.
Today, tea with Dorina & Annamari.
March 30th;
Last night finished Martin's copy of
'Temporary
Autonomous Zone' by Hakim Bey. Interesting set of
anarchist writings emerging out of his research into pirate utopias from around
1600 to 1800. Erratic but exuberant style as often with
anarchists {though of course, he's a post-anarchist anarchist}.
Bey praises enclaves which might last anything
from a few hours to a few months {festivals, collectives, communes, parties,
underground conspiracies}, in which radical utopias can be experienced
now, not as an endlessly deferred golden age-to-be. He quotes Pearl Andrews as
suggesting that The Dinner Party is one such temporary autonomous zone. Book
includes some exultant, stream-of-consciousness writing which is usually
entertaining and occasionally exhilarating. Lovely page about a park at dusk
full of awkward American boys pretending not to be bored or embarrassed by their
fathers teaching them baseball. Slightly worrying revelation that Bey dedicated
himself to the rather alarming goddess Kali at one point in his travels, close
to the homeland of the Naxelite rebellion.
He's well-read enough to know that Nietzsche advocated racial mixing, not racial
purity {as his sister and the Nazis re-read him}.
The best material is from his research on pirate-run colonies. Still hopeful about
the promise of the internet {the book is from the late 1980s}, his breezy use of
long sentences packed with things half-referred-to raises a lot of questions. I
wish he'd gone into more detail on several mentions thrown in {Moorish Orthodox
Church, Sir John Woodruffe, John Dee's "occultist imperialist" project, the
Croatans}. The prose is meant to excite to action - to be almost performative
in Austin's sense. If you can sail over sentences like
"We have seen the ghost of Rene Guenon, cadavarous and
topped with a fez (like Boris Karloff as Ardis Bey in 'The Mummy') leading a
funereal No Wave Industrial-Noise rock band in loud buzzing blackfly-chants
for the death of Cutlure & Cosmos: the elitist fetishism of pathetic nihilists,
the Gnostic self-disgust of "post-sexual" intellectoids."
on every page without exasperation, then the overall effect is uplifting.
March 29th;
Last night's full moon lights haunting
Hungarian woodland scene by
astro-photographer.
March 28th;
Bookcase
now has shelves.
Awaits wheels. Also I
probably need to find a reel of that ferociously tough strip newsagents use to
truss stacks of magazines together.
March 27th;
Stay up all night piecing bookcase together.
Adrafinil +
energy drinks + candle smoke. A heady mix, citizens.
March 26th;
Teaching methods continue to
evolve.
<< Kyle Stephenson, a 14 year-old bastard from Carlisle,
said: "I've just noticed that Mr Hayes has been stood outside my house for the
last three hours setting fire to things and laughing really loudly. In some
indefinable way, I have a feeling things are going to be very different from
now on." >>
March 25th;
Thursday quite peculiar. Wake up early and walk Jolene. Bang on time and looking
very girly, Memory Eve and Caroline turn up in
the
pawprint van packed with dogs
and puppies, to collect Jolene. They say they can take her back to Catherine today,
her Irish foster mother, who has reappeared. Good that the nervous Jolene
will not need to spend a night or two in kennels after all. Buy afternoon rail
ticket for countryside, and get to Martin's for tasty lunch, where he lends me a
copy of 'Temporary Autonomous Zone', by
Hakim
Bey, and we chat about The House, The Boat, and The
Garden as refuges against the professionalised world of centralised production.
Perhaps I should add The Kitchen to that list. Get on train and read some of Bey,
some of Frayn, and reach
Robin's
in time to see his new cracked-mud artworks in
the last of the afternoon daylight around 6pm.
I mention to him how intriguingly trangressive it was that
Jonathan
Barnes, specialist on Greek thought, turned up to give
his
talk last week dressed
in 1790s? 1820s? clothing {breeches, silk stockings, dress shirt with ruff sleeves, hair
tied back in pony tail}, as apparently he always does. None of us referred to it
of course. How interesting such a simple thing can have such a powerful effect.
March 24th;
Meanwhile,
Polkinghorne & creationism.
March 23rd;
Another frustrating day trying to contact American businesses which force you
to fill in forms because they wish to save on salaries by not answering phones
or reading correspondence. Finish a history book
'Giordano Bruno
& the Embassy Affair' by the wonderfully named John Bossy.
Rather beautifully written, Bossy adds to the scholarship on
Bruno, a curious encyclopaedic thinker burned alive by the Counter
Reformation in 1600. Bossy's claim, carefully argued with good
evidence, is that Bruno worked for a couple of years as a spy for Queen
Elizabeth's secret service run by Walsingham. Bruno spied from inside the French
Embassy where he lived as a guest in London during the early 1580s. Bruno, though
nominally an Italian Catholic monk {Dominican}, seemingly hated the Papacy even
more than Calvinists {whom he also hated}, and - if Bossy is right - was happy
to help the English cause. Puzzlingly different causes looking back, yet the
underlying nastiness is familiar enough.
March 22nd;
Some odd events in recent days. The dog and I got locked out of my flat on
Thursday, and I had the humbling experience of needing a locksmith when my
mobile phone was locked in my flat. The nearby hardware shop very kindly let
me use their phone.
Jolene
has a leash with tiny dogbone designs printed along
it. Between each pair of differently-coloured dogbones is the curious slogan
'Oh my doggy', which feels foreign, though they are each
three perfectly good English words. Several strange phone calls
from unhappy friends today.
March 21st;
Sunday. Finish
'Electronics',
by Roger Bridgman, one of those picture books done together
with London's Science Museum. Gorgeously laid out, with lots of items lying, as
it were, on the white paper of each page. I'd have loved these as a child. But
I think I'd have had a complaint that I still have now: why is it not
all to scale, or at least given a scale? Surely the whole point of things sitting
on the surface of the page is to be, whenever possible, real size? If
they cannot all be, why are there no dimensions? Also, gives you the feeling
you have understood lots when in fact you haven't. One solitary page had a simple
circuit diagram on it. Sobering to see how long I had to stare
at it to work out what was going on...
March 20th;
Mexican lunch with Mystery Friend 2. Jolene the
Labrador/Alsation
mongrel is tied to a leg of our table outdoors on the sunny street. A kind
waitress brings a bowl of water for Jolene, and Erik drops by. At home the
almost complete kitchen
scales quietly bide their time.
March 19th;
Day makes serious effort at sunshine from 9am to 5pm. Some frustration not getting
the damn coupon code for the e-text sorted out.
The Germans say I can call them,
but every time I phone throughout the day, no-one answers. Just like yesterday.
I must repeat my experiment of a fortnight ago with cooking spaghetti in my electric
kettle, since that went quite well. The 'lomtalanitas' starts in this district this
evening, and
the pavements begin to fill up with the utter junk people can throw out of their
flats for a day or two when a "lommy" is announced. Mysterious heaps of folded
cardboard, broken chairs, smashed glass, and random slabs of chipboard appear,
along with fat Gypsies guarding their beach-combed treasure.
March 18th;
Finish 'De
Imaginibus' {'On Images'} by
Thabit Ibn Qurra, translated into English by Christopher Warnock. Though pleasantly
slim, with notes and commentary from Warnock on each section, much shorter than expected
and leaves almost all its astrological underpinnings assumed. Apart from page 32
being page 31 printed a second time, and there being no diagrams, fairly well laid out.
March 17th;
Up early for haircut. Later in day pick up Jolene, an
ex-stray
crossed-Alsation bitch, from
Memory Eve. Jolene has to be the most nervous dog I've ever met. She refuses to
get on three trams in a row, flattening herself to the ground so I cannot pick
her up - apparently it's the beeping noise which reminds her of some dark
episode in her past, since she is also frightened to get into my lift which
makes the same sound. She constantly needs love and reassurance, and repeatedly
assumes the cowering, submissive posture as if anticipating a beating. I seem a
bit ill, but I am sure it will pass.
March 16th;
Watch a TV series with Dorina:
'The
Pervert's Guide to Cinema' narrated by Slavoj
Zizek, Britain's latest favourite funny foreign intellectual. Zizek steers
clear of Marx, but sticks close to Freud with his entertaining ramblings about
various trendy films past and present. Hitchcock is central, of course, as are
Chaplin, Kubrick, Disney, Tarkovsky, Lynch. When he excitedly
declaims to camera lines like "We are now in the Lynchian universe" I find myself
falling asleep though. With the whole of cinema to range over in search of
supporting examples, it is hard to imagine any thesis that could not be made to
sound plausible. And something about Freudian interpretation gives itself licence
to say anything and be committed to nothing. Zizek at one point enthusiastically
says we all dread the living father and want fathers dead,
knowing full well that if some viewers protested that, no, they actually quite
liked their fathers alive, Zizek would simply rephrase his claim to place it
beyond refutation. Much of this faux-shocking stuff that is meant to provoke
is what makes him fun. Kubrick's orgy scene from 'Eyes Wide Shut' proves the
poverty of male sexuality; filmgoing is like staring down the bowl of the lav
waiting for horrid stuff to back up from the subconscious; flowerbeds are lewd
scenes of plants flaunting their genitalia to passing insects, and so on.
Amusing, also, to see Slavoj burbling away on a boat on the lake from
'The Birds', in the cellar from 'Psycho', in the sitting room from 'Blue
Velvet', on Gene Hackman's hotel bedroom balcony from 'The Conversation'.
March 15th;
Finish the book of ideas in novel form that Martin kindly gave me,
'Lila
',
by the same Robert Pirsig who wrote the backpacker's bible 'Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance' a couple of decades earlier. Not having read more
than 20 pages of 'Motorcycle Maintenance' I relied on Pirsig's claim that this
is the more important book. The narrator, who still has a Greek name, is steering
a small boat down canals and rivers of the eastern states of the US, on the way
to the sea at New York, where he is going to carry on south towards the sun.
On the way he meets someone called Lila in a bar, and, against the advice of
a male acquaintance, lets her hitch a ride on his boat for a day or two. The
story skilfully cuts in and out of their experiences on the waterways of America
and the narrator's internal thoughts about anthropology, philosophy, history - all
part of an ambitious attempt to fuse metaphysics and ethics. At first I couldn't
quite place what seemed somehow familiar about the tone of voice, some of the
same impatience as Debord but also some of the same charming confidence and
apparent openness of outlook. Then I saw Pirsig was born within a couple of years
of my mother, and something of their early beatnik outlook jumped into focus.
Young enough to be part of the post-World-War-Two mood of new beginnings in the
1950s and 60s, but just old enough to have been formed in childhood by the
earlier post-World-War-One mood of new beginnings of the 1920s and 30s. Like
Debord, this is also a highly readable text made up of a string of interesting
assertions also, though differently from Debord, disguised as an argument. Pirsig
gives us two main ideas in the book. The first is that "Plains English", an
American vernacular of very simple, direct sentences without adorning adverbs
and so on, is actually something that came into American English from the native
Indian tribes. Pirsig recalls seeing cowboys-&-indians movies where both sides
are speaking simple, chiselled sentences of honour and conciseness and credits
this to the Navaho, Cree, Siouxse et al. This is not unlike one of my mother's often
stimulating and clever guesses that seemed to open new doors for discussion,
but that she rarely paused to re-examine. What makes this a bit worrying for
Pirsig's book is that several far more plausible explanations offer themselves.
It never occurs to him that the thirteen colonies being largely founded by
nonconformists from the British provinces, most of whom had been denied formal
educations on religious grounds, are going to straight away have a simpler form
of speech. On top of this, the presence of non-English-speakers on the East
Coast in 1650, 1700, 1750 like Swedes, Dutch speakers in what was recently
New Amsterdam, many German-speaking colonists, is going to further simplify the
English everyone used as a lingua franca. Why bring in the Indians at all? And
if you do bring them in, what gives Pirsig the idea that native American languages
are plain, simple and devoid of "curlecues" as he puts it? Never having learned
one to an advanced level, most likely, not that this makes Pirsig shy about dropping
names like Benjamin Lee Whorf, who did bother to learn Hopi. A couple of
respectful mentions of Margaret Mead and the Samoa she misdescribed further
reveals the usual American offhandedness about the value of
learning someone's language quite well {as Mead didn't} before you pontificate
about their culture. In fact, the complexity of native American languages is
notorious among linguists, but in a foreign language like English
the Blackfoot or whoever are obviously going to express themselves simply as most
2nd-language speakers have to. They don't know enough words or expressions to speak
with subtlety in the white man's tongue, simplified enough as that already was.
This already should warn us about Pirsig's more interesting suggestion, that we
can give levels of value to different levels of organisation: material, biological,
social, and intellectual. With admirable boldness, he sets out to dissolve
metaphysics into ethics, unaware he has rediscovered a fairly well-trodden path.
Not unlike Hegel's historical forces sacrificing individuals for the sake of
higher forms such as nation states, Pirsig says what is right on the social level
is often wrong on the biological level and vice versa. This intriguing move allows
him to remain scathing about Victorians {who he believes never spoke simply} and
so himself remain part of the non-hypocritical 20th-century moral relativism he
likes, while at the same time sneaking back
into his thinking some of the heirarchical moral imperatives he so loathes the
"Victorians" for. It is an interesting word for him, like "aristocratic", and
he applies both sweepingly {the word 'Victorian' occurs eight times on one page}.
A couple of mentions of the First World War help to explain this. He
casually refers to the Great War as a barbaric slaughter
of a generation etc etc, both explaining how horrible the Victorians were
as people, and showing where their "attitudes" inevitably lead. This
is High 1930s thinking, and books like
the one I finished a couple of days ago reveal just
how misleading it is, and how much of a grip on our imaginations it still
has. This received image of World War One is licence in the minds of people from
Pirsig's generation and since to dismiss the entire century before 1914 {or even
dismiss all history} as
decadent, stiff, & morally sick. Talk among adults as you grow up in the 1930s
of the all-too-recent horrors of the trenches fuse with strangely remote sepia
photographs of people in rigid, unsmiling poses and impractical-looking clothing.
Together this mixture of emotional remoteness & uncomfortable closeness produce
for people of that decade a just-escaped Dark Age against which one defines one's
own ideas. It never strikes you that everyone looks serious & formal when camera
shutter speeds are slow and photography is an expensive service for special
occasions. The weirdness of his slant emerges when Pirsig contrasts the plain
speech of the Plains Indians to what he calls European aristocratic style, when
in fact codes of honour, simplicity, and frank speech are very prevalant among
the aristocrats he's never met but believes he knows all about. Of course, it's
bourgeois people who speak elaborately. Bizarrely, he even claims the 19th century was
a non-intellectual era. Beguiling as his set of categories {material, biological,
social, intellectual} is, he does not explain when it is acceptable for a "lower"
sense of "quality" to take precedence over a "higher", and in fact avoids the
hard questions {such as ethical dilemmas} altogether. He proclaims that lots of
traditional philosophical discussions have been dissolved out, but few readers
familiar with those problems will agree.
As his female boat guest goes insane {a common manoeuvre among male
novelists who get stuck depicting a female character} we get some memories
of Pirsig's time in an asylum and one last overplayed hunch, that Lila's "religion
of one" is just as valid as the bigger religions, which are "just as mad". The
idea that a priest gamely proclaiming the Catholic host to be literally the
flesh of Christ is in the same category as his female character claiming her
doll is a live baby is self-evidently daft. Plenty of anthropologists Pirsig
should have read show that however odd religious beliefs are to outsiders, they
are carefully bracketed in that culture, and do not interfere with daily life
in the same way mad people's odd beliefs do. Plains American common sense should
also tell Pirsig that he is worried about what nutty Lila might do on his boat as
she talks to her doll and describes "going to the island" precisely because
he knows deep down that hers is a case very different from a priest saying
the wafer is someone's flesh. Would he be equally worried for his own or
his guest's safety if an average priest was hitching a ride on his boat? Of course
not. We don't seriously think that the priest is unlikely to wander off and forget
his way home because his strange beliefs about transubstantiation are shared
by people in the community where he lives. Nor does that priest need support
from fellow believers in the sanctity of Mass to successfully cook himself
dinner or rewire one of his plugs without anyone worrying for his safety.
Lila is finally whisked off, away from the boat, freeing Pirsig's narrator
character from his very sensible worries about her. Her disappearance also
frees Pirsig from his quiet struggle to rebrand Victorian morality as both
hip and his, so the book can end.
March 14th;
Finish Martin's copy of
'Society
of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord, the 1968
Situationist tract that formed the call to action for at least some of the
students in the Paris 'events' of that year, as they were drolly called in
France. Debord refines the standard Frankurt School Marxist line that our whole
culture - the 'media' - is now the tool advanced capitalism uses to
separate us from our own lives. In brief, it could be summed up as saying that
not religion, but television, is the opium of the masses.
The Frankfurt idea is that advertising, low-brow newspapers, radio, TV, what
we now in Britain call 'celebrity culture', are all a kind of hall of mirrors
helping capitalism to control us. What does Debord add to this? Not much,
though he trenchantly accuses both Soviet Russia and Maoist China of
being part of the same spectacle of digression &
deception. This is a highly readable text made up of short and long
numbered paragraphs, a good way as Wittgenstein and many others found of
disguising a string of interesting assertions as an argument.
Somehow numbered scraps of text look important and rigorous, as if it's already
clear that future commentators will need a way to identify each
jewel-like statement they put under their critical lens. Portentous lines like
"A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle
must know how to wait."
or "...they cannot set themselves any lesser task if they
wish to be recognised and to recognise themselves in a world of
their own making." give us the rousing feeling this is
the product of analytical clarity on matters of urgent importance without
ever telling us quite how. Only by squinting closely at some of
the detail {he swoops in and out of historical sections with impressive
breeziness & elan} can you see how unsupported the whole edifice is.
Just glance
at Darwin, and we have an alternative view of the 'spectacle'. The spectacle might,
like fashion, be a self-reinforcing web of images spun by no-one in particular,
not necessarily benefitting a certain class. Debord comes close to comparing
it to an organism without making the final step because that final step would
deindustrialise and declass Marxism. Marxism's obsession with factories
makes it one of the last solid monuments to the era of Big Shed manufacturing.
A social organism like a city, or like today's mass media, might benefit all
parties to some extent and survive and grow simply because we find it harder to
see its costs. Despite the preference for stylish handwaving instead of evidence,
this is an entertaining book with flashes of insight. A section about theories of
historical time is a bit dull, but for the true believer it helps give him that
feeling that Debord has checked all sections of his theoretical structure and it
all fits together brilliantly. Perhaps some Frankfurt School writings are not
describing only capital but also Kapital? Along with the mass media
whose manipulative power it so obviously envies, Marxism itself rather shimmers
and hovers "above our everyday lives", deluding each new generation,
"able to seamlessly absorb each new event or critique" into its "spaceless, timeless"
spectacle of theory.
March 13th;
Feeble attempts at sunshine. Over afternoon green tea, look at some
sociology of religion with Dorina -
Pink
Dandelion is an academic who writes about Quakers. By night,
make second batch of lemon-and-ginger angel cakes, burning them slightly.
March 12th;
Get home-made kitchen scales to the point where the pans hang properly and it's
usable. Get central frame of bookcase upright.
Finally, someone captures what I feel about the characterless novels, charmless
pomposity, and intellectual shallowness of the prewar Russian emigree girl
still mysteriously venerated by the American hard-of-thinking. Lovely piece
by Anthony Daniels sums up the derivative "philosopher"
Ayn Rand.
"In her expository writings, Rand’s style resembles that of
Stalin. It is more catechism than argument, and bores into you in the manner of
a drill. She has a habit of quoting herself as independent verification of what
she says; reading her is like being cornered at a party by a man, intelligent
but dull, who is determined to prove to you that right is on his side in the
property dispute upon which he is now engaged and will
omit no detail."
March 11th;
Outrageous. Snowing again. I take a little
set
of online tests to see whether my brain is more masculine or feminine. I
score high on both styles, coming out exactly 50/50. So that's where my
superhuman essence comes from.
March 10th;
2nd philosophy talk about
informal
logic with Martin. Then to pub quiz,
where our team do not come 4th last, but due to influx of fresh talent
{Zsuzsa and Mobile-Network Rob} we do better. 3rd place procures us each a
miniature bottle of Bailey's Irish cream. Earlier in day finish an interesting
book borrowed from Jeremy 2.
'Mud,
Blood, and Poppycock' by Gordon Corrigan is that very
unusual thing: a book which is readable, well-argued with plenty of evidence,
and has a surprising, even startling, claim. This is a new revisionist history of
Britain's experience of World War One. Corrigan builds a very convincing case
that 1) Britain needed to fight the First World War, 2) lost far fewer men in
battle than France or Germany, 3) far from being senseless slaughter, British
casualties during battles like the Somme and Passchendaele were the same
proportionately as in the Normandy landings in World War Two and were unavoidable
battles forced by the need to take pressure off French forces struggling with
mutinies, 4) British officers were not hidebound traditionalists but learned fast
and were very innovative, ahead of
all the other countries in tank warfare and use of aircraft, 5) Army generals
and other officers were not safely out of fire but spent a lot of time, perhaps
too much time, touring the front-line trenches meeting the men, 6) The perception
of heavy casualties was due to volunteer regiments being hastily recruited
from large numbers of men from single towns or factories in the early months so
concentrating losses in tight communities instead of spread across the
country as armies worldwide learned to do later, 7) British soldiers were
not in the trenches for weeks on end, but were carefully rotated,
spending only short periods {3 or 4 days} in the firing line at the front, with
longer periods either resting or stationed in safer positions further back
each month.
This last point was the biggest surprise for me, given the
popular picture we have of The Great War as an unending misery of mud-filled
trenches, shell shock, rats & frostbite. Corrigan gives figures for five
battalions showing how they spent each day of the four Januarys of 1915, 1916,
1917, and 1918. He writes "...it is unusual to
find any battalion spending more than four or five days a month
continuously in the firing line." In January 1917,
for example, none of those five battalions spent a total of even one week
in the trenches, and that's adding together time in the firing line at
the front and time in safer support trenches behind the front. In January
1915 two battalions spent 13 days that month in the trenches
{the other three were 7 days, 9 days, and 7 days} but
for 1916, 1917, and 1918 these five battalions on average spent less than a week
in the trenches in the month of January. Furthermore, not all that time
in the trenches was in the firing line. Four of those five battalions never spent
longer than two days continuously at the front under fire in those four months,
and usually only two such high-pressure two-day periods at the front in each month.
3/4 to 7/8 of the men's time was away from fire behind the front. This is not
the impression I {or anyone else, I reckon} has ever received from films, novels,
and poems about the horrors of the Great War. Also, many of the darkest anecdotes
about that war come from the French and German armies, which neglected to rotate
men as carefully as the British, and so did leave exhausted soldiers in
the line of fire for weeks or even months. Corrigan says this is precisely why both
French and German forces suffered serious morale problems and mutinies by soldiers
against their officers. Lloyd George emerges very badly from Corrigan's narrative,
constantly interfering, extending the war by scheming behind the backs of effective
officers, he and Churchill wasting lives and munitions on impractical schemes
like the attack on Gallipoli and reinforcements for Italy. General Haig emerges
well.
Perhaps the most suspect thing about the current consensus of the war as a
senseless "murder of a generation" is that the people who lived through it, as
Corrigan points out, did not see it that way. Throughout the 1920s, the Great War
was proudly seen in Britain as having been necessary, well led, difficult but
important and worthwhile. Current myths about World War One really make up an
early revisionist interpretation which began to take hold in the appeasement era of
the 1930s among the children of the 1914-18 generation. Here's an interesting
paragraph about how the British army with its frequent rotation of men kept morale
high and suffered no mutinies while the French army saw a massive collapse of
morale which almost lost the war. "As conscripts
[French] pay was derisory, their rations
were bad, and their welfare facilities almost non-existent. In some units there
had been no leave for twelve months, and for those fortunate few who did manage
to obtain leave, arrangements to get them home were regarded by the French staff
as a very low priority. The French army was far more egalitarian than the British,
and was {almost} a meritocracy; but many British officers commented with surprise
that while French officers led their men in action most gallantly, once the battle
was over the officers decamped and left the men to their own devices. British
officers had it drummed into them that the welfare of their men was one of their
major responsibilities; they organised football matches, set up canteens,
administered leave, laid on band concerts, ran theatricals, held gymkhanas and
inspected the men's billets and meals regularly. It has been suggested that it
was the social difference between officer and soldier in the British army that
allowed officers to be in close touch with their men's off-duty activities
without the risk of undue familiarity; a contrasting situation to that of the
French, whose officers were far better educated professionally than were the
British, but who came from the same social class as many of their men.
Whatever the reasons, the French army was ripe for what happened."
What happened was collapse of morale, mass desertion and mutiny - the real reason
British soldiers had to fight the Somme to take German pressure off the collapsing
French army, despite the deep misgivings of British officers about fighting that
battle then. Fascinating - how much else of the history we think we know is
dangerously distorted myth?
March 9th;
Philosophy
talk about being sceptical about one's own existence. Not sure if
I was there, but Martin & Henry turned up.
March 8th;
Dinner with Dorina, whose quote of the week translates as "The
camper van is the
highest achievement of humanity."
March 7th;
In very junior role help prepare impressive dinner at Martin's.
The finale is a pudding of chocolate, cream, olive oil, and flaky salt. Random
quotes of the day: {of Heathrow Terminal 5} "It's like the future. It's
beautiful.""Bacon is basically a delivery mechanism for salt." Also a
memorable anecdote about a vet student who was drawing fluid off a foal,
forgot he'd left the tap open, left the room, and so drained the poor
baby horse dead. A bit like that gloomy blood-transfusion scene in
'The Abominable Dr Phibes'.
March 6th;
Bitter cold wind. Get sad. Go to OBI
home-improvements warehouse. Mistake: get sadder and start sending
people nasty text messages.
March 5th;
Go to mobile-phone showroom of
Pannon,
where a sweet girl at quarter to 11 tells me my balance is 85 forints in the red.
Strange, since I think the connection should be cut off as soon as my
pre-paid 5 gigabytes
finishes. However, they once said that it can run for another half hour or so because
the system is slow to catch up with my balance. All right then. I pay her 6,500
forints, and she says the 5 gigabytes is ready to use. I go home. At home I
cannot connect to the internet. I go back to WestEndCity shopping centre to
sort this out. Another well-meaning girl investigates, and puts me on the
phone to someone. He tells me that actually I owe more than four thousand
forints to Pannon. I say this is unacceptable, since
Pannon's
moment to tell
me this was 10.45am this morning, not half an hour after I pay in some
money. Furthermore, I never agreed to be billed like that. The whole point of
paying ahead is to not go into debt - if the company does not cut me off once
the 5 gigabytes is used up that should be their problem, not mine. The man at the
other end of the phone keeps saying he understands, I reply if he understands then
his role is to sort out my problem, he says he must abide by company rules,
I point out to him he has no integrity if he accepts a wage for
following rules that are dishonest. The lad
down the phone seems almost in tears by the time
he tells me I can "ask" for my case to be considered if I write to some e-mail
address. Extraordinary - as if I have been a naughty customer and must request
an exception be made for my bad behaviour. I tell him to send the e-mail himself
since he is getting a wage to be there and I'm paying it, then I leave the showroom
and go back to Vodafone
on the next floor of the shopping centre.
If anyone has experienced the same sneaky behaviour from
Pannon, contact me on
markgriffith 'at'
yahoo.com - it seems
plain that their software is designed
to wait until a customer has paid some money in before revealing the
size of the made-up extra charges they want to levy on people they call
their "pre-paid customers". Given that my service got cut off yesterday
evening, it really isn't credible that it showed me 85 forints in debt for the
next eleven, twelve hours, then - within minutes of me paying in 25 pounds - suddenly
realises that, goodness!, it should have mentioned I owe another 20 quid.
So transparent. It clearly infuriates
Pannon
that they have any customers
at all who don't wish to run up the open-ended bills phone companies like to feed off.
They obviously hate the idea of people paying fixed amounts in advance, so being
able to control how much they give the phone leeches. This must be why Pannon
deliberately sabotage their own pre-paid service and slyly turn it into a way
for customers to run up a debt, like the good old days of telephony. Of course,
I never got
Pannon's
promised warning that I had one gigabyte left, and I didn't get the
more important warning message that I had used up five gigabytes, nor any warning
that I was about to be charged because the service would stay open. Pathetically
devious business model of the classic Hungarian kind.
I wish I could reveal that the visit to
Vodafone
went smoothly, but in fact it takes two visits, albeit speaking to two quite charming
and helpful girls, and the rest of my Friday, to get the Vodafone service working
on both the Apple and the PC laptops. On the day's fourth visit to a mobile-telephone
showroom, I bump into Mary, anxious because she has been cut off without explanation
and has to go to the airport to catch a flight in an hour.
Vodafone
at least seem to understand what 'pre-paid'
means, but when I leave them,
Mary
is still trying to sort out her problem.
March 4th;
Up late to accomplish stuff, then, without warning,
internet runs out.
March 3rd;
With Dorina to see 5-minute slide-show talks at the
Ignite event.
March 2nd;
With Henry to philosophy
talk.
March 1st;
"I am
Vladimir. I crush you."
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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