Friday conundrum

OK, a nice one for you.

A book or other literature, piece of music and work of art you think I absolutely have to experience.

My recommendations for you:
Book: Walden, by H. D. Thoreau.
Music: Steve Reich's Different Trains.
Artwork: Holbein's The Ambassadors. A complex display of cultural and temporal power shockingly subverted with a skull slashed across it.



See you next week.

Er… well done

Congratulations to Newsnight - that bastion of Oxbridge privilege - which managed to label a speaker as 'Principle' of a university. Very impressive.

Can anyone else see a little Godzilla logo on the previous post? I tried to copy it yesterday when talking about the students' use of Google Maps to track the protests, and couldn't. Now I can see it on a different post! Weird.

I'm in the mood for dumb fun. Which leads me to this Friday's question: what's the pure, stupid, song that just makes you happy? Here's a selection of mine, starting with Camper Van Beethoven's 'Take the Skinheads Bowling'.

Friday conundrum: eyes look your last.

Simple. Given a choice, what would like to see as your eyes close for the last time?

For me, it's Stoke lifting the Champions League trophy. OK, too flippant. Perhaps rolling Shropshire hills, a William de Morgan tile, a medieval painting, the sea smashing against rocks. Loved ones frantically moving my lifeless hand over a legal document. The scratched interior face of the coffin lid.

I don't know - so many options. Over to you.

The return of the revenge of the Friday conundrum

I hate fish. I really, really hate the smell of it, the fishy taste, the bones, the skin, everything about the whole thing.

Which is unfortunate, because it was served for dinner every Friday at home, because we were good Catholics. Only once I went to university was I allowed to do myself a fried egg or something instead. Before that, if I didn't eat it over the course of the entire evening, it was served for breakfast and subsequent meals ad infinitum. I would cover it in tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, anything to make it less fishy, and I'd still gag. At some point, we got a cat, which was bright enough to sit under my chair on Friday evenings. I seem to recall sneaking the offending substance into a drawer in the dining table prior to my feline friend appearing, but it wasn't a long-term solution.

How would you persuade me that fish isn't poisonous muck? And what foods make you retch?

In the interests of full disclosure, only fish makes me feel like this - I adore prawns, mussels, scallops etc., and I merely dislike rhubarb, gooseberries and raspberries - all things my mother grows in abundance.

Revenge of the Son of the Friday Conundrum

It's a commonplace of structuralism that naming something gives it meaning. Cat = not dog, not rat, not mat and not sat, amongst other things. Names exist in networks which give them meaning.

Later theory says that words, and names, don't 'mean' anything: look up 'cat' and it gives you a whole load of other words which you have to look up, ad infinitum.

Psychoanalytic theory says that without a name, you don't exist. More exactly, without language, you can't say 'I'. Therefore you aren't an autonomous individual with expressible desires. Where do you get your name from? From your parents. They impose identity upon you and you become part of the social system as an individual. Before that, you're just a lump of flesh undifferentiated from the rest of the world.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that names are important. How can you talk about something if you can't name it? It becomes unspeakable, and therefore incomprehensible.

Or does it? I have a little task for you, my children. Last night, in the pub (of course), Emma made this.

We all recognised it. None of us could name it. We couldn't remember it having a name - yet we all played with them in school, in Britain and in Ireland - we think it's global.

So - tell me what it's called. Ask your friends, or point them here. Tell us what messages you wrote on the inside, what songs you chanted as you played, but most of all - name it.

My theory is that the lack of a name is intimately linked to the game. It's a rudimentary introduction to both chance and fate. Before the final flap is listed, the players and the audience exist in a state of epistemological liminality: you don't know what's going to happen. It's like quantum physics: all the messages are possible until you choose one. In a state of knowing nothing, the lack of a name is entirely appropriate.

So fly, my pretties. Close down the radical instability by bringing me a name.

Autumnal Friday Conundrum

Easy one.

Which leaves are best for piling up and running through? Maple's aesthetically good, beech leaves are dry and crinkly - depends on what you're looking for in a good autumn afternoon.

Comments are open…

Brutal Friday conundrum

Who needs an educational spade through the head?

Jeremy Clarkson springs to mind, because he thinks he leads a silent army of common-sense blokes beset by enviro-lesbians. I know people think he's just teasing people like me, but they're wrong.

Tom Cruise. I've seen Far and Away.

Whoever invented the footballers' knot.

Friday conundrum again

Courtesy of Emma:
Using ten words or fewer, how would you change the world?

I offer you this:
Got a hairstyle? Then step this way into my camp.
or
Voting Tory? Take this pill, it'll all be over soon.
or
Try reading books. You'll soon be a better person.
or
The Daily Mail was closed and its editor shot today.
or
Leave the car at home. Walk to work. Plant trees.

All Hail Emily Howell? Your Friday conundrum.

Download and listen to some of these MP3s. This is your Friday conundrum: are they any good, and does Emily Howell's life and status affect your relationship to the music?

Friday conundrum!

Not so much a conundrum, and perhaps a little morbid: write your own epitaph or obituary! For what would you like to be remembered? Boltzmann's grave features his Constant, which is pretty cool. Shakespeare's warns people not to chuck his bones into the charnel house next door. I saw a Welsh one which read (translated) as 'not to be opened without the permission of the inhabitant'.

Mine?

Plashing Vole - turned his final page.

Too flippant? I'd like to be thought of as quiet, consistent, helpful and kind - not that I am, it's just that's what I'd like people to think. I care about books, people, education, the environment, politics and the public sphere - though I'm ashamed to say that I don't do much about them. I'd like to get my book written, and some papers, but fame doesn't concern me one little bit. Maybe it's a bit negative, but the first line of the Hippocratic Oath commends itself to me: 'First, do no harm'. We can be such destructive creatures, emotionally, physically, intellectually, that a conscious decision to refrain from harm is essential.

I'd also like to be remembered for my agility with a pun. Speaking of which, I'm thinking of opening a strip-joint featuring characters from literature. The star turn will be Jane Eyre in a G-String. Boom-tish.

Thankyewverymuch. Bookings for weddings and barmitzvahs have not been rolling in.

Friday conundrum time!

It's Friday afternoon, so the staff here are obsessed with this Name Anagram Generator. If you're good at Scrabble, you can work out my actual name from Brainy Dean. The vice-chancellor, ironically enough, comes out as 'Principal Egos', and Zoot Horn is Calendar Girl. Poor Mark comes out as Jerk Moans.

Anyway, how about a conundrum. A practical one this time. Do I spend my spare money (e.g. what I don't spend on rent and books) on:

a) driving lessons. I'm 34 and haven't hitherto bothered.

b) more violin lessons. I wasn't much good. I'd practice now. Really.

c) smack. It's the only response to living in Wolverhampton.

What skill would you really like to acquire?

An actual, honest to goodness, FRIDAY conundrum

This is the first one to fall on a Friday for weeks!

So: confronted with an alien visitor demanding entertainment, what would you show them as the best and worst features of the town or country in which you live?

The best things of Britain have to be cheese and Wales (or Shropshire). For such a small country with dishonourable history of poor food, British cheeses are varied and wonderful. The worst thing? The cities: polluted, filthy, uncared-for and atomised, actively hostile to their own inhabitants, and horrible on Friday nights, which is a shame as places like Manchester would otherwise be great places to live. Narrowing it down to Wolverhampton, the best thing about it is that it's easy to escape. The worst thing is the dreadful, dismal architecture and town planning: the inhabitants treat it badly because it encourages nothing better. I love the multicultural nature of the UK - but hate the British attitude to education and languages (roughly: they all speak in English really, why should we bother?)

A lot to love, a lot to improve. Your turn!

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

I am forsaking you, leaving you to wander the streets clutching bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (great website, by the way), staring with mute desperation at passers-by, imploring them to pretend to be Plashing Vole for just a few seconds.

In other words, I'm having a long weekend, returning to my keyboard on Tuesday afternoon, probably.

Which means you'll be needing a Friday conundrum to keep you going.

What snippets of high or popular culture summarise your understanding of the world?

There are so many for me. I loved Marvin the Paranoid Android's observation that 'the dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning', and the talkshow host's claim on The Simpsons that 'your tears say more than real evidence ever could'. Arthur Dent is quite a hero, and I'm just not getting into the Peep Show debate. Chris Morris has a peculiarly accurate though misanthropic approach to life.

Arthur Dent (from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!

"This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

Marvin:

Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow.

Why stop now just when I'm hating it?

Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.

Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

George Eliot:

The world outside the books is not a happy one, Maggie felt (from The Mill on the Floss).

Meanwhile, here are a few lines from Iain Sinclair's Downriver, just because I like them:

A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk and Kish. You were obliged to super-impose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs.

It's a great book - much more wordy, as you can see from this excerpt, than my usual taste, but it's got breadth of imagination and a real nasty swipe at the wideboys, bankers, property developers and all that crew who happily demolished old London to build poxy designer flats for yuppies. It's therefore a very good book to be reading in the midst of our current situation.

Thursday's version of Friday's Conundrum

Hello all. I'm skiving tomorrow. Cynical Ben, Neal, James and I are going walking on the hills around Macclesfield, armed with pies, but lacking Dan and his map skills. After that, Neal and I are joining James for a weekend of carousing and debauchery in the fleshpots of Chester. Or, we'll find a poky indie club in which to feel old. Either way, no blogging for a few days.

How was David Mitchell's appearance, by the way? I'm afraid I missed it.

So - the Thursday Friday conundrum. It's easy. What, if everything had gone your way up to this point, should you be doing now? Where would you be, with whom? I know Cynical Ben would be where he is, with Jo, but be a published author, but he's a spawny get, to use the demotic. The rest of us - not always so easy.

I, of course, would have received the Golden Boot after scoring enough to get Stoke City to the top of the Premiership and won the Champions League. Again.

OK, maybe not. I wouldn't have minded being a decent fencer, and I'd certainly like to be living in the Welsh mountains, overlooking the sea, or perhaps in Ireland or Shropshire, holding down a full-time post in English/Welsh literature. A book or two published, debt-free, and perhaps somebody there with me. As long as she didn't scratch my records or crease my spines. Not too much to ask, is it?

Alternatively, I'd like to have been running a moderate-sized country, consigning large sections of the population to camps for possessing hairstyles, using mobile phones as stereos, dropping litter, voting Tory, driving 4x4s and generally being objectionable. This is not a vision I have yet relinquished, by the way.

Lughnasadh Friday conundrum

Tomorrow's Lughnasadh, the Irish festival of harvest, horse-racing and handfasting (trial year-and-day marriages), so you have a choice of conundrums (conundra?) today. A little more light-hearted after the previous couple…

1. With whom, given the sweep of history, would you have contracted a handfasting? I'm torn between Lauren Bacall (stunning actor, fiercely intelligent, independent and strongly left-liberal), Katharine Hepburn (ditto), Rosa Luxemburg (martyr of the German left) and Madame de Staël, intellectual, radical and bon viveuse. Or Ingrid Bergman just because.

2. Who's the unsung hero/heroine you'd bring to public attention? I'd go for 'Freeborn' John Lilburne, the real lefty radical of the English Civil War period, or Lewis Jones - author, communist, councillor, lover, syndicalist, prisoner, a man who went to Moscow during the purges and alone refused to join in with the compulsory standing ovation when Stalin walked in - all this before dying at 41 years old. Part of my PhD was on Jones's novels.

3. What cheese are you? Obviously this will change by mood and day. I'm tending towards an organic unpasteurised Stilton - not flashy, an acquired taste, may kill you.

Here's a clip from Hepburn's Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Once again, it's a Friday conundrum

Last week, I asked about the worst things said to you, and got some eye-poppingly cruel responses, mostly thrown by men at women.

But we're rarely pure victims and we're all capable of rudeness, insensitivity and cruelty. So it's time to 'fess up to the cruel things you've said.

To my shame, I once interrupted a philosophy student who'd been spouting inanely in the pub for hours with the words 'This isn't The Secret History, you aren't the intellectual elite, you scraped an E at A-level and we've heard enough'. It was cruel and pretty hypocritical given that I spent my undergraduate years in the pub, droning on about philosophy, politics and critical theory.

Obviously this isn't the only rude thing I've said to people - there've been too many to remember. If you've been on the receiving end, do remind me. I do recommend The Secret History though.

Mid-July Friday conundrum

What have you submitted to from politeness or for a quiet life?

Being a humble chap, I've often done the decent thing to avoid offence, but one occasion sticks in the mind (and gullet). I hate fish, gooseberries and raspberries. They all make me gag. When I was a young postgraduate, I was invited, with a young lady, to dinner at my favourite professor's home. Every course (I can't remember the starter), was something I absolutely hated. Not just disliked, but utterly hated. There was no way I was going to offend these lovely people, so I got on with it, and even said yes whenever seconds were offered. Meanwhile, said young lady giggled continuously, nudged me, and made unsubtle hints all the way through. I can't even think of that meal without shuddering - which makes me feel very guilty because apart from the food (which was beautifully cooked if you like that sort of thing), it was one of the high points of my social life so far…

So come on, what have you done to smooth the path?

Meanwhile, here's Cynical Ben. I must point out that I'm not teasing him with this photo: I just like the effect of the light.

Confession Conundrum

None of us are cool. There's no such thing, to paraphrase Barthes again - we just all exist in a constantly shifting lake of codes. However, there are things we all do which don't fit our self-images, or the image we'd like others to have of us. Guilty pleasures, I guess. So now's your chance to 'fess up.

Cynical Ben is banned. He has three trillion opinions, and specialises in being contrary anyway. He expresses contempt for my music, my clothes (especially my woolly hat and my favourite DM shoes: 'amazing what you can get on the NHS' was his latest witticism) and pretty much anything else, even though we know that he'll change his mind in a week. He's also banned because he bought a copy of Space Jam. That's the kind of contrariness in which he specialises. Tease him and he'll get even more aggressive in his defence. That said, he does have magnificent taste in literature and cheese. OK, he's not banned. Just don't take him too seriously, that's all I'm saying.

My confession. Despite my well-documented objections to policing methods, and to soap operas, and my love of high-concept drama, I also love watching The Bill. I know it's often very poor, and little better than any number of cheap soaps, but there's still something compelling about it. They react to current stories very quickly and rarely take the easy dramatic or narrative option. It depends on the writers in any particular week of course, and it's definitely less political than when it started, but it's still more than a rest home for ex-soap actors. I particularly enjoyed the special episodes done jointly with SOKO Leipzig, the German equivalent, though it was embarrassing that all the Germans had flawless English while the UK actors couldn't manage a word of German.

So there we are. I'm not nearly so suave and sophisticated as you might have thought (if you've had a lobotomy recently). Your turn!

Yet another Friday Conundrum

You've spent a pleasant evening (or extended period of time) with someone you think might make you happy. Suddenly, his or her response to something you say indicates that s/he has absolutely no comprehension of your outlook, philosophy, ideology or whatever you want to call it.

Do you

a) carry on regardless - who cares, the pheromones are raging;

b) carry on, accepting the hit however many times it happens because there's nobody else around;

c) run away - you can only repress the rage for so long?

d) something else

This week's Friday conundrum

Worst (or most misleading) book title, band name, album or other creative effort? What's the most disappointing experience of your life? The event or thing that seemed to promise everything, only to let you down? ('Birth' is not allowed).

Stone Roses' Second Coming gets some points for presumption, and loses several million for being rubbish. The Beatles is a pun beneath even me… I'll think of more later.