Category: Uncategorised

Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize? I can only add to the chorus of WTF. Looking back over previous winners, I see a lot of unexciting, so-so awards, but not that many out-and-out fuckups. Dare I say it, I think this is even worse than Kissenger. With Kissenger (also Arafat/Rabin/Peres), at least they were recognizing a warmonger belatedly trying to wind down a war. The Obama nomination doesn’t even have that excuse.

The connection between psychology and society is the kind of topic that gets batted endlessly around among pundits, but never makes a dent in practical politics. Currently, it’s in the form of a “greed is stressful” meme, whether in Oliver James’ Affluenza and Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety.

That shape doesn’t much interest me, perhaps because I’m not directly affected by it. I prefer the brute statistical case made by The Spirit Level, a recent book on “why more equal societies almost do better”. This takes the prevalence of mental illness as the key figure (see the radical psychiatrists shudder), and plots it against income inequality:



It all seems horribly deracinated, considering how much attention has been given to similar topics over the decades. We had Lacan and then Guattari in France, treating madness as a rational response to society, and schizophrenia as the model for deconstructing it. Or Marcuse in America, or Laing in Britain, an army of radical psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists, critical psychiatrists, patients’ movements….There’s plenty worth abandoning from each approach, but surely there’s some scope for cherry-picking?

[PS: out of Paris. Have my mind back. More frequent posts likely, hopefully at least some more coherent than this jumble]

On the never-vanishing topic of Islam in France, this article in the FT is pretty good.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of research at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of French Muslims do not practise Islam at all. Fasting during Ramadan is considered a basic duty of the religion, yet only about 70 per cent of French ­Muslims even claim to do it. In short, European Islam has many of the same problems as European Christianity.

Via Art Goldhammer, unsurprisingly

This list of topics for a design magazine was composed in the year I was born. Nothing, it seems, has changed: they’re still interesting, still important, still underexplored. Disappointing, that, it a way.

I am, like Art Goldhammer somewhat baffled by the French government treating the Roman Polanski as a matter of artistic freedom, rather than rape. There aren’t

many

situations in which I’m on the side of Law and Order, but this must be one of them.

This, to my utter surprise, is not just usable but something I’m honest-to-God likely to use. Wonders will never cease.

Looks like there’s a new squat just outside Paris. Wouldn’t count on it lasting more than a few days, but you never know.

Meanwhile I’m sat at home, already in bed (it’s only 8:30), feeling uncertain and oddly morose. My life currently has a lot of moving parts, and I’m not entirely sure I have them all lined up. Alternatively, it could just be lack of sleep.

Warren Ellis has lately been writing a great series of articles, off in some dingy corner of the Net that I’d never otherwise have found. He seems to be working out some need to be the wise elder, reciting the tribal history of comics to a circle of youngsters. Mostly done in staccato, telegraphically-condensed fragments, with the disembodied head of Jack Kirby occasionally chipping in from beyond the grave.

Most lately on the long history of comics — or their marketers — trying to escape scorn by using just about any term other than comic. ‘Graphic novel’, obviously, but also its aborted kid sister ‘visual novel’. Then there’s Original English Manga, which has its own precursor in ‘UKBD’, a British attempt to assimilate the style of francophone Bandes Dessinées.

I feel a little sorry for the Porguese parliament. Elections are coming up on Sunday, and I’m struggling to find a single article about them in the French or British press. The German media, on the other hand, is giving them a fair bit of attention. Why the difference in interest? I have not hte faintest idea. German elections are happening on the same day — but if anything, I would have expected that to divert attention away from Portugal. Mysterious.

[I fully expect that some other European country is holding elections this week, and I haven’t heard anything about it]