Stephanie’s Pillowbook

True Selves by Mildred L. Brown & Chloe Ann Rounsley, subtitled Understanding Transsexualism: For Families, Friends, Coworkers and Helping Professionals, was written by a sex therapist (with the help of a journalist) who specialises in treating transgendered people. It is obviously a work directed primarily at those who are involved with transsexuals in one capacity or other rather than at transsexuals themselves. Indeed, the latter are unlikely to learn anything new from this book. It is a general introduction couched in a colloquial style and designed for a non-specialist audience who may never previously have given gender issues a moment’s thought. As such it has been attacked for being too middle-of-the-road and for not addressing more radical ideas and practices. The author does admit that those she sees in her San Jose practice are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, well-educated and employed. But if you keep that in mind the book is still useful for its target readership. I for one do not wish to embark on a discussion of theoretical controversies when I come out to people. I just want them to have enough understanding to appreciate that what I’m doing with my life has a reason. In any case, any problems that arise in coming out - on both sides - are far more likely to be emotional than intellectual. Indeed, it was recognition of these emotional difficulties which prompted the author’s own interest in the lives of transsexuals. So this book serves its purpose better, I feel, than some essay which addresses more accurately and interestingly the finer points of transgender theory.

However, it is this untheoretical approach which has led to the other main criticism of the book - that it views transsexuals as victims. I have some sympathy with that criticism. As a therapist the author does seem to have a rather excessive regard for therapy itself. She is scathing about what she calls “knowing patients” who treat therapy purely as a means to an end. She seems to view all transsexuals as in urgent and essential need of therapy and indeed sees transition as more or less a long therapeutic process. I’m sure I’m not the only one to be surprised by all the talk in this book of group sessions and roleplay and who knows what. Well, I have had no therapy whatsoever and I don’t expect to have any. It is true that circumstances have forced many of us to live lives of pain and confusion which take great effort to overcome. Being transsexual, though, doesn’t demand therapy - which this book appears to argue - however much help it may provide some. We are not all the same. Some of the younger generation, for instance, are far more positive and practical in their attitude. I would say that differences in life-experience, age, culture and so on show that transsexuality is not a static condition and that the therapeutic model that the author adheres to is socially determined and not universally appropriate.

The description of growing up transsexual that the author presents, with many moving personal stories, does resonate with me, however, and I’m sure with many other readers. The fear that one is freakish or mad, the incongruity between what one feels and what one is told, the misery of pretence and being forced to act a part, the constant loneliness and feeling of alienation, the fear of complete rejection, the internalisation of conflict and withdrawal from society, the escape into books and other imaginary worlds, the desperate search for solutions and coping mechanisms, the tendency towards alcohol abuse, drug addiction, suicide and other self-destructive acts, and so on - I was familiar with all this from an early age until I was past 40. Today I do want to tell my family, to show them that my desire to transition is not a whimsical or trivial or temporary one. But what I also want them to know is that transition, for all it’s difficulties, is mostly successful and offers opportunities for happiness and fulfillment that cannot be acquired otherwise. This book seems to be well suited for explaining that. I recommended it, anyway, to one of my sisters… I don’t think she’s read it, though….

The most tiresome, but unfortunately most common, statement to come across when you are arguing with someone is, “well, I am entitled to my opinion.” It is a dismal proposition and one that makes my heart sink a little every time I hear it. What does the phrase mean exactly? All too often it appears to be merely a conversation-stopper. Whenever someone says it I understand them to mean, “I’ve said my piece and I’m now shutting my ears to anything anyone says to the contrary.” It is an asinine, wishy-washy proposition which serves only to make so much debate maddening and frustrating. Yet when I have complained about it before I have been swiftly and forthrightly accused of being arrogant, confused, inconsistent, a proponent of political correctness and an enemy of free speech. So I feel justified in reposting the argument one more time - with a reminder that there is nothing controversial here, it’s all orthodox and very basic critical thinking.

Let’s spell one thing out at the start: the word “entitled” in the phrase “I am entitled to my opinion,” actually has two quite distinct meanings. In the first case, you are entitled to your opinion in a political, or legal, sense. That is, you are free to believe whatever you like and to say that you believe it. To repeat, you possess the right to have any opinion and to express it publicly. In the second case, which we might call philosophical or epistemological, you are only entitled to an opinion if you can justify it using logical argument or presenting supporting evidence. Obviously not every opinion can be justified in that way. What happens, however, is that entitlement in the first sense is confused with entitlement in the second sense as though every opinion is in fact justifiable.

The political right to express an opinion is usually trivial. In most arguments the right to an opinion is not in question. It goes without saying. If nobody has challenged your right to free speech why assert it? There is no point in repeatedly claiming a right that nobody has disputed. Furthermore, it adds nothing to an argument. Your rights cannot be adduced in support of a statement. Your expression of a right to an opinion does not count as evidence of its veracity. The one does not follow from the other. You are free to believe that the world is ruled by alien reptiles if you so wish. But your freedom to believe that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the truth of that belief. Time and again, though, the argument is made: I believe the earth is ruled by alien reptiles… I am entitled to my opinion. We see arguments of that form by the thousand. There are two ways to interpret that phrase. It either means: I believe the world is ruled by alien reptiles AND I am ALSO entitled to my opinion. In which case the second part is surely irrelevant - it has no bearing on the first part and there is generally no reason to bring it up given that you are freely expressing yourself. Or it means: I believe the world is ruled by alien reptiles AND THEREFORE I am entitled to that opinion. That, I’m afraid, is a non sequitur (”it does not follow“) - the second part of the phrase cannot be logically derived from the first and so as an argument it is fallacious.

Thus the claim “I am entitled to my opinion” is not an argument.Yet it is commonly believed that the right to free expression is equivalent to a right to have one’s every expression taken seriously as a claim to truth. The idea of free speech does not, and never has, included the demand that one’s speech be accepted as truthful. So why do people insist on using their right to free speech as though it somehow proves what they are saying? Why do people act as though their political entitlement to believe anything they like precludes them from being challenged on their beliefs? Why do they apparently think that the very assertion of the principle that everyone is entitled to an opinion is equivalent to the demand that any and every opinion of theirs is worthy of respect?

One reason seems to be that many believe that all opinions are precious - purely because they belong to the person who thought them up. They appear actually to be identifying their opinions with their very self. Indeed, one often gets the impression that they see their opinions as something unchangeable and vital which have grown out of them in some natural or supernatural fashion. It becomes: attack my opinions and you attack me, my very being. It’s as though their opinions are precious simply because they are theirs. And as precious property they are to be held on to at all cost against every threat.

I accept freedom of conscience - you may believe, in your heart of hearts, anything you please. But when you express yourself to the world at large your ideas, opinions and arguments are going to be in conflict with those of others. Now, if you have the right to express yourself, what can you expect? What are the rights, duties, obligations of those people to whom you are expressing yourself? That really is the crux of the matter. Am I obliged to accept anything you say is true? Only if there is evidence to support your assertions. Am I obliged to listen to you? On what grounds? Surely I don’t have to. Life is too short to give a fair hearing to every single opinion and idea that is expressed. Especially when so many of them are plain cranky. Am I obliged to respect your opinion? Or are there higher claims such as truth and justice which oblige me, at least sometimes, to challenge you? Surely there are.

If you wish to believe that the earth is ruled by alien reptiles I really don’t care. Go ahead and think what you like. I am not in favour of censorship, I do not want the thought police to round up alien-reptile believers, I do not demand that their blogs and forums be shut down and their books burned. However, I do agree that someone who believes that nonsense has disqualified themselves from rational debate. They have no supporting evidence for their ideas and they reject a mountain of evidence against them. So why should I respect that particular opinion? I will tolerate it and I will tolerate you for holding that opinion. But if you try to convince me of its truth I will argue against you, because it is factually incorrect, irrational and frankly rather idiotic. To give it any respect would be to lend it credence as a justified belief. It would be asking me to accept it as valid. I cannot do it. Of course this is an extreme and ridiculous example and there are in reality many grey and contentious areas which are much less clear-cut. But then those are the areas worth debating and discussing and that can only be done by challenging and evaluating opinions and beliefs and points of view. Demanding respect simply short circuits the whole process. Yet it is those who persist in argument who are accused of arrogance and of stifling dissent!

I have been accused of both, most irritatingly when I poured scorn on Julie Burchill’s tirade against the transgendered which someone quoted in full on a flickr forum last year. Burchill’s article is a malicious and grossly unfair attack on both transvestites and transsexuals based on ill-informed caricature and inaccurate assumptions. Yet all most people could think of saying in response is “oh well, she’s entitled to her opinion.” It surprised me that the victims of Burchill’s hatchet-job should be more upset at my abusive criticism of her then anything she wrote about them. But so far does the ideology of one’s entitlement to an opinion go. It seems what really shocks is that I was, supposedly, disputing Julie Burchill’s rights to freedom of expression by ridiculing her argument and pointing out its faults. Criticism amounts to silencing one’s opponent. Apparently. How have I done that, though? How could I do that? How am I even capable of censoring her? It’s sheer nonsense. Julie Burchill has been a journalist for thirty years; she has published, I guess it must be, thousands of articles in national newspapers and journals; for some years she edited her own journal; she has published a number of books; she has appeared on national television; she is now, I believe, releasing regular podcasts into cyberspace. This is one person who has shouted her opinions continuously to the world for several decades. She has exercised her rights to free speech to the full. The article of hers I took such objection to was published six years ago in The Guardian to a readership of, what, several hundred thousands at least. It was reprinted more recently on The Guardian’s website which has a potential readership of billions. And it has been copied onto a few internet forums. Now, could someone please explain to me how my comments - read by a few dozen people at most - are silencing Julie Burchill or denying her the right to free expression?

What has happened when any form of questioning itself becomes suspect? It is worth pointing out that the political demand for free speech was originally formulated as a right to criticise, a right to challenge the authority of State and Church, and was based on the perceived ability of any human being to use their reason in deciding any question. There are those today, however, who see any doubt or interrogation as a form of cultural terrorism. Respect for all beliefs is an essential platform in what Frank Furedi calls The Culture of Flattery. It doesn’t matter any more what you believe just so long as you feel confident and content in possessing that belief. While postmodernism is hardly intellectually respectable these days, a watered-down version of it has entered the realm of received wisdom. As a result the relativistic idea of a personal knowledge and experience that values alternative narratives and diverse perspectives rather than truth is now enshrined in current dogma. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about all this is that it seems to generate, and rather imperialistically maintain, a certain self-satisfied but absolutely false consensus - as though there isn’t really any significant conflict between people or contradiction between ideas. It is an attempt to avoid confrontation. The notion of consensus has been reduced to an emotional condition in which we are all happy to agree that we disagree. Nobody must have their preconceptions upset. Social harmony nowadays trumps truth.

Ultimately, the over-rating of the right to an opinion equalises all opinions as though one were no better than another. But the defence is purely formal. There is no substance to it. Furthermore it involves one in a curiously circular argument: if all ideas are valid, then it is valid to think that all ideas are not valid - which contradicts the assertion that all ideas are valid. It’s absurd. There is surely here a trivialisation of both thought and freedom. As though everything is just someone’s opinion . Thinking, properly speaking, has always been distinguished from the holding of an opinion. A thought is not the same as some vague notion which happens to drift through your mind. A thought is not a prejudice or an assumption or a taste. A thought demands time and engagement, welcomes critique and lives off doubt. A parade of opinions is an evasion of argument. What happens, in effect, is that every discussion gets reduced to the level of “which ice cream do you prefer?” - “I like vanilla” - “I like chocolate” - “I like strawberry“. And surely there are nobler conceptions of freedom than simply the valuing of passing whims? Isn’t freedom more than just being able to choose a over b or c? Are we to be satisfied with such an impoverished ideal? Doesn’t freedom involve a sense of responsibility and self-determination that seeks to escape from the shackles of the past and the pre-conceived towards some greater end?

PS. To sum up this post in one sentence: far too many people seem to believe that asserting their right to hold an opinion is, in some way, a defence of their argument; it is not.

Some time ago I was tagged by Marion - to come up with “eight random facts/habits about” myself. I decided to list eight of my favourite television programmes.

1) I don’t really share the rosy-tinged nostalgia for ’70s sitcoms common among my generation. There were a few good ones, though - Dad’s Army, for instance, was always a favourite in our house and Fawlty Towers, of course, was a classic. But the best, so far as I am concerned, was Rising Damp. It starred Leonard Rossiter as the sleazy landlord of some squalid bedsits. His character, Rigsby, was obnoxious, a boor, a scruff, a miser, and a bigot, forever interfering in his tenants’ lives. His performances were pure genius. Just to recall the sneeringly camp way he pronounced the name of Miss Joan’s fiancé, Desmond, has me in stitches. The sets were wonderful, too, dreary, faded, rundown, dull and dusty - a reminder of how much wartime austerity still lingered on in 1970s England.

2) I didn’t watch much television in the early ’80s - I was more interested in going out - but I never missed Brideshead Revisited. A strange taste, perhaps, for one who had been a punk not long before and still considered herself an anarchist? Well, I thought the accusations of snobbery hurled at the work irrelevant, really. The slightly decadent, luxuriantly aesthetic, elegiac mood of Brideshead Revisited certainly touched something in me. I read all Waugh’s novels around this time and revelled in them. While I’ve read the book half a dozen times over the years it is the filmed version of Brideshead which has nourished several of my fantasies. The second episode takes place in Venice, for instance. It has never looked more dreamy. If I ever get married it is where I want to go for my honeymoon. Not a very likely occurrence, I know. The same episode stars Stéphane Audran as Cara - shall I confess that it is her portrayal which has always been my model of “how to be a lady”?

3) It was when I was at Kent University that Dynasty became my favourite television programme, indeed the only programme I watched regularly. For me it is still the supreme soap opera - highly camp, gloriously absurd, terribly over-acted. I watched other soaps over the years, Dallas and all the rest, but what could compete with the home-knitted sweaters the gay characters were forced to wear, Joan Collins’ bitchiness and shoulder-pads, the catfights, the hysterical melodrama, the physical resemblance between Blake Carrington and Jacques Derrida, the distressing frequency of amnesia, the way they all kept the fire in their living-rooms lit even at the height of summer, the constant illustration of the dictum that money does not buy good taste, the Moldavian Massacre. It was all… delicious.

4) And that leads me to the other essential programme of the 80s which was Soap. No one talks about Soap these days but I thought it was hilarious. There were other American comedies I enjoyed later on: Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, The Simpsons. The last two in particular were so intelligent and funny. Soap I liked because it was wonderfully over-the-top. It was a sit-com which satirised soap operas. All the clichés were there - murders, affairs, suicide attempts, disappearances, madness, amnesia, kidnapping, the Mafia and the Moonies and South American revolutionaries, possession by evil spirits and alien abduction. My favourite character was the teenager Chuck who used his ventriloquist dummy to say spitefully cruel but amusing things about everybody else.

5) I have no hesitation in proclaiming Twin Peaks as the best television programme ever! I really was obsessed with that series. Perhaps I’ll do a longer post about it one day. For now just a few things. It disappointed me that so many people missed the whole point - and finding out who killed Laura Palmer was not the point. At the time I read only one article by someone who seemed to get it. They suggested that Twin Peaks resembled an ancient Roman novel in mixing any number of heterogenous genres. It was no coincidence, I’m sure, that the series was made at the height of interest in Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque - which relies on that very collision of modes and genres. It was thus precisely that which most claimed to be the programme’s great weakness which was in fact its great strength and fascination. Anyway, while I identified myself with Norma Jennings, I liked the FBI characters best. The fantastically sarcastic and misanthropic Albert. David Duchovny’s cross-dressing agent - I would suggest the most (the only?) convincing portrayal on film of a transvestite. And the wonderful Agent Cooper. Just listening to his voice makes me feel as giggly and flirty as Audrey Horne. Here, for your pleasure, is the tape that Cooper makes for Diane as he drives into Twin Peaks for the first time:

6) One of my old teachers liked to say that if you wanted to acquire a perfect grasp of English grammar you should study the works of P. G. Wodehouse. He was absolutely correct. In addition Wodehouse’s writing also illustrates the transformative quality of art in the way it elevates the utterly trivial into the realm of beauty. What unites, of course, the perfect use of grammar and this artistic alchemy is a sense of style. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the television version of some of Wodehouse’s stories, Jeeves and Wooster. I recall at the time there was some quibbling about the casting but I think it was ideal. Hugh Laurie plays Bertie Wooster not simply as an upper-class twit but as a bumbling idiot with oodles of charm. Stephen Fry, meanwhile, as Jeeves, is exceedingly competent and smart, effortlessly more aristocratic in manner than any of the ‘gentlemen’, and just so slightly sinister. The ridiculous story-lines are wonderfully plotted, every scene however farcical is played straight, and every caricature has the ring of truth. On top of all that I just adore the clothes and the furnishings. The art deco sets are a joy to the eye (and the major attraction of the similarly produced Poirot, too).

7) I am a big fan of American cop shows, NYPD Blue and Law and Order in particular, but Homicide: Life on the Streets was surely the greatest. It was bleak and beautifully filmed. Some episodes were so intense they were almost too much to watch. It had great characters - the cynical Munch, the sensitive pretty-boy Bayliss, and best of all the existentially-troubled Catholic Pembleton, a highly intelligent and ethical man who while being a brilliant detective seemed to be floundering in the cess-pit of criminality surrounding him.

8) My current favourite television programme is, without a doubt, Desperate Housewives. Actually, when it was first aired I suspected it would be to my taste but something or other, I can’t remember what now, prevented me from seeing the first few episodes. A recent conversation, though, with a woman who told me I would love it prompted me to catch up on all the old episodes. And I do love it! It is so well written and observed I could hug myself with glee. Bree is my favourite character. I know she is a terribly uptight control freak with serious issues but be honest, isn’t there a tiny part of you which is secretly envious of her whole perfect Stepford Wife act? Or is that just me? If nothing else there is a lesson or two for the transgendered about successfully concealing one’s flaws!

If you had asked me when I was 15 or 16 who my favourite group was I would have answered: The Mothers of Invention. It was Frank Zappa’s solo album, Hot Rats, that I heard first, however. That was thanks to my art teacher at school, Mr Lawton, of the brown smocks and the hexagonal purple-tinted glasses, who played rock records throughout his lessons and claimed to be able to play the sitar. I learned nothing whatsoever about art from Mr Lawton but I discovered a whole lot about rock music… It was the cover of Hot Rats that attracted me first, it was freaky - it just shouted “cool” and “this is underground“. As for the music, it was melodious jazz-rock with a certain ungainly and sleazy edge. For a couple of years I was hooked - and then the doubts began. What doubts? Well, nobody has put it better than Ian Penman in one of the most splendidly vituperative reviews ever written. Absolutely devastating and unanswerable in my opinion. (You can read it on The Wire’s website). I still have a soft spot, though, for the Mothers of Invention stuff from 1968-69, the era of Uncle Meat and Hot Rats.

From the latter, here is Peaches en Regalia:

2) Another of the regular visitors to Mr Lawton’s classroom record-deck was Captain Beefheart. The Captain’s brand of controlled weirdness has stood the test of time a lot better than Frank Zappa’s, I believe. Trout Mask Replica was always the classic - and again it was the freaky cover which first attracted me. My favourite album, though, was Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

Here’s I Love You, You Big Dummy:

3) Jimi Hendrix was unavoidable at this time even as the music world was filling up with his clones and copyists. I remember people at school preferring Joe Walsh and Robin Trower and other bores (I still shudder at the memory of that Peter Frampton Live album that they used to play in the sixth-form common-room constantly). No, give me Hendrix any day. Again, like Beefheart, it’s the real thing.

The solos in All Along The Watchtower are to my mind incredibly sexy (as was the man himself!):

4) The Grateful Dead I owe to Mr Lawton, too. He played the live albums often in class. I went through a stage when I was 16 of reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Doors of Perception and lots of Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Alan Watts as well as reminiscences of Haight-Ashbury and Yippie manifestoes; playing Grateful Dead records was part of all that. Fortunately, the phase didn’t last very long. Anyway, 1976 was the year of my O-Levels and the album Blues For Allah in particular was the soundtrack to those exams and the hot summer after. My favourite song, though, has always been The Eleven. The Grateful Dead were notorious for meandering rather aimlessly for forty minutes and then suddenly everything would come together and they would fly. Listening to this glorious track again I am transported, I’m a tripped-out, long-haired, groovy hippie chick, eyes shut, beads swinging as I sway to those soaring guitars. Positively Dionysian!

From Live/Dead, The Eleven:

5) Another song that reminds me so much of the summer of 1976 is Midnight At The Oasis by Maria Muldaur. Exactly the kind of soft, laidback, adult-oriented rock that punk wanted to blow away forever! Yet I adore her voice and this song is so lovely, it’s sexy and feminine and just made for summer nights and long dresses and glasses of Chardonnay in sweet-smelling gardens.

So, Midnight at the Oasis:

6) The class I enjoyed most at school - or perhaps I should rephrase that: the only class I enjoyed at school (by the time I got to my mid-teens anyway), was music. Four periods in a row! Wonderful. One day, the teacher invited Mr Kenny (who usually taught English) to come in and tell us about jazz. He had a fantastic record collection and used it to take us through the whole history from Jelly Roll Morton’s piano rolls to Miles Davis and the electrified Bitches Brew. Somewhere in the middle of the lesson Mr Kenny played a Charlie Parker record. He prefaced it by saying that Parker was perhaps the greatest genius jazz had produced but that his music was an acquired taste. I wonder what he meant? Because out of all the records he played this was the one that spoke most directly to me: raw emotion clothed in a form as strict as a sonnet. I can still feel myself back in the music-room on that May day staring out of the window as I heard these astonishing and beautiful sounds for the first time.

This was the record - Parker’s Mood:

7) After that inspiring lesson I used to borrow records from Mr Kenny often and built up a small collection myself. Unlike other genres my tastes in jazz are quite specific: there are some records and musicians I love - and the rest I hate (or at least, am totally indifferent to). One of the records I bought was Afro-Blue Impressions by John Coltrane and I loved that in particular for the incredible version of My Favourite Things where Coltrane’s soprano saxophone soars like an albatross over a raging ocean. How a silly song from the Sound of Music can be transformed into this long poetic maelstrom of sound is quite astounding. It is that transformation of banality in which consists the marvellous and magical power of art.

My Favourite Things (live in 1963):

8) A group I was very interested in was the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This was beyond Mr Kenny’s idea of jazz and my introduction came instead from the Melody Maker and Charles Fox’s excellent jazz programme on Radio 3. This was the era of the New York loft jazz scene. The Art Ensemble married the ecstatic free improvisation of that milieux with a profound knowledge of the entire history of jazz back to its African roots. The results were intoxicating.

Here is Nonaah from Fanfare of the Warriors:

9) Charles Fox was also my guide to the European free improvisation scene, in particular to the music of Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Paul Rutherford. It is the latter’s record, The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie, which stuck in my memory most. A whole album of avant-garde solo trombone improvisations does not sound the most inviting prospect, perhaps. Yet it is a fascinating record, not at all boring, but colourful, inventive, virtuosic, amusing.

Here is the first track, Noita Neila:

10) I have mentioned how much I relied on certain programmes on Radio 3. There was one other which was a constant stimulation in the mid 1970s and that was The Pied Piper. This was a short programme aimed at children that went out on weekdays and was presented by the most infectiously enthusiastic person I’ve ever come across, David Munrow. He was a fantastic educator who could make any subject fascinating. His specialty was early music and he was very keen to promote the virtues of the sackbut and the crumhorn and that kind of thing. The Pied Piper, though, covered an extremely wide range of music from all eras and parts of the world. It was impossible not to be caught up in Munrow’s genuine enjoyment. I would listen enthralled. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1976…

From the album, Two Renaissance Dance Bands, here is Susato’s Pavane Mille Regretz performed by the Early Music Consort of London conducted by David Munrow:

1) Not so long ago I went down to the town centre, when I was still living in Stevenage, to visit the local library and I ended up buying a couple of books. For 20p each I got George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (which I have somehow never got round to reading before) and Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking - classics both. It always feels like a shady deal - picking off the library’s depleting stock for a pittance. I walk away ashamed. What are they doing selling books? A few years ago I requested Kant’s Critique of Judgement because I needed to consult it. I knew from an old search of the catalogue that one of the libraries in Hertfordshire had a copy. I couldn’t have it now though. Why not, I asked? It appears no-one has taken the book out in the last five years and so it was sold! Its unpopularity does not surprise me - the Critique of Judgement is an extremely hard work to understand. But to sell the only copy in the county because hardly anyone is interested in or capable of reading it! Isn’t it the whole purpose of libraries to store and preserve literature for the benefit of the whole community?

Many of us in Great Britain, lacking a privileged background, managed to get some sort of education thanks to three great institutions now, it would appear, in terminal decline: the grammar school, the BBC, and the public library. I relied very heavily on the latter in particular. So far as music was concerned, then as now my great passion, the shelves in Stevenage library were packed with Eulenberg miniature scores, almost the entire piano literature, dozens of books on every composer, and hundreds of LPs. It was a splendid collection for a small town and I worked my way through the lot, just about, as a teenager. Now? The scores have gone - packed off to a central, but largely inaccessible, Resource Centre. You can order them, and pay for the privilege - that is, if you can find what you want using the very limited search engine. No one can browse any more as I did when I was young and let their curiosity move them . It is a great shame. The classical LPs were sold off long ago; these days there are just a handful of crossover CDs. In the seventies the music books took up a whole wall; in the noughties the classical section barely fills half a shelf.

That is, of course, the great question facing anyone in a library today: where are the books? Well, we are told that dusty, boring books are not what libraries are about in these exciting times. It’s all information services and meeting places now. Everything must be contemporary and relevant. There are fewer books to read in Stevenage but there are forty shiny new computers for people to send e-mails and download ringtones. It is rather depressing. Can one really make a good case for public money to be spent on providing free-of-charge what is widely available elsewhere? To allow relatively well-off people to browse Amazon and ebay? There should be computers in libraries - particularly for access to catalogues, collections, official documents, journals and so on that aren’t easily accessible to individuals. I just don’t think new library services should come at the expense of books. And they do. The library in Stevenage doesn’t have a third of the books it used to stock. What annoys me about the selling-off of books is the philistine motive behind it: that any book not borrowed in a limited period of time is surplus to requirements. To my mind it is those books not wanted by everybody which a library should be stocking - not the latest best-sellers which they now buy in bulk to satisfy a temporary demand. It has reached the level of scandal in some places. Liverpool - the European City of Culture! - notoriously offloaded a large and valuable collection of music books a few years ago for next to nothing.

2) Many people would claim that there is no need for physical libraries anymore because all the information one could ever want is already available online. This claim is, of course, short-sighted and naive. For one thing it rather underestimates the sheer volume of information that actually exists - only a tiny proportion of world literature, for instance, has yet been transferred to digital form. With extension of copyrights and the introduction of DRM mechanisms it’s likely that much will remain either undigitised or inaccessible. What is available is quite inadequate being too often poorly presented and barely edited. One hundred-year-old translations of philosophy texts, for instance, without notes or index and so on, are next to useless, to be honest. That’s not to deny that the internet has provided access to a great deal of material that was formerly rare and difficult to obtain. I now have digital copies of treasures I never expected to see or hear. Nevertheless, there is so much more and it is precisely that which physical libraries should be preserving.

Still, there are some great online libraries. I shall mention just one here, the fabulous resource that is Ubuweb. It truly is one of the most magnificent and rich sites on the internet. Starting out some ten years ago as a space dedicated to various forms of avantgarde poetry - sound poems, visual poems, concrete poems and the like, it has since expanded to cover a great variety of experimental art. I first came across Ubuweb when it was mentioned in The Wire with reference to Aspen, a multimedia magazine published in the 1960s. Each edition of the magazine came in a box containing a booklet of articles, recordings, posters, even film, and was devoted to a particular movement of the time: Pop Art, Fluxus, Psychedelia and so on. The music, to mention just one of the arts, included mostly original pieces by such diverse artists as Alexander Scriabin and John Cage, Yoko Ono and La Monte Young, Bill Evans and Mario Davidovsky. The preservation of Aspen alone would make Ubuweb notable. That is not all, however. To point out a few more things freely available on Ubuweb, almost at random: the films of Situationist Guy Debord, James Joyce reading an extract from Finnegans Wake, the Cornelius Cardew Memorial Concert, Artaud’s Pour finir avec le jugement de dieu, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, the percussion/electronics of Max Neuhaus, the positive plagiarism of The Tape Beatles, Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, etc, etc. And I haven’t even mentioned the collection of essays or the outsider art or the conceptual writing or the ethnopoetics. You really need to wander through their archives yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

3) As for my own library: my books overflow their shelves and are piled up here and there (minimalism is so over). You might be able to detect a certain amount of clumping - most of the Nietzsche books are more or less together here, for instance, and the music books over there - but on the whole it’s just a jumble. I have, therefore, long been keen to catalogue them. Unfortunately, this has always seemed to mean using some database template - and I daresay I am not the only one to give up on having to enter eight or nine fields for every book after doing the first twenty or so. Last year, though, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I can catalogue my books online - just enter the ISBN number and it will search Amazon or the Library of Congress or a large number of University libraries and retrieve all the necessary details. It took me a whole day to do my entire library and another afternoon to make some revisions and add tags. Admittedly, mine is not a large collection - a little under 700 books - but then I sold nearly a thousand back in the late ’90s. Now, of course, a lot of them are boxed up in my parents’ new house. Anyway, one fun result of doing this has been to remind me of some books I really should get around to reading again - although I have also been left to wonder quite why I wasted some much time on others (yes, I am looking at you, Martin bloody Heidegger). Of course, LibraryThing has all the usual Web 2 social things - you can browse other people’s collections, send messages, join groups, add widgets to your blog, subscribe to feeds and so on. There are reviews, recommendations conversations, and statistics to mull over. It has already become as essential to me as Last.fm and flickr. In a word, it’s brilliant. You may browse my library if you wish - and if there is anyone who reads this who is already a member of LibraryThing please let me know, there is nothing I like better than nosing through other people’s shelves!

One of the things the site has to offer is, not surprisingly, various ways of discovering literature based on what you have in your library compared with others. There is also the Unsuggester. You enter the title of a book you’ve read and it comes up with books that are not generally found in the libraries of people who’ve also read the same book as the one you’ve entered. For some reason with every book I’ve tried I get loads and loads of Terry Pratchett! All good fun - up to a point. There’s something depressing about it, though. Take the first of the example unsuggestions: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic. Of course I laughed out loud at that conjunction - but why? Why shouldn’t someone read both? Yes, there is a disparity between the books - one is the greatest work of the Enlightenment and the other is frothy trivia. It would be a mistake to value them the same. But we assume that the same person can’t be interested in German philosophy and shopping. Well, I am, actually! It’s perfectly possible to understand the Transcendental Analytic and squeal over finding the most darling satin slingbacks. Why not? There is a thought-provoking quotation from Michele le Doeuff:

“Imagine a stylish young woman, put her into a Laura Ashley dress or give her the means to dress more expensively; give her also the project of writing the modern equivalent of La Connaissance approchée; for example, a work devoted to the epistemology of superconductivity. In a flowery dress. Is there a discrepancy or not? That is the question.”

There is a notion that to be concerned with serious matters one must be a serious person - all the time. That I blame on Protestantism for it was the sixteenth-century Protestants who introduced, and eventually imposed, the idea that a serious mien, a sober disposition and a constant vigilance over one’s uprightness were prerequisite forms of decent behaviour. Beyond that, of course, to be a man was always considered a serious business. It’s all nonsense. Indeed, I find it suspicious in a person if they have no place for the ephemeral and the non-essential. I suspect their intelligence doesn’t run all that deep. To make a show of being serious indicates a lack of confidence - one is obviously afraid of being caught out. In fact, perpetual seriousness is a giveaway - just as the surest sign of a philistine is their loudly asserting they hate all pop music or all television and the quickest way to spot someone who is uneducated is their unwillingness ever to admit they don’t know the answer to a question. I regard all three as related and infallible means of detecting pretension.