Fodder

The internet was so much fun in its early days, sort of a wild west of the mind; social media too in due course. But anything that humans value becomes a resource, like oil in the ground or fish in the sea, to be dug up and sold; and ideally controlled, synthesised, reshaped to this end.

There have been LOTS of reads of this blog recently but zero interaction. I guess most of my readers are not human. Don't really want my efforts hoovered up for AI purposes so most of it will disappear from sight. Posts have become rare anyway but from now on they'll be restricted to my own wee feelings: nothing factual, nothing that's taken time to find out, no more Michael Scot; just grumbles or eulogies. Feel free to say hello on BlueSky (@alecmackinnon.bsky.social) or at my Glasgow University email address (easily discoverable) if you're a human who cares.

Time to go cycling.

'A lot went out with the horse'

I've been reading Poacher's Pilgrimage, Alastair McIntosh's reflective account of a walk through Lewis and Harris. I enjoyed a voice rooted in the Hebrides that also references Fromm, Fanon and Freire. Lots to think about! In particular I was reminded again of our tiny moment of COP26 cycling activism.

For many people, mention of the Outer Hebrides conjures up visions of seascapes, beaches and mountains, possibly all the more so in the age of Instagram. Alastair McIntosh enjoys these vistas, of course, but finds the deepest value in the people who live there. As he makes his way across the island he has many conversations, sometimes lengthy meetings with old friends and comrades, other times just a few, telling words exchanged with strangers. During one of the former he unearths an island saying: A lot went out with the horse. His friend expands on this theme: 'People thought they'd just exchange the horse for the tractor. They never realised all the linkages they'd lose. They'd get a loan to buy the tractor. Then a job to pay the loan. And now we're wondering why we've no longer got the same time for each other.' The tractor is a trojan horse - so to speak! - in the life of the islander. It lets something alien sneak into his life, something that undermines his autonomy, supplants his relation with his neighbours, enveigles him into a state of dependency; dependency on a machine he could not construct himself, and on the global supply chains that keep it working. He just wants a machine that will lighten his load and, maybe, enhance his productivity, but the price he pays is subtle and far-reaching.

No surprise to see the same sorts of agent lean in to government in the matter of climate change, doing their best to keep dependency central in whatever ways forward are adopted. A lot went out with the horse indeed; but a lot can come back with the bicycle.

Untethered

I enjoyed this blog post from Athene Donald: Where's your place in the world? Professor Donald addresses some of the human side of lockdown, the disruption, the damage to the sense of self, that must go hand in hand with the abandonment of normal practises; the psychological consequences of situations when "we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss".

I've felt "untethered" for a few years now. I spent most of my career in academia working on an activity few universities now value; possibly even an unforgiveable sin. Ten years ago I was proud of staying REF-returnable while engaged in the labour-intensive - human-centred, transformative! - project of Access and the rest of the continuing education work. A decade later most of that is dismantled. I don't have full-time employment and I'm employed at all only until the end of this month. Don't worry, I'm fine, I won't starve or even have to forego anything much.

"Happiness is a by-product of function," said William S Burroughs. When professional identity leaves, function skips off down the road hand in hand with it and with them, sense of a place in the world. This will be still more of a problem if professional identity has involved some sense of "mission". One can no doubt find other things to do, and in time reassemble a sense of self. How to persist in the meantime?

This professional sense of self is of course an illusion. Events - a pandemic for instance - could strip it away unexpectedly at any moment. There can be situations where it is irrelevant, for instance in a deserted, unlit lane facing somebody bigger, strong and angry who has a knife. More benignly, it may mean little or nothing in a group of adults gathered together for some non-professional reason like skiing lessons, volunteer park clean-up, parents' evenings... Maybe it wasn't really that central after all? Possibly even a distraction from something that should have been more important?

If we're lucky there are people who care about us, for reasons mostly disconnected from professional standing. What's left that they care about? Must be something. Anyway we might make some awful political or aesthetic judgement that would turn them against us. They might head down some road where we could not follow. You never know what's going on inside somebody else's head. What happens then?

A man has a house. It's a beautiful house, big, unique, spectacularly sited, tastefully furnished, with a fine garden creatively stocked and laid out. The man has worked very hard over many years so that he could buy this house and get it exactly to the style he wanted. He is so proud of his house. Everybody admires him for the house, for the effort that led to it and the thought invested in it. Every moment he spends in this house or the garden is a happy one.

One day he has to make a long journey by car. Crossing a high, empty moorland his car breaks down. The battery of his mobile phone is dead. He sets off on foot, trudging along an unfrequented road through dull, featureless country. Some miles further on there is no relief in the landscape but a track, like a farm road, runs across the moor. Hoping to find a house with a phone he starts following it. He crosses a barely perceptible rise. There is some mist, still no sign of any human habitation. He stops walking, looks round, sees nothing familiar. Where is he? How did he get here? Is it safe? For a moment he's in his sitting room, feet up, gin and tonic in hand, basking in a little glowing cloud of wellbeing. But the air's getting cold and the mist is thickening to fog. The house is another world, far away and no help at all; family too. He sits down on a tuft of heather, a little damp but not uncomfortable. A breeze whistles across the moor. Across the track a funny little bird is hopping about, black and dark brown, with a cream-coloured patch at its neck. At his feet he notices a kaleidoscope of colour in a patch of moss: greens, yellows, reds, browns...

Will he ever see his house again? Family, friends? Maybe. No doubt there will be a future of renewed function. But for now maybe this is enough, to be the thing that, during some finite interval of time, hears the wind, sees the birds and the clouds and watches the light change.

A special embrace to the people who usually see these. If I don't advertise a post on social media you're very few in number. Not sure if I'll advertise this one.

Blog bots?

Here's a wee impromptu blog post. My last few posts have been read much more than previous ones. Colonised in particular has been read much more than any other of my posts, by a factor of about three. I don't know who is reading, if they find the posts useful or ludicrous. I wonder if my blog is attracting non-human traffic for some reason I haven't quite been able to imagine yet. Most come from the USA. None of them leave comments or contact me.

Owners of other blogs will know that some of their views appear to come from a link in another blog which usually turns out to be advertising porn or some other 21st century service - I, the blog owner am the target. Seems an elaborate way of sticking adverts under the noses of just a few people, of uncertain customer potential, when it's cheap and easy to buy lists of email addresses. Anyway I don't think these constitute most of this recent traffic.

I can imagine that people googling "Fanon, colonization, MacKinnon" (the last for the feminist academic Catharine MacKinnon) might find my blog by accident, look briefly and decide it's a complete red herring for the topics they're interested in. That might explain the viewing figures, at least for Colonised - albeit in a way that's disappointing for me. It doesn't explain the upsurge of interest in my other, recent, rather random musings.

So here's a wee blog posting with almost no content, certainly little that will be interesting to very many other people. I wonder if bots are attracted to anything that gets mentioned on social media so no tweets, etc. Will it be seen?

East Ayrshire

Giffnock - Newton Mearns - Neilston - Dunlop - Stewarton - A77 and home. I spent a couple of hours on my bike in the countryside south of Glasgow, in East Renfrewshire and East Ayrshire. Lots of hills! - 2000 feet of ascent in total and I could easily have added several hundred more. The reward for climbing a hill is of course the roll down the other side, for instance once you've passed the highest point of the road from Neilston to Dunlop - a very small town for a name found so widely. I passed through green fields, some cut for hay or silage making a patchwork of green and yellow. Bright sun and dark clouds, rain showers not far away - typical Scottish June. In the distance, hazy blue on the horizon, lay the mountains of Arran.

I stopped a couple of times on this run to take photos.

But these are from before and after my roll through the Dunlop farmland. You don't get to share that. You weren't there. For a few minutes I thought, "wow, great photo there" over and over again but I didn't want to stop. Well, I was on a bike ride and I wanted to keep going. But even more, sheer motion was a large part of the pleasure of those moments; not just the sights but the moving through them, at some speed, under my own steam, by my own volition. If I'd stopped the sequence of those moments would have been lost, and their significance; they'd have been extracted from their place in the passage from birth to death.

Consume Red

As a young fellow I formed a rather definite view of university. One went there to learn from people who had worked over many years at understanding their chosen subjects, at developing their own sophisticated understanding and, in most cases, going beyond the books to contribute new ideas and knowledge. Often these people were strong, distinctive characters with broad interests. They WERE the university - not the buildings or the history - and one learnt so much from them, not just about their subjects but about being a person.

The original conception of this blog involved several authors, colleagues in the old DACE. Our several disciplines would bump up against each other and all sorts of conversations would take place, a virtual mirror of those that happened spontaneously in the corridors, or especially in some of the day schools when we took pleasure in mixing up different academic disciplines. That hasn't worked out so instead you get just me. If you're looking for a blog purely on astronomy, adult education, politics or whatever, you'll be disappointed. What's here is my own, personal jumble of interests. "How to build your blog" websites will tell you this is not how to build an audience. Sorry. Me is what's here.

There's been Astronomy, adult education and universities but the promised "clattery atonal music" has been gravely lacking. I've let the reader down badly - no Henry Cow, Derek Bailey, John Zorn. So here in seriously belated recompense is a link to Ground Zero's Consume Red. It starts with the shrill, piercing sound of the Korean hojok, played by Kim Suk Chul, 82nd valuable intangible cultural asset of the Republic of Korea; "brilliant music sacred enough to blow away any puny ideas about copyright." Over the next minutes the musicians of Ground Zero start to join in, scratchy, electric improvisation over the keening cry of the hojok, getting more coherent and louder until a huge, monolithic noise develops over a brutal, thumping rhythm section. It's intense, claustrophobic but fantastically invigorating; I know of few other recordings quite so crushing. I love it!

I don't think it should be freely available on YouTube like this but you wouldn't get to hear it if it wasn't. I bought a legit copy from ReR Megacorp - it's only £5.00 at the moment.

If you meet me in Glasgow University it may be in the hope of learning something about Maths, Physics or Astronomy. Perhaps there will be some illustration or remark based on a book, a film, music I've enjoyed; maybe less overwhelming than Consume Red but I hope they add to the experience anyway.

I embrace my "strange kind of streak"

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl.

Skip this post if you're still planning to read H P Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. Otherwise, stand by for another horror story.

I joined DACE in 1991. It was an exciting move for me: a new role, of a sort that seemed intrinsically valuable, but one that would make real use of the sort of expertise I represented. I would still be a research-active astronomer, but with a job that looked out from the university, that aimed to provide something useful to people in the wider community. The Access course in particular seemed like - and is! - something that could make an enormous difference to its students' lives.

It was more of a change than I'd realised. Not the teaching, but the conversations that take place in the academic discussion of Education. The nature of those discussions, the sort of questions that are asked and the sorts of answers offered, are very different from physical science. It took me ten years to begin to appreciate some of those conversations. I still remember the precise meeting in which I found myself thinking, "Good grief, I understand what (person X) is talking about."

It seemed to me that many of those conversations would make little use of my talents, and that I lacked other talents needed to contribute to them. For almost all of that time I thought of myself as an astronomer working in adult education. I thought it was important that I kept my research life alive, that I kept working at being a proper university expert in my subject. I went only rarely to meetings on the subject of adult education. Nonetheless the years rolled on and I became something different from a Physics department academic.

The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth has laid eyes on creatures that nobody should see and live. An atmosphere of decay and unease grows to a climactic parade of horrors. But it's the twist at the end that makes that story something special: the narrator himself is one of the creatures, and he begins to perceive the inevitability of a future rather different from the one he imagined. Initially only madness and degeneration lie ahead but at last he is reconciled to the only possible course of action: embrace his true nature, evil to men possibly but authentic to him. Flee the sanatorium! Plunge into the ocean! Live with your fellows among the Cyclopean wonders of the sunken city! "Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me — yet perhaps a greater horror — or a greater marvel — is reaching out."

Three redundancy situations in six years have taught me: I cannot escape my true nature. Perhaps once I could have been like other university academics but the streak of adult education runs too deep now. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.