Ransen's Blog

I heard an interview with a British screenwriter a month or so ago (I can't remember his name, the interview was on one of the BBC R4 Front Row podcasts). One of the things he said made me laugh out loud. He suffers from clinical depression. (No it wasn't that that made me laugh.) And he explained that he had tried everything, drugs and talking therapies, the lot. Nothing worked very much. The problem with talking therapies, he said, was that you have to find a therapist at the very least as intelligent as yourself, and hopefully more intelligent than yourself. Otherwise, how on earth can you take the therapy seriously? And the problem was that in twenty years he had not found a single good therapist. He was not saying, I think, that he was particularly intelligent, but that with, for example, 165,000 licensed therapists in the USA the average level is going to be pretty average. I mean, are all 165,000 brighter than their patients? You may fin

A few months ago I went with some friends to hear/see the Bach Passion According to Matteo. It started early, 19:30, because it is long. We drove to Lampugnano and then got the Metro into Milano.  At Lampugnano, near the bus station, lots of African males, and one or two families, standing around and lying on the benches. How did the mothers with children feel? Where were they going? Or going to end up? One bloke outside kicked a can angrily, one bloke inside had spread out fake handbags to sell. We got off the metro at Duomo. The piazza in front of the church was packed, with Italian youth as well as lots of tourists. I hated it. I dislike the chaos of people more and more. I almost understood the quietness of some abstract expressionists. (Though a real and silent blue sky is better than their self-concious self-important daubs.) There are big bright video ads on the side of Duomo now. I'm an agnostic/aethistic but it seemed sacrilege. We got on the crowded tram, a number

Last week, to escape the not humid weather of Lombardia we visited some friends with a flat in Val Sesia, an Alpine valley, much cooler than where we live near Milano. I was not driving so I could look out at the passing scenery. And I noticed how my mind reacted to any text or artificial signage compared with any "pure nature". As we drove by I'd think "That's a bad logo," and I'd imagine a very poor amateur artist being asked by a local company to design a logo. . "That's a good logo," and I'd wonder who designed it. And "I'm glad we're still making something in Europe" when I see a small factory making specialist mechanical parts.  Every single phrase or commercial man made image on a roadside ad provoked a word-thought reaction. I expect that you would have had different reactions, but I imagine you mind would have reacted. And as we moved further into the countryside the

These days, in Northern Italy, when it is too hot and muggy to sleep I simply get up. But in the other three seasons I have a method for getting back to sleep which sometimes work... I've been learning poems by heart, started off by this book: ...and trying to remember the poems as I lie awake in the middle of the night can sometimes get me back to oblivion. Sleep is important, so I say to myself that I can only get the "reward" of getting up once I've recited, in my mind, all the poems I know. Often I don't get to the end of the list before I'm back in the land of Nod. Actually I do not know any of the poems in that book, I've ended up choosing my own. It has taken me two years to learn 10 poems. Almost all of them have both rhyme and rhythm, much modern poetry seems self indulgent, deliberately obscure and without any artistic discipline. So here's my choice, not in any particular order. Tiger by William Blake. The Peasant Poet by Joh

Monsignor Negri (Vescoco of Ferrara) of has said of the victims   ( VICTIMS ) of the Manchester bomb attack that they: "...lived without reason and they died without reason..." So this Catholic priest, who did not know either the families of the victims or the victims themselves, is ready to judge them. He says that they were products of a consumer society. Presumably he thinks that since they went to a concert to enjoy themselves they were sinners. Presumably, according to him, they should have been at home or in church praying. He also says this is a war of religion. I bet he'd know what to do with a few nuclear bombs, look at those clenched fists: (photo by di Barbara Andolfi) So in addition to the full evil of attacks on children by Islamic terrorists we have Catholic priests who blame the victims.  Isn't religion great?

"If a tree falls in a forest, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?" Of course it fucking does you plonker. If you define sound as wavelike movement of air within a certain range of frequencies, then of course the movement exists whether there is an observer or not. (You could define sound as perception of audio waves by a human being , and in that case the sound does not exist if nobody is there to percieve the air movement. But the philosophers I heard talking about this did not do that simple thing of defining what they meant by sound. They just played with words. A History Of Ideas is a BBC Radio podcast)

There I was, slightly full, a bit overweight, and in front of me a quarter of a luvvverrly pizza. It was practically screaming: "Eat Me!" Nobody else in the restaurant wanted it. It would be a waste not to eat it. But when we ordered too much food we'd already wasted it. If I ate that bit of pizza I would be contributing to my own over-weight , the fuel consumption of my car, the fuel consumption of any planes or trains I took, and the average health of the nation would go down. Once too much food has been prepared, and if it cannot be saved for later, the waste has already happened. It is an excuse for me to say "I hate waste!" and then add to my own belly fat. I have to throw the food away, that is the less wasteful option. (Unless of course I am undernourished. But I'm not.)