blog “The art of not reading is an important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the public at any particular time. When some pamphlet, novel or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Fill a man with toast and his appetite for haute cuisine diminishes dramatically. Fill a man with celebrity gossip, current affairs, blogs, and everything else that makes up the internet and his appetite for great literature likewise disappears.
It is a long time since reading was civilized man’s pre-eminent form of cultural entertainment. Nowadays, we are dazzled by television, cinema and computer games. Equally noteworthy is the fact that there are apparently more words in one edition of the Sunday Times than Shakespeare read in an entire lifetime. Was he less intelligent than modern man? Of course not. In the same way as Google searching has replaced the fact-remembering part of the brain, books provided an endless source of stimulation that removed the need to think for yourself. Why bother, when someone else has probably already done it for you?
Information overload is upon us and it is making us incapable of thinking with any depth or clarity. There is too much noise when what we need is time, space, silence, and the absence of distractions.
Words are everywhere in our culture: you can’t go five yards without seeing someone clutching the Metro or squinting at their iPhone. But reading books is now a strange activity. According to the Guardian stating most men in Britain never read books. According to American figures 80 percent of U.S. families neither bought nor read a book last year.
On the other hand there are people like me, reading addicts who can’t leave the house without a book and spend more time choosing what to read on the toilet than they actually spend on the toilet. Reading addicts have suffered greatly with the coming of the internet, where everything you could ever want to know is a few clicks away. I’ve tried to limit the number of blog feeds I consumed and banned myself from going onto news sites during office hours, but my self-control is quickly eroded and I soon get back into my old habits.
So what, I wonder, happens when you stop reading and start thinking? This time I decided to go cold turkey and cut out all reading as an experiment in living. I would read no blogs, no books, no news, no pamphlets, and no email. It would be like that man who read the entire OED over the course of year, except that I wouldn’t be reading and it would only last a week.
It was my vaguely formulated thesis that people who don’t clog their minds with useless information are better able to confront the reality of situations, to think back and learn things from their own lives, and thus to make much better decisions.
***
The first thing you notice when you stop reading is that the world is littered with text on every surface. How resonant do the words Armitage Shanks appear when you don’t read! Code becomes richer. The words that you use – the Americanisms like center and color leap off the page far more than usual. The fewer words you consume, the more weight the words you do consume take on. Words have meaning again.
Second thing is that I find myself automatically going to read something and then managing to stop myself right at the last minute. Reading has become automatic.
Third thing is that I enjoy writing a lot more. I have long suspected that there was a diametric relationship between reading and writing. When you read nothing you come to realise that you don’t lack knowledge about the things that matter, only about trivia. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Nothing worth knowing can ever be googled.
Fourth, by removing the sense of reading, it is possible that my auditory and visual senses have become stronger. Certainly, I have been noticing things in the world — text and images — a lot more.
Fifth, there is the toxic aspect of detoxification when you give up reading. All the banalities about footballers that I have slurped up with my eyes, all of the trash talk about about television on livejournal, these are the things that burble to the surface of my consciousness. Once they are all gone, what will I be left with? It’s difficult to know now. I guess I will simply be more mindful, without all that information to distract me. I worried that I might be less intelligent, not challenging myself with a barrage of infromation, but in terms of knowledge, it is quality that counts.
There are two theories about what all the garbage in the world does to those who consume it: 1) is that it fills them with garbage, making their thoughts garbage and their actions garbage. and 2) is that the garbage acts like compost from which beauty grows.
The great fear of the person who gives up all information is that information is the fertilizer that you need to write. My wife claims that books and reading provide fuel for her own investigations. This is why she is an academic. To paraphrase Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, academics are people whose minds require constant stimulation from others to remain alert. For them, an original thought is akin to a fart. They chew the cud of other people’s thought and then fart out the occasional thought. We should sometimes think things out for ourselves.
Of course, it would be an awful shame to have to stop reading entirely. Imagine having to go on a long journey without a book to distract you from the millions of petty annoyances.
In the modern age, it isn’t what you know or even who you know — it’s how you filter out what and who you don’t want to know that makes the difference.
It is said that Marcel Proust was the most annoying companion with whom to go for a walk because he would suddenly become enraptured by a beautiful flower and stare at it for hours. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary writer doing the same. More likely they would get out their camphone and moblog to the world.
I love the silence of the reading free universe. Also, I have noticed that my eyes hurt a lot less – all that strain from reading a million blogs a day was doing serious physical damage as well as the mental retardation.
So the results so far from my experiment have been:
- more time
- more energy
- greater clarity
- ease of speech
- more directness
You could argue that reading undermines your confidence by assailing you with contrary viewpoints, you try to juggle them or incorporate salient arguments into your opinion but all you get is cognitive dissonance. The reading addict knows everything but understands nothing. They haven’t had time to digest.
Reducing your reading is to concentrate your sense of self in a world that has been diluted to homeopathic levels. Less quantity necessarily means more quality (even if it is just because you have more space to think). The internet allows you to know everything, but understand nothing. There is no time to reflect.
When you are on an information diet, you come to be very careful about what information you do consume. The thing that started me reading again was watching Lars von Trier’s grim horror film Antichrist. My mind was so full of concentrated images of torture that I had to dilute it with reading. I really wish I hadn’t seen it now. From now on, only pleasant amusing films.
26 Jul 2009
blog 15th June 2009
Am thirty years old today, a good age I think, a distinguished age that feels both vital but experienced. Previously, on days like my birthday, I felt the urge to take stock, make resolutions, and generally suffer from the anxiety of the striver. Now, under the influence of Lao Tzu I am content to merely be, to make decisions based on the moment, decisions that are intelligible, mindful, and exciting.
For instance, I have decided to never again sleep in an airport before catching a plane. Such a fitful night of cricked necks and anxious pawing of my wallet. Far better to sleep well and live well, even if it does mean getting to your destination later. We spent a decent portion of today idling and feeling discontented so he extra hours didn’t do us much good.
We did however manage to go to the Parthenon, a sad old ruin surrounded by rude American tourists. It was a strange contrast the entropy of the former and the buxom good health of the latter. The Greeks are generally tired and inhospitable, they appear to hate their role as the inheritors of a great fortune that has nothing to do with their dreams and aspirations, hence perhaps their continued love of the destructive car. The restauranteurs are either too slow or too fast, one completely disappeared.
My efforts to speak the language are generally rebuffed in the most cursory English. They are clearly tired of people mangling their language and would prefer it if we just forgot about the facade.
So, any words to commemorate turning 30? Is there anything that I particularly want to do? Not really, apart from resisting the pull to read news and listen to podcasts and check share prices. None of that matters now and none of it matters anyway. Life is too short for such things.
16th June 2009
I have found Greek food to be pretty foul in my brief time here.
First meal I had here was mousaka which was a bit of mince and aubergines capped with a huge wedge of sludgy cheese. For dinner that night we tried to go to a different restaurant not realizing that a group of four restaurants were all owned and run by the same guy. I asked for steak, there was none. I asked for lamb, there was none. I asked for chicken and when there was none of that settled for appetizers and leaving early. On my birthday. The wine is sweet and vulgar. The tzatziki is bland. Greek salad is heavy and oniony. Vine leaves are greasy. I did quite like the chicken and rice I had the other day and the beetroot salad did what it implied it would, but overall I am unimpressed. Which leaves me here with some disgusting cheese pastry in front of me – what terrible cuisine.
Piraeus port, a nightmare of Africans hawking watches, crowded streets, and a general sense of desperation. The love affair with the car, only hinted at in Athens, is evident here in an endless stream of cars. Where they are going I have no idea but I imagine if I asked I would receive few convincing reasons. They drive because they don’t think, they don’t think because they drive.
We are here to catch a ferry to Crete in the hope of finding a place to truly relax rather than endure this hellish car place. I wonder how this city will look in 50 years time when peak oil has decimated the number of cars on the road, if it has.
I expected to find in Greece a normal mediteranean culture, similar to the Italians but what I find is somehow more desperate and tragic, a meaningless people living off the dregs of a dominant European civilization.
17th June 2009
I was sleeping very pleasantly in our economy class seats on the Minoan lines ferry to Crete when my wife shook me into stark bright consciousness. She wanted food and a towel to cover her in the heavily air conditioned room and I had money and the strength to close the overfull suitcase. I ate a bland beetroot salad (a local favourite) and a twix. Now I lie here, being rumbled along to Crete listening to Diamond Dogs and thinking about what a degenerate race the Greeks are. They are primitive, obsessed with cars, smoking, and ladyboy sex. I don’t think they’ve changed a bit since the days of Plato, they’ve just changed superficially.
Sitia, it turned out, is a 3.5 hour coach journey from the port of Heraklion. I had no idea. It seems pleasant enough, like most any seaside resort with the exception that it is smaller and more full of idiots on mopeds. This moped business is becoming an obsession, everywhere I go I hear the petty roar of engines, I don’t understand how they see themselves and their vehicles. Is it because they are insecure and need their fragile egos bolstered by metal and petrol or perhaps they just love the thrill of speed more than most. I don’t know.
Am finally relaxed and restored thanks to the restful Hotel Itanos. Well, apart from the constant buzzing of the fuse box, but I can kind of live with that or indeed turn it off. Today after a hearty breakfast I am going to try and ascend the tallest mountain I can see from my hotel room, if it is anything like Bilbao it will all be fenced off but I am willing to trust Cretan disorganization.
As to whether all Cretans are liars I am still unsure.
18 June 2009
I should probably say that now I have discovered a couple of decent restaurants I am quite enjoying Greek cuisine. Trouble is that people don’t tend to write about the experiences they enjoy preferring to actually enjoy them, it is only the markedly bad experience that makes them pick up their pen (there was a good piece at the GSA degree show where an artist simply wrote letters of thanks to the makers of all the items that she enjoys in her life and why she likes them). The food then. On Wednesday we went to Zorbas and I had a beautifully hearty lamb and artichoke dish. Yesterday at lunch I had a nice Greek salad and crispy fried fresh sardines that were delicious. At dinner I had an interesting swordfish and shrimp souvlaki (skewer). I also now into raki. The Cretans are also much kinder recently, more tolerant of our terrible language skills. Sitia isn’t much of a tourist resort, although the French seem to like it a lot.
It is sad that we are here for so short a time, and I feel a bit of work anxiety creeping into my thoughts, but I must enjoy. Be in the moment, I am reading How Proust Can Change Your Life (a birthday present from Phil) and there are some lovely passages about the flights of fancy that take place when you imagine all the human stories behind newspaper headlines.
19 June 2009
Relaxed, possibly too relaxed. On my beach walk I came to realise that the ego is a sandcastle, it is so fragile: there is nothing in the ego that lives on after the wind of time and the sea of change have done their work. We look to the past to try to notice similiarities in old sand sculptures but these echoes aren’t meaningful in themselves. To be egoless is to forget all about building castles and to focus instead on the sand itself, the sea, the reality of the situation rather than the jejune projection that we have of it.
Some build elaborate castles, others simply write their name, both are washed away by the sea and the sand.
23 Jun 2009
blog A great deal of human suffering would be avoided if we decided to place a limit on things that are subject to arms race. An arms race is a situation in which competitors waste money, time and energy, yet end up in the same situation as if they had never started the arms race.
In athletics, they have decided that taking drugs is a step too far (not least because taking drugs is something that can escalate to the point of early death – see Florence Joyner Griffith). In football, perhaps we could protect the national game by having no more than three foreigners in a football team.
By imposing these arbitrary agreements, and by sticking to them, we make things more interesting. Part of the challenge is to play within the rules.
08 Jun 2009
blog A website is not a book, though it has pages.
A website is not a shop, though it sometimes tries to sell you things.
A website is not a magazine, though it thrives on image and content.
A website is not a television, though it can display moving images and sound.
A website may share family resemblances with all of the above, but it is an entity in itself. Nevertheless, if I were going to put websites, or at least blogs, into a pre-existing pigeonhole I think would choose the letterhead, which in design terms is virtually identical to the blog. For instance:
- your template must be able to accommodate numerous different types of content
- as well as a prominent logo, you need to include other relevant information
- the letterhead, though it should be well-designed, should never overwhelm the content
28 May 2009
photo 
23 Mar 2009
blog When you pare life down to the essentials — removing the incessant distractions that assail modern man (internet, television, books, games etc) and prevent him from ever being bored — you come to really notice the psychological effects of what you see and do.
It sometimes seems as if the onslaught of modern culture is primarily a means to dilute the impact of any experience you might have. Even if you happened to see something of unparalleled beauty (e.g. Bergman’s sublime Winter Light), its impression fades fast when you turn immediately to a barrage of daily news.
On Saturday we went to see contemporary dance* at Tramway that attempted to translate Nietzsche, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch into dance. It started with a perverse representation of the sadistic intent in Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walking and then one of the male dancers delivered a frenetic monologue listing “suicide, cunnilingus, pain, orgasm, fucking, fellatio, masturbation, torture”. The effect of this on audience was for them to break out in nervous laughter. I’m not sure what the alternative was.
The rest of the performance used more conventioanl contemporary dance tropes — lots of jerking movements, entangled limbs, and passionate stretching — all of which makes this viewer’s spirits soar and his body feel lighter. However violent the dance became, there was always something fragile about the dancers that kept you engaged. The only slightly disappointment was the lack of contrast between violence and silence*: it was all violent.
* CAS Public, a French-Canadian dance group, performing Helene Blackburn’s Suite Cruelles as part of New Moves International’s annual New Territories festival of dance and performance.
* The first contemporary dance I ever saw was Saburo Teshigawara’s Absolute Zero in 2000, where the contrast between the tiniest movement of a finger tip and a sweeping gesture of the whole body was sublime.
23 Mar 2009
blog At first glance, you’d think Pappy’s Fun Club are going to be awful. Four studenty comedians who put on a series of ramshackle skits about wacky subjects like which is a better source of information, an owl or the internet, I can’t think of anything worse. Yet, for some reason, it works very well. In lieu of an intelligent review, I thought I might list some reasons as to why this could be.
All the members of Pappy’s Fun Club are endearingly geeky. There is nothing threatening or confrontational about them. It is nice to have comedy with a bit of humility, if only to negate the arrogance of people like Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr.
The skits and sketches are really lo-fi and kooky, which means that they are “cool” and independent.
The adlibs are as funny as the scripted material.
There is great dynamic between the four of them — they are like Hot Chip or the Spice Girls, with each Pappy fulfilling a different role.
Like Flight of the Conchords, they make great use of amusing rhymes in their musical numbers.
Recurring motifs don’t feel crowbarred in.
Matthew Crosby looks a lot like a young Woody Allen — his devious little grin is funny in itself.
Hopefully if they go to Edinburgh this year they will find a way of expanding the scope of their show. A musical would be nice.
22 Mar 2009
blog Alerted to its existence by Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways, I have been reading Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, a book devoted to explaining Teaism to Occidental minds.
I have a good deal of sympathy for Taoism and love tea, so it was a perfect fit. Here are some choice quotes:
[Tea] has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.
The world is groping in the shadow of egotism and vulgarity. [. . .] Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous!
The nineteenth century, pregnant with the theory of evolution, has moreover created in us the habit of losing sight of the individual in the species. A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school. We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of many museums.
The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless.
It has been said that a man at ten is an animal, at twenty a lunatic, at thirty a failure, at forty a fraud, and at fifty a criminal. Perhaps he becomes a criminal because he has never ceased to be an animal. Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires.
Thus they sought to regulate their daily life by the high standard of refinement which obtained in the tea-room. In all circumstances serenity of mind should be maintained, and conversation should be conducted as never to mar the
harmony of the surroundings. The cut and color of the dress, the poise of the body, and the manner of walking could all be made expressions of artistic personality. These were matters not to be lightly ignored, for until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty. Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist,– art itself.
20 Mar 2009
photo 
19 Mar 2009
blog In meditation you don’t close yourself off from your surroundings, rather you accept and become indifferent to them in order to fully focus on your breathing. One method of accepting your surroundings — so that you don’t become irritated by an errant noise or a distracting sight — is to address the senses one by one. By doing so, you can acknowledge the sense input and either make a change to stop it happening or say that it doesn’t matter. For instance, sitting here . . .
I can smell the slightly fruity musty odour of my jumper. A jumper that lives, for the most part, amongst the raisins, teas and oatcakes in my drawer at work.
I hear the continual whirr of the servers, the occasional beep of a computer or a phone, a patter of voices, people talking quietly about work and lives, outside there is a rumble of HGVs.
I touch the keys of the keyboard, my back and bottom sit in the chair comfortably, I’m not slouching or crossing my legs. My wrists rest on the laptop.
I see the electric lights, the computer screen, Monday morning faces, the dirty rain lashing against the windows.
I taste death, a claggy feeling. I am dehydrated, my Iron Buddha tea hasn’t satiated my thirst.
My sense of balance is wayward due to tiredness.
The temperature is slightly cold, but only slightly — a tiny chill across my back.
I am not hungry but will eat an apple in ten minutes to get a sugar boost.
You’ll notice that I included other senses beyond the usual five, because the usual five seem quite restrictive and don’t acknowledge all of the sensual irritants we have to face. Once I have done this, I can then focus — that is the idea, anyway. In reality, it is Monday morning and my brain is all over the place.
19 Mar 2009