But I am not interested in the conference binge, in which the hardy warriors show their true mettle by turning up and delivering a paper after three nights and days on the piss. Nor am I interested in that old adage, which applies especially to scholars: ‘beer: helping ugly people have sex since 3000 BCE’.

No, I am interested in the truly legendary lush. Here I suspect we all have stories. It may be the lecturer who turns up for the 9.00 am lecture, pours himself a coffee and then tops it up with a liberal dash of whisky. Suddenly realising that he has done so in front of scores of students, he calmly looks them straight in the eye and says, ‘I have a cold’. Or it may be the head of department who offers you a massive shot of sherry – at an 8.00 am meeting in his office. Or the bedraggled professor decked out with his permanent sunglasses, who, at the first flush of light on orientation day, leans into his bag, pulls out a bottle of sake and pours it neat into his coffee mug (what are coffee mugs for, after all?). Or the once brilliant scholar who stuns his students with a scintillating lecture, full of witty repartee and insight – only to repeat it word for word, gesture for gesture, intonation for intonation, the following week, and then the one after that.

One may be moved to ask, what happened to such-and-such? The answer (as was once given to me): the occasional bottle of wine for breakfast is probably fine, but every morning …

But it does raise the question as to why? It’s been a while since the first impetus to human civilisation took place, namely the growing of grain for the dual purpose of producing bread and beer – the staples of life. And unlike the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, wine and beer are no longer regarded as gods. We might joke about the medicinal bottle of ‘aqua vitae’, but unlike the monks who invented the distilling of spirits, I have yet to find someone who actually believes it. It would be even more difficult to find someone who argues that hitting the bottle is a way of warding off the Black Death, as was common in Europe’s Middle Ages. And it has been a long time since a parliament passed a law such as ‘An Act for the Encouraging of the Distillation of Brandy and Spirits from Corn’ – as happened in England in 1690. At a pinch, you might get away with arguing that fermented or distilled beverages are the only way of ensuring that the water is purified.

More likely is a combination of too many social misfits in the one place, the grim realisation that you won’t be the next Confucius or Plato, and a desire to get back at the brain that turned you into an intellectual in the first place.

On Farting: Laughter and Language in the Middle Ages, which features ‘Roland the Farter’, who performed an annual jump, whistle and fart before the king of England. Indeed the final two chapters are called ‘The Mystery of Roland’ and ‘Fartprints of Roland’.

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics, in which we find a serious proposal for the discipline of ‘Waste Studies’.

(ht bg)

A beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.

Meanwhile the Chinese are waiting for the slow plane crash that is the European economy to come to a end so they can pick up some bargains at the industrial garage sale.

Hello Prof. T. Eagleton,
I am a participant in the Jordanian philosophical Association and the socialist forum. I will give a lecture about your book  “The Illusion of Postmodernism”.
I have a weak and unclear Arabic translation for your book. Is it possible that you send me a broadened idea regarding it in English?
Your language seems a bit obscure to me and I will be thankful if you you can use a more common language.
Thanks very much in advance
Ahmad Otoum
Amman – Jordan

I was actually in the water that day, about 100 metres away while all these super-fit people were competing for Ironman/woman. The waves were stunning, so I stayed in for quite a while. Too big for a dolphin, some suggest it was a pilot whale, others a shark. Mind you, it appeared a few days after the surfer was chomped down at Redhead beach, just south of here.

Here we must include Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism from 1908. Taking a ‘common sense’ realist approach, in which science gradually approaches the objective reality ‘out there’, Lenin attacks the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach, fashionable among some young Bolsheviks to his left, as a species of phenomenalism that may be traced back to Bishop Berkeley. His position is quite unremarkable and widespread even today: we may come to know, by ‘reflection’, the way things exist independently of our minds, but our ability to perceive that external world is held back by our own limitations so that our knowledge ‘reflects’ external reality only approximately. But Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was also aimed at Bogdanov’s greater influence among the Bolshevik intellectuals (Lenin always had the support of the larger number of workers). As the product of a highly skilled hit-man, the book was a brilliant success, since Bogdanov was spectacularly ‘taken out’. Soon enough Lenin would return to Hegel (in the library in Berne in 1914) and rediscover a more dialectical approach.

Usually, the work of a hit-man is understood to be less-than-honourable, a compromise of intellectual integrity, in which one uses whatever influence one has to neutralise a specified target. But as a specific type of scholarship, it requires fine skill and marksmanship to do the job properly.

Stalin looks at you and thinks you are a pile of shit … Maybe he’s right!

Anyway, recently one of my sons, who is becoming quite politically aware, spent a few weeks in the USA. Early in his visit, he found himself talking to a local about local politics.

‘Have you heard of them progressives?’ The man asked.

‘Progressives?’ Said Tom.

‘Yeah, like Obama or Bush …’

‘Bush?’ Said Tom. ‘You’re kidding’.

‘Bush was too nice to them Muslims. Deep down, he was really just a rich liberal. And Obama, you see, he’s deliberately destroying this country. His father was a Muslim terrorist and he’s here as an agent of Al Qaida. Everything he’s doing is designed to bring America to its knees’.

After this enlightening political lesson, Tom said to me after he came home, ‘That place is really f&#cked’.

One item of the report reads:

In the 4th Corps the winter shoes are in frightful condition; the soles are made from chips of wood covered with strips of leather.

Nick’s insightful marginal comment:

This is disgraceful; how many legs have been frozen as a result?

Walling, Russia’s Message (1908), p. 464