VorticalDiscussion
From UoWiki
Dougald:
I've started this as a space for random thoughts, contributions, quotes, suspicions that don't belong anywhere more specific just yet.
Like this:
Human ingenuity and skill have been poured into developing an extraordinary technological capacity to deliver information with speed and in volume, but our capacity to act on that information painfully lags behind. The tsunami showed all too starkly how we could hear of the plight of villagers long before the aid could reach them. That lag between information and action is sometimes only a few days, more often years. A flick of a switch accesses the former; the latter requires the infinitely complex task of developing forms of human cooperation between individuals and nations. Our technological ingenuity has far outstripped our skills for social organisation.
That's from a piece by Madeleine Bunting in today's Grauniad (17/01/05) . It reminds me of a book I finished yesterday, Richard Roberts' 'Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences'. Towards the end - as he's beginning to reveal that he's outgrown his traditional Christian/academic identity - there's a section where he writes about the reconfiguration of the 'religious field' in postmodernity, looking at both cybernetics/virtual reality and the (re)invention of 'goddess' spirituality, in which he distinguishes sharply 'noetic' (mind-centred?) mythology from the 'chthonic' (earth-centred). Interestingly, for a thinker who holds to an unreconstructed classically Modern polarity of 'progressgood'/'regressbad', he sees the chthonic as hopeful rather than simply reactionary. He refers to Helga Nowotny's 'Time: the Modern and Postmodern Experience' which I haven't read. Apparently, she distinguishes the pursuit of power through technological spontaneity from the unrushable experience of time in biological cycles. The latter, obviously, a particularly - though not exclusively - female experience.
I think we need to be cautious of the celebration of the 'democratisation of information' through technoprogress - we aren't fettered by lack of information, though its distortion is real enough. (I write this at the end of a shift producing a BBC news programme... knowing there's no easy way to reengineer the mainstream systems of information...). But our alienation through the enclosure/mechanisation of time seems to be more fundamental. This is absolutely not an either/or - there's work to do on both fronts.
I have been wandering your halls.... - UncleFester
Mary: And we in yours
Kevin:
Two articles I've read this week that have nothing obvious in common are bubbling over in my consciousness as I struggle to shake some smug, grinning faces out of my strand of thought. I'll start by talking about John Pilger's article in The New Statesman about how in our "Free Societies" the education system manages to implant a good versus evil notion to some of the most inexplicable and inexcusable wars in history that warps our perception of the present. It is an amnesia that regards all races in terms of their current usefulness to us, ie the good Kurds in Iraq and the bad Kurds in Turkey.
Pilger inquires why respected journalists with almost limitless access to the facts, have supported the invasion of Vietnam in the past, and Iraq in the present. The flattening of people's homes, defoliating of forestry and the mutilation of loved ones in ways in which few people in Britin can imagine, is often justified or ignored by the impositionof clueless self-righteousness on millions of authentically curious citizens. Do Hollywood movies and selective teaching at a tender-age turn people's minds off to things like Geneva's partitioning of a Communist North Vietnam in 1954 and Saddam Hussein's welcome custom to America in the 1980s?
(For everything you need to know about American cultural imperialism, watch Eurotrip. Of all the teen grossout movies it's one of the less er, gross ones. But that's another story).
I feel powerful enough to withstand but pretty impotent when it comes to infiltrating (or being sure I'm not part of) this vast realm of pig-shit ignorance. Agonising over this brought the Letter From Lebanon from lastmonth's New Internationalist racing to the forefront of my mind. The Beirut journalist Reem Haddad recalls a lazy afternoon when she picked up a book her parents had left lying around for years. Her parents didn't remember who gave it to them, but tey remember its author Asdghig Avakian as a benevolent and skilled nurse, long since passed away.
However, behind the friendly, wrinkled face were the scars of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks (I'm not going to try to do it justice, so see www.armenian-genocide.org). In 1915 Asdghig's mother had left her in an orphanage, showered herwith kisses and no record ofher exists after that, though she was probably in the death march through the desert (see the website). In 1922 the Armenian orphans were placed in Beirut, where the 15 year-old Asdghig was chosen by American missionaries to be trained as a nurse. She had a lonely but successful life and in thebook she writes "I can find love in comforting my patients, to pat them, to relieve the raking sadness and love in the world I live in".
Today some of the mot skilled and culturally important people in Lebanon are descendents of the genocide survivors, one shared her view of the book: "Sometimes horrible things happen, but good things come out of them. Many people would have surely died without her nursing abilities".
I believe that the sheer frequency of horrific stories coming from the middle-east, along with the desensitizing (and I would argue brain-eroding) of Hollywood films conspire to make us believe that these people are in some way less civilized than us, or it's in their cultural make-up to be resigned to misery, but with the awakening the book gave her Reem Haddad seems to be more profoundly alive than most of us will ever be.
Life is sad, life is a bust. All you can do, is do what you must. Do what you must do, and do it well. These awakenings are what we should live for. What can anyone ask for other than such beautiful rifts in time?
Kevin:
I am going to trascribe an NME interview from September 1993 in which RICHEY MANIC discusss his experiences at Swansa University with TED KESSLER. I don't think he gets anywhere near the root of his discontent, but it's difficult when the subject of the discussion has upset you so personally and so deeply and the trauma won't go away.
INTRO: Richey James, guitarist with the Manic Street Preachers, believes the educatin ystem is far too liberal. "It isn't radical enough" he says. "It assumes that most students are decent sorts of people and they're not." Richey should know. He spent thre years at Swansea University between 1986 and 1989 studying history - he left with a 2:1 - avoiding most of his fellow students. Richey felt he had very little in common with his peers - he wanted to study for a start.
RICHEY: I thought it would be full of people who wanted to sit around and talk about books and it wasn't like that at all. Peope wanted to sit around and do as little as possible other than have as much fun as they could. But I never equated university with fun. I thought it was about reading and learning but for most people it was about getting laid. Big fucking deal! I went there to study, to learn. I went there to avoid manual labour, whereas most other students went there to enjoy themselves for three years and I found that really offensive. For me it was about reading and that's what I did. When I went to university I was a virgin. I'd never drunk a drop of alcohol. And that's how it was when I left too, except I'd had a few drinks.
NARRATION: It wasn't purely that Richey was so tied up in the work ethic that he couldn't enjoy himself, but that his idea
- f a good time differed fairly comprehensively from his fellow students.
RICHEY: I used to get woken up frequently by pissed up students coming home thinking it would be really funny to rampage up and down the corridors knocking on everybody's door, deciding to have a party in the kitchen at 1 in the morning. Pathetic! It reminded me of my first year of comprehensive, and all these little idiots whose idea of a good time involved sitting around reciting 'Young Ones' sketches to each other. I hadn't had that since I was 13. When I went to tertiary college you just used to go to lessons and then go home, so you could avoid anyone who annoyed you. But at University I was stuck in a whole tower block with them!
NARRATION: Richey was also disappointed that people went to university because it was expected of them by their parents, because it was the first rung on the job ladder. He wasn't looking to the future when he applied to Swansea, he was looking for a way to find out more about history.
RICHEY: It wasn't about what I'd be able to do with my history degree in the future. I was just interested in the subject and that seemed to be enough. I've never seen education as a means to a job. All these students who at around saying "I woeked really hard today, I read loads" that's not what I'd classify as work. It was going to a nice library and reading books all day. that was a pleasure and a privilege. Those people who saw it as a career move were the same ones who complained about how hard it was to be a student. I wasn't well off and I got a grant, but it wasn't tough at all because I had nothing to spend it on. The people who complained about the money were the ones who wanted to go inter-railing and all those social activities that held no interest for me in the first year. In the second and third years I'd maily buy a bottle of wine and sit around and drink it, and that would be the full extnt of my expense.Maybe I'd buy a CD as well. I didn't do anything else. I still don't really.
TED: Didn't you ever want to be just a little silly, a little decadent?
RICHEY: No - not really. Education should be about learning. All the other stuff - the socialising and drinking and suf that people say are important parts of universty because it teaches you social skills - is fucking nonsense because you learn that at infant school or comprehensive. Or at least you're meant to. I think if I'd been able to have a flat of my own, my memory would have been different because I've never been good with many different people, I've always surrounded myelf with just a very few people. To hole myself up in a tower block with hundreds of people I had nothing in common with was a really bad experience.
NARRATION: If the ills within the British education system are clear to Richey the cures are even more blindingly obvious.
RICHEY: More students should be kicked off courses. That's what I'd introduce straight away. That if you missed more than two lessons a week you're drawn up in front of a committee and if you continue to not do your work you're kicked off the course. What is wrong with that? Surely that is justifiable. Otherwise you've just admitted that college is just 3 years of getting pissed and having a laugh. If you don't want to be there to learn then drop out, what's the big deal? I despised these people who sat in the bar going 'Ooooh I was really rebellious today, I didn't go to one lesson!' When you think of the people who'd love dearly to go to university and then these idiots turn it into a joke. It's obscene really.
TED: But there are always going to be people who take advantage of the system. Most schools are reasonably strict but people still break the rules. Would Matty from Blaggers ITA hav let his fists do the talking when frustrated with verbal debate if he'd been to university for example?
RICHEY: Yeah, the thing about Matty Blagger doesn't come down to education really because he's quite well-read on a number of things. It's just braindead machismo, just trying to prove I'm harder than you. I don't know what to say so I'll smack you in the mouth. I've been in loads of situations where I've wanted to smack people but I haven't because I know it's morally wrong. I find it deeply offensive. Anyway, I saw more fighting at university than I did at Comprehensive. Public schoolboys drinking loads of lager and having a big fight, all these stupid fights between the rowing club and the rugby squad. There was a lot of 'let's all drink loads of lager, stand on tables and drop our pants'. It's frightening, because these people end up in the best jobs. The education authorities shouldn't feel bad about being a bit more authoritarian. They shouldn't worry about introducing more discipline. It's pretty fucking free at university. You can do what you like, wear what you like. All you're asked to do is go to around ten lectures a week. It isn't such a big burden on your time is it? You can go and work in a brilliant library or you can go and work at home. You can do whatever you want to do as long as you do your work. If you don't then fuck off!
NARRATION: And with that, every parent and teacher sighs with relief. At last a rebel who wants you to go to all your lessons.
I wouldn't endorse this wholesale. It's always a risky business turning your personal annoyances to political polemic, but I can relate to his sense of isolation and disgust at who and what most students really are. I can only imagine how lonely it must be to be a diligent student from a deprived background, as in my experience students have been about as working-class as a piano-lesson at a ski-resort. And I would throw down the gauntlet to anyone who thinks they can match me for tales of debauchery and nihilism.
Kevin: 'The Town I Loved So Well'
This song, by singer and virtuoso pianist Phil Coulter is in many ways the unofficial National Anthem of Northern Ireland. Irish music is unfairly renowned for its lack of a colourful palette of emotions, ie provincial amateurs going their entire lives without knowing it, thus writing limited but charming pieces to fulfil a specific need. But check this out:
In my memory, I will always see,
The town that I have loved so well,
Where our school played ball by the gas yard wall
And we laughed through the smoke and the smell.
Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane
Past the jail and down behind the fountain,
Those were happy days in so many many ways,
In the town I loved so well.
In the early morning the shirt factory horn,
Called women from Creggan, the Moor and the Bog,
While men on the dole, played the mother's role,
Fed the children and then trained the dogs.
And when times got tough, there was just about enough,
And we saw it through without complaining,
For deep inside was a burning pride,
In the town I loved so well.
There was music there in the Derry air,
Like a language that we all could understand,
I remember the day when I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band.
There I spent my youth and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me,
For I learned about life and I found a wife,
In the town I loved so well.
But when I returned how my eyes have burned
To see how a town could be brought to its knees,
By the armoured cars and the bombed-out bars,
And the gas that hangs on every breeze.
Now the army's installed by the old gas-yard wall,
And the damned barb-wire gets higher and higher,
With their tanks and their guns oh my God what have they done
To the town I loved so well.
Now the music's gone but we carry on,
For their spirit's been bruised, never broken,
They will not forget but their hearts are set,
On tomorrow and peace once again.
For what's done is done, and what's won is won,
And what's lost is lost and gone forever,
I can only pray for a bright brand new day,
In the town I loved so well.
Several things jump out at me after revisiting it for the first time in a while, the lack of bravado in associating fierce pride with men on the dole playing the mother's role; the lack of materialism in its sense of what happiness is, as is seen in the first verse and the 'it ain't what you do, it's what it does to you' sentiment that runs through the first three verses; and most importantly for me, the lack of partisanship, so many of the songs at the time sought to glorify, excuse or at least defend the brutality of either side, but Coulter writes with the grace and responsibility of a Seamus Heaney or Tom Paulin. PS Forgive the layout. I'll address it when I reach a less headache inducing computer.
