Twenty 20th Century intellectual heroes, Part 2: from Eric Hoffer to Colin Wilson

You can find the first part of this post - "Twenty 20th Century intellectual heroes, Part 1: from Jung to C.S. Lewis" - here.

11. Eric Hoffer
A self-taught San Francisco longshoreman who wrote The True Believer (1951), an astonishingly insightful book about why some (mostly young) people become fanatical members of violent cults, sects and political organisations - and why they become more fanatical and violent over time. I wrote about Eric Hoffer here.

12. Simone Weil
I've recently been re-reading the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). I tend to dip in...

Twenty 20th Century intellectual heroes, Part 1: from Jung to C.S. Lewis

I started thinking about this list while watching all those Bryan Magee interviews with philosophers I wrote about in a recent post. The main criterion for inclusion was that thinker had in some way affected the way I look at the world. The fact that many of them suffered professionally for swimming against the intellectual tide isn't necessarily germane, but I do tend to admire people who actually risk something in order to express their views: it strikes me that the reputation of many widely-admired public intellectuals these days rests on their willingness to boldly trumpet opinions that will do nothing but enhance their popularity and their careers - a phenomenon which seems to have turned British and American "satirists" into a pack of lickspittle establishment toadies. One more point before I start listing - including someone on the list doesn't remotely imply that I agree with everything they believe or believed (for example, I find Orwell's views on economics almost simple-minded).

The cinemas of Old Wimbledon (and Raynes Park and Putney) - hat/tip: R. Murphy

An old friend, who, like me, arrived in Wimbledon in 1959, send me an email yesterday, crammed with images of the Wimbledon cinemas of our youth. The two main ones (as far as I was concerned, at least) were to be found practically across the road from each other on Wimbledon Broadway. The first (on the left as you headed toward South Wimbledon) was the Odeon:

Lord, what an ugly building! Still, it did a nice line in hotdogs and cokes...

Unexpected consequences of being terminally ill - mainly, the number of "peak experiences" I've been enjoying

The first is that I don't appear to be at death's door quite yet. Yes, I'm distinctly thinner, weaker and I tire more rapidly than I used to - but I'm certainly no worse than I was when I left hospital last September (or was it August?). I had expected to be bedbound by now, at the very least - but while I'm pretty much housebound, I've only failed to get out of bed and get dressed on a handful of occasions so far. I know I'm tempting fate even mentioning this - I don't in the least take it for granted and I know it can't last much longer - but I'm immensely grateful for being allowed to maintain a semi-normal existence for this long. The other thing - and the one that I really wasn't expecting - is the number of moments...

Latest health bulletin: fizzy drink are good for you - and when the NHS works, it's brilliant!

In order to still speculation by the international news media, here's where I'm currently at, health-wise. My stay at the wonderful Meadow House Hospice in Ealing just before Christmas, and the scan at Ealing hospital on Christmas Eve, revealed that all my recent digestive problems were due to two strictures in my duodenum, resulting from...

Scott, I hear you ask, how do you manage to watch all these wonderful old movies on your TV screen without needing a DVD player?

To be strictly accurate, three people have asked me this question recently, and I promised each of them I'd post some advice: here it is. I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but I'm no expert, so I'll just describe how I've gone about it. For starters, we own a Samsung "Smart" TV - i.e. a set which can be hooked into your broadband network and which is festooned with USB ports so you can plug other devices into it. We used to be able to access YouTube videos from the TV, but the app was pretty useless, and was finally removed. In order to restore this capability, I bought an Amazon Fire Stick (approximately £50 when I last looked) and connected it to the TV vis a USB port. (As far as I can tell, the Fire Stick communicates wirelessly with your broadband router, rather than piggybacking on any connection between your TV and your broadband network.) Instantly, I could once more choose to watch any of the thousands of films available for free or pay to rent one of their pay films (the only movies I pay to watch on YouTube are those offered by the company itself - many other pay films are available on the platform from other providers, but they all require a monthly subscription, and ...

A Merry Christmas to one and all! I'm at home for it - which I wasn't expecting to be. Hallelujah!

Sorry for the long silence, but my digestive system has been giving me a lot of gyp - to the extent that Christmas lunch will consist of a bowl of clear soup, an unbuttered slice of cracker bread, and a small dollop of vanilla ice-cream, all to be eaten  v  e  r  y    v  e  r  y    s  l  o  w  l  y. Yum yum! Still, at least I'm home with my family, which I didn't expect to be. For the past few days I've been enjoying the hospitality of the Meadow House Hospice, attached to the unlovely Ealing Hospital, and was expecting to stay there for the rest of this week...but that all changed yesterday, because a CT scan which hadn't been expected to take place until after Christmas happened pretty much out of the blue yesterday afternoon...

I always knew our son should be doing art history documentaries for BBC4!

Until this morning, when my son emailed me the link, I didn't know the 2012 YouTube video, A Brief Guide to Futurist Art and Futurism - which he made and posted under a pseudonym after finishing his A-levels and before heading for university - existed. And I'd probably still be unaware of it had my son not recently discovered, to his utter astonishment , that it has been watched over 66,000 times!

Look, I know I'm his dad and everything...

Another health bulletin: the good news is that I won't be losing my hair! (And who is/was Garry Weston?)

Three weeks' ago, I had my first appointment with the oncologists at Hammersmith Hospital, where my wife and I learned that my inoperable pancreatic cancer meant that, without any form of intervention, I wouldn't be around to celebrate Christmas next year. A number of options were mentioned - one clinical trial involving chemotherapy and a series of endoscopic procedures during which the tumour would be "burned", another trial involving heavy duty chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and a standard course of weekly chemotherapy over several months. Last week, I returned to the hospital for a scan and a blood test, and this Thursday - having finally steeled myself to read all the literature they'd handed me on my first visit - I had separate chats with a surgeon involved in the trials, my oncology nurse, and my oncologist...

Health news update: Oh, bugger!

I feel a bit self-important posting all this information in a public space, but I'm so knackered, it would take me ages to email everyone who's been in touch individually. I had my first appointment with the oncologists at Hammersmith Hospital. My wife was with me, thank God, because the whole process took over three hours, there was so much stuff to take in that I'm sure I'd only have remembered a fraction of it if she hadn't noted down the key points - and I was so whacked after the first two hours that, if it hadn't been for Mrs. G, I'd probably still be slumped in a seat in one of the hospital waiting-areas trying to summon up enough energy to get home. Here, for those of you who are interested, is where I'm at:

I don't know about the rest of the NHS, but Hammersmith Hospital has improved beyond recognition since the late '80s

I experienced two week-long stays at Hammersmith Hospital about 30 years ago, both as a result of  attacks of acute pancreatitis. I'd suffered at least six previous attacks over a number of years, but a variety of GPs had misdiagnosed every damned one of them, whereas the Irish nurse who collected me from reception on my first hospital visit simply asked me where the pain was and immediately said, "Oh, that'll be pancreatitis". My experiences of Hammersmith back then were so depressing, I've always dreaded the thought of having to go back to hospital for an extended stay. On both occasions, I was stuck in an enormous, positively Dickensian, dormitory-style ward with between 25 and 30 other patients...

Apologies for my prolonged absence from this blog - heat, health and deadlines are to blame

I had a deadline brought forward on me two weeks ago, which resulted in spending three oppressively hot days slogging away at a review (see previous post) in my sweat-box of a study at the top of the house. As a result, I got to experience first-hand the delights of serious chronic fatigue, as opposed to the  relatively moderate version I normally suffer from: instead of waking up with only 25% of my normal energy supply, I was waking up with between 1% and 5%: one morning it took me almost an hour to summon sufficient oomph just to get out of bed (a common enough problem at university, I remember, but I'm now 65 and retired and I actually like getting out of bed). After a few days...

If Jean-Claude Juncker stumbles because of sciatica, why doesn't he use sticks?

I've suffered bouts of sciatica over the years, and...

My third - and final - Desert Island Discs selection: from Snow in San Anselmo to Uptown Funk

I produced my first Desert Island Discs selection in 2014, and the second a few weeks ago.  That last one took me up the late '70s. It's now the early '80s, and I'm on holiday with a girlfriend in a dull, dusty, unfriendly Spanish coastal town full of stolid German holidaymakers - because her parents own an apartment there. I hate the food, the beach is nothing but pebbles, and the evenings are made unbearable by the constant buzz-saw whine of kids riding mopeds up and down the strip below.  I'm overweight, unhappy, and drinking far too much. My writing career's heading down the crapper, the long-term relationship I'm in is floundering, my life's going nowhere, and I have absolutely no idea how to fix things. There's a tape of the Van Morrison LP Hard Nose the Highway in the apartment, and I find myself listening to one track - "Snow in San Anselmo" - over and over again. I should hate it, because it keeps breaking into jazz,  it's one of those pop songs which sounds religious without actually being so, and Van Morrison's "irritating vocal mannerisms" dial is set to 11. And yet...

The annual Bedford Park Festival kicks off at St Michael's this evening - and there's a Sara Grønmark original to be won!

My two favourite bits of the Bedford Park Festival (Tube: Turnham Green) are the open air mass on Acton Green on the second day of the Green Days Fete and Crafts Fair (10.30 on Sunday, 10th June this year). The other is the Summer Exhibition of buyable art...

I've spent a week slaughtering daddy longlegs

I have an aversion to spiders, moths, wasps, cockroaches and stag-beetles. Like most people, I'm generally fine with bumblebees, ladybirds and "cute" beetles - e.g. green, armour-plated shield bugs. If it looks pretty or amusing, I can live with it. I'm not fond of flies, but I don't have any fear of them - they're just annoying. But when it comes to daddy longlegs, I'm a fullblown phobic - these ugly, gangly, amorphous, pointless bastards induce panic-attacks. Once I'm aware there's one in the room, I have to leave or kill it...

An apology to recent commenters! Normal(ish) service has been resumed.

There I was, feeling a bit Billy-No-Mates because no one was posting any comments on this blog, only to discover that there's currently a problem with Google's Blogger platform - namely that some bloggers haven't been receiving the email notification that tell them a new comment has been posted. New comments have been appearing in my admin section - but I rarely visit it, relying entirely on email alerts since I started "moderating" comments last year in order to prevent crazed racists and hysterical SJW troublemakers from regularly leaving malodorous little piles of excrement on the site...

My Desert Island Discs Part 2 (of 3) - including Lotte Lenya, Wagner...and "Popcorn"!

Family members have been exchanging lists of songs that remind them strongly of specific times and places in their lives - happy and sad. I posted my version here three-and-a-half years ago. Feeling a bit left out, I've come up with an alternative version of that original selection - and (bad luck) there's a third on the way! As with my first go, these are by no means my favourite records - they're just ones I can't hear without instantly recalling a specific place, person or event (sometimes all three). I'll start in the purple-carpeted sitting room of my family's second rented home in Wimbledon, which looks out onto a shared garden and a mysterious, tree-shrouded Le Grand Meaulnes-style domain dotted with classical statues beyond it. I'm about nine, I suppose. I've found this...

Complicated tax rules just seem to create a lot of well-paid work for middle-men

When I began doing occasional daily shifts as a researcher on BBC Radio 2's The John Dunn Show 34 years ago, I had to sign individual one-page contracts for each day I worked in order to receive the miserable pittance I'd been offered. When the money eventually arrived in my bank account, it had been taxed at source. I hunted down the admin bod responsible for freelance contracts and asked him why the BBC hadn't paid me the full contracted amount and left me to take care of the tax as as part of my annual self-employed tax bill. The Inland Revenue insisted on it, he explained. But, I...

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - I've tried the NHS, and now it's back to the drawing board

Dr James Le Fanu's column in yesterday's Telegraph caught my attention. It started with the question: "When the findings of an authoritative scientific study into the efficacy of some treatment appear to be contrary to the experience of at least some of those taking it, which is likely to be more reliable?" Le Fanu then cites two examples, the first of which is a study whose results were published in the Lancet in 2011, which essentially viewed CFS as a psychological condition, and "found" that 60% of sufferers would benefit from a mixture of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and graded exercise therapy (i.e. a steady increase in the amount of exercise undertaken by patients) - and 20% would be cured outright. The NHS developed a course of treatment for CFS patients based on these findings. The only problem is that the Lancet (or PACE) trial has since been exposed...