It is difficult for the average university-educated bourgeois to understand the depths of credulity to which people can fall. Horoscopes, alien abductions, David Icke – all of these things are truly believed. Nevertheless, as Slavoj Zizek has been pointing out recently, ascribing beliefs to other groups is a very risk business that often reveals more about your own preoccupations than it does about their actual beliefs. Indeed, when working in a public library, I was astounded by how few people read books like The Bible Code and the Prophecies of Nostradamus.
Umberto Eco, in a geriatric exercise in Christmas nostalgia, fails to realise that the majority of people who read The Da Vinci Code don’t believe that it’s true. They may wonder and imagine possibilities, but don’t believe.
A belief, whether ideological or religious, is an exception to the general rule of indifference. If you pinned people down, they might reveal their opinions on a few subjects, but people rarely are pinned down! Unconscious beliefs are important, but understanding the content of them is a matter of interpretation
What does matter, and perhaps the reason for the success of the Da Vinci Code (which I haven’t read), is wonder. For example, yesterday, I finally watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, getting quite emotional about the brutality inflicted on Jesus. But nothing in it, not even the miracles so casually performed, made me think (or believe) that he really was/is the son of God. But I did – with real pleaure – wonder.
One of the most depressing sights for any prospective publisher are the magazine racks of Borders on Tottenham Court Road or Buchanan Street. It sometimes seems that there are far more magazines than there could ever be readers, especially as most of those potential readers are just there to browse. In Borders, almost every taste and (non-pornographic) perversion is catered for, the question is: are people perverted enough to read The Mind’s Construction Quarterly?
The best way to learn something is to just go out there and do it. If you want to learn how to design websites, you need to go out there and make one. If you want to learn how to do a magazine, make one. Of course, most people are so discouraged by this first encounter that they never go back. But not me.
Back in the days when the pilot edition itself was a pipe dream, I undertook some research into similar magazines. The two that impressed me most, the two that seemed to be doing similar things in terms of size and quality of printing, were Smoke and The Chap, so it was to the editors of these that I turned. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Wednesday I performed the world’s first ever proper egogeographical walk.
Preliminary attempts at egogeography undertook when I was living in London were thwarted by being either done on a bike or being lax with the rules. Plus there’s the fact that the word didn’t exist.
Since coining it on the Monday, I thought it best to devise a set of rules, conditions and explanatory notes, which I shall outline below:
Egogeography is the act of walking from point A to point B. With Egogeography both points have some supernumerary, egoistic meaning.
For example, last Wednesday I walked from Neil Street in Renfrew to Scott Street in Garnethill. If your name is uncommon then by all means use other significant words. For instance, Rhodri Marsden could walk from Keaton Road (he used to be in a band called The Keatons) to French Street (he’s in The Free French).
Insofar as it has a purpose or a utility, it is to divest oneself of egoism. By visiting places you wouldn’t ordinarily see, by forcing oneself into random situations, by reflecting – alone – on the non-spaces you find yourself in, your sense of reality is broadened.
This is a work in progress. The author is not responsible for any dangers encountered on egogeographical walks.
I had worried that the Vichy Government were getting a bit soft around the edges, what with all the love songs (Serbian Warlords) and beauty tips (The Immortals). However, Luke Haines is Dead is not only a return to form, but a return to the kind of abrasive malevolence that made them special in the first place.
After 200 pages of cutesy prose and anecdotal science, the final chapter of Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open has glimpses into ideas that, had they been explored, would have made the book a thousand times better.
He tantalizes us there and in the notes with the idea of a bridge between the post-structuralist’s concept of the subject and evolutionary psychologist’s idea of mental development. He hints at the links between Freud’s id-ego-superego and Paul MacLean’s Triune brain. It is all very frustrating. However, Mind Wide Open is a decent introduction to a frightening subject.
Earlier in the month, The Chap magazine launched Children in Tweed. Stephen O’Hagan, assistant editor of The Mind’s Construction Quarterly, has taken the time to lambast their charitable efforts:
The dandiacal principal is an unclear thing, but at its heart is the theme of self-invention and the creation of one’s own character. It is unjustifiable for the chaps to claim themselves ‘dandyists’ and yet still attempt to push tweeds on council estaters like they were narcotics (the first is always free).
What is the most embarrassing thing you’ve done? Think back to the things that makes you flush even at the slightest reminder.
I’ve just listened to a recording of when I was on a Raiders FM programme called The B*stard (sic) Sons of Cool and am almost dying with retrospective shame. If I could pinpoint the reason the next issue of The Mind’s Construction has been delayed for so long I would say this interview. That was when I stopped being able to answer the question: why? And yet, rather than merely ignoring it, destroying it and denying it ever happened, I have made a vow to listen, transcribe and, by doing so, overcome.
Embarrassment (despite the heat it produces) is like diving into ice cold water, initially shocking but eventually invigorating. Most people – like me with this interview – prefer to dip our toes in a few times before we can face being submerged. Either way, it is far better to face up to uncomfortable facts than merely repressing them. If anything survives from Freud it is the idea of the return of the repressed – who knows what monsters grew in my unconscious as this festered in my mind for the last 10 months?
The B*stard Sons of Cool are Paul Dowsett and Shane O’Donoghue, they broadcast across the internet from a small room in Balham. After waiting outside the tube station for fifteen minutes, I worried that I was going to be stood up. Secretly I was glad that I wouldn’t have to go through with it. But just as I was about to walk, the station’s controller, Mike Summers, introduced himself and took me to a studio situated above the taxi rank. They were playing Kings of Leon as I walked in. I braced myself …
I’ve been experimenting with Garageband to create a TMCQ podcast. Partly this is because most of the music I’ve been listening to is all but inaccessible to anyone but me, but mainly it’s because I am a sheep-like follower of the zeitgeist.
Podcasts are everywhere. When the Telegraph has started broadcasting one (awkward and annoying though it is), you know that it has reached some kind of tipping point.
But do people actually listen to them? The podcasts I’ve sampled – those of 3hive.com and Stylus Magazine, for example – have been too dull to listen to without wanting to skip through most of them and I’ve had to unsubscribe. Jeffrey Zeldman has been broadcasting a computerised version of his blog for a while now, but it is difficult to see how this could be of interest to anyone apart from Stephen Hawking fetishists.
My guess is that life is too short and podcasts are too long for it to ever become an essential part of modern communication. We can skim read easily, but can’t skim listen. For minority music interests, they are perfect. For audiobooks (and the spoken section of comedy radio), they’re great. But for the mainstream (Telegraph, Zeldman etc.), it looks like a waste of time. Having said that, I’ll be interested to see the reaction to a TMCQ podcast if and when it arrives. Watch this space.
“I like experiencing different realities, but prefer not to take drugs. Temping is the next best thing.”
I wrote this today to intellectually justify the fact that I am temping. It reminded me that it was about a year ago that I was on morphine, in hospital, recovering from having my appendix removed. Morphine gives one an incredible clarity, all the petty concerns of life fade away and you can focus on the things that matter. I can quite understand Pete Doherty’s negatively capable fascination, revealed in Simon Hattenstone’s interview:
I ask him whether he thinks life is better with or without drugs. “Yeah. yeah. Course it is.” Better without? “No, it’s better with or without.” He fails to give a straight answer. Perhaps he’s incapable of doing so. Both? “Yeah, course. I think some people’s lives would be ruined with drugs and some would be dramatically improved with drugs. Anything that’s going to move them from the fucking middling state they’re in, whether it’s a cup of coffee or a snowball up your jacksy, I don’t know.”
The death of John Fowles yesterday will have left many a middlebrow brow furrowed. The author of The Magus (surely the most pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-aesthetical novel of the 20th century) was remembered by news editors as the author of a book that was made into a film with Meryl Streep. It’s a shame that people have overlooked his first and only great novel, The Collector, which has a terrifcally grim inevitability. The Collector is also, coincidentally, the name and inspiration of Sarah Nixey’s forthcoming debut single, a review of which was recently posted on this very site.
