Dread, Walking.

Oh god, that's perfectly ghastly and horrid, it really is! A so-called 'academic' who cannot even pronounce the Queen's English properly! Honestly, I knew this would be the ultimate upshot once they started allowing the bloody working-classes to enter into academia. I wouldn't mind betting my hat that this vulgar little man didn't even attend Oxbridge! And did you say that he used to be a 'drummer' for some awful popular musical band? Not even a decent, worthy instrument like the violin or classical piano? My lord, whatever next? Before you know it they'll be letting blacks teach the Classics!! Oh well, there goes civilization! (Incidentally, well done to you two boys for pointing out this heinous outrage! Bravo!)

The fact he talks bollocks is surely the main problem.

Anyone who tries to crowbar the term "Auseinandersetzung" into every book gets my vote.

>>> The fact he talks bollocks is surely the main problem.

Yes, well, I'd like to see you come up with anything other than bollocks under those circumstances: i.e. trying to talk about Nietzsche with some young ratings-obsessed half-wit from the BBC constantly interrupting and saying things like "No, no, the viewers won't understand that ... please simplify, simplify, dumb down, dumb down ... sound bites, sound bites!" -- pretty sure you'd end up blathering quite a lot of bollocks too. Considering that KAP didn't exactly get to edit the thing personally either, I think he came across quite well. (Now Miguel, *that* was funny: "What Heidegger means by 'Being' just is this stretchedness, this stretching ..." LOL!

I don't think that KAP *ever* uses the word 'Auseinandersetzung', does he?

To hand (literally), _Nietzsche and Modern German Thought_, p. vii: "But the claim that Nietzsche breaks with the philosophical tradition neglects the fact that his innermost thinking is born out of a 'confrontation' (the German is Auseinandersetzung, denoting a settlement, an exchange) with the modern philosophical tradition."

A conciliatory undercurrent writes ("this is not an apology"(C)T.Blair, B.Johnson, K.Livingstone) – the amusing aspect of it (admittedly only for those who are acquainted with da KAP de tutti kapos) was IMHO the maniac sphaleatos' obsessive transcription and faultless phonic evocation; fond memories, fine philosopher, very nice man, no offence intended, etc. The more materially-dissenting voices in the academy, the better, as far as I'm concerned, especially drummers. Like a minor language, innit! Sorry you took it that way, bloo...er..Penelope.

I've been interviewed on camera about far more trivial things than Nietzsche, and it's quite true, there are people who train for years to make sure you talk bollocks.

I'm sure we'll get Miguel next (although without the hair, it wouldn't be the same)

Absolutely. He was their rhythm guitarist, actually.

has this FYC rumour ever actually been confirmed? There must be early publicity photos....

Wasn't it confirmed by the man himself in the presence of an impeccable source (I dunno, Otto Imken)?

Alright, alright, bloo ... penelope/whoever accepts non-(autopositional)apology. Must admit the transcript did make me chuckle a bit too (not least the fact that sphaly-whatsit bothered to do it), but KAP is IMHO worth ten of your typical academics and I don't much care to see him represented as if he were some gibbering idiot. The programme on which he appeared was risible at best, but that's hardly his fault. Sometimes get the impression that some of the old Landettes resent KAP because he actually *stayed in academia* (shock, horror! what a sell out!), but if that is true, I'm pretty sure that it's not motivated by anything much more complicated than good-old-fashioned envy and hypocrisy. I've also heard people make fun of KAP's pronunciation ("oh how funny, he says 'yuman' instead of 'human'!") as if not deliberately trying to disguise your regional accent and speaking like some plummy Oxbridge c*** amounted to some kind of social failing/ineptitude. I seriously think that a good number of public-school types have a serious problem with the very idea of working-class/regionally-accented people being academics (but then condescending public-school types need a fucking good slap). Not accusing either of you pranksters of the above, though strongly suspect you're plummy twats (jest!). Not that I find it at all interesting, but I asked KAP about the FYC thing once and he told me he was a guitarist in the band that was the band that *went on to become* FYC. Can't remember the name of it, though -- fact he probably never mentioned it.

Oh, and 'Auseinandersetzung' is a bloody good word. You're not going to tell me that whenever a philosopher uses a long German word he's just being 'pretentious', now are you?

FYC was formed by Andy Cox and David Steele after The Beat disbanded. Roland Gift had been a singer in Hull Reggae-combo The Acrylics.

I _love_ the way every one of bloot's regular and lengthy comments are punctuated and/or terminated with something to the effect of "not that I care" or "it doesn't matter anyway"; auto-incriminating him/herself as a sad loser addicted to obsessing on trivial 'controversies' cooked up by equally idiotic bloggers.

>KAP is IMHO worth ten of your typical academics
Up that to 100 and it might almost sound like a compliment!

>good-old-fashioned envy
ahh....how I *wish* for those weekly meetings with Michael Luntley!

For the record, personally I've never even been near a public school in my life... (there was that thing with the matches and can of kerosene...but THE ALLEGATIONS WERE NEVER PROVEN, goddammit!)

Ouch! Guess I touched a nerve or two there, eh?

>>> I _love_ the way every one of bloot's regular and lengthy comments are punctuated and/or terminated with something to the effect of "not that I care" or "it doesn't matter anyway"; auto-incriminating him/herself as a sad loser addicted to obsessing on trivial 'controversies' cooked up by equally idiotic bloggers.

Well, I _love_ the way you soi-disant ultra-radical deleuzoguattarians/hyperstitionalists believe yourselves to have sophisticated reasons for not believing in 'molar identities' like identifiable persons but then relentlessly seek out exactly *who* posted each comment. As it happens, I can't think of any place where I've added "not that I care/it doesn't matter" etc., but since you clearly obsessively search out and identify every single throwaway comment I've ever posted on the net, I guess you'd know that better than me about this. Really can't believe that it's me who is the "sad loser" here -- which, less face it, is pretty rich coming from someone whose entire waking existence is devoted to trying to impress god-knows-who with umpteen new blog-posts per day. Not that I care; doesn't matter anyway (and yes, I really do mean it).

I fear you mistook my tone...not one of defensive outrage but merely the usual sarcasm!

>relentlessly seek out exactly *who* posted each
>comment.
if you don't mind me saying, it doesn't take a _lot_ of 'relentless seeking out' to identify your characteristic tone!

>not believing in 'molar identities' like identifiable
>persons

please, don't confuse me with Kumpty-Dumpty.

> I can't think of any place where I've added "not that I
>care/it doesn't matter"
twice above, for starters....you might be able to persuade sphaleotas to compile a list of the other occurrences....

>whose entire waking existence is devoted to trying to
>impress god-knows-who

Yes, I even dream all night of impressing lonely blogflies with my half-baked philosophical ramblings. But you're not quite correct since I always take time off each afternoon to watch Murder She Wrote.

>Not that I care; doesn't matter anyway (and yes, I really do mean it).

Yeah, yeah !! Get back to your secret blend of herbs and spices, chickenboy. See you next time...

Could I just point out that I'm not – nor have I ever been – a Hyperstitionalist.

Although I was in the kitchen when it was being invented, being murderously sarcastic.

-and I was self-exiled from the CCRU for my unwillingness to indulge patently ludicrous sinofuturist bullshit in the cause of group cohesion.

Murder She Wrote was shit today: Jessica Fletcher wasn't even in it!

But just look at the size of their GDP.

who, Cabot Cove?

How puh-feck-ly loovely, uc...I was going to say something about the twice you've recently mentioned your 'solipsism' which has greatly aided and abetted outing my own. Probably necessary to have an International Solipsism Competition. However many regional-lite ones for elimination of the small-time, it should end up nasty and serious in Paris, I guess.

Always hated 'Murder, She Wrote,' yes, is true sign of laziness, but needed to balance out all those numbers you're mad for (I would be too if I could do them, I guess). Problem with show is victim always seems to have been so delicately killed it doesn't quite register as such, so that you have to keep reminding yourself there was actually a death--very little ownmost potential there. (It's almost as mild as 'As Time Goes By,' relieved only by Geoffrey Palmer's mug.) Only thing it's made me really notice that sometimes murders of the 'rich and famous' have this sterile quality, though not nearly always (O.J., etc.) The Upper East Side here often will have a year without a single murder, but in the mid-90's Prince and Princess Khedker (he a moderately noble Indian playboy, she a much older Brazilian something or other, they weren't even Google-able just now) got wounds to the throat in their Park Ave. apt., and then some homosexual couple related to one or both of them was charged, but it had that peculiar air of 'undeath' about it, and even the follow-up was most unclear. As has the Jon Benet Ramsey case (where her death seems hardly to have happened, certainly is the least important part of the case as it's been presented, with Xmas anniversaries every year since 1996), although the parents obviously had the reptilian sensibility to just grin their redneck stiff-upper-lips and bare it--so that the husband actually even ran for political office somewhere in the Midwest this year (I'm a little too serially enthusiastic to Google anymore, must go on to other things... the horror of America useful only as a form of bondage which the release from alone will bring a form of intense pleasure, as in Deleuze's 'Masochism', when the tables are turned after long labours the other way around; and the dominatrix gets to 'enjoy' getting the shit beaten out of her--or not (I'm currently having to discipline an upstairs neighbour of 30 years now with just such a technique, although there was never a written contract, so, as per exchanges on other blogs, I can say that I also 'was' a 'dyke hag' without knowing it.. So, in my case, a culture of clandestine excitement has already begun building up as a form of coping with the loud political whoring, recently enhanced with the advent of Condi-pumps in Euro-capitals.)

I'm not exactly _proud_ of my solipsism: its main effect has been my realising twenty years too late what everyone was talking about re. reality, the world, etc. leaving me still unsuitable for 90% of normal conversation.

I don't really see how any self-conscious carbon-based lifeform could not 'enjoy' watching MSW (with 'enjoy' taken in a suitably neutral sense), it's the absolute abstract model, the degree zero of television really, isn't it? I do hate it when she's not even in it, though: it's like those 'memories' episodes of comedy series they do when they run out of money. Totally offensive to the loyal viewing public, that sort of thing. It destroys the total predictability.

Totally agree about the 'sterile' quality of it all though - in MSW it's as if the whole world has been dry-cleaned, blow-dried, dessicated and dusted with lavender talcum powder (even the bloody corpses).

> 'As Time Goes By,' relieved only by Geoffrey Palmer's mug.
LOL, you must be a terrible closet anglophile (BBC-hag?) too

Solace (of a kind) for media-unfriendly visionaries: I was reminded of this prescient paragraph from Iain Sinclair's "Kodak Mantra Diaries" about the apparent impossibility of putting anything remotely interesting on TV without moronising it:

"TV will have endless programmes on Ginsberg, on [Stokely] Carmichael, even on [Emmett] Grogan. Turn them into faces. Into more brand names. They won't have programmes BY them. And they won't have programmes FOR them. "

* * *

And then there was "Visions of Heaven and Hell"....omigod.

While not requested to impose a debt by finishing an unasked-for anecdote, I thought it vaguely necessary, in light of your Deleuze scholarship, to point out that I do not now beat up ex-friend and Lesbian upstairs neighbour as a logical conclusion to a contract we never wrote out, but which seemed to allow her to think that her annual winter funk allowed her to drop heavy objects on the floor in the wee hours to wake me up as a sign of affection (as had unrepaired toilet leaks with attendant ceiling collapses been in decades past.) In other words, I merely called the landlord, and the noise ceased (actually I didn't, just left her a note that I did.)

Was never a closet Anglophile, but was once a flagrant one, as in 'Why else do middle-class westerners find other cultures' - and their own underclasses' - taste for the bright and showy so vulgar or - to use the inverted form of the insult - so "charming" and "colourful"? I mean this would have been something requiring British condescension then--about the Falklands period through when I had to go into forced labour temp jobs in Manhattan for 8 years--even more than now. Surely nothing ought to be more attractive to the sophisticated Briton of today than the loud and garish American anglophile? Oh well, perhaps not, these things are sometimes more subtle than they're worth.

For example, my whiff of a desire to visit Clovelly has been replaced by the more realistic expectation of Bath and the less predictable one of Evesham (birthplace of favoured porn model, especially attractive once I found that's called the Vale of England; I don't like it that I don't know whether I'd have the guts to 'ask around,' since the family may not be proud). The waning goes still further than that, though, as a result of finally reading the Iliad in middle age last week: I would rather go to Mt. Olimbos than anywhere in England, but would not even do that before consulting at least the rudimentary numbers that you have led me to try to respect (wasn't Lyotard talking about something like that in 'Libidinal Economy?' I mean the 'jouissance' in capital? You've released my tongue, so I am now quite incapable of caring as much as before when I make a fool of myself; as an amateur in most all of these matters, I expect to appropriate almost all of it into a bastardized deformity all bright and showy...)

Was briefly 'BBC hag', for mainly two things: Penelope Keith's glottal stops which led to an appreciation of Coral Browne; and a 7- or 8-episode of Priestley's 'Lost Empires' which actually inspired me to go to Liverpool, dine at the Adelphi Brittannia there, and purchase a coca-cola (iced in the English sense, i.e., without ice, slightly cool) in the Empire Theatre there, which is now a cinema. Don't care what English think about my affection for the Royal Liver Birds on those buildings.

That was a very expensive trip and was the only other time until 2003 that I also had enough money to go to Tahiti. This time I made no such mistake--and my purchased sophistication was wise enough to condescend only to the cruise-ship and overwater bungalow tourists, new natives of Bora Bora, etc.--so that the 'charm' and 'colour' of my raving anglophilia has waned hugely.

It was solipsism I was closet about, because, once confessed, some of it is forced away by the hostility from others, who know you've been hoarding something.

The new posts on Lear and relationships and the links all profoundly interesting, but, since I am being done such a favour by posting such an enormous comment here, I'll leave that for others. I actually do think that these tough-minded thinkings do make one want to use whatever element may be available for those seemingly most precious alliances. Maybe we just stop caring what works, knowing that money has a lot to do with it.

I think I can follow how you could 'enjoy' MSW as a self-conscious carbon-based life-form in that neutral sense. But there is no way to get around the 'maturity' of such an action. I see nothing gaudy and showy for my own arrogant ecstasy except the way she gave out-of-work Hollywood stars work. Then she went on Barbara Walters, lowest of all human beings, and they commiserated about how MSW was cancelled (after 11 years--Jesus God, what a tragedy!)

> dine at the Adelphi Brittannia there

We feel your pain. According to Vitoux, Céline was briefly a guest there.

Oh, thank you, Sphaleotas. J'adore Celine!

>>> I fear you mistook my tone...not one of defensive outrage but merely the usual sarcasm!

Well, alright, but I also think you misunderstood my comment -- to reiterate, I wasn't accusing you or Sphaly-thingamy of being envious old 'Landettes' or pompous public school c***s, but was rather trying to explain the motive behind the original comment (viz., Penelope's -- glad to know that my 'characteristic tone' was discernible there though!). I very briefly read the "sad loser" response while in a rage about my c*** of a landlord (who is trying to sue me) and while in the middle of moving house, so wasn't exactly in the mood for detecting nuances of tone, thus the somewhat angry reply.

>>> twice above, for starters....

Bollocks -- only said that I wasn't especially interested in whether KAP was in FYC or not, and it's true, I'm not. The second time I said it because you accused me of *always* saying it. As I've said before, the reason I may sometimes come across in the 'I'm not really participating in this' mode (and again, can't think of any times when I've said 'I'm not interested' or 'it doesn't matter', with exception of FYC thing above) is simply that I really don't have time to get embroiled in lengthy blog-debates -- frankly, I wish that I did (that is, when there are intelligent people around to speak to, as I'm pretty much starved of anything approaching philosophical conversation these days -- which is why I hang out here at all). If that makes me a 'sad loser' or an idiot, then so be it.

>>> you might be able to persuade sphaleotas to compile a list of the other occurrences....

Er, nah, think I'll skip it tar. Sure he has better things to do anyway (e.g. making verbatim transcripts of Roger Trigg on Radio 4 or some such).

>>> Kumpty-Dumpty

LOL!

Think that'll be my last comment in blogdom, at least for some time; it's been fun, but got stuff to do. Ciao.

>Think that'll be my last comment in blogdom,
yeah, see you tomorrow then.