The Examined Life

I've spent the last few months watching a truly obscene amount of political and philosophical documentaries in what is probably a subconscious attempt at avoiding 'real' preparation for my PhD. One of the things I've noticed is that the documentary scene in the UK, and particularly in the form of programmes featuring 'public' intellectuals and philosophers, would appear to be in rude health. This is particularly true with the BBC, which seems to be broadcasting a brilliant number of insightful documentaries that sit anywhere between conceptions of justice and the approaches of impressionist painters.

One of the more obvious manifestations of this is the increasing number of documentaries and programmes that consider various subjects under the more general label of 'popular science', an occurrence that to me seems stimulated by the public debate encouraged by the 'New Atheists' such as Dawkins and Hitchens. For me, these merely scratch the surface, much less manage to engage with the philosophical issues surrounding the basis of our moral systems in religious and scripturally based worldviews.

 Examined Life (full video link) is a 2008 film that takes on the form of a Walk-and-Talk in New York with various contemporary philosophical figures, including Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek and Peter Singer. I found the film fascinating in that it operates without a final end point or narrative conclusion, instead treating each 10 minute dialogue as inclusive of itself. There is, in fact, little debate present in the film, instead with each individual presenting, effectively, a 10 minute manifesto on their worldview and way of operating both inside and outside of the Ivory Tower.

While the film has it's downfalls (particularly in the lack of direct challenge to each conversant), the documentary format interests me greatly as, perhaps, the perfect way to promote critical thinking and audience reflection on specific issues. Furthermore, a more political and less abstract set of discussions could be made, in various similar settings around the UK, with regards to various critiques of capitalism and the global political order - a set of interviews with various academics, graduate students and activists to various appropriate soundtracks.

The inclusion of graduate students or other figures above isn't just to appeal to my own ego, but rather to demonstrate and put across the ideas, as opposed to the charismatic force of the person being interviewed. While, for instance, Zizek delivers often mesmerising performances in his interviews and documentaries (check out 'Living in the End Times' available on the same website as linked above), it is his ideas and worldview we should be engaging with, rather than his personality. The background aesthetic (e.g. New York above) can be seen as a way of focussing and contextualising the imagination of the viewer, as would the use of archive footage.

This film idea strikes me as pretty exciting, even if it just fulfils the function of allowing myself, or a group, to interrogate various intellectuals in a way we are unable to purely through journal articles or books. Time to start planning, I think.

Barman, Sophist.

Despite the necessity that forced me into this line of work, it is fairly safe to assume that I'm not particularly well cut out to be a barman. While I am, for the present, content enough with my job, and even sometimes enjoy the limits of minimum-wage slavery, I have a few tendencies that, while often suppressed, can come to the fore at the most inconvenient moments. To put it simply, the prospect of a quiet lunchtime pint is not supposed to be faced by a bemused barman commenting that he is not particularly happy with the state of modern capitalism, and is unlikely to be any time soon. While I have no doubts that a dose of both luck and hard work have led to these outcomes and their impact on my education, this way of seeing things has led to some thoughts on how our thinking and philosophy affects our lives as individuals and as communities.

In educational terms, I stand on the imposing doorstep of what (I hope) will become a distinguished career as an academic and whatever else. While this might lead toward this kind of attitude regarding my day job, I don't think it is a necessary step, particularly given the fact that, occasionally, one of the regulars sees fit to engage me in debate, a prospect I relish. The idea that people on such a large scale are able to accept particular commitments, whether religious, economic or otherwise, without consideration or at least healthy curiosity, is one that scares me witless.

This disengagement of debate (whether philosophical, political or otherwise), much to my disappointment, appears to have strayed into academia as well. In defending the importance of a particular field as a profession, I've repeatedly run into academics who have disregarded insights from other fields because of a perceived threat to their legitimacy. My most recent personal experiences include feeling a definite outsider while attending a seminar in the history dept. as a politics graduate, as well as confusion as to my PhD proposal, which deliberately sets out to use both qualitative and empirical methods in it's methodology.

However, I'm hardly alone in this. Here's a few tasty morsels for those who have the habit of applying the five W's of who, what, when, where, and why, to their daily lives as well as to their GCSE English essay. I take solace in these people, places and events, and hope you will too.

1. How the Light Gets in Festival 2011 – This festival at Hay on Wye looks absolutely fascinating, and over 10 days is attempting to mix many of my loves – philosophy, politics, literature and music – in a huge melting pot of amazing people and more amazing words. Not least among these is Dr. Angie Hobbs, a professor at Warwick who I find absolutely fascinating, and who has an incredible collection of floppy hats. Also, Polly Toynbee. You can find out more about the festival here: http://www.howthelightgetsin.org/
   
   

2. TED – Standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design, this annual event and it's subsidiaries (TEDx is organised annually at Warwick University), has spilled over into debates on philosophy and art as well as the obvious scientific element. Twenty minute talks by people who have the courage of their convictions, and above all, the will to share them and engage in the debate that ensues. Days worth of physically lazy but mentally athletic viewing available at www.ted.com, and the Warwick version's videos available at http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDxTalks, along with others.

3. Michael Sandel Being a Pro – I have no illusions that my interest in philosophy is informed by my education, and so was extremely happy when Michael Sandel, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, started doing these programmes and live debates on the BBC that follow the themes of his latest book, 'Justice'. Accessible, insightful, and inviting towards criticism, you can watch them here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xz0pv/Justice_The_Moral_Side_of_Murder/

4. The BBC Radio 4/World Service Archives: Days worth of documentaries here. I normally get four a day of the World service documentaries, all of which manage to fit a fantastic amount of information into 25 minutes or so, meaning that I can fit two each into my walk to and from work each day. For more engaging and longer winded debates, check out In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, or Start the Week with Andrew Marr, both on BBC Radio 4. While some people think this is a pretty heavy way to start the day, I find them the perfect way to wake up and get the brain going before clocking into another uneventful day. Check them out at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, or the archives on the World Service and Radio 4 sites.
   
   
   
   
   

5. Turning up to random seminars and debates: At least once a week, I do a loop around the social sciences and humanities department of Warwick University to see what's going on. This takes some bravery, but I get a certain amount of pleasure in aiming unexpected questions at unsuspecting academics, as well as enjoying the debate my self appointed role of agent-provocateur sometimes causes. They're public forums for a reason, and if that reason is for me to question the role of history as a profession, then so be it.

There's a few there, all of which I engage with regularly, and would love to hear what you think of them. In vino veritas.

H.

New Guitar Day - The Jangly One

It just wasn't quite right. Baby Blue, the Tanglewood 335 copy that was my first electric guitar, just didn't fit. Don't get me wrong, she was lovely, just not quite right. We never really bonded, and the combination of a slim neck profile and humbuckers never quite did it for me. It took me a while to figure it out past the fact that I bought it while in the middle of a BB King phase – Baby Blue, well, she took herself too seriously.

Goodbye Baby Blue...

So the search began. I'm not a brand hunter as such, but the feel of what I wanted was present in my mind. Something a little brighter. Something I could hit without feeling bad. Something fun to play outside of the niche that historical stereotypes force a lot of particular instruments into.

I've always been a fan of custom gear, but this isn't unusual. Most amateur guitarists search for that guitar that is based on their own, exacting specification, and that is engineered in every way to fit like a glove. I prefer a more DIY aspect though, one that has led to a shopping list of equipment that I was able to build, modify and love with my own hands. Instant turn offs when it comes to guitar, for me, include gloss finishes, perfect cleans and tight gain sounds, and over-engineering in general. After deciding Baby Blue wasn't fitting the bill anymore, and funds being limited to the extent that I was only able to trade her, I surfed the forums and adverts of internet-land before coming across the website of Mark, who frequents the MusicRadar forums under the name of 'mrerikryman'.

Mark's website, the Jooky Guitar Emporium, found at http://jookyguitaremporium.blogspot.com/ , is a treasure trove for his loving creations, which happen to fit my own needs perfectly. Rough finished, off the wall, and heavily modified, the guitars he turned out are as much found art as they are player's machines. No museum required – sure they're pretty in a way, but they are also played in and feel very much alive. They also go brilliantly well with my collection of paisley ties.

To cut a long story (and a longer train journey) short, I met Mark in Bristol, Baby Blue on my back, in order to trade her for 'The Jangly One', a rebuilt, refinished, re-everything interpretation of the Danelectro DC '59 reissue. I fell in love, and drank in the acid paisley finish far quicker than the cups of steaming black coffee that were holding me awake. I was so caffeined up that the nitro and cloth finish seemed to move. Giving it only the most casual of acoustic strums, I took it and got on the bus home.

That's the story of how The Jangly One became mine. However, this was intended to be a review, so on with it.

In a slightly unusual turn of events, I was due to play a gig the night I got back from Bristol, meaning that the first time I plugged in and tuned up was on stage in front of 100 or so people with a band that had had 20 minutes practice just beforehand. On the upside, she plays as good as she looks.

By comparison with Baby Blue, The Jangly One is far more brash. Most of the hardware is similar to the DC '59 that you can read about online, with a few changes. The tuners are Grovers, and the pickups are the slightly hotter Ken Armstrong lipstick single coils that are a step up from the standard. They're far brighter than the humbuckers on the 335, and the quirks that make a Danelectro, including the hollow construction, aluminium nut, and pickup location mean that all the twang that you could hope for is there, as well as the airiness that made me fall in love with hollow guitars in the first place. The guitar also has a hand enamelled copper scratchplate which is, like everything, rough finished, but looks gorgeous.

The pickups are definitely a strange experience if you're used to more conventional options, having a huge dose of single coil snap and zing, while still sounding chunky enough for driving rhythmn work. They're very trebly, something I dialled down a little, while leaving enough there to keep things interesting. If you're after compressed high gain or jazzy neck pickup work, this is the wrong place, with loose old-school blues, rock 'n roll, and the lighter side of garage rock probably being the best place to direct your playing. The scale is shorter than I was used to at 25 inches, which caused a few problems at the gig, but nothing too difficult to get used to. The brash edge of the sound also sounds fantastic when attacked with some vigorous slide work, and has a Tele-ish character when playing in this style.

 

It's easy to get heavy with elaborate adjectives, but it comes down to this. Compared to Baby Blue, this is like taking the leash off a schizophrenic springer spaniel. It's fun to play. The rough finish, while not to everyone's tastes, looks fantastic to my eyes, and definitely sticks out if exhibitionism is your thing. If the 'found' aesthetic is something you enjoy, Mark is definitely a maker whose work you should take a look at, as well as being a nice guy and a pleasure to do business with. If groove is your thing, something along the lines of the Jangly One may be right up your street.

Emailing Chris White MP... Again

Chris White, Conservative MP for Warwick and Leamington didn't see fit to respond to my previous email (which you can read below). What a dastardly fellow. My genuine concerns as a member of the big society have been shot down by a middle aged white man with an MBA, to my infinite surprise. As such, the only way forward that I can see is to annoy him as much as possible until I get a response. My second email is below - maybe this will be more successful.

Alex

*******

Dear Mr. White,

Despite my concern that you have not yet replied to my previous email, I appreciate that you are indeed a busy man, especially with what appears to be a peaceful revolution scheduled on the streets of our glorious metropolis this coming Thursday. I hope and imagine your preparatory time is being spent staring contemplatively at the education funding motion, and considering a) the importance of the bill, b) how it will affect your responsibility to your constituents and c) the three line whip which is surely attached to your free and public voting behaviour. Your rather romanticised choice, then, lies somewhere between going down in history in Hansard as the guy that rebelled, or taking your career and isolated interests as having priority.

On the off-chance that you choose to address the concern of your constituents, I must how it is, exactly, that you intend to represent your constituency despite a lack of contact with its residents?

As I noted before, I have little knowledge of your private affairs, but thought you may be interested in hearing about the situation of one member of the big society who, I am proud to say, has done relatively well despite adverse circumstances.

Indeed, despite the lack of priority placed on funding the social sciences, I have been lucky and persistent enough to reach the level of PhD researcher in politics, as I hope was obvious given the content of my previous email. However, in order to fund this, I have resorted to working part time, detracting from my research, on a wage which is not considered by the government to be high enough to live on over any great period of time. Given the number of people in my situation - particularly in a town with a high student population - I am concerned as to the measures you are taken to combat the widely acknowledged tax evasion of large companies such as the Arcadia group and Vodafone.

As we are now all members of the big society, I am of course not considering this in the light of my own personal financial interests, but rather those of the children I don't have yet. Indeed, it is possible that your children, if you have them, may find themselves in a similar situation, as will the children of the policeman that will probably give me a jolly good rap on the head with whatever weapon he sees fit to use on Thursday afternoon.

Of course, my expectation that you will choose to represent the people, as opposed to the party whip, is not high, particularly given your record of representation on proportional representation voting systems. However, I hope you at least find the time to reply, as the current electoral system is liable to see you returned to Parliament for as long as you see fit, giving you more than enough time to occasionally address the concerns of the society you represent.

Mr. White, I look forward to your reply. Should you see fit to meet me personally, you will in all likelihood see me in the middle of a police kettle on Thursday wearing a T-shirt outlining my right of Habeas Corpus and generally making a little bit of an inconvenient racket. I hope your hearing has not degraded the way your political foresight evidently has.

Yours concernedly,

Alexander Hoseason

Bringing the Noise - DIY Microphone

So after chasing around for that down and dirty blues sound a la Jack White, and seeing some of the interesting microphones he used, I decided to make my own out of an old telephone, a guitar cable and a 'choc block' (in the absence of a soldering iron). An hour later and I ended up with this:

It's capable of some pretty epic feedback, and I haven't tried singing with it yet, but it has that lo-fi easy to drive sound that should be absolutely primo for some desperate sounding blues or old-school punk. Let me know what you think.

By the way, the total cost of this was £1 (I was given the phone and the cable was lying around the house). Not bad, all told. As it stands, this is pretty much the extent of my electrical 'knowledge', as opposed to my brother, who to my eternal pride is now a fully qualified helicopter-fixer-guy. He probably would've made this video with less feedback, anyway :)

In other news, apologies for the beard. It was a dare.

Homemade upright bass - The Diddley Bass

Every time a new instrument falls into my hands, I always wonder why I never got round to learning bass guitar. From where I'm looking, there's no better instrument for when you gotta get groovin'.

Over the last few days, I've been listening a lot to Seasick Steve and various other players of the 'Diddley Bow', a simple form of guitar that most often has one or two strings. It looks and sounds something like this:



I figured that surely it was possible to make a bass version, and so took a trip to the nearest Homebase (a hardware store) to pick up the parts for mine. The hardest bit, apart from screwing in the bolts without a drill, was probably drinking the 3 bottles of beer required to make it. It ended up looking like this:

I currently use a screwdriver and a bottle of Peroni as a beater and a slide, respectively. It's a bit quiet, so I'm going to try and fit a pickup when I get a chance. The 'bridge' is a bottle of Old Speckled Hen, and the 'nut' another bottle of Peroni. I'll upgrade to other bottles to experiment later - rumour has it that Jack Daniels offers the best 'tone' ;-)

It's 'tuned' to F#, but hopefully when I get something that isn't 'borrowed' fence wire, it'll be easier to adjust. I might get a bass machine head to make that particular pain in the arse easier.

This machine kills any pretense at skill :)

Education Funding Concerns

Good afternoon :-)

This afternoon, following the concerning announcement of changes to school funding, I took the liberty of penning this brief letter to Leamington Spa Conservative MP, Chris White. Please let me know if you can think of anyone else that might be interested in it's content.

*************

To whom it may concern,

Please find, below, a brief illustration of the marriage problem, one of the foremost thought experiments in political theory, as originally found in Robert Nozick's famous libertarian account Anarchy State and Utopia. The experiment was originally intended to demonstrate how choices and opportunities can be distributed fairly, despite appearances to the contrary. It is also the first problem that came to my mind regarding the proposed changes in school funding, as appeared on BBC News today (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11748765).

While I fully acknowledge the possibility that there are significant problems with education funding, reducing the level of Local Authority involvement in the process seems to me a proposal of such profound idiocy that it falls to me, as part of this great society, to comment on the fact. But firstly, the illustration I mentioned:

The marriage problem might arise if one is to line up two sets of people, ranked in order of (some objective measure) of attractiveness, and labelled in descending order from A to Z. Despite the luck-based attribute of attractiveness, it is clear that those ranked 'A' are likely to take the first opportunity to marry, and so on. So A1 marries A2, D1 marries D2, and so on. Now, despite having no opportunity to change the fact, Z1 has no choice other than to marry Z2, regardless of the effort he might put in. Is this fair?

Robert Nozick argues that it is, as it preserves the element of choice that is at the heart of a fair society. However, in examining the problem, we can see several issues. The initial one is that the number of choices offered to those at the 'lower' end of the alphabet are limited. It's possible to say, however, that this may be overcome if only Z had tried harder. However, a far more troubling issue is the fact that at no point (due to the objective character of attractiveness in this case), was Z ever able to change his life chances. While the process might appear to be fair, the outcome, intuitively is not.

According to the work of several of the worlds most prominent theorists of justice, it falls to the state to address these unfair outcomes, particularly if they are decided by luck or accidents of birth. While it appears that many of the brains behind the government might intuitively stand with thinkers such as Nozick and Ayn Rand, I can only suggest the possibility that this is through a lack of consideration regarding the alternatives. I am more than happy to provide a reading list, but in the meantime might I suggest you start with the eminent works of John Rawls' Theory of Justice and Ronald Dworkin's Sovereign Virtue.

The relevance of the illustration may seem fleeting, however when combined with the economic idea of diminishing marginal utility, it's relevance to education funding is far more accessible. Put simply, how does reducing the participation of democratically elected local authorities increase the fairness of locally based education? While the word 'change' was repeated during the election period to the point of semantic dilution (I hope your spin doctors have read Wittgenstein), the impression I got was that the key change to take place was an increasing level of participation in local services. We do care about the education of our children, and want to take part in it. Meanwhile, a more equitable and less targeted form of local education funding can only be seen as a colossal waste of money in the event that the funds are channelled in the direction of schools that would like, but do not necessarily need them.

Mr. or Mrs. ambiguous bureaucrat, I have no idea of knowing your wealth, social status or family background, but, having grown up in two of the more deprived areas of the country – Southern Wales and Coventry, where, I can assure you, a difference in funding between schools made a huge difference to those, including myself, who may not have otherwise been able to develop the aspirations that led to my high level of education, and furthermore developed the sense of citizenship and faith in society that leads me to pen this letter.

While this letter may have appeared to be a long way to reach the point, I can only emphasise the level of feeling, emotion and empathy that has prompted me to write it. I hope you are able to address some of my concerns, particularly by further elaborating on the form that the great society is to take in the final instance. As this government, particularly with regard to education, appears to be hell-bent on a combination of centralisation and semantic word-games with regard to very serious promises, I can only assure you, through the veil of civil service anonymity, that the irony between what is said, and what is done, will continue to attract more and more attention in the media and the universities. Throughout history, our society ultimately has always developed a desire to reclaim it's own future when the words of politicians fail us.

Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains,

Alexander Hoseason