Seb Palmer

Helping put anomalous monotheism in its proper historical context.

In Battling The Gods Tim Whitmarsh performs some fascinating cultural archaeology, digging up and reconstructing some of the deep history of naturalist (as opposed to supernaturalist) thinking.

There are two things about the way he deals with this subject that disappoint me a little: first, the acceptance of negative terms – his subtitle, Atheism in the Ancient World, uses the primary one – which have been thrust upon those who question religion and superstition (I nearly said ‘the deep history of disbelief’ above, which sounds snappier perhaps, but is once again a negative); and second, limiting the book to the ‘classical’ world/era.

But to be honest these are, for me, very minor gripes. The first issue arises from the fact that even two or three centuries after the Enlightenment we are still emerging (or so I fervently hope) from the religious hegemony of a Christian past, and simply accepts, more or less, the common parlance of the status quo (although to his credit and my delight Whitmarsh frequently challenges this negative framing and its causal religious bias). And the second limits a potentially massive and difficult subject to a smaller more manageable project, resulting in a wonderfully focussed and readable book.

Ever since my own ditching of religion, I’ve harboured a suspicion that the historical narrative left by a Christian dominion of close to two millennia has hidden a much more complex, diverse reality, in which alternative views, from persisting ‘paganism’ to outright disbelief survived, and were far more prevalent than surviving Christian history would have us believe. Whilst Whitmarsh doesn’t address this within the period of Christian dominance (indeed, he says ‘The arrival of Catholic Christianity – Christianity conjoined with imperial power – meant the end of ancient atheism in the West.’), he does make a very convincing case that ‘viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is [not post-Enlightenment atheism, but] the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.’

This book primarily looks at the Greeks, even when it deals with the Roman era, and we meet some fascinating characters, from the familiar, like Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, the Epicureans and Stoics, etc, to the less well known. One of my favourite discoveries in respect of the latter category was a chap called, rather ironically, Demonax, whose position Whitmarsh describes thus: ‘aggressively satirical, an enemy of dogma rather than a doctrinaire adherent to any particular philosophical code.’ Sounds like a topping kind of chap to me, eh what!?

One of the key points that emerges is that, just as human social and political organisation evolved from small tribal units to city states to empire, so did the roles and functions of religion. The loose, adaptive, and, broadly speaking, more tolerant/pluralist mode of polytheism eventually gave way to the adoption of a monotheistic faith, embraced by Roman imperial power – thanks a bunch, Constantine! – in a marriage of political convenience. Whitmarsh eloquently and succinctly sums this seismic shift as follows: ‘the real ideological revolution engendered by the Christianisation of the empire [was] the alliance between absolute power and religious absolutism.’

I really enjoyed this book. I would love to read more on the same theme, concerning similar naturalist free-thinking in other places and times. Even, dare I suggest, during the heyday of European Christianity, a period when we lived under a new and less tolerant dispensation, and from which we are only now gradually emerging.

PS – This is another archival review; I read and reviewed the book in 2016. I even went to Heffers bookshop on Trinity Street, Cambridge, around the same time, and attended an author’s talk by Whitmarsh, which was great.

Another in my ongoing series of archival reviews.

I really loved this book. Waugh’s colourful and irreverent romp, through the huge swathes of material – mostly biblical, but going much wider overall in terms of sources, albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity – much of which is either bizarrely arcane, pure gibberish, or frequently a mixture of both, is both educational and highly enjoyable.

Not a book likely to be admired by the devout. I was in fact first made aware of it, indeed given it, by a believing friend who themselves refused to read it, for fear it would undermine their faith: exactly why they should read it in my view.

Waugh is a little disingenuous in his intro; by the end of the book – well, long, long before then, in truth – one gets a strong sense that Waugh finds the highly irrational, deeply contradictory, and frequently plain nasty image of the almighty, as glimpsed through his multifarious sources, a very ill-defined (through over-description, rather than any want thereof), nebulous, and on the whole repugnant creation of the human mind.

It is nonetheless remarkable how many of us non-believers feel so drawn to examining what a believer might choose to call our ‘apostasy’. But personally I think that just goes to show how deeply enmeshed in our lives and cultures religion remains, for both those with and without ‘faith’. And I was brought up ‘in the faith’. Or rather within a number of the myriad bastard offspring cults to have proliferated under the name Christian.

And though I might share the desire of many contemporary ‘naturalists and free-thinkers’ (a phrase I got from A. C. Grayling), in wishing to see humanity’s consciousness collectively evolve beyond the religious phase, unlike Dawkins and some others – who at one point seemed to believe such a state was imminent – I think we’re a massively long way from any such state of lucidity or rationality. But then that’s exactly why books like Waugh’s God are so important.

He is at times flippant, and frequently very funny. But underlying it all, and despite the occasional lapse into cheap shots at straw-gods, is a very serious and in my view laudable desire to see, both for oneself and as a society, just who on earth the particularly damnable god of Judaeo-Christian tradition is exactly.

Personally I loved this book and, having gone as far as buying copies for friends, would obviously recommend it to anyone interested in such things.

Like Crumb I’m both an artist and musician*, so I find this fascinating and compelling in just about every way one could. His tastes in music are, like all sorts of folk, from Woody Allen to the now deceased Dan Hicks, to some extent, what is sometimes called ‘old timey’.

Whilst my musical tastes overlap with Allen and Crumb et al to some extent, their passion for these older art forms is obsessive – i.e. well beyond my own dilettante interest – which is great, as one can learn a lot from them. Crumb’s distinctive visual style includes not just his talent as an artist, with an emphasis on the cartoonish, but also as both designer and calligrapher.

In addition to his many terrific album covers, for labels like Yazoo, Shanachie, and others, this book also gathers together many music related Crumb works, from his early blues and jazz trading cards, to pin badges, calling cards, posters, and other related ephemera.

The whole lot comes in a slipcase, the shiny black hardback making a square yet ‘record’ like insert, complete with circular cut-outs on the hardback slipcase, like an old paper record-sleeve. As with all Crumb’s stuff, it’s eclectic, individual, beautifully done, and filled with verve and joie de vivre.

Superb, and highly recommended.

* I’m not comparing myself to Crumb in terms of talent or success!

I’ve always had a somewhat confused and mixed relationship with Robert Zimmerman. Like a lot of the most famed folk in popular music, from Elvis to Sinatra, the Beatles to Led Zep, I think he’s been overly reverenced. That’s not to say that these artists haven’t occasionally, or even consistently, been great, or even brilliant. It’s just that the focus on them leaves less time and space for noticing and enjoying other stuff.

That said, I’m currently enjoying revisiting Bob’s oft-maligned Christian phase. I grew up in a Christian household in which this phase of Bob-ness helped confer some much needed hipster cool on our dreadfully dull religion. Well, that’s how I saw it, way back when (I was nine when this came out!). Now I’m no longer religious, let alone Christian. And quite a lot of overtly religious music is anathema to me. Although I must admit I love early Christian choral music, like Tallis or Victoria, etc.

Many professional hipsters slagged Bob’s Christian music off at the time. I may be prejudiced, thanks to my childhood exposure to it. But I think a lot of it is really great. The title track here, and In The Summertime, are terrific. And along with one or two others, are sufficiently vague in their religious overtones. The elegaic paean to Lenny Bruce is beautiful, and whilst the lyrical content of Property of Jesus does make me cringe, the music is great. The musicians involved are top drawer, the ensemble feel live and organic, and the music very rootsy, in an aptly gospel r’n’b vein.

Not perfect, but surprisingly good. And certainly not the fall from grace that hipster journos such as the writers at Rolling Stone pronounced it to be at the time. Definitely worth having and enjoying.

Yesterday I drove up to Leeds and bought myself a beautiful shiny Boosey & Hawkes 400 series 3/4 double bass. The drive, three hours each way, and fuel cost, of about £50, were well worth the effort and expense. I’m absolutely delighted with this gorgeous looking and sounding instrument.

On getting home, after taking Chester for his daily constitutional in the back garden, I immediately set about getting intimate with this curvaceous dusky maiden. Woefully out of tune out of the bag, thanks to an handy iPhone app I was able to swiftly get her singing much more melodiously/accurately.

To my great delight, some of the licks and riffs I used to play started coming back to me, so I made a little video. Mostly excited chatter, with a good dose of itchy nose fiddling and talking to Chester, who’s off camera mewing plaintively (wants to get outside again). Showing my ineptitude publicly like this is, perhaps, rather fool hardy. But hey… who cares!?

Why my iPhone wants to film video in a misty soft-focus – and I’ve cleaned the lens numerous times – I really don’t know. Photos come out perfectly clear and sharp. Weird! I’m thinking of naming my bass, with Brigitte and Fran as top contenders. Mind you, Valerie, or Leonie, for Valerie Leon also appeal. Mind you, I absolutely hate that total musical non-entity of a track Valerie, by Amy Greenhouse, so that’s out, methinks.

Fran is for Fran Jeffries, and, based on sheer sexiness, is my favourite. But Brigitte sounds as cool and sexy as the bass looks. Hmmm… bit of a poser, eh!? Or should I say conundrum (or even Conan-drum?)?

And sticking with the utter sexiness of this bass. The back is very feminine. Put me in mind of Ingre’s Bain Turc. But then, when I see the painting, I think the bass is actually sexier. The painting, by comparison, is less subtle or sophisticated, more harem as meat-market!

As a low-income freelancer with mostly very old Apple gear, my whole tech situation is a right nightmare. I intend to start documenting this dystopian experience here on my blog. Today the issue is connecting devices such as my iPhone(s), iPad, or other peripherals, and transferring stuff like photos, music, and so on.

There was a time when it was quite easy. Just plug ‘n’ go, more or less. But it hasn’t been that way for ages now. Partly thanks, I think, to the whole iCloud thang. I’m not that keen on iCloud. It’s potentially a good idea. But, as usual with Apple, they’re way too limited and prescriptive in how it works.

I’m sure the features i’d like would be a piece of the proverbial pisces to implement. Why son’t they make such features available? I can only guess that it must have something to do with control/money: it seems Apple want you to do everything their way, preferably – for them – via subscription service. And I ain’t goin’ that way!

Just one example of this, and how it relates to iCloud, would be the ability to select, for every entry one makes, where calendar data will appear of be shared. So, for example, I might be happy that some calendar info is up on the iCloud, but I may prefer other data remains purely ‘local’, to my devices. Butt, to my knowledge, this is not, never has been, and looks unlikely to ever be, a feature. Bummer!

Anyway, moving on to the issues that I’m dealing with – or rather facing, as I don’t appear to be getting anywhere in the dealing with sense – today, these are: transferring photos and videos from mobile devices to the back-up/core libraries I try and maintain on my main iMac centred network. Both ‘libraries; are in fact on an external hard-drive.

Oh, and yet another recurring bugbear, just to interject, is the way that when I try and set up or control my imports, shit happens that I appear to have no control over. For example, changing the setting on my iPhone 6S so as to allow me to put any music on it, and specifying that I DO NOT want to auto-sync with my default iTunes library (which for starters is waaay too big, and secondly, despite being repeatedly set as the default library is never auto-located when I launch iTunes, but has to be found and ‘selected’)

On selecting this option in preferences, iTunes proceeds to dick about with the content on my iPhone, such that stuff that was there before that I had painstakingly removed, has reappeared, whilst stuff I’ve added, disappears. And then, to top it all off, it appears to hang mid transfer, with large swathes of content greyed out, and the little progress icons stuck in a frozen greyed-out inactivity. FFS!!!

Sheesh, on the evidence of countless movies like this, Americans sure are dumb fuckers. This ridiculous porridge of run of the mill clichés is just – and only just -bearable watching*.

It’s like most entertainment these days: throw enough dollars at it, cast enough himbo/bimbo stars, and it might just work. It’s another aspect of what I call ‘the sliced white life’: employ skilled professionals to put it together, it might just stand up. It looks like bread… so surely it must be bread!? But don’t be fooled, it contains nothing of substance.

The plot driving bull is just your run of the mill McGuffin; corrupt politicians with cops ‘n’ hoods on their payroll murder the mrs of ‘the wrong guy’. You know, that former black ops dude, now just your average blue-collar unemployed guy, with the ninja killing skills. Oh, and his kill-kit, still stashed in a wall at his home.

But what is it with these heroically meat-headed dumbos? Why is it they can’t go after those serious hard-ass crims without first securing the safety of their family? Even after they’ve already killed his wife! He has the foresight to stash his kill kit. But not to relocate his family before going on a vengeful rampage. Dude, your priorities are shot!

Replete with ridiculous hairpiece, and undergoing a religious crisis of faith (like any upright American, he loves to kill, but that’s fine, like any upright American, he’s a Christian), Revolta’s Stanley Hill character goes all Arnie. He even looks like kind of like Da Dermïnadorrr! Working with an old buddy – I reckon they’re lovers; near the end buddy-boy says ‘I shaved your ass!’ (at least that’s what I heard) – they merrily butcher whole swathes of baddies, wisecracking their way to seriously psychotic serial-killer status.

Like Rambo, Last Blood, movies of this ilk, whilst mildly diverting in a sickeningly desensitised way, feed into that zombie-like consciousness (or lack thereof) necessary for a nation to be dumb enough to elect someone like Trump. Endlessly grunting and bleating about their individual rights to be better armed than a third-world dictators’ entire private army, all the while clinging to a personal pot-pourri of pre-medieval religious bollocks, mixed with toxically postmodern levels of cynical truth-is-relative poison. And to cap it all off, everything is marinaded in the ever more pervasive ‘everyone other than me is part of a corrupt conspiracy whose testicles, er… sorry, tentacles, reach into every part of society’ type paranoia, so beloved of the great unwashed.

Hill and his chum merrily widow and orphan hundreds of people**, from druggy street scum to the entire security team of the governer (but that’s ok, he’s corrupt), causing collateral damage that in real world terms would include large numbers of innocent bystanders at numerous locations.

In more ‘up close and personal’ terms, in addition to his wife, the dead also include Hills’ daughter’s au pair. But no sweat, Hill and his lover wind up sipping cocktails in Sao Paolo, whilst his daughter’s family emerge, miraculously free of any physical or mental trauma, despite the loss of their mother (dead), father (on the lam), au pair (dead), a bullet in the shoulder for the son-in-law, and all the terror normally associated with bereavement, drive-by-shootings and home-invasions, etc.

As a moral parable this is utterly vile. As a piece of cinematic work it’s competently run of the mill. Travolta is, thanks to his undoubted charisma, okay in the role, as morally bankrupt and nonsensical as it may be. Indeed, many of the cast are decent actors, doing their best with unbelievably banal and tasteless material. Amazingly, in spite of the vacuity, or worse yet the moronic mish-mash of half-baked ideas and totally addled morality, this remains reasonably diverting entertainment.

I think that this is a sad reflection on our times. Surely we all deserve better than this? I want to say ‘it’s ok’ when, frankly, it isn’t. Mass-produced pap like this elbows aside and takes up the space other better stuff might occupy. Indeed, most better stuff will never even get made, whilst dross of this ilk is produced in abundance.

I think actors like Revolta ought to have sufficient principles to turn down dumb-ass junk like this. But in the current marketplace such high principles would see most of Hollywood’s current talent forced into jobs in the kind of malls movies like this will call home.

*This sort of stuff – what one might formerly have called celluloid dreck – is also, thankfully, instantly forgettable.

**By the twisted MAGA type logic of such films the hero’s bloody antics would beget countless copycat offspring, as the angered relatives of the folks he butchers set out in their turn, looking for their own violent retribution. All of this ought to give the execs who produce this tripe rock hard boners; the possibilities for endless sequels being literally exponential.

‘The islanders have always been a mongrel race and we are the stronger for it.’

NB: I originally wrote this review around 2012, when I was sent the book to review as part of the Amazon Vine program. But, in the light of Brexit, I wanted to re-post the review here on my blog.

Wow! This book is a fascinating and exciting compendium of diverse facts, beautifully illustrated, telling the most incredible story.

Cunliffe writes with great clarity and engaging straightforwardness, weaving together various strands of scientific deduction sufficient to put Sherlock in the shade. What science there is here is, on the whole, easy enough to follow. Certainly this isn’t too drily technical a read. Indeed, throughout the book we often touch upon moments connecting us with our forebears, a very early and poignant instance of this being the discovery of Mesolithic footprints in the littoral muds of Formby point.

Covering 11,000 years, from the retreat of the ice around 10,000 BC (when these lands were still connected to the European continent), to the arrival of the Normans in 1066, Cunliffe tells how the people of these islands grew from bands of a few hundred hunter-gatherers to a mixed population of around two million. Before embarking on this epic tale he sets out what we used to tell ourselves was our history, from the first mentions of these lands in ancient Greek and Roman texts, through to indigenous writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth, examining how myth and fact interwove, before beginning on the journey to the more complex and nuanced understanding we have now.

More than half of the book is given over to the period prior to these islands entering into the written record, which Cunliffe describes as formerly belonging to ‘shadowy pseudo-history’. It’s quite moving reading Geoffrey of Monmouth, who belongs to this earlier semi-mythical phase, saying ‘Britain, the best of islands… provides in unfailing plenty everything that is suited to the use of human beings’, and then having Cunliffe, the modern post-enlightenment scholar concur, stating that indeed, ‘The British Isles … occupy a very favoured position in the world’, and explaining why this is so (geology & climate).

At around 500 pages, with a very substantial ‘further reading’ section at the back, this is a serious book. But despite the books size, as Cunliffe concedes, his scope is so huge that it remains a very general and brisk overview of a huge subject. Chapters often conclude with summarising statements, which is helpful, and there are three ‘interlude’ chapters, dealing with such topics as language and religion. As he says in his preface, ‘An archaeologist writing of the past must be constantly aware that the past is, in truth, unknowable. The best we can do is to offer approximations based on the fragments of hard evidence that we have to hand, ever conscious that we are interpreters. Like the myth-makers of the distant past, we are creating stories about our origins and our ancestors conditioned by the world in which we live’.

Unsurprisingly the nearest lands have been those to most consistently stock our genetic banks, with arrivals coming from land masses we now know as Spain, France, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia, and in the Roman period an even wider ranging area. The first 9,000 years of this story are couched more in terms of generalities and theories, drawing primarily on the longer standing practice of antiquarianism, or what evolved into archaeology as we now know it, but also other associated areas, some of which, like our growing knowledge of genetics, are much more modern developments. The parts dealing with the last millennia become more like the kind of history many of us will know from school or general reading, with tales of kings and queens, war and invasion.

The ‘innate mobility of humankind … inherent in our genetic makeup’ is a continuing theme throughout, existing in constant tension with the domesticating aspect of human culture, as waves of invaders and colonists seek first to find new territories and then to live in them. Throughout this continual ebb and flow human and material traffic continues, leaving behind trails of artefacts and monuments, from grand buildings to everyday waste. Rather like the amazing detective work of Darwin, this is a tale concerned with origins, and it’s amazing what we can deduce from a close examination of the world around us, and how much that world can still tell us of our past.

As a generally interested reader of history I found this an extraordinary, fascinating, and very compelling read, fabulously supplemented by a rich array of graphic material. Loved it!

Not what we were expecting to see as we headed out to Tesco!