Observations from a Hill

OK, Wunderkammern and Infinities. The last two night's posts have hinted at the kind of Zen that I espouse and kind of follow, as following is not really my kind of thing, if you know what I mean. What do I mean by this? Good question and no doctrinal answer will do, as I don't do doctrine or dogma. The easiest way to approach it is by trawling back and accessing your store of childhood memories, before adolescence clouded your mind with sex and aspirations for your future life; a time when there was stuff that needed to be dealt with, in the moment, on the spot, day in, day out. When priorities were as and when they presented themselves, not part of some grand plan as yet to be formulated let alone unfold. In short, child-mind: the mind-state untainted by the weight of the future yet to be, entangled as it inevitably will be by the exigencies of daily necessity and struggle. Sometimes, those travails and the baggage of formal education plus the abstraction of 'career pat...

We went into town today to drop off some charity shop donations of clothes and books, as we're in the process of thinning down some - only some - of our stuff, in truth probably to make way for more of the same. After the drops we went up to Bangor's little 'village' Kyffin, at the top of town, for coffee at Jo Pott's excellent little café there. She serves great coffee and bakes most of the cakes and other stuff on sale there, including her beautiful lemon sponge. The ambience of the place is world music, posh chocolate and well, comfortably 'alternative'. She keeps a daily copy of the i Paper, Private Eye, and a floating selection of other periodicals. Today I picked up the current issue of The New Internationalist, in which I found a good essay by Remy Ngamije entitled "Approaching Infinity", which gave me much food for thought. Randomly, I've just lit upon a YouTube episode of the excellent podcast "The Rest is Science" ponderin...

Wunderkammer. The word itself is redolent of mystery and wonder; of rooms and cabinets of curiosities, discoverables, themselves discovered, and curated reverently and felicitously in no particular order save that of the principle of the 'good neighbour'. I am gradually getting my space back to the realms of such creations, after many years of simply living within a forest of stacks of books, records, CDs and magazines, all very nice, if gathering great gouts of dust, Quentin Crisp style, but not seeing enough actual use; and hence not quite approaching a liveable ideal. So, as pictured above, more shelves have gone up today, almost completing my two-wall covering of books and interesting 'stuff'. Where I go when I've used up every square inch of those two surfaces, I've not yet decided, but I have ideas: I like ordered clutter if that makes any sense, and although it can rapidly spiral out of control if left to chance, as it has done in the past, if a little re...

My eye was drawn to a piece in today's Financial Times - yes, I'm still buying analogue print media: use it or lose it, folks, the alternatives don't bear thinking about in my book - by Rana Foroohar, on the repetition of history that the current, war-induced global financial panic represents. Stating at the outset that the current conflict has exposed the vulnerability of the U.S at sea, she points out out rightly that the world and particularly Trump's America has been wrong-footed by the scale of the economic domino tumble that ensued from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. How can this be, when we have effectively been rehearsing these same conditions for, in her words, almost the last thirty years? Forgive me if I choke a little on that rather youthful overview of political and economic history, but only thirty years? Oh, how were are destined to think only a generation deep, if we're not careful or mindful enough: Many of us are still alive that remember, a...

OK, despite it being Sunday and even given that I've constructed the usual Sunday roast dinner which would normally precipitate a 'Lazy Sunday Food Post™', I've decided instead that I would share instead a fragment of the progress in my reorganisation of the chaotic clutter that is my material existence. I have been busily constructing shelving and re-jigging my library of books, files and vinyl records, some of which are pictured above; in an attempt to keep up with my ever-increasing consumption of such stuff. I've decided that my vinyl collection will stay pretty much static in its present state from now on; but books, I can't resist adding to my collection weekly [daily?]. It's a thing, but there you are. What is visible here is but a portion of the household library, most of which is randomly spread throughout the house and the cottage next door. I've mentioned it before, but the importance of the presence of books in my life was given to me by the ...

I love treading the shoreline between analogue and digital, that liminal space between human and machine interaction, each informing the other in beneficial positive feedback. It reflects the absolute need for us to engage with the world in as broadly-formed a manner as possible, obviating source bias and echo chamber reinforcement. We were talking earlier over lunch about actual, personal and group knowledge of historical events versus the unfounded suppositions and associations of the more conspiracy-minded of our world. How some of our number are old enough to remember events now having doubt cast upon them by the 'C-Theorists', whose views are propagated digitally and further reinforced, digitally , by reward algorithms via 'social' media, until the resultant epistemological soup resembles less the reality that pre-digitised minds can actually remember first-hand, and more the output of rogue feedback loops [see blog posts passim for more on those ]. The beauty of h...