Zen and the art of fly fishing

Went to the lake again last night, and while it was perhaps too hot for the fish to bite in the shallows where I can reach them, or the breeze was a little too stiff and on-shore, you couldn't have dragged me away. There is something deeply spiritual about fly fishing. The more time I spend by and in the water the happier I feel. It is as if it fills me up, satisfying some ancient desire and leaving me exhausted but complete. There was a moment last night, just before the sun set andthe moon had risen and turned a boxwood yellow, that was so inexpressibly beautiful that it was almost too much to comprehend. I found a spot behind some fir trees where casting was almost imossible save for a small hollow beneath a weeping willow and as the sun sank threw my line out where the insects were congregating in the last heat of the day. It's strange to think that for me fly fishing has little or nothing to do with actually catching fish, instead, catching a fish is something that you have to justify to yourself if the art of what you are doing measures itself against the mindset of the moment with no remainder. The repetitive motion of casting the line, the gather and retreive, forces your mind to wander, and if met by a beautiful scene when in the right state of mind, creates a euphoria akin to something approaching what I can only think to describe as a spiritual experience. It's no wonder that people fill these moments with thoughts of God, only something as awesome as a God power would seem to justify it, but for me the awe alone is Godly. I must be the same for sailors, mountaineers, hikers, or any person who appreciates the natural world via a pursuit that requires them to interact to understand. Your mind has to be occupied by some involved but related task in order for the scene to truly fill you. I get the same feeling looking at the sea; the space and the assumed depths are sublime but reassuring. For me there is nothing worse that sitting by a man made pond fishing for the sole purpose of dragging a fish from the water, I'd rather be in a nice place and catch nothing that sit by a concrete hole in the ground missing the point. Solitude, space and sublimity. Before too long you start thinking about the important people in your life, those who you've lost and who are no longer with you, whispering across the water.

And after a day of fishing I get the best kind of sleep.

Fishing Trip

Well, despite the fierce squalls and stormy English weather, I ventured out at the weekend for a day by Draycote Water. I'm not what it is about fishing that I find so appealing, after all, what would compel a person to don a pair of thigh length rubber wellies, wade out into a freezing lake and spend 6 hours thrashing the waters with a fly rod in the search for slippery, smelly fish? Perhaps its the Zen-like appeal of a monotonous but nevertheless satisfying ritual; your mind focused on one simple but all-consuming task? Perhaps it's just the prospect having a tatsy Trout for your tea, or maybe it's just being outside knee deep in nature. In any case, we all caught at least 3, and at least one was over 5lb, which really is something to behold. Decided I need to get some kind of snazzy fishing hat, not the awful American style baseball affair, more a Fedora, Raiders of the Lost Ark number in which to ensnare a few dry flies and dazzle passers by with my remarkable resemblance to a sad case in an Indiana Jones hat. I've already bought myself one of those fishing waistcoats with all the integral pockets and clips (thank you e-bay) so I'm nearly there. Been having day dreams about trekking through the Colorado hills in a River Runs Through It homage, but for the time being I think I'm just going to have to settle for the lakes and rivers of Middle England.

Went to the county libarary and selected a few fly fishing classics. Unfortunately they didn't have much of a selcection, but I cherry picked a couple of hefty tomes on the art of getting up at 6am on a weekend. Also got a book on the insects of England in the hope that I might develop an aptitude for identifying which flies the fish are taking. Also learned that there is an artificial fly called a 'Booby', so called because of its two massively out of proportion polystyrene eyes that resemble the insect equivalent of a boob job. The boob job fly is, according to my reliable source, a fly suited to mid summer when larger, mature insects reach their full size and consequently end their days floating around on a lake somewhere after getting just that little bit too close to the surface. why these flying morons should choose to pursue their mates just inches from the noses of hungry trout is beyond me, but don't all creatures put themselves into all manner of dangerous situations just for the mere promise of a quick shag? A lesson for us all perhaps. There's also the 'buzzer' which kind of looks like a maggot in drag. It's a gaudy, glittery based number with a silk tail, and when paired with the booby bears a striking resemblance to a couple of good fun gals on a night out. Boob Job and Drag Maggot offer a formidable team when paired as a dropper and a point fly, and the trout just luv 'em!

Also learned that amongst fly fishermen it is considered a heinous crime to kill a Brown trout. As our native Trout, the Brown is a much slower maturing fish in comparison to its North American brother the Rainbow, although the Rainbow cannot for some reason reproduce effective in the wild, and has to be nututred in stock pools. Not sure how true this is, but that's what the 'The complete fly fisher claims.' Never kill a brown trout, to do so would be call down the wrath of god himself and he may well smite you like he did in the days of old, when by all accounts he was a much grumpier god and had a tendency to torment and kill whatever pissed him off the most. If you should catch a Brown trout it is advised that upon its release you should offer up a libation to the great Trout headed god, which usually takes the form of several pints of mild and a bag of sampy fries. mmmmm Scampy fries.

Another day where I got surprisingly little done

Considering that I got up at 8, cleaned my room, did my washing and got all papers organised in preparation for the 'read-a-thon' I somehow managed to falter and wind up pretty much wasting the best part of a day. Got two volumes of Freud to read tomorrow: Art and Literature, and The Origins of Religion, which look to be an interesting read, especially that when you consider that it's the old boy's 150th anniversary.

I'm still reading Bleak House, which I fervently recommend to anyone with a taste for Victorian literature or the Gothic tradition. Like so much of Dickens' work you find yourself sinking into a fetid, rotting vision of London with its opulent landed classes and miserable poor. I have no great fondness for the capital, so this novel feeds right into my dislike for big cities. Large numbers of people put me on edge and fill me with an unsettling feeling of paranoia; I half expect something terrible to happen at any minute, or else find myself hopelessly lost in some forsaken district miles from familiarity. I'd much rather live in a foreign city where such anxities merely blend into the general malaise of being out-of-place. For some reason I never feel the same degrees of uncertainty and anxiety in foreign cities, and actually enjoy the feeling of geographical alterity.

Went down into the cellar today looking for a bucket. I live in an old coverted retirement home with a rag-tag collection of other students. I think the building dates from the late Edwardian period, although I'm probably wayout with that speculation. Needless the say the cellar is vast and closeted. There a number of rooms which have been bolted shut with their vision panels painted over, so I assume that are home to some hideous starving monster, or perhaps the video surveillance room. The last room on the right is absolutely filled to capacity with bric-a-brac and verious other useless bits of tat that would no doubt fetch a pretty penny on e-bay. I also suspect there are rats down there.

Wasps keep visiting my window

little bastards must be building a nest near by. I remember when I first moved into this place at the end of the last summer I found scores of brittle wasps corpses picking up fluff in the small communal toilet next to my modest little room. There's an old apple tree in the garden that's seen better times, as, indeed, has the garden, now the home to countless pots and rusting pans, old bike frames minus the resalable accessories and various other pieces of junk discarded by previous inhabitants. What I mean to say is that this apple tree, which for the most part goes untended, unloved and generally forgotten, fills the long grass around the base of its trunk with any number of slowly rotting fruit, which, I'm sure, attracts every wasp for a 3 block radius. I wouldn't mind so much save I have the things and their needless seasonal aggression. One got into my room earlier and I damn near broke my leg as I tried to flee while dressing. I think it was queen, although to a phobic even the most emaciated bug would assume monolitic proportions. Suffice to say I've been unable to open the window since and have been swealtering in the forced heat of an unexpected minor (British) heatwave. To try and keep my mind occupied I read some Neruda and wrote out some notes I've been taking in a more legible hand. When it got dark I went for a walk out past where the street lights give way to the countryside and enjoyed a half hour listening to the birds down by the river.

Bad fruit and wasps. I'm convinced there's a wasp in here with me now, tired and angry just waiting to me to drop an unprotected foot onto its pulsing body. That would be my room 101, I really can't stand them. It takes a monumental amount of effort for me to re-enter a room after a wasp episode, and it would seem I'm getting worse. The only way I could deal with the one today was to prop the door open and wait for it leave before rushing into the room while waves of mild panic thumped through my body.

While I'm on the subject of nasty bugs, I saw a video clip of a camel spider the other night and it gave me nightmares of a severity I haven't experienced since I was a kid. Appartently these things live in the deserts of Iraq and as such crave shelter and the cooling reflief of anything that casts a shadow, including people, and have been known to chase after people, and presumably, camels, in an attempt to shade their bodies from the searing heat of the sun. what's more, these guys grow to quite a size and even 'scream' as they chase you. I sincerely hope I never see one of these things.

Also watced Factotum this evening, which isn't bad. Not sure whether this was a novel that needed to be made into a film, personally I thought there wasn't enough for a film, but as a short novel it worked well. Gotta love some of Bukowski's one liners though, the man certainly had that bar room philosophy down to a fine art. Anyone who's ever worked a crappy service job for terrible wages, which is probably almost everyone, will appreciate the mindset I'm sure. As for me, I've worked crappy part-time jobs for so long I get nervous when I think about careers, but part of me feels that everyone should have to work a service industry job at least once in their life, like completing your national service or something in a similar vein, as a means of preparing you for later crises of a self-conscious nature.

I'm off to bed. Good night.

Wasps keep visiting my window

little bastards must be building a nest near by. I remember when I first moved into this place at the end of the last summer I found scores of brittle wasps corpses picking up fluff in the small communal toilet next to my modest little room. There's an old apple tree in the garden that's seen better times, as, indeed, has the garden, now the home to countless pots and rusting pans, old bike frames minus the resalable accessories and various other pieces of junk discarded by previous inhabitants. What I mean to say is that this apple tree, which for the most part goes untended, unloved and generally forgotten, fills the long grass around the base of its trunk with any number of slowly rotting fruit, which, I'm sure, attracts every wasp for a 3 block radius. I wouldn't mind so much save I have the things and their needless seasonal aggression. One got into my room earlier and I damn near broke my leg as I tried to flee while dressing. I think it was queen, although to a phobic even the most emaciated bug would assume monolitic proportions. Suffice to say I've been unable to open the window since and have been swealtering in the forced heat of an unexpected minor (British) heatwave. To try and keep my mind occupied I read some Neruda and wrote out some notes I've been taking in a more legible hand. When it got dark I went for a walk out past where the street lights give way to the countryside and enjoyed a half hour listening to the birds down by the river.

Bad fruit and wasps. I'm convinced there's a wasp in here with me now, tired and angry just waiting to me to drop an unprotected foot onto its pulsing body. That would be my room 101, I really can't stand them. It takes a monumental amount of effort for me to re-enter a room after a wasp episode, and it would seem I'm getting worse. The only way I could deal with the one today was to prop the door open and wait for it leave before rushing into the room while waves of mild panic thumped through my body.

While I'm on the subject of nasty bugs, I saw a video clip of a camel spider the other night and it gave me nightmares of a severity I haven't experienced since I was a kid. Appartently these things live in the deserts of Iraq and as such crave shelter and the cooling reflief of anything that casts a shadow, including people, and have been known to chase after people, and presumably, camels, in an attempt to shade their bodies from the searing heat of the sun. what's more, these guys grow to quite a size and even 'scream' as they chase you. I sincerely hope I never see one of these things.

Also watced Factotum this evening, which isn't bad. Not sure whether this was a novel that needed to be made into a film, personally I thought there wasn't enough for a film, but as a short novel it worked well. Gotta love some of Bukowski's one liners though, the man certainly had that bar room philosophy down to a fine art. Anyone who's ever worked a crappy service job for terrible wages, which is probably almost everyone, will appreciate the mindset I'm sure. As for me, I've worked crappy part-time jobs for so long I get nervous when I think about careers, but part of me feels that everyone should have to work a service industry job at least once in their life, like completing your national service or something in a similar vein, as a means of preparing you for later crises of a self-conscious nature.

I'm off to bed. Good night.

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.