belated and tedious return. More to follow

Bloody hell,

three months since I posted anything. Busy. Doing what? Couldn't tell you.

Anyhow, Viz 190 popped through my slot a week or three back. A 30th birthday blow-out with Fat Slags, letters

"This morning on the Jeremy Kyle show, after giving one of the guests the bad news that their boyfriend had cheated on them, he said "This is the worst part of this job." And he kept a straight face! Fair play to the man."
Followed on page 11 by "Kyle Honoured with Cunt Status"- very very funny piece, but Kyle, he's laughing all the way to the bank.

Please leave my arse along pretty good, as is BNPea

Meddlesome Ratbag is approaching high art- just beautiful

Read and Loearn and Wonder and Look and Learn has an hilarious piece "Incredible Flying Machines".

Look, I am going to stop now. Viz. Is. Funny. Sits well alongside my London Review of Books subscription.

Viz 185

God I love Viz. It's one of my guilty pleasures. It will ALWAYS deliver at least one - usually many more - outright belly-laugh.

This issue has Baxter Basics MP fiddling his expenses, and getting his grandmother to save his bacon.

PC Hubble and PC Bubble "they're spoiling for trouble" (I do miss PC Hopper, bent copper!)

Drunken Bakers are as Beckettian as ever.

Jack Black and the Goodwin Manor Mystery is comedy genius "It's gettign a little chilly in here isn't it? Jack, put anotehr wodge of notes on the fire, would you, there's a chap... No, not the tens, the twenties give out more warmth?"

The Modern Parents delivers the sharpest and nastiest laughs, as usual. John Fardell skewers, as usual, eco-hypocrisies.

And Roger's Profanisaurus, well, What Can You Say?

"you can only fuck with the cock you've got"- exclam. Useful get-out clause for men defending themselves against accusations of inadequacy

"jizzabyte"- A unit of computer memory equivalent to approximately 1 million million gigabytes. 1 jizzabyte is defined as the approximate amount of hard drive space occupied by the pornography downloaded by an average teenage youth in a single calendar month.

"face like a rent boy's ringpiece" descriptive of someone who looks life has given them a regular, relentless and vigorous shafting.

Viz 183

One of my not-so-guilty pleasures forced its way through my letter box yesterday; viz, the latest issue of Viz (this link apparently takes you to a "less shit viz website")

I read most of it on the stepper at the gym, polishing off Roger Mellie at home.

Not a classic, but still has its laugh-out loud moments.
"The Bee Man of Big Ben" is a sort of surreal piss-take of the Dam Busters, exquisitely drawn. Huge talent spent on something, well, childish, but revelling rightly in that childishness. That's Viz all over...

No hilarious letters for once- usually a strong point.

A fun "Photo Romance" about rich people not enjoying the credit crunch.

More Godot-esqe bleakness with the Drunken Bakers (for some reason one of them self-medicating flour for facial cuts caused by landing in broken glass had me almost falling off the stepper. Also beautifully drawn).

A standardly fun Profanisaurus.
Cleverest is probably "Excalibird: A magnificient piece that a chap manages to pull successfully, against all the odds."

And the highlight? Well, I suppose the Critics, who go from writing about how the recession is(n't) causing great Art to be produced to stacking shelves at Sainsco themselves... And then...

Peter Gowan, Viz 181, Exhausted Nature...

Peter Gowan is

“Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University and course director of the MA in International Relations. He is a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, on the advisory boards of other journals and is a member of the America Discussion Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.”

He's a startlingly smart guy, IMHO. His article "Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe"(New Left Review 1/213 Sept/Oct 1995) is brilliant on the political choices around how Eastern Europe was dealt with after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

His book The Global Gamble (1999) has heaps of useful things in it, on what he calls “the Dollar Wall Street regime”. One day I'll blog on suzereignty...

Often my NLR's get left in their plastic wrapper for a bit. However, when latest thudded onto the mat with an editorial by Gowan “Crisis in the Heartland”, it got put in the "urgent gym reading" pile. There's HEAPS of good stuff in it. Tasters-

"All modern economic systems, capitalist or not, need credit institutions to smooth exchanges and transactions; they need banks to produce credit money and clearance systems to smooth the payment of debts. These are vital public services, like a health service. They are also inherently unstable: the essence of a bank, after all, is that it does not hold enough funds to cover all the claims of its depositors at any one time. Ensuring the safety of the system requires that competition between banks should be suppressed. Furthermore, policy questions as to where credit should be channelled are issues of great economic, social and political moment. Thus public ownership of the credit and banking system is rational and, indeed, necessary, along with democratic control. A public-utility model along these lines can, in principle, operate within capitalism. Even now the bulk of the German banking system remains in public hands, through savings banks and Landesbanken. The Chinese financial system is overwhelmingly centred on a handful of huge, publicly owned banks and the Chinese government does indeed steer the credit strategies of these banks. It is possible to envisage such a public-utility model operating with privatized banks. The post-war Japanese banking system could be held to have had this character, with all its banks strictly subordinated to the Bank of Japan’s policy control via the ‘window-guidance system’. The post-war British commercial bank cartel could also be viewed as broadly operating within that framework, albeit raking off excessive profits from its customers."

and

"This crisis of the American and European set-ups will no doubt have two intellectual effects. Firstly, to raise the credibility of the Chinese model of a state-owned, bank-centred financial system. This is the serious alternative to the credit models of the Atlantic world. The maintenance of capital controls and a non-convertible currency—which China has—are essential for the security of this system. Secondly, as the crisis unfolds, broader discussion of the public-utility model seems likely to return to political life, re-opening a debate that has been silenced since 1991."

I think there IS doubt about its intellectual effects. I think there's no guarantee a proper debate will be had. But then again, in a debate on this topic with Gowan, I'd back him every time...

Viz is something which, if I had any guilt/shame I'd call a “guilty pleasure.” It was the cause of most of the early rifts between me and my now-wife (I've found new ways to annoy her, mostly to do with not doing my share of the housework...) I've subscribed for a long long time, back before you saved any money doing so. It's gotten better over the years, I think. More frequent, funnier. I don't buy these myths of the golden age, and narratives of decline.

True, it's uneven, but you usually get a bellylaugh or two. Occasionally three. This time mine came while I was on the stepper, which was a bit disconcerting for me and t'other punters. It was during a cartoon in which Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is trying to leave an apology on Andrew Sachs' answer machine, but keeps getting drowned out by farting elephants and “swearing” presenters etc. It's entirely formulaic, a little puerile and very very funny. I don't know if I was laughing with the cartoonist, at him, or at myself for laughing at it. And I didn't care.

Other good bits- “Ban this Filthy BBC filth”
Saint versus Saint- Santa Claus trying to get the ascetic Saint Augustine to accept consumerism
Tasha's mam- all your class prejudices at chavs/scallies etc rolled into one, magnified and reflected. God bless ratboy, eh.
Christmas with the Drunken Bakers- makes Samuel Beckett look like Benny Hill.
Raffles the Gentleman Thug with what looks to me to be some quite rude Italian bits
The incomparable Roger Mellie writing a misery memoir
John Fardell's “The Critics” getting another comeuppance when they rub a genie up the wrong way (oh yes they do)
Sid the Sexist with a horribly wrong-placed wet dream

A couple of Profanisaurus entries-
“to punt from the Cambridge end”
“shituation”- a bad situation
worm-burping

Brilliant stuff.

Finally, I just had time to start reading more about the Exhaustion of Nature, in Monthly Review.

New Left Review, Viz, Studs Terkel, Cystic Fibrosis

There's a bunch of words you don't see often together. Anyhow, here's a fascinating rundown of my fascinating day (irony alert).

After a pretty sleepless night (I got to read most of the book about the participaive web), I saw on the bbc's tinterweb site that the Aussies are struggling against South Africa in the dead rubber in Sydney. I may not see that Matthew Haydn in next year's Ashes, but then again, I may. Made the missus her first cup of tea, did the washing up, walked to walmart/Asda with the plastic recycling to walmart, bought vaseline for chaffing prevention.(fat bastard). Used the automated till- one more weapon in thinning out the workforce, eh? On the stepper for 80 minutes

Read Peter Gowan's New Left Review essay on the financial crises. He and I both get the FT, but he 'gets it'. Then for something a little heavier I read Viz (of which more separately- it made me laugh out loud and actually cry a little, which is kind of embarrassing on the stepper at the gym). Then started in on a piece from November's Monthly Review on soil and nature and capital.

Came home collecting cans as I did in days of yore. The rumour goes that one can recycled is equivalent to three hours of a TV on standby. There's a lot of TV hours on standby between the gym and home...

Read my bible for the King James Version posting (here).

Went on the March, via the newsagent for an FT and then a vegetarian pizza. So managed to miss both the pre- and post-march speeches. What a shame.

Back here and typed up the Terkel quotes, did a review. Woohoo.

Then got stuck into finally cracking out a crude but (in)effective CAECUM site. I am semi-serious about a Campaign Against Enduring Counter-productive & Useless Meetings. We really are lousy at them.

Sigh.

Oh, then to work to treat a young lady with cystic fibrosis, a cruel cruel disease.

Right. Separate posts about Gowan and Viz to be done...