Kaddish for the City

I had a dream last night. Or rather this morning. It wasn’t a very pleasant dream.

I dreamed a song. It rhymed and scanned and everything and had a rather plonky piano accompaniment. It was in the voice of an American black anti-capitalist Christian suicide bomber who was going to detonate a nuclear bomb to destroy a big chunk of New York because the city was so full of sin. He hated abortion and he hated racism and he hated capitalist exploitation and he wanted to show them all how bad they were.

And the song had angry moralising and absurd self-justification and stuff about how he was going to let the pure white light shine through his heart and soul into the city to clean out its dark places; and how he was going to hold his arms spread out as he died in a gesture of love to those he was killing. Or as it occurred to me while dreaming it, some blasphemous parody of the Crucifixion.

The dream was, I think a reaction to news on the radio. I had got the Euro elections and the BNP and the “Christian” party and the Tamil Tigers and the recent murder of a doctor in the USA all mixed up in my sleepy head and my anger against us electing racists and Nazis was coming out in a dream.

It was pretty unpleasant and as I woke up I realised that the piano accompaniment was what was playing on BBC Radio Three at the time – Ravel’s [i]Chanson hébraïques[/i] a setting of some Yiddish and Hebrew traditional songs. And I think – I’m not sure because I was still more asleep than awake and I don’t exactly understand Yiddish and Hebrew though I recognise some of it – I think the song was Kaddish.

And that was an odd juxtaposition.

If that’s what the BNP getting elected does to my brain I think we need to do something about them

A post about nothing – feel free to comment about anything

This is just a sort of test, a placeholder, The idea was to replace a dead link in some other web pages with something that went somewhere. I was intending to update the previous post with more pretty pictures of high-density low-rise housing in North London but I can’t easily do that until I have reactivated my Flickr account and I can’t do that until the bank sends me a new card after having cancelled my last one because I naughtily spent lots of money I didn’t have. Even though it wasn’t really my fault. And the unpaid phone bills probably take precedence over Fickr, or even my intention to go to Glastonwick

But I hate to short-change my loyal readers (all both of them) with an entirely empty post, so here is a poem:

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days -
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

John M. (Mike) Ford

(Copied from Making Light )

Its like, quotative.

A minor triumph in my ongoing quest to collect samples of the way we speak now!

Genuinely overheard on a bus in London. The speakers were young women, I assume late teens or very early twenties, talking about their college courses and what they intended to do next. One of them seemed to be at SOAS, the other was at an American university but doing a short course abroad here in London. But they seemd to know each other, and both had what sounded like English public-school accents to me.

[...]

“Where are you staying?”

“I’ve got a flat at Waterloo”

“Like, Awesome!“

“I’m supposed to be like staying at the course accommodation but its like SO small! It’s like TINY”

[...]

“Then there is a course called ‘Issues in contemporary British politics’. It’s about, like, Britishness”

[...]

“There’s quite a lot of writing but its not, you know, like what I’m used to”

[...]

“He’s asking me. like complex numbers, and I can’t do them in my head”

[...]

“I was like going to go to some like third-world country but it was too much like these Christian missionaries who were killed so my parents were like: ‘You’re not going to go!’ I can never remember the name of the place.”

You were going to go there and you can’t remember where it was?”

“It was like begining with ‘C’”

“Cambodia?”

“That’s the place. I keep on getting it mixed up with California”.

I swear that’s true. That’s what they said.

Maybe they were having a laugh. Maybe they are budding radio comedy writers improvising their new show. The world might be a better place if more radio comedy writers were rather cute young Asian women. Not that I know that both these women were actually Asian. They were sitting behind me on the bus, though I had seen one of them get on. Maybe they noticed that I was listening to what they were saying and were deliberatly playing up. Like.

Anthroposophical?

Over heard on a train in London

“I met X going to the library – you know, the anthroposophical business…”

That’s not a word you hear every day.

Especially

Two business types in cheap suits, SE London or urban Kent accents (that’s “Estuary English” to the posh among you), one maybe in his twenties, one perhaps forty. Planning office coup. Colleague A, apparently, isn’t up to the job and needs a little help. Manager B has other things on her mind and anyway she isn’t “technical”. Things have come to a head due to some critical email that makes A. look very bad. Manager C. needs keeping out of it. The younger man was being subtly invited to “help” A, with the unspoken promise that soon he will get a promotion out of it, maybe even step into A.’s job if he has to go. I never quite worked out what business they were in, but it seemed to involve mobile phones and providing internet access to clients. I wondered if maybe they worked for NTL, sorry, Virgin Media. Trite advice was passed around – the best being “Keep the customer in the loop – even if there is bad news”. If it wasn’t for the suits (I don’t see a lot of suits these days) they could easily be the sort of blokes who drink in some of our local pubs. Maybe Charlton supporters rather than Millwall.

Then “anthroposophical”. Where did that come from?

There I was making up stories about 5-a-side football fans from Sidcup with a couple of A-levels and ten years experience cabling things up for BT getting themselves jobs in some kind of barrow-boy comms provider in the city, maybe even calling themselves a Consultancy, the IT equivalent of Estate Agents, and now they have a library and use words like “anthroposophical”.

Thousand-factor growth!

I just listened to the BBC r4 Today programme. Interview with a bloke representing Amazon, asking why they made “only” 100 million dollars profit on sales the size of a planet. (It sounds like precision pricing to me – a cause for congratulation or admiration, not criticism)

I was only half asleep, but I think I heard him say they were experiencing “thousand-factor growth” WTF is that? Does it really mean something? Or have we discovered an entire new strain of managementspeak bollocks? Or did I make it up?

Its not anywhere in Google – well it is now

That half woke me up, and I really did hear him say that Amazon is competing with the “entire retail waterfront”.

That’s kind of wonderful and makes me want to rant on about the way the growth and development of retail businesses parallels the evolution of prokaryotes into eukaryotes (its them Golgi bodies that count), single-celled organisms protists into metazoa, plants, fungi (etc etc), hypothetical ancestral simple blobby or tubelike animals into diploblasts and triploblasts, villages into towns into cities into megacities, and riverside wharfs into docks – which are exact analogies of Golgi bodies. Its all about increasing the surface area across which transactions can take place. But if I kick of on that one I’ll never get to work this morning.

Hey, I could go off on a riff about bacterial and metabolism and ecology and how some of it is exactly analogous to competitive advantage in economics – which (unlike most of economics) is almost certainly generally true. (I think I might be able to show that, but the margin of this website is not large enough to hold the proof) Any economic theory that works for bacteria (indeed, naked enzymes) probably has something going for it. Maybe I did ought to do that PhD. If I could only work out what the question is.

Anyway, maybe these odd phrases are current in Amazon culture. Or maybe Amazon Bloke – whose name I didn’t catch and can’t find on the BBC R4 website and I’ve got better things to do than be downloading old interviews in audio format (We Love Transcripts) – is “r-selected for contributions to the lexicon” (I didn’t make that up – a lecturer at Birkbeck said it about the brilliant but vile Haeckel), someone who blurts out new things to say, some of which stick, some of which don’t.

Either way, its fun. More fun than Yet Another Blair Interview (YABI, YABI, YABI) which is on the radio now. The Prime Minister should go. He should have gone last year.

Ethnopoesis, or, Neocons nicked my new word!

I thought I had made up a cool new word. I was walking through Russell Square in the rain – its a beautiful drizzly first of December in London, not quite cold enough to need to wear a coat, but cool enough that you don’t feel too hot if you do, lovely subdued light, mottled pail sky, water everywhere, the trees have finally shed most of their leaves in the last week or so, the limes that are so common as street trees in south-east London and the planes in Bloomsbury are holding on to their last few yellow raggedy leaves flopping about in the wind – and I was thinking about a question someone asked on the Ship of Fools a while back, Why is South Africa more liberal? (which was originally about legalisation of same-sex partnerships)

The obvious reply to the question is another question: “why do people expect different African societies to be like each other?”

And so my thoughts drifted. OK I hadn’t got to Russell Square yet, I was still on the 68 bus at this time, and wishing I’d waited a minute more to get on the 188 behind because it goes straight to the north side of the square (saving me a road crossing and about two minutes to get to work) And I was composing a little story in my head about it, using bits of African history to illustrate the idea of a stateless society or a functioning anarchy, comparing the Igbo with the Yoruba, or the Kikuyu with the Baganda, or the Nuer with the Dinka and Shilluk.

And I made up the word “ethnopoesis” for “Deliberatly writing a people into being”. It could be used for the literary side of ethnogenesis, the rhetorical and mythical aspect of the definition of a new ethnic group. Its not often I invent a new word while walking from the bus-stop to work. A pun as well. That’s Deeply Cool. I was pleased with myself.

Ands then I arrived at college and searched for the word on Google. And there are twenty-one hits. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! I am beaten to it! (and I got slightly crosser about it at my Rant of the Month site)

I confess. “pail sky” was a genuine mistake, but I have now noticed it and I could change it if I wanted to. But I don’t. Because its full of water and some of it is the same kind of dull silvery grey as the dirty zinc bucket I have at home.re,