Out of My Head and other stories

 It's not often we have a TV review here and this is officially the very first time for an i-player review. Good Lord, what will they think of next but I'm told than one day all television will be like that and seeing the second half of Tomorrow's World because you switched on in plenty of time for Top of the Pops at 7.25 on Thursday is a thing of the past.

But I am indebted to my Liverpool correspondent for the tip about Can't Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis, a wide-ranging survey of what was really going on in the C20th. Through the stories of various significant figures, his main point might be to refute all the mad-cap conspiracy theories which is timely given that for the last four years they formed the basis of government policy in the USA. It tells the stories of the likes of Madame Mao and the inglorious history of C20th China. One conclusion one might deduce from it is how revolutions often land you back where you started, if not further behind. The result of that is to leave people so bereft of anything to believe in that they believe in nothing. If the overall object of the exercise is to provide happiness and it proves not possible then one can at least make people think they're happy because they can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's where consumerism and football come in useful. It reminds me of something Simon Schama said in his History of the Jews, that they prefer to wait forever for the messiah rather than have him arrive because 2000 years ago the one that promised redemption and that he was the saviour didn't work. But although 'happiness' is surely unarguably a reasonable aim, there are some of us who might not be happy being happy. We don't quite trust it and know that we only 'feel happy' and so feeling happy enough that we don't trust ourselves to feel happy might by now be the best we can hope for.

I wouldn't want to challenge Adam Curtis or misrepresent him because there's a lot in these six programmes of 74  minutes each and I've only seen three of them so far but he credits Alexander Solzhenitsyn as being one of those that decided there was nothing to believe in after the failure of the revolution. That's not what I understood of Solzhenitsyn who I remember in the 1970's describing Democratic Socialism as an oxymoron like 'boiling ice'. I had understood that Solzhenitsyn became a patriot for old Mother Russia if not even for the Tsarist old days but don't quote me on any of that, see if you can find time for Can't Get You Out of My Head and I hope you won't regret it. The soundtrack includes some things one might like. I went to some lengths to find out what one track was and briefly found myself a new favourite band. I'm not sure how long that will last.

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But once in a while one can see how the world has moved on since, in the Stan & Ollie film, Oliver Hardy buys a newspaper from a newsboy to find a horse racing result (in the days before the At the Races website). It is well beyond our comprehension now. Strange e-mails one gets sometimes. But today, the unrecognized names in the inbox weren't made up ones trying to lure me into some scam. An American poet I briefly exchanged e-mails with some time ago included me in a mailshot advertising a lecture. It's Mon 8th March with Andres Rojas if you really want to know. But I've been made to feel included by since receiving replies to it from two other recipients., one of them from Santa Monica.

That's a bit of a test for my downbeat, provincial attitude. My idea of poetry and theirs could be more of a division than anything we have in common, like Larkin meeting Gary Snyder but you never know.

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This was the remarkable leader board in a tournament at LiChess yesterday after three games playing 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move.

 

Joint top out of 604 players, really, since the order is decided by current rating when on equal points. I'm BorderIncident, named after a horse from the 1970's that would have won the Cheltenham Gold Cup but for injury. And I'm officially on fire which means if you've won your last two games you'll keep getting double points until you haven't. Sadly, that's as far as it went and I completely bombed after that and only won one more. I finished 85th, top 9%. I thought I'd slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. But it's not easy keeping it going for a solid hour. You don't know how hard it can be. But I thought I'd take a picture of it while I was there.