Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to him who does not die.

After a little while, and a good deal of talking among themselves, he began again —’I know all about it — oh yes! Before you came we had rain every day — very wet indeed; now, ever since you have been here, it is fine hot weather. Oh, yes! I know all about it; you can’t deceive me.’ And so I was set down as a conjurer, and was unable to repel the charge. But the conjurer was completely puzzled by the next question: ‘What,’ said the old man, ‘is the great ship, where the Bugis and Chinamen go to sell their things? It is always in the great sea — its name is Jong; tell us all about it.’ In vain I inquired what they knew about it; they knew nothing but that it was called ‘Jong,’ and was always in the sea, and was a very great ship, and concluded with, ‘Perhaps that is your country?’ Finding that I could not or would not tell them anything about ‘Jong,’ there came more regrets that I would not tell them the real name of my country; and then a long string of compliments, to the effect that I was a much better sort of a person than the Bugis and Chinese, who sometimes came to trade with them, for I gave them things for nothing, and did not try to cheat them. How long would I stop? was the next earnest inquiry. Would I stay two or three months? They would get me plenty of birds and animals, and I might soon finish all the goods I had brought, and then, said the old spokesman, ‘Don’t go away, but send for more things from Dobbo, and stay here a year or two.’ And then again the old story, ‘Do tell us the name of your country. We know the Bugis men, and the Macassar men, and the Java men, and the China men; only you, we don’t know from what country you come. Ung-lung! it can’t be; I know that is not the name of your country.’ Seeing no end to this long talk, I said I was tired, and wanted to go to sleep; so after begging — one a little bit of dry fish for his supper, and another a little salt to eat with his sago — they went off very quietly, and I went outside and took a stroll round the house by moonlight, thinking of the simple people and the strange productions of Aru, and then turned in under my mosquito curtain; to sleep with a sense of perfect security in the midst of these good-natured savages.

Other Jay Ryan fans will no doubt understand some of the frustrations involved with this. For instance Googling his name returns some tool who used to be in Neighbours… not ideal!

I digress. The Jay Ryan I’m talking about is part of / creator of The Bird Machine. His screenprints have graced the posters of the best modern bands around, and are consistently things of great beauty in their own right.

When I do finally jack in all this digital malarky and start doing something more tangible, it’s between baking bread and screenprinting largely down to the Jay Ryan influence (not the bread bit!) It even inspired me to have a go a few months ago.

You’ve probably guessed by now, the most interesting thing about talking about great screenprinting is not the talking about them, but the seeing them, so I’ll keep comments to minimum. However the reciprocal relationship between great music and Jay Ryan now means that I’m willing to trust his judgement that if he’s done a poster for a band, chances are they are or are going to be brilliant. Which is quite a handy byproduct of admiring his art!

I have this one on my wall at home:

This book in my book case:

And he seems to be able to keep producing amazingly high quality images, like these from this year:

He’s even got good taste in films (probably more respectably see also Aguirre Wrath of God above!)

And my mind leaped ahead, skipping and whistling. In the first year I’d master French, the second year join some kind of traveling medical entourage, dressing wounds and disseminating medicine. We’d do inoculations. We’d do birth control. We’d hold the line on AIDS. After that I’d marry a Senegalese woman and we’d raise our kids while working shoulder to shoulder — all of us — at the clinic. The kids would check people in, maybe do some minimal filing — they’d do their homework in the waiting room. I’d visit America now and then, once every few years, in Senegal read the English-speaking papers once a month or so, slow my rhythm to one more in agreement with the landscape here, so slow and even, the water always nearby. We’d live on the coast.
“Sounds good,” said Hand.
“But that’s one lifetime.”
“Yeah.”
“But while I’m doing that one I’d want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives — the one where I sail —”
“I know, on a boat you made yourself.”
“Yeah, for a couple years, through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Caspian Sea.”
“Do only seas. No oceans.”
“Yeah but —”
“Can you sail? You can’t sail. Your brother sails, right?”
“Yeah, Tommy sails. But that’s the problem. It could take years to get good enough. And while doing that, I’m not out here with my Senegalese wife. And I’m definitely not running whitewater tours in Alaska.”
“So choose one.”
“That’s the problem, dumbshit.”
We passed two more white people on ATVs.
“You know quantum theory, right?”
This is how he started; it was always friendly enough but —
“Sure,” I lied.
“Well there’s this guy named Deutsch who’s taken quantum theory and applied it to everything. To all life. You know quantum theory, right? Max Planck?”
“Go on,” I said. He was such a prick.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Quantum physics is saying that atoms aren’t so hard-and-fast, just sitting there like fake fruit or something, touchable and solid. They’re mercurial, on a subatomic level. They come and go. They appear and disappear. They occupy different places at once. They can be teleported. Scientists have actually done this.”
“They’ve teleported atoms.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
No one tells me anything.
“I can’t believe I missed that,” I said.
“They also slowed the speed of light.”
“I did hear that.”
“Slowed it to a Sunday crawl.”
“That’s what I heard.”

We drove as the sky went pink then barn red, passing small villages emptying in the night, people standing around small fires.

Hand went on, gesturing, driving with his knees: “So if these atoms can exist in different places at once — and I don’t think any physicists argue about that — this guy Deutsch argues that everything exists in a bunch of places at once. We’re all made of the same electrons and protons, right, so if they exist in many places at once, and can be teleported, then there’s gotta be multiple us’s, and multiple worlds, simultaneously.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s the multiverse.”
“Oh. That’s a nice name for it.”
(…)

“So about the multiverse,” I said.
“Oh.”
“It’s irrelevant. Who cares how many universes or planets there are when they don’t intersect?”
“Who said they don’t intersect?” he asked.
“Do they?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read anything about that. But the thing you’d like is that with the multiverse, you have basically every option you want — really, every option you’ll ever see or imagine — and one of your selves somewhere has taken that option. Pretty much every life you lead would conceivably be lived by one of your shadow selves. Maybe even after you die.”
“But it’s useless,” I said, “if you don’t share any consciousness.”
“Sure, I know. But then again, maybe we’re not dying. If you combine the quantum physics paradigm with the idea of the subjectivity of time, we’re basically all alive in a thousand places at once, for a neverending present.”

It did sound appealing. Consciousness or not, to be alive, always, somewhere. And what about dreams? That’s got to figure in — but what I wanted, really, was every option, simultaneously. Not in some parallel and irrelevant universe, but here. I wanted to stop and work at the field hospital and fall in love with the local beauty, but also be home in a week so I could do so many other things, fifty life-directions all seemed equally appealing and possible — shark wrangler! Whatever happened to training to be a goddamned shark wrangler?

Back in St. Jude, Enid was playing bridget at Mary Beth Schumpert’s one afternoon when Bea Meisner began to vent her Christian disapproval of a famour “gay” actress.

“She’s a terrible role model for young people,” Bea said. “I think if you make an evil choice in your life, the least you can do is not brag about it. Especially when they have all these new programs that can help people like that.”

Enid who was Bea’s partner for that rubber and was already annoyed by Bea’s failure to respond to an opening two-bid, mildly commented that she didn’t think “gays” could help being “gay.”

“Oh, no, it’s definitely a choice,” Bea said. “It’s a weakness and it starts in adolescence. There’s no question about that. All the experts agree.”
“I loved that thriller her girlfriend made with Harrison Ford,” Mary Beth Schumpert said. “What was it called?”
“I don’t believe it’s a choice,” Enid insisted quietly. “Chip said an interesting thing to me once. He said that with so many people hating ‘gays’ and disapproving of them, why would anybody choose to be ‘gay’ if they could help it? I thought that was really an interesting perspective.”
“Well, no, it’s because they want special rights,” Bea said. “It’s because they want to have ‘gay pride.’ That’s why so many people don’t like them, even apart from the immorality of what they’re doing. They can’t just make an evil choice. They have to brag about it, too.”
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a really good movie,” said Mary Beth.

Enid was no champion of “alternative” lifestyles, and the things she disliked about Bea Meisner she’d disliked for forty years. She couldn’t have said why this particular bridge-table conversation made her decide that she no longer needed to be friends with Bea Meisner. Nor could she have said why Gary’s materialism and Chip’s failures and Denise’s childlessness, which had cost her countless late-night hours of fretting and punitive judgement over the years, distressed her so much less once Alfred was out of the house.

I first heard Jason Molina in The Star in Oxford. The song was Blue Factory Flame from the Songs:Ohia album Didn’t It Rain:

When i die put my bones in an empty street to remind me of how it used to be
don’t write my name on a stone bring a Coleman lantern and a radio
Cleveland game and two fishing poles and watch with me from the shore
ghostly steel and iron ore ships coming home
where i am paralyzed by the emptiness

It affected me as soon as I heard it. His lyrics were astonishing and the basic instrumentation the perfect accompaniment. In many ways it’s not surprising to learn that Jason struggled with alcohol addiction, which ultimately brought about his untimely death, but it is heartbreaking.

Few people have the ability to write music that captures emotion so viscerally. By the time the next song was halfway through I knew I’d be listening to this music for years to come. Chatting to the barman, it was clear he felt the same way.

When the bells ring twelve times in hell, the bells ring twelve times in this town as well.

If Jason had only written Didn’t It Rain, he would absolutely have been a major part of my life. Instead he was an incredibly prolific artist, and I’ve spent the last week listening to every one of them. As Magnolia Electric Co. he assembled a band that brought a more full sound to his songs. The strength at the core of this music is still his extraordinary songwriting however. Such Pretty Eyes For A Snake from Trials And Errors is one such example:

A lot of people are compared to Nick Drake. I don’t really think comparisons are particularly useful, and seem to be mostly used cynically by marketing departments to shift records. I do think there is a shared spirit between Nick Drake, Jason Molina and Jack Rose though.

Few people can create music that moves you on a spiritual level, but it’s standard for these guys. I hope you listen to some of this and feel equally moved.

The last word must go to Jason, and these are the introductory lyrics from the above track from album, Josephine:

She said “I’ve been the stockyard’s pony”
She said “I’ve been the mountain engine’s roll
From Chicago to West Virginia,
I’ve been as lonesome as the world’s first ghost
As lonesome as the world’s first ghost

But out here even the prairie doubts the horizon
All I have to do is prove that I’m not pure
Oh, the right words come,
But I ain’t talking
The devil’s mean but he’s honest just as sure
Oh, he is honest just as sure”

We live because there are people who love us, and people we love back. We live because we want to find out things, and learn, and become able to do things that we would like to do. We live because others want us to, and we want them to live along with us.

We live because we have hope, and want to see what happens next. I hope that lots of people live because they know life at its best can be wonderfully good, and want to help make it so: and that is a great reason for living.

Written by AC Grayling and borrowed from The Guardian

Chip was having trouble feeling disappointed about “The Academy Purple.” Never to look at the script again, never to show it to a soul: this might be a relief even greater than his relief in the men’s room of Fanelli’s where he’d taken the salmon from his pants.

From an enchantment of breasts and hyphens and one-inch margins he felt himself awakening to a rich and varied world to which he’d been dead for who knew how long. Years.

“I’m interested in what you’re telling me,” he told Gitanas.

“It’s interesting. It is interesting,” Gitanas agreed, still hugging himself tensely. “Brodsky said, ‘Fresh fish always smells, frozen smells only when it thaws.’ So, and after the big thaw, when all the little fish came out of the freezer, we were passionate about this and that. I was part of it. Very much part of it. But the economy was mismanaged. I had my fun in New York, but back home—there was a depression, all right. Then, too late, 1995, we pegged the litas to the dollar and started privatizing, way too fast. It wasn’t my decision, but I might have done the same. The World Bank had money that we wanted, and the World Bank said privatize. So OK, we sold the port. We sold the airline, sold the phone system. The highest bidder was usually American, sometimes Western European. This wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Nobody in Vilnius had cash. And the phone company said, OK, we’ll have foreign owners with deep pockets, but the port and the airline will still be a hundred percent Lithuanian. Well, the port and the airline were thinking the same. But still it was OK. Capital was flowing, better cuts of meat at the butcher, fewer brownouts. Even the weather seemed milder. Mostly criminals took the hard currency, but that’s post-Soviet reality. After the thaw, you get the rot. Brodsky didn’t live to see that. So OK, but then all the world economies started collapsing, Thailand, Brazil, Korea, and this was a problem, because all the capital ran home to the U. S. We found out, for example, that our national airline was sixty-four percent owned by the Quad Cities Fund. Which is? A no-load growth fund managed by a young guy named Dale Meyers. You never heard of Dale Meyers, but every adult citizen of Lithuania knows his name.”

This tale of failure seemed to amuse Gitanas greatly. It had been a long time since Chip had had such a powerful sensation of liking somebody. His queer friends at D—— College and the Warren Street Journal were so frank and headlong in their confidences that they foreclosed actual closeness, and his responses to straight men had long fallen into one of two categories: fear and resentment of the successes, flight from the contagion of the failures. But something in Gitanas’s tone appealed to him.

“Dale Meyers lives in eastern Iowa,” Gitanas said. “Dale Meyers has two assistants, a big computer, and a three-billion-dollar portfolio. Dale Meyers says he didn’t mean to acquire a controlling stake in our national airline. Dale says it was program trading. He says one of his assistants misentered data that caused the computer to keep increasing its position in Lithuanian Airlines without reporting the overall size of the accumulated stake. OK, Dale apologizes to all Lithuanians for the oversight. Dale says he understands the importance of an airline to a country’s economy and self-esteem. But because of the crisis in Russia and the Baltics, nobody wants tickets on Lithuanian Airlines. So, and American investors are pulling money out of Quad Cities. Dale’s only way to meet his obligations is liquidate Lithuanian Airlines’ biggest asset. Which is its fleet. He’s gonna sell three YAK40s to a Miami-based air freight company. He’s gonna sell six Aerospatiale turboprops to a start-up commuter airline in Nova Scotia. In fact, he already did that, yesterday. So, whoops, no airline.”

“Ouch,” Chip said.

Gitanas nodded fiercely. “Yeah! Yeah! Ouch! Too bad you can’t fly a truck undercarriage! OK, and then. Then an American conglomerate called Orfic Midland liquidates the Port of Kaunas. Again, overnight. Whoops! Ouch! And then sixty percent of the Bank of Lithuania gets eaten up by a suburban bank in Atlanta, Georgia. And your suburban bank then liquidates our bank’s hard-currency reserves. Your bank doubles our country’s commercial interest rates overnight—why? To cover heavy losses in its failed line of Dilbert affinity MasterCards. Ouch! Ouch! But interesting, huh? Lithuania’s not being such a successful player, is it? Lithuania really fucked things up!”

“How are you men doing?” Eden said, returning to her office with April in tow. “Maybe you want to use the conference room?”

Gitanas put a briefcase on his lap and opened it. “I’m explaining to Cheep my gripe with America.”

One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was just possible that this escapade signified something other than even a slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or sign. Perhaps the foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal that he ought to have understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps the new Thursday was always chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is always escorted along it. He was just selecting a tentative inquiry, when the old Professor opposite suddenly and simply cut him short. Before Syme could ask the first diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without any sort of preparation:

“Are you a policeman?”

Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.

“A policeman?” he said, laughing vaguely. “Whatever made you think of a policeman in connection with me?”

“The process was simple enough,” answered the Professor patiently. “I thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now.”

“Did I take a policeman’s hat by mistake out of the restaurant?” asked Syme, smiling wildly. “Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a policeman? Do, do let me be a postman.”

The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but Syme ran on with a feverish irony.

“But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy. Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir, the ape fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never detect the shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don’t mind being the policeman that might have been. I don’t mind being anything in German thought.”

“Are you in the police service?” said the old man, ignoring all Syme’s improvised and desperate raillery. “Are you a detective?”

Syme’s heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.

“Your suggestion is ridiculous,” he began. “Why on earth—”

The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table, nearly breaking it.

“Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?” he shrieked in a high, crazy voice. “Are you, or are you not, a police detective?”

“No!” answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman’s drop.

“You swear it,” said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face becoming as it were loathsomely alive. “You swear it! You swear it! If you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil dances at your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your grave? Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?”

He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large loose hand like a flap to his ear.

“I am not in the British police,” said Syme with insane calm.

Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly collapse.

“That’s a pity,” he said, “because I am.”

Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a crash.

“Because you are what?” he said thickly. “You are what?”

“I am a policeman,” said the Professor with his first broad smile. and beaming through his spectacles. “But as you think policeman only a relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters’ club. I suppose I ought to arrest you.” And with these words he laid on the table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.

Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now the capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from whom he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house, who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him. He did not for the moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the happy and silly fact that this shadow, which had pursued him with an intolerable oppression of peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying to catch him up. He knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free man. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme’s egotism held hard to the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly adopted the third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until his spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted with a barbaric laughter.

Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives, plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there was something Homeric in Syme’s mirth which made many half-drunken men look round.

“What yer laughing at, guv’nor?” asked one wondering labourer from the docks.

“At myself,” answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his ecstatic reaction.

“Pull yourself together,” said the Professor, “or you’ll get hysterical. Have some more beer. I’ll join you.”

“You haven’t drunk your milk,” said Syme.

“My milk!” said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable contempt, “my milk! Do you think I’d look at the beastly stuff when I’m out of sight of the bloody anarchists? We’re all Christians in this room, though perhaps,” he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd, “not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I’ll finish it right enough!” and he knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash of glass and a splash of silver fluid.

Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.

“I understand now,” he cried; “of course, you’re not an old man at all.”

“I can’t take my face off here,” replied Professor de Worms. “It’s rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I’m an old man, that’s not for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday.”

“Yes, but I mean,” said Syme impatiently, “there’s nothing the matter with you.”

“Yes,” answered the other dispassionately. “I am subject to colds.”

Syme’s laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.

The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that that man Gogol was one of us?”

“I? No, I didn’t know it,” answered Syme in some surprise. “But didn’t you?”

“I knew no more than the dead,” replied the man who called himself de Worms. “I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in my boots.”

“And I thought he was talking about me,” said Syme, with his rather reckless laughter. “I had my hand on my revolver all the time.”

“So had I,” said the Professor grimly; “so had Gogol evidently.”

Syme struck the table with an exclamation.

“Why, there were three of us there!” he cried. “Three out of seven is a fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!”

The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.

“We were three,” he said. “If we had been three hundred we could still have done nothing.”

“Not if we were three hundred against four?” asked Syme, jeering rather boisterously.

“No,” said the Professor with sobriety, “not if we were three hundred against Sunday.”

And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph, and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites, that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday’s seemed almost to grow more actual during absence, as if a man’s painted portrait should slowly come alive.

My next informant was the Orang Kayas, or chief of the Balow Dyaks on the Semunjon River. He said, “the Mias has no enemies; no animals dare attack it but the crocodile and the python. He always kills the crocodile by main strength, standing upon it, pulling open its jaws and ripping up its throat. If a python attacks a Mias, he seizes it with his hands, and then bites it, and soon kills it. The Mias is very strong; there is no animal in the jungle so strong as he.”

It is very remarkable that an animal so large, so peculiar, and of such a high type of form as the Orangutan, should be confined to so limited a district — to two islands, and those almost the last inhabited by the higher Mammalia; for, east of Borneo and Java, the Quadrumania, Ruminants, Carnivora, and many other groups of Mammalla diminish rapidly, and soon entirely disappear. When we consider, further, that almost all other animals have in earlier ages been represented by allied yet distinct forms — that, in the latter part of the tertiary period, Europe was inhabited by bears, deer, wolves, and cats; Australia by kangaroos and other marsupials; South America by gigantic sloths and ant-eaters; all different from any now existing, though intimately allied to them — we have every reason to believe that the Orangutan, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla have also had their forerunners. With what interest must every naturalist look forward to the time when the caves and tertiary deposits of the tropics may be thoroughly examined, and the past history and earliest appearance of the great man-like apes be made known at length.