tay tay

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I don’t know if Taylor Swift writes her own songs or is just a pretty face with autotune, but the lyrics often have a certain “tay tay” quality, which makes me think she either writes, greatly contributes, or whoever writes her songs can, Pessoa-like, create a distinct Tay Tay persona.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buBm1ZwtMo0

The lyrics please me:

Sleep in half the day just for old times’ sake
I won’t ask you to wait if you don’t ask me to stay
So I’ll go back to L.A. and the so-called friends
Who’ll write books about me if I ever make it
And wonder about the only soul
Who can tell which smiles I’m fakin’
And the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own
To leave the warmest bed I’ve ever known
We could call it even
Even though I’m leaving
And I’ll be yours for the weekend
​’Tis the damn season

And she made for an excellent Murdoch Murdoch character.

book report: the Kybalion

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A classic modern occult work, I would imagine composed in the early 20th Century; many have suspected the author is in fact William Atkinson and having read several of his books I would agree there is a similar style and approach. It begins:

The purpose of this work is not the enunciation of any special philosophy or doctrine, but rather is to give to the students a statement of the Truth that will serve to reconcile the many bits of occult knowledge that they may have acquired, but which are apparently opposed to each other and which often serve to discourage and disgust the beginner in the study. Our intent is not to erect a new Temple of Knowledge, but rather to place in the hands of the student a Master-Key with which he may open the many inner doors in the Temple of Mystery through the main portals he has already entered.

The entire book is written in a stuffy but readable Edwardian mode. It is mostly commentary on seven principles:

1. The principle of mentalism

“The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.”

2. The principle of correspondence

“As above, so below; as below, so above.” […] This principle embodies the truth that there is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of being and life.”

3. The principle of vibration

“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

4. The principle of polarity

“Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”

5. The principle of rhythm

“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

6. The principle of cause and effect

“Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.”

7. The principle of gender

“Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.”

I would describe it as a work of philosophical occultism; there are no practical techniques here. In essence, it treats of cosmic laws, and their manipulation. Hermetic occultism is about transcending our mundane reality, in order to see and be more, and to thus control the lower:

We overcome the lower laws, by applying still higher ones – and in this way only, But we cannot escape Law or rise above it entirely.

Having studied the occult for a decade and more, I found much of it obvious; though I can’t say if that is because the Kybalion’s themes have been so echoed in subsequent works, or because it borrows from earlier works, or both. However, it would be an interesting read for anyone beginning to study the philosophical occult; and even I found much of interest, e.g.

The word Positive means something real and strong, as compared with a Negative unreality or weakness. Nothing is further from the real facts of electrical phenomenon. The so-called Negative pole of the battery is really the pole in and by which the generation or production of new forms and energies is manifested. There is nothing “negative” about it. The best scientific authorities now use the word “Cathode” in place of “Negative,” the word Cathode coming from the Greek root meaning “descent; the path of generation, etc.” From the Cathode pole emerge the swarm of electrons or corpuscles; from the same pole emerge those wonderful “rays” which have revolutionized scientific conceptions during the past decade. The Cathode pole is the Mother of all of the strange phenomena which have rendered useless the old textbooks, and which have caused many long accepted theories to be relegated to the scrap-pile of scientific speculation. The Cathode, or Negative Pole, is the Mother Principle of Electrical Phenomena, and of the finest forms of matter as yet known to science.

For the time, pre-WW1, this is an interestingly Taoist insight.

That is, that lack itself generates, by its very lack & vacuum, an enabling suction. Imbalance is the driving force for balance. As in The Four Quartets, the perfect figure is found not in static being but rather in becoming; in the ceaseless motion of death and rebirth, striving and becoming, failure and regeneration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugc5FZsycAw

book report: Old School by Tobias Wolff

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Another in my run of university/school-themed novels, Tobias Wolff’s Old School is, on the face of it, a rehashing of the standard “working class protagonist gets scholarship to elite institution and observes the rich kids’ lives” trope. The plot centres around a 1960s boarding school, a clique of 6th form budding writers, the school magazine, and guest writers who come to give speeches and “advice”. I really enjoyed the portrayal of these adolescents all trying to write like Hemingway – it’s inconceivable today, even in an elite institution; even at my (elite) university, the English Lit students were almost completely uninterested in reading, let alone in learning how to think or write.

Wolff really captures the sense of excitement some feel with novels; that great literature is wisdom literature. Although Wolff demeaned himself by jumping aboard the “Trump is literally Hitler!” train, one can forgive him because he has a Beowulf ‘stache and a great face, like an old rain-worn statue, and after all Old School is partly about the disjunction between the writer as man and the writer as book.

Look at that ‘stache. That’s a ‘stache that means business.

I especially relished the description of Robert Frost and Ayn Rand visiting the school; Rand is simply ghastly, strident & self-mythological for all her insight & intellect. There’s also a fine portrayal of the schoolmasters, their life bonded to the school and the pupils; their difficulty in forming a self separate from their role as teacher. The narrative control is impressive, the focus mostly on the boy protagonist and his peers, but then effortlessly flickering onto the teachers; for example, a teacher who quits the school:

In former times Arch had supposed that his sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognised, he had become a ghost, even to himself.

I was forearmed against the book by the surname, “Wolff”. I wearily imagined a kind of Philip Roth “look at how Jewish I am!” exercise, but while the protagonist’s Jewish background drives the plot & character development, it’s not too obtrusive, or not obnoxiously so. I was reminded, subtly, of The Great Gatsby, another story about a (presumably) Jewish parvenu and self-mythologiser in WASP-world. The subtleness is the thing here – I probably wouldn’t have noticed Gatsby is most likely Jewish were I not in the habit of Noticing; and likewise with Wolff’s novel, the narrator doesn’t really think of himself as Jewish, so only experiences a mild sense of friction, of unbelonging in the WASPy school – but that mild friction generates, as it were, a pearl. Deception, illusion, a metamorphic & chameleon self, is so central to the protagonist’s Jewish being, that his very attempt to articulate his unbelonging becomes deceit: he plagiarises another Jewish writer’s short story because it so clearly expresses his own unease and pretense; pretending to be another pretender, to confess his pretense. All too circumvoluted and frankly Jewish for the Anglo-Saxons, it’s perfect matter for a novel.

last night on /pol

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My sleeping patterns have been savagely disrupted of late, so I’m often awake in the early hours, unable to sleep but too tired to get up or read a book or commit a homicide. So I browse the internet, most of all /pol on my smartphone. It’s usually just flamewars, with people calling each other faggot, kike, shill, glowie, bot etc. However some maniac kept making threads on this political question:

The same anon had made several threads with the same post, over the night. I participated in this one. So if you want a picture of my life, imagine me lying in bed at five in the morning, laboriously typing the two Italian flag responses to the Amy Coney Barrett T Rex Question.

book report: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

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A Christmas book for this old dog. There aren’t many modern books I would look forward to, as most of my favourite writers have died; Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a great read and resonated curiously with my own preoccupations, 15 years ago (English magic). JS & Mr N is a strange beast indeed, a Fantasy work set in Georgian England during the Napoleonic wars, and written in very passable Jane Austen; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who loves the Game of Thrones books, but it would also probably irritate those who sneer at anything lower than Henry James.

It also made a great, surprisingly unpozzed TV drama:

Her later & related short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, was surprisingly excellent, but Clarke is far from a prolific author and so I was astounded & pleased to hear of Piranesi. Where the Jonathan Strange world was, if you like, Fantasy filtered through Jane Austen, Piranesi is somewhat Borgesian but quite often reminded me of my own short stories –  although Clarke is a little older than me, we hail from a similar part of England and so perhaps there was something in the air. Piranesi is a curious meeting of genres – an allegorical fable at the beginning, later it became more concretely-grounded in an everyday, quasi-plausible reality, while never sinking to the mundane. As it opens, the main character is almost totally alone in a vast stone building of great halls & staircases, full of statues and floods. The lower halls are permanently underwater, and clouds form in the upper halls; fish and birds abound. The narrator, Piranesi, wanders these halls in his own routines & understanding; I say “his” but I was sure he was a she until his gender was specifically mentioned. He survives on fish soups; he avoids the floods; he takes care of skeletons he has found among the alcoves, regarding them as other people who just happen to be dead. As the novel progresses, he encounters others, strange visitors to his halls.

The prose is unflashy and pleasing:

In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall. I imagine I am walking the path from the vestibule to the hall. I note with precision the doors I must pass through, the rights and lefts that I must take, the statues on the walls that I must pass. 

As I began reading the book, I was alone in a vast stone building of great antiquity, free to wander the halls and staircases without a mask, for there were none to meet – not even ghosts, for the thousands who have died here, over the centuries, died at peace; there are statues but also bookshelves and paintings and sofas, a pingpong table, a kitchen, a stove; and, mercifully, no floods; and so the book had a special significance for me, constructing my own private rituals and order amidst a Piranesian world:

Il pozzo, tavola XIII dalle “Carceri d’invenzione” di Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma – ANSA)

the incorruptible

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In The Untouchables, Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness is stymied by typical Irish police corruption; how, he wonders, can he got after Al Capone if the entire Chicago Police Department is on Capone’s payroll. Then he meets Sean Connery’s Malone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs-_7EIxBik

The team Ness eventually puts together comprises: Malone, an almost burnt-out reject cop who is still doing night patrol in his 50s because he won’t join in the corruption; Oscar Wallace, a Treasury Department accountant sent from Washington DC to Chicago to assist Ness; and George Stone/Giuseppe Petri, a police academy recruit who hasn’t even become a full cop yet. 

So when the system is corrupt, it can only be taken down by outsiders of one kind or another. They can be officially part of the system but railroaded and sidelined like Malone; or not from the swamp at all (Ness and Wallace); or still in the young & idealistic phase, not yet tempted by all the enticements of evil power & privilege (Stone).

Here endeth the lesson.

a temporary change

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Although almost no one reads this blog, I don’t particularly want to lose it, so for the next 2 or 3 months I won’t be directly commenting on American politics. Since almost no one reads this blog, I don’t have to worry that I am muzzling my important opinions.

film report: 55 Days at Peking

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A surprisingly good film from 1963 about the Boxer Rebellion and the siege of the legations in Peking/Beijing. It’s a bit corny at times as one would expect, but then most modern films are plagued with much worse flaws. Charlton Heston is a badass American who drinks and whores and shoots and punches, David Niven is a refined tea-sipping Englishman as one would expect, and Ava Gardner is a Russian whore who is clearly up for a bit of hard military penetration and artillery bombardment if you know what I mean.

I have some mild critiques, e.g. it’s largely bloodless, at times I wasn’t sure what the situation was, exactly, but it’s otherwise a good solid film and highly enjoyable. It’s on Youtube at the moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZdmNbJ7EMI

book report: Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

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One of my “I didn’t finish the book” reviews, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Like a lot of these university/school novels, the dirt poor protagonist has won a scholarship to an elite institution where all the other pupils can trace their family back to the Mayflower. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad book by any means, I just found myself unable to engage with it so gave up about 10% of the way in. It felt inauthentic and a bit too creative-writery to me, a common failing of most modern novels; for example Donna Tartt’s The Secret History also felt like something of a creative writing exercise, albeit one that had burst through the constraints & niceties of its apparent origin. Prep just felt lame, formulaic, everything you would expect from a modern, successful novel: carefully attuned to the needs & phobias of New York publishing, and unilluminated by even a flicker of real passion or creativity or intelligence – at least in the first 10%, which was as far as I got before I decided I’d be more intellectually nourished by Baldur’s Gate 2.