Peter Watts is free

Peter Watts is free.

Peter Watts is a Canadian marine biologist and writer who, as some of you may have heard, was arrested in December by the American border patrol after failing to immediately comply with an order during a search of his car. He was choked, maced and then physically assaulted, held overnight and then released into a blizzard without any warm weather gear to walk back over the border into Canada. Despite film footage that proved the contrary, he was further charged with assaulting a border guard. His subsequent trial by jury dismissed all charges of assault, but found him guilty of non-compliance with an order by a law-enforcement office, and he faced up to two years jail time despite clearly being attacked with unnecessary force by the guard in question.

Although the jury expressed solidarity with Mr Watts, with individual members going as far as to write to newspapers after the trail defending his actions, they carried out their duty according to the letter of the law; he was clearly told to get back in his car by a law enforcement agent, he did not immediately comply, therefore he had broken the law, and they had no choice but to find him guilty.

While I do not take issue with the actions of the jury, they carried out their duty as directed by the judge, it is the law itself that I have grave concerns over, based as it is on the notion of an absolute submission to the authority of a law enforcement officer. The officer in question was clearly acting in an inappropriate fashion, and yet because of his position he is automatically assumed to be in the right in the eyes of the law. The Stanford Prison Experiment clearly showed that even people with the best will in the world are capable of great brutality when placed in roles of authority, that the act itself of bestowing a mantel of authority on them encourages a sense of superiority and a justification in their mind for acts of brutality, so what effect does bestowing unconditional authority have upon those who are lacking a good will to begin with?

I have long questioned the motivation of those who pursue a career in law enforcement. While there may be some nobility in the concept of protecting one's fellow citizens from harm, the reality of modern policework is less about community building and more about statistics-based enforcement of conservative notions of an ordered society. I often wonder how much of an individual's desire to join the police is based upon media portrayals of police life as exciting and glamorous, how much of the behaviour of an individual officer in a given situation is shaped by their consumption of cinematic and television portrayals of police, and do they immediately act in an agressive fashion because they have been conditioned by the media to believe that is how they are supposed to act, because every encounter is a confrontation that could lead to their own demise? But can irrational fear and media conditioning alone explain the assault on an unarmed writer by a group of armed border guards, or is their some deeper, truer observation to be made about the psyche of an individual attracted to such a career, that some people just like having power over others?

In an environment where the constabulary were genuinely defending the interests of the citizenry, this might be an aceptable flaw, a trade that a given society is willing to make to protect itself. The Law is a set of rules by which a society chooses to govern itself, it lays out acceptable behavior and the penalties for transgressions, and a constabulary is one method by which a society enforces those rules. If it takes a person with a certain mentality to enforce those rules, then so be it, or so the rationalisation might go. However the suspicion is always there that the constabulary is used to enforce the rules not of society at large, but of a wealthy and powerful minority.

In the UK ASBOs, or Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, have fast become the preferred method for dealing with people or acts that mainstream society finds offensive. An ASBO is an individualized proscription, wherein a person is prohibited from a specific act, or banned from a specific location. If they break this prohibition twice, they can be sent to prison. It is important to note that this prohibition is not against something that is illegal, typical examples often given of proscribed behaviour include associating with certain other individuals, being in a particular location, making noise after a certain time, etc. ASBOs create specific laws tailored for specific individuals that carry full legal penalties.

According to Anna Minton in her book 'Ground Control', by 2009 in the UK over 10,000 ASBOs had been given, and in Manchester alone over 90% had been breached, resulting in jail sentences. Many of these ASBOs have been issued at the request of property management companies that own the private streets and retail areas that have replaced town squares and other common land as the centre of many UK towns. Increasingly ASBOs have been issued for activities that the property management companies feel deter consumers from shopping, such as groups of teenagers hanging out, anti-war demonstrations, political groups leafleting high-streets, street-corner preaching and other such activities.

In this situation the civil constabulary, the police, are engaged in the enforcement of individualised laws not enacted by society at large, but at the behest of private corporate entities. For example while the majority of UK citizens have been against the Iraq war, and thus those protesting the war were expressing the sentiment and will of society at large, the actions of protestors though legal have been judged to be to the economic detriment of private corporations, and the police have been directed to intervene, not to maintain public order but to preserve the economic order. Furthermore the death of bystander Ian Tomlinson at the hands of London police during last year's G20 protests shows that when enforcing economic order the actions of the constabulary are often indiscriminate and without restraint.

My own personal interactions with the police have ranged from the farcically indifferent to the painfully extreme, so admittedly I have a negative bias against the reality of law enforcement organisations, as opposed to the idealised concept, but as a rule I question anything that demands explicit surrender to their authority, especially given their increasing deployment to protect the interests of corporate, rather than civil society.

I'm not sure whether any of this was in the mind of the Judge who sentenced Peter Watts on Monday; during his summation he outlined his own childhood wherein he was taught to obey the police without question, yet he said to Watts that he wished they were just able to sit down over beers and "hash this stuff out". Clearly there seemed to be some distance in the mind of the Judge between the letter and the spirit of the law, and in the end he sentenced according to the spirit. Watts was fined and released without jail time, which was not the expected outcome, and is now safely back across the border in Canada as a free man.

Which is good.

Links
Peter Watts' account of the original incident
The Trial
His reaction to Monday's result

What Unkie Dave did next

Another week, another rather poor showing on the whole blogging front. The more astute and/or cynically-minded amongst you might have assumed that this was because Unkie Dave was on another far flung fact-finding mission to see the world before it is inevitably destroyed by careless mendicants and other idlers jetting around intent on seeing the world before it is inevitable destroyed, and, as a result of being rather too clever by half, was waylaid by the somewhat unexpected recent volcano activity in a location or locations unknown.

Well, you would be wrong.

The simple fact of the matter is that I have been rather busy of late, working out my master plan for the coming year, or more specifically until the end of the year, 2011 just being too far in The Future(TM) for me to take seriously at this stage. This week sees the second anniversary of my departure from corporate life, and while you can take the manager out of the corporation sometimes it is hard to take the corporate out of the manager, and thus I find myself still somewhat overly fond of milestones, target dates and other key performance indicators, and just as equally prone to missing those milestones completely as I ever was in corporate life.

Sad, but true.

Thus with such a major anniversary looming I have spent the last three months imposing order upon the somewhat chaotic and haphazard approach I take to whatever approximates my professional life. For the last year or so I have been consulting, and at the end of this year I still am no closer to understanding what exactly a consultant is. Basically people seem to want to either a) ask me questions about stuff that I have a vague knowledge of, b) have me put them in touch with people much cooler than I, and/or c) take advantage of the fact that I have a rather nice collection of suits and look good standing beside them on a podium, adding a bit of gravitas to a presentation.

The fact of the matter is that none of these three present a long-term career path given that eventually my knowledge will become stale, my friendships with cool people will be strained, and my suits will slide inexorably towards the depths of Anti-Fashion (Like Anti-Matter, but in polyester), one elbow-pad away from teacher-wear. What was needed, I realised in January, is a long-term plan to stave off both the bailiffs and the fashion police, who now thanks to the recent Criminal Justice Bill can convict you solely on the word of a fashion police officer, serving or retired.

A pox on both your houses, Minister Ahern!

With that in mind the last three months have seen a veritable torrent of planning, scheming, conniving and deliberating, and now at the end of it all and as we approach the magical two year anniversary of my transformation from corporate duckling to terrified and aimless entrepreneurial swan, we now have something that approximates a plan. Roughly speaking what I am currently working on can be divided into four projects:

a) Internet Start-up A
For over a year now I have been advising an Irish internet start-up that has created an online B2B network. This has been an interesting project, from advising on the business model and construction of the web-platform itself, through to the sourcing and securing of seed capital to finance the project, and as a result of this involvement I have transitioned from being an external advisor to being an internal company Director. While this is the project that is currently the most fully formed, operational and commercially viable, ironically it is also the project that currently consumes the least of my time.

b) The Space
In January I was invited to join a group of entrepreneurs, environmentalists and educators working towards the creation of a physical space where small scale start-ups, social action groups, educators and artists could come together to work, collaborate and learn, all run along the principles of sustainable design. Part-incubator space, part-social/academic environment, the goal is to be operational by November, and the consultations and public events associated with this project have been an amazingly educational process, particularly those aspects of collaboration with the public sector and local government, areas that fascinate me but with which I had very little direct experience.

c) Knowledge Transfer
One of the unique aspects of The Space will be the provision of training programs designed to facilitate small-scale start up enterprises, individual social entrepreneurs, or anyone who is interested in the principles of sustainable design, change management, personal or professional development. The programs on offer are wide-ranging and cover a multitude of topics, and will be taught by professional educators currently involved in running Masters level programs. I've been working with these educators to create a business model around the provision of programs outside the environment of The Space, either to individuals, academic bodies or businesses, and the first of these external programs will go live in late May.

d) Internet Start-up B
I was contacted by a group of film makers who wanted to create a digital distribution platform for their body of work, and generate an ongoing source of revenue to finance future productions. As our planning sessions progressed I have become more involved with the off-line side of their business, and although it is unlikely that this will see any tangible results until the end of the year, this is actually the project that is exciting me the most at the moment, and the one about which I can currently say the least.

The ultimate goal behind all these projects is to end up with a varied portfolio of activities that each occupy a small amount of my time and individually generate a modest revenue stream, but collectively keep the metaphorical wolf from the allegorical door while leaving me with enough time on my hands to pursue other less-commercial activities, about which I will write at a later date.

The previous twenty-four months have left me with a reticence for anything that resembles full-time work, an allergy to fixed working hours, and a phobia of corporate monoculture. The next eight months will tell me whether it is possible to live a life free from such compromises, or if I need to start updating my wardrobe once again and embrace what I call 'Plan B', appearing in a series of stock photos illustrating exciting everyday business life, looking alert and attentive in energised meetings, jumping in the air high-fiving a diverse array of pretend colleagues, or simply smiling behind a laptop, giving you the confidence to hand over your credit card details to whatever organization could afford the discounted licence fee my image commands.

Seriously though, there is no Plan B.

Ca-Boom!

Street art, Wexford Street, Saturday morning. Dozens of people walked by unseeing, almost didn't notice it myself.

Of course in America the artist would probably go to jail for this.

Not big fans of vegetables there.

More photos here.

In the company of Kings

Interesting piece in yesterday's Times*, by JK Rowling on why she is still not a Tory. She writes about why her values haven't changed since becoming a gazillionaire, and what struck me was the following passage:

"The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize."

Ah, makes you proud to be Oirish; seven Eurovisions, six Nobel Prizes and now this. Our reputation on the world stage has been firmly cemented.

Brings a tear to me eye, to be sure, to be sure.

*the London one, not our own paltry shadow of a newspaper. Which means we'll probably see an almost identically themed article in this Saturday's IT, the usual level of vigorous research for the Grey Lady of D'Olier Street being to get a couple of interns to plunder the previous weeks Sunday Times for 'inspiration' to help pad out the Roisin Ingle fluff and gushing puff pieces on Cecelia Ahern. Sometimes it really is just the Sindo minus the rabid neo-liberalism and eulogies for dead models.

A lot done, a lot more to do

And so we have reached the magical 500th post here at Booming Back. With just over four years of posting and more than a few smiles, polemical rants, snafus, spelling misdemeanors and the occasional awkward and uncomfortable silence behind us it is worth pausing to reflect on what the outcome of all of this has been.

One way traditionally used to measure impact is the number of column inches devoted in traditional dead-tree media to whatever you are blathering on about. This being the age of post-tree news, however, a snapshot of where you are in the great tangled web of pre-singularity/post-human consciousness might be slightly more appropriate, and for this I turn to rather helpful folks at MIT's Media Lab to try and understand how 500 posts of bloggy goodness have been received online.

According to their Personas program, both Unkie Dave and Booming Back are perceived slightly differently by the great and powerful web. Personas scans the internet for references to an inputted name, and then characterizes those references into a few predetermined categories and visually displays the resulting online persona in a colourful bar (click on any of the images below to expand).

As you can see the results for Booming Back itself get somewhat skewed by a certain Dutch techno producer, and for some bizarre reason an awful lot of sports references. The distribution between Politics and Religion is pretty spot on though.

Unkie Dave, however, is unnaturally concerned with Fame and Education, which no doubt many of you suspected all along.

The analysis engine is also visualized, and throws up an interesting pattern of webquotes, blog posts and assorted online flotsam and jetsam that it is mining to create the profile:

For the record I have not now, nor ever in the past, considered buying a Furry.

Whatever that is.

So obviously to bring my online persona more inline with my mental self-image, to bring about the happy situation where you, dear reader, think that I am writing about what I also think I am writing about, I must devote even more energy towards posting about government corruption, religious intolerance, and the abandonment of civic duties and responsibilities by the fourth estate and the citizenry themselves, all with pretty pictures and the occasional snide remark directed at (insert unsolicited bugbear of the week here).

Are you excited? I'm excited!

Here's to the next 500!

On Hyperbolic Crochet and Lacan

I love the Science Gallery, its a great place that never fails to surprise and delight with the exhibitions it puts on. A few weeks ago The Very Understanding Girlfriend took part in a crocheting workshop there, but not just any crocheting workshop. This was part of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project, a global exhibition that travels from country to country crocheting coral reefs.

"And why?", I hear you ask. Well, Hyperbolic Space is non-Euclidian Geometry in action. According to Wikipedia:

"In mathematics, hyperbolic n-space, denoted Hn, is the maximally symmetric, simply connected, n-dimensional Riemannian manifold with constant sectional curvature −1. Hyperbolic space is the principal example of a space exhibiting hyperbolic geometry. It can be thought of as the negative-curvature analogue of the n-sphere. Although hyperbolic space Hn is diffeomorphic to Rn its negative-curvature metric gives it very different geometric properties."

which makes no sense at all to me either, I'm afraid. As far as I can tell its a structure where parallel lines can be folded upon themselves so that two points on separate parallel lines can actually be in contact with each other, which is impossible in standard Euclidian geometry.

Growing up on a diet of SciFi, tesseracts and wormholes, this all seems perfectly plausible to me, but to a whole raft of mathematicians the idea that this type of space could ever actually be physically modelled in the really real world was ludicrous. Or more specifically to a whole raft of male mathematicians it seemed impossible, and then one fine day in 1997, Dr Daina Taimina of Cornell University realised that you could actually model hyperbolic space through crochet.

Her work was then picked up by Margaret and Christine Wertheim, two US-based Australians, who saw parallels between the hyperbolic shapes crocheted by Taimina and naturally occurring coral structures, and so a project to highlight the destruction of the coral reefs and showcase the role of women in mathematics was born, and touched down here in Dublin at the Science Gallery just over three weeks ago.

As part of the preparation for the exhibition an open workshop was held, where folks could go along and crochet their own contributions to an Irish reef that would become part of the permanent travelling exhibition. According to The Very Understanding Girlfriend between 30 and 40 people attended, none of whom were men. In fact according to the Wertheims over 3,000 people have contributed pieces to the exhibition over the last few years, 3 of whom were men.

This lack of male participation in crocheting and the over-representation of men in positions of academic authority in the mathematics world might have had something to do with the fact that it took so long for someone to realise that hyperbolic spaces could be modeled in the really real world. For the male-dominated Academy such modeling was impossible, meaning that if they couldn't understand it, it couldn't possible exist.

I am a man. I have never experienced gender discrimination, and would like to think that I have never knowingly participated in it. I have rarely witnessed it, but increasingly I have come to think that this is because I am not attuned to seeing it, believing that gender struggles in Western/Northern societies are largely a thing of the past, a battle fought in the twenties and seventies, and gender inequality is largely something for the history books.

I am, of course, very, very wrong about this, but it still manages to shock me when I witness it in an otherwise 'enlightened' environment.

I've been reading a lot of Badiou and Žižek over the last few months, and both draw on the psychoanalysis of Lacan, Žižek especially, as the basis of many of their sociological and political theories. Lacan, who seems relatively unknown in the mainstream society of the English speaking world, is passionately followed by roughly half of the 20,000 or so practicing psychoanalysts in the world, the others being more traditional Freudians. I finally got round to reading a bit of Lacan directly, and was happily working through his theory of the Real, and thoughts on language, nodding my head along as I do when I think I understand something, but almost certainly don't, and then suddenly came to a crashing halt when he started to expound upon the nature of women.

Men, you see, have a phallus. Women, as you may have noticed, do not. For Lacan the Phallus is not just the penis, but the penis is a Phallus, the Phallus being an externalized representation of male sexuality. It is easy therefore to define what a man is, a man is that which has a Phallus. But women, as we have already noted, do not have a Phallus, therefore it is impossible to define what a woman is except in terms of the absence of something, and defining a woman as that which does not have a Phallus is a pretty poor definition indeed for Lacan. Women are thus undefinable mysteries.

This, to my uneducated mind, is complete rubbish; that in the opening years of the 21st Century any widely held academic belief could be based on such an androcentric model, that men are the baseline and women can only be defined in terms of their lack of an essential male-ness, beggars belief. While it is easy for me to dismiss this notion from my worldview as antediluvian, what are the implications for my acceptance of Lacan's other theories? If his central understanding of masculinity and femininity strikes me as ludicrous, then must I also hold his theories of Language and the Real as suspect? And if Lacan is suspect then must I also hold all of Badiou's and Žižek's theories as erroneous, built as they are on fundamentally flawed foundations?

The Academy itself must therefore be suspect, particularly in disciplines dominated by a specific gender, for male psychoanalysts, political philosophers and mathematicians alike all suffer from a singular monoculture of the mind, a gender-based myopia that seems incapable of allowing for the existence of experience outside their own masculine world-view, and even though they may believe themselves to be open and egalitarian their inherent myopia prevents them from seeing the ways in which their thought-models actually discriminate.

Their belief system prevents them from accepting the possibility of their discrimination until someone comes along and crochets them a new model.

Update
Oops! (but a good 'oops') Dr Daina Taimina replied this afternoon via the comments below to say:

"Hi, Unkie Dave - sorry to disappoint you -but it was a man who came with the idea to have this model - see the history of a model here:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~dtaimina/hypplanes.htm

so I stand suitably and happily corrected!

Her book 'Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes' recently won The Diagram prize for the Oddest Named Book of the Year, and is available from Amazon in the UK, and the US, and you can see and read more of her work on her blog, Hyperbolic Crochet.

Amazing!

I'm still skeptical about Lacan and the rest of the Academy though...

Links
The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is on display until June at the Science Gallery.
The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the Science Gallery
Interview with Dr Daina Taimina at Cabinet Magazine
More of my photos from the launch event
lusciousblopster's photos from the launch

A number of friends are exceptionally creative in the fields of knitting and crocheting, and have the good sense to blog about it extensively. For inspiration and encouragement check out the kaleidoscopic Caroline at An Snag Breac, the fabulous Felix at The Domestic Soundscape and the indomitable Lean at The String Revolution . I, alas, barely qualify as having opposable thumbs and possess the manual dexterity of a manatee, so it is highly unlikely that you will see the knitted productions of Unkie Dave on this blog, but you never know...

Yeah, but its raining

And so an uncharismatic, short-tempered and deeply unpopular leader bows to the nation's demands and takes the long drive up to the great house, cap in hand, to ask the titular Head of State to exercise one of her few remaining powers and dissolve the elected assembly, calling a national election. The people have spoken, no longer will the corruption and financial mismanagement be accepted, no more to the quangos and expenses scandals, no more to the destruction of state run hospitals and the degradation of a once triumphant education system. It all ends here, today, and in four weeks the people will rise up and finally have their voices heard. Arise, citizens, the hour is upon us, arise!

erm, except, unfortunately, this is all happening in another country. The UK to be exact. Poo.

But fear not, a triumphant movement bringing together rural and urban poor has marched upon the streets of the nation's capital to protest against the socially conservative and economically neo-liberal ruling elite. Despite the near total control of the media by supporters of the ruling party hundreds of thousands of protesters at this very minute continue to occupy government buildings and have brought the capital's streets to a standstill demanding a return to true democracy and an abandonment of social and economic policies that only benefit the richest 1% at the expense of the vast majority of the population living below the poverty line. It all ends here, today, the people have risen up and finally their voices will be heard. Arise, citizens, the hour is upon us, arise!

erm, except, unfortunately, this too is also all happening in another country. Thailand to be exact. Double poo.

And here, well, you see, its raining. We've all had a nice four-day weekend and so its back to work now, heads down, focus on just getting through the day until its time to go home and head out to the pub tonight to watch the match, maybe play the lotto tomorrow, nice bit of golf at the weekend if the weather eases up, if not then off to the pub for another match and a few scoops with the lads, or out on the town with the girls and Bacardi Breezers all round or a bottle or two of the old Cab Sauv, and a bite to eat at Harvey Nicks, roish. Did I mention its raining?

Double-plus poo.

For the Irish amongst you who still live in Ireland, I say to you that if you don't feel like marching, if you don't feel like protesting, even if you don't especially feel like we need an immediate change in Government, read Fintan O'Toole in today's Irish Times. Read it, and tell me you're not angry.

And if you're not, you're part of the problem.

Reflections in the Pool of Bethesda

Easter Monday, out for a walk on the streets of Dublin, I have the city to myself. A low grey cloud is draped over the bunkered rooftops, a shawl covering the hunched shoulders of broken and battered men. The wind that follows me through the lane, whispering in foreign words just behind my ear, is warm and urgent, pushing me along to my destination with a rattling can of impatience, tumbling down the street behind me in haphazard haste.

I pause in a shop for an indifferent coffee brewed by an equally indifferent woman. Though no sign or signal passes between us we are inexorably joined together by a shared and forced obliviousness to the ragged man at the table behind me talking loudly to himself. He exists but does not exist, money is exchanged, thank-yous are proffered in a normal tone of voice despite the incoherent cacophony and random castigations that erupt just outside my peripheral vision.

We see but unsee.

The night before the Good Man Jesus is betrayed, Philip Pullman's Scoundrel Christ seeks redemption at the Pool of Bethesda. Surrounded by the lame, the infirm and the diseased, he strains to understand the true nature of human goodness, asking the most wretched of the beggars around him for an answer. "Companionship" comes the answer, a kiss, an embrace, a moment of human warmth, "the touch of a kindly hand is worth gold". The Scoundrel Christ overcomes his nausea and revulsion and embraces the man, kissing him lightly on the head, before disgust forces him to flee. Later, as he reflects on his actions, the realization dawns that in their clumsy embrace his purse was stolen by the beggar. Shame and revulsion drive him on to the pivotal act in his life, and that of his brother Jesus. The course of human history is forever altered.

From the magazine rack looms the turtlenecked face of Steve Jobs on a hundred copies of a dozen magazines; is this what Jobs would see if he entered his own head through a portal on the 7½ Floor? In a week of bombings and earthquakes, racial attacks and NAMA, commemorations and commiserations, the story everyone leads with is a plastic box that fills a need that eight weeks ago nobody knew they had. A manufactured desire, two months of pain and notions of inadequacy and finally a $499 panacea, or 64Gb for $699. A pain so deep that people queue in New York for 48 hours to have themselves healed in a great glass tent.

"And finally...", the News proclaims over the ceiling mounted speakers hidden throughout the shop, still not loud enough to mask the ragged man's frenzied discourse with companions vanished and unknown. "And finally", a joke and a giggle at the end of so much gloom and despair to brighten your mood before the ads come on so you're not too upset to buy things. "And finally", the News proclaims, smug-superior and condescending, the last bastion of the white man's burden dispensing colonial wisdom as they weep over helpless Africans or gnash their teeth at mistreated Afghan women, with sadly no time left to report on injustice and inequality at home. "And finally', the News proclaims, let's all laugh at Japan, where they marry computer game characters and wear white gloves to push passengers into trains. Where everything is sold in vending machines and they prostrate themselves before giant robots and pink plastic cats. "And finally", the News proclaims, we turn to Japan, where people are buying hugging pillows for elderly relatives and lonely singles, because they're all too busy working to offer each other a kiss, an embrace, a moment of human warmth. An arm-shaped pillow to replace the absent Other. Look at Japan, the News proclaims, isn't it all so strange?

48 hours the people of New York queue outside a glass tent for a $499 panacea to take away the pain, to mask the symptoms, to help them forget how they miss a kiss, an embrace, a moment of human warmth. 'Companionship' is all they long for, 64Gb for $699. 300,000 units sold in a single day, "The touch of a kindly hand is worth gold" thinks Jobs.

An edge of desperation has entered the voice of the ragged man, debating the injustices of life with himself over a now cold and still indifferent coffee. His words slurred and incoherent but all in the shop can hear the secret layer carried underneath. All in the shop can do nothing else but hear the secret layer carried underneath. "Look at me", his hidden words say, "talk to me, see me, recognise me as you. Stop for just one moment in your lives of self-anointed consequence and offer me a single kiss, an embrace, a moment of human warmth"

I walk on, unseeing, fearful for my purse, back into the sticky caress of a warm breeze that whispers somewhere behind my ears no matter which way I face, back into the streets that crouch low and brace themselves for the next blow that will inevitably come, back into the indifference of Easter Monday.

Shame and revulsion are the echos in my footsteps.

The Unsubtle Knife

As we enter into what I, in a former life, may have enthusiastically referred to as "Quarter 2", it makes sense to take stock of my progress against what I, in that other life so dim and distant in the past, may have called "Quarterly Key Performance Indicators". In this other life, as you can see, I talked a lot of nonsense.

Last year I read a respectable 45 books from start to finish. There were a few more that I read the start of, or the finish, or occasionally the bits in between, but on the whole I am only satisfied by a complete progress from cover to cover. This year I set myself an ambitious target of a book per week, or rather I reset myself an ambitious target, for in truth that was also the goal of 2009, but as with our national balance sheet there seems to have been some unforeseen discrepancies between projections and returns, and now the poorest amongst you must all suffer. I don't make the rules, I just play the game.

While this goal may sound easy and I did indeed manage to finish thirteen books in thirteen rather hectic weeks, it was rather touch-and-go towards the end as I found myself somewhat sidetracked last month by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, each volume of which is around 800 pages. Charlie Stross has an interesting article about why Sci-Fi books tend to be of monstrous length, and its not because the authors get paid by the word. Surprisingly it also has nothing to do with a dearth of editors in the genre, although curiously enough each Mars volume took me about as much time to go through as 150 pages of Alain Badiou, suggesting a dearth of competent editors in the genre.

I find this happens a lot in speculative fiction, that the concepts being explored are interesting, but the way in which they are explored detracts from their impact. Points are laboured and devalued by excess padding and superfluous detail all designed to lend weight to a text like so many extra adjectives added to an essay to bulk it out to the correct word-count. Or worse yet an idea so nice in naked simplicity is devalued by the choice of vinegar-and-fish-stained newsprint as wrapping.

The most recent case-in-point, Philip Pullman's new release 'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ'. I like Pullman, his 'His Dark Materials' trilogy being a particular favourite and not a small influencer on my decision to visit Svalbard last year. An outspoken humanist, Pullman offers his trilogy as an anti-Narnia, a children's tale as polemically secular as Lewis' is evangelical, though the literary merits of both elevate them above mere opposing propaganda.

Sadly 'The Good Man' is not so similarly blessed. Attempting to explain the discrepancies between the portraits of Jesus in the four Gospels (specifically between John and the three Synoptic Gospels), and strip away later literary embellishments of supernatural mysticism, Pullman adopts the conceit of there being not one historical Jesus but two, twin brothers named Jesus, and Christ. Jesus is the wandering preacher familiar to us from scripture, his brother Christ follows behind in the shadows, the archivist and recorder of his sibling's life and perhaps the source of the Q document from which both the Gospels of Mark and Luke are drawn.

The trouble with the book is that while the idea is immediately engaging, the execution is not. The faux-biblical style of writing with short simplistic sentences becomes tiring quite quickly, and where it does evolve into genuinely engaging prose as Jesus considers the dangers posed to society by a future all-encompassing hierarchical Church, Pullman's interjection of a thinly veiled attack on recent clerical abuse scandals seems particularly clumsy and unsubtle, and detracts from what could be a powerful scene.

Much in the same way as background images drawn from Abu Ghraib photos seem laboured in Alfonso Cuarón's otherwise excellent 2006 film, 'Children of Men', such polemical points seem jarring and sledgehammered into the work and are as unwelcome and intrusive as the taped laughter track on a sitcom, belittling the reader/viewer with their flashing neon directives to "FEEL EMOTION NOW!".

This is what happens when an artist is too emotionally involved with the subject matter of their work, the desire to transmit their message overrides their internal quality control systems, the audience is alienated and the message itself is rejected.

Maybe I too am too close to this subject. As both an atheist and a theologian perhaps what I see as awkward and clumsy may seem inspirational and insightful to someone with more distance. What I find to be a missed opportunity may be revelatory to those for whom this is their first encounter with the quest to identify and understand the historical Jesus. But to offer this defense places the book dangerously close to 'The Da Vinci Code' on the shelf of literary near (and not so near) misses, where the phrase "yeah, but it makes you think" comprises six of the most damning words ever offered as praise.

Overall this was a disappointment for me. As a summary or a conversation, the concept of the novel is amazing; I would love to hear Pullman speak about the subject and his reasonings behind the division of each gospel event between the two brothers, why he felt one scene suited the forthright Jesus and another he attributed to the more reluctant Christ. But the execution of the concept as a novel is flawed and this, for me, unfortunately detracts from the impact of the concept itself.

The back cover of my edition proclaims loudly in embossed gold lettering, "This Is A Story". Perhaps, but what it isn't, alas, is a good read.

Links
'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' by Philip Pullman
Extract at The Guardian Online

All of this has happened before...

Things that have not changed in the last two years (Number One): Apple batteries are poo.

Fourteen months after replacing the battery on my 17" MBP, I came in a few weeks ago to find it deader than a doorknob. My laptop gets minimal use, for the last year my computer of daily use has been an iMac, my travel computer has been a Samsung NC10 netbook. My MBP is hauled out on occasion and runs for maybe 10 hours a month, and yet here we are two months after the warranty has conveniently expired and it is no more, it has deceased, it is an ex-battery. If I had used the laptop more often perhaps it would have died within its warranty period and I would have been able to get a replacement, but as it is I am €139 out of luck. Again.

Things that have not changed in the last two years (Number Two): Delivery companies are unable to find my doorbell.

Yesterday afternoon at 16:10, and again this morning at 09:26, UPS failed to locate my doorbell and alert me to the delivery of my replacement MacBook Pro battery. I work from home, so does the Very Understanding Girlfriend. It is a rare occasion that neither of us are home during business hours, and neither yesterday nor today were one of those moments. If the house was continuously occupied and no doorbell was heard, one can only conclude that the delivery person was unable to locate and/or use said doorbell.

If the local street urchins can locate our doorbell for their humorous antics and tomfoolery, one would imagine a trained delivery professional would also be able to locate and utilise such a device.

Alas, no.

Things that have changed in the last year: My cholesterol.

This might not be big news to any of you, but for me its huge. I am a vegetarian. I do not smoke. I am an occasional drinker (read: a lightweight). I am an appropriate weight for my height. And yet last year during my first annual check-up my cholesterol came in at a staggering 6.9, with an LDL of 4.69. The advice from my doctor: eat less meat (I'm a vegetarian), cut back on butter (I'm allergic to dairy), eat more oily fish (um, I'm vegetarian) and so on. There was really nothing I could cut out or add to my diet, the cholesterol was being produced internally by an overactive liver and the main course of action would be to start popping pills, and continue to do so for the rest of my life.

But before we moved on to that my doctor suggested trying Benecol, a daily drink containing plant Stanol Ester (which means nothing to me either) and available in two dairy-free flavours. I have been methodically chugging a 65.5g bottle a day, every day for a year (minus the odd hiccup here and there in foreign climes less concerned with cholesterol), and got back the results of my latest cholesterol check yesterday: astonishingly I'm now at an overall level of 5.1 and an LDL of 3.7, just marginally outside the healthy range but no longer in danger of dropping dead in the presence of a chip butty.

That's more than a 25% reduction in cholesterol levels, almost entirely attributable to plant stanols (whatever they are), as there was almost nothing else in my lifestyle that I could change (having a somewhat joyless life already). Given the dearth of information on dealing with cholesterol for otherwise healthy vegetarians and vegans, this is something that I feel like shouting about from the rooftops.

And while I am on the aforementioned rooftops, I might be able to catch the attention of passing UPS delivery guys and point out the location of my doorbell.

Its really not that easy to miss.