Cheers all for attending the apocalypse kf yesterday - apologies for slightly, ahem, undermining the ending of the Herzog short by, erm, giving it away and, erm, for the minor technical fault during the early bit of Threads. Still as the glazed sky descended on a bleak dreary Sunday, I hope that the true horror of our nuclear future did not escape you (though I did worry about that little kid that was hanging around at various points, trying to catch a glimpse of the screen). Watching Threads this time round, I was struck by the brilliance of the minor details and the timing of the cuts - the way the instructions to wrap bodies in polythene or paper switches to the corpse-shaped hand-delivered milk bottles as one of the last signs of civil order; the way the printed sheet with potential war-bunker operatives contains an added hand-written 's' on the end of 'Homelessness Officer', the way Jimmy's book of birds appears quite so many times, the heart-rending scene in which the Ruth's grandmother says 'I feel so ashamed...like a little baby' as her body inevitably gives into radiation sickness.

This kind person wrote a very interesting piece about the changes in our understanding of nuclear warfare after the screening, and Carl wrote a really fucking good piece on Threads for the paper-thing (ha! I hope you all enjoyed the this-is-what-all-magazines-would-look-like-after-the-world-had-ended style of it). Owen will put the rest of the pieces up on the kf site shortly because I am too tired after five hours of talking about Parmenides, and have no time before preparing for tomorrow's Metaphysics class. Perhaps I should take a cue from one of my more evangelical students who decided he didn't like the Presocratics because they don't talk about spirit very much. Fair enough, I say, fair enough.

Currently waging a war against administration as the University have decided to ban students from accessing online resources until their fees are paid. One of my current courses has 120 students and is run entirely via 'e-learning' (whatever the hell that is). Basically, we can't use paper hand-outs, and all resources are on the intranet. Mmmm, lovely. However, given that a fair proportion of students are unable to pay their fees because their local authority has a backlog of loan payments, this means large sections of the class can't access the materials, or the exercises they are supposed to complete each week. It's as if the 'old-fashioned' lecturer with photocopies were to have intimate financial knowledge of their students and, on this basis, refuse to give copies to people in their class. It's immoral, and stupid, and cataclysmically time-consuming as I seek to find a way to get the oh-so-supposedly-bleeding-edge-of-technology materials to oh-so-old-skool-boringly-anxious students who are being punished for something that isn't their fault. It's like a surveillance camera crossed with a mean, judgemental aunt. And I hate that sort of thing.

'La Soufrière' (Werner Herzog, 1976)
'Threads' (written by Barry Hines/directed by Mick Jackson, 1984)

We will be here tomorrow:

The Wenlock Building
50-60 Wharf Road, N1 7RN

We will screen:
October 5th
roughly 2-5pm
£2

Due to apocalyptic timing/organisation, the magazine was cut and pasted (literally) by me. It resembles a copy of Just Seventeen, if Just Seventeen had been put together by a girl who had spent her childhood locked in a cupboard.

A nice little subversive isotype.

I think this kind of dark stick-bending is really very effective.

- My second year students, who have collectively decided to be the most engaged Philosophy class in the history of pedagogy. They make preparation a sheer, exciting endeavour, rather than the anxious, hasty mess it can (sometimes) be.

- My new first year mature student who, after a decade of selling expensive luggage to rich folk in Harrods, gave up her job to study Philosophy after seeing Chomsky on television late one night talking about human nature.

Numbers are up dramatically on last year, despite (or perhaps because of) the current economic climate. I wonder whether a certain kind of vocational despair (study business? What for?) increases the intake for 'useless' subjects like my own. Burdened by loan repayments for decades to come, you might as well take the opportunity to read books you actually want to know something about, and study subjects that quicken the pulse rather than merely please your parents or some future business big other.

Working on student reception for a short time while the secretary mercifully escaped to the toilet after a six hour stint, students would buy their £1.50 module readers with 5ps and less, in a high state of generalised penury and anxiety. Students of mine don't appear on the register as the university fails to include them for failure to pay their fees. They wonder whether they should be there. I assure them they should be, and that we can sort something for reading by getting groups to share books, and photocopying all the secondary material. Whatever the real effects of the economic crisis are and will be, I can already see the sacrifices students will be forced to make, are making, as they struggle to fit jobs around lectures, reading around complicated living arrangements, paying for childcare, rent, food. If a single one of my students is forced to quit their course for financial reasons, I will personally blow up the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Peter Morici, professor of business at the University of Maryland, said: '...the economy will go into something much worse than a recession.'

An Old One? A giant rampaging pig spitting tainted blood on the heads of anyone who ever had savings? A cataclysmic destruction of space-time that will simultaneously herald a new ice age and an all-consuming fire-ball that will destroy the totality of living matter for all eternity?

Roger sent me this astonishing 1907 clip of a dancing gentleman pig and girl. It manages to fuse in one brief flurry my vintage porn collection with my nightmares, which in turn are indistinguishable from any other kind of dream. The pig, male, for a change, as almost all of our contemporary pigs are women, from Palin to Darrieussecq's porcine-sex toy in Pig Tales, does his best to seduce the girl in her frills and bonnet. First he curtseys, then he kneels. She shoos him away, eager to return to folding laundry. The pig tries to get fresh, swapping gentlemanliness for straightforward physical intervention. At this point, the girl gets cross, kicks him and pulls his suit jacket and shirt off. As she dances with, the pig holds his stomach in shame, and this is genius, even though it was on display when he was wearing his suit. There is no better definition of shame, perhaps, than trying to hide what was already in plain sight.

The gentleman pig tries to cover himself with a newspaper whilst the girl thrusts a stick with ribbons on the end into his trotter. He forgetting his nudity, and she forgetting her irritation - they dance together for a while before walking away, the girl leading from behind by pulling at his tail. They return, trotter in delicate hand, for a final encore. A curious, and rather terrifying addendum, sees the pig, alone, flapping his ears and jutting out his tongue in disturbing fashion before grinning to reveal a set of vampiric teeth, a scene which can have only been the inspiration for this cover that China once sent me:



Swivelling his snout and opening his eyes, the monster dancing pig with his many and varied seductions, reminds us that behind every animal archetype (Jung's all too predictable faithful dog, enduring horse, devious cat) lies a mass of confusions, oneiric, sexual and geopolitical. This is partly why the pig has proved to be so fascinating - hairless enough to be uncomfortably human, obscene enough to be a capitalist, beady-eyed and barrel-chested enough to be a cop, curiously both smart and stupid, dirty and clean, loathed and loved, the pig is unplaceable in the attempt to forge a simple anthropomorphic exchange. Jung's archetypes fail because far too many animals are far too mysterious. Far better Neurath's isotypes in all their glorious, generic universalism:



The science of communication is infinite in its simplicity. Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, a systematic attempt at a kind of benevolent internationalism that would take signs for wonders, in a good way:

'Why should not everybody get a chance to learn a lot by means of pictures?' - Neurath.

But how much can we learn? When animals are occasionally allowed to intrude into our dream-worlds, the results are astonishing:


The big other, the little others, or the animal other? Only the lovers are blind...

Jindřich Štyrský, illustrator, writer and editor of the Czech Erotická revue and founding member of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia is peerless as a practitioner of the simultaneously archaic and modern, in both form and content. As Karel Teige put it: 'the poetic image is the book illustration, the photograph, the photomontage'. This flexible recording of the unconscious in the age of lightbulbs can still be seen in the likes of Samorost, a wordless Czech computer game just as you had always fantasised about but never thought would actually exist. Here machines, discarded consumer objects, nature and animals form a world both depthlessly strange and curiously attractive. Švankmajer hopefully plays this as he sits in Prague, dreaming of animations to come.

It is in this combination of the tension between constructivism and poetism that the animals reside. But it is too late for us. Teige again: 'In the period whose essence is formed by contradictions, we must have the psychological ability to perceive strange almost paradoxically sharp contrasts.'

Štyrský's sexual dreamscapes draw attention to these contrasts, revel in them. In the promotional flyer for Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream', a short sexual reverie, illustrated by Štyrský's own photomontages (including the one above) tells us that 'with scissors one is able to sever any type of inseparable double' (recall the scene in Daisies where limbs and heads start getting lopped off and the very material of the film is no longer safe from snipping (you can watch it here (at 1:57)).

What are we asked to do but 'perceive strange almost paradoxically sharp contrasts' and yet pretend as if everything is 'as usual'!

Curse you blogger! I have this big weird post lined up, plus some more alphabets, but the pretty (and not so pretty) pictures just won't stick.

Keep the apocalypse rolling, by the way. I think this is going to be the biggest and best yet...we'll put all submissions on the site after the event (unless anyone tells us not to, of course).

In other news, here is a video of a pig suckling some tiger cubs (thanks Dave). And a pig goes bad by holding a woman hostage (thanks again Dave). In fact I got sent the story twice (thanks Mark). Actually three times (thanks Paul). It's like there's this whole pig newsfeed system out there!

Rangers say the pig will be captured and taken to a piggery.

Ms Hayes became distressed when council officers tried to take the pig away and asked them to leave her property, a council spokeswoman said.

"This morning, I wanted to go to my toilet, which is outside. I opened up the door and the pig pushed me that hard, it pushed me back into my room, where I fell over," she said.

"I picked up a broom and poked him out with it and he snapped it in half with his mouth."

In not-totally-unrelated news I am reliably informed that Goldsmiths College was overrun by Paparazzi today as Princess Beatrice arrives to take up her History degree. Hopefully she will become a groupie of the silver-voiced Howard Caygill and start writing slightly wayward essays about the history of energy.

And recently someone I know was touched by Perry Anderson! Apparently he really does look like this. As soon as I think of any more unconvincing academic/fame vignettes, I'll be sure to let you know.

And another thing! In a fit of listlessness, I came up with a list of academic types, manufactured by putting an extra letter in front of the word. Thus:

Cacademic - simply, a bad academic
Hackademic - someone who spends much of their time writing articles for non-academic publications (ahem...)
Knackademic - a tired academic, perhaps by about week 10
Lackademic - an academic found slightly wanting/a female Lacanian academic
Mcademic - an academic who writes solely about popular culture
Packademic - a group of academics, such as one might find roaming at a conference, drunk
Quackademic - someone who accepts money from pharmaceutical companies to write lies
Sackademic - an academic who has recently lost their job...as I probably should for even thinking of these...

UPDATE:
Spakademic - an academic filling in for another academic
Blackademic - an academic who is/was a goth
Chiracademic - a corrupt academic [three from Helen]
Yackademic - an old academic so depressed by the state of academia, he/she talks to himself in the staff room alone in a corner, the younger staff no longer listening
Shackademic - all those academics who talk about people living in shacks but never actually go and hang out in shack land and talk to shack dwellers et cetera et cetera...[from anon.]

UPDATE TWO:

Crackademic: an academic who has developed a worrying addiction to the latest Hot Theory or Theorist

Jackademic: an academic who seems to enjoy nothing more than complaining how jack of academia they are* (*Australian usage)

Trackademic: academic on the make who always seems to have the most connections, publications, grants, etc; generally destined for ridiculously rapid tenure/promotion/professoriat

Fracademic: academic who enjoys fragmenting departmental harmony whenever possible, whether through gossip, criticism, white-anting, bullying, legal threats, or other creative diversions

Tackademic: academic who luxuriates in trash culture, obscene jokes, profanities, and general buffooonery designed to impress their students or colleagues.

Yackademic: academic whose primary research activity involves standing around the corridor holding forth about declining student numbers, creative assessment, pro-active learning, falling literacy standards, the Decline of the University, etc.

Faceademic: academic who has spent far too much time on Facebook amassing student friends and joining dubious Theory fan clubs (all from Robert).

We've got some great pieces in already, but a couple of people have requested extended deadlines. To that end, please can we have all kino fist apocalypse pieces in by Sunday 28th. Toddle-pip and please enjoy the termination of the world...

Btw, Serious publishing problems with Blogger. Can't put anything new up. Hopefully will be resolved soon.

Monu have a call for papers on 'Holy Urbanism'. I don't think the picture gets any bigger, but you could email them if it's the sort of thing you might like to write about.

Reminder: Kino Fist wants your Apocalypse-related texts/ images by 24th Sept.

This recent New York Times feature on academics and fashion is a curious thing. 'These professors make academia look good.' But, erm, do they? I'm not sure. If anything, they look exactly how you'd expect academics to look in pointlessly fashionable clobber. There's the still-sexy older Lit professor, there's the tweedy guy with a bow tie, and not one, but two(!), perky young science women ('Im in yr labs, confoundin yr eggspegtashunz!' - urgh, sorry), erm, and some older blokes hanging around looking sheepish and out of place.

I'm seriously glad that RateMyProfessors.com never really caught on over here, as the thought of students discussing the relative hotness of their lecturers fills me with a curious kind of horror (not least because one of my lovely new colleagues is an ex-model, o ho ho ho). Still apparently, if you're deemed 'hot', you students tend to also think you're a good lecturer, which seems unfair to everyone (This argument is apparently made in this paper: 'Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com'). Still, you can't get away from the fact that if you fancy a subject, you tend to fancy the people who know more about it than you do. There's no cure for that. Last year I had a student who developed such an affection for me that his grades improved from borderline fail to a high 2:1 with several first class marks. Whilst he did monopolise my office hours, my emails and gave me new scribbles to read constantly, the episode clearly demonstrates that, with enough subjective will, you can do almost anything.

Here's to a new term!

[All haunted paper images created by ICJ in the pub on Sunday with the help of newspaper ads and a rubber (that's an 'eraser' for my American friends). All photos of billboard ghosts by me, obviously]

England is famously the most haunted country in the world. While all that is solid may have melted into air, particularly of late, as savings and mortgages evaporate into the ether, there is a residual kind of heaviness to our cities, even as their specificity is subsumed under identikit shops and forms of employment that could be done anywhere. This leftover past is marketed as 'history' to tourists, bemused as to why all the pavements are really small and why it costs £5 for a horrible sandwich. The National Trust and English Heritage, with their over-staffed prissification of manor houses and obsessive protection of pre-historic sites, perversely destroy the darker side of this nation's history, such as that recorded by English Heretic with his black plaques (a joyously grim counterpart to English Heritage's blue plaque series). All the official ghosts have been rounded up and tagged...

Ads observes in passing that it would be much harder, though perhaps more interesting for this very reason, to formulate a hauntology of New York. The 'old' York is of course overflowing with spectres, several competing nightly ghost walks, and at the last count they had 140 officially recognised spirits...



But ghost stories are strangely comforting...Far more disturbing are the ghosts of the present: the architectural spectres of the billboards, adorning the sides of luxury flat developments that may never now get built. These corporate, contentless bodies that populate public spaces, waiting for history to begin again...





Even when some kind of realism is attempted, cheap body doubles appear; the women with the red bag and red top stops to talk to a couple, horrified to see her future self five seconds in the distance.



This mysterious man - a mafioso of the old school, or perhaps its more contemporary Russian variety - stands at the bottom left of the architectural projection, menacingly regarding the construction as if his very financial security depended on it...but perhaps it does...



An advert for domesticity made morbid in facelessness. The present makes a dubious pact with its future and comes off badly. No need for nostalgia, even, as the failures of the future are already with us.

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve and Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs tycoon who became US Treasury secretary, have done more for socialism in the past seven days than anybody since Marx and Engels.

Like a spoiled child, what big finance wanted big finance got. This week saw the arrival on the scene of Supernanny; big finance now faces a long spell on the naughty step.

- Larry Elliott, who looks like Peter Cook, but is in fact an economics journalist.

The THE (The THE?!)...anyway, them. They ran a marking experiment. But who can this mysterious 'Marker 4' be?!

Within the sample, those who taught at new universities gave the lowest average mark, even when the zero is excluded - apparently debunking the popular perception that new universities are less academically rigorous than their older counterparts.

The zero mark came from Marker 4, an academic at a new university, who said the essay contained extensive paraphrasing and insufficient referencing, which meant that it, in the academic's view, fell into the category of "plagiarism and/or poor study skills". Under normal circumstances, the academic would have asked the student to resubmit the work.

Strikingly, Marker 4 was the only one to identify the paraphrasing, from a commonly used textbook, Descartes, by John Cottingham, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading.

This afternoon I visited Canary Wharf...


But before that I went to the JobCentre in Woolwich (no, not for me, not yet, not yet). Opposite the building is a Funeral Home, now closed. It had this notice on the shutters.

Next door is a giant building site where they will apparently build a Tesco. Some signifiers had gotten mangled in the rush for construction.


Then I went to the 'Wharf. The atmosphere was tense. I wanted to try and find some weeping bankers. I didn't quite manage it, though there was much swearing, which I failed to capture on camera. One man said 'it's a carcass', though Bat later pointed out at our Keynes reading group that he had probably actually said 'car crash'.

The now infamous 'Slug and Lettuce' where unemployed city types go to get drunk. They were offering 50% off all food on Mondays.

The many clocks in the station area of the 'Wharf now appear to be counting down rather than up.

Where? Into the ocean? Into the ocean!

There was some strange competition to win a car going on. People seemed interested in the car, but unsold tickets covered the ground.

This one needed no caption.

(Organised by 56a)

Date: 19 September, 2008
Time: 7.00pm for 7.30pm start
Location: The Pullens Centre, Crampton St, SE17

Programme:

Elio Petri, The Working Class Goes to Heaven/La Classe Operaia va in Paradiso (1971) 111 min.



I was a piecework laborer, I followed the politics of union, I worked for productivity, I increased output, and now what have I become? I’ve become a beast, a machine, a nut, a screw, a transmission belt, a pump!

Steeped in the volatile political conflicts taking place in Italy at the time, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the rejection of the compromises of the Italian communist Party (PCI), the refusal of work, factory and university occupations, Elio Petri's film The Working Class Goes to Heaven explores the struggles in the factory in all their contradictions; between consumerism and work, alienation, libidinal desire, self-destruction and, potentially, collective action. The Working Class Goes to Heaven demonstrates an impressive and inspiring illustration of the exploitation of capital society and the alienation of workers under this system. It showed us how the ruling class manipulates the ideology into people’s mind by alienating them through work, and how the workers are exploited with and without being conscious of that. Furthermore, it also gives us a sketch of the futility of reformism and the issues which will be confronted in the process of revolution. [taken from: here]

Harun Farocki, Workers leaving the Factory/Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (1995) 36 min.



Workers Leaving the Factory - such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this still existent sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home? These questions have preoccupied generations of documentary filmmakers. For the space before the factory gates has always been the scene of social conflicts. And furthermore, this sequence has become an icon of the narrative medium in the history of the cinema. In his documentary essay, Harun Farocki explores this scene right through the history of film: 'I have collected images from several countries and many decades expressing the idea "exiting the factory", both staged and documentary - as if the the time has come to collect film-sequences, in the way words are brought together in a dictionary.' - Harun Farocki quoted here.

When pigs ruled the world! (thanks Bat)

Pig-like creatures ruled the world millions of years ago during the porcine age, according to palaeontologists.

Oh, for a new porcine age...

Ha! And you thought you knew what 'v' was going to be. Well, truth be told, I don't own one of those, which is probably as shocking as owning one was fifty years ago...ah, history! How tawdry you make yourself!

This is, without doubt, the most stupid thing I own. It's a pointlessly small and expensive Samsonite case that is unable to carry anything more than a novel and an apple. Actually, hang on. That's pretty good. In fact, I like this object a lot, although I didn't take it out of the house for six months as I felt silly for having spent so much money on it. But everyone seems to like it when I do: it has a particularly scarlet kind of red and makes a reassuring clicking sound when I open the catches. It also looks like I'm carrying a kind of attache for elves, in which all official documents are A5 or smaller. I like to think of myself as an ambassador for the Elf world.

Whilst I do not understand why women are supposed to like handbags, or why they need so many, or why they have those ones that look like they could contain several severed heads, I do appreciate the need for the right bag. To this end, I have three. The one above, a small brown pouch such as one might have seen on the childrens' television programme 'Knightmare', and a proper academic one in soft leather which is invariably filled with giant tomes entitled 'Metaphysics' and 'Being and Nothingness' (or Time, or Event).

I'm teaching Metaphysics proper for the first time this year: a bit intimidating. If anyone knows of a good clear secondary textbook, please let me know so I can recommend it to my students. Primary texts are all covered by this book, which has the advantage of including the historical texts (Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant etc.) in which the original metaphysical problem is introduced. Funny how I find that material so much easier to read than Davidson, Lewis, Snowdon, etc. Doncha just love those courses where the lecturer is teaching themselves as they go along! It's all very Rancière...

This lolcats hedgehog is rather timely.

Some left the bank carrying their belongings in cardboard boxes, while others sorted out their expenses or spent the balance of their credit at the canteen. Some staff even spoke of heavy drinking up on the seventh floor of the building.