Some kind of floating hotel praxis

Aieeee!   That sound of torment is my anguished cry as am forced to return to blogging chores. I had been hoping for leniency, but alas for me, and for you, gentle reader, I am driven by the agency of pointy sticks back to the uncomfy desk, for to witter on in the empty echoing vastness of the blogosphere.  Ahem.  All of which is a frankly silly way of saying that I have been on holiday and I've got better things to do on my holiday than blog blog blogitty blog.  Looking out the window for example.  Or reading a damn fine book.  

Both looking and reading were occasioned by traveling from Bergen up and round the coast of Norway, to Kirkenes on the Russian Border. 

I travelled by Hurtigruten, (or Hurttigrutimurtiturtigrun, obviously) which was great, apart from the fact that me and my mate were the youngest people on the boat by about 30 years.  It must be single party babes week on the Hurtigruten this week, not last.  Damn.  Anyway here is a picture of wot I saw.

  

Drifting serenely from fjord to fjord while watching the awesome scenery roll past is an excellent way to spend time.  It also leaves plenty of time for reading, so it was lucky that I brought a good book.  A great book in fact.  

Now, I know that Mr S Langridge, not of London Town, believes that Neal Stephenson jumped the shark the moment he finished In The Beginning Was The Command Line (though he may concede Snow Crash if he's in a good mood or drunk) but I disagree.  I liked Cryptonomicon.  I loved the Baroque Cycle, all three and half thousand bastard, brilliant, long hand scribed pages of it.  I had the same feeling I got reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, like someone somewhere knew me and said, 'let's write a book for this bloke.'  I guess I'm interested in many of the same things as Stephenson; science, philosophy, history and fucking great spaceships / sword fights, depending on when in history you find yourself.  Anyway, his new tome (and it is a Tome) is called Ananthem, (a deliberate cross between Anthem and Anathema, though I found the clever clever linguistic mash-ups the least convincing thing about the book) and its ace.  It is by no means flawless, but it creates an utterly convincing and internally consistent world, a task that has proved beyond JK Rowling for example.  

Anyway, on the world on which Anantham is set, society has evolved into two camps. First is the saecular world, which isn't a million miles away from the society we live in now. The second part is made up of the Avout.  Now, the Avout are like monks and nuns in some ways, they live in monastery type institutions and dress in robes, but rather than being religious in nature they are made up of scientists and philosophers.  They live sequestered away in their 'concents', only venturing out into the saecular world once every ten, hundred or thousand years, and they take the long view.  In one dazzling passage, the narrator, a young Avout called Erasmas, describes the location of his concent.  He tells how it can be found down river from a natural crossing point and that sometimes there is only an inn or a gas station by the crossing, though occasionally that grows into a town or a city and skyscrapers overlook the concent, but such things pass and fall, and forests surround it, only for the process to begin again.  These are people who view nuclear winters as the kinds of things that roll round once in a while.  I found this juxtaposition of two views of time absolutely spellbinding. It has wonderful consequences in the story too.  When an avout leaves the concent, he is uncertain if he (or she) will be picked up in a horse and carriage or in a helicopter.  Both technologies (or praxis, as they call it) come and go and go and come.  

Couple of other things, then I'll shut up about it for now.  First, characters from our intellectual history crop up in this world, but under different names, and working them out is good fun if you're as sad as me. Secondly, a couple of new words really, really work.  'Plane', for example, meaning to destroy someone in an argument ("I got talking to Grant about philosophy and he totally planed me"), and even better, bulshytt:

Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have been infected by Procian thinking. …

Procian thinking is his way or describing nominalist philosophy, or more extremely and cruelly, any kind of post-modern mumbo jumbo.  

It is a word I intend to make a trusty friend.   

Final point here.  The concents are beautiful places, where people study and teach and research with no other purpose than tending to the flame of knowledge.  They grow their own food and make beer and wine.  They date and marry and live full lives.  Now, I know this might mark me out as a bit of a weirdo, but I can kind of see the appeal...

Three Word Poem

America.  Fuck yeah.

Better Angels

So we come to it at last, the great battle of our age.  I believe that just about everything that could be written about the US elections has been written (somewhere there are monkeys with typewriters about to lose their jobs) but I'd just like to chuck in a final few observations.

First up, why should I, as an Englishman in Scotland, give two hoots about whoever the damn Yankees elect to strut around in front of old glory for the next four years? The first answer to this is about power, and the second more interesting answer is about legacy and philosophy and dreams.  The first answer is obvious, so its the second one I want to dwell on here for a moment.

It was F Scott Fitzgerald that called the United States the 'last and greatest of human dreams.' America is the expression of some of the finest impulses and traditions that have shaped my own country and my own beliefs.  It is ultimately an enlightenment project, an attempt to create a country and system of Government based on reason, self determination and, to quote one of the greats, government of the people, by the people and for the people.  While its self conscious striving towards this ideal has been tarnished by some horrific acts, those acts are no different than those of every other industrialised country, but we hold America to a different standard.  I'm not looking to downplay its crimes here, just to point out that the US suffers in comparison with its flighty rhetoric, but at least it has the rhetoric and it lives up to it more often than I can quite credit  It is the best, bravest and most important attempt to make the idea of democracy and freedom stick, which is why its actions and elections are so important.  If the yanks can't make this work, it probably can't be done.  The American Caesar, the man to break the republic and establish a tyranny of fire and glory is always closer than we care to think.

The ideas that animated the founding fathers and still course though America today are ideas that spring from my country, or counties in fact.  It was the infringement of ancient English liberties that so enraged the colonists.  It was said in the build up to the English Civil War that 'magna carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign'.  That was as true in the fields of Virginia was it was in the downs of Sussex.  In fact, it could be said that the American Revolution was a replay of the English Civil War (minus some of the religious headbanging) and the same side won.  The US is the finest expression of the better angels of the English political nature.  The Scots shaped it too.  The extraordinary flowering of the Scottish enlightenment forged ideas that became the tools of the craft of Constitution building in the hands of Jefferson and Adams.  Hume and Adam Smith's thoughts on the nature of man and the best form of government to manage him directly inspired the founding fathers.  In other words, the project of America is the project of all of us who see ourselves in the enlightenment tradition, especially if we are at all proud of what the sons and daughters our own lands contributed towards it.

My next observation is a bit less pompous.  This election has been so much fun.  I'm going to miss it.  I've really enjoyed the musings of Michael Tomasky and Oliver Burkeman at the Grouniad, and Fivethirtyeight's been brilliant. If there's a rookie of the years for this election its surely Nate Silver (though a certain Mr B Obama might run him close.)  The Economist's multi coloured bloggers at Democracy in America have great too (and funnier than I ever expected.)

Finally, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like we are on the threshold of something glorious in the election of Obama.  America needs to dream itself up again and he can do it. Something extraordinary is happening.  He'll let us down, the world is a hard and unforgiving place, the challenges he faces are colossal, and he's just a bloke, but for a glorious moment here I feel like I can believe in a political system, believe like I feel I should be able to.  

Live up to yourself, America.  There are some of us out here that share something deep in our souls with what you can be.  Be true.