The book presents the story story of an old lady who – left alone by her son who was at work – felt the spleen and turned on the radio.

John Smith offers to the reader a detailed account on the two hours that the old lady (her name is Clementine) spent in front of the radio set, changing the frequencie; it gave the author the opportunity to lead us in the world of radio waves (see the chapter covering the microwave background radiation of the Universe, a remnant of the Big Bang, the pages dealing with signals from distant galaxies and how they cross large void gaps), but also to outline a history of music. The narrative is particularly interesting, consisting of the interlacing of sounds and memories of Clementine.

A personal history of the music though, because the reader perceives that the old lady can be identified with the author. In the epilogue we learn that – while trying to prepare a tea – Clementine has caused an explosion and, thereafter, she died burned. Shaken, the radio set changes the frequency by itself and all can be heard in the loudspeaker is the background noise of the universe.

Stanislav Grof is a big naive. In a monist and materialist world, he seems convinced that the consciousness exists.

In the history of philosophy, consciousness was defined as the thing that makes us aware. For Descartes – the most authorized voice in the field – conscoiusness is immaterial and has no particular place inside the body; for the rationalist philoopher, it is the fundamental entity that makes possible the appearance of the awareness about the two innate ideas – God and the self.

I won’t spare my time refuting this notion (that Gilbert Ryle called the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine”, where the machine is of course the body, and the ghost, you guessed, the consciousness); anyways, the cartesian thesis has nothing to do with Grof’s ideas.

For Stanislaf Grof, the consciousness is not innate, but aquired. It actually is a sequel of our interactions with other individuals; according to this description, the consciousness is just like a sexually transmitted disease. Once aquired, the consciousness starts laying eggs, which generate the feelings. These feelings prevent us from being sociopaths or serial killers.

For Stanislav Grof, the psychology of the future is an exact science: a genealogy of the feelings.

But, it must be said, that Grofs began his reasoning with the undemonstrated premise that the psycholofy exists. On the contrary, the private language argument and the problem of mental states, clearly show us that psychology as a science is impossible. In reality, the psychology of the future is nonexistent; or it’s a genre d’écriture, just like the historical novel, the X-rated literature or the arithmetics.

Consciousness: past and future

What I definetily understood from Grof’s book is that we say we have consciousness in the sense we say we have head lice. Hopefully I’ll soon return to this matter, with an article named no more and no less then “Do bottles have a consciousness?”.

The book is an account of the sensations and feelings of a pair of siamese twins. The plot is placed in France, during the 1740s. The story’s heroes are Philomène and Elodie, the children of a baker – Paupine – from Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

As a baker assistant, Paupine got married to Sandrine, the daughter of his boss. Sandrine didn’t love Paupine. She loved Loîc instead, one of the apprentices, but her father wouldn’t care to listen to her complaints and arranged the wedding. The marriage was violently consumed and its fruits were the siamese twins.

The children were born holding tight together. They were united in the chest area and had only one heart.

The novel’s most impressive pages are those on which Sandrine fights against everybody and finally gets to keep her children. She directs towards them all the love and affection she couldn’t possibly give to somebody else.  She passionately cherishes them and, watching them, she fells she’s going to die. The other family members look at her suspiciously and with an unhidden disgust.

Under the attentive eyes of their moms, the children grow fast. They learn how to talk and, a few years later, even how to walk. They love singing. They quickly understant they got to stand each other. They’re a little unhappy because they can’t run and  instantly get tired, but they have the strength to resign.

The novel’s drama happens when the twins fall in their first love. Philomène and Elodie fall in love in the exact same moment, with the same person. Crushed by the two loves, the heart they share cracks and stops beating.

The book begins in 1619, in virginia, and ends in 1985, when NBC was proposing an universally successful show, namely Dallas.

Texas was a grueling land, when only drunks managed to survive. It was the land of cows, of cotton, of Southern pride, oil and xenophobia. In the Age of Cowboys, any stranger that came to Dallas was beaten or killed; the practice, abandonned for some time, was resumed in 1963, when the opportunity came up.

The author makes an apology for the Southern nationalism and an eulogy of the Dixiland traditionalism, isightfully writes about the saloon myth and skillfully waves a history of texan oil. She also describes and makes explicit the obscure politics of selected contemporary texan politicians.

At the end of the book, in a copious addendum, Perault summarizes the narrative tram of the Dallas TV show; the summary is accompanied by profound characters caracterizations (see especially the Digger Barnes’).

Image by Anyjazz65

Contrary to any expectations of the reading audience, Tom Hodgkinson refuses the temptations of the Marxist dialectics. His idle is far from being a monkey passing its days with the tail curled around a branch, swinging upside down. Tom Hodgkinson’s idle is a man, with fully human skills.

Idle book

The author build his book around the finding that nowadays people are conditioned by society to be active. Being active, people go to meetings, make loans, pay their house and car credits, while their lives unnoticeably pass by them, just like a fly flying by the gab of a sleepy cat. Tom Hodgkinson aims, through this manifesto-book, to wake up the cat and to give it an impulse to catch the fly.

Unfortunately, and for our eternal desolation, the author suffered from a laziness attack and didn’t felt like showing us the way any more.
The idle cat continues to sleep, and we are condemned to live our active lives spining around our tails in meetings and lines at the bank, slaving for our homes and cars.

gavagai and Thecat, on a sunday afternoon.