Don't Forget Your Shovel If You Want To Go To Work

Christy Moore was crooning away to Dead Beat the other night, and Dead Beat swooned:



"Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work.

Oh don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work.

Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work

Or you'll end up where you came from like the rest of us

Diggin', diggin', diggin'...



And don't forget your shoes and socks and shirt and tie and all.

Don't forget your shoes and socks and shirt and tie and all.

Mr murphy's afraid you'll make a claim if you take a fall.

("how's it goin'" "not too bad")

And we want to go to heaven but we're always diggin' holes.

We want to go to heaven but we're always diggin' holes.

Yeah we want to go to heaven but we're always diggin' holes.

Well there's one thing you can say...we know where we are goin'...

("any chance of a start?" "no" "okay")



And if you want to do it...don't you do it against the wall.

If you want to do it...don't you do it against the wall.

Never seen a toilet on a building site at all.

There's a shed up in the corner where they won't see you at all.

("mind your sandwiches")



Enoch powell will give us a job, diggin' our way to annascaul.

Enoch Powell will give us a job, diggin' our way to annascaul.

Enoch Powell will give us a job, diggin' our way to annascaul.

And when we're finished diggin' there they'll close the hole and all.

Now there's six thousand five hundred and fifty-nine paddies

Over there in london all trying to dig their way back to annascaul

And very few of them boys is going to get back at all...

I think that's terrible.



Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work.

Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work.

Oh, don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work.

Or you'll end up where you came from like the rest of us

Diggin', diggin', diggin."

The Last of the Rat Pack - Joey Bishop Remembered

Dead Beat remembers well his days hanging out in Vegas with the Rat Pack. Drinking and chasing broads with Lawford, Sinatra, Martin and Sammy D. Jr.

Dead Beat was therefore saddened to hear of the passing of the last of the Rat Pack members, comedian Joey Bishop.

"All I know is that if it's in good taste, if it's funny and stems from honesty, that's the best I can do. My rule is: To thine own self be true."

Not The Prize But The Offering

Okay, you know the D.B.'s thoughts on prizes, but he is nevertheless delighted for Anne Enright on her Man Booker win for The Gathering. A long time admirer of her work, D.B. salutes not the prize but the offering.

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

It doesn't have to be a Sunday morning to listen to this.

The Best Place For Text Is Back On The Body - Dead Beat and Peter Greenaway Talk About Sex

"......I'd like to believe with Godard, once you've written the text and you've found the money and you've got your stranglehold over the producer, you throw the text away.
Unfortunately, circumstances as they are at this present time don't allow us to do that, and I proselytize for an autonomous cinema, which is essentially image-based, not text-based. So my search all the time, and not just for this film, but other films as well, is to find alternative systems for organizing the material."

"Okay, let's calm ourselves down, hush, hush, Peter. Let's talk about sex."

"Lacanne in his famous French essay from 1953 talks about how the body makes the text. And I would facetiously answer in this film if the body makes the text then the best place for that text is back on the body. I'm not serious in that, it's metaphorical. But what he does argue is how the mind is influencing the arm and the arm is influencing the hand and the hand the pen and paper. So the body makes the text, very, very physically. Now, in the 20th century, although you have written text here, ultimately your product will be typed up on keyboards, so we've broken that magic connection by this mechanical reproduction between the notion of physically making a mark that signifies. "

"I taught we were going to talk about sex."

"We are talking about sex."

"So what did you think of Deep Throat?"

Dead Beat and Peter Greenaway's Love-In

"Peter, Peter, Peter!"

"What's the matter, Dead Beat? Something I said?"

"It's always something you said."

"What did I say?"

"The death of cinema."

"Well you know that is correct. Cinema's death date was in 1983, when the remote control was introduced to the living room. Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings."

"Okay, then, the Scorcese thing."

"Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that D.W. Griffith was making early last century."

"Yeah, that thing."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Oh come on. He only just got his Oscar."

"Don't get me started."

"Peter, you are always started."

"Cinema is predicated on the 19th-century novel. We're still illustrating Jane Austen novels -- there are 41 films of Jane Austen novels in the world -- what a waste of time."

"See what I mean. Not even Jane Austen is sacred."

" 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Harry Potter' were not films, but illustrated books."

"Oh no, not Tolkien, J.K. Rowlings."

"Thirty-five years of silent cinema is gone, no one looks at it anymore. This will happen to the rest of cinema. If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, its tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain-dead."

"Dinosaurs, you're now shooting dinosaurs in the head! I mean Jurassic Park. Surley you liked Jurassic Park?"

"Why do people spent thousands of millions of pounds trying to create artifical dinosaurs for 'Jurassic Park', that seems to be a total waste of time to me. These sort of things are just heading conventional text story lines with conventional attitude, it has nothing to do with changing the media, it just means to create robotic equivalents, which exist in the frame anyway, I don't see any point, you know, a real 'Jurassic Park' can be much more exciting than any robotic invention anybody invents inside a frame."

"No, no, Peter, no, no..."

"I suppose, my general sense of anxiety and disquiet about the cinema we've got after 100 years -- a cinema which is predicated on text. So whether your name is Spielberg or Scorsese or Godard, there's always a necessity to start with text and finish with image."

"NOT Godard. No, not Godard."

"I don't think that's particularly where we should organize an autonomous art form. That's why I think that, in a way, we haven't seen the cinema yet, all we've seen is 100 years of illustrated text."

"TEXT. What's wrong with text?"

"A supreme example is The English Patient. Why would anybody spend so much time and energy and money to make a product like that which is just perfectly well in a book? That makes it highly questionable in regards to, "do we really feel confident that cinema is an autonomous medium that can create its own product?" Why do we have to keep running off to the bookshelf all the time? But that's an extreme example. Whether your name is Godard or Woody Allen, there's still a way we have to start the text...."

"AAAHHH, Allen............................................................."

The Domesticated Human

Ed Russell's back. I have the kettle boiling.

"Pull up a chair, Ed, green tea brewskies on the way."

"Something I forgot to say: Most of the literature on domestication implies that humans have sat in the driver's seat while other species rode in the back of the truck. The first word in the title of anthropologist Yi Fu-Tuan's analysis of pets, Dominance and Affection, reflects this view. For Perkins, who described the Green Revolution as one stage in a long evolutionary process, this unidirectional view is inadequate. "Wheat and people coevolved in ways that left neither much ability to prosper without the other," he argues. This bi-directional view opens the possibility that organisms domesticated humans as well as vice versa. Biologist Raymond P. Coppinger and English professor Charles Kay Smith have argued that since the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, much of the most important evolution has taken place within the arena of human activity. Teaming up with humans was a good strategy for organisms faced with a rapidly changing environment."

"Domesticated humans. I like this alot Ed."

"Dead Beat, don't you think the time has come for us to understand such histories in a coherent way. Scholars in a variety of disciplines and fields have built the foundation for such an inquiry, with biology and history leading the way along parallel, but too rarely intersecting, paths. Evolutionary history offers a way to link these endeavors. To biology, history offers understanding of the social forces that create selective pressures. To history, biology offers understanding of the ways organisms respond to such pressures. Together, as evolutionary history, they offer understanding of the ever-changing dance between humans and nature. The resulting synthesis just might lead us to new understanding of historical episodes as disparate as state building, capital accumulation, geopolitics, industrialization, and domestication. If we are to understand how genetic engineering shapes human experience today and in the future, it behooves us to examine ways in which anthropogenic evolution has shaped us in the past."

To put it another way, dear readers, if we are to write about the human experience as we all claim to do, it behooves us to examine ways in which anthropogenic evolution has shaped us in the past.

Bearing the Mark of Anthropogenic Selection

Edmund Russell, associate professor of technology, culture, and communication and history at the University of Virginia, drops in for tea.

"It's got to be green," he tells me.

"None greener."

"Anyway," he goes on in between sips, "I like what you have been saying about evolutionary historians. You see Dead Beat humans have been shaping the evolution of so many other species, for so long, in so many ways, and for so many reasons that this process often has hidden in plain sight. In one morning, even before making it out the door, we might wake in bed sheets made of cotton, dress in clothes made of wool, put on shoes made of leather, eat a breakfast made of wheat, butter, oranges, and eggs, read a newspaper made of wood pulp and soy ink, pat a dog, and admire flowers on the table. Every one of these materials and creatures bears the mark of anthropogenic selection, from cotton bred for large bolls to flowers selected for their showy display. Every one of them has a history. Every one of these histories has resulted from social and biological forces. And every one of these histories tells us about ourselves as well as other species."

"Thanks for that, Ed. Insightful. The stuff my readers need to know."

"Glad to be of help. By the way, nice tea."

The Writer As Paleoanthropologist

It comes as no surprise to Dead Beat, amateur paleoanthropologist that he is, that Neanderthal skeletal remains have been found further east than previously known - in Southern Siberia and Uzbekistan.

Neanderthals as you know are our closest relatives - remains date back 400,000 years and they are believed to have died out about 30,000 years ago as modern humans spread around the world - yes, it's an old story.

Still and all, these nomadic traits are ever increasingly more important to the writer wishing to understand the human condition. Russell Banks got it right in Continental Drift and that was back in the mid-Eighties. Who can ever forget Bob Dubois?

Anyway, the thing that Dead Beat is urging here is that all of us who would lean towards the writing line of business should understand that we are evolutionary historians. There are no two ways about this, and no way around it.

Paleonthology. Physical Anthropology. That's the real business we are in.

On The Road - John Updike

"Okay, okay. I won't let them forget about your poetry. Really..."


On The Road

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors
while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller,
those hotel rooms where the TV remote
waits by the bed like a suicide pistol,
those hours in the air amid white shirts
whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers,
those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts—
such venues of transit grow dearer than home.

The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss,
the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life?
No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop
whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror,
in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent,
and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide
down through the cloud cover to a single runway
at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

John Updike