Cut-Throat's 2017 Resolution Round Up

I have been busy. Accordingly my last quarterly review will be replaced/superseded by the cut-throat annual round up, which starts now.

1. Seize the Day (Off).

So I started this year wanting to make more of my free time. In particular I wanted to plan ahead more so that I could do more interesting stuff with my days off outside of 'whatever strikes me as fun/practical on the day'.

This one has been a mild success, the use of a calendar helped but to be honest phone apps proved more effective. No one checks their calendar anymore, but you check your phone hundreds of times a day. It just makes more sense to organise your life through your phone. However while I have been able to do more exciting/interesting things with my time off, at least some of that success must be attributed to the more stable, predictable and easily planned 9-5 lifestyle that I now lead.

Either way this is just something that I expect to get better at with practise.

2. Learn a Craft.

I wanted to get a more technical grounding in a combat sport; originally I was looking at grappling but quickly switched to Muay Thai. I have trained with two/three different teams since the start of this year and am looking to get back into fighting. The coaching I have received has been some of the best technical and strategy focused coaching I have ever had. I am hugely satisfied with my achievement on this front.

3. Specialise in the Kitchen.

I ended last year after going back to the basics in the kitchen and have spent this year learning Scandinavian and Japanese cooking. They are rather eccentric choices of cuisine but they were deliberately picked for their obscurity. The idea was that by learning about schools of cookery far removed from what I had experienced before, I would be able to expand my knowledge of food much faster than if I had done something more orthodox.

Learning to cook this way has been fun but it has made hunting for ingredients more time consuming; though it is often a pleasant adventure to go rooting around in specialist stores looking for a herb or seaweed that you previously had never even heard of. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly depending on your perspective, I have gotten the most satisfaction out of the development of classic skill sets like stock-making and butchery - despite having actually done comparatively little of them. Next year I'm probably going to focus more on this side of cooking.

Otherwise I feel like I have begun to flesh out my grasp of world cuisine and develop tastes of my own. No doubt there is a long exciting road ahead, and it feels good to have had such a strong start this year.   

Book Review: A Hedonist Manifesto by Michel Onfray

Ethics, Art and Knowledge are all subjects that can be seen to have a transcendental element. Each is capable of acquiring a religious tone, especially when they unconsciously replace the un-touchable figure of God with abstract notions of un-corrupted beauty, goodness or truth. Even in nominally secular pursuits there is often a desire for contact with something beyond the mundane and terrestrial: a desire for art that portrays an ideal form, ethics that could transcend human subjectivity or even knowledge that we can be certain to represent reality as it is.

This transcendental impulse is what Onfray takes to be the stumbling block of philosophy. From Plato's cave to Kant's Noumena and Phenomena, philosophers have been obsessed with attempts to reach beyond the material world. Onfray's alternative is to refocus on the here and now. To reject any transcendental claim that pulls us away from the material conditions of life. Drawing on Pre-Christian philosophers such as Epicurus and Diogenes the Cynic, Onfray pulls together thinkers who rebel against the transcendental impulse identified early on in his historiography of philosophy: though he later also incorporates the existential humanism of Nietzsche and hints at some of the themes in Camus in order to more fully situate his approach. The result is a philosophy that is concerned with, and exalts, the human experience and rejects any attempt to supersede our subjectivity.

The book is philosophically iconoclastic in a very exciting way. Onfray doesn't just sneer at the empty verbal gesticulations of arm-chair theorists, he works productively to identify new directions for philosophy. What's more he identifies precedents in philosophy's own history that could act as starting points for more hedonistic and concrete theorising. Onfray's case is extremely compelling, perhaps one of the reasons philosophy is often seen as an impotent practise, next to more scientific endeavours, is due its lack of material relevance Onfray identifies in this book. To quote Dawkins 'Science works'. The criteria for successful scientific research involves an improvement of our ability to control and impact the world: something which is often independent of any abstract truthiness.

Ultimately, 'A Hedonist Manifesto' is not just an appeal to refocus philosophy on human affairs but it is also a polemic in defence of hedonistic human relations. Onfray does not advocate for any particular form of utilitarianism but rather for an ethic of honour and kindness; an ethic which considers acts with the the thoughts, feelings and freedoms of other humans at its heart to be the highest good. An ethic which asserts, perhaps un-controversially, that the highest good is whatever pleases us best. Our moral responsibility is then not to God or History or any empty abstract talk of values but to each-other and we must interrogate norms and practises which suggest otherwise.

His closing suggestion for making this world a better one is decidedly humble, but perhaps this is in line with the books ethos. He advocates not for social revolution or mass immediate change, but for his readers to become 'Nomadic Epicurean Gardens'. Doing what they can to look after those around them and build pockets of micro-resistances to the boredom and tyranny of the world.

This is a far reaching book that does well to unify Onfray's critical look at our current, sorely limited, idea of what philosophy can be, with his more bold and hedonistic sensibilities. It's iconoclastic in a constructive way and subtly political in a way that is more humanistic than it is partisan. An important read for ethicists and lay people alike.

Cut-Throat's Half Time Review 2017

Accountability, Reflections and Musings Ahoy....

1. Seize The Day.

Considering my lack of posting here, I think we all know how well this has gone. That said I have finally planned and had proper holidays for the first time in years and been socializing a lot more. I am certainly busier than I used to be.

I will also be moving house in just over a month, meaning I'll have to make very good use of my time over the next few weeks. Hopefully, this will inspire me to make better use of my diary.

2. Learn A Craft.

  As for sport and fitness, the past couple of months have seen real progress. I have a semi-regular lifting routine and am racking up some serious sparring hours at Muay Thai practice. My striking has never looked better. I was enjoying learning classical Brazilian Jui Jitsu but alas my coach has re-located. Luckily I will be moving to a City with a very well rounded MMA team with great grappling coaches so this is only a temporary set-back.

Otherwise I have some goals to hit before my Birthday 2018, I'd like to compete again. Specifically do a couple of grappling competitions and a Muay Thai fight; and just for giggles, maybe see if I can get a half marathon in there as well!

3. Specialize in the Kitchen.

I have been experimenting a bit more with a different Scandi cook book and have started to get a feel of the Nordic flavors - salted, herbal and earthy. I get the sense that it's basically an un-orthodox and heavily foraged style of French-cuisine, however my understanding of French-cuisine consists of a couple of stock phrases like 'confit' so I don't know on what authority I say that.

 Japanese cooking has also proven fruitful and greatly enlightening regarding western misconceptions of Japanese culture. Sushi was originally a street-food, and before that it was the staple of impoverished rice farmers; Ramen was originally a Chinese dish, one that didn't really make it in Japan until the 1950's. So much of what we think to be 'authentic Japanese cuisine' has its roots elsewhere, or at the very least has more humble origins than is often thought.


Speaking of my lack of experience with classical French cooking, I have noticed a gap in my skill-set - dessert. In typical overambitious 'me' fashion I may in the near future look at learning some French patisserie skills for the sake of variety.

Cut Throat's First Quarterly Review of 2017

What can I say? I have been busy these past four months, but I'm back for the sake of accountability. Hopefully there will be a couple more posts appearing here in the next few weeks, for now... let's take stock of the year.

1. Seize The Day

At the beginning of this year I promised to use a diary and a calendar to plan my days off more effectively. So far I have seen partial success in this area. I am certainly making better use of my down-time but perhaps not as much as I had originally envisioned. Part of this may be explained by the fact that while I may be trying to keep better track of up-coming dates, most of my friends don't, which makes the planning of anything social potentially frustrating.

However I must also share some of the blame here. About a month ago my planner was moved off of my desk and onto a shelf, so that the aforementioned desk could be cleaned - it was never put back. Also I have struggled to discern any reason for keeping both a calendar and a diary planner. Moving forward I'm going to keep the calendar for the planning of events far in the future and the planner for mapping the individual weeks as they come.   

2. Learn a Craft

I have started taking advantage of the gym next door and its wide array of combat sports. Currently I am back to training about 5 times a week, once we include lifting and stretching sessions. I have put a bigger focus on diet, stretching and recovery than ever before, I want this hobby to last so I need to make sure it won't wear me down chronically or become too much of a time burden in relation to the other aspects of my life.

Training as a now fully grown adult (tm) comes with certain benefits. I don't drink like an arts student anymore, so my body has more of an opportunity to recover from the various sessions; furthermore I am now a better cook than I was 3 years ago, so preparing meals to maintain a healthy diet has become a lot easier.  So far it has all been really enjoyable, I am learning classical gi-based jiu jitsu and orthodox muay thai, which has given me a much broader appreciation of their unique approaches and strategies. I'm now looking to perfect my management of time vis a vis training vs recovery. Combat sport is extremely stressful and the risk of neurological burn-out from over-training is very high; consequently I am watching my recovery to make sure everything I do is manageable and in my long term interest.

3. Specialise in the Kitchen

There has been a little experimentation with new foods over the last couple of months. I have been doing more in terms of casseroles, gotten the process of marinating down to a fine art, and begun exploring more unusual oils and vinegars for the sake of salad dressings and frying.


In terms of geographic specialisation however, not much has happened. I have learnt a bit of Scandinavian cookery but not enough to really call it progress. The book I was given is heavily reliant on specialist ingredients, such as elderflower vinegar, which makes its recipes both logistically challenging and low in cost-efficiency. A lot of my more adventurous cooking plans have been put on hold while I sort my diet for muay thai and jiu jitsu. I'm still very happy with my Scandi book and I really appreciate its haute cuisine French-style influences, but when I resume this resolution I'm going to have to pick a Japanese cook book that won't require me to take such extreme measures in acquiring ingredients.

Cut-Throat's Resolutions for 2017.

2016 is dead. Long live 2017. Here are my resolutions for the coming year, along with some related observations and expectations.

1. Seize the Day (Off).

I rarely plan my days off, and when I do my foresight struggles to see past the first 48 hours. Consequently, I repeatedly fail to visit friends who live in other cities, and have not taken a proper 'sight-seeing' holiday for over two years - which is fairly appalling considering that I don't have any dependents to account for.

132 Seize the Days, a travel guide published by the Lonely Planet in 2007, attempted to cajole the reader into making better use of their weekends and holidays. Although it presumed the reader had a lot of disposable income, at least far more than I currently posses, it otherwise offered plenty of inspiration to do something interesting with those days off. To this end, I will be using a diary planner, in conjunction with a calendar, to plan ahead and make the most of my free time.

2. Learn a Craft.

Where I live there are a lot of opportunities to participate in combat sport. Unfortunately the nature of my work does not allow for facial injuries and so I will have to stay focused on grappling this year. This is not necessarily a problem. I have a fairly rag-tag martial arts background, but little in the way of accredited technical skill. Although I am a - relatively - okay grappler and a - below - average stand up fighter, it would be nice to be able to say that I do 'orthodox [insert grappling style]' to a reasonably satisfactory level. My aim for this year then is to grade in either Brazilian Ju Jitsu or Judo.

3. Specialise in the Kitchen.

Now that I have developed an all purpose cooking from scratch skill-set, it is time to dabble in the realm of culinary specialisation. By the end of the year I hope to have a strong grasp of at least two styles of world cuisine: I am currently hoping to learn Japanese and Scandinavian cooking. Vegan cookery may also make a later appearance, for the sake of my vegan friends, moral conscience and general curiosity.