The second instalment of my latest never-to-be-pursued novel, for anyone who remembers the first.

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Ricky Kellogg was a man on a mission.  At twenty-five, he was the youngest sub working on The Guardian on-line edition.  He wasn’t proud of the fact.  Coining google-friendly headlines and standfirsts and saving ungrateful colleagues from their own laziness and illiteracy was not exactly how he had imagined spending his working day at this point in his glittering career.

In fact, he had only been in the role for three months.  Career-wise, it might as well have been a retirement home.  What he wanted, what he never tired of telling his editor-in-chief Miles Waldron, or anyone else who would listen, was a move back to investigative journalism on the print edition. 

That had always been the plan.  That was why, as a sixteen year old fresh out of school, he had worked so hard to find a job – any job, just to get into the industry.  It was why he had done the same to get himself on the staff of a national.  But here he was, a fully-fledged, London-based pro with a good nose and some hardcore contacts in the right places.  When they finally started chasing internships, the middle-class boys and girls who had drifted through their gap year and a degree in Journalism or Politics & Economics, followed by an MA, were miffed to find that clever Ricky had been in paid employment all along and was burning up the word-strip ahead of them.  Or would be if he hadn’t been diverted into subbing.

“Look, Ricky,”  Waldron would explain with his customary patience and kindness, “you have to see this job as an opportunity, not a punishment.  It will give you the disciplined, methodical approach you need, and real insight into the digital and professional challenges of the job.  It will make you a better journalist.  Knuckle down for a year or so.  Make the most of what it has to offer.  Then we can talk about where you go from there.”

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Competition’s authentic value as opposed to its having been the most overvalued, misinterpreted biological fact of European Peoples’ interests (thank you Mr. and Ms. Dumb Bastard, Right-Winger).

This will not be a rigorous piece, rather it is meant to shed some light on a few important considerations by moving them through the terministic screens of a personal history. The issues taken into consideration are the over-valuation of competition - which corresponds closely with boiling everything down to equality/inequality being the problem, that is, the stupid right-wing position of being against “egalitarianism” - to the detriment of other methodological concerns in evaluation of qualitative identity.

Objectivism results in a susceptibility in Europeans to having their enemies shift close genetic identity into objectivist individualism and liberalism, leading to their adopting an array of absurdly affected, non-European identities. While there can be many such diversionary sub-identities, such as student/teacher of a particular non-European study at university, universalism, eastern mysticism, religion, of course, even foreign cuisine, any full treatment of diversionary identity must address sub-identities in music and sports – these will be a predominant theme here as I am familiar with them as identities, strongly held, yet come to recognize where they were more or less diversionary from European identity, quasi identities and competitions to be set aside in favor of more authentic identity.

It should not be too hard to provide facts and numbers as to the impact of these competitions and identities on European people, nor that these can significantly diminish our resource of European identity. Nevertheless, while youth in particular may be susceptible to such diversionary competition and identity, these activities also model means of identity, social participation and evaluation in determination of authenticity which do not necessarily entail violent conflict, immediately lethal, zero sum results – which we should be particularly concerned to keep to a minimum within European genus and species.

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by Neil Vodavzny

Having arrived at H+ (Transhumanism), a few observations may be in order: things in the multiverse have to be either instantaneous or very fast. There seems to be no time for pace, tempo, stillness or even serenity. Probably that’s because they don’t exist in the multiverse! Why should that be, since in most other respects everything’s hunky dory?

Einstein famously stated “Time is an illusion”, though he wasn’t playing the piano at the time.  And the general consensus seems to be that we experience time as a way of making sense of space-time, which in reality is continuous (like Dr Manhattan, or the Starchild). It’s easy for scientists to accept this since the nature of time is still unknown.  Philosophically, this is highly improbable since such statements as “ actions have consequences” would lose their meanings.

What you can equally do is turn this round to its opposite and say, time is real while the multiverse is fake. Of course, what scientists will say is, we can observe such and such an event – so that is true. Quite, but what they’re observing is the world of pure reason, a Cartesian world. However far they peer they’re not going to detect the works of Shakespeare.

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Monoculturalism meets Rockefeller (and eats him)

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George at Golden Dawn New York has issued a statement (by podcast) on the Baltakos Affair, which I will come to in a moment.  First, the background.

Baltakos was a close aide of Antonis Samaras, who appointed him to the post of government general secretary in June 2012.  He is identified with the right-wing of New Democracy, and is said to have led opposition within the party to the crackdown on Golden Dawn, at least up to the December 2013 murder of the “anti-racist rapper” Pavlos Fyssas (which the Greek government used as a pretext to attack GD).

Six months ago Baltakos initiated a series of conversations with Golden Dawn - he says now, to gain their trust and extract information from them.  But the information flow appears to have been in the opposite direction.  A video has been posted by the impressive Ilias Kasidiaris, the GD member of parliament and Athens mayoral candidate,  showing Baltakos explaining to him, Kasidiaris, how, why and by whom the decision to crackdown on GD was taken.  It is a seismic political confession.  Baltakos has been forced to resign.  He now says he expects other “damaging” releases from GD to follow.

A translation by EnetEnglish of the Baltakos confession follows:

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In the immediate aftermath of last week’s initial debate between the Deputy Prime Minister and LibDem leader Nick Clegg and UKIP’s Nigel Farage, an easy victory for the former was swiftly declared by the entire media Establishment – only for a snap poll by YouGov, conducted for The Sun, to prove them painfully wrong.  57% of the thousand-strong panel thought Farage won.  Only 36% thought Clegg had emerged victorious.

There followed a lot of very rough changing of journalistic gears, along with several admissions of Westminster village behaviour.  The underlying inference, though, remained that Farage’s views were “populist”, ie, not the sort of thing that interests the cogniscenti (they being far above the infirmity and fickle affections of the public Mind.  Naturally.)

Anthony Wells at YouGov – a left-leaning polling company if ever there was one - made the point that just finding a thousand people who would listen to the LBC Radio broadcast was a challenge in itself; and took months to achieve.  He seemed not to have great confidence in the sample at all.

Everything, then, hung on the second of the debates last night - an hour-long joust between Clegg and Farage on the benefit or otherwise of EU membership, to be broadcast live on BBC2:

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by Neil Vodavzny

Re-animating nature is another way of thinking of Whitehead’s conception of more or less “letting it be”. The ancient Greeks may well have thought of nature in a more animated sense than we do. Materials such as limestone and wood have an organic origin, and the sense of inherent dynamism may have come naturally (Greek temples evolved from wooden ones, retaining the organic sense). The Bible alludes to Man being moulded from clay, clay being the raw material for the potter’s wheel.

If nature wasn’t animate, even the greatest artist would be unable to let it be, so that’s probably a traditionalist view of art, ie, studying nature, life-drawing, landscape etc. Since the Renaissance, what seems to have happened is that nature has been corralled by science, so it is no longer the preserve of artists. Modern art is correspondingly thanatopsic, with no understanding of materials or craft, deathlike in its nihilism. Almost all traditionalist contemporary art is popular and commercial, where studying the essentials is a prerequisite. Art as a wordling or narrative form of myth-making is alive and well - in pop-culture.

A near-perfect instance of someone presenting a personal mythology through a mastery of various techniques and intricate craftwork, allied to subconscious or intuitive powers, is Patrick Woodroffe’s Mythopoeikon.  Just how far you can go with an etching is shown in Mickey’s New Home, a self-produced children’s book); depth and stop-out (to bleed the sky), then aquatint applied in graduated tone (creeping bite) mythopoeikon2. You know what they say about etchings, and this plate shows why. As you see from the illo, he’s essentially self-taught. What that means is he learnt a trade, the practical skills and techniques needed to become an artist who uses the subconscious, instinct and feeling. In fact, this applies to others in the field who work “in the school” of .. (comic artist/creator Rob Liefeld is routinely scorned for his naïve style but at least he possesses adequate skills, and the work has a sort of rough honesty).

Known primarily for sci-fi book jackets, here’s a typical multi-media effort, Neq The Sword (Piers Anthony, Transworld) mythopoeikon3.

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Neil Vodavzny

Having conscientiously done preliminary research for this part of The Maze on craftwork, I have to say that both Derek Whitehead and David Hamilton have a tendency to abstraction. Doubtless this goes with the territory, but it isn’t easy to sell such things except to the converted, it can be admitted. Some practical examples help to it make palatable, so I’ll attempt to weave those into the discussion.

Whitehead delves into the interrelation in Greek art of techne, praxis (production), and poiesis (world-founding). The work of art brings into being through a type of facility of production something imbued with the tension of spontaneity

Both the artist’s vision and the activity of production combine in the world-founding. It might not be recognized so much nowadays, but the aim of art is not expression. Up to the late Renaissance, it was more to do with apprenticeship, learning a trade then, after long years of strenuous graft, finally practising the craft and discipline of art-making.

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