Talk of bloody long hauls! But now got this more or less last part done. Might even qualify for some kind of compensation. Keep your fingers crossed

I’ve finally finished a pretty long entry for the Hemingway bollocks which I hope will be the last such long piece. Still to come are a couple more potted blogs covering the old fraud’s last 20 years, then a general tidying up exercise.

If you want to read any of the entries (the total is almost 15,000 long, so I’ve split it into six parts), you can find them here.

If not, fuck off. I mean so say! A lad does his utmost for the intellectual life of the planet, more or less works his fingers to the bone but is treated in a very cavalier fashion along the lines of ‘stuff your Hemingway bollocks, did you really think we are interested? Really? Moron.’

For those with a more charitable heart who feel compassion is in short supply and why not spread a little of it, here are the links. 

The snooty rest of you, up your kilt!

 

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

PS As every world-beating, award-winning, cutting-edge blog is immeasurably improved by pictures and illustrations, who am I to buck the trend.

So here is a nice little piccy of one Vladimir Putin relaxing a little in the sun. And I do hope there are no mealy-mouthed ejits among you who begrudge Vlad a little me time.

I mean you might think I work bloody hard (I don’t, but you might think that), Vlad’s in a totally different league. This chap has got a country to look after! And he must make sure no one gets any big ideas about free and fair elections and any of that nonsense.

So cut him a little slack, will you, and admire those pecs.

Tripette to The Netherlands (which is very, very close)

Afternoon out at a town in the north of the Netherlands called Appingedam. Can’t really call it a ‘day out’ because it is close by, less than an hour’s drive away. After that my host — no names, no pack drill — who has lived or been based in Germany for more than 40 and is a tadette didactic, took us — our younger brother has joined us — to a kind of Dutch ‘new town’ called Blauwestad a few miles from Winschoten.

This really is a new town, being built on the banks of a new canal/lake called Oldambtmeer (the Dutch like doing things with water, according to the Germans turning it into a sliceable form and selling it as ‘a tomato). Appingedam was by far the more interesting, though not particularly interesting.

We wandered around the ‘old town’ with my sister pointing out house fronts, windows, gables, roofs and I don’t know what else to admire, but to be frank there’s only so much admiring I can do and I tend to flag after a while.

My fear is always that if I don’t demonstrate the required level of enthusiasm, I am ‘being difficult’, and ‘being difficult’ was a label hung around me early on in my life in my family, so situations like that demand some diplomacy. For all my ‘tactlessness’ (which I prefer to see as a dislike of being forced to dissemble) I can be and am far, far more diplomatic than a great many realise.

Certainly, the obvious point to make is that ‘diplomacy’ is essentially dissembling, but here I crave your goodwill and accept that there are subtle differences between the two, not least that ‘diplomacy’ in our private lives is intended to avoid bruising the feelings of others whereas dissembling is usually a great deal less admirable. But it was good to wander around and get some fresh air. I would like to see ‘old Dutch architecture, but there are I’m sure more interesting examples elsewhere in the country and I shall make a point of seeking them out in the future.

Blauwestad? Well, the first question is, what exactly it the point. It was not created to ‘provide more homes’ as the new houses — they are all new houses, though some a year or two less new than others — are not cheap and from what I saw through open blinds they all looked like the ‘second home’ refuge ‘in the country’ of professionals from Amsterdam, and Rotterdam (which are easily accessible just down the road).

Notably included in the house price was a berth for your own small but no inexpensive motorboat in the mini marina just yards from your front door. (My phone was low on juice, so I left it in the car to charge and didn’t take any pictures. I wish I had.) With no exaggeration the interiors might all have served as ads in interior design magazines. These were not ‘new homes from working class folk otherwise priced out of the market’. There also seemed to be few folk at home for a Sunday afternoon. Who knows what was going on.

Here are a few piccies from Appingedam, suitably dicked around with (the new phrase for ‘artistically processed’ if you haven’t yet guessed).

Good morning on this Sunny day in the far north-west of Germany, a clog's throw from the Dutch border

A few photos taken about 30 minutes ago (and which I’ve also posted on Facebook with the caption ‘This morning’s sun, 今天早上的太陽 in Chinese (it's always good to be prepared)’.

Here are a couple from about 100 years ago. Only just come across them:

Hilly Stuff


Fuck You

The Little Bugger


Let’s Split Up


Jesus Loves Bush

Hemingway bollocks: the end if in sight

I'm glad to report that I'm slowly getting to the end of the Hemingway bollocks. This last essay (last, I think and hope) is in some ways crucial and took a while to get started. I've so far written over 10,000 but there's not much more to say.

It's all about how academia is eternally in danger of disappearing up its own bum, yet 99 per cent of us are rather in awe to 'academics' and if they were to contradict us and declare that on occasion black really is white, few of us would feel confident disagreeing. Here are two prime pieces of apparent gobbledgook (or maybe I'm the dumbo). But once from 1950 they decided Hemingway 'was an artist', there was no going back. Here they are:

There was much more to [The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms], of course, than an act of personal exorcism, however complicated. For to destroy by embodying is also to create by arranging. The artist’s special blessing exists in an impu. lse to destroy an aspect of the thing he creates, and to render permanent what for him, in another and internal dimension, must be permanently destroyed.

That is from Carlos Baker in his book Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. This is from a woman called Hollis Robbins, written while she was teaching at Princeton. It is her commentary on a commentary be Jackques Derrida commenting on Sigmund Freud's comments about Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes:

[It is a] critique of criticism [and a] tale, teller, interpreter, and critical case study all in one . . . Yet if it is true that the tale’s very transparency is a critique of the desire to critique — or rather, the exhibitionistic desire to unveil publicly — Derrida’s privileging of the themes of analysis, truth, and unveiling in his (albeit brief) reading of The Emperor’s New Clothes provides evidence that the awareness of this desire does not reduce its influence. The desire to read The Emperor’s New Clothes as either a fantasy of critique or a new literary history critique of the fantasy of critique is symptomatic of our assumptions about what it means to be a reader-analyst.

If anyone can tell me what either piece means, or even might mean, get in touch.

A blog entry of songs I like (by others) is resurrected after I realised several had visited it but the songs could not be played, and now a few more songs, notably three versions of the same, great song (but not a version by the late Mr L Cohen of Quebec who co-wrote it)

I happened to be looking through the stats for the ‘ere blog and which posts had been recently viewed and came across one, post on August 23, 2017, which was a collection of notable singles. Then I noticed that the could no longer be played, so I decided to rectify that.

I realised that the method I had used — inserting a certain ‘audio’ code in the blog entry which referenced a file stored on the web – had broken down because the site where I had stored the files, a ‘Google site’, had been overhauled and retired by Google.

After a lot of faffing around trying to place the files elsewhere and getting nowhere, I decided simply to make brief ‘videos’ with the relevant songs as the soundtrack. In fact, there’s no video footage involved.

So I’ve resurrected that site and you can hear those tracks here (if you’ve got nothing better to do).

Given how, in the event, straightforward and simple that task turned out to be, I’ve added a few more songs. You might like them. They might not do much for you.

The first is an early Pink song I heard while in the gym at work. It’s Family Portrait and when I first heard it, it almost made me cry? My oldest child, now 25, had just been born and it immediately made me think of her and, more to the point, imagine it was she who was unhappy. Couldn’t take it. To this day the thought of any child — white, black, brown, green — who is unhappy, neglected abused can almost bring me to tears. Don’t know why (and the interesting thing is when does ‘the child’ become ‘the man/the woman’? Discuss. I’m buggered if I know.

Family Portrait by Pink

. . .

The next song is one of my favourite songs with some of the best lyrics I’ve heard in a song. It’s Everybody Knows, and this first version is by some guy called Peter Mulvey.

Everybody Knows by Peter Mulvey

The song is usually billed as ‘a Leonard Cohen’ song, but in fact he co-wrote it with the pianist and singer/songwriter Sharon Robinson. Here version comes after Mulvey’s and is a very different take, but very good.

I don’t like Leonard Cohen at all, and I don’t like his version of this song. Like pretty much everyone else I had and listened to his first album (called an ‘LP’ in those days) but finally got sick of him, the reverence with which he is treated, his voice and pretty much everything else about him.

Everybody Knows by Sharon Robinson

Finally, there is a version of the song by a Holly Figueora O’Reilly, of whom I also know nothing else. It, too, is different and it, too, is great. Give them all a whirl.

Everybody knows by Holly Figueora O’Reilly.

. . .

I’ve always liked ‘good’ lyrics, though quite obviously I must admit what one bod thinks are ‘good’ might not much appeal to another bod. But this song scores in every line. It also manages to be and ‘true’ (another dodgy word, of course) and pulls off that trick of at once being very serious but not in the slightest bit ponderous, weighty, pretentious. In fact, many lives are laugh-out-loud funny. No bugger every bothers to comment on my blog post (well, once in a month of Sundays), but I really would be interested in what others make of the lyrics.

. . .

Off to Germany tomorrow for a month, though not flying out till Tuesdays. Staying with my brother in London who is also going. Wonder what all the covid restrictions will make of the journey.