| Propaganda |
[Nov. 21st, 2009|02:22 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time | ] |
So I'm not the best person in the world. So, a few Christians set up a stall on Houghton Street giving away free tea and biscuits, in the attempt to lure the unsaved to a talk (with free pizza!) and all I do is take the tea and ponce off. Yes, I have taken advantage of their kindness without hearing their 'good news': but what of it?
For consider: this is a not uncommon tactic amongst merchants of any good, sacred or profane. The other day, I was poncing around Covent Garden, filling up on the 'free samples' of its various food-stuff vendors. Upon being asked whether I wanted to buy any of the aforementioned food-stuffs, I would reply that I was 'thinking about it' - an utterance both parties knew was false - and swan off. This strategy was working well - I was getting my fill and had not paid a penny - until I happened upon the cheese-monger. Having sampled some Gruyere and some soft Normandy cheese, I was about to waltz off when he offered me a deal on the Normandy one. I was rather bamboozled by this, so before I knew what was going on, I found that I had purchased half a pound of top-notch cheese. Even the experienced free-loader - c'est moi - can easily be persuaded to hand over his hard-won cash.
This is certainly a problem with the free tea: I am here running the risk of pledging my very soul to a church - and not even a decent one, such as the Anglican, Roman Catholic or Armenian Apostolic Churches, but a rag-tag band of Evangelicals, &c., who make up for their lack of decent liturgy or theology with praise-bands and propaganda - for the price of a cup of tea. This is surely folly. But consider - I have already escaped the 'immorality' objection outlined in the first paragraph. It is in fact the Christians, attempting to get me to exchange my soul for tea, who have set up the lousy bargain; that I take advantage of their evident wrong-doing will discourage them from foisting this deal on another. Morally, my actions are impeccable.
But am I not taking the risk of exchanging gold for brass - in this case, my soul for tea? Absolutely not. Since I am pretty much dead inside, there is very simply nothing with which I could make good in this exchange, just as a pauper may scurry round Covent Garden without incurring any risk. The reader may be confused in this defence: after all, isn't the typical 'conversion story' one of 'man loses himself in drink and drugs, then finds Jesus, &c.'? But such a man still has a very active internal life - the endless drive of the Will, either pushing him to exert himself further and further in the world, or hence driving the man to quash its screaming by liquor and drugs.
Not so with me: I am, in my external and internal life, all surface, nothing else. My concern is only with the moment: with the patterns of sounds and colours of the city, the texture of mood, the beauty of philosophical argument. They are not appreciated as representations of something greater, nor as things-in-themselves, but in their very aspect of appearances. Even my bouts of drink-induced melancholy are cultivated to appreciate the beauty of sadness: burdensome, when directed at an object; unbearable, when possessed by a subject - but quite beautiful, when appreciated for its own aesthesis.
***
Either way, at least the Christians give you tea: the Militant Atheists don't even have that courtesy. Now, there's a lot to object to in Dawkins et al., but their latest campaign just takes the logical biscuit. The campaign is this: a poster of a child saying 'please don't label me - let me grow up and let me choose for myself', with the upshot that calling a child 'a Christian' makes no more sense than calling a child a Keynsian.
The failure in this logic should be clear to the meanest intellect - grasping a doctrine is not a necessary condition for membership of a community. Although being a 'Keynsian' demands the grasp of economic theory, being a 'Briton' doesn't require the grasp of any doctrine. Similarly, although some churches (notably the Baptists) may demand the believer understand the doctrines of Christianity before being admitted to their community, churches who baptise in infancy convey membership into their community through that very method. Ergo, a baptised child is a Christian child, regardless of its understanding of the faith's doctrines.
***
The excellent ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sabotabby has asked me questions five! Being a good sort, I shall answer them (while eschewing the mimetic means by which they came to my attention).
1. How would you suggest I cook Care Bear meat, assuming it was actually meat and not stuffing?
The Care Bear (ursos arctos filos?), eschewing the rigours of its more manly cousins, the ursus arctos mittendorfi and the ursus arctos horriblis, would presumably have a rather fatty body. As such, I would recommend you cook it in the same way as you would cook pork belly.
2. What is your opinion on Kantian Nihilism?
Not as good as Platonic Nominalism or Schopenhauerian Optimism. Or Heideggerian Logical Positivism.
3. What is your favourite drink?
The Sazerac (rye whisky, absinthe, lemon, bitters) is some damn fine drinking, and they serve up a great one at Milk & Honey. But um er I'm laying low from there for a while after chinwising my way in there once too often.
4. Is Strauss hilarious, terrifying, or a combination of both?
Although you would be hard pressed to find much humour in Strauss, the following identifies some howlers in his method. I wouldn't agree that Strauss' work is entirely without interest - indeed, I find some of it highly insightful - but it should be taken with a long spoon. As to terror? Well, he identifies the problems of our nihilistic age very well; on the other hand, the doctrine of Neoconservatism, which I find rather worrying, does treat him as a guru of sorts. TO SUM UP: he is both.
5. How come when I look at your profile, you appear to be the only one on LJ with "champagne leninism" as an interest, and can this be remedied through better propaganda?
When I was a mere Master's student, I had two Leninist friends who were very rich and would ply me with the best champagne while we argued very loudly about politics and philosophy. As such, "champagne Leninists" are good to know. How can we get other people to know this good? Very simple - Leninists should be liberal, nay prodigal, with their distribution of champagne. The answer is not propaganda, but booze. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|04:07 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  aporetic | ] |
So yet again I am in in Turnpike Lane in the middle of the day, trying to write this stupid fucking essay on Socrates' disavowal of knowledge. Turns out the Apology isn't as simple as I thought, actually it's really really complex, to the extent that the more I read it the less I understand it. And I have to give it to my Professor in the middle of the day! Oh noes!!! Oh and then I have to translate Aeschylus and Herodotus. What larks.
Turnpike Lane is as depressing as ever, all the more so since the beautiful, crisp wather of October has decended into the slushy darkness of November. So depressed!!! I think I might make an onion tart to try and inject at least a semblance of happiness into my deeply aporetic state of mind. |
|
|
| Decisions |
[Oct. 16th, 2009|05:19 pm] |
Tufnell Park house. Slightly dingy but large room, sharing with one other person, £80p/w
Turnpike Lane room. Tiny but in lovely house with fab people. £70p/w.
The question is, which one to pick, since both have appeal? |
|
|
| Man vs. Wasp, Part II |
[Aug. 28th, 2009|01:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | ashamed | ] |
Today, I got chased down the street by a wasp, while trying not to drop my groceries.
I think I have just lost at life. |
|
|
| Y Wladwriaeth |
[Jul. 23rd, 2009|01:55 pm] |
So I went shopping in my local Oxfam today, and I think I have won. As well as an omnibus of GK Chesterton and Schoenberg's chamber-orchestra version of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, I also obtained a Welsh translation of Plato's Republic!
'Euthum i lawr ddoe i Peiraews gya Glawcon, fab Ariston, i weiddio ar y dduwies; a defyd dymunwm weled pa fodd y cadweny yr wyl, gan mai yn awr yr oeddynt yn ei dathlu gyntaf. Gwych, dybiwn i, oedd gorymdaith y tirgolion, serch bod golwg gystal hefyd ar y Thraciaid yn gorymdeithio...'
Welsh is such a beautiful language; a shame it has no real use, outside of travelling to Patagonia. |
|
|
| Joke |
[May. 21st, 2009|12:47 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
Q. What kind of bees make milk?
A. Boobies. |
|
|
| Absinthe |
[Apr. 15th, 2009|02:03 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | my head going POUND POUND POUND | ] |
The best sort of drunk: the worst sort of hangover |
|
|
| The Shakes |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|11:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pro-shakespeare | ] |
I was perusing the Guardian website today and found an article therein whose sheer, mind-boggling idiocy has sent me into a dipsomaniacal torpor. Since my life is notable by its absence of both melancholy and alcohol, the reader will be quick to conclude that the idiocy contained in the article was, indeed, mind-boggling; should the reader also wish to retreat into a bottle of absinthe and Lou Reed's Berlin, he could do worse than look here: here
For goodness' sake! The writer's main beef with Shakespeare seems to be that Shakespeare does not share the world-view of a 2009 liberal Islingtonite, and hence (for example) does not write strong female characters. I sha'n't bore the reader with a list of counterexamples to his claim (Rosalind? Cordelia?), for it is his entire approach to the text which irks me. One simply cannot judge a work on its political leanings, explicit or implicit - this is precisely the sort of idiocy which leads people to dismiss Wagner's immortal genius with references to his antisemitism. But it's also an approach which undermines the artwork's status as art. To judge a work of art on its ideological commitments (for example, its propogatation of such-and-such an attitude to (say) racism) is to treat it as an object - that is, it is a valid text only if it displays such-and-such and attitude towards a topic. However, this does not make any comment on the artwork qua artwork - should the artwork be destroyed, and replaced by a completely different object which propogates precisely the same attitude to the same topic, nothing would be lost here (a point which goes as much against the view that art is validated by the emotions it invokes).
Intrinsic to a work of art is the relationship which exists between the artist, the text itself, and the reader. The text's character as text exists only insofar as it is a mode of communication between the artist and the reader - a picture of a sunset is not a sunset. However, this makes a concomitant demand of the reader - to appreciate a work of art, qua work of art, is to appreciate it in its communicative aspect. The actual message communicated is quite incidental - what is important is how the artist achieves this. How does the artist build rounded characters? How does a composer vary a theme? How does an artist portray an object? A work of art is a demand that the reader take this critical approach towards it: this alone allows the work of art to be judged as a work of art. This alone allows one to appreciate the work of art with reference to its constituent parts, and hence as a self-subsistent totality, whose justification is itself, and not another object with similar causal properties. However, this is completely ignored in this fellow's failsome analysis.
Bah. This should have made more sense, but this absinthe is rather strong yo |
|
|
| Disputation |
[Mar. 18th, 2009|12:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bored | ] |
Sometimes there are pies, and that is an excellent thing. This world being one of great - almost obscene - beauty, the pie's filling is sometimes another pie (or other pies), thus making that Prince of foods - the meta- or pie-pie. To give an example, a pie containing chicken pies is a chicken pie pie.
Question - is the chicken pie pie itself a chicken pie?
Pro - A pie-type is defined by its filling: e.g., a pork pie is defined by its porcine contents, a custard pie by its custardy insides, &c. The chicken pie pie is thereby a chicken pie in virtue of its containing chicken.
Contra - A pie does not fall under a pie-class merely by virtue of having a certain kind of filling: it also requires the exclusion of other fillings. For example, a pork and chicken pie is neither a pork pie, nor is it a chicken pie, but is rather sui generis
Contra II - Suppose a chicken pie pie is a chicken pie. As such, the chicken pie pie pie, chicken pie pie pie pie, &c., are all chicken pies. As such, the (hypothetical) pie of all chicken pies is itself a chicken pie. However, were the pie of all chicken pies to be itself a chicken pie, it would have to contain itself - an absurdity. As such, a chicken pie pie is not itself a chicken pie, QED.
Pro - Such an analysis merely demonstrates the impossibility of characterising a pie with a universal quantifier - it does not show that a meta-pie does not fall under the class of pies it subsumes. By the same argument, the (hypothetical) pie of all pies cannot contain itself; however, this is not itself sufficient to demonstrate the non-existence of meta-pies. Better to suggest that a pie cannot contain all pies of a certain type, than to infer metaphysical conclusions about the make-up of meta-pies. |
|
|
| A World of Beauty, II |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|11:08 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
In the transition between winter and spring, even the greens are a mode of browns - and yet, how impudent, how beautiful, the irrepressible spendour of the snowdrop and the daffodil! |
|
|
| A World of Beauty |
[Feb. 24th, 2009|10:49 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | contemplative | ] |
Dave: Hey, did you know there is a journal called 'Irish Political Studies'?
ME: That is the most uninteresting fact I have ever heard in my life.
Dave: Well, what if I were to tell you I can see a tree from where I am sitting? Surely that would be more uninteresting?
ME: A tree! How lovely to have a reminder that it is indeed a world of beauty in which we live.
Dave: ...
ME: What sort of tree is it?
Dave: A cypress, I think.
ME: It is indeed a world of beauty in which we live. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Feb. 22nd, 2009|10:57 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | drunk | ] |
bahhh. how much does life suck! |
|
|
| Class Meme |
[Feb. 1st, 2009|12:19 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  classy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Wagner | ] |
I am a believer in hierarchy, and I belive this applies as much to class as it does to time. I prefer a system whereby people have a definite position in a class system, and can call that their own, rather than a system whereby atomised 'citizens' can find no place to call theirs, and spend their lives endlessly trying to advance their social positions. Good manners follows from this simple precept.
However, the reader will be asking: what class are *you*, Erotetica? The following meme should provide some clues:
1. Gum chewing: Just don't. Smoke a cigarette instead.
2. Knife: I have notoriously bad table manners. I eat with my mouth open, frequently taking at speed with my mouth full; I slug wine back at a rate of knots; large amounts of food and booze tend to fly around my person as I dine. I hold my knife and fork very far down the handle as I shovel food into my mouth; however, I use the knife more for gesticulation than for eating, pointing it at my interlocutors, slicing it through the air and suchlike - all the better to emphasise the point I am making.
If called upon, however, I can eat in a perfectly dainty manner, holding the knife and fork at their very tips, and laying them in a parallel position on the plate at the meal's end. It takes a large effort on my part to eat in this manner, however.
3. Sports: Fox-hunting, game-hunting, darts, chess.
4. Radio: 4.
5. Hygiene: I tend to bathe every few days. I dislike showering, preferring to spend several hours in the bath, reading Proust and suchlike.
6. Drink: Yes. French wines, scotch, bourbon, ale; all served in ludicrous quantities.
7. Restroom/napkin/couch: I do not refer/napkin/sofa.
8. Room the sofa goes in: living room/lolfa.
9. Groceries: I get my vegetables and fruit from the green-grocer's, I get my meats from the butcher's (different animals at different ones), I get my fish from the fish-monger's, my bread from the bakery, and suchlike.
10. Name: An indifferent one.
11. Socks: Plain black.
12. Midday meal: I tend to wake up at around 2pm, so there is no such entity for me, as I tend to avoid songustatory activities. Otherwise, if called upon to be awake at such a ludicrous time, I refer to it as 'lunch'.
13. Dogs: Horrible, horrible, vile creatures! I am ludicrously scared of dogs. I can't stand to be in the same room as dogs. If I see a dog jumping around on a street I'm walking on, I'm pretty anxious. If it's running up towards me and barking or whatever, I become a gibbering wreck. I have been known to shout at dogs, curl up into a ball, or run away panicked if they approach me - I 'wig out', as a psychiatrist might say.
14. TV: Oh, dear. No, thank you.
15. Holiday: Erm, anywhere, really. I tend to prefer the countryside to the city - I would, for example, prefer to visit the Deep South than New York.
16. School: An indifferent comprehensive. Then on to LSE.
17. Asking for clarification: I beg your pardon?
18. Newspaper: The Telegraph or The Times. |
|
|
| Gradschool vs. Becoming a Chef |
[Jan. 30th, 2009|03:41 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  angry | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Olivier Messiaen | ] |
Ugh. I today vaguely thought about returning to gradschool but it turned out most of them had closed their applications for the year, which was sort of lame but what are you going to do.
-Why would you return to gradschool?
-The best reason I can think about - to investigate an area of philosophy further.
-Which?
-The history of Conservative thought, from, let's say, Burke & de Maistre to, say, Voegelin & Strauss; more specifically, how these thinkers related to the concepts of the subject and the political in modern philosophical thought, in particular, Kant and Hegel.
-So, apply.
-*&*!*(*
-What's the matter? Does five years of living off Ramen noodles and potato soup sound unappealing?
-Not really. I can do the whole 'being an ascetic' thing. THE BIG PROBLEM with all of this, of course, is that since JOHN RAWLS modern political thought is rubbish. The standard story of modern political thought goes something like this - pre-RAWLS, political thought was vague and Hegelian and not worth considering; however, RAWLS came along and tidied it up and made it vaguely presentable and worth talking about. However, this story is completely false. If you look at the political thinkers of the 20th century pre-Rawls - let's say, Schmitt, Strauss, Voegelin, Benjamin & Adorno, Arendt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Berlin, you will find thinkers who actually think - who articulate worldviews, and make philosophy something which matters. These thinkers examine the relation between the examined life and the engaged life of the polis, trying to articulate the tension between the two.
-And post-Rawls?
-You get these endless, dry, dessicated husks of books which concern uninteresting things such as social justice and feminism and suchlike, which base their theories upon this stupid idea of the 'social contract' which Hume and Shaftesbury and de Maistre had shown to be empty 200-odd years ago.
-And isn't that relevant to the real world?
-In a sense, much more so. In a sense, a grad student's nth commentary upon the nth commentary upon the nth commentary upon A Theory of Justice can tell us more about, say, how to run a healthcare system than the complete works of Voegelin could. But still, I cry foul. I'm interested in the concept of politics as such and its relation to engaged subjectivity, not in some poxy adjustment to the Veil of Ignorance. Plus, since all modern political thought is basically Liberal, Socialist, Feminist, Secular and Democratic, and I oppose all of these 'philosophies', I would be hounded out of any university at which I teach.
-Isn't it appealing to be chased out of a university by a group of pimply undergraduates baying for your blood?
-The thought does have a certain appeal...
BAH. It is all a pile of wank, if you ask me, and the thought of tutoring the aforementioned pimply undergraduates in this crap, jumping through hoops to get tenure and so on whilst living in some nice house in Hampstead sounds EVEN WORSE. It's not very condusive to the Examined Life is what I'm sayin' here.
ON THE OTHER HAND, if I became a chef or something, I could cook delicious meals and make people happy. Nothing poncy, nothing foreign, nothing 'molecular' - rather, good, English food (there is such a thing, o scoffers - indeed, Escoffier himself trained in Britain!), served up with lashings of claret and real ale. Indeed, since basically all of my philosophising these days seems to concern the relation of MAN and NATURE and man's reconceptualisation of NATURE into CULTURE and suchlike, is it not more philosophical to cook?
-No.
-Oh. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jan. 21st, 2009|12:06 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | bored | ] |
I may have found the greatest webcomic in existence! The Easy Breather (she being the eponymous heroine of the webcomic which is the subject of our discussion) is a frequently-nude, crime-fighting heroine, who spends her days fighting such baddies as the 'Tobacco Pusher' (who seeks to 'push' tobacco [or rather, its concept] onto people) and campaigning for clean air. Those of you who enjoy comicbooks and wish to follow her adventures could do worse than look here: http://easybreather.comicgenesis.com
I am not convinced, however, at the author's assertion that 'smokers don't win, and winners don't smoke'. Winston Churchill was seldom seen without a cigar in his mouth, and yet he pwned Hitler; he would also have pwned Stalin had FDR not got in his way. Stalin was an afficianado of the pipe, and he not only pwned Trosky and the left-Bolsheviks, but *also* pwned the right-Bolsheviks in his Five Year Plan; he then went on to pwn FDR by tricking him into allowing Eastern Europe to fall under Soviet tyranny. Furthermore, the new President of the USA is a well-known smoker (though is shamefully trying to quit this most awesome of habits), and, by pulminorally invoking the Muse, has beaten his rival - the anti-tobacco John McCain - into a cocked hat, hopefully leading us to a happy, properous, smokey future.
***
When I was younger I was *so* into Jerry Fodor. He wrote the best paper on concepts ever, and was also the lulziest analytic philosopher of them all. I have, however, recently come across this sentence from Steven Pinker:
Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?
To which Fodor replies: “Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world?” |
|
|
| On Darts |
[Jan. 7th, 2009|09:14 pm] |
I was destined to be one of the great atheletes of my generation - however, in granting me a physically weak and small body, with little-to-nothing in the way of gainliness, Fate provided its typically intractible foe to Destiny. This point was brought home to me as a four-year-old, where I was called upon to compete in a hundred-metres race on my school sports day. I could see the tape marking the finishing line, and thought that, just by an epic force of will, I could best my classmates and be the one to break the tape, winning the plaudits of parents, educators and children alike. Alas, it was not to be - not only did I finished an ignominuous last, I realised that the object of my goal (to break the tape) would not even have been accomplished even had I won (the tape being lifted over the head of the victor). I decided, instead, to retreat into the life of the mind I was granted, as a 'booby prize', a copy of Spengler's 'Decline of the West' and the rest, as they say, is history.
As a child and teen-ager, I therefore eschewed the pleasures which the sporting life provides, and even thought it beneath me to watch sportsmen. I now concede this is something of an error. Although watching rugger or footer bring back far too many painful memories of my teen-age years, shivering like Scott of the Antarctic on some accursed playing field whilst being pummelled whenever some oik saw fit to subject me to a tackle, there are a few sports which I do genuinely enjoy. Being a Hegelian, the reader will be unsurprised to learn that an enjoyable sport is not, for me, one whereby man confronts his nature as an embodied being - they are those where man confronts his being-towards-death, and those which confirm his nature as a rational animal.
Perhaps the apotheosis of sport is bullfighting. The two conditions which I enumerate above are surely fulfilled here - the matador is undertaking an activity where he has a very risk of being killed; however, he puts the delicate ballet of man and beast - a thing of great aesthetic beauty - above any fear he has of the grave. He confronts the irresistible, sublime force of nature: the ferocity and puissance of the bull - with the human attributes of beauty: courage, skill and intelligence; the matador is, by putting his body at mortal risk, able to defeat nature in its most destructive aspects.
The English equivalent of this sport is arguably fox-hunting. Fox-hunting is, contrary to the tiresome claims of its opponents, a form of pest control - the fox being the enemy of settled people everywhere. However, rather than treating the fox as a mere pest, the hunt turns the fox into a sacrifice, into an object given its apotheosis in a bloody ritual. In both bull-fighting and fox-hunting, the essential animality of the fox or bull is respected - we do not treat them as mere pests or sources of meat, rather, we venerate their animal natures - however, we demonstrate the sovereignty of man over nature. This sovereignty, like that of kings, is founded by violence and confirmed by the war; however, it is an essentially beneign hierarchy, able to recognise and respect the condition which those in the lower orders find themselves. People often comment on how funny it is that I am a keen supporter of the hunt, and yet refuse to eat factory-reared meat - hopefully, this paragraph will put such questions at rest.
Indeed, the ritual of fox-hunting is one which brings all aspects of a village together - the lord, the vicar, the black-smith, the farmer, the equestrian - all of whom bring their particular talents to bear in pursuit of the fox. It is a cliche that the opponents of this sport are motivated by class-hatred - this analysis is, however, not quite correct. So many socialists enjoy the comforts of the aristocracy - as one socialist friend of mine commented, 'people call me a champagne socialist, but I don't think that's true - I mean, it has to be a good vintage'. No, what is being objected to in the hunt is precisely the harmonious working of a hierarchy, rather than its diffusion into mutually destructive interests; similarly, what is being objected to is not the killing of the fox as such, but the fact that nature can be venerated in its dominance, rather than being reduced to a tool by which the almighty State may feed the proletariat (as we can see in Stalin's 'progressive' agricultural policy towards Kalmykia, which, in ignoring the Kalmyk's wisdom regarding how to tend the land, has resulted in Europe's first desert).
I could discuss here the appeal of fisticuffs or of cricket (which is surely the perfect marriage the Olympian ideal of idleness with the English ideal of the gentleman). But the subject of my discourse here is darts. This sport may be argued to be the absolute abnegation of the equestrian or tauromachian pursuits - a point which I will concede. It is not aristocratic, but is resolutely egalitarian - anybody can afford three darts; its greatest sportsmen fall far short of the athletic ideal, sporting 'beer-bellies' and being seldom seen without a cigarette or pint in their free hand.
We should take care not to overstate the differences here - after all, could the aristocratic age of the Greeks have rendered the towers of Ilium topless, been achieved if its soldiers were not given the courage derived from wine and hydromel? No - and, similarly, the dart-player's performance is drastically improved after quaffing a few pints, as is the case with the more aristocratic pursuit of sharp-shooting. In the sports which I celebrated earlier in this missive, I emphasised the sportsman's overcoming of nature; however, the darts-player has to overcome a far more implacable foe - himself. One of the joys of watching a great game of darts is to see the darts-man trying to hit the 'zone', where his aim is true and he scores highly. One can frequently tell which sports-man is losing a leg just by his bearing and countenance - uninterestedly throwing his missiles at the board, scoring averagely. However, one of the joys of darts is the relative difficulty of checking out (one's winning shot must hit a double). Although a difficult finish - hitting, say, a treble, a single, a double - is a joy to watch, if the dartsman who is ahead cannot hold his nerve and score a winning shot, it is perfectly possible for the laggard to hit 'the zone', scoring highly and, in the next round, checking out. Darts, in promoting the ability to hold one's nerve under fire, promotes one of the most important virtues a man may possess. It promotes a mental agility with numbers. One of the proofs of the superiority of the Imperial measures over the detestible Metric equivalents is the fact that using Imperial measurements demands more nimble mental arithmetic; similarly, with darts, calculating the shots one needs to finish a match provides ample training for a young mind for a career in a good investment bank, where a head for numbers is a pre-requisite.
We therefore see the glory of darts can be charaterised as proletarian, bourgoise or aristocratic. And it is for this reason that darts is a pub game. Just as, in the Christian religion, a peasant may take communion with the land-owner, finding a radical equality in Christ, so too do Englishmen of different classes find an equality in the pub (this is why I think the best name for a pub is 'The Barrowbow and Banker', in London Bridge - although both do arduous jobs to wildly differing rewards, both will find a welcome, a pint and a pie here; for similar reasons, I castigate the 'gastro-pub' as the work of the Devil). Under the benign eye of the landlord and the skilful service of his barmaids, the pub is a community of essential equality - it does not matter if you are a millionaire, if you are causing trouble, you will expelled as surely as if you are an urchin. The egalitarianism of darts is the perfect game to bring a pub together - a peasant has as much chance to win at the dart-board as the banker. As Homer's hexameters provided a rhythm for his hymn to war, so too do the triple thump of the darts provide a rhythm for the pub.
I would therefore say to readers of this blog - watch darts on TV. It is an absolutely topping game. |
|
|
| Holy crapsticks! |
[Dec. 9th, 2008|10:03 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | ecstatic | ] |
Tomorrow I am going to London to see PIERRE BOULEZ conduct works by OLIVIER MESSIAEN!
I'm so excited I could spunk my goddamn pants. |
|
|
| Mmee |
[Nov. 13th, 2008|02:22 pm] |
|
If you saw me in a police car, what would you think I got arrested for? |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
