Five reasons to read Dante’s Divine Comedy in 2012

1. It’s the closest you will ever get to being able to quite literally read a cathedral. Medieval cathedrals are gigantic assemblages of Christian theology, philosophy and apologetics in stone. Each surface, angle and cornice is drenched in sign and symbol, from the number of sides to the baptismal font to the number of windows in the nave. Everything works in threes and fours and aligns with the grand intersection of the Cross.
2. It’s only way short of a Vulcan mind-meld you’ll be able to experience the point of view of one of the greatest of the high medieval intellectuals. Dante’s thought ranges from the apparently profound to the (from a modern perspective) shockingly bigoted and back again via arrogance, piety, humility, horror and every shading in between. And all of it in the most complicated rhyming scheme known to epic poetry. Or most other kinds, come to think of it.
3. It’s one of the greatest works of speculative fiction known to man. Forget Cyrano de Bergerac or Jules Verne or any of the other pretenders to be the founding father of SF – Dante spun his web of invention on a rock solid (for 14th century Italy) foundation of natural philosophy, optics, astronomy and classical thought. Then took it literally beyond the boundaries of the Heavens.
4. It’s a work that challenges our ideas of Christianity and makes us look beyond our regular feeble stereotypes of bigoted American baptists and milksop British Anglicans. What we find is full-blooded, ferocious and undeniably at the centre of whatever it is that we call a culture. And I speak as thoroughly heathen individual.
5. It’s one of the most lovely books ever written. Dante claimed that words failed him as he tried to describe the impact of the most profound experiences death had to offer. Then he went ahead and wrote them down anyway.

You can read – or listen to – the whole thing here in a a quite wonderful translation by the Hollanders. Go on – take a walk on the really wild side for a change. Better than Twilight or your money back.

Vinyl, sacred spaces and the placebo effect

I’ve been reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and I’m especially intrigued by the the chapter on placebos. The effect is probably well known. Crudely, it’s the idea that the belief that one is being healed or medicated is as likely to have a positive benefit as the actual medicine itself. It can be held responsible for everything from the occasional improvement in someone’s hay fever via to homeopathic sugar pills to remarkable treatment successes documented in shamanistic cultures.  Goldacre cites Moerman’s reframing of placebos as the meaning response, ‘the psychological and physiological effects of meaning in the treatment of illness’ and I like the idea of explicitly addressing how meaning affects the tricky and highly permeable interface between mind and body.

So what does this have to do with records?

Another way of framing the placebo effect is to look at it as a consequence of the way rhetorical devices frame our responses to pain, illness, perceived pleasure or other life events. In other words

• do records sound better than mp3s because we expect them to?
• do we expect them to because of the rhetorical devices that comprise and frame the act of putting a record on?

When a shaman sets to work to drive out an illness, the dancing, chanting, herbs and all the rest of their activities form a powerful ritual that has an actual physical impact on many healing processes (for example, here’s an academic paper examining the impact of shamanistic ritual on drug addiction). Now lets think about the ritual associated with vinyl compare to CDs or mp3s with the caveat that, as with the placebo effect in medicine, all of this is deeply and locally culturally specific.

Firstly, there’s the act of choosing a record and the limitations the physical nature of the medium impose. Records occupy space. It takes time to riffle through a shelf and pull down just the right one. Additionally, long playing records aren’t set up to easily play just one song – one is choosing to immerse oneself for a set length of time. The cover art is larger and demands one’s full attention. The record itself is fragile and needs care and cleaning before being played. ‘Fragile’ equals valuable – a record is more easily broken, damaged, scratched than a CD.  Records, then, demand an investment in acknowledging their ritual value before one has even turned on an amplifier and played a note. And it is a ritual, like the tea ceremony or awarding a degree – it’s a ceremony that ascribes value.

Then there’s the equipment. Mp3s are utterly portable and carry no inherent value. CDs can be exactly replicated on home equipment and are again relatively portable. Records are completely useless without a record player. Listening to records requires an environment specifically set up for record listening. It’s an activity which needs a dedicated sacred space, not to mention a non-trivial bunch of relatively pricey hi-fi, even at the lowest end.

To recap. Before we listen to a record, we’re (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘people-who-listen-to-records’) prepared to accept that it has an innate value beyond that of other mediums. We’ve invested a degree of time up-front. We’ve spent quite a lot of money and organised a not inconsiderable portion of our homes to provide a space for this ritual*. We’re ready to be transported; to, in ritual terms, have our consciousness. We are ready to listen to a record.

Is it any wonder, after all this, that The Queen Is Dead sounds so much better on 180 gramme black vinyl?

The latter, by the way, relates directly to another phenomenon Ben documents, of how much more Western people trust anything that comes wrapped in pseudo-scientific-techno-babble over something presented in plain language. Of course 180 gramme vinyl sounds better. One hundred and eighty grammes!

Of course, there are are a seemingly limitless number of complicating factors – everything from how clean the record is to the quality of the stereo, the shape of the room, the amount of damage your ears have suffered, the bloody quality of the electricity – that feed into the journey from that deceptively simple vinyl groove to your ear. A controlled test is virtually impossible. And, in any case, if it really is the ritual and rhetoric of the vinyl placebo that enhances ones listening, does that really matter? When I put a record on, it’s a commitment to that piece of music that goes beyond sloping around the underground with my in-canal earphones and iPhone or slotting a CD into my work computer. Is it any wonder I get a little more out of it? And if the impact of my nice record player, speakers and cables and so on is rather physical and more metaphorical or metaphysical than I might like to think, does it really matter all that much?

*Space…ritual! Geddit? Oh, forgeddit.

The despair of the Inter-Galactic Hitchhiker

I’ve been re-reading Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels over the last week. It’s been an odd sort of ride, pulling me deeply into my past in some ways and highlighting the present in other, surprisingly depressing forms.

Encountering the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy proper for the first in thirty years time-warped me straight back to being fifteen and glued to Radio 4 via my family’s one pair of big, padded headphones, waiting at the dinner table for the expansive FM stereo of (unbelievably) The Eagles ‘Journey of the Sorcerer‘ (the rest of the music was provided by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop). It was 1978. In the outside world, things were about to get seriously unpleasant. Then there’d the announcement of the title in those fruity Radio 4 tones that now seem so cemented to a certain time and set of assumptions.”The story so far…”

And then I’d be gone.

On another planet or spaceship or space-time continuum entirely, wrapped up in this strange little world that only I and a few privileged friends at school had heard of. To my family, it was utterly meaningly and once they’d established that there was no swearing, no readily discernible blasphemy and zero sex references (I was very lucky with the ten minutes they actually listened too), they left me and the luxurious headphones to it.

The show was wonderful. And hilarious. And utterly, magnificently true – the Universe (as I was discovering) really did make no sense. Forty two was as good an answer as any. A gang of white mice who were really extensions of pan-dimensional beings conducting frightfully sophisticated experiments on humans was as credible (and certainly more attractive) an explanation as a God who’d let his only son be flogged, nailed to a tree and stabbed with a spear after days of horrible torture.

I think there were many ways I’ve since forgotten in which it must have helped me survive a pretty grim adolescence*.

The book itself came after the radio series in 1979 and I promptly saved up and bought it, along with the first two sequels – The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe (1979) and Life, The Universe and Everything (1980). After that, I went to university and lost touch with the series. Or did it lose touch with me? Loftier things (the worst relationship in the world, being in dreadful bands, drink etc) got in the way.

Returning to the books, my 49 year old self notices two things. Firstly, I’m now at the age Douglas Adams was when he died (see the extended kvetch on this subject in my last post) and secondly, how astonishing it is in some ways that Adams lasted as long as he did. I can only assume he existed at the same level as some sort of Zen Master, serenely and ironically composed in the face of the singular horror of a universe with no rhyme or reason other than the entirely futile and random rationales that its hapless inhabitants project upon it. These are seriously depressing books if you approach them in the wrong frame of mind. A handful of pages into the first volume, the entire human race is wiped out to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Later, the ‘hero’ (the books don’t really have heroes, actually, except possibly for Trillian), Arthur Dent, finds himself returning to his doomed home planet again and again and each time the horrors and the pathos redouble.

Does anything lighten the existential murk? Well, a few things.

For one thing, the books are funny. Very funny, in the nihilistic, absurdist vein mined by Monty Python or the Goons (especially Spike Milligan). Adams was actually a minor Footlights alumni and had a couple of writing credits for Monty Python. He revels in demented neologisms (“the mattress flurried and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and willioied…” I should mention that we’re dealing with a sentient mattress here), silly names (Slartibartfast? Zaphod Beeblebrox?) and complex puns.

And they’re also bursting with ideas. Like Philip K. Dick, Adams is an ideas man first and a plotter second. One meets SEPs (Someone Else’s Problem) field generators, Infinite Improbability Engines and an altogether convincing general theory of time travel. Doors talk. The mighty marketing machine of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation embeds annoying personalities in every moving part of a space ship. A huge computer and a sentient drinks machine nearly kill everyone trying to solve the problem of how to make tea. And so on. The characters in his books are pretty much identical at the end to the way they are at the beginning. Their lack of progression is almost the whole point.

But as the series goes on (and I’m about to start the fourth volume, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish), it gets darker and darker and the satire shifts its targets from petty bureaucracy and marketing to bigger, less easily laughed away evils – war, genocide, environmental havoc, the entitlement felt by the very rich and the powerlessness of the rest of us to change, well anything. Very little light gets through.

Except for one thing. At the climax of Life, The Universe and Everything, Trillian the closest we get to a sympathetic character in the entire series, notices that the most hideously feared warmongers in the entire history of the universe quite possibly don’t want to kill anyone. They’d rather play ‘krikket’ with them. And for a few pages, a character changes the small, dark space around her through an outpouring of what is, effectively, love. Earlier, one saw her struggle to reach the titanically solipsistic Zaphod Beeblebrox, fail, and quietly walk away. Here, Trillian succeeds, on a planet where a cloud of dust has blocked out any of the light from the surrounding universe from ever reaching it.

Love. Love the people immediately around you. That’s the only meaning the books dare offer, they only way in which they attempt to make any kind of sense whatsoever. As things get bleaker and bleaker (and the books are full of appalling prophecies ranging from Kindles to the deforestation of an entire planet to avoid hyper-inflation of a currency consisting of leaves to a civilisation descended entirely from the survivors of a spaceship full of marketing managers and accountants) it’s as good a message as any.

*Believe me, the Ravenous Blugbatter Beast of Tral** would have been light relief, with or without a towel.

**Read the damn book, ok?

What is a grown-up?

There is a view that 49 going on 50 is too old to be listening to the likes of this:

Or this:

Alternately, I could claim that I’m just paying attention.

I’m struggling with my life at the moment. I have a responsible, well-paid job by my standards. We have a nice flat (though we could do with a bigger one). We have two lovely children, even if they do occasionally behave like monsters).

It’s not enough – or it’s too much – and I’ve still got no idea what I’m going to do about it.

Douglas Adams was my age when he unexpectedly collapsed on that treadmill (surely a symbol in direct opposition to everything he stood for). Joe Strummer had just turned 50  when a  heart condition that could have taken him at pretty much any point in his previous life finally called time. I’m clearly at a dangerous age for a man, an age men die or make stupid choices or both.

My whole dilemma, of course, is a product of too much privilege and education. If I lived in Victorian times, I’d be a clerk or a factory manager or a middling government civil servant in an unimportant department and none of this would be an issue. Would it?

Perhaps I should get religion. Or go to the pub. Or enter a Buddhist monastery. The Japanese nobility of Heian times regarded that as a perfectly valid retirement option once one’s children were grown up and settled. What their wives thought isn’t recorded. Perhaps they were obliged to become Buddhist nuns. Supermum wouldn’t be having any of that.

The question is, what does a grown do? I mean, honestly, what would Strummer do? What would Douglas Adams say? And is it perhaps a not unpromising thing (to, at the very last minute, take a glass-half-full perspective) that I still really have no idea what I want to do with my life? Or perhaps I know – let’s admit that – but getting there. Well’s that’s the tricky bit.

Comments closed because this is a bit silly.

Note: OK, comments opened due to demand. Though the people who demanded it are probably going to be the only people who actually do comment and they left their POV on another post entirely. 

Reading: Ranger Apprentice, The City & The City; Hideous Gnosis

Ranger Apprentice: 1 – The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan is the first in a middle grade series that seems to be coming out at the rate of three a year and accelerating. Dudelet (who’s on Michelle Paver’s sixth Wolf Brother novel but taking a break to feed a serious Wimpy Kid habit) took one look and shook his head.

“I like books like this,” he said, pointing out the mix of comics and text in Wimpy Kid, “without too many words in.”

I point out the half completed Michelle Paver and Roman Mysteries by his pillow. He deals with the inconsistency with his usual, eerily adolescent shrug.

Anyway, I read it and moderately enjoyed it. It’s the kind of book I’d classify as ‘efficient’ – craftsmanlike, linear, uncomplicated and resorting to the most fearsome stereotypes, especially in the coy little hints of romance. For the uncomplicated eleven year old boy in your life, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

China Mieville’s The City & The City is not a children’s book, though a patient sixteen year old with a thing for noirish urban fantasy might find a lot to like. It’s a slow burning detective novel set in a vaguely Mittel-European city. Or cities. There are actually two of them occupying the same geographical space but acting as if they were as separate as East and West Berlin. Or Jewish and Arabic quarters in Jerusalem. Or the hopelessly intermeshed interracial interstices of London or any other European space. It’s indebted to Calvino, the Inspector Zen mysteries, Borges and (most of all) John Le Carré by turns and repays the initial patience it requires (though the character of Cowie still seems like a certain female police Sergeant met in a previous Miéville novel). Recommended.

Hideous Gnosis is a collection of essays derived from the academic seminar of the same name. You’ll find more information at the  Black Metal Theory blog. It takes on, in occasionally impenetrably abstruse terms but also in terms of photos, oral documentary and much else, issues of gender, race, right wing ideologies (and their rejection), nature worship, differences between the Scandinavian and North American strands and many other interesting aspects in contemporary and early 90s black metal. Beginners should probably start with Pitchfork writer Brandon Stosuy’s Slate article on Heavy Metal For Hipsters then watch the the venerable Fenriz’s Black Metal 101 (below). Hideous Gnosis itself is on Google Books under an open access licence and pdfs are freely available.