life is but a joke

Most of yesterday I spent surrounded by a sharp white sea of academic spume: papers, books, reports flowing over every available surface. Occasionally I would reach for one, wonder why it was in my hand, squint at the tiny type and big words, and grope at its (over-)intellectualisations, before taking to gazing out the window. And as my gaze drifted, I wondered why I couldn’t be doing some sort of job where I got paid just to kind of sit about looking out the window wondering about things without having to try to understand random strangers’ turgid abstractions of the world and be required to spew something equally incomprehensible back out at my contemporaries. In other words, yesterday was a day where I wondered whether I can or want to spend the rest of my working life doing this academic thing. Maybe I could become an ice-cream seller? I remember someone once saying that the ice-cream van business was a good and uncomplicated affair: someone gives you money and you give them something that makes them smile and walk away happy. What could be better than that? I imagine a world where everyone is an ice-cream seller and there is no more war or suffering or pain or disease or religious conflict. We are all tolerant of one another’s different preferences and lifestyle choices – I’m an Orange Fruitie man (or Callippo otherwise), that you are a Mr Whippy is not a threat to my world-view, and that’s the way it should be.
After several pointless bouts of such navel gazing, in the evening we went to Cardiff to see one of the finest and most important song-writers and poets of all human history, Bob Dylan, in concert. It was indeed a privilege to hear this epoch-defining man singing some of the greatest songs ever: he did Rainy Day Women, Like A Rolling Stone (best one of the evening), Tangled Up In Blue, All Along The Watchtower, Blowin In The Wind, Mr Tambourine Man and possibly one or two other classics that have slipped my mind. For me, when he was playing his harmonica was when I felt the ‘real’ Bob Dylan was there (rather than the actual real Bob Dylan); it made the hairs stand up, meant a lot, type of thing.
On the other hand, there was something perhaps a little weird about going to see one of the most important and finest song-writers and poets of all human history, where what you actually get is a man in a big white hat mainly mumbling and creaking incoherently into a microphone that is not even facing the audience, the existence of whom he appears to have very little awareness. Such is Bob Dylan live. In fact, some of even his classics were performed so oddly that you often had to make guesses about whether you knew them, and hope that a glimpse of a lyric told you you were on the right lines. (hmmmnum-mm-mmm-dur-nurm tamboureeeeen mmmnn hurmmm hee urm hurr mmm.) He kind of talk-sings these days, shouting out each line (not necessarily in the original order) with a kind of exaggerated raised pitch and emphasis at the end. I chewed it over anyway, wondering why, when he is more established than pretty much any living musician, he still keeps touring – apart from saying ‘thanks, friends’ near the end we might as well not have been there – but in the end I decided that actually the fact the performances and tours don’t seem in any way a mega-star’s ego-trip was actually really quite heartening, and I like Bob Dylan even more for it. He must want to perform and be pleased people come to see him, he just does it in his own quiet way. Well done Bob.
This evening ran 6.75 miles in an hour. Was nearly sick. Made fajitas and put so much chilli in the salsa that Anne was nearly sick. HHHHooooeeeuuurrrghhhhh.
Decided to change the name of my blog to a Bob aphorism. Far better than some stupid made-up pretentious word.

yomping stomping barn break

Away this last weekend with assorted miscreants, misanthropes and misfits to a camping barn bunkouse thing of a place near Ilfracombe. Got there early as learned from the website that there were small rooms and one eight-bed room and didn't fancy the latter. Got there just in time to avoid being put in the swingers' room (there was no choice, if you arrived late, you had to do sex to everyone else in there whether you liked it or not. I think. I mean I wasn't in there).
Friday night was Claire's quiz night where she got to carry on being a secondary school teacher except with her friends. I got told off lots of times for no reason at all, except like all the teachers at real school when I was younger she targeted me unfairly for no reason. Unlike real school though I had had a beer or two and so talked back. Unlike her current real school, Claire could use swear words and fight back using politically incorrect put downs. No one was harmed though, and my team even won the quiz. I say won, but it was only because we sort of cheated, but only sort of, our advantage was in fact due to another team sending spies over who we then cunningly managed to corrupt into giving us their answers. The hunter became the hunted, as it were, and we won champagne.
Saturday, anyone with leg muscles and any lung capacity went walking along a disused railway line to Ilfracombe then on towards Mortehoe and Woolacombe. One minute rain, the next sun, just like April. Very pretty views and countryside, a standing stone, lemon-yellow gorse, bluebells, dramatic skies, churned seas, and so on. Found a really nice pub in a place called Lee, a place like you only see on BBC Sunday evening dramas about village jam-making murders, where we had a hearty lunch, then the people with really proper walking ability went onwards to Mortehoe and Woolacombe. Quite a trek in the end - having left camp at 1030am with an hour or so for lunch didn't get back to the barn till nearly 8pm, feeling a little tired but in a good way.
Saturday evening involved Claire making use once again of the rare opportunity to carry on being a secondary school teacher except with her friends. This time with Bingo. By that point I had a nasty headache probably brought on by having drunk little more than two pints at lunchtime despite having been on a 10 hour walk in the sun and wind. So I drank several plastic cups of water and retreated to my wipe-clean plastic bunk bed with my zombie comic book.
Following a scuff about the beach at Woolacombe the next day, headed home.

Well now it's Monday and we've just sent off another email to recruit, remind and invite people to the wedding and wedding reception. It's been fairly hard deciding who to come to which but our secret criteria have worked in the end. Tomorrow we're going to see Bob Dylan, that's right, the real Bob Dylan. In a massive arena, from near the back probably. Looking forward to it, though concerned I might not be enough of a massive Bob Dylan fan to appreciate it fully. Hope it's not like when we went to Haight-Ashbury hoping for a rainbow freak out and all we found was bong shops. Nah, it'll be grand. The man's a living legend after all - up there with Bob Marley, John Lennon and Vanilla Ice.

Got quite a bit done on my piece of write up I've been asked to do, where I explain and justify and describe my interim thoughts about methods and analysis. Sometimes I wonder though whether I'm just trying to convince myself and others that what I'm doing makes sense, or whether I really believe it does. Maybe there isn't a difference. To read most sociology I don't think so.

drifting

My poor muscles and bones ache to buggery today. I've been trying to get to 6 miles running, because that's what I used to be able to do a few years ago before I fell into disrepair, and have finally managed it (twice now), but I think I could be doing something bad to myself in the process. Instead of feeling healthy, I went about as red as a gouted Lord, and had a worrying tight feeling in my chest. Also, talking to someone at Cardiff who knows about these things, if you push yourself too much you can get 'shin splints' which is apparently where the lining around your muscles like you have around sausages splits and causes tremendous pain. Great. And there was a pile of partly mopped up sick on the floor on the way out of the gym. How have I managed to get myself wrapped up in this nonsense?

As for the general and ongoing collapse of the world economy, I discovered today that every cloud has a silver lining. Once we see Simon Cowell having his swimming pool repossessed and Paris Hilton checking into the TravelLodge we'll know we're really in business.

Off later today for a camping barn weekend (forecasted to be rain-soaked). About 25 people in total going I think and worryingly I heard that thre will be 100 vodka jellies going along too. To be honest, I'm not at all in the mood for that sort of carry-on and would rather stay back on the boat drinking cups of tea and indulging in one of my harmless hobbies, like making experimental music no one would ever listen to with my experimental music making programmes. If I ever figure out how to (a) turn them into MP3s and (XV) how to post them here, I might put some up as a record of time well spent aligning crackly geiger noises with echo-inflicted Japanese monologues.

ee-raa-no

Lord on a plate, I'm completely knackered now. I ran 6 miles earlier, on a treadmill machine admittedly, but that still counts surely. Finding it hard to concentrate at the moment in fact, as apart from my having eaten a big curry and drunk wine, am half-watching The Daily Show, where one of those ones that go out and about were in Sweden pointing out the evils of free healthcare, education, prosperity and economic surpluses. He had a nice moment with the man from Abba where he pointed out in respect of 'Money money money' that he had "created a model that 50 cent was able to follow".
Anyway if I'm going to do this blog properly I can't just comment on TV programmes. Or can I...?

I've been trying to understand something of the philosophy of argumentation today (let's call it Argumentation, that looks better - in fact there's a journal called Argumentation), as it sort of might maybe play a fairly large part in how I'm doing analysis for my PhD. It's a big scary area anyway, proper philosophy always is when you get into the nitty gritty, but I reckon they're just showing off to be honest. Yeah, all of you, showing off. On that sort of theme, and also speaking of Sweden's evil socialist system, I was reading about Engels too today, and whilst I knew neither him nor the other one were exactly proper Kim Jong Il 1984 types I was ignorant of the fact that he was a full-blown aristocrat, lobster-sucking, champagne soaked, unrepentant whore-using, mill owner. Chuh! - you think you know someone.

Well got to check wording of wedding invites now. It's a complicated business.

uu-va-voo

A new day, a new blog. Having failed to keep a real proper written diary beyond mid-February this year (probably because my hand-writing ability has been diminished by square-pushing all day) I thought I'd start a blog. I fancy the idea, as there is something existentially appealing about broadcasting my thoughts to a world that, frankly, isn't listening. Oh sure, Gwyn will have a look because he does a blog. Annie also, just to make sure I'm not revealing things I shouldn't or getting into trouble. Maybe the odd crank too. But on the whole I can witter (if only they'd called it Witter not Twitter I might've joined) away safe in the knowledge that my thoughts of the day are pretty private. Also, safe in the knowledge that I'm not really sure what a blog is for. Another good existential reason for doing it (I like the word 'existential', it doesn't really mean anything but sounds clever and pretentious, a bit like 'post-modern').
Where was I?
Ah yes, thoughts and what's happened and so on.
So I've called this blog Inquivoo as that's a made-up anthropological term used by my favourite sesquipedilian Will Self in his novel The Butt which I'm reading at the moment. It means to have been assigned by a shaman a passivity or impotence to act. So what I'm saying really is I'm impotent. Maybe I'll change the title, it doesn't really work. But I mean impotent in an existential way, of course, not in reference to my willy or anything. Not sure this is going how I intended it...

Today I was determined to actually get some work done on my PhD, and not do the usual thing of finding hundreds of distractions over the course of the day. I even wrote myself a list of instructions yesterday about the sorts of things I shouldn’t do: don’t check emails every 5 minutes, don’t read every article in every online newspaper, that sort of thing. But somehow – somehow – despite my best intentions, I found myself in a bookshop at around midday reading a graphic novel (alright, comic) called The Walking Dead, with all zombies in it and everything. I have in fact grown quite keen on zombies though do not have an encyclopaedic knowledge of George Romero’s works or anything. I do stand with those traditionalists however who maintain that zombies are shuffling, waddling, damaged creatures. As Simon Pegg argued in an excellent article on the subject, “death is a disability, not a superpower”. Well said. He also said, which I never knew, that zombie comes from the Haitian term tsambi, which was of course the state in which one could be put by witch doctors of a particularly amoral sort. One might even say they rendered a person fully inquivoo.

Following on from this, today was budget day in Britain, a very exciting time when the chancellor of the exchequer tries to sugar coat a 220 billion pound deficit with a £2000 car-scrapping scheme (you scrap your car and buy a new one, you get £2000 – what kind of a twat’s idea is that?) Really, it wasn’t that exciting. I watched the live rolling live on-the-minute coverage and David Cameron being all oily about it for a while but gave up and went back to my comic after a while. Sadly, gone are the days when Tony Blair would wow everyone with his wars and cocaine parties for rock stars in Downing Street. All we’ve got left is tired old bastards giving money to bankers being sneered at by old Etonian used car salesmen. Anyway, you (who?) know all that anyway.

I have recently discovered Spotify which is the mutt’s knees and lets you listen to anything – with the one tiny fly in the ointment being that every 15 minutes you have to be subjected to an advert for Swift cover car insurance by Iggy Pop. He tries to sound all cool, like probably most of the time he really drives around without any car insurance and without a shirt on, even if it’s not that warm outside, but really I bet he loves insurance and the whole area of actuary more generally. Got a doctorate in pure mathematics you know, Iggy Pop. No, really. Actually, no, he hasn’t.

Well, I think I’ve done well for a first effort. Feel free to say hello, whoever you are, if you exist. Or don’t. I don’t care. In fact, I’ve written all this in Word and might as well just save it, but why buck the post-modern existential trend to broadcast one’s thoughts to the world. Away, words!