xchmp

Week: 1
Day: 1
Result: I suck. Kinda.

So last week I did the initial test and scraped into the second tier with a total of six push-ups. Today the actual programme began properly, and I kind of sucked at it. I had to do five sets of push ups, starting with two sets of six, then two sets of four, then a final set with as many as I could manage.

I did OK at the first two sets, but it got really difficult and I only managed two proper push-ups each for the two sets of four. There was no way I could have managed any proper push-ups for the final set, so I compromised and did five knee push-ups. Still, I don’t feel too bad about it - I’m substantially better at this than I was the last time round and I’m only going to get better. If I seriously can’t manage the next couple of days, I can just repeat the week, but I’ll see how it goes.

In other fitness/new year resolution news, I bought the swimming stuff I need - goggles, swim cap and trunks. I’m planning to go on Wednesday, depending on whether I’m still aching from today’s push-ups.

It took me a while to work out that Raoul Duke the antihero and authorial alias of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wasn’t really intended as a role model. Some kids want to be footballers, some want to be commandos. When I was a teenager, the drug-fueled excesses of Fear and Loathing were the only model of machismo that I could really believe in. But unless you’re as undeniably talented and charismatic as Thompson was - and I never was - behaving like a drunk, drugged madman is neither entertaining nor endearing. It takes all of Thompson’s skills as a writer to transform his train-wreck Las Vegas tales into the riveting and engaging story it is. It has a wild, unhinged machismo that tendsto strike a chord in the male psyche.

As I’ve got older, reading Fear and Loathing has become less comfortable. It’s very definitely a product of early 70s America, and Nixon, though only mentioned a couple of times, hangs over the book like a bad hangover. Thompson makes a persausive case that the only way to cope with the failure the liberalism of the 1960s was to engage in such excess that it wouldn’t hurt any more. At its heart there’s a deep despair, one that’s still be relevant today.

It’s not quite as fun to read now, though the dazzling acrobatics of its prose is still enjoyable if you can ignore the legions of journalists who have tried (and failed) to imitate it.

Panic. It crept up my spine like the first rising vibes of an acid frenzy. All these horrible realities began to dawn on me: Here I was all alone in Las Vegas with this goddamn incredibly expensive car, completely twisted on drugs, no attorney, no cash, no story for the magazine - and on top of everything else I had a gigantic goddamn hotel bill to deal with. We had ordered everything into that room that human hands could carry - including about six hundred bars of translucent Neutrogena soap.

I’m re-reading a lot of novels from my teenage years at the moment. The latest is Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. My original reaction was kind of mixed - I liked the post-modern structure of the novel and the use of the chorus-phrase “So it goes”. But the content seemed rather one-note, only shallowly exploring its themes. Re-reading it, I found that that the bits I enjoyed before are less engaging and the bits I didn’t enjoy still do nothing for me.

On the plus side, Vonnegut has nice turn of phrase every now and then. For example: “This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano” and “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

I guess this pretty much sums up why it didn’t work for me:

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

This may be true, but it’s just not very interesting. And it’s not a profound enough insight to justify the poor characterisation and lack of dramatic confrontation.

Anyway, since I was bored while reading it, I made this graphic, which charts the occurences of the phrase “So it goes” against the pages in my copy of the book:

Week: 0
Day: Initial Test
Result: 6 push ups.

I tried to do the one hundred push ups thing in the last few months of last year. Unfortunately, I came down with a vicious cold after a couple of weeks and ended up forgetting about it once I felt better. So I’m starting again, beginning tonight. I’ve just done the initial test, where you try to do as many push ups as possible in one go. Last time I could only manage one or two. This time I managed six, so it looks like I’ve actually retained some of the gains from last time round.

I’m going to start out doing my three days of this on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and I’ll be starting this Monday.

The first Haruki Murakami novel I ever read was Norwegian Wood. I was 19 and had just arrived at university. I found it in the university book-shop and bought it because I liked the cover. I’d never heard of the novel or the author before. Maybe it was on the reading list of one of the literature courses. I was doing a politics degree and the only literature course I ever took was on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so I don’t know. Either way, it transformed me into a Murakami fan, and over the rest of my university days I worked my way through all the English-translated Murakami works.

So this is only kind of a review. It’s not like I’m going to be remotely objective here. I love this novel.

Some novels should be read at a certain age. The Hobbit should be read when you’re ten years old. There’s no better age than 15 for The Catcher in the Rye. And Norwegian Wood should be read when the ink-and-bleach smell of your textbooks hasn’t quite worn off. For me, it was one of those rare instances of accidentally perfect timing. I was a year older than Toru Watanabe, and was in the Midlands rather than Tokyo. But like him, I was in my first year of a second-rate university. And like him, I was a self-absorbed outsider. To say that I identified with him is something of an understatement. How could I not love a hero who thinks like this?

By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a university education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to abandon my studies straight away, and so I went to my lectures each day, took notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.

Norwegian Wood is a love story. Watanabe is caught between two women: Naoko, who is beautiful, fragile, and emotionally damaged; and Midori, who overflows with self-confidence and independence. At the same time it’s a story about death. There are a startling number of suicides among the novel’s youthful cast. Murakami is far more preoccupied with death than with love. “Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.”

The novel feels like an autobiography, though Jay Rubin’s translator’s note at the end quotes Murakami:

I set Norwegian Wood in the late 1960s. I borrowed the details of the protagonist’s university environment and daily life from those of my own student days. As a result, many people think it is an autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not autobiographical at all. My own youth was far less dramatic, far more boring than his. If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than 15 pages long.

It’s not quite an autobiography, but the scenes set at the university feel like they’re based on affectionate memory. This framework lends an authenticity to the other events. In effect, Murakami sells the less believable aspects of Watanabe’s life to us by wrapping them up in the absolutely realistic setting, drawn from his own life. These scenes are enjoyable all by themselves, particularly when you’re living through the modern British equivalent. It was easy to recognise the counterparts to his characters in the people around me.

And though Norwegian Wood is ostensibly about love and death, it’s really about finding a way to co-exist with society. Each of Murakami’s characters represents a different kind of person who fits in or fails to fit in to society in their own way. Naoko tries to separate herself from society by retreating to a community of outsiders. Nagasawa, an older student, shares Watanabe’s disdain for society, but fits in by exploiting it in every way he can. And the characters who commit suicide, reject society for their own reasons. None of the characters we get to know find themselves able to believe in the revolutionary actions going on in the turbulent times they’re living through. Watanabe may have to decide which woman he wants to be with, but the real decision is how to reconcile being an outsider with having to live in society.

“You’re very clear about what you like and what you don’t like,” she said.

“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe that’s why people don’t like me. Never have.”

“It’s because you show it,” she said. “You make it obvious you don’t care whether people like you or not. That makes some people angry.”

Norweigian Wood is an extraordinary novel, although it’s not really representative of Murakami’s work, which is generally much more direct in its symbolism. But this is part of its charm - it’s a multi-layered and often subtle novel and rewards re-reading. My perspective on it now, at 26 is very different to they way I felt about it at 19, and it’ll probably be different again in another seven years. It’s one of my favourite books, and if it’s tinged with angst and melancholy, it’s also filled with the author’s genuine affection for the characters and a multitude of funny, touching moments. Like I said, I love this novel. If you haven’t read Murakami, you could do a lot worse than starting here.

So I have a few New Year’s resolutions. They’re the usual kind of things. Lose weight. Get fit. Eat right. Have more fun. Get more stuff done. That’s all kind of nebulous though, so to be specific:

Lose weight: I have a 38 inch waist. I want a 34 inch waist, which is probably a couple of stone.

Get fit: I want to complete the one hundred push-ups programme. I’ll be starting tomorrow and blogging my progress here.

I also want to start swimming one or two evenings a week. There’s a really good swimming pool on my way home, which should make it pretty easy to incorporate into my routine. I need to get some swimming trunks and, since I have really long hair, a decent swim cap. Goggles sound like a good idea, too. I’ll go shopping for this stuff next week, probably.

Eat right: I have a reasonably good diet most of the time. I want to eat breakfast every morning and prepare a lunch for the days I work rather than buying junk from the vending machine.

Have more fun: I haven’t been on holiday for years. I don’t want to spend too much money, but I’d like to take a long weekend off and go somewhere nice, either alone or with friends. I’ll continue to develop my guitar playing (being able to play decent barre chords by the end of 2009 will make me happy) and read more.

Get more stuff done: I want to start using Google Calendar and to do lists more to organise myself. I also want to keep up with paperwork better and utilise the filing system I already have set up more consistently.

So that’s the kind of stuff I’ll be aiming for in 2009. I made a lot of changes in my life last year, so there’s no need for me to do anything too dramatic now. If there’s one thing that 2008 taught me, it’s that small, incremental improvements are the best way of approaching this kind of stuff. I’m looking forward to 2009 (one more hour to go before it begins!). It’s really good to be able to be hopeful and confident about the future, which isn’t something I’ve been very good at before.

What the world needs is another blog post about Fight Club. The book by Chuck Palahniuk, not the film by David Fincher, that is. I read the book after I saw the film, so I was 18. Like Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it defined my teenage years. I was kind of rebellious and these transgressive books of drugs, death and self-destruction keyed into that perfectly. I was an angry young man and the idea of fighting everything that was wrong with society, the dark, glistening glamour of it was exactly what I wanted to hear. These days, I don’t read it like that. Whether that’s because I’m not so angry, or because I’m not so young is up for grabs.

There’s not a whole lot of point to reviewing books like Fight Club. Everyone’s seen the film or read the book and if you haven’t and want to find out if you should, then there’s over 600 reviews on Amazon. So this isn’t a review. If I were writing a review, though, I’d point to Palahniuk’s minimalistic style and the way it condenses a novel into a series of quotable sections. I can flip to a random page and come up with some phrase or paragraph that could be slapped onto a fridge magnet and sold at a profit. Or stuck in a film and endlessly repeated by students on media courses:

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.”

Another reason that Fight Club hit such a deep nerve with me when I was 18 is that it’s all about growing up, rebelling and rejecting authority. The novel constantly equates fathers, God and authority figures, initially covertly, but eventually explicitly: “If you’re male and Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God.” And the lack of these things, God, fathers and authority figures is the cause of the malaise that leads to the formation of the fight clubs. The men there are “a generation of men raised by women.” The fight clubs, with their vaguely homoerotic grunting and noise and hyper-masculinity are, like the testicular cancer support group the narrator attended, about remaining men together; fighting against a world where men like the narrator have substituted IKEA furniture catalogues for pornography.

The narrator’s problem is that he can’t grow up. Because he has no father, no God and no effective authority figures, he has nothing solid to rebel against to establish his adulthood. Ever since college he makes friends, his friends get married, he loses friends. They grow up and he isn’t able to follow them into adulthood. The closest thing he has to a father is his boss - “sometimes you find your father in your career.” The death of the narrator’s boss is the end of the second act of the novel and the start of the third. The murder of his substitute-father allows him to finally start to progress beyond the angstful rebellion of Tyler.

Tyler is a seductive figure and the narrator’s relationship to him is similar to the way I reacted to the character when I first read the book. Tyler exemplifies outsider masculinity, free from the encumbrances of society. He inspires the men who join the fight clubs and Project Mayhem by sheer coolness.

I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.

But at closer examination, Tyler’s philosophising is empty. Like the advertising that he criticises - “as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says” - he’s selling an image to the guys who follow him. His cobbled-together philosophy, a taped-together conglomeration of nihilism, anarchism, Marxism environmentalism and Zen is self-contradicting dogma. He has guys saying things like. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost heap.” At the same time, Tyler thinks the goal of Project Mayhem is to “teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. But look at Project Mayhem’s links with Taylorism. Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” are the key principles behind modern work and led to the assembly-line work of Fordism. It may be significant the the nameless narrator works for an equally nameless automotive company. Compare this extract from Taylor’s 1911 monograph, The Principles of Modern Management to the way that Tyler organises Project Mayhem:

Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work.

Project Mayhem isn’t about achieving anything. It’s about being bad. It’s about acting out: “Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption [...] Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.” These are Tyler’s words, and hence they are also the narrator’s. That’s the reason that Tyler exists: To be noticed. The book charts the escalation of the badness, from the initial violence of the fight club, to the “complete and right-away destruction of civilisation” that forms the goal of Project Mayhem.

Eventually, after rejecting Tyler, the narrator finds himself in heaven (AKA a psychiatric hospital) where he meets God (AKA a psychiatrist). The narrator has finally found a way out of his predicament. He’s found his father-figure and is able to respond to him as an adult rather than a child. Rather than the adolescent rebellion that Tyler represented, he is able to disagree. He doesn’t need to be bad to get attention any more - he has God’s attention.

I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.

We are not special.

We are not crap or trash, either.

We just are.

We just are, and what happens just happens.

And that’s how I’ve changed since I was an angry young man of 18 approaching the book for the first time. You realise that Tyler’s an asshole and you grow up.

In 1849 Auguste Comte (1798-1857) published his ‘Calendrier positiviste’. This is not the place to expound Comte’s positivist philosophy, save to say that it encompassed lofty sentiments for the progress and betterment of the whole of mankind along rational lines. His calendar was intended as a vehicle for the inspiration of the people and to be transparently simple. Formally it broke new ground by dividing the year into 13 months, each containing 28 days or four seven-day weeks; these accounted for 364 days. The remaining day (or two days in leap years) were complementary epagomenal days placed at the end of the year; they did not belong to any week, nor were assigned a weekday name.

— Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, E.G. Richards

One of the nice things about the positivist calendar is that each day is dedicated to a particular person from history, ranging from Prometheus at the start of the year, all the way to Gall (a pioneer of neuroanatomy) at its end. This is also one of the reasons that few people other than Comte and his positivist friends took it seriously. Less fanciful attempts to reform the calendar have often failed, so Comte’s positivist calendar never stood a chance. These days it’s nothing more than an amusing historical footnote, which is a pity because even though it’s kind of ridiculous, it would be nice to live in a world where I could refer to today’s date as “Friday 19th Bichat, the day of Berthollet in the month of industry.” (That’s Marie François Xavier Bichat, an 18th Century French anatomist, and Claude Louis Berthollet, French chemist who helped devise modern chemical nomenclature.)

Obviously something had to be done. You can view the positivist date here. You can also download the source of the python script.

About seven months ago I bought a cheap electric guitar and started to teach myself how to play it. It’s been a lot of fun so far (and a fair bit of frustration - my current nemesis is the B7 chord). I think I’m at the stage where songs actually sound quite like songs, though fairly simplistic. So here’s my cover of Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears (Video of the original on YouTube).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This was recorded via a awful soundcard and an even worse microphone, with me singing very quietly because it was late and I didn’t want to annoy the neighbours. So, don’t expect too much of it.

Gunson looked up to see a breach appearing in the top of the dam. Feeling a sudden, violent, vibrating of the ground beneath his feet, he quickly scampered up the side of the embankment, luckily just in time, as a few seconds later there was a total collapse of a large section of the dam, unleashing a colossal mountain of water which thundered down the valley and on to the unsuspecting population below. For two hundred and fifty people who lived in Sheffield and the hamlets in the valley below the dam, this was to be their last night on Earth. Six hundred and fifty million gallons of water roared down the Loxley valley and into Sheffield, wreaking death and destruction on a horrific scale.

Mostly forgotten today, the bursting of the Dale Dyke Dam resulted in the worst man-made flood in British history. Samuel Harrison’s detailed account, A Complete History of the Great Flood at Sheffield, was written in the months after. The damage went far beyond the immediate toll on life and a special act of parliament resulted in one of the largest compensation claims of all time. Claimants ranged from servants whose gardens were ruined to an author and publisher whose autobiography was swept away. Even the army claimed for damages to Hillsborough Barracks, where the waters breached three-foot thick walls and drowned two of the Sergeant Paymaster’s children.

[crossposted from MetaFilter]