May 31st;
Awake at
Nigel's.
Rigo
pops round to walk
Juno.
May 30th;
Pizza with
Kate.
Later to Nigel's.
May 29th;
Awake in Craig's sunny sitting room early, struggling out of
dreams of regret
and resentment: a sort of short bright morning of the soul.
May 28th;
Last night we kept Kerry up, doing
Tarot
readings for all 5 of us in turn. By day, with her to
British
Museum. Dine with Nigel & Phil in Brick Lane.
May 27th;
With Scott and Kerry to
Tate Modern.
Kerry and I walk back through City. Hot, sticky weather.
May 26th;
Leisurely day, culminating in showing of
Scott
& Sam's film at the
Hungarian
Cultural Centre. Drinks afterwards with Paul,
David,
Veejay, and
Rachel.
May 25th;
Fly to London.
Scott's
brother Craig meets me at
Old
Street Tube station.
May 24th;
Shop for trip.
Linguistics
Paradise says hello.
May 23rd;
Still not ready for
Wednesday's flight to London.
May 22nd;
Time to
map-reference
Prague.
May 21st;
Lovely grilled meat and trifle at
Rajiv's
garden party of busy
toddlers. Later
Franc & I
watch 15 British men dressed as Elvis impersonators mob girls at a
cafe. Finally with Heather to
Philipp's
farewell party.
May 20th;
Beer with
Mr Mahita.
Chat: Alex,
Brandon,
reiki,
coffee & meat,
memory,
people who look like Beata.
May 19th;
Much less gloomy day. Finish the line drawings for Rex's Swiss patent application.
I drink milkshakes and Rex talks inspiringly about Plato and
Parmenides
1
2
3
4.
May 18th;
I make another mistake and waste at least 30 quid on buying the wrong
air ticket.
May 17th;
Insomnia, 3 hours sleep, forget don't have return ticket as usual. Am fined on
train.
May 16th;
Ice-cream outing again, today to
Tiszakurt.
May 15th;
Cool, cloudy weather. I read
Robin's copy
[or perhaps Robin's old Berlin friend Mike's copy] of
'Understanding
Media' by
Marshall McLuhan.
It is an interesting read from the mid-1960s covering familiar
McLuhan
territory. Cool [inclusive] media versus hot [intensive]
media, the pervasive message that is
the medium, and the ending of the linear, print-dominated Renaissance-to-1850s
period.
I would have liked this book to recap a bit about the lost "rich"
world of scriptoriums, annotated manuscripts, and orally-focussed
mediaeval scholasticism that he asserts movable type killed off in
Europe. Footnotes and an index would have been good too - a lot of it
is cryptic references, sometimes to events and people of the 1950s
or 60s which I had never heard of. His
dense, allusive, snappy style goes so far in a couple of places that he
lost me completely.
{"[Tribal society's] money can be eaten, drunk or worn, like the new
space ships that are designed to be edible." ends one paragraph,
bafflingly.}
The book is also smug. Lines like "The hi-fi changeover was really
for music what cubism had been for painting..." make up about 2/3 of
the text, and feel very much like McLuhan extemporising brilliantly
while on a roll, rather than saying anything very likely to be true.
It has an over-rushed feel to it - very repetitive and more than
a little full of itself. It's easy to imagine McLuhan smartly claiming
that this is exactly the
post-Gutenberg
sensibility in action,
spiralling back on the same points again and again to show how
post-linear, participatory, cool and tactile it is as a book. On the
other hand it might be a shortage of persuasive evidence. The host of
unsupported anecdotes ["A researcher...",
"An African village...", "An airline executive"]
seemed odd coming from a
professional scholar, however hip. Call me boring, but
while I enjoyed hearing of an airline executive who asked executives
at other airlines to send him a pebble from outside their offices
around the world, I would have liked it even more with a reference
citing which airline. The claim that African audiences are
surprised when someone disappears off the side of a shot on the movie
screen, dropped in to make a point in one sentence, sounds like
an oft-repeated story that has grown in the telling. Likewise
that Nigerian students cannot [or could not in the 1950s] understand
pictures in perspective - a little support would convince more. One
page even has a casual half-line reference to
Descartes being alive in the
early 19th century: an unchecked typo may be all in the spirit of
the post-Gutenberg inclusive blur of tactile media, but this is
still, after all, a book.
The obvious question is what McLuhan would have made of the Internet,
the web in particular. On many pages he confidently heralds
something that sounds very much like it, but this confidence [resting
on his breezy division into cool versus hot, and his matching condescension
to other writers like
Lewis
Mumford who he explains almost get it right but not
quite] is not fully warranted. If radio and print are "hot", and the
telegraph and television are "cool", what would the worldwide web
be in McLuhan's neat taxonomy? Presumably cool, because inclusive and
participatory and "mosaic-like", but on the other hand it prompted a
stock-market bubble, a rather hot-medium thing to do, and it is full
of large chunks of intense, deep linear text. Would printing a
book made up of items that first appeared on the
Internet amuse him as being as misguided as early buyers of
printed books taking them to a scribe to be properly written out by
hand? As with all his analogies, it might be like that. Or it might not.
Similarly, when he is glibly
explaining away apparent contradictions in his theory [Britain and
the US were so shaped by print culture, apparently, that they were
more immune from the hot effects of 1930s radio than tribal Germany],
you see a set of lucky guesses being stretched into a pseudo-science.
The suggestion that Central European physicists were still more part
of a non-linear folk past than West Europeans, so were better able to
imagine non-Newtonian 20th-century physics, gives some idea of how
ambitious his offhand explanations get. All I can
say is that his competition [such as the
Frankfurt
School] do even
worse at explaining how films, TV, newspapers helped shape the
last couple of centuries.
Like his others, this book is full of stimulating, provocative thoughts,
and, as elsewhere, McLuhan heavily overplays his hand.
May 14th;
Robin & I drive with 5-year-old Bela to a party in
Bekesszentandras,
where we meet
Istvan
the linguist, Laci the classicist, and
Nara the
chemist. Giuliano, the host, meets us with home-made Limoncello
prepared from Italian lemons.
May 13th;
A rather good Friday the 13th. Just manage to catch train connection
at Szolnok and make it to meet
Robin
at Lakitelek. If otherlanguages reader
Mahita has
now finished reading
how
to combine yin and yang energies
to reshape bits of reality, he has presumably started doing it.
May 12th;
A cake lady tells me there are 3
Auguszt cafes,
not just 2.
Now a week since
Harold Wilson
the 2nd led
Labour
to another election victory.
May 11th;
Last night finished
Marion's
copy of 'Othello'.
In the years since I last read this, two
things have changed. First, I've met more sly, cool-blooded Iagos than I knew back then.
Second, this time it seemed to be less about jealousy and more about rage.
Othello, a Moroccan military leader serving the Republic of Venice marries a
Venetian debutante called Desdemona. They are very much in love, yet a vindictive and
clever officer passed over for promotion by Othello succeeds in convincing him, with
great subtlety and many shows of reluctance, that Desdemona has cuckolded him with
another officer called Cassio. Othello loses this, his most challenging battle,
and is outwitted by Iago into strangling his newly-wed bride and
killing himself.
The most worrying scenes are those in which Iago insinuates to Othello that his
wife has been unfaithful while seeming to do the opposite,
arousing Othello's jealousy by warning
him against jealousy. In a way the Moor is an ultimate tragic hero,
since not even destiny or his own unforced blunders are needed to bring him down.
A single opponent, like a chess player, takes the initiative, pinpoints Othello's one
weakness and goes straight for it. While Othello is admired by all for his
frankness, bravery and nobility of character, it only takes one Iago to see
that Othello can be broken, and to do it. Even the craven
Macbeth needed a steely
wife and a clutch of witches to expose him to his own weakness. Last week saw a
New-York accent joke quoted by
Language
Hat about how "a tragic hero is someone
who falls through a floor in his character". Othello
disappears down a
kind of moral trap-door with extraordinary suddenness: magnificent leader
one moment, crippled animal the next - fatally poisoned by a character sharpened
into a needle of evil. I saw a British TV executive bawling in raw
wrath at a set of game-show technicians a couple of years ago stopped in his
tracks by one student so-bravely interrupting "I must defend Gabor" and realised
that I was watching the magic at work: there and then seeing someone in
the instant of being manipulated by a person pretending to
tremble with just the right mixture of nervousness and humble indignation.
The TV executive was completely taken in. Shakespeare warns in 'Othello'
that we need to not simply guard against our flaws but to really fear
them. Someone out there has the key to your lock.
May 10th;
I meet Liia's
friend Rex, an
ex-watch
trader.
May 9th;
Icelandic purists contact me.
Intense
stuff.
May 8th;
Unpack boxes in new
office
on
2nd floor. Fail to attend
Linda
& Mike's showing of
'No!'.
May 7th;
Read copy left me by SF Jessica of Kurt Vonnegut's
'Galapagos'.
While I used to have a twinkle of
curiosity about his first title,
'Sirens
of Titan',
from the 50s, now I don't think I need read one of his books ever again.
The
story is narrated from one million years hence. It
is about how, in the late 1980s, a global disaster
makes a small group of people on a boat heading for
the Galapagos Islands the ancestors of all future
humanity. Vonnegut's
facetious 'Ship of Fools' nihilism is as boring as
ever. The idea that human beings are handicapped by
having large brains [and so will be much happier as
they evolve into seal-like beings without proper
hands] is repeated ad nauseam on almost every page.
Like any Vonnegut book, the plot proceeds with
deliberate use of chance at every turn. Blunders and
misfortunes turn out well, and carefully
thought-out plans turn out badly.
Plot twists come from genetic disabilities,
heart attacks, hungry waiters, insane soldiers,
economic events Vonnegut flatters himself he
understands - whatever it takes to mock our idea
that we can think ahead and negotiate positive
outcomes. Vonnegut takes particular delight in showing
how disparate elements of his toy
world fit together: just as a missile is about to blow
up the airport the protagonists are headed for, a food
riot delays the bus departure, saving them all
from certain death etc etc. This confident omniscience
jars awkwardly with an overcute plot full of holes. The disease
causing infertility across the
planet would clearly die out or mutate before reaching
every corner of earth except the island they are
wrecked on. Or else twenty years on from 1986,
a childless and high-tech civilisation would have
flown over or noticed from space the island our
proto-seal-humans' ancestors are marooned on.
His over-neat randomness tries to have it both ways.
Such quibbles would hardly matter if there were anyone
worth caring about in the story - if in fact it were a
real story. But since - in the guise of humbling all
of us on the cosmic scale,
Vonnegut
promotes himself to cosmic narrator god who patronises his own
twittish toy creatures - the tale's cod science and economics
are all that's left. The nearest we get to a
character is the wriggling blue tunnel to
the Afterlife that pops up now and then, trying to hoover
the ghost narrator out of the world. This tunnel comes
a lot closer than any of the people or post-people in
the story to having a personality: it glows electric
blue, it writhes in peristalsis like a beckoning intestine,
and it drops in drolly at unexpected
moments. This is in fact pure storytelling sleight of hand by
Vonnegut, since the mischievous tunnel puts a little meaning
back into the dreary tale he has doggedly washed
all meaning out of, thus making it at least partly
bearable to read again. For of course charming blue tunnels
to Afterlives make no sense in terms of the smug
materialism that fills his writing.
The smart-alec slapstick palls. Perhaps
Vonnegut, whose entire career looks
to me to amount to snide sci-fi rewrites of
Voltaire's
Candide, closes this
couple of centuries of self-mocking [ie self-pitying]
rationalism. With any luck, he will soon be as forgotten as the
clockwork people trapped in his books. As he says
in one paragraph on page 298 (several times)
"But this wouldn't have
mattered either." Quite.
May 6th;
Interesting article about
'stereotype
threat'.
Gyorgyi finds me and helps out too.
Office
is moving floors, so everyone packs boxes.
Boo Boo has lively party, where I meet Svetlana & Istvan, free spirit Krisztina, and
Sard-speaker
Ricardo.
May 5th;
Tim zooms by in white mercymobile to help out.
May 4th;
Free
Hindi and free
Arabic lessons on in town?
May 3rd;
Another
Hungarian-English
online dictionary.
May 2nd;
Hello to a
Chinese
weblog writer I wish I could read, and
who apparently reads me. Blush.
May 1st;
Wayne
helps out with
Maori
library signs.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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