It’s coronation weekend. I’ve not participated and I have felt more annoyed by it than interested when it has intruded. You know the cringe inspired by a performance that’s slightly off-key? That’s how I feel about it all. I don’t want to join in with The Guardian’s self-admiring republicanism: like most of the Guardian’s attempts to paint itself as still relevant, it has a whiff of trust-fund radicalism to it, but, on this point, my sense of events chimes with its.
A billionaire gets a ceremonial celebration of his privilege that costs the state millions, and we’re told we can’t afford to fund a decent health service, to educate children properly, or treat victims of war and oppression who seek safety here with human dignity.
For most of my life, I’ve been an intellectual republican but a sentimental monarchist, but I’m alienated from all of it now. It’s a farce: a Netflix mega-production pretending to be real history. It’s the simulacrum in the middle of our national breakdown, an embarrassment.
Computers seem to gather. This slightly incriminating image shows seven laptops, six of which belong to me, and two desktops. One of the desktops, the mini-lenovo in the top-left, is my Nextcloud server, and the other, sitting, in defiance of the term desktop, under the desk, is my main computer, an Asus gaming machine of impressive age.
Of the laptops, three are in useable working order, but one of those – the red Dell netbook, is so old that its uses are limited. I have put antiX Linux1 on it, but connecting to a modern webpage, of even the most static and undemanding design, sets its poor little processor into terminal sprint and sends its temperature up to alarming levels. I’m loathe to get rid of it, because I bought it almost new, from the Dell outlet store, in 2010, and it has served me well, but I think it may be time to offer it to the computer recycling people, who might be able to find a use for it.
The live machines are the two Thinkpads in this second picture. The one to the left (it’s the one with the yellow sticker on it in the first pic) is a slightly more modern machine than its stablemate (orange Ubuntu sticker). That is an X220, which my wife bought second hand, but could never get on with. I always thought it had the most amazing keyboard, but she broke the trackpad buttons at some point, and I took it on when she replaced it. I fitted a replacement keyboard, but it’s a cheapo Chinese rip-off that has a lot of flex. Yesterday, I popped into Just P C’s (sic) in Newport and asked whether he could fix it, and he said I could just stick it down with a double sided foam pad. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll give it a try soon.
I hadn’t used it much since the disappointment of finding that the keyboard repair was shonky. I’d put a small SSD in it and loaded Xubuntu2 on, and liked that operating system so much that I’d done the same on the other ThinkPad, my main laptop. I was happy enough with that for some time, but wanted to try systems other than Ubuntu-based ones and, a few weeks ago, I stuck Manjaro Plasma3 on the X220, as an experiment.
And there, children, the tale begins. But first, some history.
Manjaro on the Thinkpad.
Linux & Me
Ubuntu, which was designed to be ‘Linux for the rest of us’, was the first Linux OS I managed to get running, when a Toshiba I couldn’t afford to replace got so many viruses that its Windows XP system became useless. At the time, my attitude to computers was turn-on-and-use: it seemed outrageous to me that I might have to pay, a second time, for the operating system to get my expensive property working again.
So, with many false starts and struggles, I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, made a CD of it, discovered how to boot into BIOS and managed to install my first linux OS. WiFi was a new and wonderful thing in those days, and I had to buy a wireless card, something like the one in this picture.
The first Ubuntu OS I installed was 32 bit, and it fit on a CD. I was immediately hooked, not to mention, extremely chuffed with myself. At that time, it felt like a major operation to install an operating system. This morning, I installed Kubuntu on my desktop before breakfast.
I’m pretty sure this is Ubuntu 07.04, the first version I installed. It is running Gnome 2 with the BUUF icon scheme.
Anyway, for several years I used Ubuntu, and very happy I was with it too. It made writing and editing and other work very easy, and it also made the new media, such as electronic images and digital music files, enjoyable to create, store and use. I became a bit of an experimenter, putting an open source operating system onto an ipod,((https://www.rockbox.org/)) and making my first, stumbling attempts to understand the command line.
However, in 2011, Canonical, the company who developed and maintain Ubuntu, took their netbook remix layout and pushed it on to their main distribution, calling it Unity. It was a wrench and I was somewhat miffed. It was the first time I had felt that Ubuntu was trying to limit my computing freedoms, as opposed to trying to help me realise them. As you’ll see, over the years, that has become a theme.
My gripes at the time were that it was much more difficult to personalise the Unity desktop, and I couldn’t install my favourite icons or make it look the way I like my computer to look. In frustration, I began experimenting with other distributions and found Bodhi Linux.4 I was using the Dell netbook as my main laptop by now, and Bodhi, being very lightweight, made a huge difference. It was also accessible and easy to customise, and I stuck with it for some years.
I had, however, bought a cheapish but reasonably powerful desktop computer when we moved into this house. It was, incidentally, the last new computer I bought, except for a Raspberry Pi I keep as a media server. Bodhi felt a little stretched on a large monitor, and in 2014, having read enthusiastic things about Unity, I switched back. For a few years, it was love.
Another shot from 2014. I don’t think my Ubuntu setup has ever looked lovelier.
I was using, although not yet self-hosting, a cloud computer by then, so I had discovered the pleasure of integrating files across a network and, more importantly, contacts, task-lists and calendars between devices. I had also, finally, succumbed to the smartphone pressure in either 2012 or 13. I had, I felt, entered the future. I could take a photo on my phone and it would appear on my computer when I turned it on. I could write a page of text on my laptop and the updated version would be synchronised to my desktop. It still all felt new and wondrous.
Then, Canonical fumbled the ball again. They had been developing Unity so that they could achieve “convergence”: creating an operating system that would be useable on computers, phones, tablets, TVs and, for all I know, jetpacks, and the launch of the Ubuntu phone was crucial to this. Alas, it flopped, partly because Google and Apple were not likely to allow their cartel to be challenged, partly because the phone operating system was simply not ready when they released it, and partly because of Canonical’s hubris. I remember feeling quite angry about the way the phone was marketed. ‘Ubuntu insiders’, an elite clique of supporters, contributors and docile bloggers, got well publicised freebies, while the paying mugs were forced to hang on social media announcements to have a chance of buying one. At the time, I tried to get the tag #Ubuntuoutsiders going, but none of my twelve Twitter followers were interested, so it died a death.
Anyway, I did eventually get an Ubuntu phone, and it was a bit of a dog. The hardware was underpowered, and the OS lacked the very elements that would set it apart: the calendar, for instance, only had the option for local storage, or Google. For me and, I suspect, many people who use Linux, escaping Google’s creepy, coercive, bullying oversight is a major motive for the work it takes to remain an open-source software user. Assuming that everyone would have a Gmail address and would be happy to donate their personal information, creative endeavours and political interests to the monopolistic parasites of Mountain View, California, seemed a discordant clang.
In fact, Ubuntu Touch was a beautiful piece of work in many ways. A few years later, I bought my first Fairphone and loaded the system, now maintained by an heroic community of volunteers,5 onto it. It was, and remains, I should imagine, a distinctive, clever and attractive way to manage multiple functions on a small touchscreen device. It’s just too niche to be useful for everyday interaction. Its app store is tiny, and it hasn’t flown. Not all Canonical’s fault, but they didn’t do it justice.
Linux and Me: The Next Generation
At about this time, I made a mess of my commercially hosted OwnCloud setup, and became interested in self-hosting a cloud server. This is not a straightforward process, whatever the Nextcoud homepage6 may say, and, for me, it represented the start of a multi-year struggle to get to grips with topics for which my intellect is woefully underpowered.
A cloud server consists of a machine running an operating system, on which a specialised web server program manages files in a database, making them available over the internet for the users to access, while securing them from internet users other than the permitted owners. There are a number of quite specialised areas of expertise within this melange, including database management, command line proficiency and networking skills.
Quirky, like worn brakes.
When I started this process, I had none of these. Indeed, I still don’t, really. As a result of my clumsy endeavours, I do now have a little more than basic command line understanding, but I still have to do a websearch for any sort of database management, and am resigned to giving up a weekend to correcting even the most minor error message. As for networking, it remains a clouded mystery. I dogged forums, nagged my ISP and begged my domain hosts for information as I got my first experimental Nextcloud server set up, but, somehow, I managed it. For the hardware, I had used my mother-in-law’s abandoned Dell Latitude D430, a quixotic little laptop that was manufactured in 2007.7 The problem with that was that it has a hard drive like the ones used in ipods, and there wasn’t the space to upgrade it. Thus, I had the advantage of being able to use an online calendar, contacts manager and tasks manager, but I had to be very frugal with my file uploads, to avoid overwhelming it. Also, it ran an integrated chip, and that ran hot. I was never entirely sure it was safe to leave it running.
That’s better.
Eventually, though, I was able to afford a small, fanless computer, refurbished, from ebay. After that, I had to save up for a 1 TB SSD, and went through the process again. I had used Debian as the base operating system for the Dell setup, as the smaller it is, the better and, running ‘headless’, without a GUI, the specifics of the operating system are pretty unimportant, so long as it supports a software repository with the required packages for the task for which it is being used. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but is somewhat larger, even in server form, but I was persuaded to use it this time by the fact that most people on the Nextcloud forums used it.
However, even in the command-line-only, server edition, Ubuntu has, for some years now, been pushing their version of containerisation, called Snaps. Containerised apps are computer programs that have been bundled together with all their dependencies – the other programs and snippets of code that they require in order to work on a real computer. In Linux, traditionally, programs have remained focussed upon their own tasks. If a music player needs to use the sound card, for instance, it doesn’t include sound card management. Instead, when it is loaded into a repository, from which the users will download and install the music player software, its dependencies are listed. The user will get the software using a package manager: a piece of software that reads the dependencies, compares them to what is on the computer already and then adds any that are missing to the download of the software package.
Snaps make installing and maintaining a computer much easier, at least superficially. Unfortunately, they introduce their own set of problems. Unless you are a programmer, what you are given is what you get. Nextcloud, when I was trying to install it in 2019, was an example. It had the basic Nextcloud installation that would set up a database and the Nextcloud web server with one click. However, I never discovered how to link it to an SSL certificate: a fundamental security process without which a web server is so vulnerable as to be useless. In the end, I scrubbed the machine and started over again, and this time I didn’t hit the snap button, but dragged myself through the manual install process.
And, for nearly three years now, I have been able to keep my files on the little box on my desk. With very little maintenance, apart from the occasional upgrade, it has allowed me to not worry about losing data on my computers, as they are stored externally. A few years on, I became a little anxious about depending upon a self-maintained machine for all my data and bought a 10 TB external disk drive as a backup machine and that is an added level of security. I’m pretty happy.
Wires are good
I also set up a samba server, to store and share my media files and Nextcloud and email backups within the house. This was a simple enough task: at first, I used my Raspberry Pi with the external hard drive connected. It was a bit Heath Robinson, but it worked. However, the transfer rates, from the spinning disk hard drive to the computer processor via USB, were rather slow; though fine for music streaming and transfer, it was liable to stutter with decent quality video.
Pretty, but not much use at the moment.
So, I started saving for enough SSD storage to hold all my music on an integrated system and bought a case last summer. It worked well enough, but the software I was using, Open Media Vault, had a major upgrade and the Pi version hadn’t caught up. On a routine update, it stalled and I panicked and shut it off, wrecking the operating system. This is not a complete disaster, as it’s not harmed the files, which I have backed up on the external drive anyway, but I haven’t been able to be arsed to reinstall it yet. I have an idea I’d like to learn how to use Docker8 – another containerisation system, rather more developed and useful than Snaps, but that is another major learning task, and I just haven’t got started.
Back To The Desktop
My experimentation with servers satisfied my computer curiosity for several years. I did play around a bit with desktop operating systems, but I stuck to safe choices: mostly stock Ubuntu, then the wonderfully stable and accessible Zorin OS,9 then, for a while, on a whim, Lubuntu.10
The Leviathan, lurking.
Sometime in 2018, I’d been offered and had bought an old gaming machine. It’s a real beast, but wasn’t particularly useful to me. I didn’t have the desk space for another monitor and I was in the habit of using laptops most of the time, anyway. My Old desktop didn’t last all that long: I got about six years out of it, and I had a bit of a prejudice against desktops, as power-greedy, space-hungry white elephants. However, I did, eventually, find a use for the monster Asus.
I had always needed to maintain a Windows machine, for one, annoying purpose. Epub files are DRM protected and I read a lot. I still buy real books, but for my junk reading, science fiction and, as I get older, crime thrillers, I buy ebooks. To purchase a DRM protected epub, you must use a piece of software owned by the odious patent trolls Adobe: it’s called Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe don’t support Linux, just out of spite, I think, or because Microsoft pays them not to. So, I used to keep one laptop with Windows 7 installed, just to download my book purchases. As soon as I’d got them, I’d run them through Calibre and strip the DRM, and then load them on my Tolino, but to first buy them, I needed a Windows machine.
Starting up a Windows machine you don’t use very often takes a full morning. You will, inevitably, be stopped in your tracks by the infuriating Microsoft update process, which is designed, it seems, to divert you from whatever task you need a computer for. Its voice is that of the creepiest sort of teacher: moralistic and cautionary, with a vague hint of dark consequences if you don’t cater to his every perverted whim, articulated in the light, jocular bullying boss’s language of camaraderie and mutual purpose. I loathe Microsoft, not just on a practical level, but on a tonal, cultural level. It is deeply, instinctively fascistic, in a uniquely white, wealthy, passive-aggressive, American way. And that is why I have persisted, for so long, with Linux.
My father’s old laptop, vast and beautiful to look at, but with a processor just powerful enough to run a fridge if the door’s not opened too frequently, added to the pain. So, I hatched a plan to set up the gaming machine as a virtual host for Windows.
Virtualisation is a real computing marvel. It allows you to run a computer within a computer. So, on a Linux machine, you can set up another Linux machine, or a Windows machine, or even a Mac, if you don’t tell Apple’s lawyers, borrowing some of the host machine’s resources to do things you don’t want to do to the main machine. Its main use is as a way to manage complex networks: up until recently, it was the safest way to give large numbers of users access to a network while controlling their impact upon the network. It is also used to experiment with development and it is useful in education. Indeed, another reason I wanted a machine powerful enough to run as a virtual host was so I could complete a Linux Foundation course,11 which involves a lot of trying things out in the command line. In this situation, when you’re presented with the “DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON” bit of code, it’s nice to be able to press it and see what it does, without having to constantly re-install my operating system.12
And it worked! I used VirtualBox,13 bought an OEM Windows 10 licence from a cheapo online store and had Windows when I needed it, without sacrificing a machine to it. I completed my course and thought I was happy with my computer setups.
But then, a serpent began to eat at me.
The Lure of Computer Games
I realised, using the desktop, just how powerful it is, compared to the machines I’ve used up to now. That knowledge became, after a while, like a serpent, leading me towards the forbidden fruit of computing: games, weak sinner that I am.
Overall, I haven’t taken much interest in gaming, mainly because I think it is a poor substitute for books, but also because I’ve always thought the entry cost was absurd. Nevertheless, after I was made redundant in 2013, I bought a second-hand Playstation3, played five games (Bioshock,14 Journey,15 Mass Effect 1, 2 & 316), started a fifth (Bioshock __Infinite17), got bored, and gave it up as a bad job. I didn’t regret this little experiment: at the time, I needed a boost, and Journey, in particular, was a spectacular piece of art, which I was able to share with my wife and which has stayed with us as a treasured experience. All the same, gaming just didn’t really feel like being true to myself.
It’s a little like giving up smoking, though. So long as the cost of getting back into it is high, you can fight it, but if it’s made easy, it’s a problem. The gateway drug, for me, was a video extolling the virtues of Witcher 3,18 which I drifted onto on Youtube, and the audiobook of one of the short-story collections on which it is based being available on my library app.19
Witcher3 is what it is; I’m not going into it here. The books are good, though. I recommend them. What’s relevant is that the game was five years old by the time I decided I must play it, and I got it for a song on Gog,20 which is an online game store, similar to Steam,21 but with more of a commitment to open source or something. Then I tried to play it on my Virtual Windows machine and discovered that Virtual machines don’t use graphics cards.
Well, no: that’s not completely true. However, Virtualbox doesn’t support graphics cards, and the main competitor, VMWare, is commercial and the process for mounting a GPU is not available in the free version, and is really complex anyway23. In effect, though, it’s not a straightforward process, and unless your computer is very, very powerful, which the Leviathan was in its youth, but really isn’t now, it probably won’t be adequate for playing modern-ish computer games anyway. I can remember being really angry with myself when I discovered this, which might explain my bad decision making.
Remember what I said about Microsoft, above.22 If you recall, I’m not a fan. I use Windows on my work laptop, of course. I work for a Council, and the subservience to Microsoft’s imperialism is total in such environments. We use Microsoft 365, rather than a proper office package, which is unbelievably stupid and means that the Council will never be able to escape Microsoft’s clutches.23 For a Linux user, Windows is a continuous series of annoyances. It’s not because I’m not used to it: I am, like most wage slaves whose job has some clerical component, a moderately expert Windows user. It is the unnecessary complexity, the ‘guided’ processes, the ugliness, the distraction of the cluttered, intrusive, authoritarian medium. It takes creativity and introduces a slightly competitive, suburban American mundanity into every use. It interrupts to assert itself. It is needy.
All that being true, I still shamed myself. I reinstalled Windows as the base operating system on The Leviathan. This was about a year ago and, in that time, I have spent more hours than I want to admit playing, first, Myst,24 then Warcraft II25 then Witcher3.18 I reached level 20 on Witcher3. No man in his fifties should be able to say that.
I was running it, though, with only a 128 GB SSD as storage, having cannibalised the larger 1 TB SSD for my Samba server, and, as Windows boxes tend to, it got filled up with stuff, without me adding much to it. In particular, it didn’t like the attempts by GOG to update Witcher, a vast program, leaving me looking at error messages which wouldn’t go away. At some point, this lack of utility began to feel like a sign.
I bought another 1 TB SSD, fully intending to reinstall Windows. Then, having installed Manjaro on my Thinkpads, I decided to see how it would run on The Leviathan.
This is where we came in.
Back to the Beginning
The weekend before last, I put Manjaro Plasma on The Leviathan. It ran like a bullet and looked even prettier than it does on the Thinkpads, but, for a non-programmer, it has some limitations. The worst of these is that it is based upon Arch, rather than Debian: it is an entirely different branch of Linux operating system to the Ubuntu family, for which a lot of Linux software is packaged. VirtualBox, for instance, does not have an Arch package that is easily installable on Manjaro. There are instructions for making it work on the forums, but they look pretty intimidating.
So, wanting to use Plasma, I tried KDE Neon, which is an Ubuntu distribution maintained by the KDE community. Alas, a piece of software I use regularly, Manuskript, doesn’t load in Neon. Neon is built on the latest long-term-support version of Ubuntu, and that has some quirk which prevents Manuskript starting up. No one has yet managed to fix it.
Finally, this weekend, I settled on Kubuntu. This is an ‘official flavour’ of Ubuntu, meaning it is supported by Canonical. It seemed perfect, but then…
Firefox on the newest versions of Ubuntu and its ‘flavours’ is a snap. Even if you try to install it via the command line, using the apt-get command, it converts the command to a snap install. I really do not like snaps. For a browser, they can be a real nuisance, as their updates happen in the background and lead to random restarts of the application. If you’re in the middle of an online form, or a TV programme, you lose your data, unless you save manically.
And they don’t look as good. I like a rather beautiful set of icons called Buuf, originally designed by a young artist called Mattahan, way back before I was using Linux. I’ve used them from my earliest experiments with Ubuntu26 A very active, responsive and kind volunteer called Phob1an27 maintains a set of them for Plasma28 and they look pretty amazing.
Nice, or what?
Snaps, however, don’t conform to the GTK theming: they have their own icons included and that’s that.
There is, of course, a way around it. One of the real strengths of Linux is that you can change everything, if you have the skill. If you don’t, people with the skill will share their knowledge. So I have a new repository (program source) added, maintained by the Mozilla Foundation, who make Firefox, and Firefox integrates prettily into my desktop while being properly and safely updated.
For, me, with sixteen or so years’ experience of playing with Linux, that process was a bit of a challenge, taking several hours to sort out properly, but for a new user, fed up with being bossed around by Windows, the sense that Canonical are trying to limit your choices on Ubuntu would be an off-putting welcome. I have a lot to thank Canonical for: they took the community endeavour, Linux/GNU, and made it simpler to get into and to use for all the things that computing makes better or even makes possible. However, I think they do have a tendency to try to compete with Apple in making a consumer product that requires no engagement and allows not variation. They should not be despised: they have created server software that runs over 35% of the internet, second only to Debian in the field.29 And, unlike Windows and Apple, they have done that while remaining a company with a modest income, that doesn’t exploit oppressed people in their supply lines or try to trap people, schools or other public bodies into holding their data on systems from which they can’t export (Microsoft).30
It’s just that Ubuntu has begun to feel, again, that it knows better what’s good for us than we do. Its use of a strict, difficult-to-modify version of the Gnome desktop system and its push to make snaps the standard way of installing applications, has the odour of Apple, late Steve Jobs era, with just a hint of recent Microsoft preacher-knows-best tonality.31
Or, maybe the problem is with me. After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve paid Canonical for a copy of Ubuntu, although I do make payments to open-source software projects – my last donation was to Thunderbird. And, if I’m really so fed up with Ubuntu, maybe I should move to Arch,32 on which Manjaro is based, or to Debian,33 Ubuntu’s fully-open-source big sibling, or Fedora,34 the independent, community arm of RedHat.35 It’ll take some work to change from what I’m used to, but it might be fun.
However, for now, I’ve got a lovely looking desktop on which I am happy to do my writing, and I have to put up with feeling slightly left behind.
There’s a discussion of the point in this podcast. I recommend listening to the whole thing if you have time, but I’ve specifically bookmarked the pertinent passage [↩]
There’s a discussion of the point in this podcast. I recommend listening to the whole thing if you have time, but I’ve specifically bookmarked the pertinent passage [↩]
It seemed as though it would never come. Only a couple of weeks ago, in late November, I took this picture of blackberry blossom, the brambles fooled into a second bloom by the absurdly warm winter.
The warmth followed several weeks of heavy winds and rain, and the memory of the historically hot summer combined with each successive wave of extreme weather to build a feeling of apocalyptic disorder. The climate disaster we know to be true on an intellectual level is becoming a process we are experiencing.
Our garden this morning.
For the past week, though, winter has settled in, with sub-zero temperatures and a sense, when it is my turn to do the evening dog walk, that snow is an imminent possibility. And it is beautiful. We are unlikely to actually get snow on the Island – that happens only when the cold comes from the East, and this cold air is coming from the North, according to the forecasters – but we have had at least five days of cold, clear air, bright sun, and the most wonderful night skies that have given way to heavy frosts that make the mornings as beautiful as the moonlit, frosted darkness.
The rotting barge in the sun.
I rode into town late this morning to do some shopping, although that could have waited. I just wanted the ride. Yesterday, I’d done my first shift as a rider for the new cargo-bike delivery company on the Island1, and had ridden the Cowes to Newport cycle path for work. Today, I rode it for pleasure. The wintry, white sun dazzled me all the way to Newport, the late-remaining leaves coloured the barren-looking trees and hedges, and the rotting barge, that has sat in the Medina for as long as I have ridden that path, looked newly-reborn, as if she could heal herself and take to the sea again.
On Wednesday, I tried to take a picture of her on my ride home from doing my teaching prep at County Hall. The view had been utterly stunning then, lit by an almost full moon that reflected upon the water as an ivory glow, the air as still as the moon. A lone bird chirruped in the dark as I struggled to take a steady image. Alas, my Fairphone is a good phone, but not a great camera, and I could only achieve this blurred, but still evocative, picture.
The pleasure of recalling my reading of Death In Venice is strong enough that I have ordered a copy of Buddenbrooks, and am looking forward to reading it. I was amazed by the precision of Mann’s storytelling in Death In Venice but, chiefly, I found in it a sense of what I called ‘degraded magic’ and a feeling of an epic voyage through decay to a reverse epiphany. It is the small tale of a lonely, arrogant man becoming unravelled by his vanity, but it feels like opera. What most impressed me was how this little story was able to plausibly bear the weight of that sense of grandeur.
However, seeing his work tied to Wagner, and discovering he was, in fact, a scholar of the composer, has made sense of that feeling of grandiosity in his writing. To describe Death In Venice as ‘Wagnerian’, is not to puff it up or dismiss it, even though, for me, ‘Wagnerian’ denotes a sense of camp ridiculousness, a la Bugs Bunny. See embed source for copyright
Wonderful, camp and gleeful as this is, it is most definitely what not what I find in Mann. The sense of epic greatness, applied, in Mann’s case, not to overblown legends of racial origins, but to the struggles and delusions of the bewildered subjects of a collapsing empire, creates, for me, a power greater than opera. Where opera feels like parody, even before the hubristic American cartoonists – heirs to the old empire’s powers and treasures – get hold of it, Mann’s writing feels like truth.
I have no love of Wagner. Besides finding his music boring and unresolved 4 I had assumed he was a fascist, simply because his work only seems to make sense, after the mid-20th Century, in the light of fascism. Apparently, though, he was more an anarchist; most definitely of the left, although still a horrible, loud, unapologetic, anti-semitic bigot. As someone who thinks that fascist is as fascist does, I find the distinctions here a bit tricky to identify, but…
He was, Mann said, ‘charged with life and stormily progressive’, an innovator, with one foot already ‘on atonal terrain’, a ‘cultural Bolshevik’ (Kulturbolschewist) ‘man of the Volk who all his life fervently rejected power, money, violence and war’ and intended his festival for ‘a classless society, whatever the age made of it’. In conclusion: ‘No spirit of reaction and pious backwardness can claim him – he belongs instead to every future-directed will.’5
This is from a speech Mann gave in 1933 entitled The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner, 6 In it, he managed to dismiss the newly-ascendant Nazi party’s claims on the composer effectively enough to cause a backlash that led him to leave Germany. The Nazis were in the process of deifying Wagner and Mann, while acknowledging his admiration for Wagner and the peaks of genius in his work, had the cheek to suggest that he was a bit, well, bourgeois; a bit gauche, like displays of artificial flowers.
[Wagner’s texts]…often seem somewhat overblown and baroque, naive, with an air of grandiose and overbearing ineptitude: yet interspersed with passages of sheer genius, of a power, economy and elevated beauty that banish all doubt, though they cannot efface an awareness that these are creations which stand outside the tradition of great European literature and poetry.7
My qualifications as a literary scholar are pretty thin, and my experience thinner still, so it is rather nice to find my opinions reinforced by the work of real critics. And yet, thanks to my new reading about Mann, I can see that he was a knowing Wagner enthusiast, who loved the power of the work while seeing its weaknesses. I am further impressed by this remarkable writer.
However, I still hate Wagner. I gave a streamed Parsifal (WARNING! Youtube) five minutes this afternoon, and just couldn’t take it. What is it the fanboys hear in that ‘clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’ rubbish?
I was delighted to read that I am in good company here, too: “Not everyone was seduced: Rimbaud was indifferent; Tolstoy denounced the Ring cycle as ‘counterfeit art’; a discombobulated Ruskin left a performance of Die Meistersinger claiming the music was ‘clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’.” Stammers (2022)[↩]
“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.”John F. Kennedy
A joy I’d forgotten.
I have done very little leisure cycling for several years. I ride upwards of forty miles a week for work and shopping, and the habit of fitting a few hours’ riding into the week simply for the pleasure of the exercise has got lost somewhere.
My much missed workhorse, a great all-rounder.
A part of the problem is that I haven’t had a mountain bike I liked for some time. My last good one, a 2015 Voodoo Bizango,1 pictured left, was stolen in 2019. I replaced it with the newer model during lockdown in 2020, but it was a dog of a bike: badly specced, twitchy, overspecialised and yet ponderous. It was richly praised2 on various websites, which is a testament to the power of a large corporation’s P.R., I suppose: it was a Halford’s brand. However, the previous bike – the one I lost to a bike thief – had been the same brand, and it had been a beauty, both robust and nimble, as well as versatile.
I am a sucker for a bargain, though, and the new Bizango was even more widely promoted3 and not, this time, just by dodgy, fly-by-night bloggers.4 I looked at the details a little more closely this time. The previous one had an internal bottom bracket and clunky Sram gearing, and the saddle and grips were unusable, so that I had to spend about a hundred more pounds just to make the bike rideable. The 2022 model has Shimano Deore gearing, the updated, single chainring version of the gearing on the late lamented first of my Bizangos. It also has a Deore bottom bracket and the saddle is pretty decent.
Interestingly, my search for Voodoo Bizango reviews5threw up an illuminating situation: the 2015 Bizango – the one I loved and lost – appears most frequently on the stolen-bikes.co.uk site, while there are dozens of the ropey orange-coloured later one for sale on Gumtree, Pinkbike and Shpock.com, whatever that may be. Coincidence? I thinks not, indeedy.
A couple of weeks ago, Halfords advertised a trade-in offer on their own brand bikes. I could have got more for it by selling privately, but I am not confident with ebay and all that stuff, so I took the unloved bike in, received a gift card and ordered the new model. I also ordered a dropper seat post – I’ve been meaning to try one for ages, and the prices have been coming down, so this seemed the time.
Originally, I was to have picked it up this Saturday, but I got a phone call on Thursday telling me they were understaffed, and asking for my forbearance and I got my new bike on Sunday. I rode it home and was a little uncertain, noticing a couple of snags. The cable for the dropper post was far too long, creating a potential noose to catch on branches. Worse, the rear brakes were out of line. When I got home, I tried reseating the rear wheel and centering the brakes, and I fiddled with the handlebar alignment: I don’t blame Halfords for that, as it’s one of those things you just have to fiddle with until you get it right. All the same, as I put the bike in the shed for the night, I had the uneasy feeling I might have, once again, bought a dud.
So, today, I rushed through my various household duties to make time to take the bike out and get a proper feel for it. I left the house at two and was still feeling quite uneasy as I got towards town. The seat post cable, in particular, bothered me, but the rear brakes were still rubbing.
In increasing irritation, I cut short my ride and headed into Halfords to have a whinge. In contrast with the chaos of Sunday, when a small gang of staff were struggling to cope with a horde of customers, it was quiet and peaceful, the cave-like building glowing with the light of a sunny day. I found Sean, who I think is the bikes manager, although they seem to keep their roles obscure, at the bike mechanics’ station and bent his ear for a minute. Sean is a calm character, and effective. By the time I’d run out of steam, he’d sorted out the brakes and was ready to discuss when he could refit the dropper post. As a temporary measure, he folded the loose cable back on itself and tied it with a cable tie. I felt stupid for not having thought of that. He also helped me to get my handlebars sorted out and revived my enthusiasm for going for a ride. By the time I left, I was full of a renewed sense of well-being.
The weather was hot and bright, fairly windy with scattered cloud. I hauled through the Carisbrooke housing estate and turned up the Carisbrooke Road. I had thought to go left at the Castle turning, up over the Castle hill and out to the bridle paths that climb around the hills towards Brightstone Forest. The bike was feeling better though, as if I’d found my fit, and I wanted to get off-road quicker, so I climbed the hill through Carisbrooke, over the horrible Forest Road roundabout, to Nodgham Lane. It’s a hard climb, but the bike is so light and easy that I was quite fresh as I turned off the paved road on to the Tennyson Trail.
The path up to the down is a beautiful, rough, technical climb. Over the years, I’ve done it on full suspension bikes, hard tails, cheap bikes and high-end bikes, but I don’t remember enjoying it more than I did today. I was using my SPD trail pedals and had the mechanism set tighter than I like for off-road riding, so I was a little worried that if I needed to put my foot down fast I would just topple over, my feet still locked into my pedals. It’s a long time since I’ve done that.
Instead, I seemed to be able to find the perfect peddle turn with every stroke, judging the pressure I needed to use for each rut and rock and root. I realised, after having read a hundred bike ‘reviews’ over the last month or so, what a well-balanced bike feels like: I felt the ground through the bike, and found my way forward as an instinctive action. Cycling journalism might seem as though it’s splitting hairs for the sake of finding something to say, but it’s rooted in some real experience.
One of the deeply-channelled paths that are common on the Island.
The path, for its first half-mile, steep climb, is thickly hedged on both sides, often with high banks enclosing it. It is one of the deeply channelled paths that are common on the Island. Eventually, the left hand side clears and the path emerges into the edge of a bank of meadow flower, overlooking the valley across to Carisbrooke Castle. The path levels out here, and I was able to catch my breath and snap up a couple of gears, gaining speed. The gearing is not as smooth as my old 3 x 9 Deore setup, and that may be because it has a clutch on it, to stop chain slap, or it may be because the single chain-ring, with such a wide gear ratio on the rear cassette, forces the chain to make much higher jumps across a much tighter space. However, the range of gears was definitely much, much more comfortable than the orange Bizango.
I was beginning to really push the bike. The path runs through more hedged banks, but is wider here, and undulates between gentle descents and moderate climbs. We’ve had a quite dry summer and the ground was hard and the suspension fork, being new, was transmitting a fair bit of judder into my arms. It’s not the cheapest of forks, but it’s only air sprung in one leg, so there’s a coil that will take a few hundred miles to bed in and become properly supple. However, I didn’t feel that the wheel was bouncing unduly. Suntour fork though it is, it was doing a decent job of keeping the front wheel in contact with the track. I would like to buy a better fork, but I’m not sure it’s a financial priority, and the fork on my much missed first Bizango was also a Suntour Raidon which, in time, became softer and more biddable.
I came to a gate at a crossroads of two bridle paths: the one I was riding – Down Lane – crosses the one that goes to the South, down towards Gatcombe and to the North drops down to the Calbourne Road. I have never turned off here, as I usually continue on to Brightstone, at least, but the path to the right, towards Calbourne, was looking beautiful. I turned right, nearly tipping over as I hit the steep slope up onto the other path, then climbed the steep path to the highpoint shown on the map here: 134m elevation.
Here, I stopped. I’m going to embed the video I took, crap audio and all, because it captures the sense of excitement I was feeling, as evidenced by my incoherent jabbering.
What I’m babbling about is the sight of a bird of prey, plausibly either a buzzard or a red kite, having just floated over me, circling around, checking me out, before it disappeared over the edge of the down. The sun was hot on my skin, the dust blowing in the stiff wind, and I felt as I haven’t felt for many, many years. It’s the feeling that cycling first gave me when I got back into it as an adult, about fifteen years ago, and which I had allowed myself to forget, in all the struggle to keep life going, to do my best at it, to be a grown up. It’s the feeling of what it felt like to be a child: happy, excited, engaged with the moment, in love with life.
It felt like being ten again.
The hill down to the Calbourne Road was insanely steep, and I rode my rear brake for most of it. Nevertheless, I felt in control. It was brilliant to discover that what poor mountain biking skills I had ever had weren’t entirely lost. At the road, I had the choice of heading back towards Carisbrooke on tarmac or hauling myself up that steep hill to head home via the off road route.
No contest. It was a hell of a climb, but I made it, without running out of gears, and reached the peak with some strength still in my legs. When I got back to the gate, I stopped for a drink – I don’t have a camelback at the moment nor does the new bike have a bottle cage fitted, so I had to take off my backpack to get one of my water bottles out, but the rest was welcome. Then, it was back along the Down Lane, heading downhill this time, for a long, bouncing, mile-long descent. The dropper post did its job perfectly: it’s easy to push the seat down with your weight and then stand up on the peddles, and with the saddle out of the way, peddling while standing is much easier. Where the way ahead was clear, I hammered it, but I had to slow where the path wound out of sight, in case of walkers coming the other way. I met no one, though, and made it back to Carisbrooke Road feeling like one of the Athertons.
It was a day of days. A fine way to spend a couple of hours. I will DEFINITELY be doing that again, very soon.
Synik is a hip-hop artist from Zimbabwe, currently living in Portugal. He released this album earlier this year, and it is his first since the left his home country and made the arduous journey to Europe. In it, he discusses exile, alienation, the exploitation of migrants and the hostility they encounter.
His real name is Gerald Mugwheni, and there is an article1 about the political pressure that drives artists to leave Zimbabwe, including an appreciation of the album, in the much-mourned online paper, The Conversation.
I don’t listen to much hip-hop. A year or so back, Englistan,by RizMC2 caught my attention. I listened to it again this week, as I have just bought a pair of bone conduction earphones, and can start listening to music as I walk the dog or cycle. I had had to give that up because earphones set off tinnitus – another of the indignities of encroaching old age. Englistan is a theatrical, even cinematic experience. A Travel Guide For The Broken strikes me as a more lyrical (in the classic sense of the word) style of rap. I think you’d describe it as downbeat hip-hop: it has a rich, melodic jazz inventiveness that is immediately musically engaging.
What has kept me listening, though, is the way the raps catch you with narrative force: on ‘Underground’, Synik talks about working in the shadow economy; ‘Wega’ is a clear depiction of being in an alien environment, while your heart is focused on home. The title track is quite special. It seems to describe a response to an experience which might be the defining adventure of our times – the experience of being uprooted by economic terror and political victimisation.
We were fractured
The scattered fragments from broken homelands
Transient bodies,
Dislocated and displaced
With borderless imaginations we discarded the familiar for worlds unknown
Forced to become adept in contorting limbs to fit in confined spaces
Which constituted a further breaking
We traversed inhospitable lands in search of new homes
And the warmth of other suns
I wrote about Thomas Mann in a recent post1 and recalled that I had read Death in Venice many years ago, but remembered little about it. I searched the house, but couldn’t find a copy, so I looked on ebay. I might have had a modern copy for under £2 but this one was available for a fiver plus postage. I am enough of a book fetishist to love old Penquins and when it arrived I was rewarded with that smell that is one of the most profound yet fleeting sense experiences: the smell of an old book as it is opened for the first time in a long while.
This copy did not betray any secrets with it. Often, books of this vintage come with the scent of tobacco mixed in with the paper-and-ink must; once or twice, enticingly, I have opened a book and had a hint of Chanel No. 5, triggering images of a languid reader in a Chelsea flat. More common are the suggestions of student reading: sandalwood or patchouli, or the faintest gust of weed, along with a wine stain or two. But, no; this book just smelt of its constituent parts, and did not even carry an owner’s inscription. Its past is a closed book.
Having reread it, that blankness seems wrong, for Death in Venice, though it is written in a voice that is, initially, detached and calm, is a story of intense passion and of a slide into madness. It is very much more vivid than I remembered and what really surprised me about it was the baroque tone of degraded magic. Despite being introduced as the perfect bourgeois rationalist, whose life is an ordered triumph of will and detachment, Aschenbach voyages through a vivid world of encounters with the grotesque to meet his lonely, perverted fate. The uncanny element is introduced in the vision of the stranger outside the mortuary chapel in Munich, after which Aschenbach conceives his plan to leave his well-ordered life for a few months of restorative travel. It is developed in various encounters on his journey to Venice, through the ticket agent, the old drunken reveller on the steamer, the unlicensed gondolier and the manager of the hotel, “…a small, soft, dapper man with a black moustache and a caressing way with him…”.2 It reminded me of the sense of uprooting that launches Marlow’s journey into the interior in Heart of Darkness, although that is another book I haven’t read for decades, and may be misremembering.
The oddness that seems to clamour around Aschenbach as he travels is heightened by his character. In the early pages, he is established as a prissy old maid, both stuck up and over-sensitive, who manages his squeamishness by controlling his surroundings. Mann describes this nature and its tendency towards paranoia in beautiful terms, worth quoting at length.
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
((Ibid))
And so, as the central non-relationship of the story emerges and Aschenbach’s passion for the boy Tadzio unfolds, his perversity does not seem as strange, jarring and ugly as it should. Aschenbach has already developed a seedy quality, reflected in his experience but also in his prissiness and impatience with others. His tendency to be disgusted by and dislike people is the other side of his capacity to idealise and intellectualise this objectified stranger. I mentioned in my earlier post that…
I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, engaged, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, in a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
I hadn’t remembered – or, perhaps, as a younger reader, I didn’t pick up on – how the aesthetic moralising degrades as Aschenbach’s obsession takes him over. This story is a quite clear parable of the fragility of bourgeois restraint. Nothing Aschenbach does is truly alien to him: in true early-twentieth century fashion, Aschenbach suffers a collapse of repression.
Even before he has let his passion take hold, the sickliness of the environment is pre-signalled in his discomfort with the climate. He attempts to escape, but is relieved when his plan to leave falls through and, realizing when he next sees Tadzio that the boy is the reason he wanted to stay, he is, from this point, lost to his obsession. Before then, he still holds on to the forms of his intellectual conceits, “…assuming the patronizing air of the connoisseur to hide, as artists will, their ravishment over a masterpiece.”((Mann, p35))
The sense of the uncanny has, by now, become monstrous, and is given a form in the growing awareness of the cholera outbreak which is threatening Venice. Aschenbach attempts to find out the truth about the epidemic, but seems also to lack the will to do anything about it, as he is lied to and soothed by the hotel manager, a street performer and the barber. However, when the young English clerk in the travel bureau whispers the truth to him, Aschenbach cannot turn the knowledge to action:
…the thought of returning home, returning to reason, self-mastery, an ordered existence, to the old life of effort. Alas! the bare thought made him wince with a revulsion that was like physical nausea. ‘It must be kept quiet,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I will not speak!’
((p75))
A dream follows; a nightmare of orgiastic pagan savagery, after which, it is clear that Aschenbach is ill. The magic has become the detached ecstasy of low-grade fever, in which internal experience entirely overwhelms the outside world. He seeks to remake himself with cosmetics, with the help of the barber, who contrives to transform him into a grotesque as alarming as the drunk on the steamer:
There he sat, the master: this was he who had found a way to reconcile art and honours; who had written The Abject, and in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled depths of the outcast human soul…whose renown had been officially recognized and his name ennobled…There he sat. His eyelids were closed, there was only a swift, sidelong glint of the eyeballs now and again, something between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.
((p80))
Aschenbach’s final reverie is on the power of the passions that an artist must channel and repress in order to practice his arts. “…we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion and guide.”((p80)) It is a complete reversal of the values he seems, at the opening of the story, to embody: an indulgent embrace of sensuality over learning, rejecting knowledge in favour of beauty:
For knowledge, Phaedrus, does not make him who possesses it dignified or austere. Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss – it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form. But detachment, Phaedrus, and preoccupations with form lead to intocication and desire, they may lead the noblest among us to frightful emotional excesses, which his own stern cult of the beautiful would make him the first to condemn. Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who are poets – who by our natures are prone not to excellence but to excess. And now, Phaedrus, I will go. Remain here; and only when you can no longer see me, then do you depart also.
((p81))
He seems here, to me, to be prefiguring his death. “I will go now,” means not just that he will finish the dialogue, but that he is aware, on some level, that this is the end for him. He is held to life only by his passion for Tadzio, but within a few days, he learns that the boy’s family are finally leaving.
The close of the story is magnificent. Aschenbach’s death is the central event, but, at the point before he finally collapses, a tableau plays out on the beach between Tadzio and his friend Jaschiu; a fight that seems to represent the collapse of their holiday friendship. Tadzio, humiliated, shrugs off Jaschiu’s attempts at reconciliation and retreats to the sea. The narrative voice never leaves Aschenbach; we see the boy’s isolated sulk through the eyes of the dying man, but, for half a page, the boy becomes a character rather than a figure, and the sense of the end of childhood and the clouds of approaching adolescence are drawn in the simplest description. He might have noticed the strange old man who has been making him uncomfortable over the previous weeks, but he is just a part of the cloudy, oppressive end-of-summer sorrow into which he has been plunged. For Aschenbach, however, the boy has acknowledged him, and legitimized his lechery.
It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation.
((p83))
And then, the end, unmourned by the reader, barely noticed by the love object, but,
…before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.
In our time the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Thomas Mann
Today is the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am travelling home after having visited my mother and my sister. This morning, the front page of my mother’s right-wing newspaper was covered with pictures of terror and pain and the business section noted that BAE systems are the best performing stock in a turbulent market. Even my mother, in her increasing dementia, raised the topic of the Russians’ massacre of the innocents when I got to her flat for breakfast.
My sister was less interested, or less obviously so. We are careful about our discussion of politics, although it animates us both, and we are sympathetic to one another’s outlooks. She is preparing for another Extinction Rebellion action, and for the appeal against her conviction for protesting against the Murdoch empire’s half-century of climate crisis denial. On Thursday night she spoke at a meeting. I spent the evening at my mother’s flat, then met Charlotte – my sister – at a pub afterwards. She was with people from her meeting; good, impassioned activists who are committed to pushing for real change in the way the world is run, in the hope of mitigating the damage done to the world by human activity.
I felt ashamed in their company. I am torn by a guilty desire to affect indifference, to the war and to the climate disaster. I had my season of political hope2 and it made me very unhappy,3 and the awareness of my impotence in public matters, and the apparently illusory nature of the virtues of democratic involvement, seem to press on me whenever I break my embargo on news. I leave my phone in another room when I sleep; I try to discipline myself to avoid the news, and I seek calm and serenity.
And yet my sister’s comrades seemed to me to be – not happier than I am – but more aware of themselves and warmed by their mutual endeavour. I’ve no idea whether there is a Christian among them, but they seem to have the clear-sighted tenacity of hope that I have always envied in true believers. I didn’t get to know them closely, but they included me in their round of goodbye hugs and I felt they were giving me access to the secret of their power, as they drew their comfort from each other and, generously, shared it with me.
I found the Yeats poem while reading an LRB article4 by Seamus Perry, on Colm Tóibín’s new novel,((http://colmtoibin.com/content/magician)) about the life of Thomas Mann. I intended to read the entire issue of the magazine, taking advantage of my train journey home, but this article has brought me up short. It seems to address perfectly the disillusionment I feel towards taking responsibility for anything outside my personal orbit. I was surprised to read that Yeats was a reluctant revolutionary. He wrote, after all, perhaps the greatest poem of struggle of the twentieth century,5 a poem that might today be applied to the awful glory of Ukrainian heroism in the face of the Russian spasm of fascist imperialism: in this horror, another “terrible beauty” is born. And yet, at least at the end of his life, in Politics, the last poem of the last collection he published, he expressed a weary indifference to worldly engagement.
I ‘did’ An Irish Airman…6 at school and I learnt the first stanza of Second Coming7 when I was a taxi driver, about twenty years ago, and I have, at times, taken a non-poetry-enthusiast’s limited interest in Yeats, as both an historical figure and an artist. I respected his reputation as one of the best of the modernist writers, but he was shaded from my enthusiasm by the fact that I despised them as a group because my teachers were all so uncritically adoring of modernism. Yeats got lumped in with (well, actually, overshadowed by) Lawrence, who was drilled into us as a paragon when he seemed to me to be a hack. It is only now that I realise that most of my English teachers just weren’t that good: they may have been devoted pedagogues, but their tastes were shaped by their polytechnic educations and their 1960s and ‘70s, lefty-ish, play-for-today political outlooks. Lawrence, with his leaden, explicit prose and his interest in sex and class, was easy to teach; Yeats, an infinitely more subtle and wide-ranging writer, was a more difficult study, even if his is the more beautiful work, by a country mile.
“Yeats sometimes feared that his work would be distorted by the restrictions of Irish culture.”8 He was, throughout his life, inescapably a political and public person, serving, to his apparent regret,9 six years as an Irish senator. It seems that, as he could not escape Irish culture, neither could he escape politics, living, as he did, in the long, bitter decline of British colonialism, whose death watch has lingered for over a century now.
It must be a terrible thing to be forced to upend your life in resistance to an inescapable event. How bitter the longing for the life abandoned must be. To my modern ear, the poem seems to drift close to depicting lechery as a virtuous alternative to engagement, but my response is, no doubt, an artefact of the time, and misses some of the poem’s cultural echoes: according to the notes in my copy of the Collected Poems of Yeats10, its phrases reflect the anonymous sixteenth Century English song, Westron Wind.
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.11
Perry has this to say about how Yeats gives privately cherished passion a greater truth than worldly knowledge and engagement:
You could imagine a much more straightforward poem that pitted public discourse against, say, the intimate conversation of lovers, but Yeats does something much odder than that: he sets public language against the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze. And here, too, Yeats was entirely in tune with Mann, who was similarly fascinated by the way that catching sight of someone you don’t know can make you forget yourself – or, rather, suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought.
(( Perry (2022)))
For Mann, apparently, aesthetics (that ‘forgetfulness’), at least partially, manifested in a life of secret and vividly focussed crushes on unsuspecting men and boys. The most famous expression of this in his art is the ecstatic fixation of Aschenbach the writer upon the boy Tadzio in Death In Venice.12 It’s decades since I read it, but I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, consumed, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, by a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
Like Yeats, Mann was dragged into political activity by his times: first by the German collapse into Nazism, and then by McCarthyism in the States.((Meyers, J. (2012) ‘Thomas Mann In America’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issue 4, Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1 Accessed 6th March 2022)) Even earlier, his Nobel acceptance speech of 192913 addressed the balance between art and the political atmosphere in which it is practised. He is, however, considered an ‘apolitical’ writer.14 After he had grasped the full stupidity and dishonesty of the McCarthy putsch…
Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”
Unsure how to respond to the experience of reading a poem that I feel might have been written for me in my current situation, I turned away from this post and read some news articles on my phone. The Russian attack was utterly mesmerising to watch, a dreadful deluge of iron and diesel spills, unleashed by the shrill screech of Putin’s deranged sanctimony. By the time I reached home, it had become clear that something that should be impossible was happening: the Ukrainians were standing up to their invaders and the Russians appeared to be stumbling. The Ukrainians’ courage was inhuman: it must have felt like watching a tidal wave coming at you, but as a million of them fled to the borders, hundreds of thousands of them rushed to take up arms.
By the next evening, there were interviews on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast with British-resident Ukrainians who were equipping themselves to return home to enlist. In answer to the predictable question, they all said they had no choice.
No choice. Like Mann, more suited to a life of bourgeois deception than to confronting evil, and like Yeats, who felt himself fettered into a conflict that reached back as far as the Norman invasion of his country and of which he was weary before he even began to publish. But unlike me. I, for now at least, seem to have a choice and I have chosen to be inactive.
Charlotte told me, when she first threw herself into Extinction Rebellion, that she didn’t expect to change anything. She just wanted to be on the right side of history. I understood that, but I still believed in the virtue of political hope and was, at the time, deeply involved in the Labour party. I felt that party politics offered the best opportunity to make a change, but that all fell apart with the 2019 election. At the time I wrote:
So, I’m looking at my position…the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that…is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics…I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Instead, I crumbled when it became apparent that Starmer had lied to gain the leadership and was just another capitalist lackey, pushing the anti-Semitism lie to squeeze out any supporters of real social justice, in favour of returning the party to right-wing conformity.((https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/whet-does-starmer-stand-for/)) Rather than take my energy elsewhere, I retreated.
I have been surprised by how deeply I have fallen into nihilism, and how unable I am to rekindle hope. I have always believed that optimism is my natural state, and that pessimism is a pointless self-scourging: why anticipate sorrow? For the past two years, though, I have felt that our last hope of stopping the end of the democratic era has died, and that the drift towards authoritarian tribalism is unstoppable.
And yet, my ideals have not changed. I still believe that economic equality is a necessary first-condition of a just society. I still believe that the maltreatment of animals is at the core of the rapacious relationship of capitalism to the planet. What I have not done is find, “the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze” that Perry describes as the state in which one might, “suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought”. My fugues have been fruitless. I am as adrift as I was two and a half years ago, when my political hopes died. My courage – my optimism – has been overwhelmed by the sense that the world really is spiralling towards destruction.
Is it just a question of courage? Raymond Williams said that, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing,” but I never wanted to be radical. I don’t see my politics as radical: the belief that one life is no less valuable than the next should not be a radical assertion. It is the basis of decency, and its denial is obscene. I think, fundamentally, I’m not suited to political engagement: I’m too self-conscious and too naked; too heart-on-sleeve.
That’s an excuse, though, of course. Yeats didn’t want to be drawn into politics:
…But the strife engendered when an intensely inward mind finds itself cast into remorselessly political times was perhaps more of an epochal predicament than it sounds. The great works of Yeats…are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of ‘what’s difficult’, and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
((Perry))
What to do? What to do?
I sought permission from Simon and Schuster to post this poem back in March. I heard nothing, and I did nag, so I’m going tp do it anyway. I own the book, and this post only makes sense if you’ve read the poem, so let’s see what happens. I expect I am beneath their notice, but if they do notice me, it will be exciting. [↩]
Today was a beautiful, late-winter morning, as clear and still as any day in the past few weeks. This was in contrast to yesterday, a Sunday, which was stormy and intermittently wet. Yesterday’s gloom gave me and Mrs DWC the excuse to have a do-nothing day: she stayed on the bed, reading, with the cat and the dog competing for the cosier spots, and I, having given Hazel a short walk, sat at my computer, planning the renovation of an old bike.
The fruits of my labours are contained in the document below. In fact, a good part of the document is redundant already, as I decided this morning that I would pay a professional to do the headset, but it was a pleasant day’s research which led me to muse on my bike ownership and the fact that, after a decade and a half of using bikes as my main transport, doing up even such a simple bike as the TIE Fighter is a major challenge.
This is the TIE Fighter. When I got it, I kept up the affectation of naming my bikes after spaceships from Star Wars, and she is the oldest of my bikes that, a) hasn’t been nicked and, b) is still in some sort of working order. I want to lay out my plans for this much-loved, but very tired, little beauty in this post, but, first, I’d like to return to point a) and indulge myself in reminiscence of all the bikes I’ve loved and lost, or neglected.
She may not look like much, but I’ve made a lot of special modifications…
It is, as you can probably see, a Boardman hybrid, of the sort that really became popular at the turn of the millennium: a road bike with flat bars and aggressive gearing, designed for whizzing around towns rather than for long journeys. Surprisingly, though, it has always been a comfortable bike, and a powerful workhorse: for several years I used it with a trailer, and carried up to thirty kilos behind it, doing up to fifty miles a week in that state.
Not a spot of rust.
Its original owner hadn’t used it very much and it had the gloss of newness. Compare it with the picture at the top of this post and you can see the years etched upon it.
In many ways, like a well-read book, I prefer a slightly battered-looking bike. However, the TIE Fighter has got beyond battered-looking, to just battered. Since I got it, I have tended to commute on whatever mountain bike I had in the winter but revert to the TIE Fighter whenever the weather was reasonable, as it was simply easier. I still used my mountain bikes, but as leisure bikes, not on the roads.
The A-wing, in her glory days.
However, around 2013 or so, after a succession of rough winters, the Island’s roads had got into such a state that using a road bike, particularly on my night-ride home after teaching evening classes, had become quite frightening. When the Millennium Falcon was stolen, in July of 2013, I used the A-wing for a couple of years, but that was overkill, and, in 2015, I bought a 29″ Voodoo Bizango; a Halfords mid-range bike which was absolutely perfect for long commutes with a laden trailer over pot-holed roads.
Gone, gone, and never called me Mother.
Alas, the East Cowes bike thief – may he (or she) suffer a thousand chronic saddle sores – struck again, in 2019. I’d forgotten to bring the bike into the back garden after cycling home one night and it was gone by the morning. In some ways, that was the more annoying theft, although I didn’t have the same affection for that bike that I had for the Falcon. I don’t have any pictures of it, for instance. It was, however, a superb tractor of a bike. I’ve since replaced it with a later model, and it is not nearly as good. For a start, the new version cannot pull my trailer, as it has stupid, smart-alec chainstays that mean you have no room for the extended quick release that secures the trailer’s bracket. The 2015 Bizango was a sturdy, capacious bike with a superb gear range that was both an enjoyable off-road ride and a useful and reasonably fast on-road commuter, able to cope with potholed roads.
At the time of this theft I hadn’t the funds to replace it and the A-wing, to my shame, was in an unusable state at the top of the garden, needing a lot of money to bring up to scratch, a situation that has only got worse in the intervening years. So much for leisure bikes. The TIE Fighter, on the other hand, needed some work, but it was within my means if I was careful for a month or two. So, I got it done up by a nice mechanic who works out of an industrial unit at the other side of Cowes. Understanding that I couldn’t afford to have everything that needed fixing replaced, he tightened the exhausted headset, managed to force a little more life out of the knackered hydraulic brakes and only replaced the cassette and chain, which were beyond repair.
It did the job. It felt a little sketchy with the trailer and it was odd to ride a bike with road wheels after several years of riding a 29″ wheeled mountain bike, but it was a bike and it got me to and from work. In the years since I’d bought the Voodoo, the Island’s roads had been resurfaced, so my reason for giving up on the TIE Fighter had been resolved. Nevertheless, I was saving for a new bike.
Then COVID happened. Suddenly, I didn’t need to drag folders and laptops around the Island and, in fact, I thought for a while that I would be out of work, so I volunteered to redeploy and was roped into two days a week of voluntary work at a retired people’s respite centre and short-term care home in Ryde. I bought a new Voodoo – a mistake, really, but I’ll discuss that at another time – and began to use that as my everyday bike and the TIE Fighter was consigned to the shed, and to an apparently permanent place on my rolling to-do list.
In this month’s Cycle Magazine, the excellent freebie sent out to members of CyclingUK, there is an article arguing that restoring an existing bike is a far better option than buying a new one. It sounds obvious, I know, but it inspired me. In particular, the following quote got me dreaming.
Cherish the bike you own. It’s easy to be distracted by the siren call of the shiny and new. Yet the fact that there’s a new bike that’s better than your old one doesn’t make your bike any worse than it was when you bought it…Recapturing that warm glow is partly mind games…I like a bike with what Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works calls ‘beausage’ – a portmanteau of ‘beauty’ and ‘usage’, which means the former comes from the latter. In other words, a well-used bike with some scuffs and scars looks better than a pristine, unridden bike. But if you prefer a polished bike, shine that frame! Want perfect paintwork? Get a respray…The more your bike meets your ideas of how a bike should look, the more you’ll like it.
Dan Joyce, Editor, Cycle Magazine
I have never been a competent mechanic. I have tried and, more than once, got myself into a real muddle. My chin bears the scars of an accident caused by my not being meticulous enough in re-tightening a wheel after having a disheartening go at sorting out some brakes. That was a decade ago, and now, though I can beat a deraillieur into submission, given an hour or so, I still quail at the idea of bleeding hydraulic brakes. I did, in a moment of inspiration, manage to teach myself how to change brake pads, a task that costs £50 for just one brake if you pay a bike shop, so that’s a win. All my working bikes use Shimano – or Shimano rip-off – brakes now, so the pads are cheap on ebay. However, I suspect that fitting new brakes on the TIE fighter will be beyond my powers. There are some seductive videos of the process online, that try to persude you that it’s easy, but the variables in mechanical processes are what catch me out. What’s easy for Rod of MTBWhizzo’s YouTube channel (“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!!!”), who spends his days tinkering with bikes for which he doesn’t have to pay, is an anxious, fiddly, potentially ruinous mystery for me, nine times out of ten.
The Star Cruiser, unladen.
Fortunately, I’m in no hurry. I have the starcruiser, a heavy, pannier-rack laden wonder that I spent far too much money buying in 2020, and which is relatively maintenance-free, thanks to its internal hub gearing and carbon belt drive. It is my main bike now, for work and for shopping. The new Voodoo, though a chore for getting around, is lovely off-road, but I don’t have much time for that, so it stays in the shed, mocking me. I’m also not crazy about the slightly questionable brand name, so am thinking about getting the frame resprayed at some point, but I digress. The purpose of the TIE Fighter is to be a quick hop-on when I only need a couple of things from the shops, or when I don’t need to carry too much to work. It’s reverting to its original purpose, of being a fast, zippy runaround.
Walking Hazel this morning was a cure for the post-Christmas malaise.
The fog was thick even as far up the town as our house. In Whippingham, it was like a veil, and St Mildred’s looked like a fantasy castle. I was listening to The Sword of Destiny, by Andrzej Sapkowski, beautifully read by Peter Kenny. The weather suited the story telling, and I could almost picture a dragon gliding up from the Medina, the mist making swirling vortices at its wingtips.
Down in the woods, across the fields, the cobwebs were silver with mist drops. The mist settled on my beard and on Hazel’s muzzle. I wanted to go on, through the woods, down to the Folly Inn and along the path to Newport, walking all day. It was a workday though, and I had to be at Westridge by midday, to do paperwork and then teach an evening class: as prosaic a use of a day as the morning was poetic.
All the same, for an hour, I felt free, and my spirits were lifted, and work was a little less oppressive because of the beauty of the morning.
