Have been reading Nirad Chaudhuri's The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. A strangely compelling book: Chaudhuri's an anglophile Indian, writing about his Bengali family in the twenties and thirties, intersparsed with philosophical and historical reflections. He attempts a rigorous objectivity, writes in a neutral, rather charmless, resolutely grammatical style, and because he has not a cultural nationalist bone in him presents a very different India than the one that we have become accustomed to in the post-Rushdie moment: violent, litigious, money-grubbing, unsentimental. Indeed by comparison with Chaudhuri, it becomes clear how Rushdie, for all his political dissent, is in the business of magicing and sentimentalising the sub-continent. But Chaudhuri cant maintain his 'objectivity' of course: his conservativism and fuddy duddyness, a kind of imitation of an imaginery 'civilised' Englishman seeps through it. And because the India that he comes from is in many ways so awful, and his family so unnurturing—his descriptions of his mother's regular fits of what he calls 'hysteria' are particularly horrific— the stiff-upper-lip stance comes to seem like a flight from chaos. Maybe thing will change in the book, I'm only about half way through.
Reading this while listening to the Blue Note cds of Grant Green with Sonny Clark, recorded in the early (?) sixties but only released in the eighties (I have a pirated copy of the cds, bought I think in Beijing so I'm not to clear of its history). Anyway it's wonderful music, made before 'funk' became reified but headed in that direction, and made before the guitar sound went fuzzy and chordal: clean pure music. Its chastening to think what Chaudhuri would have thought of it: the problem with him (and the education into the West that he received) is that he obviously couldn't have listened to it at all.

Writing this section of my book on the web makes me think about my own use of it. What did I do on it today? Partly it depends I guess what you call the "web": at one time it meant the world wide web which was just one service on the Net, the easy one. Today it seems to mean the whole thing. And the web isnt just a service it absorbs and transforms most of the old communication technologies: telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishing, and adds some new ones: audio downloading, linking, info-tracking (or whatever its capacity to record and publish usage immediately is called). To use the old Hegelian lingo: it sublates the old media.

Me on the web today: check my email first thing after breakfast and then once every couple of hours or so till now before going to bed; order some books (a nice fat check has come in) and fiddle with my want lists on Amazon and ABE; open up at&t news site a couple of times during the day to make sure no big disaster has hit the world while I was doing something else; go on to Limewire and try mainly unsuccessfully to download some Son Volt tracks, because I came across a reference to them somewhere or other (I think reading the paper this morning) which seemed intriguing; randomly checking out some blogs and bookmark one's I might one look at again (Lessig's Blog looks definitely promising) and then just before the day comes to end spend some time on Apple Music downloading 30 second samples of a bunch of pop albums, following the trail of "people who bought this also bought this' leads....

If this is at all typical of net usage, what might it mean? More time available for consumption; things that one used to do out there in the world (mainly in shops) you now can do at home; more cultural fragmentation which means more choices (Lisa is watching tv, I am reading and then webbing). Not much else? Certainly no victory of dematerialisation or virtuality, those catchcries of technoculture theory. The whole 'virtual' thing was a red herring. And if everyone moves onto the Web like this the social effects will likely be profound: less culture in public more cultural consumption in domestic space (withdrawing some of the movement between neighbourhoods that came in with the car); the emergence of new domain between the public and the private—the domain of this blog, which is not just for me but not really for anyone else either, its neither secret nor public, its not signed but not quite anonymous. Lost in the vastness of the web's chatter, and enabled by that.
But of course no one knows where the web is going, what it will deliver. So predictions are all the more tempting and all the more useless. One day it will just form the armature of the culture and society we have: like electricity or the car or the telephone, whose impacts were probably no less profound (what does it mean to say that?)

Where should we put the tv?

the new sound system arrives...which now has the big (but not huge) tv (36" I think) perched on top of it...dwarfing that part of the living room (which is officially called the receiving room)...in the US, bourgeois interiors tend to conceal tvs and or hide them away in their own special room...the home theatre thing is class coded low....is this pretentious?... as if, against all the realities, civilised life were lived out of range of the media.......I dont like to watch tv much myself, but when I do its best to be comfortable...and anyway it's a social thing, tv.. .bad as it is, it's a better bet than conversation, often.

Typing

Isn't there more to life than sitting hunched in front of a computer screen scribbling (if that's the phrase) away?