Lingual

When I was in the selection process for a top-secret job at GCHQ, somewhere back in the early 90s, one of the things they tested me on was my ability to learn a new language at speed. They'd gone to the lengths of inventing a completely fictitious language that bore no resemblance to any existing language, so that no one would have an unfair advantage.

I didn't get selected in the end (though it was a close-run thing; it was only my total and utter ignorance of macrogeopolitical affairs that let me down), which was fortunate, because if I had, my entire life would have been subject to the Official Secrets Act and I would never have been able to have this blog.

But I keep being reminded of their fictitious language every time I see anything written in Finnish, which given that I'm currently in Helsinki, is quite often. I'm treating the Finnish language (which, as any fule kno, bears no resemblance to any other language apart from Estonian and Hungarian) as a giant crossword puzzle that I have to solve in its entirety before I leave on Saturday.

It's quite difficult, but there are helpful Rosetta Stones everywhere, as almost everything in Helsinki is written in Swedish as well as Finnish, and Swedish is practically German, which is practically English*, so that's OK. This is how I came to realise that keskus in Finnish means 'centre', and that keskiviikko, which means 'Wednesday', is literally 'centre of the week'. I got almost as much pleasure from linking these two words as I did from idly reading the signs in the hotel lift and suddenly realising that avain means 'key' and avoinnen** means 'open'. By my reckoning this means I've done 2,138 across and 25,876 down, and now I've only got 48 hours left to finish the whole thing!

Oh, the inside of my mind is a terribly interesting place, I can tell you. Luckily it's balanced out by the inside of James's mind, which is constantly inventing fantasy subterranean zoos and enumerating the physical attributes of the manticore***.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we had a top international blogmeet with the lovely Taiga, who gave us Moomin fridge magnets and Superlon photos, and showed us around her gallery, where there was a fantastic red painting by a person called Janne Kaitala, and a slowly revolving brass and mahogany Victorian-style globe that was also a music box and played the music created by the outlines of the countries. So you can see we haven't been putting our time by idly, oh no.


* Pace BiB, I know it's not really.

** Or avoinna. Oh I don't know, I'm confused now.

*** Apparently 'the body of a lion, the face of a man, the wings of a bat and the tail of a scorpion'. But it wouldn't bite you.

Never Mind All That

Look - new PEANUT!

I'm Clearly Researching The World's Greatest Novel

Things I've apparently looked up on Wikipedia recently:

Albigensian Crusade
Arsène Wenger
Clay Shirky
Collioure
Cryptozoology
ECHELON
Fauvism
Flintlock
Monitor Lizards
Morwenstow
Occitania
Panty Line
Periwig
Philippe le Bel
Pierre Bourdieu
Quatermass
Raoul 'Tin Tin' Dufy*

I *am* Neal Stephenson and I claim my £5! And now (well, shortly) I'm off here, with this one, to turn it all into a pale imitation of this. Hurrah!


* Which made me laugh a lot, but not as much as Wyndham's job interview.

Nature Suddenly Goes Terribly Wrong

On my walk yesterday, I couldn't help but notice the following natural phenomena:

1. Blazing hot sunshine and thirty-degree heat

2. Mushrooms growing on one side of the path

3. Crocuses growing on the other

It was as if all the seasons had come at once, in a sort of apocalyptic telescoping of all known laws of nature! I was half-expecting to come across some isolated patches of snow underneath the quince trees.

I rushed home and reported this foreshadowing of Armageddon to my mum, who looked at me witheringly and said "Yes, Patroclus, they're autumn crocuses."

Oh.

Your Cruel Teabags*

In accordance with the scriptures, the mighty Husky Rescue have at last recorded their fabulous languid Finnish electronica cover of Alice Cooper's 'Poison'!

Incontrovertible proof that God is in his heaven and all's right with the world!

Of course you should really be buying the single, because that way you also get the marvellous [Barley alert!] Kustaa Saksi cover design, but I can't let this pass without informing you that tip-top Texan mp3 blog The Rich Girls Are Weeping is giving it away, absolutely free, with this post! So haste ye over to see the rich girls while it's still available!

Over and out.

UPDATE: Husky Rescue now playing unexpected gig at London's toppest small venue the Luminaire in Kilburn, on Wed 11th October. Tickets £10. Woohoo! Anyone fancy it?


* Try and tell me that's not how the first line goes...

I Can't Define It, But I Know It When I See It

7.45am: Patroclus puts the finishing touches to an article that argues that Europe is a post-industrial society, and has to rely on service and intellectual property for economic growth.

8.00am: Patroclus goes out for a walk, observing the local populace hard at work harvesting grapes.

Conversations With My Mother, Part 1

INT. CHATEAU QUINQUIREME - DAY


My Mum and I are sitting in the living room.

ME: I've got to write some text to go on some pretend playing cards, that my client's going to send out in an envelope that looks like a sleeve. Look.

I hand mum the mock-up of the playing cards, which have that 'lorem ipsum' placeholder text printed on them.

MUM (in the manner of the Pope reciting the Nunc Dimittis*): Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...consectet tempor incidunt...ut lab ore et dolore veniami...

ME: Yes, that's not the real text.

MUM: Quis nostrud exercitation...ullar com modo consequat...duis autem vel esse...

I disappear into the kitchen and return some minutes later with a cup of tea.

MUM: In voluptare velit esse molestare...so tum toesne legume...duis autem vel esse molestaire con...I'll say it's a con.

ME: Yes, that's not the real text, it's just...

MUM: Tum toesn legume...that's not Latin...odioque civiuidia...duis autem...This is nonsense. I should charge double if I were you.

ME: I think I will.


* Or, you know, another one of those chanty Latin incantations. I don't know, I'm a protestant, me.

Establishing Shots

Given the vast number of Things I Am Supposed To Be Doing, multiplied by the even vaster number of Books I Should Really Read, there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for me starting to read Cryptonomicon *again*.

But somehow it sneaked itself into my bag yesterday, and seeing as extra high security at Stansted meant that I could only take 'essential items' on to the Perpignan flight, I thought I'd better demonstrate its essentialness by actually reading it, otherwise I might have been carted off at gunpoint by sexy French army chicks for flouting the Geneva Convention, or something.

And by crikey, Cryptonomicon is a brilliant book, isn't it? Not really because of the subject matter, although I'm more than happy with anything that involves Alan Turing and encryption techniques and data havens and what have you. And certainly not because of the plot, which meanders in labyrinthine and prolix fashion for 908 pages, before Stephenson attempts to resolve it all in the final page and half, as is his wont.

Nooo, what's great about Cryptonomicon is its fantastic use of the English language. Now Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and my top mate Bruce Sterling usually all get lumped together as the founding fathers of cyberpunk, but while Gibson and Sterling are both disappointingly ham-fisted and arrhythmic in their use of English (even though they have great ideas), Stephenson is a brilliantly fluid and clever and erudite and witty writer.

And having reminded myself of just how brilliant the opening paragraph of the book proper is, I thought I might write a little post (this one) about my favourite Character Establishing Scenarios in Literature. Then I remembered that I don't have any favourite Character Establishing Scenarios in Literature, because:

a) I don't read all that much literature these days,

b) I never remember any of the literature I *have* read, and anyway most of it was all in foreign, and

c) I know that the minute I come up with a list, all of the terribly well-read people who read this blog (that's you lot) will come up with a Much Better List, causing me to plunge into a slough of shame, humiliation and self-doubt.

But I still wanted to reproduce the opening para of Cryptonomicon, because it's a fantastic Character Establishing Scenario, even if I will concede that it probably isn’t the best one available in the entire corpus of Literature ever written ever.

This is how it goes:

Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse.

Now doesn't that have everything you could possibly wish for from an opening paragraph of a novel: macro-scale geekiness, a pleasing mixture of registers, references to computery things, nice phrases like 'tedious fugue of carnality', and an excellent undercurrent of silliness?

God, how I love Neal Stephenson.

Then I was going to go on to quote the opening parry of Cold Comfort Farm, as another great Character Establishing Scenario in Literature, and I was half thinking about citing the opening sentence of Great Expectations as another, only I couldn't remember either of them, and don't have the books here.

And then I got ambitious, and thought that I could challenge you to write your own Great Literary Character Establishing Scenario, which in turn led me to recall that I inadvertently wrote my own back in June, thus:

Ever since that time I was tear-gassed in Park Lane amid the burning cars, I've quite fancied myself as an urban guerrilla, a lone fugitive from justice, an off-world outlaw cruising the meatspaces and metaverses of West London armed only with a samurai sword and a copy of Elle Decoration.

But then I thought that that would be a bit too much like hard work for you, dear readers, and a bit too much like blowing my own trumpet for me.

So I didn't.

Did I?

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Näkemiin

The real me is off again, to France and Finland, returning to Blighty in October (I hope). Patroclus's presence in the blogosphere will nevertheless continue to be an irritatingly permanent fixture, so expect regular fig, quince, fungi, cloudberry and reindeer carpaccio updates. Bet you can't wait.

Pop Cult Update

The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the serialisation of my dissertation came to an untimely end, much like the original Futurama, before I'd even really established the dramatis personae or got round to the bit where Henry Jenkins cops off with Sherry Turkle during a furtive raid on the empty space behind the metaphorical bike shed of Western patriarchal capitalist domination.

This is not because I got all coy and paranoid about my facile and ill thought-out arguments, oh no. It is because apparently Professor Chapman himself wants to read it, and my tutor wouldn't let him because (according to him) it isn't actually finished yet.

Impressed that anyone with 'Professor' in their name might actually want to read something of mine (though I might have been on safer ground if it had been Professor Yaffle), I immediately ran off to look up this Chapman chap, to discover that he's *only* the world authority on the cultural politics of Dr Who and the semiotics of Diana Rigg.

Now that's what I call academia, ladies and gentlemen.

Things I Unexpectedly Suddenly Only Had One Of

Tip for high-powered executive types: when returning to work after an extended spell of AWOLity in the south of France, do not attempt to walk the entire mile from your flat to your swanky nu-meeja converted-factory office wearing tiny bejewelled flip-flops.

If you do this, one flip-flop will inevitably fall apart halfway, obliging you to walk the remaining half a mile along filthy London pavements in your bare feet. This will cause fully attired people to stare at you as if you were some kind of mad anarchist hippy, prompting you to smile in a zen-like fashion in order to conceal your feelings of awful humiliation exacerbated by unwelcome reminiscences of all those dreams you had where you turned up to school/lectures/work naked.

Actually it was quite a lovely feeling. Mm, smooth warm pavements.

I've got shoes on now though. Just in case anyone was worried.

Probably Not In The Cartesian Sense

I can't believe I was actually about to write a new post entitled 'Things I Have Two Of'.

I might leave that one for another time.

Of Lavender And Blogging

I've been summoned back to the UK just as I was getting used to my exile in foreign parts.

I finally realised I'd gone a bit native yesterday evening, as I was wandering through the sun-dappled vines among terraced vineyards cascading down ancient hills, an armful of lavender in one hand and three ripe purple figs in the other. If only I'd been taller and prettier, and wearing a flowery dress instead of black vest, jeans and battered iPod, I could have been mistaken for an 'ambient media' advert for L'Occitane.

Although if I had been, L'Occitane would have been wasting their money, because for an entire hour and half I didn't see another person.

Anyhow, back I come on Monday, so that I can meet up with the tutor, who wants to discuss some 'minor' issues (his inverted commas) with my dissertation. I'm a bit worried about those inverted commas; they look like sarcasm. But he did alert me to this week's New Statesman cover story, which is all about how big business is paying bloggers to say nice things about their products. It's well worth a read, although I do notice an almost complete lack of concrete information about how many bloggers are doing this kind of thing, and how much they're actually getting paid (rather than how much they hope they're going to get paid).

Sooo....has anyone tried payperpost.com? If so, does it actually pay up? How much is my reference to L'Occitane above worth? How much more would it be worth if I gave them a link? But what if I said that every time I go into their shop in Béziers (ker-ching), I see lots of things that seem very nice (ker-ching), but on further investigation, they also seem very overpriced (oh) and not quite as special as they make them out to be (ah)?

And how can L'Occitane be sure that my blog will always be a good standard-bearer for its brand? If they pay me to say nice things about them, will I still be able to write about going to court for not paying my council tax, being tear-gassed in Park Lane, or - erm - experimenting with hallucinogenic substances? Or will I be condemned to talk for all eternity about wandering through the sun-dappled vineyards with armfuls of lavender and a basket of freshly-fallen almonds? I think cello probably has the answers. Cello?

Avatar Of The Week!

We interrupt this edition of The Late Raymond Williams Show to bring you exciting news from the world of, errr, I dunno, the carnivalesque production of the self in disembodied space or something, otherwise known as my new Avatar Of The Week award!

This week's award goes to last.fm user and Swamptrash fan hdickins, who may or may not look a bit like this:


Who knew the chance articulation of fruit and lego could be so entertaining?

Part 1.1 - The Lost Organic Community

Well everyone, I have in front of me a glass of one of the classier local red wines and a slice of warm fig 'n' blackberry tart wot I made earlier, with some crème fraîche, and here for your delectation is Part 1.1 of the dissertation, which is all about the idea of the supposedly lost organic community and its authentic folk culture. There was an intro bit before this bit, but I've left it out because it was quite similar to the abstract.

I've generally tried to avoid academic jargon as far as possible, and I've bunged in links to the people referenced, for your info:

1.1 The Lost Organic Community

The idea that industrialisation, mechanised production and mass culture obliterated an older, organic community and its grass-roots folk culture is prevalent among the earliest British cultural theorists, including F. R. Leavis and Richard Hoggart. Leavis, in Culture and Environment (1933), locates the lost community in the seventeenth century, explicitly stating that "there was, in the seventeenth century, a real culture of the people…a rich traditional culture…a positive culture which has disappeared." In Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), he describes some of the attributes of this supposed community thus:

"What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk songs, folk dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year."

Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy, also bemoans the loss of a more organic way of life, in which people create, share and participate in their own culture. He locates the lost community in the north of England of his own childhood in the 1930s – the very period in which Leavis was writing of a lost community in the seventeenth century.

Hoggart identifies the same type of "responsive adjustment…to the…rhythm of the year" in this community as Leavis did with his:

"…throughout the year, Pancake Tuesday, Voting Day, which is always a holiday, Hotcross buns on Good Friday, the Autumn "Feast", Mischief Night, and all the weeks of cadging and collecting for Bonfire Night."

He contrasts the grass-roots culture of the 1930s working class community with the youth culture he perceives in the 1950s, in which the "contemporary forces" of mass-produced culture and mind-numbing factory work have turned working-class youths into "the directionless and tamed helots of a machine-minding class." Hoggart sees these new, passive, depoliticised, working-class consumers as an omen of an even poorer and less fulfilling world to come:

"The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, or to see a five-million-dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent."

The view that industrialisation and mechanisation had turned ordinary people into passive consumers, unable to think and act for themselves, and therefore ripe for exploitation by dominant economic and political forces, found its ultimate expression in the work of the Frankfurt School critics of the 1920s – 1960s. Theodor Adorno explicitly contrasts the activities of the profit-driven culture industry, which "intentionally integrates its consumers from above" and in which "contemporary technical capabilities" and "economic and administrative concentration" are used to exert "total social control" over its target audience of consumers, with what he sees as its polar opposite; "a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art." The latter, for Adorno, was characterised by an inherent "rebellious resistance", which has been extinguished by the numbing effects of the culture industry.

For the purposes of this dissertation, the primary link that I would like to make between the aforementioned texts is the role ascribed to technology in the destruction of the supposed lost, spontaneous, organic folk culture. Technological advancement, harnessed by capitalism, is seen by Leavis, Hoggart, Adorno and many others as an irreversible process that progressively disenfranchises and alienates the people and leads to the increasing standardisation and impoverishment of available cultural texts.

This view was taken up in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s by a new generation of critics concerned with the rise of television as the dominant global cultural medium.

TO BE CONTINUED...

PS I cannot believe people actually want to read this. And I have a feeling I'm supposed to sign something to say the dissertation hasn't been published anywhere. And also if they run their plagiarism software on it, they might find it here, and try and accuse the real me of plagiarising the mythical Patroclus, or vice versa. But hey, life on the edge...I might put up an instalment a week...woohoo, ready-made content!

Newsflash

We interrupt this edition of Newsnight Review* to bring you important news from the Languedocien countryside.

Bong! The figs have ripened!

Bong! I had fresh figs for breakfast with honey!

Bong! The equivalent quantity of figs would have cost me £8.50 from the fruit & veg stall on Chiswick High Road!

Bong! Please write in with your best fig recipes so that I may make the most of nature's bounty!

And now back to Mark Lawson and that dreadful Kermode character.


* Bags be Germaine Greer.


TOTALLY UNRELATED UPDATE: James has a salutary warning about an outfit called BlogBurst. If these people try to flatter you into joining their 'network', do not be fooled. They are going to make you work for free, while they and the Big Meeja rake in the cash. Don't give them the time of day.

AND FINALLY... This is my 400th post! Wheeee! I'm going to celebrate with a nice cup of mint and liquorice tea.

Well, You Did Ask

Here's the abstract for the infamous dissertation. If you like this bit, I'll maybe do a Dickens/Home & Away-style serialisation, with appropriate seasonal cliffhangers:

Blogging: A New Folk Culture?

This dissertation posits the idea that the practice of weblogging has given rise to an online worldwide community of millions of cultural producer-consumers, who are collaborating creatively in the ‘blogosphere’ to create and share cultural products in a non-commercial environment.

It will examine this phenomenon in the context of four interrelated aspects of cultural theory: the idea of the lost organic community with its authentic folk culture; the role played by technology in the ebb and flow of cultural power; Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the profit-driven culture industry, and Fiske and De Certeau’s notion of the absence of a dedicated ‘place’ where people are free to create their own culture.

I hope to demonstrate that the blogosphere, as it exists today, embodies some of the aspects of the organic community and its authentic, non-commercial folk culture that many cultural commentators presume was wiped out by industrialisation. I also hope to show that mass access to and use of the internet as a technological tool for cultural production and distribution is tipping the balance of cultural power away from the institutions that make up the media and entertainment industry and towards this millions-strong organic community of bloggers.

However, I also plan to show that this techno-utopian state of affairs may only be temporary; as the powerful media and entertainment corporations that operate what Adorno called the ‘culture industry’ move to appropriate the blogosphere and its underlying technologies for their own profit-driven ends. In doing so, they appear to be on the verge of co-opting the community of bloggers into acting as largely unpaid workers, using them as an audience that can be sold to advertisers, and as poorly-remunerated carriers of advertising. I will examine how these shifting power relations threaten to compromise the idea of the blogosphere as a communal, creative ‘place’.

The dissertation combines established cultural theory with emerging research into the size and nature of the blogosphere, together with a number of first-hand case study examples of ‘grass-roots’ cultural production in this new, but already threatened, ‘organic folk community’.

Gawd.

Not Our Natural Habitat, You See

The thing with writers is that we're terribly articulate and that with the typey-typey keyboard, but stick us on the phone and we miraculously transform into monosyllabic imbeciles.

Today I was meant to have a briefing call with my client's in-house writer about an article they want me to write. The call went something like this:

[Phone rings]

Me: Hello, Patroclus speaking.

Other Writer: Oh. Ah. Hello. How are you?

Me: Fine, thank you. How are you?

Other Writer: Very well, thanks. Bit cloudy here.

Me: Oh. It's sunny here.

[Long pause]

Me: So, er, you wanted to brief me about something?

Other Writer: Oh. Ah. Yes. Or...how about I just send you some stuff? I could send you an article I wrote, and you could write something like it. Only there are lots of different versions of it. Um. Because I cut it into different lengths for different places. It's all the same though.

Me: Alright, well just send me the longest one.

Other Writer (brightening up): Oh yes, great. If I send you the longest one, that's got the bit about Jiminy Cricket in it. [Sighs] He was the first to go when it got cut.

[Long pause]

Other Writer: Are you still there?

Me: Oh, yes, sorry. I was just thinking.

Other Writer: Right. So I'll email you that article then.

Me: Great! Bye then!

Your Questions Answered

Tim asked: "But going back to first principles, why do you want your armpits to smell of vanilla?"


Cut to:


INT. SPAR ST CHINIAN - DAY

PATROCLUS is dithering in the cosmetics aisle.

Voice of Inner Petulance: I want the exact same deodorant as I have in London!

Voice of Inner Reason: They don't have it. And anyway, that makes you no better than the hordes of Daily Mail-reading Brits who move down here, refuse to speak any French, get Sky installed illegally*, only socialise with other Brits, and have cornflakes and marmite flown in from Stansted every day.

Voice of Inner Petulance: Right! Well, I'll have this one, look, it's vanilla flavour - you'd never get that in Britain. Plus it's called 'Ushuaia'. I think I've been there.

Voice of Inner Reason: No you haven't. You don't even know where it is.

Voice of Inner Misplaced Pub Quiz Confidence: I think it's in Hawaii.

Voice of Inner Reason: Then you haven't been there.

Voice of Inner Melodrama: You're in exile in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, incarcerated in a ramshackle, falling-down old house, and you're worried about what your armpits smell like?

Voice of Inner Python: I bet Ovid never had this trouble.


Arabella asked: "Did you eat the pie yet?"

I had some of it with some mascarpone (which may or may not be the same as BiB's Russian curds). It was very tasty. Hurrah!


* Ahem.

L'Aisselle Du Temps Perdu

I've got some new French deodorant that advertises itself as vanilla flavour, but which smells inescapably of Play-Doh.

The net effect of this is that I keep having Proustian transportations back to the cottage where we lived when I was very young, and in particular to a blue snail* I fashioned from Play-Doh at the age of about five.

That masterpiece aside (and I think I probably had considerable adult assistance), I wasn't a very artistic child. I remember once at primary school attempting to make a blue pig* from papier-mâché applied liberally to a blown-up balloon (which excitingly had to be burst from the outside once the confection was complete), and getting very confused about where its eyes should be in relation to its snout. While my classmates managed to take home something appreciably porcine in appearance, I took home a misshapen blue ball with no discernible facial features whatsoever.

Umm, I'm not actually sure why I'm writing about this. Bloody Proustian deodorant.

In other news, I have taken the unusual (for me) step of making a pie from the rubbish pears and blackberries I found along the old railway track. I considered chucking in some rosemary and unripe figs as well, but common sense luckily stayed my hand. Mind you, it hasn't finished cooking yet - it might be inedible anyway.

Ahh, the countryside. It isn't much like London, is it?


* Clearly showing a predilection on my part for blue animals. Well I never.