WATERMELONS: A PERFECT PLEASURE

I am not very well acquainted with melons, having been raised on a humdrum diet of apples, oranges and bananas. I remember having one or two at friends’ houses, but they never made much impression with their slimy texture and insipid sweetness. As an adult, I never bothered to buy any - until recently. Here in Budapest, heaps of watermelons are piled up outside small grocery shops like cartoon cannonballs. They’re cheaper than water, but incredibly heavy and need to be lugged home separately from any other shopping. There’s no room in the bag for anything else.

Here’s how to eat a watermelon. It’s best enjoyed chilled – this is important - after a tiring day at work, or for breakfast, or having returned from a drinking session, or in the middle of a hot afternoon. Stick a knife into its impressive bulk and cut right through the soft flesh. Then, when it is almost cloven in two, grab the halves and pull them apart with a satisfying crack. Admire the flesh, a perfluence of glowing deep pink incandescent with runny sweetness and glistening like the surface of an iceberg. It’s scattered with jet black seeds.

Repeat procedure until you have a large segment. Then cut round the edge of the pink area, prising the gorgeous fruit away from the skin. And cut into chunks. They’re almost opaque when held to the light. You can imagine the individual crystalline cells. The anticipation is a delight.

Now, plunge in and feel the juices break over your chin, running down and dripping on to the table/ your feet. Deliciously crunchy like a sorbet on first contact, the fruit then collapses on your tongue, bursting into a cool flood which gushes down your grateful throat. For a few minutes you dissolve in a frenzy. It gets a real mauling, and soon you are whimpering with pleasure, and replete with a distended belly.

ETHICS AFTER NIETZSCHE: SOME THOUGHTS ON NATURE, CHARACTER, VIRTUE

This was originally posted on a Nietzsche discussion group.

How fixed are our natures? Is there such a thing as a universal “human nature”? Are our natures conditioned more by genetics or the environment? On the other hand, are they at all malleable? Can we work with them as at a potter’s mould? Can we "become what we are"? Does this art of overcoming become more difficult as we get older, as suggested below? When, if at all, do we lose the skill?

The ideas below are tentative, and derivative. I offer them for comment.

I am fairly convinced by the "hardwired" school of evolutionary psychology; we are born with certain capacities and limitations. This I call our individual nature. Then the individual's early upbringing and family environment triggers/activates certain capacities while others are left dormant, yet not atrophied. I call the resulting product (or rather, "climate" - see last post) our character. I suspect that we can change our characters very little after adolescence, and only by degrees, but there is probably individual variation in this.

As part of their characters, some individuals have a stronger tendency to suppress their basic drives, and conform. All men (& women?) have to do this to some extent - i.e. suppress the most violent drives - to exist within society. Whether we tend to resist or conform, it is all utterly deterministic. Different social circumstances vary the the opportunity for pre-existing elements of our characters to be expressed; this is why we appear to change as we move from place to place, geographically or in a hierarchy. The appearance is greater than the reality of the underlying change, although of course new behaviour can become habitual.

Often, and more often than not in the truly great and the criminally insane, the basic drives run contrary to external pressures; we call this Will. Our ethical systems - after Nietzsche, “fragments” would be a better word - were socially evolved systems of drive-suppression, conditioning by means of sticks and carrots. Incredibly useful to have in society, but the stronger-Willed sceptics, as well as the merely cynical, have always been able to reinterpret, reinvent or else junk them to suit themselves. The weaker-Willed castigate themselves for not following these dictates; as Nietzsche pointed out, guilt is indeed one of their strongest feelings, the characteristic manifestation of drives suppressed.

"One must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments." Beyond Good And Evil, 191

Within this post-Nietzschean world, it is still possible to construct a system of virtues, although the final ones individuals choose to aspire to, and teach their children, need not be Nietzschean ones! To be credible, they do need to be rooted in a good grasp of evolutionary psychology.

Compassion is arguably a virtue, though it was utterly contemptible to the Nietzsche we find in print. (Perhaps not in all cases. He was marvellously inconsistent. And where's the virtue in consistency?)

HARDWIRED

“ Success (or failure) in matters of love, money, reputation or power is transient stuff; you soon settle back down (or up) to the level of happiness you were born with genetically.” In Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up

Wolfe predicts that a new Nietzsche will soon come to announce “the Soul (or Self) is dead.” The suspected killer is the neuroscientific world view, which aspires to explain away these entities, along with another old friend, free will. Scientists claim to have discovered that most of the behaviour that makes up our cherished view of ourselves is in fact genetically encoded, infamous examples being intelligence, homosexuality, having criminal tendencies, and how we respond to beauty.

This will bring about a sea change in our thinking, claims Wolfe, as we have long been used to ideas of social or psychological conditioning – from Marx and Freud, respectively. The result could be that many of our everyday notions become quaint artefacts. Personal responsibility is the most important of these, and along with that goes the ability to criticise meaningfully the actions of others.

I doubt the change in the intellectual climate will be so profound.

(1) There is as much evasion of responsibility in saying “I’m socially conditioned – don’t blame me” as in saying “I’m wired wrong – don’t blame me”.
(2) When we praise or blame, for moral wrongdoing (e.g. “Blair was wrong to go to war”) we are not thinking of some absolute freedom of choice at the moment of decision, as if the culprit had flicked the wrong switch. (This kind of existential pause before decisionmaking is, in any case, the exception rather than the rule.) Rather, we are thinking of someone’s whole character that formed the background to the choice made. Blaming someone is like blaming a faulty computer. It doesn’t matter exactly how the fault came about; the point is that it is there now, and worth complaining about, or taking action over.

As for the Soul (or self) being dead, this is old news to Buddhists, readers of Proust, and many philosophers. Don't be too hard on yourself, because you, as a discrete entity, literally don't exist. The notion of your slowly changing and evolving character is preserved, however - it is something akin to a climate. Get used to acting as a collection of events, and seeing statements about you and your personal beliefs in the same category as weather reports - reasonably reliable, but not facts. Your moods are like tropical storms. And if things aren't going your way, wait for a change in the weather.

RAW FOOD SUBVERSIVE

"The ethical value of uncooked food is incomparable. Economically this food has possibilities which no cooked food can have." Gandhi.

Raw and "bio" food seems to be taking off here in Central Europe, but I suppose it never came down to earth, as it were, in a culture where "total wellness" has long been touted as a panacea to the great Hungarian cholesterol-gobbling masses. The more usual diet of sausages, fried dough and multifarious cheeses sadly leaves droves of people hobbling before their time.

Headed off to the country recently for a weekend of eating raw food, doing yoga and general abstinence. Our hosts were a rake-thin couple in their sixties, who had evidently been at it for years. They prepared exquisite dishes from various vegetables, fruit, seeds and nuts - not just salads but tasty main courses, spreads for toast and even cream cakes (with nut cream.) I certainly felt rejuvenated after eating this stuff for two days, though this may have been as much to do with not having had a drink all weekend (something I don't do, unless ill) as anything else.

On the down side, there wasn't a lot of humour to be had during the weekend. All the participants were very earnest; good people, but of the po-faced fanatical type, and scarcely a giggle escaped their lips. I've noticed this is a marked tendency among the spiritual and people from a broadly Left tradition, and I'm not sure why. I think it's because "enlightenment" tends to dispel lightness, and humour to subvert.

Joan was utterly dominating, and presided thin-lipped over the proceedings. Before each meal, she declared, after waiting grimly for silence to descend, that she would talk about the food, and this she proceeded to do in hushed reverential tones. The first time, we wolfishly lunged at the great mounds of food, so her tremulous husband pre-empted us the second time: "in this house, it is customary to spend a few seconds in silence." We felt suitably admonished.

Among many edicts and prescriptions, Joan said you should eat nothing with a watermelon, and no more than eight dates at a time. Also, water should be drunk no less than half an hour before eating, NEVER with the meal or afterwards as it would wash away all the enzymes before they got to work. So when I went upstairs to get a little of my water (wisely packed) I felt a Class A twinge of guilt. I plucked up the courage to bring the plastic bottle into the yoga room later; it earned a withering glance from my teacher, the kind relapsing alcoholics get from their counsellors. When Judit, my girlfriend, brought some plates and leftover food to the kitchen, she was stopped from putting it in the bin with Joan's terse proclamation, "I have special rules for leftover food!" (It was to be further empulped for one of the next day's spread.)

All the discussion was about food, food, food. In a moment of snatched privacy, Judit said, "you'd have to be in your dotage to be so preoccupied with your digestive system." We had to escape for walks a couple of times - and we felt as if we were skipping off school! When her husband started going on about some disciple of Hungary's original raw food guru - possibly a former Nazi, I thought - who was alive at 96, I thought of my grandmother going strong at 91 on her own particular regime of sweets and cream cakes.

THE HYPNOTISM OF WASPS

When I used to live in Ghana, I had a wasps' nest somewhere near my house, perhaps even under the rafters, and, since I had left my radio in bed under the mosquito net, my breakfast time entertainment was to study their behaviour. I observed a strange ritual that I can't explain.

The noise of the wasps all buzzing together would begin soon after I turned the light on, and sometimes they were up before me. Collectively, they generated a deep high-voltage hum like you would get from a faulty electrical appliance. They would always gather on the grille of the windows because the brightest light usually came from here. Like a schoolboy, I'd extinguish this light and switch on the external one, listening to the immediate pitch change when I did so. Of course, they'd gradually migrate to the other bulb, although it took some of them quite a long time to realise the light source had changed. Perhaps they were sleepy like me.

By now, the sun was starting to come up over the bush land beyond the campus. At one point, just at the moment you'd describe as daybreak, when the light was enough to give some colour to the sky, the wasps stopped dead. This wasn't sudden enough to make you sit up and notice; it happened over a minute or two. There they would sit, frozen in awe (as it seemed) or else complete confusion. All buzzing ceased. And the stillness continued for about twenty minutes, after which they began to fly off, individually and randomly. The first time I saw this conglomeration, I actually thought they had all died during the night. It was spectacular in its own way.

What was going on? Were they greeting the dawn, passing chemical messages to each other in mute communion, or simply trying to calculate the position of the real sun? In their eerie unison, I couldn't help but notice the similarity with the other call to prayer which was happening a little further away on campus, every day at the same time.

LIVE 8: HOW WE ARE ALL BEING BETRAYED

Behind all the supposed well-wishing for Africa, Western companies are lining up to exploit the continent. The increases in aid will have strings attached. There will be no real movement on fair trade. An economic protectorate is being created, rather than giving Africans a say in their own future. Please copy and paste this link into your browser, and someone tell Bob Geldof.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1521411,00.html

AGAINST CYNICAL HACKS - MAKE POVERTY HISTORY

A colleague at work told me that he had read a review of the Glastonbury festival that said no one really knew what Bob Geldof was on about when he tried to rally the crowd. He asked me why Geldof pops up once every twenty years to rant on about Africa. I also read a comment on the BBC site about his having an inflated ego, etc.

Stop!

Here is a man who has often campaigned on poverty-related issues. It doesn't often hit the big headlines because it doesn't involve Live 8 type events. (Incidentally, he had to be begged to do this one. Itisn't a publicity stunt.) He has, as far as I know, visited the continent on many occasions. What I know for certain is that he was a member of The Commission for Africa, a UK governmental body which was set up to look into all these issues and into what the developed (read "rich")world could do to help solve some of the continent's woes.

Commission for Africa site:
http://commissionforafrica.org/index.html

Geldof knows his stuff. As for his oratory skills, that's a matter of opinion. I like him because he talks straight. In the middle of millions of messages broadcast across the planet every day, he is saying the things that need, desperately, to be said. OK, words are just words, I know. But Geldof is doing more than any other human being on the planet to raise awareness this year. And awareness is where it's at. As far as I know, the hip Glasto crowd responded well. Some people cried. A lot of the audience will have been following the campaign from the beginning of the year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4620635.stm

As for the timing, this year is a once in a generation chance to make a huge impact on global poverty. The reason is to do with a unique coincidence of events. The UK government, which is more progressive on these issues than most governments, is hosting the G8 summit in Gleneagles. The summit has development on its agenda, and comes quickly on the heels of the tsunami disaster, which motivated millions to give an unprecedented amount of money. So, the argument goes, with this amount of popular awareness coinciding with this political event, the opportunities for change are immense. And won't come again soon.

The Make Poverty History campaign aims to:
- double aid
- cancel all debts
- bring about fairer trade rules

If trade rules can be altered (getting rid of subsidies to rich countries, letting developing countries have a degree of protection for their markets...) or, at the very least, aid was not conditional on these countries' having to implement unsuitable economic policies (privatising their essential services, etc), then we wouldn't have to have the level of poverty that we put up with.

Of course, Bush has already watered everything right down and the politicos are doing their usual fudging. So the show will go on as usual...

Except that this time, there's a crucial difference. Because of Live 8 (which will be a culmination of the growth in awareness of these issues since the original Live Aid) THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. And if these bastards do not heed the million people on the streets, we can take one clear message away from it: democracy is a sick plant. People have been coming to realise this, but it will never have been hammered home so starkly.

1968 nothing. Welcome to 2005. Go to the Live 8 site and sign the petition.

NO SATANIC POWER IS IN CHARGE

This is a rather catchy shop (actually just a roadside kiosk) name I remember from when I lived in Ghana in the late 1990s. I was recently sent a link to the site of Trevor, a Peace Corps volunteer who worked in the same town as I did, a dusty but wonderful backwater called Tumu in the Upper West region. Seeing the photos again nearly broke my heart as I miss those days so much. (Funny that, in my last months there, I was crossing the days off the calendar... See my entry on sleepwalking.)

Trevor also did a good job of collecting the shop names below, which are all genuine. I'm not sure whether the idea is to have God's blessing on the business, or whether these were just dreamt up in fits of fervour? I love the typically African juxtaposition of the spiritual and the absolutely mundane.

Bride of Christ Aluminium Works
In God We Trust Fast Food
My God Is Able Plumbing Works
God Did It All Fashion Centre
Anointed Fashion
In Step with the Spirit Enterprises
Anointed Hands Furniture Works
I Can Do All Through Christ Strengthened Me Fashions
Blood of Jesus Electricals
Lord Is My Shepherd Hotel
God Will Provide Supermarket
God's Time Barbering Shop
Jesus Is Evergreen Enterprises
God First Carwash
God Bless You Modern Fashions
Lord J Clinic

The photos are here:

Trevor’s Peace corps site

INSPIRED?

I came across this thought-provoking idea on a website about plants, amongst other things. It's a proposal for a new religion.

http://deoxy.org/t_ppp.htm

"A non-theistic mythology that inspires awe in the mysterious, reveals cosmology through science, provides social cooperation in the form of compassion and a pedagogical foundation is indeed the natural course of our development. Obviously, the myth must be simple in its minimalist form, imaginative and yet profoundly sublime."

While I don't agree it's "the natural course...", I do think the writer has made the important points about the things a post-religious society lacks. What could such a new myth consist of? Could it ever be designed, or must it just grow? Or is the whole idea misplaced?

HOW SLEEPWALKING CAME TO BE SO PAINFUL

The essentials were hatched by two of a little coven of devils working under a distant hill, moulding the fate of men from the base metal of their dark kingdom. Crouched in a hole, warming his claws against the licking flames, Verhanorath first had the idea:

“Let’s fill their idle hours with longing for the things that were and the things that can never be!”

“And let’s make sure their wisest books tell them in grave and inky words to live in the eternal moment…” added Septeroth, his green eyes glinting. “They’ll want to work on this, but we’ll make it tedious and time-consuming to master.”

“And useless,” chuckled the first, “for these fully lived days will be as spent matches to them. Not so the days they sleepwalk through: rainy October evenings, attentive lovers not appreciated, idle pavement strolls in early summer, hated lessons at school, bus journeys on streets so familiar that they've long ceased to make any impression… these are the ones that shall sting their drab hearts ever after! And they'll be counted in years."

He rubbed his talons – click click - in quiet mirth, but Septeroth looked uncertainly at the flame-lit walls and wondered if they dared let such a thing loose.

MINUS 11

This is the coldest weather so far. For Hungarians, it's very moderate - many of them are walking round without hats. It's the kind of icy cold that sends draughts seeping through hats anyway, and scarves, and layers, so that you feel your body stiffen and draw back. But there's absolutely no refuge from it. Until you come back indoors to the amazing blast of uncontrolled communist-era centrally heated blocks.

How hellish to be sleeping on the streets tonight, and there are some who do - under shelters of scaffolding, with dirty old quilts and mattresses made from cardboard boxes. Shame on any society that can let its old men shiver and, in some cases, die in pathetic berths like these.

DO NOT ACCEPT...

"Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in your books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who... shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height."

The Buddha, in a Zarathustra-like moment

SNOW IN BUDAPEST

At last! It'd been one of those post-global-warming non-event winters here until yesterday. I'd given up reading the online forecast and my thoughts had drifted elsewhere when I opened my curtains and there it was - filling the air. It fell all day without stopping once. There's nothing I can write about snow that hasn't already been written, and yet it seems like a new experience every time, I suppose because the cityscape is so transformed.

The first glimpse of it was in the Buda hills on Sunday. It started falling as we were climbing up to the wooden tower on top of one of the hills. It looked golden with the late afternoon sun illuminating it. The wood became like a scene from Lothlorien. We all had to grab big sticks so that we could edge down without falling, though the Hungarians were able to breeze past in trainers. They had their snow feet while we stumbled and joked about being trapped up there as night fell.

Yesterday it came in earnest, piling up on the branches and car bonnets. The best scene was the Parliament buliding - imagine the Palace of Westminster rebuilt on an impossibly large scale to dwarf all the surroundings, half-glimpsed through netted veils of snow, the chandeliers of imagined long halls - this building surely cannot have mere rooms - visible through its windows. All of this is seen from a bright yellow tram which travels along one bank of the Danube, making a neat arc round Parliament. As it drops us off, people are huddled well into their coats; this is the coldest it has been. Really chilling around your legs and on your face, as cold as I have ever felt. I try to picture the physics of all those almost motionless unheated particles and how their influence is draining off the warmth from my skin.

SOUL RANT

I decided to change the heading on the blog to reflect how I'm feeling these days. I no longer feel like a drone - my job has suddenly become more exciting. Maybe I'm just a more satisfied drone. Anyway, doing just what I want to do makes me feel a little less insignificant. Budapest is an incredible city by day and by night. I'm getting out until the small hours two or three times a week, something I was never able to do in London, living so far from the centre. (Haggling taxi drivers down to £35 for the journey home was too depressing.) I'm meeting new people all the time. I am no longer permanently tired. Thank God (for want of a better expression) I came and kick-started my life!

I chose the line "I don't get what the society wants" as a kind of anti-quotation. I feel as if I'm on permanent holiday from the mainstream. I feel like the character in A Disaffection by James Kelman when he says that everything that the society values means little or nothing to him and everything he thinks is valuable isn't rated by anyone. Or my best friend who recently said in despair that he is tired of a world where money, power and war are valued, and where love and nature are not. I can't put it into words very well:

I couldn't care less about Changing Rooms or I'm a Celebrity or Big Brother

Most of the musicians I love are dead or half-dead

I have never seen an episode of Friends

I don't know who Arson Wenger is (can't even spell his name) and I couldn't give a toss about the football results

I have little respect for any of the political parties. Bush's victory and Blair's upcoming victory are both profoundly depressing events. What happened to the Green movement?

I find it hard to make small talk, about anything

I want to write songs and perform them all day long, then go to a wine-soaked orgy in some ruins in the evening. And tell ghost stories round a fire. Creative expression, wild sex, ancient buildings - aren't these great things?

Buying property is not the be-all and end-all of my life - can't you think of something more interesting to talk about?

Don't ask me what I do - it's my day job. It pays the rent. Ask me about my soul

Ah yes! SOUL. There's not a lot of that to be had, is there? (Hip hop has taken over the world, according to today's Observer)

And, most of all, I'm living on a planet which is being criminally mismanaged by fools, careering towards environmental disaster, and all I hear on the airwaves is... nothing. Everybody's forgotten.

By the way, I know I've written something like this before - it's a kind of chorus. It's come round again. Now all that's off my chest, I'm off for a walk in the Buda hills - it's a beautiful January morning and the whole sky is bright.

DIGITAL MURK

Downloaders of MP3s are being offered a very different history of rock, rewritten by small children who've never seen a copy of MOJO in their lives. By a process of online Chinese whispers, a lot of classic rock songs are cropping up attributed to the wrong artists. No, A Horse With No Name is not by Neil Young. No, Stuck In The Middle With You is not a Dylan song. (In case you don't know, both of these were recorded by people aping their heroes, turning out passable imitations of the "greater" artists - see last post.) Smoke On The Water is definitely NOT in the "Jimmy" Hendrix back catalogue! And there is no song called Everybody Must Get Stoned. There should be a new word for these files. Ideas, anyone?

Added to this, there are fantasy MP3s put together by computer geeks. Hendrix did play Day Tripper in '67, but it wasn't with John Lennon. Would have been a nice gig, though.

It's interesting to see what people come up with. I wonder if in years to come, the music of lesser known musicians will just drift around the wireless networks in complete anonymity, or be swallowed up by the better known names. Maybe there will be authorship disputes, like the theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by Ben Jonson (or was it Marlowe?) Reputations will be tarnished forever; I mean, Stuck in The Middle is a great pop song, but Dylan would have thrown the lyrics out the next morning.

ART Vs ENTERTAINMENT

The Beatles are better than Busted, and of course neither should be mentioned in the same sentence as Beethoven.

Ulysses is the greatest novel of the 20th Century.

Damien Hirst is just taking the public for a ride.

Can we make objective qualitative judgements about art? Is there a difference between “great” art and “mere” entertainment? Or is it just a matter of taste, like choosing between wines? Worse still, are prejudice and snobbery involved?

Some of us were discussing this in a bar in Buda yesterday. I mentioned a remark by Neb, a commentator on this blog, that entertainment is “just” to make you feel good, and is escapist. My colleague maintained that all art is like this, that the feeling of satisfaction or catharsis or even sadness after reading a good book is really not any more valuable than the fleeting pleasure some people get from hearing the latest manufactured chart-topper. I suggested that the essence of art is not that it can conjure up some feeling, but that it contains some important message about life in the real world. He challenged me about this notion of “importance” and who is to be the final arbiter of this. Might the importance be illusory, and have more to do with the smugness of the educated?

His main point was that people lucky enough to have some hours of leisure have a need for something to occupy their minds. Art and entertainment just two labels for what is in fact the same thing: a distraction. And therefore it's all escapist! (As opposed to, for example, doing voluntary work in your local Oxfam shop.)

We might attempt to define great art by agreeing a checklist of criteria e.g. longevity (that it will be relevant to people a century later); the fact that it manifests a degree of talent or skill, which is some sense measurable; that it requires some thought to execute and to be properly understood. The problem is that none of these criteria alone would suffice. That of longevity, for example, can be challenged on the grounds that we can imagine a piece of “bad” art being valued over time. (Kylie songs on 22nd Century digital media?) It’s unlikely, but not impossible.

Can anyone improve on this checklist, or, better still, give a watertight definition of good art? Or should we just abandon talk of “good” and “bad” in this context as a category mistake, and replace this with the less loaded “I prefer…”? The implication in terms of public policy would be to show up the awarding of Arts Council grants as being entirely arbitrary.

JOHN PEEL

I will miss having someone like John Peel around. I actually didn't hear his show that often, but was always aware of how unusual he was in the media. A real music fan, and a hero of radio. As radio fades into the past, I can't imagine anyone being in a similar niche again. The thing was that he didn't follow received opinion or "believe the hype". He played the music he liked, and refused to be stale and predictable. So, as a "grumpy old man", he broke the mould.

As an unsigned musician, I am made painfully aware, again and again, of how no one gives your material half an ear; no one cares a great deal about what you've laboured over - it couldn't possibly be in the same league as someone sponsored by a corporation, so why bother?

We planned to send our new demo to John Peel because he really did make the time to listen - and all the tributes tonight are testament to that.

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

I have just finished Notes from Underground, and I am genuinely puzzled by something. What did Dostoyevsky have in mind by going to such lengths to describe the main hero/anti-hero?

When the Underground man makes his "sympathetic" speech to Liza the prostitute, only what we know of him from the first part of the novel reminds us that he is not in earnest. I'm tempted, however, to think D was attempting to show the character groping towards redemption here. Is this naive of me? If the speech is supposed to be seen as entirely utterly mailicious and false, why does the Underground man give Liza his address? Only so that he can torture her more?

It is hard for me to imagine anyone so consumed by shame, bitterness and sadism that they could resist the final offer of love from Liza.

But my main question is about what D was trying to do in dedicating a whole novel to such a detailed portrait of someone so beyond redemption. Was he portraying this uniquely ruthless inconsistent character as a bleak comment on human nature in general or as a critical statement about the "Russian man"? i.e. it is a call to spiritual awakening. Only the latter seems to fit in with D's political conservatism, yet the relentlessly bleak tone would seem to suggest it's far from being a spiritual tract.

I read online that some critics have seen it as a dark reply to Rousseau's solitary walker.

OLD WORLD CITY/ SLOW TOURISM

Just walking along to the music cellar last night was as exciting as being in the place itself. Walking under an old clock, through dimly lit streets. Catching a thrill from the just-turned-Autumn air. Feeling very alert and prowly like a wild animal in new surroundings.

An unusually high number of people here seem to have deformities (rickets?) so it makes me conscious of how wonderful it is to be able to stride along. This is also because I got into some tortured thought process (because of a slightly sore back) at lunchtime that I might be going down with MS! No idea why. But for a few days afterwards, you feel differently about walking.

In the cellar, there is the kind of slightly shabby wooden decor that reminds me of an old cinema ad where people got holed up to dance the night away when there was a hurricane blowing ouside. I feel more at ease than I have for years in club-type environments, which I generally don’t enjoy that much. But it wasn't set in stone and maybe I'm a different person.

Maybe I was playing at being someone different when I was in the UK? I know that every time I open my mouth to launch an opinion, especially of the “generally, I don’t…” variety, I am forging an identity rather than describing anything. So much of our behaviour is just reacting to what others expect.

Now it's the weekend I should really be doing some more sightseeing. But why rush it? I love this slow tourism. It means that a metro station can be enjoyed as much as an art gallery, even more perhaps, because of the atmospherics.

DATAFACTORY

The Office for Statistical Management and Moderation has an awesome reputation for data manip and that’s why Crabdale was proud to join them after the last lot had pulled the wires from his chickenbone frame.

You can find it in one of the cratered back streets, a slightly scabby but not unattractive turn of the 20th Century building, with a courtyard open to the sky and enormous double doors like sentries. You can see by its magnificent pillars that it had originally been some elegant urban apartments, but you wouldn’t guess it has also been a base for the Purification of Youth movement; an interrogation centre in the dark years; and then a sound recording studio during the years of hope, where, tutored by long-suffering orchestrators of genius, a stream of untidy musicians converted their half-baked ideas into ephemeral jingles, used occasionally to promote gadgets but usually as soundtracks to poisonous adolescent vision quests.

This was all before it was purchased by DataFactory and thus entered its loftiest, though tattiest, period, in the service of Hibernia. Which is the greater good, arching above us all, in case you were wondering. (Don’t. There are more dark years ahead, more detention centres, and none of it must be hastened into existence by your unruly thoughts.)

DataFactory is a private consortium whose owners, whoever they are, do very well; not a credit from the public purse is intentionally lavished if it’s in any way possible to claw it back. The moderators all use reconstructed keyboards, grey with finger-grime and the data storage devices crash daily because of the amount of meaningless junk stuffed into their limited capacities. There are still typewriters on the go, the whirring and crashing of which can now be read by data-sticks as text. Ranks of drones are jammed into their individual stalls, often walled in, either racking their brains or dreaming uncontrollably, which occasionally results in an excited shudder. (It’s all right. No one is looking.)

They conduct interviews using beaten-up tape recorders held together by sellotape, and afterwards everyone strains so hard to separate the dialogue from the hiss that you would think there was something worth hearing. And, for relief, most drones go once or twice a day to the other stalls, which are tiny and stink like a farm.

The line manager is Lentil, a man in whose soul there isn't enough light material for any spark of humour to catch. He has protruding eyes and a wispy beard. He is thin and stalks round the office like a heron. No one knows exactly what he does. Crabdale, by contrast, scurries round trying to deal with the piles of paper on his desk and weights on his mind, both accumulating. He takes pills for today's hectic lifestyles and hopes they'll prevent the spreading of the dry patches on his palms.

Nothing is ever mended or brought to completion here. It is a continual striving for an improved state of affairs no fool would dare spell out in any detail. For he would be howled down, and after the howling was over, everyone would sit awake in the early hours and grip their sheets.