More Post Truth Blues.

For some time now I’ve been meaning to make a series of posts on YouTube Tasters I Refuse to Click On. You know, things like: ‘She died and went to heaven. She met Jesus there who told her…’ Nobody would click on something as absurdly fake and manipulative as that, would they? Apparently they do, in their tens or even hundreds of thousands, and my faith in my fellow humans sinks a little lower every time. Anyway, I never seem to get around to making a list to compile in a blog post, so I thought I’d pick out one to make a general point.

This evening I came across a taster about the mysterious circumstances around the death of Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve heard the story from several sources, but a quick glance at the thumbnail told me something was off. It has a picture of a dark sky over an American-style, high rise cityscape, but the most prominent feature is a picture of an ageing Nikola Tesla. Why Tesla? Where’s the connection? As far as history recalls, there’s no connection whatsoever between the two. They weren’t even contemporary, Poe having died five years before Tesla was born.

So was the uploader so ignorant that he didn’t know the difference between a famous writer of gothic stories and a ground-breaking scientist? Or was he simply using a well known image to encourage other ignorant people to click on the video, which is fraudulent? This happens with images of Carl Jung a lot. ‘What Carl Jung said about…’ Rubbish. And there was a trend at one time for uploading songs credited to Enya, when nothing about the writing or performance had anything to do with Enya. People pointed it out in the comments, but the fake credit stayed.

So here’s the real question:

If Google wants to own and run YouTube for the purpose of making huge amounts of money, why do they abdicate the responsibility to exercise some control over the veracity of the information?  We all know the answer to that one, of course. Truth doesn’t matter any longer, only money does. You can tell as many lies as you want to invent, and peddle as much garbage as you can find, and it’s wholly acceptable if it’s making money.

There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t. ~ Margaret Thatcher.

So what do we do about this lamentable trend? Decline to watch any more YouTube? I think I might, but that would be a shame because there are genuine people out there making a living out of it at a time when the jobs market is faltering. And it’s obvious from the production values that most of them put a lot of effort into it. And some of them are genuinely informative and/or entertaining. (Try Hilary Layne’s channel for a good example.) Besides which, the protest of one little man like me wouldn’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy and dishonest world. We would have to do it in our hundreds of thousands. And what about the rest of the media world? They’re all becoming just as bad.

I’m sorry to say this – truly I am – but I think America largely took us down this road. ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,’ said the Great God Money. And so they don’t. (Hilary Lane is American, by the way. At least I think she is. I suppose she could be Canadian. We Europeans get easily confused by North American accents.)

Opposite Poles.

I was engaged in my regular people watch outside Sainsbury’s today when I saw a young man and woman – around mid to late twenties – walking briskly towards the car park. The woman had jet black hair (a rarity in the UK) cut neatly in a bob style at collar length, but what most caught my eye was lower down. Beneath her midi length skirt she was wearing flat formal shoes and ankle socks. The usual attire for woman that age is either shorts or jeans with trainers, and so I decided she was either from another time, another place, or was maybe a little odd. I wanted to make her acquaintance because I like people who are a little odd, but her male companion was thin and wishy-washy with fine, pale blond hair, so I didn’t bother. And she might not have spoken English anyway.

What was even odder, however, was the pair of men standing outside the doors. One was tall, thin, and around thirty. He had very long and heavily permed hair, and was wearing the oddest two piece suit in a random mixture of retrained colours. The top garment was tight and clung to his overly slight frame, and the trousers were heavily flared with tassels up the back. His face carried an overly enthusiastic grin and he was being equally enthusiastically interviewed by a fat, slobbish, middle aged man holding one of those little furry microphones which some YouTubers use. I decided that their brand of oddness was one with which I’m wholly and gratefully unacquainted, and so I gave them a wide berth. Heat and sunshine does bring the strangest of creatures out into public view, doesn’t it?

Recovery: The Garden Diary.

The bats are back. Anyone reading this blog in the old days might remember me waxing eloquent about the bats at twilight. It was the delight of the day to stand among them during their feeding frenzy, but then the long, cold winter of 2012/13 decimated their numbers and they’ve never recovered since.

This year they have, and once again I’m able to stand outside on a warm evening being thrilled by a veritable tribe of the little creatures flying rapidly around the house and pirouetting at mesmeric speed. And some of them are bigger than others, so I’m hoping they’re a family and the kids will survive next winter to carry on the tradition. They might even multiply.

There are also very many more butterflies in the garden than there have been in recent years, and even two species I haven’t seen here before. The bees are still a cause for concern, though. There are plenty of bumble bees, but still very few honey bees. I assume it’s why my apple tree has failed to crop for about five years now. And there’s also a dearth of wasps, maybe because the apple tree is failing and wasps seem to be particularly attracted to fruit. Maybe they’ll appear in numbers once the plums begin ripening. It seems odd to most people that I like wasps, and yet I do. They’re good looking and I don’t find them at all threatening as long as I accept their presence with equanimity.

On the Precious and the Perplexing.

The dream I had last night was a vague, misty affair. I was helping somebody do a job with a pile of white plastic pipes which had a bore of about two inches. But I was hesitant because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them, why I was there at all, and I couldn’t properly see the man I was supposed to be helping.

When I woke up I was beset by the fear that if the present drought in the UK continues, the rivers and reservoirs might soon run dry. I imagined the consequences and they became ever more awful until we were all dirty, decrepit, and finally dead so it didn’t matter any more.

And then I remembered that all through my life – even as a young boy – I’ve wondered why we don’t commit resources to the development of desalinisation technology and the provision of infrastructure to distribute purified sea water to where it’s needed. It always struck me that this would be a far more sensible use of resources than going to the moon, keeping huge militaries, killing children in Iranian schools, and producing shiny things to bolster the egos of the dim witted. The confidence we have that the planet will always continue to behave in a manner commensurate with human interest sometimes seems a little risky. And it seems a little odd that while we can develop software capable of doing nearly everything that people used to do, we still can’t develop the means to take salt out of water efficiently.

And then I used a few dozen gallons of precious water to have a shower. I always feel weak and a little ill after a shower, and I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with guilt. They say the INFJ mind works differently than the normal mind. Well, I’ve spent a lifetime being driven into the wilderness, mostly alone, by it, so they’re probably right.

But here’s a little end note: When I was walking up the lane earlier I was passed by a big, articulated box truck. The whole of its back doors was covered by an image of white plastic pipes, seen end on as they were in the dream. And up came that old question about coincidence again.

Getting to Know Me.

There’s an American woman on YouTube who does reaction videos on old British children’s TV shows. Her gravelly voice sounds a bit New York to me, but I’m no expert on American accents (except Deep South, of course; we all know the drawl), but the point is this:

She’s done at least two now on The Magic Roundabout, and it just occurred to me that when I’m in high functioning mode I’m the perfect cocktail of one part Dylan, one part Ermintrude, and one part Dougal. Anyone familiar with the British version of the show (the original was French with the same characters but different stories) will know what I mean. And the main point in saying this is that I think I need a Florence.

(When I’m in low functioning mode I’m pure, unadulterated Eeyore – which I thought was an oxymoron before I learned the true definition of the word. I blame a cousin of mine from whom I first heard it.)

Must stop making Me posts.

Phloxes and Fallacies.

The garden was scented this evening. It’s the first time the garden’s been scented this year, so I tracked down the source. It was the phlox flowers, two clumps of which stand next to the big dogwood shrub. And it was rather pleasant.

‘Excuse me.’

Oh, God, I’m about to be interrupted by one of my lesser known personality variants.

What?

‘You shouldn’t say that.’

Shouldn’t say what?

‘That you like the smell of a scented garden.’

Why not?

‘It’s girly.’

Why is it girly? Why am I allowed to express a liking for the smell of new-mown hay, salt sea air, women’s perfume, and pubs, but not a scented garden?

‘Where was the scent coming from?’

Some flowers.

‘And what colour were they?’

Pink.

‘Well there you are, then. Girly.’

Bugger off.

Now do you see what I have to put up with when my depression is in high functioning mode?

The Peril of Panpsychism.

I was just reading an old post about the night my Spanish guitar went west (or ‘went south’ to the colonials.) I remember the feeling of sorrow I felt at the prospect of casting it into the tip on its way to lie broken and unwanted in some smelly old landfill site somewhere. And on recalling the fact, something crystallised in my mind – something I already realised but hadn’t thought much about before. What I was feeling was guilt, not loss.

I give some credence to the doctrine of panpsychism, you see (consciousness is present in every cell of material – the basis, as I understand it, of the old Sufi saying {originally ancient Indian, apparently}: that God sleeps in the stone, stirs in the plant, dreams in the animal, and wakes in man.)

So that was the real basis of my regret: not so much the sorrow of losing something precious to me, but the worry that I might be hurting its feelings. I feel the same way about most things I discard. It’s one of my oddities.

On Topping Up the Bird Table For the Morning.

Imagine a late afternoon or early evening when the sky is a dull, unremitting grey, interrupted only by the various shades of greyness here and there. The land and all who move upon it take on a torpid and reluctant air, and a mild sense of misery afflicts those sensitive enough to feel the oppression.

And then a break appears in the western sky and a low-hung sun reminds us that he wasn’t gone after all, but merely hiding. The world suddenly explodes in golden brightness, and we mere earthbound creatures are startled by the rapid elevation in our mood.

Don’t you just love that moment?

It didn’t happen this evening. I wished, but the sky stayed grey, a cold wind rose, and light rain began to fall. Shame.

W Again.

2 o'clock on a Sunday morning.

The World is quiet. The Whiskey is mellow. Listenin’ to the Wailin’ Jennys singin’ This is Where.

I love alliteration almost as much as I love good music. Just sayin’.

The Shirley Jackson Mystery.

I’ve had internet problems again today. Twenty minutes of attempted solutions failed to remedy the matter and I thought I was gong to have to engage with the agonising prospect of trying to contact BT again. Fortunately, I restarted the computer as a last resort and the internet came back. Is that encouraging or worrying? I don’t know. In any event, now I can make the post I’ve been wanting to make since yesterday, so here it is:

I want to say a brief word about Shirley Jackson who has become one of my favourite writers. Everything I’ve read about her has been united in seeing her literature as belonging to the mystery/horror genre, and her work routinely described as ‘gothic.’ I’ve even seen her absurdly, in my view, described as 'following in the tradition of Poe', and I don’t for the life of me understand why.

I’ve read five of Jackson’s six novels and greatly enjoyed them. (I didn’t read the first of them because the synopsis suggested it was all about suburban politics, and suburban politics are not my style.) I’ve also read a fairly comprehensive anthology of her short stories. One of her novels, The Haunting of Hill House, is, to my perception, the only one which fits the category universally applied to her. It is unquestionably gothic and fairly well loaded with mystery and horror. But the rest?

There are slight hints of all these appellations in other works, but they are infrequent and often combined with a dry sense of humour, itself a rare component in the horror genre. What I see and relate to in Shirley Jackson are various forms of neurodivergence in female MCs, and especially the sparkles and misapprehensions which ensue when the neurodivergent heroine comes into contact with the world of neuro-normals. It’s all psychological observation related back to the reader in great detail and quite brilliantly. Her plots are pegs on which to hang this observation and there is very little in them which might be described as mysterious, horrific or gothic.

So what on earth is going on here? Is my own neurodivergent tendency shining a light on just one aspect of interest and leaving the rest in darkness? Are all the critics, editors, and bookworms right and am I the one in the wrong? Is that it? I wish I knew. Meanwhile, I’m well into my second reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and getting more from it than I did the first time. Good enough, I suppose.