Thursday 27 January 2011

An Experiment

An Experiment


Assume that the world, or at least the human world, will end. You have a trunk which you might bury in the mountains or some such thing, that may be expected to survive the coming apocalypse. The contents of the trunk will be preserved, to be discovered by whatever peoples, human, sub-human, post- or meta-human, or alien of whatever kind, that will stumble upon the wreckage of our world and discover these last archaeological traces of humanity as we know it.


Which 10 (or 5) items in your possession would you put into the trunk?


Remember that these 10 (or 5) items may well be all that the future knows of our species and all that we have done or been, thought or said, felt or loved. And remember that it must all be taken without context or explanation. What pieces of humanity would you choose to survive humanity? And don’t choose Guttenberg Bible’s or anything like that, what do you own that ought to be recorded in cosmic history?


Think about it.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Catch-22 Etc.

I met an interesting man to-day. Together we were the only one’s eating alone in the deli of our neighbourhood Whole Foods equivalent: The Market of Choice. The moment I saw him I knew (toyed with the idea) that he was one of these ex-anti-establishment intellectuals, a veritable wise man of the mountains who periodically combs out his leonine facial hair, dons his Birkenstocks and ball cap and descends to take his noonday bacon-lettuce-and-avocado in the Market of Choice and wonder where the ‘60s went. We exchanged the occasional glance, synchronising our bemused appraisals of the various surrounding displays of consumer and familial foibles in this our late stage capitalist society, and bringing our respective senses of irony, bred on the one hand by the decline of western culture and on the other by the decline of the tradition that has traditionally catalogued the decline of western culture, into ever more perfect harmony. We agreed that not only had the Revolution been televised, but we were currently eating it on Rye.

Or perhaps he was thinking none of these things and our brief moment of pre-verbal human contact while mutually feeling the pull of existential loneliness over a half-eaten all-natural synthetic meat product and avocado sandwich was just that: a briefly human encounter between two merely spatially and not at all ontologically unaccompanied individuals into which I have inserted an entirely unwarranted over-abundance of adjectives and pseudo-intellectual innuendo? Perhaps this is just a be-ball-capped gentleman enjoying a sandwich? For that matter, maybe I’m the hermitic malcontent catastrophising over the mass-consumption of anti-consumerism and the brand name insurrection so carefully marketed to children of all ages between the bulk-buy spelt and the eco-bottles? Am I just projecting these ramblings into the eyes of the as yet mute sage three tables over? I am, after all, the one wearing the Birkenstocks…

He gets up. Actually I don’t notice, there’s a tiny blonde boy wandering around in such a daze that he manages to walk into a shelf backwards. A philosopher in the making. They say Thales fell down a well. Or perhaps a budding amateur social critic; is there a glint of madness in those bleary eyes? In any case, he (my aged co-conspirator in counter-cultural critique, not the boy) pauses beside my table.

“Catch 22? Kids still read that these days?”

Do kids still read that these days?? Kids do still read that these days! At least this kid is reading it, and a fair number of kids of his acquaintance have read it. These days. Of course, this kid is not particularly familiar with the literary tastes of kids these days and once decided that it would be a good idea to wear a monocle to first period econ. A fair number of kids of his acquaintance have been known to intentionally cultivate foreign accents and publicly lament the passing of the days when it was possible to use words like ‘smashing,’ ‘authentic,’ and ‘well-dressed’ unironically.

“I have no idea really, but I’ve been loving it.” I responded. “Apart from being hilarious, I love the idea of Catch-22. I’d never known that part of the Catch was that agents enforcing Catch-22 don’t have to prove that Catch-22 actually includes the provision that the accused violator is accused of violating. If you did a find and replace – Catch-22 for PATRIOT Act – I wonder how close you’d get to the literal text…”

He laughed. Of course he laughed, my partner in dissent and freethinking! Right now, somewhere in the parking lot, there are probably two men in sunglasses, dressed like the early Beatles, arguing over which government listening device, the one stuck under his collar, or the one in my coffee cup, gets to record this conversation. His tail has seniority, but mine’s only got until I finish my latte before he has to plant a new bug.

“I first read it in 1962. I was at Stanford at the time, electrical engineering and philosophy, I wanted to be a big time intellectual, know something about science, religion, a little bit of everything, and in those days part of that was doing analysis. I walked into my first session a few minutes late, and my analyst had his feet up on the couch reading Catch-22. Bought a copy on my way back to school.”

I was speechless. I’m a philosophy major! And I find my probably prejudicially incomplete knowledge of quantum physics a fascinating complement to my likely horribly distorted conception of Buddhism! For god sakes, I sleep with a copy of the Interpretation of Dreams under my pillow just in case! And I want to be a big time intellectual! Unironically!

“Was that the sort of thing kids read those days?”

“Oh yeah. We read Heller, Salinger, Hesse, Camus; I wrote a paper once comparing Catcher in the Rye to the Stranger for a modern lit class. Professor was the most interesting part of that class; he resigned the next year and set up in Menlo Park, turning people on for a fee. It was a different time back then.”

“I hear that a lot.”

“It’s true. We were trying to change the world. It’s hard to imagine now, but Peace and Love, the idea that you should actually be aware of how you live your life, it was all revolutionary. We were trying to live like no one had ever lived before, we were trying to wake up.”

They were also probably the last generation to honestly believe they could change the world. The last generation to think that there was something to wake up for. For whatever reason the wave broke and rolled back, leaving scummy pools of Anarchists, artists, Beats, Buddhists, Hippies, potheads, psychonauts, reactionaries and rebels splattered across the desert from San Francisco to Seattle. Even the kids these days that still think they can change the world, or at least know it needs changing are reading the books their parents read back when they thought they could do it. We read Heller and Salinger and Camus because we don’t have anyone who can write like they did. Where did the 60s go? What happened to the revolution you promised us? Has it really been reduced to Che Guevara’s head (for 5 points name the country of his birth*) and ironic facial hair (what does that even mean? mutton chops on a vegetarian?)?

“Well… Hopefully it was all a preparation for something. Take care, kid.”

[Editorial Note: while the above is loosely based in reality, the emphasis is on ‘loosely.’ The Author does not intend to accurately represent a conversation as it took place, and any similarities to real events are entirely adventitious.]



* Argentina

Friday 14 January 2011

The Pauli Effect, Baader-Meinhof Phenomena and Synchronicity

In theoretical physics there is (or more precisely was between the years 1900 and 1958) a principle known as the Pauli Effect. Named after the renowned quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is, simply stated: Experimental equipment will inevitably mysteriously malfunction in the presence of Wolfgang Pauli. The Pauli Effect was so feared by physicists world-wide that Pauli, despite his own prominence as a theoretician in the field, was barred from laboratories on three continents and wracked up unaccountable technical catastrophes in Germany, Switzerland and at Harvard. In one case, a friend of Pauli’s was so impressed by the mysterious total failure of his equipment during an experiment that he immediately wrote to the absent, and presumably far distant, Pauli cheerfully exonerating him only to discover that the good doctor had been changing trains on a nearby platform at the exact moment of the inexplicable debacle.

The principle survived Pauli’s death in the more general form: ‘The equipment of eminent experimental physicists will inevitably mysteriously malfunction in the presence of eminent theoretical physicists,’ and in large part the Pauli Effect owes both its birth and its endurance to its namesake. Pauli was firmly convinced that his pet principle was a reality, and he spent a large part of his career corresponding with the psychologist Carl Jung and other like minds about synchronicity and related parapsychic phenomenon in an effort to prove it.

The point of all this is not that physicists believe screwy things, nor am I trying to convince anyone that screwy things happen and look! a physicist agrees with me and that’s all the proof anyone should need, the point is more disinterestedly to draw attention to a fascinating phenomenon that, regardless of its foundations in science, pseudoscience or chicanery, has extremely interesting implications for the way we think about awareness and causality.

So, the long-awaited morbidly self-conscious statement of authorial intent: Whether you’re inclined to buy that there is some sort of parapsychic lattice of meaningful coincidence underlying reality or not, if you examine your life with an eye for synchronistic, or more popularly serendipitous, happenings, you will discover your own web of uncanny relationships that can be both useful and revealing. Chalk it up God’s plan, the ways of the Earth Spirit, or if you’re of the scientific ilk, some sort of awareness bias in which rather than certain things happening with unnatural regularity, the observer simply starts noticing certain existing things with increased regularity, whatever your philosophical views on the subject, exercises in synchronicity can hardly fail to entertain and edify if you’re of the mind for that sort of thing.

I imagine that most of the people who might be reading this are unlikely to become eminent physicists of either the experimental or theoretical variety, and are therefore, sadly, unlikely to have cause to observe the Pauli Effect in their own lives. Luckily for those among us that don’t have access to particle accelerators or just aren’t that good at math, there are other species of synchronistic effects that, if less spectacular than Pauli’s, can be just as fun. My personal favourite of these are the Baader-Meinhof Phenomena.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang was a West German terrorist organisation financed by the communist East, but the group itself is only anecdotally related to the principle. According to theory, whenever you learn about something new, be it an idea, person, place, thing, etc, that particularly strikes your fancy, you will begin to see signs of it, or references to it, or even the thing itself with surprising frequency. These events are called Baader-Meinhof Phenomena because the original incidence that led to the formulation of the theory was the peculiar recurrence of references to the Baader-Meinhof group.

This sort of effect is interesting for three reasons. In the first place, it virtually guarantees that the subject of the phenomenon is cemented permanently in memory. It’s been demonstrated neurologically that the brain forms memories by forming connections; a new piece of information is associated into the existing framework of memories, and the more associations a new memory carries with it, the more solid its foundation in memory. If you are told about the terrorist activities of the Baader-Meinhof group by a friend, then in the video store chance upon a German foreign film about the group, and finally find yourself reading a terse but amusing blog entry about Baader-Meinhof Phenomena, you are far more likely to remember the significance of the name than if it had only formed one of those associations. In this respect, the Phenomena can be extremely useful; by a simple trick of perception, new and interesting ideas are circumstantially reinforced in the mind of a person who is aware of the tendency towards concatenation of meaningful coincidences.

In the second place, and though it is a bit technical, it raises interesting philosophical questions about the reciprocal effects of perception and reality. Specifically, there is very little way to know if the tendency of events to group themselves in meaningful but unrelated ways is a property of reality as such or the result of an unconscious categorising faculty of perception. On the one hand, there may be a synchronistic lattice underlying reality that is responsible for organising the world around nodes of powerful meaning. On the other hand, it is equally possible that these nodes of meaning are the tangible result of the spontaneous organising activity of the brain, catalysed by a powerful stimulus, using material that had always been present in the environment to construct meaningful complexes.

And in the third place and most important place, these sorts of synchronistic events always occur around ideas that have an especially deep emotional resonance. They are immediately a window, at a very deep level, into your evolving values and passions. Whenever you stumble onto one of these relationships of meaningful coincidence, it is the sure sign that the nucleus of the affair ought to be looked into in much greater depth.

You may perhaps notice, if you are a student, or remember your student days particularly clearly, that even when taking four perfectly disparate classes there is a tendency for several of the same ideas or themes to appear and be discussed in all four, or at least three, of the classes. That, I believe, is the archetypical form of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomena, though admittedly it does seem to complicate our lovely little picture by hinting that perhaps the resonance is as much with the cultural gestalt as with the individual one. Be that as it may, the Baader-Meinhof Phenomena in this case is the ideal opportunity to capitalise on and consolidate the skills learned in each class and bring them to bear on a particularly salient interdisciplinary problem.

And now it seems that I’ve painted myself into a bit of an authorial dilemma, the Pauli Effect being quite obviously not a Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, it seems high time to examine the general principle underlying both Pauli and Baader. The Ariadne’s thread is the ‘acausal connecting principle’ theorised by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and termed succinctly: Synchronicity.

The idea is deceptively simple, that there is a principle that leads events with similar meanings to group together despite the fact that they are causally unrelated. The classic example comes from the memoirs of Emile Deschamps. In 1805 he was treated to a dish of plum pudding by a stranger named M. de Fortgibu. Years later, at the end of a very fine dinner at a Paris restaurant, Deschamps ordered a cup of plum pudding only to discover that the last of it had just been served to the same M. De Fortgibu. Finally, in 1832, Deschamps was served a plum pudding at the house of a friend, he began telling the story of his mysterious coincidences around the dessert only to be interrupted by the entrance of one M. De Fortgibu.

When I say that the principle is deceptively simple, it is not because the element of the uncanny in the these such events is difficult to discern, nor because it’s difficult to sum up, but because the theoretical psychological justification of why such things should occur at all is by no means as simple as its demonstrable effects. Synchronicity serves as a sort of psychic parallel to the traditional chain of cause and effect. Just as causality operates in the mind as well as in the material world, synchronicity is not limited to the space between one’s ears, but also has a distinct effect on outer events.

In the same way that the organising principle of causality is the transfer of energy through matter, the organising principle of synchronicity is a sort of magnetic attraction between events of similar meanings. While causality is entirely determinate in its limited applicability to individual cases, in the main it is probabilistic and synchronicity chiefly describes the improbably frequent occurrence of the improbable in highly meaningful situations.

By way of example: In the mid 20s Jung did a statistical analysis of the relationship between astrological sign and likely marriage partner using a randomised sample of data from all over Europe. Midway through the study, having found no statistically significant relationship between birth sign and spousal choice, he left the rest of the number crunching to a student. This student was herself a devotee of astrology and was very much hoping that the study would validate her views. In the end it didn’t. The final result was that there was no statistically significant relationship between astrology and betrothal. What was statistically significant was the difference between the results calculated by the sceptical Jung for the first half of the data, and the results calculated by the emotionally invested student for the second half of the data. The numbers were re-tabulated and results were the same: the random distribution was such that the sceptic had been validated in his scepticism while the believer’s belief had meaningfully raised the incidence of a correlation that statistically speaking should not have existed in the data.

At this point, Wolfgang Pauli and the fledgling field of quantum physics became involved. Following an inspired conversation with Pauli and Albert Einstein, Jung and Pauli began collaborating on the daunting project of uniting the uncanny probabilities of synchronicity with those demonstrated by quantum theory and evidenced in Einstein’s relativity theory.

Certain foundational principles of quantum mechanics (entanglement, the collapse of the wave function under observation, the dual nature of light as wave and particle) were believed to precisely mirror on the subatomic level the macro-level effects that Jung was had described in his theory and that Pauli experienced every time he touched lab equipment.

But, to resurrect this discussion from the abstruse depths of technical so and so, the further history of this theory is far less illustrious. Shortly after the deaths of its principle proponents it was taken from the cold hands of the brilliant crackpots by the crackpots otherwise unspecified. Synchronicity was intended to be the beachhead from which hard science would begin to grapple with the awe-inspiring mysteries of free will, fate and divinity. It has become quite the opposite, an umbilical through which new-agers and charlatans more interested in a pseudoscientific justification for areligious mystification than in anything properly described as a quest for demonstrable truths leech legitimacy from the body of credible science. I would go so far as to say that no greater hell would be necessary for the doctor’s Jung and Pauli than an eternity in a simple cell furnished only with a stock-ticker tracking sales for ‘The Secret’ in real time.

This sort of popularisation-for-the-sake-of-capitalisation of infant interdisciplinary theories only serves to increase the numbers of scientific dogmatists who wont touch the stuff on principle because it’s been made so manifestly ridiculous by the ludicrous preachers of pragmatic pietism. The only person who has ever made a fortune playing the synchronicity stocks is the one who wrote it up into a self-help book. The sorts of spiritual sophists who float their faith on the market for magical solutions would do their cause much better by contenting themselves with self-discovery, terrorist trivia and the occasional plum pudding.

Wednesday 12 January 2011

We are the Unhistorical Generation

In the final days of the Cold War, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an American political theorist by the name of Francis Fukuyama published an article in a moderately prestigious foreign affairs journal titled ‘The End of History.’ It was the sort of article that people who know about things without knowing about anything in particular were very enthusiastic about, and its popularity no doubt endures on undergraduate syllabuses for the sort of classes that you can spend a semester in only to conclude that the course description with all the adjectives in quotation marks and no nouns was in fact less vague than the course itself.

But I digress. The point, and by that I mean what Fukuyama was getting at in his article, is that History Is Over. Of course, he doesn’t mean that things have stopped happening, but he does mean that interesting things have stopped happening.

Now naturally you will object that plenty of interesting things have happened since 1989. There were two Gulf Wars, 9-11, two rather nasty recessions, Bill Clinton did something to someone that seriously impugns his ability to stop someone in the Balkans from doing something to someone in the Balkans, NAFTA, Avatar, the Giants won the World Series, and so it goes. Well it’s not a bad objection, but more on that later, before you start getting all objectionable let me tell you why History Is Over.

The basic idea is that all human history up to this point has been a seething ideological conflict just sort of bubbling away until the chaff of backwards ignorance boils away leaving us with Democracy/Capitalism. Tribalism, Feudalism, Royalism, Fascism, Communism, all fall by the wayside, the struggle is won and the world is now safe for the best of all possible worlds, namely liberal democracy and the free market. Once you’ve got a Capitalist Democracy and all of the attendant rights and entitlements there is simply no going back. Everyone pretty much gets along and buys things and we don’t really want that to change. History from this point will no longer be about things changing, if anything happens at all, things will be the same and become more so.


This isn’t to say that there won’t be problems. There are going to be Iraqs and Irans, sex scandals and the occasional Kim Jong Il, but Democracies and Market Economies have been popping up all over the world ever since the Original Thirteen opened up the maiden shop and started franchising and they’ll keep popping until every last reluctant obstructionist dreg of the primitive and deluded ideologies which proceeded our obviously superior way of doing things has been swept into the rubbish bin of history.

‘History’ will become a term of abuse for the rubbish heap of prototypes and beta versions of people, ideas and lifestyles that never made it out of R&R. The Greeks, the Romans, European, Chinese and Indian empires, all no better than errors in the cosmic game of trial and error that has led us faithfully onward and upward to our heavenly resting place in Democracy American Style.

But be that as it may, whether Fukuyama is right or not is beside the point. The fact that some Neo-Con hung up the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner a bit early is not what interests me. The grain of intrigue here is that, ‘End of History’ or no ‘End of History,’ a distinctly twilight of the world pallor seems to hang in the air. Apocalyptic speculation hasn’t been so rampant since 1945, and the best that most people can say about the global political situation is ‘I dunno, stalemate I guess.’ Call it anomie, ennui, apathy, disappointment, disillusionment, depression, despair or simple indifference, the temptation seems to be to call it a world and be done with it.

Whether Fukuyama was, against all odds, a prophet of our time, a modern Zarathustra throwing over the idol of ‘things could be different than they are, maybe even better,’ whether our metastasised egos have finally throttled our better angels, or whether disenchantment with the revolutionary ways of the Beats, Hippies, Abolitionists, Communists, Utopians, Suffragettes and our parents who have been pouring out of the woodwork since 1776 with harebrained schemes for building a better world has finally dripped into the nether-regions of our collective psyche, whatever the reasons for it, the present generation seems oddly convinced that while they can make the world a better place, they will not make it a different place.

But you object. ‘Well my good man, your conniving sophistical subtleties notwithstanding, I,’ you say, ‘am not convinced that there is a problem here. In fact, I am not convinced that you’ve said anything at all. Your argument, to the extent that I can discern an argument here, seems to be entirely based on a dimly understood article from the eighties and a series of irrelevant distinctions in vocabulary and verb tense that, I confess, are all Greek to me. My honest opinion, dear sir, is that if you have a point to make, make it. And throw in an example by way of illustration, why don’t you!’

Well, that was quite the indelicate intrusion into the flow of my thoughts, dear reader, but if you insist, and it seems you are adamant, I will answer your objection as best I can.

My point is that insofar as History is conceived of as a dynamic battle of ideologies, the sustained questioning of the way we live and why, supported by a genuine willingness to try radically different patterns of thought and action, particularly vis a vis our basic assumptions about life the universe and everything, I suspect, based on my rather provisional membership in modern human society, that we as a culture are no longer playing that game. I’ll emphasise that this is really no better than a hunch, but as I see it, the great creative uncertainty that brought us the clash of Religion and Science, Democracy and Totalitarianism, Capitalism and Communism, is no longer alive in the [Post]-Post-Modern soul. To say nothing of what may actually happen, and I do say nothing on that subject, we are a decidedly Unhistorical generation.

Barring climatic or nuclear catastrophe, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the historians of the future look on the end of the Cold War in much the same way we look on the Fall of the Roman Empire; the last interesting thing to happen for a good long while.

Monday 10 January 2011

Post I

I hate technology. I condescend to texting and occasionally to email, largely because the one reminds me, rather quaintly I admit, or a sort of direct automatic telegraph, and the other is far easier and more reliable than typing out a letter on my Remington and posting it. (It is also far cheaper; the price of stamps just broke 50 cents, USPS having come to the economical conclusion that the best remedy for a total lack of demand is to raise prices. But that’s the postal service for you: doing the unnecessary inefficiently since Xerxes was on the throne.)

As for the rest of it, I am firmly convinced, and experience continues to bear out the view, that the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and cetera, self-select for all that is base, stupid and perverse in human nature, to the emphatic exclusion of the nobler sentiments and/or anything creative, authentic or worthwhile. ‘They used to say that a million monkeys pounding away at a million typewriters would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare; now thanks to the Internet we know that is not true.’

Blogs, the medium through which I now talk to myself in what will soon become a dusty, cobweb ridden and perennially unvisited corner of the indelible historical record, are if anything even worse. As I see it, they cater on the one hand to the would-be pop culture icons who feel that their no doubt fascinating and completely original lives deserve the level of attention society pays to a Lindsey Lohan or a Hurricane Katrina, and on the other hand to the would-be demagogues who feel that their no doubt moderate and well-reasoned socio-political views deserve the sort of adoring audiences society provides for a Huey Long or an Adolph Hitler.

Given the nature of the Internet, all of this fevered activity should draw easy and obvious parallels to those other institutions now synonymous with wrong-headed communicative failure (High Schools, the Senate, Italy) with everyone shouting and no one listening, the result can only be truckloads of useless and in retrospect embarrassing term papers, red-tape and Italians that we’ve resolved to ignore until they go away. Sadly the Blogosphere (someone has decided that the Blogo-world is circular, presumably to match the logic that sustains it) has proven more enduring then the problems of the kind that we’ve traditionally faced, it cannot be burned or forgotten, and all attempts to distract it with Boobs have backfired horrifically.

To be fair, there are of course plenty of good blogs out there, and the Internet is full of useful information and even, I admit, valuable original work, and I have nothing but respect for those almost Nietzschean aberrations that have managed to heave themselves, half-dead and crusted in faecal matter from the malarial swamp of a marketplace to which our culture comes to trade, gossip, sicken and die.

Of course, I anticipate your obvious and by this point assuredly outraged question: ‘What the hell are you doing writing a blog you hypocritical Ludite?! If you want to express your inflammatory views to an indifferent audience, go write a book lamenting the Decline of Western Culture or the Ignorance of the Masses, or better yet, go write for the New York Times, surely that’s the place for widely-held minority opinions and unsubstantiated cultural commentary with an elitist tilt and a progressive thrust!’

Hmm. I seem to have forgotten why my straw man is wrong.

Ah, yes! I was going to answer the question. Why has an avowedly technophobic enemy of mass culture decided to throw his hat into the already over-populous ring of amateur authors and armchair cultural critics who spend their free time transcribing their indolent observations and tacking them up online in the vain hope that somebody might give a damn? It seems that some sort of Statement of Principles or Declaration of Intent is in order.

In the first place, despite my unsympathetic appraisal of modern culture and my firm belief that not just the state of things, but the sort of people who generally talk about the state of things has been looking pretty damn shabby lo these past 30 or 40 years, I believe that there are still people out there who are saying important and insightful things, some of them even going so far as to say them on the Internet, and while I don’t necessarily claim to be one of these people myself, I do hope to be able to bring some of their ideas together with older, largely forgotten ideas in new and useful ways, and generally bring attention to the ragged rear-guard of the civilised world, and possibly have a bit of fun while doing it.

In the second place – and I warn you now that I am about to make an Unsolicited Disclosure of Personal Information – I’ve reached a point in my life where it will be either the Blog or the Bottle for me. Confronted with the classic problem of Artists, Intellectuals, Sensitive Souls and those like myself burdened by the particular conceit of secretly believing to be one of the above, ‘Do you make something of your life or do you drink it away as quickly and painlessly as possible?’, I have decided to take the former path insofar as it will have me. That said, given my personal weakness for Jackson Pollock’s double or nothing school of artistic philosophy, you will probably be right in expecting the occasional drunk screed for or against something something something, or not, etc.

And finally, in the third place, though I may wax vitriolic at times (often with more venom than I honestly feel), the reason that I like to think and write about the world and people and the things they do and books and such, is that I genuinely find them interesting and exciting, and perhaps there are others who do too. The world, our hearts, and our psyches, may be full to their inky bottoms with quite a lot of plastic, prefab shit, one-size-fits-all ideas, emotions and desires made en masse in China for a firm in Milwaukee, but there are also a lot of beautiful, wonderful things out there or in there, and I’d like to do my bit to expose the one and elevate the other.