Time is a strange commodity.

Our watches tell us it’s ticking away at a standard rate and that it’s a constant, although anyone familiar with physics knows this is wrong, and it’s just a construct to keep us all in place at our shitty jobs.

Incidentally, I just heard today that in an experiment involving neutrinos at the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the speed of light was observed to have been surpassed. If true, the implications for physics, and our entire understanding of the universe may have to be radically altered…

But back to time.

Do you ever feel that time is so ephemeral and so speedy that you are hardly able to grasp a hold of events as they shoot past?

I feel like this when I’m on holiday, which lends a strange otherworldly air to the whole experience.

Let me explain a bit more.

Normally we don’t really notice the passage of time in our daily humdrum routine existences. We know we’re fatter than we were a year ago, and with less hair, and we aren’t earning as much money, perhaps, but on a day to day level we can’t easily detect change and can get a handle on things because there is an illusion of stability.

But in a way, nothing exists. I don’t mean this as a pessimistic manifestation of existentialist angst, but think about it.

The past has gone, and is just a ghostly memory which will fade, and the future hasn’t happened yet, and so doesn’t exist.

That leaves us with now. This is the only point at which we are experiencing things directly, the only point which is ‘real.’

But if you go deeper, you find that this point of real life is minuscule. If you try to pair it down with a temporal scalpel, you could say that one second ago is the past, and the next second will be the future, leaving a tiny window of now. But you could keep paring this down infinitely until you find that there is in fact no ‘now‘ at all, just the intersection between two unreal states. That’s quite a disturbing thought, isn’t it?

In our normal lives this kind of thing doesn’t matter, because what we did last week pretty much resembles what we’re doing this week, and chances are it will be virtually the same as what we get up to next week.

So there’s an illusion of stability and permanence brought about by the repetitiveness of everyday life, which dulls our awareness of the march of time and the ephemeral nature of all things.

On holiday it’s different, though…

It’s been eleven days since I returned from a three-week trip to France and Portugal.

Now I’m locked into a kind a stasis in which I go to bed at 4:30am, get up at noon, go and hang out in a cafe for a few hours, go back home, listen to some music, cook, watch DVDs, process photos, read books – everyday precisely the same routine, a lethargic torpor partly caused by extended jet-lag but also a desire to try to prolong this stretch of time before the horror of going to work starts again.

When I was in Europe, however, I was experiencing new things every day, changing my location frequently, meeting new people, and the whole thing shot past at a velocity which seemed so high that it was hard to keep a hold of anything.

I took to jotting down the events of each day in a little notebook, because if I didn’t, I had the feeling that they might vanish, leaving no trace of their existence.

Sometimes this feeling of temporal velocity and my inability to construct a wide enough ‘now‘ upon which to build a stable vantage point led me feel that the events passing before my eyes were not real, and actually appeared somehow ‘thin‘ and distant.

I felt like an observer watching someone else’s film at high speed, that my connection to the surroundings, the people and events was so tenuous that I couldn’t tether myself to them sufficiently to make them real.

And indeed, in recent years when I return home from extended trips I always feel as if I had never actually left, and only my photos prove that I was really there (and the enormous hole in my bank account, of course).

It’s for this very reason that I deliberately try to force myself to enjoy every new vista in quiet contemplation before picking up the camera.

So many people on holiday are snapping away that paradoxically, their very attempts to preserve the moment actual heighten their inability to connect with and experience it in any real sense, adding to the feeling of its unreality and ephemeralness.

How sad then, that it is the mundane repetitiveness of everyday life that keeps us grounded and lends our lives a sense of stability in a sea of constant flux, rather than the spontaneous adventures into new territories which are gone in the blinking of an eyelid, leaving faint traces of a fantastic ‘otherness‘ to be chased after in daydreams like a rare butterfly, always just out of reach…

‘Prolonging the Now‘ – well, that sounds like a great song title to me, but it’s also something to strive for in making the most of life.

Just as a Buddhist acolyte seeks to transform his insights into a permanent state of satori, so should we be looking how to deepen our connectedness with reality in order to heighten experience.

However, it has just occurred to me that some people might argue that it is precisely those repetitive rituals of daily life that should be cherished and enjoyed since they are the only realities. ‘The more you travel, the less you see‘ kind of thing.

As Hitchcock might say (Robyn, not Alfred), these are all very much late September kind of thoughts….

I’ve just deleted my Facebook account, and it’s so very liberating to have dispensed with all that vacuous nonsense.

I was an early adopter, signing up just out of curiosity when it was it in its infancy, then leaving it dormant because I didn’t really know what it was for.

Then it hit the big time, and very soon I found myself with a whole roster of new ‘friends.’

Sometimes I thought it was good: old acquaintances in other countries found me and we would exchange messages. Family members too could keep in touch.

But very soon I found myself pressured into accepting friend requests out of political expediency from people at work I dislike.

Then people from school who I didn’t really know would appear, and I would casually (and foolishly) accept them. Likewise large numbers of my students. The vast majority of both types would submit friend requests, only to never engage in a single word of communication once connected. Why did they bother, if they didn’t want to get in touch?

Far from facilitating interaction, then, Facebook has proved to be an exercise in futility.

I’ve no desire to post anything on my ‘wall,’ since I’m effectively muzzled by the nature of the people in my friends list, and would never ‘share’ anything even remotely personal. Similarly, I have little interest in the meaningless drivel posted by others.

So, what is the point of Facebook?

I have never met or got to know anyone new there.

I’ve had next to no meaningful interaction with my family or ‘friends.’

I don’t need it as a platform for my ideas and thoughts, since I have two websites and two blogs for that.

Even if faced with loneliness, these are no substitute for real face-to-face human interaction.

I would have got rid of this shallow and superficial all-pervasive monster long ago, but I kept thinking ‘what if someone wanted to find me, what if friends want to send a message – shouldn’t I just leave it open for that?’

Now, I realise, this is unnecessary.

If anyone wants to get in touch with me, there’s this thing called email. It’s private. It’s easy to use. My friends and family have this channel already.

Likewise, if someone else wants to find me, an internet search will work wonders.

Being part of Facebook is not only a pointless waste of time, it’s allowing yourself to be sucked into the paranoid creation of some dysfunctional megalomaniacs.

Think this is an exaggeration? See what happens when you try to leave.

First, try to find the ‘deactivate’ button buried somewhere in your settings menu.

You might assume that pressing this leads to your account (and all of your personal data) being deleted, but oh no.

You are transported to a page where Facebook tries to emotionally blackmail you. Almost unbelievably, a selection of your friend’s images are displayed, together with a message that they will miss you if you leave.

One might be tempted into thinking this was a joke, but no: despite having five hundred million souls signed up, they can’t bear it if just one slips away, and they’ll do anything to keep you there.

So, assuming the blackmail doesn’t work, and you decide to go anyway, you then make the astounding discovery that ‘deactivating’ your account doesn’t mean ‘deleting’ it at all.

Facebook wants to make it as difficult as possible for you to leave, and thus ‘deactivation’ just means that while your mugshot and profile are removed from the public gaze, all of your photos and data are stored away somewhere so that you can revive your account any time by just logging in again.

That’s right, they’re going to keep your stuff for you just in case you ‘change your mind.’

To really shut down your account you’re going to have to work a little harder : there’s no button for this – you actually have to submit a request, and even then they don’t immediately shut things down – they wait two weeks, in case you have ‘second thoughts’ about your rash and unreasonable desire to regain control of your privacy and start communicating with people the good old fashioned way, by using your vocal chords and looking into their eyes.

For those who don’t know, Demjanjuk is a 91 year old Ukrainian collaborator and mass murderer. During World War II as a Red Army soldier he was captured by the invading Nazis, then willingly changed sides to become a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. Here, during a period of seventeen months around 200,000 people, mostly Jews, were exterminated. Demjanjuk has been found guilty of taking part in the deaths of some 27,900 of this total.

Like many involved in the Holocaust, Demjanjuk somehow evaded detection and managed to become a naturalised US citizen, but eventually his past caught up with him and he was extradited to Israel where he spent eight years in detention, accused of being the notorious ‘Ivan the Terrible,’ a sadistic guard at Treblinka, another death camp (more than 700,000 victims). Unfortunately, despite clear evidence to his having been involved in the Holocaust, he was found not to be the aforementioned guard, and had to be released.

However, Demjanjuk, now stripped of his US citizenship, was extradited to Germany in 2009 to stand trial again, this time prosecutors placing him in the correct death camp.

Although the sentence seems somewhat mild given the enormity of his crimes, the point is that justice has been done, despite a gap of nearly seventy years, and this despicable individual will be remembered for what he was – a willing mass murderer who showed no remorse for his crimes.

He may not have been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, but he certainly fits the bill for that of Sobibor…

DANIIL KHARMS – “Today I Wrote Nothing” (2007)

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was an obscure and bizarre Russian writer, poet and dramatist of the twenties and thirties.

A member of the absurdist ‘OBERIU‘ circle based in Leningrad, little of whose work has filtered through into the West, his unruly artistic outpourings became increasingly hard to realise by the late 1920′s as Soviet intolerance of the unorthodox grew.

Finding occasional work as a writer of children’s stories (very suitable given his absurdist sensibilities), his eccentric existence on the fringes of society came to an early end when the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany in June 1941.

Escaping the draft by feigning madness (not difficult for Kharms), he was subsequently arrested by the NKVD in a round-up of suspicious characters as the Germans encircled the city, and was sent to a psychiatric prison where he perished from starvation the following year, sharing the fate of hundreds of thousands of fellow civilians caught in the siege. He was still in his thirties.

This volume collects together some of his fragmented and unusual output in the form of stories, plays and poems, for the most part brief in the extreme.

As an absurdist, Kharms‘ work is wonderfully free of restraint. His stories end prematurely when he can’t be bothered to finish, or even start them. His characters often do nothing, or die suddenly for no apparent reason. Violence prevails as in the unexpurgated Grimm stories, surreal and nonsensical. A deep dislike of children and old people underpins the proceedings (the former being ironic in that Kharms‘ work for children was what fed him and established his posthumous reputation).

Some pieces are intensely funny, but many are so wilfully obscure and futile that they are almost pointless to read, which, I suppose, paradoxically, is the whole point.

Nevertheless, after finishing the book I felt I wanted more, having become immersed in the strange world of Mr Kharms, where people die of blows to the head from giant cucumbers, Pushkin and Gogol appear in a play in which they just fall over each other repeatedly, and Frenchmen try endlessly to find the most comfortable furniture in their rooms.

A great read for people willing to experiment and who do not need the conventions of plot and linearity (or indeed logic) to derive enjoyment from the written word.

Think of Kharms as the literary equivalent of some of the more extreme forms of modern painting that were appearing in the same era: breaking boundaries and challenging the audience, like shock troops, but ultimately not for everyone.

Here are two prominent examples of Kharms‘ micro-fiction:

 

BLUE NOTEBOOK No.10

There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a rehead arbitrarily.

He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him any more.

 

THE MEETING

Now, one day, a man went to work, and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.

And that’s it, more or less.

More of my book reviews can be found here.

It would come on in the evening, usually at bedtime, often as I lay awake with my head on one side, waiting for transportation to the Land of Nod.

Instead, I found myself in a bizarre sensory juxtaposition that was hard to put into words, let alone make any sense of. I don’t remember ever being scared of it, and indeed, I seemed to relish it to a certain extent. No, we’re not talking onanism here, you filthy-minded readers, something much more cerebral – quite literally.

Attempts at explaining this strange experience to siblings and parents were met with incomprehension, as far as I can recall, and as I got older its frequency of occurrence sharply declined, although it returned sometimes, always at night, and when it did I welcomed it like an old friend.

See, what happens is, all of a sudden, you are looking at something, or maybe not even looking, just having an awareness of an object, say the cupboard door two metres in front of you, and it feels as if it is simultaneously so close to your nose it is almost inside, and yet so far away that it resides on the other side of the universe.

This feeling of the infinitely close and infinitely distant is incredibly overwhelming, and you feel as if you are floating on a sensory wave, disorientated in the extreme, but at the same time enjoying it immensely from the confines of your warm bed.

It used to make me giggle like a lunatic, much to the bewilderment of anyone who happened to be present, sometimes provoking enquiries about my recent alcoholic consumption.

It’s as if you are an astronaut adrift in space being propelled at speed towards a vast galaxy which is filling up your vision and yet you are at the same time also aware of a single atom before you. Think of the kaleidoscopic star journey sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, only without the terror.

I never really wondered much about what this was: in later years I ascribed it to some weird imbalance of the inner ear, since it only ever happened when my coconut was on its side, blocking one lughole. More recently I was reading about synaesthesia, and thought it might be something allied to that.

Or perhaps connected to my chronic inability to tell left from right, which manifests itself in me wearing my watch on my right hand (I am right-handed, so this is unusual).

I suddenly remembered it a few days ago, and a little research soon showed me that I was not alone in having experienced this: indeed, the trippy phenomena has a funny-sounding appellation, dysmetropsia, which one would think would be more suited to a disease for short-sighted rabbits, but no.

Apparently it can be connected to migraines, and you can, confusingly enough, have migraines without actually having a headache. No, I didn’t really get that part, either.

Thing is, I don’t get it any more, which is a shame, because it is a most wonderfully weird trip that needs no illegal or costly chemicals: in other words, a natural high – or more precisely, a natural near and far.

To conclude, I am reminded of this altered state every time I hear the superb Sebadoh song here, since the succinct lyrics to this gem contain the phrase “Close enough, but further away.” Note the wonderful ending to this miniature masterpiece of hi-fidelity, and stare at the wall and see if you too can induce this state, or perhaps even bang your head against it, I dare you…

Just this last week, however, I’ve made a few very pleasant discoveries.

I heard that venerable art-punk stalwarts Wire had released a new album, and went to their website to read about it. There I noticed that they were offering it for sale not only as a CD and a vinyl album, but also as a high-quality digital download. £6.99 and you can get the songs delivered to your computer in pristine FLAC form.

What does this mean? Well, these files are lossless (unlike shitty MP3′s), and can play ‘as is‘ with good audio/video players such as VLC, but even better, they can be converted to WAV files as well and burned onto a CD, as well as imported into iTunes as MP3′s at whatever bit-rate you choose : in other words, you have the best of both worlds. And, no shitty DRM anti-pirating bullshit which assumes you’re a criminal and denies you your rights to the goods you’ve purchased.

This finally makes downloading music a viable proposition as far as I’m concerned, in which you can directly support artists you like, pay less, and get quality product in return. Now compare this to iTunes, where most downloads are still offered only as laughably piss-poor 128Mbps MP3′s with no hard copy at all and at a higher price.

Next I went over to Richard D James‘ Rephlex Records site to find a similar kind of set up: 30 minute EPs going for £3.50, downloaded as CD-quality WAV files – yay! Needless to say I filled my cart with techno goodies, a very satisfied customer indeed.

Clearly this is the route for established artists and punters alike, a system which cuts out crap like iTunes completely, and rightly so. Shame on you, Apple, for getting it so wrong and morphing from a cool stylish outfit into a hard-nosed corporate behemoth.

*        *        *        *        *        *

I also blogged recently concerning my misgivings with regard to Amazon’s Kindle. Well, as I suspected, that particular device has been entirely discarded and now lives on the arm of my sofa under a pile of miscellaneous crap. Not only did it not win me over to eBooks, it met with an amusing but somehow appropriate accident and is now inoperative.

A week or so ago I thought I’d bring it out to show to a friend. Somehow, during the course of a long cafe chat session, I managed to briefly sit on it. It looked fine after my arse had made contact, and there was no visible damage, so once home I chucked it irreverently into a corner somewhere.

A few days later I thought I’d try to use it again, only to discover that the top half of the display had vanished, thus rendering it completely useless. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say…

The object is a nostalgic representation of a by-gone age, a historical artefact linking me to my forbears and a pre-digital non-PC era.

It evokes at once images of learned Victorians dimly lit in leather armchairs grappling with new ideas while sipping whiskey from cut-class tumblers.

Simultaneously, however, we can also picture Irish navvies taking well-earned breaks from their canal-digging endeavours, or cloth-capped Northerners on grim street corners of mining towns, immortalised in black and white.

I suppose, like the best horror films, I should never reveal the nature of the object in order to maintain suspense, stir the imaginations of my readers, and avoid the inevitable anticlimax when it is revealed.

However, we are not dealing with papier-mâché dinosaurs or badly-rendered CG ghouls, so here we go: we are talking of a pipe.

Of course, the title of this piece probably gave that away, since it is hard these days to write a headline without an attempt at some kind of witty word-play. The large picture of a pipe might have given the game away, too.

Yes, a pipe, a finely wrought briar artefact purchased many years ago in Frederick Tranter’s shop in Bath, under the aegis of long-departed Lightfoot Sr, himself an adept with the old meerschaum and beard.

No doubt this shop has seen better days, although still extant, and the few remaining ageing bearded pipe-smokers have long since retreated to their respective garden sheds, shooed into the shadows by current social and legislative trends.

And so every few years I notice my fine pipe (no smutty remarks, please), and, appreciating its workmanship and texture, bring it out of its hiding place, along with a tin of hand-blended Danish tobacco imbued with the aroma of coffee, once purchased in Copenhagen and no doubt long past its sell by date, if tobacco possesses such things.

Now I’m not really a smoker, and never have been, although my various abodes have always had stocks of Gitanes, Sobranie, and various brands of cigar languishing in the shadows, and every now and again I indulge.

There’s just something magical and wondrous about sitting in my garden after midnight with a glass of whiskey or rum, listening to some fine tunes on the iPhone and gazing at a clear night sky and all that it offers the contemplative viewer, while occasionally puffing on a ‘gar (as Mike Watt calls them). Take away any of those principal ingredients and the experience just isn’t the same, and loses its magic.

Modern PC-ism might describe my relaxing nocturnal habit in slightly different terms: damaging brain cells, liver and throat through the imbibing of alcohol, harming my already shredded ear drums through the use of headphones, and the introduction of various carcinogenic toxins to the body due to contact with burning New World leaf products.

But I say fuck those killjoys in their white coats and clipboards, the dull end of science feeding into the straightjacket of overweening government bent on wiping out all traces of childlike flights of fancy and wonder.

Einstein liked a pipe, and I hear that Heisenberg smoked sixty Woodbines a day, while Madame Curie was rarely seen without a Gauloise dangling from the corner of her gob, and these were true visionaries of science.

Such habits in the end do not really warrant analysis when indulged in moderation, and too much of practically anything will kill you. Hell, life itself may kill you, and usually does.

But I digress. Each time I bring out the pipe, the same thing happens. After admiring it, handling it and remembering a long lost world, I fill the bowl with the noxious weed, and light up.

Shortly after, coughing and spluttering, head dizzy and stomach convulsing with the strong unaccustomed intake of Nick O’Teen and his chemical pals, I realise that the habit is not for me, and the pipe is replaced in the cabinet, there to linger a while longer until I repeat the experiment years hence, never learning.

The projected image of the waistcoated intellectual puffing away in his leather armchair, bewhiskered and adorned with a pince-nez, is after all nothing more than a pipe dream.

I finally bought a Kindle the other day after finding that they were back in stock at Amazon.com after the Christmas rush.

I was ordering books for a forthcoming trip to Italy, and after putting a couple of high quality Blue Guides into the basket I realised I needed another, less cultured and more practical guide, so looked at the Lonely Planet.

As much as I dislike this series, they are useful for when you need to know about rail connections rather than obscure architectural trivia.

However, just as I was grimacing at the thought of having to lug this 1,000 page monster around when I’d only be checking it for details a few times, I noticed a Kindle version was being offered alongside the traditional book, and at a slightly reduced price.

A quick check revealed that the Kindle was in stock, and suddenly I envisioned the weighty tome being transformed into a small slim grey slab, which could also be stuffed with other documents, the ones I usually print out and staple together. A practical solution, even though I realised I would most likely never be reading novels from the electronic newcomer.

The Kindle arrived a few days later, and now, after a couple of weeks of use (or rather, non-use), I can say that its purchase was a mistake.

The moment I saw it I knew that this device was not going to be as revered and respected as my iPhone 4 or Nikon D7000.

The Kindle is just a very limited device in a medium which is clearly still in its infancy. Sure, its promise and premise are startling, and has potentially the same appeal as the iPod first had : you could have your entire collection with you at all times.

With the iPod, however, you still retain your earlier medium. Your entire CD collection gets processed and stuffed into the device, leaving you with both, the mobile lower quality version, and the full files on your CDs for blasting out on your fancy hifi.

The Kindle is different, and crucially so. That large book collection you’ve been building up over the last few decades isn’t going to appear on your eBook reader, not unless you’re prepared to buy them all again in digital form.

It’s rather like the shafting we all got in the vinyl to CD switchover back in the 80′s.

Perhaps some richer folk don’t mind that, and obviously it is they who are the main target for the device : kids brought up in the digital age wouldn’t be affected, but they don’t read books anyway.

Aside from that, which in itself is something of a deal-breaker, we come to the actual reading experience. The screen is fine, and easy on the eyes. The navigation, however, is horrendous. Clunky and unintuitive, all users of iPhones will constantly find themselves touching the screen, somehow hoping that it has suddenly become touch responsive in order to obviate the awful clickfest that ensues any time you want to locate something within your tome.

Maybe for novels this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but for reference materials it is annoying.

A few days ago I discovered that Kindle has an app for the iPhone which I dutifully installed and found I could download and read all of my purchased eBooks in style.

What a difference, even though the smaller screen is less pleasing to read: being able to navigate by touching headings, turning pages seamlessly by swiping the screen, having maps in colour and being able to activate links directly in a real web browser.

The iPhone will be coming to Italy, not the Kindle.

I only purchased one other book – a large compendium of poetry, which I thought might be nice to dip into. Unfortunately this was not to be – like most of the shoddy free stuff you can fill your Kindle with, this eBook came with no index or contents page, rendering navigation impossible. The illustrations too were missing, replaced by ugly placeholders.

My regard for the Kindle can be seen in the way I treat it – instead of buying a fancy case, it resides in a tatty yellow paper bag.

Obviously the Kindle has been a big hit in its latest incarnation, and sales of eBooks at Amazon have eclipsed those of paper, but for me the device is of little immediate use.

Perhaps it would be more appealing if, aside from the navigation woes, Amazon were to adopt the policy of throwing in a free electronic version with every real book purchase, just as the surprisingly large number of musicians releasing on vinyl include a free CD or MP3‘s. Then you could enjoy the best of both worlds.

CDs – well, that wasn’t too difficult : sacrifice the large artwork for a dinky little booklet, but gain a far more durable and glitch-free artefact, and once we’d got past the initially lousy digital transfers there was no going back, really.

The second stage of the music revolution has been different, however. As an audio engineer of sorts I was always aware (and wary) of the sonic limitations of the MP3 format compared to the .wavs of the CD. This didn’t stop me from becoming an early adopter of the iPod, although I always drew the line at actually buying downloaded files, always preferring to have the hard copy CD beforehand. The rare occasions on which I have purchased songs on iTunes led me to realise not only the inferior quality of the files and the lack of artwork, but also the issue of ownership. Buy a CD and you have the music there in your hands forever (or at least until that shiny disk starts to corrode…). Download an MP3, and you are merely leasing it. Change computers more than three times and you’ll find that the song is no longer available to your ears. I lost a few in the migration from Windows to Mac, with no way to get them back save by re-buying.

So this last step I will not take, since for me the losses clearly outweigh the gains. Perhaps the young, brought up on this and not knowing any better, won’t care and will cheerily accept what is obviously a diminution of  both quality and consumer rights.

Next transition was photography. I wasn’t an early adopter here, and only went over to the digital side about five years ago, concerned again that the rendering of light into 0′s and 1′s would result in a reduction in quality. When I finally took the plunge and got my first Nikon DSLR, a D50, I realised that the crappy quality evident in most compact ‘point and shoot‘ digicams was not a concern on the big cameras. Once assured of the quality of the images, I embraced the vastly increased possibilities of digital photography to the full.

The fact of being able to see what you’ve just taken has transformed photography from an elitist esoteric pursuit full of arcane terminology into an egalitarian art form which can be enjoyed by everyone. Rule books can be thrown away, and free experimentation is enabled at no extra cost, a real emancipation.

And now Kindle, representing the digitisation of the book. Aside from my love of gadgets, I can’t say that I ever want to forgo the pleasures of holding a new book in my hands. I understand that the decline of the book is probably inevitable now, since young kids don’t read them anymore, and I find myself spending my commuting time peering into my iPhone‘s diminutive screen to read a whole range of things. I also get the undeniable relief our forests will feel when the book becomes a mere niche product like vinyl.

But still, I don’t think that the sheer convenience of having thousands of reads at one’s disposal can beat the feel and look of a real book. This is one transition I don’t think I can ever fully make.

And all this brings me to another consideration of these changes: is the ready access to vast amounts of music, books, information and images necessarily a good thing? The nerd in me loves the idea of being to carry my entire music library around with me, but after a certain stage was passed in the growth of my iTunes library I was reminded of the lyric to the Devo song ‘Freedom of Choice.’

‘In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.’

Sometimes of an evening, when I’m recumbent on the sofa and looking forward to an hour or so of sonic relaxation, I reach for the iPhone, open the iTunes remote app, and am then stymied by the vast amount of music available to me – around 21,000 songs. It freaks me out a bit. I don’t know what to listen to. Stick to a well-worn favourite, or try something a little less familiar, or even completely unheard? (Such is the amount of undigested material in my collection). Perhaps there are limits to what the human mind can deal with. I find I can handle a collection of 5,000 songs, but not one of 21,000. That I cannot conceive of comfortably.

How then, do the young folk brought up with the internet deal with this overabundance of material? Do they develop a good filtering system that helps them cope with the vast possibilities? And is the easy availability of everything causing it to be devalued? Do the teenagers of today love and cherish the tunes on their MP3s as much as I did the 7″ singles I used to buy once a month or so with my savings?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions, but I understand the importance of not becoming another tedious old git complaining about how things were better in the old days (I don’t necessarily think they were).

However, I do know how amazingly adaptable human beings are, and how the universe itself is built on change, and how it is futile to fight it. The digital revolution will proceed no matter what we think of it: the trick will be to embrace only that which seems to truly enhance life and reject that which does not, although it is often difficult to make this important distinction.

EMILE ZOLA – “Germinal” (1885)

The thirteenth in Zola’s epic twenty-novel Les Rougons-Macquart series chronicling the effects of heredity and environment in nineteenth-century France, Germinal is often regarded as the finest.

Gripping, and at turns shocking and moving, the story takes place amid the blasted landscapes of northern France’s minefields where entire families are employed in eaking out a subsistence living under the earth in foul conditions.

Enter Etienne Lantier, a wanderer who picks up a job at the pit and is taken in by a local poverty-stricken mining family. Semi-educated and influenced both by the promises of the International in Paris and a local anarchist, he soon sets himself up as leader and brings the workforce into industrial action against the mine owners with disasterous consequences.

Zola’s deft telling of the tale takes no sides and explores both the doomed failure of the strike, the misguided self-aggrandising impulses of Etienne, the failure of the International, as well as the insensitive and petty mine owners.

Zola obviously researched well, since the details of the hellish conditions of the mines are stunning and vivid, and the short, brutal lives of the human moles who toil there are portrayed in harsh terms: precocious couplings amid the slag-heaps to counter the lives cut short by occupational diseases and disasters.

Hardly a light read, very depressing in content, and yet we are left with the idea that a seed has been planted in the workers, an acceptance that their own blood scarifices will eventually lead to a better world in the future.

A superb and highly recommended read.

More of my book reviews can be found here.