2013 — 6 April: Saturday
The radio presented me with the usual litany of so-called news:
- President 'A' calling President 'B' an old hag via a microphone left switched on.
- Tax code and tax rate changes (all from last year's Budget, of course, so not new news) dragging variable numbers of people into or out of the tax net depending who's talking and from which side of the political spectrum you're being harangued.
- Proposed uranium enrichment in the land of the ayatollahs.
- Military posturing in the land of the free, aka the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
It is still apparently necessary to incentivise the feckless poor by punishing them, the rich by rewarding them, and everybody else by terrifying them, despite the existence of seven (rather than three) social classes this week. How very Dickensian. Remind me1 why one bothers to get out of bed. Methinks Oblomov may indeed have had the right idea.
Therefore he did as he had decided; and when the tea had been consumed he raised himself upon his elbow and arrived within an ace of getting out of bed. In fact, glancing at his slippers, he even began to extend a foot in their direction, but presently withdrew it.
And it's currently too early for Brian Matthew and his cheery musical nostalgia-fest.
Oh happy day :-)
I prefer to...
... read my books, rather than study them. Case #1:
Don't misunderstand me. There is unquantifiable intellectual reward from the exploration of scholarly problems and the expansion of every discipline — yes, even the literary ones, and even if that means doing bat-shit analysis like using the rule of "false elimination" to determine that Josef K. is simultaneously guilty and not guilty in The Trial. But there is one sort of reward you will never get: monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university.
Case #2, from the chap whose recent book "How the end begins" is still on my desk within reach of my keyboard:
I escaped Yale before it became the center of the frenzied fad for French literary theorists, as a result of which students read more about arcane metaphysics of language, semiotics and the like than the actual literature itself. But, even though many of the most sophisticated contemporary intellectuals who once bought into this sophistry (such as Terry Eagleton) have abandoned it, the tenured relics who imposed this intellectual regime are still there, still espousing their view that literature itself is only to be understood through their diminishing deconstructing lens.
I recall Christa taking an extremely dim view of the shenanigans she encountered in the German literature department of our very own Royal Holloway College, with the Professor who was the head of that department endlessly and tirelessly recycling his notes on German fairy tales of previous centuries each year. The prospect of making some extra pin money by translating a colleague's wife's (awful) romance novels into German also failed to appeal...
Not only did young Mr Postie...
... bring me news of a welcome, albeit minor-league, increase in the amount of the monthly pittance2 I receive from my last employer, but also — much more excitingly — this (apparently) under-rated little film from 1998 that I've never seen:
I shall have to fire up the rarely-used Oppo BD player as I strongly suspect this Canadian 1080i3 Blu-ray4 is locked to Zone A.
Me? Resentful?!
From the catalogue notes on Bowie's 1976 to 1979 album covers that are part of the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A... allegedly:
Their harsh visual bleakness was irresistible to a generation of NME-reading sad young men (and they generally were young men) whose imaginative parameters were sketched out by the novels of J.G. Ballard, the music of Kraftwerk and the films of Nicolas Roeg
And what, pray tell, is wrong with Ballard, Kraftwerk, and Roeg? A fantastically-talented set of people, if you ask me. (Not that anyone ever does, of course.) And I never read the NME. Nor was I sad.
Speaking of sad...
... I've just been listening to an excellent half-hour programme called "Medicalising Grief". It's been dealing with the way in which the newest edition of the APA's DSM (by no means my first mention of this fat and idiotic [dangerous?] tome) has decided to remove the present "bereavement exclusion" and thus offer a nice, quick, all-too-easy route to the (mis)-diagnosis of depressive disorder after as little as two weeks spent grieving over the loss (for example) of a partner such as Christa. And, of course, the consequent profitable prescribing of anti-depressant medication, tailored to "bereavement grief disorder" (or whatever the fatheads decide to call it). Lovely. Not.
The book comes from North America (where else?) — a country in which the con-trick known as psychiatry5 is a major industry, Big Pharma is a huge industry, and 10% of the citizens are already currently taking anti-depressant medication. Mind you, if I lived there I might well be depressed myself...
Don't just take my word for it...
Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.
This from a chap with a 45-year career, and who chaired the preparation of the previous edition.
I have — perhaps foolishly — been...
... browsing a booklet IBM Pensions 'pointed' out to me. I have until October 2016 to try to work out what effect this little gem of info will have on my bank balance:
I didn't realise my monthly pittance already includes a 'provisional' amount of GMP. Nor do I know, offhand, how much it is. I had naively assumed that when (or if!) I finally reached State Pension age our benevolent guvmint then simply added the amount of said State Pension to the IBM one. Why is nothing ever simple?
"The Faculty" is a remarkably asinine piece of sh1t, by the way. Monitus eras.