An interesting quote, some ramblings and a peanut butter and jam sandwich

It's 11:30pm and despite my best efforts to get an early night I find myself unable to sleep, so I thought I'd post this rather interesting quote from Mr. Theodor Adorno. It's taken from his Minima Moralia (page 106 of the Virtuoso edition 2002) and is part of a discussion convering history and facism, but still remains pertinently relevent. See what you think:

'For only leaders who resembled the people of the country in their ignorance of the world and global enconomics could harness them to war and their pig-headedness to an enterprise wholly unhampered by reflection.' 106

...while I'm on the subject, I also happened across this unsettling quote from the former Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

You have to ask yourself what creature is democratically administered warfare? Surely for such a concept to maintain itself its need must operate from behind a lie, otherwise its motivation is no longer democratic but fascist. I would argue that it is impossible to legislate any form of warfare without initially administering a lie great enough to propagate the necessary progression to conflict. What happens when the war becomes the veil, the propaganda machine, when the template is inverted and all we see is our society at war? Normative consent?

Hmm...time for bed methinks. Might try and read some Dostoyevsky; I bought a copy of The Brothers Karamazov as a treat for doing very little work last week. I managed to pick-up Bleak House and Karamazov for 60p, which as any book fiend would agree are rich pickings indeed. I went through a South American/Latin American phase these last few months, but now I think I'm heading into classic European Novel territory, that is to say, the big fat ones with those long Russian patronymics that have you rolling and whiping dribble off the wall with a beach towel. Or perhaps not. I remember reading Anna Karenina and thinking it one of the best books I ever read. It often strikes me as odd how come books seem to find you at exactly the right moment in your life, as if they're out there in general circulation just working their way towards you in ever decreasing circles. It's for this reason that I used to 'release' the odd novel on a bus or train by simply leaving it behind in the hope that someone else might pick it up at just the right moment. Youth hostels the world over have their own little library orphanage where weary travellers surrender their bag-worn copies of Lolita, Bryson and Hemmingway, along with countless copies of Let's go Bulgarian Yak Coughing, or The Rough Guide to Bog Snorkelling.

I think a good travel book, (fiction not guide) would be Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, since it's one of those books that really come into their own when you're travelling in a foreign country and have lots of alienesque architecture to fill you with feelings of genuine antiquity, something you never really seem to appreciate when its in your own backyard. People sometimes say to me that if you spend all your time with your nose in a book you miss what's going on around you. In response I would say that appreciate what goes on around you all the more for having spent some time in the imagination of another, whose common experiences blend with your own and provide glimpses of life from the other direction. You could spend the eveing getting to grips with the latest happenings down at Emerdale farm, or alternatively spend an hour with Hemmingway, or Proust, or Marquez, people who spent their lives trying to steal moments of recognition from the abyss, to be passed around and gilded by experience. Nietzsche once said 'do not look too long into the abyss else it might look back into you' or something to that effect. But there have been those among us who have spent their time at the edge and have come back to tell us a little something about it. At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, it is precisely because of this that we find something for ourselves in great literature; the great universal truth of human suffering born witness. It never ceases to astound me that I pick up a book written by a nineteenth-century Russian dissident and read his words as if he were whispering them to me.

Anyway, enough ramblings for tonight, I have a long day tomorrow reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.

ps. peanut butter and jam sandwiches really are a fantastic combination.

What I've been reading this month April

Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire - A collection of poetry that never fails to draw my interest, and one that despite its age, and like all truly remarkable poetry, remains as poignant today as it did in 1857.

The Dancing Serpent by Charles Baudelaire Fleurs De Mal

Dear indolent, I love to see,
In your body bright,
How like shimmering silk the skin
Reflects the light!

On the deep ocean of your hair
Where purfume laves,
Odorous and vagabond sea
Of blue and brown waves,

Like a vessel awakening
When morning winds rise
My dreaming soul begins to sail
Toward remotes skies.

Your two eyes that neither sweetness
Nor bitterness hold
Are rwo chilly gems mingles of
Iron and Gold.

The Melancholy Science by Theodor Adorno - An aboslute must for any conscientious cultural theory wannabe. Along with Minima Moralia this has to be amongst Adorno's most frank and disturbing work on pretty much any major avenue of mass culture of the 20th century. although he often works from a decidedly obtuse and turbid formal essay structure, his writings seem to manipulate you into assuming a dialectical point of view, which, as your progress, draws out the conclusions of his articles with succint clarity. Read these texts and you'll never look at TV, Cinema, cars or fridge doors in quite the same way. Read them closer still and you'll probably find yourself at odds with pretty much anything aspect of consumer culture you care to mention! Frankly, I'm an Adorno junkie, a groupie and avid fan, even if a sizeable lump of his thinking simply rebounds off my brain like a rubber ball skimming off a speeding towerblock.

Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno - Read it, believe it, try and do something about it.

The Culture Industry by Theodor Adorno - It all starts here. The negative dialectic; the inverse, sideways thinking on culture and how consummerism has assumed a pseudo-religious significance of its own. Essential reading for anyone who finds themselves quietly outraged by every other human being on the planet; their habits, clothes, musical tastes, mobile phones, hair styles, the manner in which they talk to people in the service industry.

Notes from a small island by Bill Bryson - Now this has to be one the best Bryson books I've read, although I hasten to add that his Short History of Everything was a stroke of summating genius and is undoubtedly amongst the best choices of perfect intelligently written, informative light reading. Notes from a small island is Bryson's anecdotal whimsy about being an American living and working in England and I have to say he gets it spot on. This is an hilarious and expertly well written book and would recommend it to anyone.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - After missing Capote at the cinema I decided I'd better read his masterpiece (discounting Tiffany's simply because despite having sat through the film a dozen times and failed to see its timelessly quaint majesty every time, a grizzly multiple murder just sounded a bit more compelling than some tarts big tart's day out in NY). It's a good read, but not exactly the best thing I've ever spilt my coffee over. The first 100 pages is riveting, but I does get a little tedious. This is one to read, and it is extremely well written and it's easy to its formulaic influences in much of the crime drama of the time.

Herzog by Saul Bellow - Amazing, brilliant, awesomely reassuringly tragicly humanly brilliant. Bellow at his acerbic best. Gotta love this. Read this book and beautiful people will want to have sex with you.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera - Can't help but feel I missed the point with this one. Not exactly the great life affirming read I thought it would be. A good novel nevertheless, with some truly beautiful passages covering loss of love and reflections on the true complexity of human inter-relations, but, and I know this will probably have some people huffing and waving their hands in exacerbated fury, it just didn't do it for me. I'll revisit this one later in the summer I think; some books just do better with the right weather. I read the complete works of Oscar Wilde while travelling around France by train and i have to say that for me, this was the only way to read Wilde. For some strange reason it helped having the mesmeric French landscape zimming past at speeds British Rail could only ever dream of achiving. And yes, I know it's no longer BR, but I refuse to think of it as anything else. Public transport should be national commodity, especially considering that it is publically funded and yet inexplicably remains privately owned by a jabbering conglomerate of chimps in bowler hats.

Women by Charles Bukowski - Not a book you'll find on any University feminist theory reading list, but worth a gander simply to spite such lists. This is a bizarrely compelling read, if only for his occasional cultural definitions. In my mind Bukowski can command a place on any readin list that covers the Beat culture, and yet he is often maligned in favour of his sadly prosaic contemporary Jack Kerouac, who I must say is incontently overrated, at least as On The Road is concerned. I'm sick pf reading that bloody Burrow's quote about sending a million US teens 'on the road' with their faded Levis and expresso coffee, can anyone honestly tell me that they read that book in one go, and not after 15 failed attempts that saw you stuff the bloody thing right down to the bottom of rucksack after only three chapters. Okay, Bukowski might offer you little more than one long exaggerated wank, but at least he has a good, upstanding sick sense of humour and offers you a disturbing glimpse into a world that I'm sure everyone has at some point longed to experience, for me, I had one of those moments only today, while repeatedly trying to flush a toilet one of my housemates had kindly blocked up so that I might have something to do while I waited to soil my pants.

The List Begins!

This is the dusty attic; a cosy corner away from the world where one might swing the teapot out over the fire, select a book from the morass of meandering book shelves and fall clumsily into the dusty sanctuary of an old armchair. There's corner window over looking the sea, an overflowing ancient blanket chest whose lock and key have long since be separated; cracked mugs and china dishes for cake, buscuits and peanut butter sandwiches; a dazzling selection of rare teas and rich coffees, many of which exist only in the attic and cannot be found anywhere else on earth. There are shelves of yellowing books and thumb-worn paperbacks; musty fusty copies of articles long since withdrawn from circulation and one penny comics. Piles of ancient tomes recline in awkward piles, their leather bindings bright with the passing of many hands. Somewhere, in amonsgt the shades and shadows, Mr. Mawcombe the tabby cat sleeps or worries the more elderly of the mouse fraternity. House plants, strange flowers and exotic fruits grow in the adjoining glass room, and with the gentle passing breeze, sends generous wafts of cultivated scents into the attic room. Everything and anything you could possible want or need for a good read can be found in this room. It is an old room, but generally clean, and those who leave their readings here leave them for all.