he shows that people hold little visual in their consciousness, but build a semantic model of what they see and use the world as a memory store to update and refresh their bare-bones model of what is out there;
Roger Penrose: Hameroff's collaborator stresses Goedel's limitation on computation as a problem for AI and computational models of consciousness, and also sees thought as unavoidably quantum in character;
Vilayanur Ramachandran: interestingly suggests that animals might have consciousness but only humans have "meta-consciousness";
John Searle: describes his Chinese Room thought experiment and why he thinks computational models can only simulate thought, not actually think; Petra Stoerig: claims humans are jealous of animals, and some animals might have more consciousness than we do;
Francisco Varela: describes his Buddhist-influenced phenomenology;
Max Velmans: suggests that mind and brain collapse together like wave and particle;
Daniel Wegner: suggests we sense our acts and our intentions, and mistakenly believe the second cause the first.
March 19th;
Wake at 7.15 out of vivid dream about being at a raucous classical-music concert,
a kind of staccato, syncopated crescendo, composed by someone called something
like CMCKCY. People were passing round librettos and having hysterics. I was
dressed only in a towel but no-one noticed. It was the climax of a difficult
scene climbing up a twenty-foot high wall-mounted bookcase inside a big library
to get to the concert room. Wake up, get up, pack, grill bacon sandwiches for
breakfast for mother & me.
On train to Leeds, two males in black, one with a tufty quiff hanging down over
his forehead dyed blue, the other with his identical quiff dyed red. Catch
train
down to London and WiFi works this time, after a fashion.
March 18th;
Picked up Judith's bouquet from the florists in next village yesterday
while having a drink with John. Mother & I fussed around last night shortening
the stems and decanting them into two jars of water. Today,
Mothering
Sunday. Trim ivy & clean windows. Bright sunshine,
couple of short hailstorms, snow after dark.
March 17th;
After Foucault, in small hours finish
'The
Trial of Socrates' by I.F. Stone.
Very persuasive and - judging by the few sources I've read - fair. Stone points
out that our only accounts of the trial are both slanted, written by two of his
most devoted students, Plato and Xenophon.
Stone
notices what first struck me about
the argumentation of Socrates in the dialogues - that it's often evasive
and not very good. Socrates' constant attacks on democracy can be construed as
snobbery and covert support for the two dictatorships that briefly overthrew the
democracy of Athens in the decade and a half before his trial, that of the Four Hundred
and the Thirty - both led by former students of his. Stone also claims that
Socrates could easily have asked for and won a not-guilty verdict, or at least
a lighter punishment like exile, but wanted to die. Stone stops short of suggesting
what occurs to me - that Socrates was shrewd enough to judge that a painless yet unjust
death from hemlock surrounded by his heartbroken students might ensure his
philosophical immortality rather better than the quality of his ideas or arguments.
Later in day, wake up and finish mother's intriguing book,
'How
to Catch Fairies' by Gilly Sergiev. Tongue so firmly in cheek it must hurt, Sergiev tells us
about all sorts of fairy creatures such as goblins, dwarves, sylphs, harpies, as well as less-well-known
ones like wiskies, complete with spells for attracting each one. No entry under Lorelei, I notice. Further,
she claims to have some in her bathroom. I like the sizes. For example sylphs are
commonly 8 foot tall, while imps are typically an 1/8th of an inch in height. A mix of lovely
Victorian illustrations - including several by Arthur Rackham - is a bit spoiled by being combined
with her own slightly-too-slick drawings which have more than a touch of the
Hanna
Barbera about them.
John gets train over: we meet for drink in Hebden.
March 16th;
Odd day in Manchester. Woman at Chinese Internet cafe asks me if I would like a
cup of tea, and I say yes, carefully explaining I would prefer it weak and without
milk. She brings a cuppa with so much milk it disguises that she has also
made it very strong. So I cannot get to sleep until 3am back in the village.
That evening, struggle to the end of
'Surveillir
et Punir'
['Discipline
and Punish'] by Michel Foucault which I overambitiously tackled in French because
I couldn't get an English or Hungarian library copy in Budapest. Quite a didactic
read, and hedged with sneaky rhetorical tricks like those of other post-war French
philosophers. These are the phrases like 'play of gazes', 'network of forces',
'economy of power' designed to imply that something is going on somewhere
or everywhere, and therefore Foucault doesn't have to actually spell out who makes
what happen how. What is especially clever is that Foucault is claiming that power is
all around us and we all take part, so his very thesis perfectly suits the
precise-looking-yet-actually-evasive language he keeps repeating until the reader
starts to feel he's proved something. Foucault contrasts the use of judicial
torture and public execution in the early eighteenth century with the closed, uniform,
regulated sanctum of the prison in the late eighteenth century. His point is that
the rise of the modern prison between 1790 and 1820 looks a more humane alternative
to the grisly Ancien Regime ways of punishment, but in fact marks a new kind of state
power extending throughout society, with the creepy
Benthamite
Panopticon as the model
for hospitals, schools, factories, offices extending the gaze of power into the whole
of our lives.
Bentham's
Panopticon, a kind of circular prison where guards in a central tower could watch
inmates, but inmates could not see if they were being watched, is Foucault's
central image for the way people and the state [or at least
the French state] now experience each other. Along with this process is a claim that
the state stopped punishing the criminal's body, so as to better interrogate and
control his soul. Since this doesn't cut crime, Foucault's second line of argument is
that the failure of prison to reduce crime proves that it serves some other purpose for
each modern country's ruling class: such as isolating and controlling the most dynamic,
potentially revolutionary, members of the lower classes. Since it's all a "network of
gazes", however, it's hard to know how Foucault's claims could be tested. The fact that
un-Enlightenment Tsarist Russia and its successor Soviet Russia both made extensive use of what
Foucault calls old-fashioned punishments [public execution, chain gangs, exile, torture]
alongside what Foucault calls new-fangled punishments [a vast prison system, use of
doctors to control dissidents, keeping of files, highly politicised schools] rather suggests that
a simpler explanation might work. For example, industrial societies became richer,
therefore could afford to build bigger prisons to tackle the increased crime that
bigger cities brought with them? And once their populations were hidden from the public,
prison reformers became more concerned with what was going on inside them? Less
exciting of course, and hardly likely to support a thrillingly controversial history
like Foucault's. I'm reminded of
Canetti's
ludicrous claim that the prison cell is
modelled on a predator's mouth and the bars on the window are like the teeth, when
clearly a cell is a room designed to be hard to leave, and barred windows
are only barred if you haven't yet invented glass bricks, or if you feel the need for windows
at all.
March 15th;
Again use Hebden
WiFi bar. Bus back to Mytholmroyd looks clean, but has a mild,
distinct aroma of vomit throughout. Once back in mother's village, a surprising
sunset lights up a ceiling of cloud from behind a hill. What look like
snow-covered ridges and uplands, bathed in pink, green, orange & yellow, like
a vast other country upside down in the sky.
March 14th;
Mother & I go to the refurbished
village
pub to check their WiFi reception. We have two
rather pricey drinks on the edge of a big group of very cheerful people hearing about
a Norwegian woman one of them knows who has cut her own hair since age 12, lives on
only coffee, wine & steak, and buys ten or twenty sticks of lipsalve at a time.
Later they introduce themselves to us as a support group, all with children or
grandchildren born deaf. Wifi connection quite slow and iffy. By afternoon find
better place in Hebden, with good food and the first half-reasonable @ pun I've seen:
'B@r Place'.
March 13th;
Last night, finished book I bought mother:
'Born
on a Blue Day'. The autobiography of Daniel Tammet,
an autistic savant who is also a synaesthete, this is a fascinating insight into
the mind of someone who can say "her father was very tall,
and reminded me of the number 9" or "when
my parents argued, their voices would turn dark blue".
His plain, measured prose becomes refreshing after a few pages. Quite a few
professional writers &
editors could learn from his writing style. His successful struggle to understand feelings,
his own and other people's, and become independent, is moving. He describes his discovery of his own
homosexuality with dignity, and there is a wonderfully unselfconscious moment
when he and his partner, Neil, both sob, heartbroken, at the death of their
beloved cat. Particularly interesting is how he does his impressive trick
of learning a language very fast. Londoner
Tammet
gets up to sufficient speed
in Icelandic in one week, for a documentary about him called
'Brainman',
that he can hold his own in an interview in Icelandic on Icelandic television. Only slightly
reassuring that he admits to being very nervous. Obviously the
automatic colour-coding of synaesthesia helps him
rapidly memorise a big vocabulary, and he has the right
attitude in practice, where he is not afraid of making mistakes in front of native
speakers, but once corrected wants very much to not make that mistake a second
time. Learning to switch on synaesthesia at will would be a handy trick. Inspiring,
intriguing book.
Today, Hebden Bridge WiFi hotspot seems elusive.
Return to Bradford to get my money back on
unusable SIM card.
March 12th;
Train
to Bradford half an hour late. Two people waiting with me at Mytholmroyd are
discussing critical theory, Laing, Derrida, and the
Adam
Curtis documentary about
game-theory-influenced
ideas of personal freedom that was
on BBC2 last night. The woman relates how she invited
Laing
to speak at her university
once and he turned up drunk, aggressive, & incoherent. I ask if Laing was not in
fact a Glaswegian, and they gently chide me for cityism. Drop in at Bradford's
Carphone
Warehouse to buy a
mobileworld
SIM card. The assistant asks
my opinion of his impending oil-block purchase in Kuwait, then tells a customer
that she only got good service because he thought she was a mystery shopper. She
becomes irate. I say that actually I am the mystery shopper, but by this point no-one
is listening to me. Nigel of Darkness sends me
smoke-&-mirrors video.
Train back to Mytholmroyd 20
minutes late. On train I meet a cheerful
Human-Relations
consultant nostalgic for his oil-industry days in Lebanon and Azerbaijan.
March 11th;
With mother in Yorkshire. I cook our dinner and finish Piera's book.
'The
New Jerusalem' is an account of how Rosicrucians
and Freemasons were heavily involved in the redesigning of the City after London's
Great Fire in 1666. This involves a nice diagram of how one proposal superimposed
the Kabbalistic
Tree
of Life on London's street plan, and some interesting background
in the likelihood that the Knights Templar fled to Scotland, helped Bruce win at
Bannockburn, and probably turned themselves into Scottish-Rite masons. However, there
was nothing about Ackroyd's suggestion that the church architect Hawksmoor was a secret
Manichaean,
and a lot of the stuff about Wren, Nelson & others being masons is a bit
conjectural, with phrases like "it is not hard to imagine" and "it is very likely
that". On page 243 Wren's studies at Wadham college Oxford are described and on page
244 we read about Wren's studies "at Cambridge". Book padded out a little in places
by repetition, and some worrying-looking sacred geometry supposedly encoding details
of Cheops Pyramid in the exact height of the Monument and Nelson's Column. Still,
some intriguing material on who met whom. The claims that Christianity was founded in
England in AD 36, before the Church in Rome, and that London's importance as a
trading centre substantially predated the Roman occupation were persuasive.
March 10th
Pop over to Piera's to borrow book over a black tea. Make it to King's X in time.
GNER
promise WiFi on the train north to Leeds, but often it doesn't work very
well - or, on this occasion, at all.
March 9th;
Not much luck shopping for 2nd-hand books. Meet lots of charming people at
Rof
drinks on fleet Street, then dinner with some of them where we discuss the
Foucault
book, all but one of us rather shamefacedly admitting to having
not quite finished it. General mood is moving towards
Kuhn
next as I rush off for a late drink with Angela.
March 8th;
Full late English breakfast with Nigel of Darkness at the cafe where the Bulgarian girls
work. Later he sits out on the pavement on his deckchair, sorting papers and
receiving visitors in warm spring sunshine. I go into town at dusk and meet
Piera at Charing Cross under the stone monument. She drives us to
Gigi's gallery in Bethnal
Green, where we eat Parma ham and drink beer in a packed back room.
Piera suggests I need to release my inner emotions. Back at Charing Cross we sit in
her car for a few minutes. She adds there is a demonic aspect to Turin, not just London.
March 7th;
Wake up on Nigel's sofa. Juno sulking in her basket outside in hall.
Nigel's phone rings in cupboard under stairs. I answer it. It is him. Two
buyers are coming to view his house. They arrive, with cheerful
South African estate agent. I show them round. They leave. I go out for fish & chips.
Spend afternoon in
library.
After Chinese meal, Nigel shows me how to draw cube in
AutoCAD.
March 6th;
Fly from Budapest to London.
March 5th;
Go out in warm spring weather looking for nearby fitness gym Julia suggested.
Find it in a bleak one-storey cement block,
next door to an Irish pub. A sign outside mentioning manicures alerts me to the chance
it might be a women-only gym, but I pop inside just to check. A vaguely butch-looking
woman inside
is not just hostile - her hackles actually rise: from fifteen feet away I can see her shoulder
& back muscles stiffen with hatred as I enter. She glares as I ask if it is a gym. She spits
out that it is not a gym for men. I leave. An hour later I buy a chocolate bar from a small
shop I visit daily. The woman is on the phone, and annoyed at my entrance. When it
becomes clear that I need to ask her something, she apologises to the person on the phone
for the irritating intrusion of a customer [rather than apologising to me for staying on
the phone], interrupting her call to serve me with weary patience at my demanding rudeness.
By evening, I treat myself to a pasta dish at the
expensive Goa restaurant in the centre of town. I tip a little over ten per cent,
and the waiter brings back my change having deducted slightly more than I agreed to tip.
The way the numbers work out, it is clearly deliberate, and they shrewdly judge I will be too
shy & tired to mention a couple of missing shillings. Last time I saw this behaviour was
also
at Goa. Knowing Hungarians, my interpretation of such strange,
petty cheek is that I am being ticked off for not
ordering a second dish and a more expensive drink. As it happens, the
restaurant is near empty the whole time I am there. Probably all my fault.
March 4th;
These
people fear they're being wiped out.
March 3rd;
Up late. Stroll out to find vitamins, and buy mandarins from a 5th greengrocer's stall
for, naturally, 398 forints a kilogram. Market forces, innit?
Evening soup with Mariann & Phil & old friends.
Gyuri
describes Morocco as boring, ugly,
expensive, dirty & irritating. We peer outside for lunar eclipse, then give up. I
leave for 1am nightbus as Joszef is harvesting yellow snails from Mariann & Phil's aquarium.
March 2nd;
The usual long Friday. Up at 6. Morning spent practising with bored class, who refuse to believe they will be nervous once on stage in front of hundreds. Performance arrives. My class suddenly find
they are nervous once on stage in front of hundreds. Some classes' presentations are a bit mysterious. High point is a restaurant sketch in which a perky girl with blonde pigtails plays a talking dog on a leash. Farewells with
Renata and other
friendly teachers
who sweetly present us with bottles of wine.
Our journey across Austria begins. One Matzen teacher who lives in Vienna,
Martina,
kindly drives some of us into the city. She & I
visit the Secession gallery, where we watch a film of Leopold Kessler punching holes in street signs around Vienna. One is outside the gallery, and we pop outside to check that this sign still has holes in it. Then, with Martina & her boyfriend Nicolas, I have a decaff coffee and an excellent plate of humus with fresh bread at a
cafe in
Naschmarkt. Unlike Budapest stallholders, the Austrians understand the idea of selling products at different prices from each other.
I rejoin group and board train to Vienna. While eating an omlette, I hear a puzzled Dallan describing how Nick & Jeff took an earlier train, along with their joint ticket, somehow leaving Dallan behind to buy himself an extra ticket. Dallan briefly describes his
art school and then the
ex-convent 'English Girls' school in Saint Poelten his group
were teaching at this week. Greg shows me his handsome Tarot pack. Teacher Neil plays guitar in the dining car and Elie sings. We reach Budapest. I switch on my phone and get a text from
Politics
Judit, suggesting drinks in a few minutes. I go there, and meet Judit and her adventurous
friend Elisabeth from Austria. Elisabeth [Scorpio with Scorpio rising, like myself]
is an independent woman doing business in Montenegro and falling in love
with her new homeland.
Isabel,
also enchanted by her first trip to Montenegro, joins us. Judit &
Elisabeth both firmly express the view that
Journalist Neil
is really a spy. Take bus out to suburb, partly unpack, and fall asleep at 3am.
March 1st;
Last night the teachers kindly invited us to dinner in a local
heuriger (apparently
slightly different from the
buschenschank
concept) for cheese, cold meats and local wine.
As usual, I went home early at 10pm to general surprise, and found this morning that my
bother-avoiding
radar is still working well. Everyone else left round midnight, and Andy at
breakfast reports some worryingly advanced squiffiness among a couple
in our team. Renata drives me to school alone,
and the other five arrive a few minutes later just as the first lesson bell is going. In the
early evening, we meet Renata for drinks at the Auersthal cafe. This time she is dressed elegantly
in black and grey, after yesterday's autumnal browns and Tuesday's apple green.
As I drink my beer, Andy tells me about his romantic life in Berlin, and introduces me to a
German contractor working on seismic surveying and permit-clearing for
OMV. This must have
been the man Teacher Stephen met yesterday who he described as prospecting for oil.
The cheerful German lives in our hotel, like the Major in
Fawlty Towers.
He tells us he has been living in Austrian hotels 48 weeks a year since the mid-1990s. He
mentions a period of five and a half years he spent in one Austrian hotel near the Czech border.
I leave at 11pm.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
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