Nothing is What It Seems

---

A man stopped me in the street and asked for directions to the community center. Sweat was almost literally pouring off him, and he was trembling uncontrollably - the classic signs of an alcoholic in major withdrawal. I pointed him in the right direction (it was only street away), he thanked me as though I'd given him a hundred pounds, and we went on our ways.

It was Tony. Again he didn't recognise me. The community center hosts an Alcoholics Anonymous branch - maybe he's trying to get his life back.

The thing is, I'll happily play this tiny role in helping him kick his habit, but if he asks for coins to buy that revolting ultracheap cider he depends on, I'll give him spare change if I have it.

---

I'm reading Lenin's Embalmers - essentially the autobiography of the son of Boris Zbarsky, the social climbing biologist charged with preserving Lenin's corpse under communism. But it's also a history of paranoia, inflated egos and bureaucratic absurdity in 20th century Russia.

The sentiment is snipingly anti-soviet - the rumour that Lenin had syphilis is uncritically repeated as though it has some bearing on his ideas, as is the silly story that Lenin only tried to get Stalin booted out because Stalin was rude to Lenin's wife. Having said that, I was astonished to read just how easily the Bolshevik leaders sank from high-level theory and brave military action in the revolution, into squabbling and scheming afterwards. It's...worrying.

---

I caught another episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat. On the one hand, he's really scraping the barrel now. On the other, shows like this tell us something about what beliefs are now considered silly, and which sophisticated.

He appeared to teach a woman how to hold her breath underwater using "ancient yogic techniques known only to a few", and how to untie a knot using only visualisation. The latter, involving tying what looks like a strong knot, then hiding the knot itself with one hand and "dissolving" it by pulling on one free end, is a painfully familiar trick of stage magicians. The esoteric trick to holding your breath for ninety seconds is...to keep calm. You see what I mean about scraping the barrel, but both these commonplaces are presented as an advanced level of "mind over matter".

Brown is repackaging old stage magic as remarkable but hidden and undeveloped abilities that all humans have. The message is that everyone can work wonders, that the paranormal is normal.

One sequence I think was quite remarkable, ideologically speaking. He claimed to teach the woman how to enter a special "mediumistic" trance used by Victorian spiritualists, which enabled them to break out of otherwise unbreakable ropes and chains, in the dark, in order for them to put on fake spirit manifestations.

In other words, he's openly assuming that the audience knows that all spiritualists are frauds, but claiming they perpetrated their frauds by effectively supernatural means.

Obviously there is no such special trance. Spiritualists broke out of bindings the same way they and magicians do it today - with fake bindings. But Brown confidently expects his audience to be sophisticated and skeptical of spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, while casually swallowing his similar mumbo-jumbo, packaged as "hidden human potential".

I recently saw a YouTube video (now taken down for copyright infringement) of the illusionist Chris Angel walking on water. He was surrounded by the same group of "bystanders" he always uses, looking amazed and whooping their bafflement. And the perspex ramp just below the waterline was just visible in some shots.

Angel is one of those illusionists who's just as well known for debunking new-age scams as for seeming to do the impossible, so his fans ought to know that he wasn't really walking on water - right? Judging from the comments on the video, fully half thought he really was walking on water. For real.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Penn and Teller once performed a seance, before explaining exactly how they achieved each of the effects. The volunteer student participants then tried to argue that some of the effects weren't faked after all - they just felt too real not to be ghosts.

People really are fuckwits sometimes.

---

Two comrades are preparing to move homes, which means they're throwing out a lot old books, which means...I've got a big rucksack full of lovely books to read.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roddy Doyle, Anthony Burgess, Margarat Atwood, Robert Fisk...and one book explaining in great detail why Lawrence of Arabia was (a) a liar of epic proportions to the world, (b) a liar of similar proportions to himself and (c) a big screaming queen who liked being whipped by Arab boys.

Which one should I read first?

---