Strike, if you will, but hear

Over the weekend (which I spent pleasantly on the south coast, it being obligatory for all Britons to spend the August bank holiday crowding out the edges of our scepter'd isle), I bought and read a recently published little book, an essay by Schopenhauer enticingly entitled The Art of Always Being Right. The essay itself is certainly worth a read, but this particular edition (Gibson Square, 2005) is certainly not worth buying. It is a reprint of T. Bailey Saunders' 1896 translation (which is, in any case, freely available online), the only innovation on the part of the publishers being, as far as I could tell, the environmentally-hostile page-spacing – the text, which could easily have been accommodated in little over one hundred pages, sprawls over twice that many. There is a new introduction by A. C. Grayling, which is fine, but surely not worth shelling out for on its own. The editors of this volume evidently considered this to be their main selling point: perplexingly, Grayling's name appears on the spine of the dustjacket where Schopenhauer's is nowhere to be seen. General editorial incompetence is further evidenced by the abundance of typos towards the end of the book.

The editors also judge it necessary to inform the bewildered reader not once but twice (the second time in a completely superfluous 'Publisher's Note' in the back-matter) that Schopenhauer's writing on argumentation is relevant to today's readership because of 'the ever growing importance of public debating on TV and radio'. I checked: these words of wisdom were in fact written in 2004 and not, as one might have assumed, in 1896.

Anyway, to the text itself. The first problem that seems to have worried many readers (and Schopenhauer himself, if truth be told) is that it is never quite clear to what extent Schopenhauer is being ironic. Is he really recommending that we forsake truth for sophistry (sorry: 'controversial dialectic'), honourable conduct for unscrupulous machination, and intellectual integrity for opportunistic playing-to-the-gallery? The reader is required to perform an intellectual juggling act in appreciating Schopenhauer's wit: his obvious contempt for the 'common man', who will be convinced nine times out of ten not by appeals to reason but by appeals to his own vanity, is counterbalanced by the fact that he, Schopenhauer, quite clearly takes great pleasure in working out just how this might be achieved.

Schopenhauer claims in his prefatory comments that he is, to his knowledge, the first to have attempted a work of this type, effectively a how-to manual: how to win an argument, especially if you're in the wrong. He might well be right, although it is worth pointing out that manuals of rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance have always had this as their unavowed objective. Schopenhauer's essay is different in that he does not merely present us with a box of rhetorical tricks to be used as and when required; nor does he simply give us a tedious list of names for logical fallacies. In fact, he not only tells us how to employ logical fallacies to our own advantage by concealing them (it's amazingly easy to whip up a false but convincing syllogism without batting an eyelid, just try it!), he even tells us how to defeat an opponent by falsely accusing them of having committed a logical fallacy (see 22, for example: avoid having to concede a crucial point by stating authoritatively 'That's just begging the question!'). Isn't that just great?

Many of the techniques mentioned are variations on the trusty old method of misrepresenting or exaggerating your opponent's argument, then refuting the misrepresentation. I've always thought that this rich and varied dialectical method requires a much better name than the one it most often gets landed with, the 'straw man'. What an inappropriate name for this most robust and full-blooded species of fallacious argument! What is required, at the very least, is a subtler typology of the technique, which in practice takes as many different forms as there are personalities in the world. (Mind you, Schopenhauer never uses this term - I could be wrong, but I don't think they have it in German anyway.)

Another technique that often gets lumped in with what are conventionally labelled 'logical fallacies' is the ad hominem attack. I've never quite understood why this is considered to be invalid. Let me be clear: by ad hominem I don't mean simply the method that consists in ignoring the matter at hand and insulting one's interlocutor in personal terms (what Schopenhauer calls specifically the ad personam attack). An argument that proceeds by pointing out inconsistencies in an opponent's argument, whether by showing that he has made contradictory claims, or by showing that a claim he makes is inconsistent with his belief system or school of thought (say, Christianity for example), is, properly speaking, ad hominem. Isn't this the most valid method of argumentation?

Schopenhauer's understanding of human psychology is spot on: he knows that it's easier to get a hostile interlocutor to deny the opposite of your hypothesis than to concede the hypothesis itself. He knows, too, that when we say 'I don't understand what you mean', more often than not we're really saying 'You're full of shit'. And he knows how easy it can be to 'claim victory despite defeat' – and that it very often works.

Another favourite of mine is what Schopenhauer calls the 'Vicar of Wakefield' technique, which is in some ways another species of the appeal to authority (and feel free to invent your own authorities, Schopenhauer reassures us). This is the method, otherwise known ‘round our way as 'talking bollocks', whereby an antagonist wins points by sounding forth with incomprehensible but imposing bombast.

And, if anyone wishes to take issue with anything I've said here, to refute them utterly I need only quote these lines of Goethe:

Gewöhnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hört,
Es müsse sich dabei doch aus was denken lassen.

- a technique which works all the better if neither one of us speaks any German.

all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep

This afternoon, in an idle moment, I happened upon The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.

Now, I remember picking this up once before, about a year ago I suppose, on the recommendation of Stencil, yes that Stencil, of House of Leaves messageboard fame. It didn't grab me on that occasion, but I was persuaded to pick it up again last week, purely on the strength of the arresting cover photograph on the Penguin Classics edition (by Gérard Castello-Lopes). I'm so glad I did. The sensation I got from reading this on a greyish, overcast, raining-cats-and-dogs August afternoon was indescribably poignant. No doubt I'll return to this text tomorrow, or next month, or in ten years' time, only to find it trite or pretentious or incomprehensible. But this afternoon I really felt that I made a connection. What's that? A connection? (Note that this word suffers not to be de-italicized.) Let's leave that kind of language aside, please...

Reminding you of things you had forgotten you knew: that alien but familiar sound of an eyelash brushing against a pillow; your eyes, sore from the tears they didn't shed; a clearing in the sky, a picture from a calendar. And anyone who can write, even through the filter of translation, "I'm dazed by a sarcastic terror of life" is alright by me. Just fine by me.

I love all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love, and perhaps also because nothing is worth a human soul's love, and so it's all the same - should we feel the urge to give it - whether the recipient be the diminutive form of my inkstand or the vast indifference of the stars.

And all this, only 43 pages in!

Autumn's well on its way. The onset of that season has always been associated with a sort of melancholy. That's why I'm happy to live in a country that really experiences autumn, not as an afterthought of the hot summer months, not as a fledgling harbinger of winter, but as a season entirely of itself. I'm not talking about the poets' season of growth and maturity and death, of mists and mellow fruitfulness; nor of the artists' season of reds and browns, associated with New England and that area of the world - the Americans call it "Fall", which I've always found appealing. No, I'm talking about that season of warmish dew-soaked mornings and bright grey evenings, of light-scattered showers and green salt-winds. Clouds. Skies. Autumn's all about the sky. Keeping winter at bay, lest it 'drown the wakeful anguish of the soul'.

At least, I assume it's autumn now. I hope it is, at any rate. The grey skies opened and tipped it down all last week where I am, which suited me just fine. Then I spent the weekend visiting friends in London and how did I find it? Hot as the birdless flood of black Avernus. Sunday in particular was a killer. And it's obvious why. City life. Why the fuck do we insist on living in such close proximity to other people? We all hate other people, don't we?

Still, I hope to God it clears in time for the cricket tomorrow morning. Honestly.

C'était au temps où Bruxelles bruxellait

As I said in the last entry, I was to spend a week in France. So, on the first leg of my Gallic odyssey I spent a couple of days in that well-known French town, Brussels, which is, of course, in France, as you know. Brussels a wonderful city. It gets a bad press for obvious reasons; but it's one of the few cities in continental Europe that I've really appreciated.

Grrr. I spent ages uploading all my photos to imageshack and now it's refusing the connection. Surely I can't have exceeded the bandwidth allowance already? Back to trusty photobucket then. Unfortunately my images will not be accessible in all their glorious immensity. NB: they're mostly clickable, so take your chances.

First thing to report: the lifts in this Brussels hotel were manufactured by none other than:





Now, I know I'm not the first to have noticed this and found it amusing. In fact, my brother told me some years ago that Schindler's lifts were a fixture in certain faculty buildings at the University of Manchester (and I refused to believe him for quite some time). And googling for info on the company just now, I came across this blog entry, which suggests that the whole joke is more widespread than I dared to imagine. Oh well, I still found it funny.

Now, I figured out that there's only one place you can stand in the Grand' Place to get a decent picture of the Hotel de Ville (at least, if you haven't got some sort of wide angle lens), and that's here:




All other photos are partial:



I spent quite some time trying to get a good photo of this pseudo-Gothic monstrosity, and I'm pretty sure I failed. Oh well.

The Maison du Roi doesn't display much more restraint, but it does offer something in the way of visual relief:


I quite liked these:

The Belgians will set up a museum to anything:




Japanese businessmen walking up a hill:




Le Petit Sablon is a pleasant little park opposite the Église Notre-Dame, populated by sixteenth-century statuary (they're nothing of the sort, of course):



I don't know what the hell this thing is:




The Erasmus House is a pretty little museum located in an Anderlecht residence reputedly occupied by the great man himself sometime in 1521. Traces of his presence there, though, are conspicuous by their absence. Here, for example, is a writing desk which might have been the very one Erasmus used to compose his greatest works:




It wasn't, of course; it was a just a common or garden sixteenth-century writing desk. Still, nice photo, even if I do say so myself.

The Belgians seem to have this tendency to claim as their own famous sons of the region that were quite clearly not Belgian. I mean Erasmus of Rotterdam, for Christ's sake! And they have a Metro line in Brussels named after him! Still, it must be symptomatic of living in a country that's only a century or so old and doesn't have much in the way of a coherent national identity. It was only in visiting Brussels that I realized how incongruous it is to have a community that functions on the basis of a French/Flemish bilingualism. It's like the ultimate clash of linguistic identities: the Romance facing off the Germanic with neither side giving any quarter. And they made this place into a nation! I'm just amazed that Belgium didn't turn out like the Balkans, franchement.

But the old joke about there being no famous Belgians is quite clearly not true: there's Magritte, Hergé and Jacques Brel. And I'll let them have Breugel too (though not Bosch). I love that they have a Metro station named after Brel. And a museum. And a Youth Hostel. And so on. Despite the fact that most of his songs are bitterly critical of Belgian culture. I remember reading, too, that Brel had to have a native speaker's help with the song Marieke because he didn't know enough Flemish. Another contradiction.

The Musée d'art moderne is well worth a visit, purely for the fantastic collection of Magrittes it holds. None of his most famous works (at least, as far as my limited knowledge goes), but a huge selection - at least two dozen - of very impressive works from various points in his career. I especially liked L'Empire des lumières. It took me quite some time of looking at that picture to realize what about it was making me feel uneasy. The museum also has a nice collection of works by other surrealists, including Man Ray, and Dali (if that's your thing: leaves me a bit cold, personally).

It was the Musée d'art ancien that really held my attention. Hanging there is Bosch's Temptation of St Antony. Though the museum paraphernalia is remarkably reluctant to inform you of the fact, this is not in fact the Bosch original but a very well-executed copy by a contemporary of his. Despite this fact, it attracts the most visitors (in the short time I was looking at it I was able to eavesdrop guided tours in German and Japanese, and notice that the first reaction of most visitors, not just the children, was laughter) followed closely by Bruegel's garish Fall of the Rebel Angels. People like the weird stuff. Actually Bosch's Temptation is a breathtaking painting to look at as a whole even without paying close attention to the fantastical elements. I can't say the same of the Bruegel, which is only superficially interesting. Nevertheless it attracts the most attention in the Bruegel room, perhaps jointly with the younger Bruegel's Battle of Carnival and Lent, which is yet another copy, of course. This at the expense of the far superior Fall of Icarus, in my opinion the finest of the museum's holdings. The lack of attention given to this painting by visitors to the museum is nothing if not appropriate, given Bruegel's inspiredly beside-the-point treatment of the subject.

If I had to pick out one other remarkable painting - although the museum has dozens - it would be Lucas Cranach's Venus and Cupid (the one with the bees, defintely the best of his variations on this theme). If that's not the kinkiest Venus ever committed to canvas, I don't know what is.

The Erasmus House

is chiefly notable (it seemed to me) for housing more portraits of the great humanist than you could feasably shake a stick at. Most of them are variations on the famous Holbein portraits. I reckon I could easily pick Erasmus out of a police line up of seriously-dour-looking-Dutchmen-with-a-g

lint-of-mischievous-humour-in-the-eye-and-a-general-bearing-of-serene-wisdom, no problem. Many of the exhibits are only loosely connected to Erasmus, if at all. What a nineteenth-century grandfather clock has to do with Erasmus is anyone's guess (it bore the legend 'Vigilate: nescitis horam discessus', which is, I think, from the New Testament; it sounds vaguely like something Erasmus would have written on, I suppose). Still, the museum's definitely worth visiting, if only to take a look at the Temptation of St Antony by Pieter Huys, an oddly cartoonish variation on the Bosch painting, and quite startling enough in its own right.

The other reason to visit the Erasmus house is what they call the 'Philosophical Garden'. I love the idea of a philosophical garden. Indulging peripatetic moods.


Scattered throughout the gardens, Erasmian adages, written on water:



To Heysel. The Atomium was being refurbished when I was there. I was very much impressed by the size of the thing, which I had always assumed to be pretty small for some reason. Seeing the workmen perched on the top of those spheres gave me the fear, let me tell you.



Sun-backed photos. What can I say? I likes 'em.

...and Lyon

C'est ung grand cas veoir le Mont Pelyon,
Ou d'avoir veu les ruines de Troie:
Mais qui ne veoit la ville de Lyon,
Aulcun plaisir à ses yeux il n'octroye

(Marot)

I passed through Lille on the way from Brussels to Lyon. As most European travellers know, Lille is basically purgatory. It has somehow rebranded itself in recent years as a legitimate tourist destination. God knows how (it probably has something to do with the Eurostar). Anyway, I quite like this picture, if only for its geometricality; kinda like a suprematist painting.



I had high hopes for the Musée de l'Imprimerie in Lyon. It turned out to be pretty disappointing. The museum has a decent enough but fairly mediocre collection of incunabula and sixteenth-century books; but what's the point in displaying books in a museum? Books are not things to stick behind glass cases, if only for practical reasons: you can only display one verso and one recto at the very most, and you can't feel the texture of the vellum or inhale the odour of centuries. No, as Dr Johnson once said in an unguarded moment: "A book placed in a museum is like a dog made to walk on its hind legs: fucking useless." Luckily for him (and posterity), Boswell was not present at the time.



This is not a genuine fifteenth-century printing press.

Hardly anything there on Louise Labé, on Rabelais, Scève, Pernette du Guillet, Marot, or countless others the bulk of whose literary production was printed for the first time at Lyon. The most wothwhile thing on display in the museum is one of the printed flyers that kicked off the infamous 'affaire des placards' in 1534 (in fact one of only two surviving copies). Posted by Protestants around Paris and at the King's residence at Amboise, the flyers prompted a crackdown by François Ier on the freedom of the press which directly affected Rabelais, among others (a fair few heretics were burned too, but they weren't great authors, so we needn't worry about them). Since these flyers weren't even printed in Lyon (they were printed by exiles in Switzerland, people who have posed a nuisance to civilized society throughout history ::wink::), it's not entirely relevant to the history of printing in Lyon, but who cares. Stick that behind a glass case, by all means.

The Amphitheatre des Trois Gaules is a Roman amphitheatre dating from the reign of Augustus. Complete with lengthening shadows and black cat for added foreboding. The Romans were quite superstitious about cats. And now they're all dead, and the cat is lording it over the ruins of their once great civilization. I think we can all all learn a lesson from that.





I quite like this picture (taken in the Place des Terraux), even if it is technically awful. I like taking photos directly into the sun. Is that so terrible?



There are some wonderful views to be had from the old town.




I like this one, for the off-kilter arboreal encadrement:



And this:



And this, for the almost-symmetry:



More into-sun nonsense (this time it's the Notre-Dame de Fourvière basilica):



The Rhône, or is it the Saône, Meh, either way:




The trompe l'oeil murals are something else, mainly because they're go unnoticed for the most part; they seem to be so inconspicuous. They might as well be permanent fixures in the city. This has been an obsession of mine for quite some time now.

Here are my photos of a couple of them. Firstly, the Fresque des Lyonnais:

Almost a good photo, this:



The Mur des Canuts, which is, as the last image shows, a completely flat wall.