In recent weeks, I’ve been becoming increasingly dependent on art to get me through the day. My actual life is bland and featureless; working on things I believe in and care about intellectually, but boring myself silly doing it. The only way to con myself into concentrating is with a kick of words or music or pictures. Then 20 minutes of hand-waving ecstasy, settling down to a lingering vague sense of meaningfulness, that can easily be transferred to whatever dreary task I’m supposed to be working on. It feels somehow nastier than achieving the same effect with caffeine or self-discipline; like using manuscripts as firelighters or something.

Particularly useful is anything implying that the current moment is somehow important, that there’s some reason to be emotionally focussed on now, rather than listlessly comparing it to tomorrow. So there’s the line from _Possession_, for example:

“when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”

And when that’s too bleakly romantic for me, I look back to Alba De Cespedes’ poems of love in Paris ’68, in a last night of closeness before normality is restored:

Encore un soir, le dernier, nous serons entre nous: les fous d’amour et de révolte. Cette rive sera encore la nôtre; à nous seuls, prison, ghetto, léproserie.

One more night, the last, we’ll be together: delerious with love and revolt. This bank will still be ours, ours alone: prison, ghetto, lepers’ colony

Similarly, on Sunday I went to see a friend playing in a small band. What really shook me were the support band. And then not musically, but because the singer was obviously in the midst of some fairly serious depression**. Being able to spend an hour staring at somebody in that state was — terrifying? powerful? horrifying? All the little traits that I can normally only see in isolation, blending together into self-reinforcing patterns.

* necessary guilt-disclaimer that, for all this talk about work, I’m not in fact doing a huge amount of it.

** or yes, maybe it was all an act. If so it was simultaneously an impressive feat of acting and not at all suitable for a gig.

LRB on Blair’s memoirs

He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been crazy and made war inevitable. But why on earth did he think that al-Qaida was an example of the first, and Gordon Brown of the second, rather than the other way round?

Tiger Beatdown:

One of the things that’s really important in this life, and in any form of political engagement, is to be aware that no-one is actually “one of ours.” Which is to say: The instinct you have to protect someone who seems to side with you, and to gloss over their crimes, is a bad one.

Another piece of regressive crisis-response, this time by the German government. They’re reducing the eco-tax, and in place increasing cigarette taxes (TAZ. In other words, tax the poor and let polluting big business get away unaffected.

Peter Thiel, Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor, on politics and women:

Thiel announced: “

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible

.” The public, he says, doesn’t support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn’t support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the

extension of the franchise to women

—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have

rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron

,” he writes.

[from a delightfully vicious Slate profile]

It’s scary to think that this guy’s wealth and power are orders of magnitude above anything I could ever come close to attaining.

The Independent reports on plans for the re-establishment of Nalanda. It has all the markers of a ‘flagship’ project that will mainly serve to fluff politicians’ egos and divert large amounts of money towards elites. Still, I can’t bring myself to be

entirely

grudging about it.

“purportedly, Bolano used to write for 20, 40 hours at a time before passing out and then waking up and doing it all over again”

[source otherwise uninteresting]

and from a profile in the NYT — nicely-crafted but again underwhelming:

His subjects are sex, poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and the desperate glimmers of transcendence that sometimes attend them. The prose is dark, intimate and sneakily touching

Cute Cthulhu is the scariest Cthulhu of all:

Part of this horrible obscenity lies in the ability of cute to undermine human reason and agency. The return of the Great Old Ones will reduce every human being unlucky enough to be alive to utter helplessness. But so too do we all become drooling sock-puppets of mammalian algorithms when confronted with furry exteriors, chirpy voices, disproportionately large eyes and heads, charming reductions of scale, and goofy facial expressions.

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What I don’t understand about this, is why Chomsky chose such a lousy phrase to make his point. Only somebody who’s never had a nightmare could deny the possibility of sleeping furiously, while you could easily describe the output of some environmental think-tank as ‘colorless green ideas’. On another tack: what is Cthulhu, if not a ‘green idea sleeping furiously’?