Hawking on myth

Hawking seemed to be on more solid ground in the next episode in his mini-series when he suggested that science has replaced myth. The program invented a group of Vikings watching a solar eclipse and chanting to chase away the wolf god which they believed was eating the sun. Sometimes myth provides a good source of imagery and it obviously provides insight into the primitive mind. But surely quite often the best reaction is just to say that 'aetiological' myths like the wolf god one are quite stupid and boring, and that the scientific explanations are far richer and more beautiful, even if they often take more mental effort. The prestige of myth in the literary world has declined and you don't get, anything like as often, poems like those of Tennyson that centre on mythical characters. But the 'mythic' is still often accorded more respect than it deserves and this can produce things like the Seren series of novels based on stories from the Mabinogion. The ones I've seen in that series are very poor, and I do think that mythic content is very often a sign of lazy thinking, and often of a kind of unexamined mysticism, and that this kind of writing really isn't representing the contemporary world.

stephen hawking on the meaning of life

In a recent TV program, Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead and has been replaced by science. Given the astonishing discoveries in recent science you can see what he means - some of the staple questions in philosophy like the mind/body question look entirely different given what science has been saying. Hawking's philosophical outlook has inevitably been shaped by his scientific background which has made him focus on the construction of an infinite universe from atomic particles - which translates philosophically into a form of materialism so that, when he comes to translate this into what the meaning of life might be, he's clearly faced with the premise that human meaning is largely irrelevant. Struggling against that obvious conclusion he decided to say that life does have meaning and that it arises from how individuals impose meaning in their own lives. This is banal at best and demonstrates that ignorance of philosophy is likely to lead you, when you're forced to philosophise, into reiterating philosophical cliches. His line was little better than 'life is what you make it' or, less colloquially, a crude version of existentialism.

David Gaffney

I went, last weekend, to the 60th birthday celebrations for Stand magazine, which has played a major role in contemporary poetry and deserves to be supported in every possible way. I gave a reading and listened to others and the general standard was extremely impressive. The most distinctive though was by David Gaffney who writes micro-fiction, - each piece 150 words long. He read, for example, one about the emotional meaning of the spiral structure of Ikea stores,  a deeply creepy one about wardrobes, and one about a man who hates grocery shopping so much he starts - on the principle that people buy more or less the same things - to commandeer trolleys which have already been loaded by other people. One day his victim notices what he's done, but he decides to pretend he knows her:

'Darling, I'll just get eggs.'
'We've got eggs,' the woman chirped. 'Listen, do you want to go out to the car? You look stressed. You can listen to your tape.'

I talked to David at the interval and, in an attempt to influence him, broached the subject of blowdry handriers: how the conventional ones breathe a death rattle on your hands and leave them no drier than before, but the Dyson Hyperblade is scarily effective - if you look at your hands while it's operating, you can see it drives deep ripples across them, as though it's plunging underneath your skin to dry it from the inside. It may work, he seemed interested.

Hillsborough Report

Tony Blair said 'We're all middle-class now', but the horrors explicit and implicit in this report indicate the very powerful role that class still plays in British society, and which is all the more powerful because class is being so cleverly and subtly marginalised as a way of understanding contemporary experience. That the innocent victims of this horror could actually be blamed for causing it, and that such blame was routinely extended and so widely believed, shows the extent of the dismissive contempt with which they were regarded in the first place, and shows how class prejudices carry the weight of unexamined 'common sense', and can be used against the working class by the same people who say it is old-fashioned to talk about class at all.

"poetry"

It's odd how the word poetry is used in sporting contexts as a term of the highest praise - that sprint finish was sheer poetry - by people who would never read a poem.

secret wheels: funding for athletes

The Olympics have certainly been a fascinating, vivid spectacle, and the British medal-winners are generally compelling and often charismatic individuals. There's been some discussion of lottery-funding and fears etc it will decline after the home event, but there's been no attempt that I've seen to look at the bigger picture in the funding - about funding for athletics in comparison with other cultural activities that find it difficult to fund themselves from their audiences alone. Poetry is comparable in this respect to a sport like kayaking - it's a minority interest and needs public money to survive. The difference is that poetry is part of a very long British tradition and one which forms part of our larger global prestige. Its neglect is evident when you compare the imminent appearance of British athletes on stamps to the absence of WHAuden from such honours in his centenary year a couple of years ago. Auden was the greatest British artist of the twentieth century. This is also reflected in the funding - British success at the Olympics has been achieved through targeting lots of cash at elite athletes. The amounts involved are staggering when you compare them with Arts funding which has been squeezed and squeezed so that small presses like Salt and Cinnamon are struggling desperately to survive. It's not just poetry that's suffering, but all the Arts, and the career of Danny Boyle, who directed the opening ceremony, needs to be borne in mind in this context. He's a generation older than the athletes and benefited from a previous economic regime - he was a student in my own academic department at a time when students got grants. He will also have furthered his career in Britain at a time when there was general funding for all the Arts. Younger versions of him will certainly be struggling to make their way.

shouting insults from cars

As I was walking home a couple of nights ago, a car moved off and the driver shouted something loud and raucous at me through his open window. This seems to be a growing habit, and it's cowardly because the driver needn't ever be face to face with the insulted stranger. Mostly it's young men doing it, but it's part of a general culture of insult that's grown up in the past decade where the major culprits, like Ann Robinson and Simon Cowell, are older and where insult as entertainment has become a norm. A bad recent example is that idiot comedian who thought it was funny to say that Rebecca Adlington is ugly - surely this suggests that your comic resources are extremely meagre.
There was an element of self-conscious insult in Gore Vidal, who died this week - so it's clearly not that new. Vidal would also give the impression, sometimes, that he was shouting insults at passing macho strangers, (Norman Mailer, William Buckley) but he wasn't as cowardly and did receive some physical buffeting in reply. Even so it was a distraction from his genuine achievements, which were important in subverting rigid gender norms in the 1960s and after.