Posts

Showing posts from August, 2006

New Scientist Poetry

On my way back from Düsseldorf, I indulged myself with my new addiction: New Scientist magazine. Imagine my shock when fuck me if there isn’t an article by Simon Armitage about the relationship between science and poetry. It stands out immediately because every other article is characterised by depth analysis whereas this reads like it has slipped in by accident and should have been in the Reader’s Digest. “Science by another name” as it is called, despite claiming to explore the links, starts out with a first column of personal anecdote demonstrating that poets really are as disconnected from scientific thinking as their stereotype. He concludes with a short poem: “Being more in tune with the feel of things than science and facts, we knew that the tyre had travelled too fast for its size and mass, and broken through some barrier of speed, outrun the act of being driven, steered, and at that moment gone beyond itself towards some other sphere, and disappeared.” (I took the liberty of r

More Madness

Just stumbled on this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/put_the_blame_where_it_belongs.php Apparently evolution is least accepted in Turkey closely followed by ... America. Coincidentally to my good impressions of my visit, Iceland comes top on rationality too.

Visiting America?

The 'security alert' only delayed my flight to Reykjavik by a few hours - arriving at 3am in the end. But the madness of travelling to America is played out each day on the TV. So I have to ask: why continue to visit America? The question is actually academic for me because I decided when Bush bombed Iraq that enough was enough and adopted a personal boycott. I don't expect this effected the Evil Empire but made me feel better. Recall we all enthusiastically boycotted South Africa. I have been interested for a while in the debates that took place in Germany before the Second World War among artist and writers around whether it was better to stay in the country to resist the rise of Nazism or go into exile. Ultimately most of those who stayed were either dead or compromised. After Bush's last election 'win', there was a brief period of talk about liberal Americans emigrating. Whether they did or not isnt my question. Even if my decision is silly to other people,

Back from Reykjavik

Back from Reykjavik. I can’t recommend this trip too highly; I guess it is just like you’ve seen it on TV – geysers, mountain ranges, glaciers, wild Martian landscapes – though, as a city boy I steered clear of all this outdoor Romanticism. Reykjavik itself: It is an unusual city, low-rise, sprawling, reminiscent of a cross between Douglas and Ramsay (in the Isle of Man. There was a great feeling. Lindsey Gordon from Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen recounted from someone else the Icelanders are like the Irish would have been if they had not lived under the English. But the commitment and understanding of contemporary art was marvelous. The reason for my trip was to see Alan Johnston’s show at Safn Museum http://www.safn.is/english/index.html – which I had, in my slapdash way not researched so it turned out to be a 3 person exhibition with Séan Shanahan and Ragna Rόbertsdόttir. Alan Johnston works are almost invisible. His wall drawings are made of short, irregular pencil marks, closel

Sartre on Genocide

The stream of images and reports of the continued American-back Israeli evils triggered my return to Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1967 article Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide, written in his capacity as President of the International War Crimes Tribunal. http://www.sartre.org/Writings/genocide.htm It is not surprising that a search of American websites, even/especially academic philosophy ones, that there is remarkable vitriol aimed at Sartre (one of my heroes). As this tends to be at the level generalised dismissal, I guess it is as much based on fear and hate of someone who got them bang to rights. Anyway, the striking thing about re-reading the essay is that simply replacing the Vietnam references with Iraq/Lebanon and America with Israel/America you get a pretty trenchant and accurate indictment of the current practice of genocide. As I write this, an Israeli on the TV has just said that as far as he is concerned for every Israeli who is killed 1000 Lebanese should die. As it is, they are

Vinculum

0. "interrupted pendulum" with equal probability finding grains spinning up or down, some part which cannot be assessed, only non-zero within ourselves, and the amount of each does not depend on the presence of the other, fundamentally non-local fields are to accelerations as falling is to shopping, tales of passing vicariance, conserved so long as the masses did not interact; preyed on and preying, fearful of collision preyed on and preying between them. Prognosis varies from hope here to fear there and fear here and hope there. Senescent memory loss, language deterioration, poor judgment appearing first as function. Under the continuous symmetry of time translation symptoms continue as a daily torment and will do, despite all our bijective vinculum to someone non-local; conjugate variables appear separated, that old couple can only cleave together until they are cleaved apart, the system of fear to curl up with cumulative mistakes, a smell like tobacco, tired leather and ur