Fitness

Since my baby arrived, I've not exercised much, I've run a lot of time on adrenalin and exhaustion, I've found energy through eating, and so I've got fairly fat. I wasn't too worried until I tried my customary high-intensity interval training and got no corresponding rev up.

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An Idiot Abroad

I've been enjoying 'An Idiot Abroad', Ricky Gervais and Stephen Marchant sending Karl Pilkington on adventures around the world. Karl is a talent, trenchant, observant , sweet through all his sourness. He is the sort of genuinely funny but entirely unassuming person who would never become a star. Ricky Gervais edited Extras with him (I think) and realised how comical he could be.

Hegel's Master and Servant analysis ends up being an analysis of how self-consciousness attunes itself to a reality of being one among many. The problem of other minds doesn't pose itself anywhere that other minds represent serious threats. Master and Servant shows how freedom is conserved inwardly bythe servant when the master expends his own limited store of freedom outwardly. The Servant is therefore enriched, being conscious of his own and the Master's point of view. The great thing about Karl Pilkington is how interesting his deliberately small world is. I'm sure he was joking when he talked about the moon as being 'like Tenerife' - everyone wanted to go there in the 60's and 70's, but then they realised it wasn't that great. You can make a man bungee jump, but it prompts no reflection. The bungee-jumper on the other hand, is a furious ball of anxious reflection, alive to everything he wants and everything the paymaster wants.

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Narrative and Practice

You might recall my Illustration: Story and Game post.

The other realisation I've had since then, is that a story is a 4D map of the world; it gives you a view of a bit of narrative terrain you might have to negotiate.  A rich movie (grand narrative) will pick up alternative paths in neighbouring regions in the subplots.

The relationship that is interesting is that between narrative and practice.  We live by practice, familiar ways of resolving the world.  Narrative is the way of 3rd-person-ing the practice so that it can be out there for us to learn from each other, which is invaluable for infrequent occurrences.

(I'm indebted to Dramatica, and probably sadly derivative of everyone who has gone before.)

Logic of Addiction

I think my mother would line up with Georges Battaille on living life. There were those in my year 2 class for whom being organised was satisfaction itself, and I often felt threatened (legitimately: I always lost permission slips and money, forgot to keep the journal I was supposed to keep, forgot it was sports day etc). When I fretted on this she reassured me that there were two ways of living, the careful, insulated, controlling remoteness of being organised and the vital immediacy of living in the moment, which is what she preferred, and thought was better. I don't know much about Battaille, but he was a stickler for the irreplaceable, unmissable, ungovernable excess to be found in sensuous experience; he wrote some (relatively philosophical) pornography.

I think this is part of how addiction functions - if life is to be lived, it has to be given over, moment by moment. A sensuous experience which exceeds the reason's capacities to appreciate and represent is a good candidate to give your moments over to. Battaille and my mother know there's more to it than that, but they are alive to the possibility that there may be nothing better.

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Commuted

In November last year, our State Govt commenced funding for a punt service across the river. The punt operators had tried to get a service through the week, but it wasn't economical without a small subsidy. I enjoy the punt so much that I might harmlessly vote conservative in the next election. The government is in dispute with nurses and teachers to cut their pay and I'd still probably vote for them. They could use schools for firewood and I still would have to think. I will attach a pic or two later. Did I tell you we once saw a fur seal touring the upstream regions?

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Achieving your dreams in an hour a week

Due to the pressures of life, there is always too little time for everything. The Tristrapedia of child rearing is always a very good and pleasant task, and life and my work are good. But when I thought about ways to rustle up $X00 for a new synthesiser, I rediscovered that it is still possible to sell science fiction to science fiction magazines, for a few hundred dollars per 5-8000words (5c / word). So my plan for creative success as a musician is now predicated on creative success as a short sci-fi fictionist. (I am going to write the short stories of my screenplays first, thus killing two birds with one stone).

The thing is, progress toward basic completeness (much less excellence) is incredibly slow at a rate of an hour a week. A short story of 8000 words might take until the end of the year; advancing from not very musical to musical will take longer by far.

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Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven's film of Robert Heinlein's book) is another nice use of science-fiction.  The tone is lighter than Moon, District 9 or Rise of TPOTApes, but it's only light with ironic distance from quite heavy material. In Heinlein's book, the heaviness of a war with an existential threat is treated without irony, as requiring courage.  In Verhoeven's film, the visual feel is Beverly Hills 90210 meets The Empire from Star Wars, and the ironic distance allows you to see the following:

• globalisation means we are all Americans now.  Jonny Rico, Carmen Ibanez and all are from Rio de Janeiro Buenos Aires, but there is no trace of latin culture to be seen.
• the militarism of Heinlein's book, which draws on his WWII experience and is reasonable given a significant threat, is shown in its fullness - on the one hand, discipline, training, power and career advancement at a young age; on the other a narrowed conception of the possibilities of life and an inability to do anything other than fight.
• 'Violence is the supreme authority, from which all other authority derives.' A perfect, ironic summation of the problem of this culture (and ours). Relating this to Foucault's Knowledge-Power we might say that yes it is, but the technology of such power is becoming overspecialised and will miss opportunities to finesse, or to find new efficiencies.
• The neat fit of 90210-world and the Empire - the same winner-takes-all competitiveness, the same casual commitment of your all in relationships, the same unreflective self-enlargement, the same expense of the destruction of the weak.

What I think is so clever about Verhoeven's film is that it doesn't really do a disservice to Heinlein's book - the reality of the book is there, and its goods are present; but Verhoeven gives us lines to follow that take us outside the frame and show the weakness behind the strength, the narrowness of outlook and the foreshortening of life.