Ago.
Once again one is faced with the question, though the 'disciplines' cannot ever properly credit the others.
Me for quite a few years, including to the expensively coiffured Grayling's face 4 years ago "it's all just Madame Bovary...". At least this year i got to a far better, perhaps the greatest ever, simplest exposition upon bling, screwing others over for position and.... conspicuous consumption... not being good for actual human beings. Even if they're lost to it.
Cant and vanity. Even if one vainly thinks others may have read half decent books so as to have some kind of shared cultural reference, at least i can provide a more simple and accurate one " Stendhal got EVERY single bit of silly arrogance over stuff and showing off, and thinking you are special due some dull service provided, in his utterly hilarious Scarlet and Black... every semi satirical word he wrote then, is today..."
But to think that the phrase 'conspicuous consumption' was popularised so intelligently back in 1899 even i am a bit shocked
The Theory of the Leisure Class
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001sdrt
(THE problem: yes a wise woman may properly regale a year back into my ear, with correct opprobrium along the lines of " thinking people who are wise enough to know where it has all gone wrong know the BBC are REALLY a huge bourgeois part of it..." but just now and again really interesting documentary or collaborative investigation comes along like Melvyn often manages, where we discover things in fact even more quickly and efficiently than by reading good books*)
Now to be sat in one of the modern day temples to it.... (i had no idea until i looked them up these gauche Dry Robes one sees everywhere - i didnt know they existed from my previous wanderation region - are not only fixed at far too many pounds for a very ugly and impractical coting of recycled plastic... but of course (as we knew years ago) requiring far more time in the washing machine with all that salt water ruboff the fact that showoff coverings made of 100% synthetics, which 100% for sure end up in the washing machine outflow ... in a big way, is somehow some kind of positive new recycling development really takes the ultimate biscuit, pissed on as it is discarded in the gutter...
ANyway the short and long i had no idea this level of conspicuous consumption exists everywhere... and so it makes me feel very ill. Even if as some genuine returned-to-rural simplicity mode person i have found it so extraordinarily crass i have attempted some months to turn it all into a photographic study and even some poems...
One day. But then if 99% are...(as the superb Bragg ends with even a yank apreciating " and nowadays weve got so so much more horrifically worse the way we [subtly - the outsider, moi, senses the subtlest hidey hidey from plain site cc behaviours] conspicuously consume") so totally lost to EVERYTHING worn, shown in public, and everything to do with a housepet... oh yes they call them 'dogs'... is 100% about being seen with labels, a fancy £15+ waterbottle even still when its pissed down endlessly for much of the last few months... everything ... i have NOTHING 'special' even my theoretically one special Toggi hat is a £1 charity shop passing grab...
Otherwise i haven't bought silly (official) 'walking boots' for years ... pumps quite adequate anyway drying out walking boots takes days ...if they have been used on the occasional day they may be 'needed'...
sunglasses, walking poles, fancy backpacks (my own charity shop £1 and fixed for years when straps go and holes appear, until they really do need replacing), and almost every dog must have most conspicuously at least £50 worth of accessories... a correct description as a £5 lead and collar has been quite adequate for 100s of years..... no more though!
And their phones.... i sit and stare for days on end at the horizon and occasional really good nature places in the region, and at them...as they appear on the horizon where there is a nice horizon, 95% have their heads in their silly small plastic phone ...ALL the time...
* the problem, though... i have sought intelligent real HUMANIST 'philosophy' for all my life - maybe a good definition: what REALLY causes a more centred peaceful inner life for humans...and better behaviour to others around them. But none of these 'academics' ever seem to manage to think for themselves, and add in obvious good literary thinking for example: " clearly the DAMAGE done to souls and even simple familial relations which should not be damaged, by consumption and all that cant and vanity, really is very very bad for humans.."
And by the way Edith Wharton - i stumbled across all of her books late 20s...ploughed through them. Now i know HE, Mr Velben, deployed a style of writing a bit cheeky and provocatively playful with words - to attempt to get through! And she ... was very influenced by his academic book, well maybe i DO get her far more clearly as i always wondered was she satirising a bit? in which case she is the ultra genius ten times better than mansplaining rather inconsistent Mister Dickens.... or is she one dimensional? And my feeling is in fact it was the former... which is a wonderful discovery.
Anyway whats the fundamental q? is one far more yank than one admits? as in true thinker yank the kind most superbly were attempting inteligent critique 124 years ago? or more European true modern humanist minds inspired? The Berhhards DE Beauvoirs, Sartres to Hesse and all the rest?... all this fabulous modern intellectual thought as aforementioned feeding further afield into Kusturica my year ago 'find'...
Or were the European newthinkers maybe a bit too surrealist and oblique and trying too hard.
Maybe i am more yank even if i would never wish to set foot there again .... been there, done it...
yank maybe being more call a thing a thing and maybe get it sorted out....for humanity's sake..
That one failed. IN which case a philosopher does understand almost no ideas ...work...
All i know is that the ideal life if one must inhabit these climes is that where one has organised life so as to get plenty of sunrises, and even some sunsets ... as sunshine energy is the only kind that makes one wish to carry on with all those ideas...
And that if people are the in fact small percentage who do have their own ideas - good, well thought through ones, they should stick together as 99% simply cannot.... think for themselves... being so so busy thinking (and yabbering even on holiday) about the STUFF...or 'look'..or vehicle...ot type of plastic wood they call surfboard.... or whatever absolute WASTE of themselves they, need...
I knew 14 years ago being made to not wish anything, is the key to a fre mind that can maybe be a little useful... except no one any more WANTS to think of useful actual real change...
that costs nothing, and involves no special new ideas
And i shall not get to my own stories even which are sweet and gentle and even totally provable as 100% real and true!
(in this world of every Walter Mitty scam artist has inhabited the attention-space for decades.... we knew that 40 years ago!... i even had a family member married to a movie star it was obvious even to a yokel like me the public space is full of every weird hustler ever .... and the internet only expanded all that)
(so interesting when their Shantaram - the literary god of the 18 year olds from a decade back, started to demand a few years ago that the internet be wiped of every word about him.... you know you are dealing with a rather Messianic suspicious confused multiple personality.... not me i constant for decades.... and have no secerts ever)
unless i can find an ally with a socket as no public spaces in this whole region (i have trawled them) seem ever to understand that quiet to think is a human right
(note to self dont forget.. the tall tales, a few days ago...a week ago in the quiet region, to hear the way they hissed and gossipped was ... REALITY ... " i have written to the GMC about him.... the way he sits in his shorts his hairy legs on display and flip flops... its inhumanly disrespectful to his patients... they have to look at his hairy legs... its awful i want him struck off!" ... funny that, crazy dinosaur body fetishist 'Muslim' cultures have been controlling very nastily by body fetsishism for ...ever....
Go to almost all of S America, or sweaty Sub Saharan Africa.... even ....women...can wear what the fuck they want ...always....
SO much to attempt to write nicely, but i maybe never will, which is sad for me as it was all i was planning for some months.. and i know i am quite good at. And best of all not one word is for me.... long ago i experienced the absolute fact of creative thought and even words: when someone ( BAFTA nom woman film director professor and mother in 2010 for example) says your words and stream of consciousness ket rip poetical way.....she 'gets' and finds engaging, its the worst thing ever for you. Far better no one ever says anything good ever. Then you stick to what is only you. And works for me...and i have high standards. I only read one new thing for some years - a mere 16 pages... i thought was good. And had me engaged. Still does.....all the time - she alone lives only in my head ... especially when i smile and think of her 'b' word.. "bird". And how of course she was right to stick to her version - more than 'artistically' but because no words should ever offend or be used as weapon or tool of control