Cut Throat's Third Quarterly Review of 2016

The final quarter of 2016 is upon us and it is time to retrospectively assess the second half of the year. My initial resolutions for 2016 can be found here, and June's "half time" review of those resolutions can be found here. On with the show...

1. Reading, Writing and Running.

Now that I have picked up Judo and MMA again I no longer have any need for running. My exercise regime splits my week into three rest days and four days of workout; this has been the greatest success of 2016's resolutions so far. Exercise has finally been properly integrated into my lifestyle with an intensity and purpose that makes it both efficient and fun. After spending nearly two years drifting around in limbo, I am finally back in shape.

Progress with both my writing and reading has been encouraging but inconsistent. Reading wise, I have managed to stave off the temptation to buy new books, and have gotten close to clearing my home libraries gargantuan back-log; writing wise, I have begun work on a novella and am enjoying the process of writing poetry. I have begun experimenting with the integration of reading and writing into my morning ritual, this has worked well so far.

2. Get Techie.

No progress here, and little intent to improve. Back in January I thought I had a relatively stripped down set of resolutions. Bizarrely, I didn't spot the folly in wrapping up "read more, write more and run more" under one heading while also expecting to learn computer programming and progress with my cookery at the same time. I have come to my senses and abandoned this resolution in order to better pursue the other two.

3. Get Foodie.

Most of this year in the kitchen has been spent honing the elementary crafts and skills of world cuisine. In particular, mastering simple dishes and processes to the point that I can guarantee a consistent level of quality in terms of homemade curry/pizza/stir-fry/grill meals/omletes etc.

I have also, since getting back into combat sport, moved onto a more calorically restrictive diet. This is less of a stumbling block than you would imagine. The crux of good cookery is in making mediocre things taste great; learning to cook and learning how to enjoy food, that isn't drowned in butter and animal fat, work surprisingly well as a complimentary set of practices.

Lessons Learned.

The maxim "Do Less, Achieve More" was uttered at the beginning of this year: I have only recently begun to take it seriously. Accordingly, I will not pick up any skills in computer programming this year and will focus on consolidating the progress I have made in other fields.

Another life lesson is that if you want to incorporate a new activity into your life you need to properly alot a time and place for it. For example, getting and staying in shape is now fairly easy. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I go to a training session where I can wrestle, puff and lurch myself through endless tai-otoshis and juji-gatames and go home knowing I have had a good evenings workout. After that, all I need to do is work one more exercise session into my weekly schedule and I have met my target.

It's a shame I won't pick up any tech skills but I really should leave it until I am finished working on other areas of my life. What I really miss is the opportunity to engage in an activity with marked cognitive benefits. Meditation appeals to me for similar - but still different - reasons, and would probably be easier to fit into a daily routine. Well... there is always next year.

The 2016 Half Time Review

With the arrival of June comes this year's edition of Cut-throat and Clueless' Half-Time Review. As you might have noticed, I have half-finished redesigning this blog in celebration of this milestone. For my original list of 2016 resolutions click here, and for my last quarterly review click here. Below is a summary of victories and setbacks that have been achieved and/or suffered over the last three months.

Resolutions.

1. Reading, Writing, Running.

My reading has picked up its pace since I last discussed my resolutions on this blog; my writing has been steady, though mostly fiction orientated, and my exercise regime has finally diversified to include body-weight training - routines that once reduced me to a huffing mess, I now breeze through effortlessly and it feels great! I have also recently booked myself onto a distance learning course with the UK Society for Editors and Proof-Readers - I'm looking forward to it immensely. I also have my first Judo session, in years, coming up at the end of this week.

2. Get Techie.

Hurrah for progress! I have finally started learning Python and it's fascinating. Coding engages a very different part of my brain to that which is engaged when reading and writing philosophy. Frankly I'm excited to learn something tech related but also hoping to gleam some of the mental benefits associated with programming. Granted the few hours I have put in so far were grinded out purely so I'd have something to write here, but the enjoyment I have received from it has been genuine.   

I'll have to find some sort of project to focus on later in the year, at the moment I'm just trying to memorise the basics.

3. Get Foodie.

There has been too much progress made here to list comprehensively. Notable success' include home-made pizza made from scratch; vegetable pakora and a couple of other great finds discovered among my growing collection of cookery and cocktail books. I'm making food better, faster and with less stress than ever before. As a side note, I've discovered that food and drink books are remarkably reflective of their social origins.

Consider that "The Savoy Cocktail Book" written by Harry Craddock back in the 1930's is close to 300 pages long with almost every page containing  4 or 5 recipes, each of them calling for a variety of spirits and liquers. By contrast, "Good Things to Drink" written by Mr Lyan, and published last year, features recipes that tend to focus on one particular spirit and prefers the intelligent use of mixers and garnish to accompany drinks. In terms of "recipes per page", it has one recipe for every couple of pages with the majority of the book being photos of Mr Lyan and his friends drinking in rustic locations while looking infuriatingly hip.

This is the unfortunate consequence of modern advertising, and caused by the same forces that have perfume companies advertising with bizzare montages of models sliding out of Limos. While Craddock may bring content by the bucket-load, Mr Lyan would trounce him in terms of sales if they ever competed - the gloss sells.

Gripes aside, as much as I have enjoyed Mr Lyan's book, he has a bad habit of tacking "top up with champagne" onto the end of his recipes; the fact that he considers adding champagne to be an afterthought indicates that mixology has yet to escape its privileged roots.

Reconciliations: An Apology to Poetry

Just over a year ago I published a piece venting my frustration with the medium of poetry. I would like to announce a change of heart. After spending the last 12 months reading and writing poetry, in an effort to force myself to understand it, I have come to accept it as a necessary, even if sometimes dull, artform.

The aforementioned blog post is no longer available but its core contention can be distilled down to "poetry is too obtuse to be of any real value and we would lose little by jettisoning it from our culture". In hindsight it was foolish of me to even suggest that poetry could be done away with. It's musicality and rhythm come naturally to the human ear and the directness of vers libre would demand inventing, if it weren't already in existence. Indeed, although I was blind to it at the time, it was the giants of vers libre with which I took umbrage.

 Free verse is most notably what people refer to when they say they hate poetry; after-all few, my former self included, would begrudge the charm of conventional rhyme. And the vox-pop criticisms of free-verse are pretty close to the criticisms I wielded against it a year ago. Even Stephen Fry, a private poetry aficionado, shares my worries:

I think that much of poetry written today suffers from anaemia. There is no iron in its blood, no energy, no drive. It flow gently, sometimes persuasively, but often in a lifeless trickle of the inwardly personal and the rhetorically listless. This lack of anima does not strike me as anything like the achieved and fruitful lassitude of true decadence; it is much more as if the volume had been turned down., as if poets are frightened of boldness. - Fry, The Ode Less Travelled p.g. 325.

It is important to note that elsewhere in "The Ode Less Travelled", Fry expresses his love of T.S. Eliot: the grand-daddy of modern poetic crypticism. Fry doesn't fail to "get" modern poetry but he does worry for the effect of obscurantism on poetry's ability to say what is important.

Yet free-verse seems unusually predisposed to the introverted meanderings that Fry criticises. Such introspection is a by-product of free verses' directness which facilitates unmediated outpouring. This intense need to take what is inside and place it on paper is what makes the work of Plathe, or even the later plays of Sarah Kane, incomprehensible to someone with little biographical knowledge of the author. Such authors use free-verse techniques to encapsulate intensely intimate sentiments which most modern readers will struggle to unpack without the aid of contextualising references.

This particular style of free verse reflects the artist qua artist, which is why it is worth defending. It represents the legacy of conceptualism: art as a mode of expression and experimentation rather than as commodity or product of patronage. There are those who bemoan entitled art students who refuse to master their field and instead churn out conceptualist guff;  but perhaps it is the other way round. Perhaps the real entitlement lies with the on-looker who cries fraud when encountering art which doesn't speak to his interests or function within a familiar frame of reference. Defending this particular exercise in solipsistic free-verse by emphasising its artistic purity is to admit that while this kind of poetry has its place, it is far away from the limelight. But what of the more accessible, pleasing or otherwise extroverted poetry of Whitman, Shelley or Byron? Why are these forms of poetry not flourishing?

While I wish to avoid being dragged into the "Is poetry dead?" debate I think it's worth acknowledging how little poetry sales account for in the book trade. With this context in mind, poetry is often talked up as a much needed yet maligned hero fighting against a quick-fix culture. This seems somewhat rash. The contemporary era of the twitterati is one which is dominated by the succinctly written word. The memorableness, poignancy and sheer stick-ability of poetry should make it the perfect candidate to under-go a digital renaissance and yet it still remains a cultural outsider.

Perhaps the poetry industry has yet to recognise the potential of social media. Alternatively, the snobs might have a point. It may be that one of the joys of poetry is chewing over stanzas until they fall into place and its decline is due to a lack of slow-thinking engagement among modern readers. I hope for the sake of humanity that that is not the case and, whether poetry makes it to the centre stage or not, I wish it all the best.

Notes on Free Speech

It's difficult to think of a golden era for free-speech in the world. This is puzzling when one considers how much of the rhetoric on the topic invokes an oncoming dystopia in which we lose our precious freedoms. Whether we are discussing the increase of government power to disrupt public protest or criticising rise of the social justice left and their programme of no plat-forming, both narratives subtly imply that there was a time when anyone was free to say anything and not face any consequences ever.

Of course, the "anyone free to say anything and not face any consequences ever" bit is somewhat farcical: which is probably why no one really defends it when pressed on it. As it stands, you have a right to say what you want but others do not have an obligation to offer you material support or withhold criticism from you and your works. Typically the philosophical framework that supports such an argument rests on a dichotomous public/private conception of society: freedom of speech is seen as a civil "public" right, an agreement between you and the government, not a private obligation between particular individuals or their institutions.

Regardless, it seems difficult to find any period of time where contentious artists didn't face attempts to ban or boycott their work and where protests were roundly tolerated with no foul play on the part of the police.  In light of the history of censorship it's important to view free-speech as a struggle, an ongoing questioning and drawing of boundaries, rather than a concrete liberty.  Free speech isn't a magical place that exists in the past and while we may be tempted to view it as a possible utopian destination for our future, this is a similarly questionable conception. The bulwarks against total freedom of expression - the right to say anything anywhere to anyone anytime and never face any consequences for it ever - are often far too reasonable or ingrained into the human psyche as to be banished conclusively.

To clarify, here are what I consider to be two core reasons for defending free speech:

Firstly it is, in a very basic way, central to any notion of ethical individualism or moral conscience. It's also methodologically encouraged by our need to have a full variety of conclusions available to us in order to the deliberate effectively. These two elements dictate how one normatively evaluates today's issues.

As noted earlier there is a sound philosophical argument for withdrawing support and denying a platform to positions or voices you disagree with. Of course this philosophical argument is nestled within the assumptions of classical liberal thought - and like many aspects of classical liberalism is somewhat short-sighted. While not engaging with or providing resources to one's opponents is not a direct interference with their freedom of speech, the methodological/epistemological reasons for promoting free-speech are forgotten here.  When a person or movement is no plat-formed the wider public and both sides of the debate are deprived of valuable dialogue.

 This argument - that freedom of speech includes dialogue not just expression - would seem to condemn the no-platform tactic out of the box.  This is not necessarily so. There are a plurality of valid and serious factors in need of considering when hosting any sort of contentious debate. In particular when one is hosting a debate where ideas that you find to be morally abhorrent are being expressed. 

A host must seriously consider whether the debate will make people feel threatened or perhaps provide unwanted publicity for a dangerous movement or idea. The simple truth is that not all debates are worth having: not even from a specific political perspective but from a simple concern for the well-being of others. For instance, there is plenty of room to debate the merits of various vaccination programmes and there is some duty to provide room for all sides of the argument but when the anti-vaccination movement raises its voice it is generally innocent children who suffer as a consequence of people buying into their rhetoric.

Outside of handing a megaphone to morally abhorrent or damaging opinions one must also consider whether there is really a debate to be had. Are physicists obligated, by the values of free-speech, to debate psychics? At what point does a crank perspective of reality or politics begin to warrant debating in the public arena?

We have never had un-interrupted freedom of speech and, so long as we are forced to take a pluralistic approach to evaluating the merits of a debate, we never will. The fundamental dynamics of censorship are still intact and it doesn't look like they will go away. So long as we recognise that there are cases in which debate is un-necessary or potentially harmful, a case by case approach is unfortuntely required. There will most definitely be cases in which the spirit of such an evaluation is perverted: cases where the debate or object of concern is warranted, benign but blocked due to an irrational fear that previous political and philosophical commitments might be shattered.

This may seem somewhat defeatist but we have to remember that the "say anything, anytime" alternative is a poor substitute. The values of free-speech can only be realistically sustained as part of a culture that can patiently take calculated risks and deal with the other ethical concerns that arise in the process of mediating a diverse culture. 



*Not least because a world in which a person's words can never be held against them would be severly dysfunctional to say the least.