But I don't care anymore; I've lost the will to want more
Thursday, 24. July 2008, 13:42:55
Used to be a Neil Gaiman fan
Wednesday, 23. July 2008, 18:58:46
I feel as though I'm about to commit social suicide. I was going to start this by saying something like, "Some of my best friends are Neil Gaiman fans", but actually, I'm not sure that I know a single person who doesn't worship Neil Gaiman as a god. I wonder how this state of affairs came about. I, too, as the title of this blog entry suggests, used to be a Neil Gaiman fan. There are two mysteries here; the universality of Gaiman's lionisation, and my own path from admiration to abhorrence. I think I can illuminate, to some extent, the latter mystery, but not the former. Therefore, because I don't actually enjoy offending people, I shall give my usual warning and say, if you are a Neil Gaiman fan, and think you are likely to be hurt by criticism of his oeuvre and possibly even his public persona, please read no further.
I described my Gaiman-related apostasy as mysterious, and indeed it is, to some extent. That is, it seems to have stolen over me, in a largely irrational, unexamined way, without me knowing quite why; to use common parlance, I began to find that I was somehow 'going off' Neil Gaiman. I used to be a big fan, and would probably still very much enjoy his comic books if I re-read them and tried to expunge the vision of his smug face from my mind as I did so. In fact, I was such a big fan that I long considered if I ever had a third tattoo, the design would be one of Gaiman's characters. So, a reasonably big fan.
However, today the name 'Neil Gaiman' is more likely to produce in me a frown of distaste than a smile of recognition and pleasure. And I can give no definite cause to explain this transition. All I know for sure is that the transition has taken place. There is one fairly certain memory I can offer now as an example: I was stepping from a train onto a platform at Waterloo Station and saw a poster advertising Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Something in me attempted to add the book to my internal 'to read' list, and then I suddenly found myself thinking, "Actually, I hate Neil Gaiman."
If I try to go further back, I have indistinct recollections of learning that Gaiman was branching out into novels, and reading an opening paragraph, and trying to like it, and then realising that the prose was like a pleasant scent to mask the odour of corruption. There was the vague thought somewhere, "This is a con."
And I never have read any of the 'novels', other than the graphic ones, I mean.
Today, however, since I have been hearing the name Neil Gaiman from a number of different sources, and have been forced to wonder at the intuition that makes the name now sound like something unctuous to my ears, I decided to settle the matter and actually read a substantial amount of some Neil Gaiman prose. I'm afraid to say that my intuition proved correct; I did not like what I read, at all.
That's the opening line. If you don't already hate this, then probably your taste is so different to mine that nothing that I now say will mean anything to you. I've been trying to analyse just what it is I dislike about this style (the rest of the text goes on in the same manner, and I'll probably give further examples). Do most things begin with a song, or is that just the kind of thing that a smarmy git would use as a pick-up line? That's it, isn't it? This is the pick-up line for Gaiman's story. It reads as if he's trying to seduce an audience of New Age ladies. It's the literary equivalent of "Do you come here often?" Often enough to have heard this line before, I'm afraid. It is, in more senses than one, a horribly over-familiar line.
If we're going to extend and torture this musical theme a little, the prose that follows reminds me of the sentimental piano on the soundtrack of a bad film. The words themselves could be the voiceover. The tone adopted here is fake. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is, I get the feeling that Gaiman himself doesn't even realise it's fake. My guess as to what's happening here is that the comic book medium is one that is very much used to referencing, and, so to speak 'quoting' other media, and Gaiman's style, developed in the world of comic books, therefore reads like one long, tacky quote of other media. This can work in comics because the text basically serves as stage directions, and the actual tone of the story, the texture, is created by the images. But if, when you work entirely in text, you have nothing but those 'quoted' stage directions, the whole thing is going to sound like voice-over. It's as if Gaiman is doing an impression of all his favourite bits from 'the movies' in a very poor American accent. This is simply what he's accustomed to doing, calling it 'post-modern', because this works in comic books, but, to my surprise, people still seem to think it works in novels. Not for me, it doesn't.
To be honest, I think I've largely summed up what I hate about this stuff already, but I'll have a trawl through the text to see if I can find a few more quotes to illustrate my point in specific ways.
I suppose this, like all things in art, is just a question of taste (and whether or not you have it), but I'm really not into this pattern of brief-assertive-sentence plus another-brief-assertive-sentence-reiterating-the-same-message-in-a-slightly-different-manner. ("Songs remain. They last." And the song remains the same, I suppose?) Perhaps these little devices are like standard trills, licks, riffs and so on, that any good musician knows, but overuse of them, and poor use of them, makes a song sound corny. I expect to hear lines like "Songs remain. They last", as part of a section of breathey, overwrought film dialogue between a man and a woman who are not sure if they'll get back together and are saying all sorts of profound things to each other in a tugging-on-the-heartstrings manner. Gaiman's prose is absolutely peppered with such devices, to the extent it almost seems as if he uses nothing else. Once again, everything is 'quoted'. And that's the power of songs, apparently. And no doubt that's the power of love, too.
Even Gaiman's characters are quoted. (I'm not going to bother putting quotemarks around the word 'quoted' anymore, except just there.) The "little old man" basically is a spotless white fedora and a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, and that's all he is. I'm sure that's how Gaiman constructs his characters. He has one of those books where you flip the top, middle or bottom of the page to mix and match different outfits. "Uh, pink gloves, a pith helmet and... rugby boots. Great character!" And that use of the phrase, 'when X and Y were worth something' is particularly emetic - another corny old lick in Gaiman's song, another phrase in which the assumed American accent doesn't quite work. You can see the pale flesh beneath the fake tan. And the whole production has such a schmaltzy, feel-good, folksy wholesomeness about it - and all fake, and all unconsciously fake - such a knowing, wise, warm, we're-all-good-underneath-ness, alluding to the humourless humour of shared and unquestioned values, without ever actually stretching to humour, that it makes me want to go and crucify a cat, just to feel bad about myself.
"It was going to be a good evening." God, no! Not another self-loving, feel-good cliche, please.
Do I have to continue? Basically, I got as far as the conversation between the two affianced characters talking about their planned wedding, in which the guy, 'Fat Charlie', doesn't want to invite his estranged father, and the girl starts to sulk on this account, and I gave up. Even to be able to say that I'd read enough of Neil Gaiman's undiluted prose to be able to form a good judgement of it, it wasn't worth reading further. In order to save myself from exploding out of sheer hatred, I had to stop.
Yeah, but we know that Fat Charlie is a softy deep down, don't we? Just look at his puppy face under his floppy locks! And his fiance is going all cold-shoulder on him. Oh no, what's he going to do? He's going to have to do what we all know he should do, anyway, and have some kind of emotional reconciliation with his father.
I really think I've fallen in love with Gaiman's characters here - that's how you can tell he's a real professional writer.
I forget who it was - J.G. Ballard? - but someone, referring to William Burroughs said something like, "He's the last of the real writers. After he goes, there'll be nothing left to us but the career-writers." While I disagree that Burroughs was the last, the current preponderance of career writers is brought home to me by the fact that someone who constructs novels out of bad impersonations of bad films can somehow be thought of as edgy or alternative. Neil Gaiman, anyway, does not provide much evidence that there are still real writers out there in the world.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
I described my Gaiman-related apostasy as mysterious, and indeed it is, to some extent. That is, it seems to have stolen over me, in a largely irrational, unexamined way, without me knowing quite why; to use common parlance, I began to find that I was somehow 'going off' Neil Gaiman. I used to be a big fan, and would probably still very much enjoy his comic books if I re-read them and tried to expunge the vision of his smug face from my mind as I did so. In fact, I was such a big fan that I long considered if I ever had a third tattoo, the design would be one of Gaiman's characters. So, a reasonably big fan.
However, today the name 'Neil Gaiman' is more likely to produce in me a frown of distaste than a smile of recognition and pleasure. And I can give no definite cause to explain this transition. All I know for sure is that the transition has taken place. There is one fairly certain memory I can offer now as an example: I was stepping from a train onto a platform at Waterloo Station and saw a poster advertising Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Something in me attempted to add the book to my internal 'to read' list, and then I suddenly found myself thinking, "Actually, I hate Neil Gaiman."
If I try to go further back, I have indistinct recollections of learning that Gaiman was branching out into novels, and reading an opening paragraph, and trying to like it, and then realising that the prose was like a pleasant scent to mask the odour of corruption. There was the vague thought somewhere, "This is a con."
And I never have read any of the 'novels', other than the graphic ones, I mean.
Today, however, since I have been hearing the name Neil Gaiman from a number of different sources, and have been forced to wonder at the intuition that makes the name now sound like something unctuous to my ears, I decided to settle the matter and actually read a substantial amount of some Neil Gaiman prose. I'm afraid to say that my intuition proved correct; I did not like what I read, at all.
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
That's the opening line. If you don't already hate this, then probably your taste is so different to mine that nothing that I now say will mean anything to you. I've been trying to analyse just what it is I dislike about this style (the rest of the text goes on in the same manner, and I'll probably give further examples). Do most things begin with a song, or is that just the kind of thing that a smarmy git would use as a pick-up line? That's it, isn't it? This is the pick-up line for Gaiman's story. It reads as if he's trying to seduce an audience of New Age ladies. It's the literary equivalent of "Do you come here often?" Often enough to have heard this line before, I'm afraid. It is, in more senses than one, a horribly over-familiar line.
If we're going to extend and torture this musical theme a little, the prose that follows reminds me of the sentimental piano on the soundtrack of a bad film. The words themselves could be the voiceover. The tone adopted here is fake. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is, I get the feeling that Gaiman himself doesn't even realise it's fake. My guess as to what's happening here is that the comic book medium is one that is very much used to referencing, and, so to speak 'quoting' other media, and Gaiman's style, developed in the world of comic books, therefore reads like one long, tacky quote of other media. This can work in comics because the text basically serves as stage directions, and the actual tone of the story, the texture, is created by the images. But if, when you work entirely in text, you have nothing but those 'quoted' stage directions, the whole thing is going to sound like voice-over. It's as if Gaiman is doing an impression of all his favourite bits from 'the movies' in a very poor American accent. This is simply what he's accustomed to doing, calling it 'post-modern', because this works in comic books, but, to my surprise, people still seem to think it works in novels. Not for me, it doesn't.
To be honest, I think I've largely summed up what I hate about this stuff already, but I'll have a trawl through the text to see if I can find a few more quotes to illustrate my point in specific ways.
Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughing-stock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.
I suppose this, like all things in art, is just a question of taste (and whether or not you have it), but I'm really not into this pattern of brief-assertive-sentence plus another-brief-assertive-sentence-reiterating-the-same-message-in-a-slightly-different-manner. ("Songs remain. They last." And the song remains the same, I suppose?) Perhaps these little devices are like standard trills, licks, riffs and so on, that any good musician knows, but overuse of them, and poor use of them, makes a song sound corny. I expect to hear lines like "Songs remain. They last", as part of a section of breathey, overwrought film dialogue between a man and a woman who are not sure if they'll get back together and are saying all sorts of profound things to each other in a tugging-on-the-heartstrings manner. Gaiman's prose is absolutely peppered with such devices, to the extent it almost seems as if he uses nothing else. Once again, everything is 'quoted'. And that's the power of songs, apparently. And no doubt that's the power of love, too.
Before Fat Charlie's father had come into the bar, the barman had been of the opinion that the whole Karaoke evening was going to be an utter bust. But then the little old man had sashayed into the room, walked past the table of several blonde women, with the fresh sunburns and smiles of tourists, who were sitting by the little makeshift stage in the corner. He had tipped his hat to them, for he wore a hat, a spotless white fedora, and lemon-yellow gloves, and then he walked over to their table. They giggled.
"Are you enjoyin' yourselves, ladies?" he asked.
They continued to giggle and told him they were having a good time, thank you, and that they were here on vacation. He said to them, it gets better, just you wait.
He was older than they were, much, much older, but he was charm itself, like something from a bygone age when fine manners and courtly gestures were worth something. The barman relaxed. With someone like this in the bar, it was going to be a good evening.
Even Gaiman's characters are quoted. (I'm not going to bother putting quotemarks around the word 'quoted' anymore, except just there.) The "little old man" basically is a spotless white fedora and a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, and that's all he is. I'm sure that's how Gaiman constructs his characters. He has one of those books where you flip the top, middle or bottom of the page to mix and match different outfits. "Uh, pink gloves, a pith helmet and... rugby boots. Great character!" And that use of the phrase, 'when X and Y were worth something' is particularly emetic - another corny old lick in Gaiman's song, another phrase in which the assumed American accent doesn't quite work. You can see the pale flesh beneath the fake tan. And the whole production has such a schmaltzy, feel-good, folksy wholesomeness about it - and all fake, and all unconsciously fake - such a knowing, wise, warm, we're-all-good-underneath-ness, alluding to the humourless humour of shared and unquestioned values, without ever actually stretching to humour, that it makes me want to go and crucify a cat, just to feel bad about myself.
"It was going to be a good evening." God, no! Not another self-loving, feel-good cliche, please.
Do I have to continue? Basically, I got as far as the conversation between the two affianced characters talking about their planned wedding, in which the guy, 'Fat Charlie', doesn't want to invite his estranged father, and the girl starts to sulk on this account, and I gave up. Even to be able to say that I'd read enough of Neil Gaiman's undiluted prose to be able to form a good judgement of it, it wasn't worth reading further. In order to save myself from exploding out of sheer hatred, I had to stop.
He buttressed this by stating categorically that he was damned, double-damned and quite possibly even thrice-damned if he was going to invite his father to their wedding. In fact, said Fat Charlie in closing, the best thing about getting married was not having to invite his dad to the reception.
And then Fat Charlie saw the expression on Rosie's face and the icy glint in her normally friendly eyes, and he corrected himself hurriedly, explaining that he meant the second-best, but it was already much too late.
"You'll just have to get used to the idea," said Rosie. "After all, a wedding is a marvelous opportunity for mending fences and building bridges. It's your opportunity to show him that there are no hard feelings."
"But there are hard feelings," said Fat Charlie. "Lots."
Yeah, but we know that Fat Charlie is a softy deep down, don't we? Just look at his puppy face under his floppy locks! And his fiance is going all cold-shoulder on him. Oh no, what's he going to do? He's going to have to do what we all know he should do, anyway, and have some kind of emotional reconciliation with his father.
I really think I've fallen in love with Gaiman's characters here - that's how you can tell he's a real professional writer.
I forget who it was - J.G. Ballard? - but someone, referring to William Burroughs said something like, "He's the last of the real writers. After he goes, there'll be nothing left to us but the career-writers." While I disagree that Burroughs was the last, the current preponderance of career writers is brought home to me by the fact that someone who constructs novels out of bad impersonations of bad films can somehow be thought of as edgy or alternative. Neil Gaiman, anyway, does not provide much evidence that there are still real writers out there in the world.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
A Vague Uneasiness
Tuesday, 22. July 2008, 17:08:57
Some time back, I announced that I would like to introduce to my readers, through this blog, a number of short stories, with my own commentary, simply in order to share and encourage interest in the form. I have not forgotten this intention. In fact, I am about to fulfil it by delivering the first in the series of my recommendations. It's taken me this long in part because I have been thinking carefully about my selection. I didn't want to choose something too likely to be familiar to my readers, but I didn't want to choose something (to begin with at least) with which I was not all that familiar myself. In other words, I wanted to choose something that is a favourite, or close to being a favourite of mine, available online in a form that is not an insult to the reader's intelligence, but which I haven't already mentioned on this blog one thousand and two times. And I have finally chosen the first story. It is 'Rashomon', by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke's work may already be familiar to some readers without them even knowing it (a fate that befalls many writers). If you are a fan of Japanese cinema, then the chances are you will have seen the film Rashomon, from director Kurosawa, the plot for which is constructed from two of Akutagawa's short stories, 'Rashomon', and 'In a Grove'. In fact, the short story 'Rashomon' only provides the framing device for the action of the film, most of that action being a reproduction of the plot of 'In a Grove'. Therefore, if you have seen the film Rashomon and now read the short story, you will not know from the film what is going to happen. It should perhaps also be noted that the final ending of the film suggests a far more hopeful future than is ever suggested in either of the original stories.
Chris Power of The Guardian, writing on Akutagawa, tells us, "Using limpid prose to blend traditional and modernist storytelling, Ryunosuke Akutagawa is an under-acknowledged master". Under-acknowledged? This is questionable. I suppose he is under-acknowledged in at least two ways. Firstly, he is under-acknowledged simply because he is a writer and all writers (with only one or two exceptions) are under-acknowledged. Secondly, he is underacknowledged in the English-speaking world, because nothing outside of the deathly tedious 'comedy of manners' in Britain, and the 'great American novel' in the US, is generally deemed even to exist. In Japan, Akutagawa's name is attached to the foremost literary prize - the Akutagawa Prize. Of course, that one fact alone doesn't mean that he is sufficiently acknowledged, even in Japan. People say 'Dickensian', thinking (inevitably wrongly) they know what it means, even if they have never read Dickens. This could easily be the case with Akutagawa in Japan, too. However, I wonder if that was what Chris Power meant. Or did he simply mean that Akutagawa is Japanese, and therefore you will never have even heard of him, let alone read him? Sadly, I suspect that he did.
I'm not really criticising Chris Power here. He seems to know his Akutagawa better than I do (I'm not going to get into a competition about this). I just find the underlying assumption very sad, even if it is (because it is?) a correct assumption with regard to the attitudes of English-speaking readers.
I also noticed something else in what Chris Power has written:
If they do represent such an improvement that's because past efforts have been abysmal. One of the many curses of Japanese literature is that lack of interest in the West means no money in translating, which means that the dismal trickle of translations that do appear are usually executed by anaemic academics, with no idea of literary style, in their coffee breaks, between marking exam papers. I wonder if Chris Power has been able to compare Jay Rubin's translations with the originals here. I often remark blurbs that say what a good job the translator of such-and-such a story has done, from reviewers who obviously don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Also, he's right to say that Murakami only "musters faint praise". Why was Murakami, who doesn't even care about Japanese literature, drafted in to write this introduction? Because he's probably the only Japanese writer who people in the West can name, I imagine. He provides an introduction that reads like an essay he was forced to write for high school, with a few metaphorical I's dotted and T's crossed. And all the while, beneath the surface of the introduction, is the subtext, "Forget about Akutagawa. That's old Japan. Pre-war stuff. Worhship me! Me! Me! ME! ME! MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI FOR THE CUP!"
Chris Power suggests Akutagawa would enjoy this irony, but having one's grave shat on is not really so much an irony as something that's very boring and expected for a writer. My personal guess is that Akutagawa wouldn't 'appreciate' it at all; and there's no reason he should do.
Anyway, I shall proceed to my thoughts on the story in question. I can't remember when I first read 'Rashomon', but it would have been in one of those bad translations at university. I found it understated, but it stirred something in me. In any case, I remembered it, when I forget so much of what I read. I've since read it again at least twice in other English translations as well as once in the Japanese orginal. Reading it in the orginal I found the whole thing suddenly came alive to me, and I understood. What did I understand? The usual line in describing Akutagawa's work is, to borrow Chris Power's words again, that he achieves his effects by "applying modernist techniques to [...] adaptations of traditional stories". 'Rashomon' is set in Mediaeval Japan, the distant past, at a time when the country was collapsing into barbarism at the end of the effete gentility of the Heian Period. The opening passages mention a series of disasters that have ruined the capital - "earthquakes, whirlwinds, fire and famine". This is, in fact, the period written of by Kamo no Chomei, author of Hojoki, or, A Record of My Hut, and Akutagawa seems to borrow some images straight from this work, including the Buddhist effigies used for firewood. They are images that conjure up the idea of a 'dark age'. Reading the story in the original, however, it suddenly struck me with a ghoulish tingle, as if I could see the piled corpses before me - this was not only the distant past, this was also the future. It is that tingle, I think, at once understated, and also vast and chilling in its scope - the tingle of an observer in a gold-plated, air-conditioned atrocity exhibition - that is the hallmark of much of Akutagawa's work.
I also find it fitting that the first work I present in this series of short stories, should be written by someone who wrote no 'full-length' works. I hope that, even in translation, it demonstrates that the worth of a writer does not come from the bulk of his or her output. As a matter of fact, it would have been difficult for Akutagawa to produce an oeuvre of great volume. Suffering in his final years from poor health, and fearing the onset of hereditary madness, which he believed might be his destiny, in 1927, at the age of 35, he took an overdose and ended his life. He had written just prior to his death that he felt "a vague uneasiness" about the future.
So, readers, just in case you missed it the first time, let me provide a link to an English translation of 'Rashomon'. I won't comment on the translation, except to reiterate that I did find there to be a considerable difference between the translations I had read, in their impact, and the original Japanese. I hope that you will enjoy the translation sufficiently for it to be worth your while. It is, after all, only a short story. And finally, I will give that link again; readers, let me present, the future.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke's work may already be familiar to some readers without them even knowing it (a fate that befalls many writers). If you are a fan of Japanese cinema, then the chances are you will have seen the film Rashomon, from director Kurosawa, the plot for which is constructed from two of Akutagawa's short stories, 'Rashomon', and 'In a Grove'. In fact, the short story 'Rashomon' only provides the framing device for the action of the film, most of that action being a reproduction of the plot of 'In a Grove'. Therefore, if you have seen the film Rashomon and now read the short story, you will not know from the film what is going to happen. It should perhaps also be noted that the final ending of the film suggests a far more hopeful future than is ever suggested in either of the original stories.
Chris Power of The Guardian, writing on Akutagawa, tells us, "Using limpid prose to blend traditional and modernist storytelling, Ryunosuke Akutagawa is an under-acknowledged master". Under-acknowledged? This is questionable. I suppose he is under-acknowledged in at least two ways. Firstly, he is under-acknowledged simply because he is a writer and all writers (with only one or two exceptions) are under-acknowledged. Secondly, he is underacknowledged in the English-speaking world, because nothing outside of the deathly tedious 'comedy of manners' in Britain, and the 'great American novel' in the US, is generally deemed even to exist. In Japan, Akutagawa's name is attached to the foremost literary prize - the Akutagawa Prize. Of course, that one fact alone doesn't mean that he is sufficiently acknowledged, even in Japan. People say 'Dickensian', thinking (inevitably wrongly) they know what it means, even if they have never read Dickens. This could easily be the case with Akutagawa in Japan, too. However, I wonder if that was what Chris Power meant. Or did he simply mean that Akutagawa is Japanese, and therefore you will never have even heard of him, let alone read him? Sadly, I suspect that he did.
I'm not really criticising Chris Power here. He seems to know his Akutagawa better than I do (I'm not going to get into a competition about this). I just find the underlying assumption very sad, even if it is (because it is?) a correct assumption with regard to the attitudes of English-speaking readers.
I also noticed something else in what Chris Power has written:
As a final note, Jay Rubin's translations in the recent Penguin edition of Akutagawa's stories represent a significant improvement on several past efforts. The choice of Haruki Murakami to write the introduction is a puzzle, however, given that he only musters faint praise for his subject. But that's an irony Akutagawa, who once ended a story by claiming that if her boyfriend didn't brutally deflower his heroine then the critics most surely would, might well have enjoyed.
If they do represent such an improvement that's because past efforts have been abysmal. One of the many curses of Japanese literature is that lack of interest in the West means no money in translating, which means that the dismal trickle of translations that do appear are usually executed by anaemic academics, with no idea of literary style, in their coffee breaks, between marking exam papers. I wonder if Chris Power has been able to compare Jay Rubin's translations with the originals here. I often remark blurbs that say what a good job the translator of such-and-such a story has done, from reviewers who obviously don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Also, he's right to say that Murakami only "musters faint praise". Why was Murakami, who doesn't even care about Japanese literature, drafted in to write this introduction? Because he's probably the only Japanese writer who people in the West can name, I imagine. He provides an introduction that reads like an essay he was forced to write for high school, with a few metaphorical I's dotted and T's crossed. And all the while, beneath the surface of the introduction, is the subtext, "Forget about Akutagawa. That's old Japan. Pre-war stuff. Worhship me! Me! Me! ME! ME! MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI. MURAKAMI FOR THE CUP!"
Chris Power suggests Akutagawa would enjoy this irony, but having one's grave shat on is not really so much an irony as something that's very boring and expected for a writer. My personal guess is that Akutagawa wouldn't 'appreciate' it at all; and there's no reason he should do.
Anyway, I shall proceed to my thoughts on the story in question. I can't remember when I first read 'Rashomon', but it would have been in one of those bad translations at university. I found it understated, but it stirred something in me. In any case, I remembered it, when I forget so much of what I read. I've since read it again at least twice in other English translations as well as once in the Japanese orginal. Reading it in the orginal I found the whole thing suddenly came alive to me, and I understood. What did I understand? The usual line in describing Akutagawa's work is, to borrow Chris Power's words again, that he achieves his effects by "applying modernist techniques to [...] adaptations of traditional stories". 'Rashomon' is set in Mediaeval Japan, the distant past, at a time when the country was collapsing into barbarism at the end of the effete gentility of the Heian Period. The opening passages mention a series of disasters that have ruined the capital - "earthquakes, whirlwinds, fire and famine". This is, in fact, the period written of by Kamo no Chomei, author of Hojoki, or, A Record of My Hut, and Akutagawa seems to borrow some images straight from this work, including the Buddhist effigies used for firewood. They are images that conjure up the idea of a 'dark age'. Reading the story in the original, however, it suddenly struck me with a ghoulish tingle, as if I could see the piled corpses before me - this was not only the distant past, this was also the future. It is that tingle, I think, at once understated, and also vast and chilling in its scope - the tingle of an observer in a gold-plated, air-conditioned atrocity exhibition - that is the hallmark of much of Akutagawa's work.
I also find it fitting that the first work I present in this series of short stories, should be written by someone who wrote no 'full-length' works. I hope that, even in translation, it demonstrates that the worth of a writer does not come from the bulk of his or her output. As a matter of fact, it would have been difficult for Akutagawa to produce an oeuvre of great volume. Suffering in his final years from poor health, and fearing the onset of hereditary madness, which he believed might be his destiny, in 1927, at the age of 35, he took an overdose and ended his life. He had written just prior to his death that he felt "a vague uneasiness" about the future.
So, readers, just in case you missed it the first time, let me provide a link to an English translation of 'Rashomon'. I won't comment on the translation, except to reiterate that I did find there to be a considerable difference between the translations I had read, in their impact, and the original Japanese. I hope that you will enjoy the translation sufficiently for it to be worth your while. It is, after all, only a short story. And finally, I will give that link again; readers, let me present, the future.
The Great Channel 4 Swindle
Monday, 21. July 2008, 21:35:41
I basically distrust television, though perhaps not as much as I should. Anyway, it didn't come as much of a surprise to me to read of what appears to be at least a bad case of negligence on the part of Channel 4, and quite possibly a campaign of grievous vandalism, with regard to the issue of climate change. The article in question is this one, by George Monbiot. I'm not going to give commentary; I think it speaks for itself.
Happy Birthday to Chomu
Wednesday, 16. July 2008, 09:55:41
What is Chomu?
Is it a town in the Indian state of Jaipur with a literacy rate slightly higher than the national average? Is it "a person who lives for the singular purpose of trying to ruin the best parts of life for others by subintellectual activities"? Or is it a literary blogzine of dadaoist writing founded by Justin Isis and myself as a forum for the kind of writing we really want to see out there in the world, but which everyone else is too determinedly boring to publish? It is all of these things, and more.
In its incarnation as a blogzine, however, Chomu is now one year and four days old. Not only that, Justin has just posted there a new story, which I shall read after writing this, called, 'I Attain to the Level of Fucking Your Basic Hairdresser'.
Let us celebrate the wonder of Chomu... by reading it.
For the beginner, here is the zine's manifesto, which may guide you in the understanding of the works.
And for beginners and veterans alike, I now nominate some of my favourite pieces from Chomu:
The Lambs in the Trenches are Lambent and Trenchant
Wild Dogs and Alley Cats
The Ends II: of Phoenix Flower itself, metamorphical
The Tenth Night
Looking through to choose these pieces just now, from different contributors, I realised afresh just how much great stuff there is waiting to be discovered and rediscovered there in Chomu. I'm not going to link to each piece individually - that would be silly.
Anyway, perhaps there will be other forms of celebration on this occasion, and perhaps you will be invited, or perhaps not. We shall see.
Before I go, I'd just like to say that, although there are very few things in life of which I am proud, my involvement with Chomu is one. Can I explain? Should I explain? I think it is enough for me to say that I am proud, and the causes of that pride are such that explanation might not be in keeping with their spirit. I can perhaps say this much, however: Chomu is free, in all six senses of the word. Like the Dao itself, it is simply there whether or not you notice, whether or not you care.
Is it a town in the Indian state of Jaipur with a literacy rate slightly higher than the national average? Is it "a person who lives for the singular purpose of trying to ruin the best parts of life for others by subintellectual activities"? Or is it a literary blogzine of dadaoist writing founded by Justin Isis and myself as a forum for the kind of writing we really want to see out there in the world, but which everyone else is too determinedly boring to publish? It is all of these things, and more.
In its incarnation as a blogzine, however, Chomu is now one year and four days old. Not only that, Justin has just posted there a new story, which I shall read after writing this, called, 'I Attain to the Level of Fucking Your Basic Hairdresser'.
Let us celebrate the wonder of Chomu... by reading it.
For the beginner, here is the zine's manifesto, which may guide you in the understanding of the works.
And for beginners and veterans alike, I now nominate some of my favourite pieces from Chomu:
The Lambs in the Trenches are Lambent and Trenchant
Wild Dogs and Alley Cats
The Ends II: of Phoenix Flower itself, metamorphical
The Tenth Night
Looking through to choose these pieces just now, from different contributors, I realised afresh just how much great stuff there is waiting to be discovered and rediscovered there in Chomu. I'm not going to link to each piece individually - that would be silly.
Anyway, perhaps there will be other forms of celebration on this occasion, and perhaps you will be invited, or perhaps not. We shall see.
Before I go, I'd just like to say that, although there are very few things in life of which I am proud, my involvement with Chomu is one. Can I explain? Should I explain? I think it is enough for me to say that I am proud, and the causes of that pride are such that explanation might not be in keeping with their spirit. I can perhaps say this much, however: Chomu is free, in all six senses of the word. Like the Dao itself, it is simply there whether or not you notice, whether or not you care.
Whatever happened to Lene Lovich?
Tuesday, 15. July 2008, 12:23:57
Is that a strange question to ask, I wonder.
I mean, maybe it sounds a bit rude, as if Ms Lovich has disappeared off the face of the Earth, when it could be - probably is - me who has disappeared. Or at least, to be fair, it's probably more objective to say that myself and Ms Lovich have probably simply ended up on different faces of the Earth, each invisible from the other. And on that side - her side - there's probably no one asking, "Whatever happened to Quentin S. Crisp?", least of all Lene Lovich, who has never met me.
I began thinking about Lene Lovich because I heard some music and thought it reminded me of something. Some other names came to me relatively quickly. Cyndie Lauper and Kate Bush, I think they were. But I knew that something in my mind was trying to grasp for something else. And then it found it - Lene Lovich. (Although I must confess the name first came back in the form 'Lena Lovett'.) I hadn't thought of Lene Lovich for years - how strange to have something lying, perfectly (well, perhaps not perfectly, but relatively) intact in my memory all these years without me dusting it off once. And yet, all my associations with the name were positive and quirky enough for me immediately to wish to look her up, so to speak, but not in a Mae West sort of way, just on Google and Youtube, as that was basically what was available to me.
Let me tell you first how I remembered Lene Lovich. I remembered her as a weird, famous-but-obscure female singer with a distinctive voice, whom I associated slightly with Kate Bush. I couldn't actually name any of her songs. What I remembered in particular was finding a home-taped cassette of her album Flex (I couldn't remember the title), in the house where I was living at the age of about twenty. It must have belonged to someone in my family. I remember that I picked it up, and seemed at the time to know the name, and, in curiousity, played it. I'm not sure I can describe what I remember of my reactions. There was a sense that I might or might not like the music. It was different to anything I had heard before. Thinking about it, I probably had her pegged for a flash-in-the-pan version of Kate Bush, who nonetheless had something (and something that I couldn't quite get a handle on). That seemed to be the prejudice I carried with me when I looked her up this time. Although, it wasn't only that. I must have felt some peculiar kind of pleasure in listening to her music at that time, because I was also looking forward to re-discovering it. I don't know how many times I listened to that tape, but I imagine it was not many. It was not enough to overcome the conservatism of youth, and the hesitation that comes with wondering if this is quite hip enough to listen to (not that I was ever really hip). Which is a shame, because I had managed to overcome that conservatism on many counts previously.
I'm not sure there was much more to my memory of Lene Lovich than that, apart from the tickling in my brain of a melody, or a style of melody, that I couldn't quite bring into full consciousness.
I have now listened to quite a few Lene Lovich tracks on Youtube. The peculiar thing is, that although I think that Bird Song was the one I listened to most, and which I most enjoyed, as a melody, rather than an impression, it was the one I remembered least this time out of the two that I definitely remember. It is still, however, the one I like most out of those I have recently listened to.
I was already thinking of writing a blog entry on her, and probably saying that she was as good as, or better than I had remembered, but, after all, still a little too bound by pop convention in terms of genre, beat and so on, to be as good as Kate Bush, but now I'm beginning to wonder. For one thing, Lene Lovich could not have been a Kate Bush clone, even if she sounded identical, which she doesn't, because they both had their first hit singles in the year 1978 . Now, I haven't yet pinpointed this in terms of month, week and day, so I don't know which entered the charts first, but I believe I'm right in saying that Lene Lovich already had some involvement with musical releases, though perhaps not solo, before that year. She is also about nine years older than Kate Bush. Kate Bush is often presented as being the first original wailing madwoman to enter the pop charts, and Lene Lovich is seldom mentioned in this connection (that I've noticed), although there was, of course, that association of the two of them in my mind from somewhere.
What really made me understand who Lene Lovich is, however, was when I looked up, again, the song Lucky Number. How could I have forgotten this? This lip-synched version shows Lene in some very Bush-like poses. Yes, I knew this song. I must have heard it quite a few times when it first came out - when I was about six. My juvenile emotional responses to the song came back to me. I'm not sure I can describe them, except that there was definitely a response to the transition from the lucky number being one, to it becoming two. I believe I understood the sacrifice of independence that the song was expressing - one is good, but two, to Lene's surprise, is also good. I also remembered the line, "There's something in the air besides the atmosphere", with its slightly 'close encounters' spooky feeling, reminiscent, yes, please forgive me, in tone and delivery of some of the songs on Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, such as Kite, Them Heavy People and Strange Phenomena. (In the promotional video for Lucky Number, at around 18 seconds, you can see the band (?) bowing to Lene - behind her - in a we're-not-worthy fashion, as well they might.)
Okay, inevitable Kate Bush comparisons out of the way, I hope. I really like this stuff! I think the same fear that made me secretly like, without even knowing it, Adam and the Ants for years without acting on that attraction, was at work here, all those years ago. But now I'm old enough to know - most of the time, I think, with music and stuff, anyway - when I like something, and not care about other people's stupid tastes. Why has it taken me so long?
I had other comparisons in mind to make concerning Lene Lovich, too, but I will refrain. There seems no point. I could say that she appears to me now a neglected missing link in pop music between, well, all sorts of things, really, and I noticed she's worked with another childhood hero, Thomas Dolby. But, more than a missing link, she now appears simply as Lene Lovich.
As to my original question, whatever happened to Lene Lovich, well, I don't actually make much of a point of keeping in touch with this scene or that, so if I wonder what happened to someone it doesn't necessarily signify anything apart from my own lack of attention. However, I did look up some biographical material. It appears that after Flex (I'm going to have to check this again), the album to which I listened, amongst other things, she took time off to raise a family. I mention other things, but in no particular order (and probably including things from before Flex, too), these seem to include dubbing screams onto horror films, being a gogo dancer, co-writing and performing in the musical/play Mata Hari and bringing out a new album, Shadows and Dust in 2005. So, maybe I should ask what didn't happen to her. I am tempted to say - but I don't really have much evidence yet, just a desire to say it - that perhaps what didn't happen to her is that she didn't sell out, and that's why I haven't heard her name on people's lips for a while.
And now I'm thinking about all the things that haven't happened to me, too. Like being a gogo dancer, for instance. Is it too late?
I mean, maybe it sounds a bit rude, as if Ms Lovich has disappeared off the face of the Earth, when it could be - probably is - me who has disappeared. Or at least, to be fair, it's probably more objective to say that myself and Ms Lovich have probably simply ended up on different faces of the Earth, each invisible from the other. And on that side - her side - there's probably no one asking, "Whatever happened to Quentin S. Crisp?", least of all Lene Lovich, who has never met me.
I began thinking about Lene Lovich because I heard some music and thought it reminded me of something. Some other names came to me relatively quickly. Cyndie Lauper and Kate Bush, I think they were. But I knew that something in my mind was trying to grasp for something else. And then it found it - Lene Lovich. (Although I must confess the name first came back in the form 'Lena Lovett'.) I hadn't thought of Lene Lovich for years - how strange to have something lying, perfectly (well, perhaps not perfectly, but relatively) intact in my memory all these years without me dusting it off once. And yet, all my associations with the name were positive and quirky enough for me immediately to wish to look her up, so to speak, but not in a Mae West sort of way, just on Google and Youtube, as that was basically what was available to me.
Let me tell you first how I remembered Lene Lovich. I remembered her as a weird, famous-but-obscure female singer with a distinctive voice, whom I associated slightly with Kate Bush. I couldn't actually name any of her songs. What I remembered in particular was finding a home-taped cassette of her album Flex (I couldn't remember the title), in the house where I was living at the age of about twenty. It must have belonged to someone in my family. I remember that I picked it up, and seemed at the time to know the name, and, in curiousity, played it. I'm not sure I can describe what I remember of my reactions. There was a sense that I might or might not like the music. It was different to anything I had heard before. Thinking about it, I probably had her pegged for a flash-in-the-pan version of Kate Bush, who nonetheless had something (and something that I couldn't quite get a handle on). That seemed to be the prejudice I carried with me when I looked her up this time. Although, it wasn't only that. I must have felt some peculiar kind of pleasure in listening to her music at that time, because I was also looking forward to re-discovering it. I don't know how many times I listened to that tape, but I imagine it was not many. It was not enough to overcome the conservatism of youth, and the hesitation that comes with wondering if this is quite hip enough to listen to (not that I was ever really hip). Which is a shame, because I had managed to overcome that conservatism on many counts previously.
I'm not sure there was much more to my memory of Lene Lovich than that, apart from the tickling in my brain of a melody, or a style of melody, that I couldn't quite bring into full consciousness.
I have now listened to quite a few Lene Lovich tracks on Youtube. The peculiar thing is, that although I think that Bird Song was the one I listened to most, and which I most enjoyed, as a melody, rather than an impression, it was the one I remembered least this time out of the two that I definitely remember. It is still, however, the one I like most out of those I have recently listened to.
I was already thinking of writing a blog entry on her, and probably saying that she was as good as, or better than I had remembered, but, after all, still a little too bound by pop convention in terms of genre, beat and so on, to be as good as Kate Bush, but now I'm beginning to wonder. For one thing, Lene Lovich could not have been a Kate Bush clone, even if she sounded identical, which she doesn't, because they both had their first hit singles in the year 1978 . Now, I haven't yet pinpointed this in terms of month, week and day, so I don't know which entered the charts first, but I believe I'm right in saying that Lene Lovich already had some involvement with musical releases, though perhaps not solo, before that year. She is also about nine years older than Kate Bush. Kate Bush is often presented as being the first original wailing madwoman to enter the pop charts, and Lene Lovich is seldom mentioned in this connection (that I've noticed), although there was, of course, that association of the two of them in my mind from somewhere.
What really made me understand who Lene Lovich is, however, was when I looked up, again, the song Lucky Number. How could I have forgotten this? This lip-synched version shows Lene in some very Bush-like poses. Yes, I knew this song. I must have heard it quite a few times when it first came out - when I was about six. My juvenile emotional responses to the song came back to me. I'm not sure I can describe them, except that there was definitely a response to the transition from the lucky number being one, to it becoming two. I believe I understood the sacrifice of independence that the song was expressing - one is good, but two, to Lene's surprise, is also good. I also remembered the line, "There's something in the air besides the atmosphere", with its slightly 'close encounters' spooky feeling, reminiscent, yes, please forgive me, in tone and delivery of some of the songs on Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, such as Kite, Them Heavy People and Strange Phenomena. (In the promotional video for Lucky Number, at around 18 seconds, you can see the band (?) bowing to Lene - behind her - in a we're-not-worthy fashion, as well they might.)
Okay, inevitable Kate Bush comparisons out of the way, I hope. I really like this stuff! I think the same fear that made me secretly like, without even knowing it, Adam and the Ants for years without acting on that attraction, was at work here, all those years ago. But now I'm old enough to know - most of the time, I think, with music and stuff, anyway - when I like something, and not care about other people's stupid tastes. Why has it taken me so long?
I had other comparisons in mind to make concerning Lene Lovich, too, but I will refrain. There seems no point. I could say that she appears to me now a neglected missing link in pop music between, well, all sorts of things, really, and I noticed she's worked with another childhood hero, Thomas Dolby. But, more than a missing link, she now appears simply as Lene Lovich.
As to my original question, whatever happened to Lene Lovich, well, I don't actually make much of a point of keeping in touch with this scene or that, so if I wonder what happened to someone it doesn't necessarily signify anything apart from my own lack of attention. However, I did look up some biographical material. It appears that after Flex (I'm going to have to check this again), the album to which I listened, amongst other things, she took time off to raise a family. I mention other things, but in no particular order (and probably including things from before Flex, too), these seem to include dubbing screams onto horror films, being a gogo dancer, co-writing and performing in the musical/play Mata Hari and bringing out a new album, Shadows and Dust in 2005. So, maybe I should ask what didn't happen to her. I am tempted to say - but I don't really have much evidence yet, just a desire to say it - that perhaps what didn't happen to her is that she didn't sell out, and that's why I haven't heard her name on people's lips for a while.
And now I'm thinking about all the things that haven't happened to me, too. Like being a gogo dancer, for instance. Is it too late?
More on Thomas Disch
Monday, 14. July 2008, 16:06:35
Excuse the brevity of this post. I just wanted to let readers know that there's a follow-up on the recent Thomas Disch news, here.
The BBC hand them stardom
Saturday, 12. July 2008, 12:56:41
Well, if I don't write this today, I probably never will. It's been over a week now since I saw, in company with Mr. Wu, Morrissey in concert at the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park.
I'm a little tired of live music reviews, as they seldom seem to convey more than the fact that the writer either enjoyed or didn't enjoy the event. I don't really want to write the usual live review, but I don't really know what else to write. Anyway, let's see what we can do.
There were a number of acts lined up for that day, but I think the only ones that Mr. Wu and myself were interested in were Beck and Morrissey. Besides which, I was coming up to London on the day, and Mr. Wu had to work, so we were bound to miss most of the line-up. I met Mr. Wu at his place of work, and we discussed what songs we thought Morrissey would do, and what songs we would like him to do, and whether we would catch much of Beck's set. Mr. Wu was particularly keen for Morrissey to do The Last of the Famous International Playboys. I made some jokes about the first song being National Front Disco, and so on. I also remarked that it would be interesting to see how he comes across now, since he's at an interesting stage in his career. It seems as if, with his 'comeback', he's more popular than he's ever been. At the same time, he has only recently been involved in another controversy, perhaps the most notable of his career so far, ending as it did in legal action being taken, by Morrissey.
I had a feeling that it was going to be a good show. Morrissey's recent statement somehow seemed to exude confidence and augur well.
When we arrived at Hyde Park, Beck was already onstage. We strode briskly in the direction of the music, stopped only by a girl giving away free samples of wine. Even that would not have stopped us, had not the girl shouted, "It's free!"
Soon we came to a place of comfortable distance and settled in. To be honest, I don't want to spend any longer writing this than is necessary, and writing about Beck's set, it seems to me, is not necessary. It was the first time I had seen him live. At one point, I remarked to Mr. Wu, "I think he's phoning his performance in." "Not even that," said Mr. Wu, "he's faxing it in." Mr. Wu assured me that he has seen Beck before and he has been brilliant. I wondered if perhaps he resented being second billing. Whatever the reason, Beck's set was the dullest kind of rock'n'roll set, and not something I would have expected from someone who can do this.
There was about half an hour or so of this, then, mercifully, there came the interval. Mr. Wu complained that it was better in the old days when there was some compilation tape put on before the main act, usually put together by the headliners themselves. Then we noticed something strange as we watched the video clips being played on the video screens either side of the stage. They were brilliantly chosen and hilarious. It was obvious, after all, that this was the work of Morrissey. I still want to track some of those clips down, but they included footage of Brigitte Bardot, some camp old hoofer singing to a girl in a tutu that he is the one she should confess to, some clips from an episode of The Untouchables in which there featured lots of dialogue about a villain, or victim, called Morrissey ("It's settled then. Tonight, we take Morrissey", etc.), an interview with Shelagh Delany, and probably more that I've forgotten.
After a pleasingly brief interval (sometimes these things do drag on), the drum intro track to The Operation started up, and the band and Morrissey entered the stage. All were wearing Playboy T-shirts, and the first number was, by great serendipity, The Last of the Famous International Playboys. It was obvious that it was going to be a great gig. Somehow, Morrissey had known when he had written his statement that it would be. Towards the end of the first song, Morrissey did one of his famous live lyric changes. "In our lifetime those who kill/The news world hands them stardom", became, "In our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom". We both laughed at this, Mr. Wu and I.
The second song was a Smiths song, Ask, which was a very pleasant surprise. In fact, the setlist was full of great surprises, including The Death of a Disco Dancer, Vicar in a Tutu, Stretch Out and Wait, Sister, I'm a Poet and Billy Budd. With the occasional lapse into hohummery here and there (All You Need is Me), the gig just seemed to get better and better. When The Death of a Disco Dancer started, I had the feeling that this was going to be the best song of the evening. The interesting thing about a Morrissey gig is that, even in the midst of all the physical confusion of a live performance, the words still seem to matter. This song felt, to me, incredibly zeitgeisty. "Love, peace and harmony/Love, peace and harmony/Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice/But maybe in the next world." The ironic bitterness of that repeated "very nice" came across quite chillingly. Surely we're at a point in history where that really is the decision facing us - love, peace and harmony, or "the next world", in other words, the end of this one.
Maybe it was just me, but APOCALYPSE seemed very much in the air. I mean, perhaps that should not be a surprise. Still, some of the lyrics struck me afresh: "Will the world end in the nighttime/I really don't know/Or will the world end in the daytime/I don't know", from Stretch Out and Wait. Perhaps tellingly, there was another lyric change here. The following line is usually, "And is there any point ever having children?/Oh, I don't know." This time the answer to the question was a single, emphatic, "No!" There was also the slight lyric change in Ask: "If it's not love, then it's the bomb/The nuclear bomb that will bring us together."
I suppose the apocalypse theme - also emphasised in a peculiar way by Morrissey complaining about the smell of roasting meat wafting over the park, "Putting death into your body, death into your body," he repeated a number of times, ending with the peculiar quip, "Oh, I've gone too far" - chimed in with some things I had been thinking anyway. I believe the crowd there numbered about 30,000. I thought, and not for the first time, about the tremendous amount of resources that are needed for such an event, in terms of electricity, transport and so on. Obviously, it would be hypocritical of me to be damning of such a use of resources, since I enjoyed the event, and I wonder if such mass public celebrations are, to some extent, necessary. Still, I also wonder how much longer we can keep this sort of thing up. Maybe, if we get the right energy sources, for a much longer time. But we don't seem to have the right energy sources at the moment.
What it did lead me to reflect on is the nature of stardom, and what I have long believed to be the very unhealthy relationship that our society (Britain, and I'm sure other societies) has with art. There is really no system for nurturing the artist in our society, outside of a few elitist institutions. When, back in the early eighties, Morrissey sang lines like, "No, I've never had a job/Because I'm too shy", what he was really expressing, in both a very direct, and very roundabout way, was the difficulty of being an artist in a society that does its very best to destroy artists. The usual response to anyone trying to 'make it' in any artistic sphere, before they have made it, is, "Who the fuck are you?" People resent artists. People wish to lynch artists. A huge event like the Morrissey gig, resembles, in some peculiar way, a sacrificial bonfire, complete with the smell of roasting flesh wafting across the field. The difference being that the sacrifice now is only symbolically of the artist ("Tonight, we're going to take Morrissey"). It is a bonfire erected to the artist's success. The artist has become god. How did he do this? He overcame death - the death that society tried (and failed) by any means necessary, to inflict on the artist and the artist's dream.
What kind of a relationship is this to have with artists? On the one hand they are despised as vermin, and on the other, revered as gods. And then people are surprised when occasionally those artists are human and act like arseholes. If you had had a whole country lusting for your blood one minute, and then worshipping you the next, the chances are, I reckon, you'd act like an arsehole sometimes, too.
All this is summed up for me in the words of that opening song, The Last of the Famous International Playboys: "See, in our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom/And these are the ways on which I was raised/These are the ways on which I was raised/I never wanted to kill/I am not naturally EVIL/Such things I do/Just to make myself more attractive to you/Have I failed?"
Well, on Friday night, in Hyde Park, at least, Morrissey did not fail.
The encore, and possibly the best song of the night, was another surprise, What She Said, from the album Meat is Murder.
"What she said/How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead/And decided to bury me/God knows I'm ready..."
Excellent stuff.
I'm a little tired of live music reviews, as they seldom seem to convey more than the fact that the writer either enjoyed or didn't enjoy the event. I don't really want to write the usual live review, but I don't really know what else to write. Anyway, let's see what we can do.
There were a number of acts lined up for that day, but I think the only ones that Mr. Wu and myself were interested in were Beck and Morrissey. Besides which, I was coming up to London on the day, and Mr. Wu had to work, so we were bound to miss most of the line-up. I met Mr. Wu at his place of work, and we discussed what songs we thought Morrissey would do, and what songs we would like him to do, and whether we would catch much of Beck's set. Mr. Wu was particularly keen for Morrissey to do The Last of the Famous International Playboys. I made some jokes about the first song being National Front Disco, and so on. I also remarked that it would be interesting to see how he comes across now, since he's at an interesting stage in his career. It seems as if, with his 'comeback', he's more popular than he's ever been. At the same time, he has only recently been involved in another controversy, perhaps the most notable of his career so far, ending as it did in legal action being taken, by Morrissey.
I had a feeling that it was going to be a good show. Morrissey's recent statement somehow seemed to exude confidence and augur well.
When we arrived at Hyde Park, Beck was already onstage. We strode briskly in the direction of the music, stopped only by a girl giving away free samples of wine. Even that would not have stopped us, had not the girl shouted, "It's free!"
Soon we came to a place of comfortable distance and settled in. To be honest, I don't want to spend any longer writing this than is necessary, and writing about Beck's set, it seems to me, is not necessary. It was the first time I had seen him live. At one point, I remarked to Mr. Wu, "I think he's phoning his performance in." "Not even that," said Mr. Wu, "he's faxing it in." Mr. Wu assured me that he has seen Beck before and he has been brilliant. I wondered if perhaps he resented being second billing. Whatever the reason, Beck's set was the dullest kind of rock'n'roll set, and not something I would have expected from someone who can do this.
There was about half an hour or so of this, then, mercifully, there came the interval. Mr. Wu complained that it was better in the old days when there was some compilation tape put on before the main act, usually put together by the headliners themselves. Then we noticed something strange as we watched the video clips being played on the video screens either side of the stage. They were brilliantly chosen and hilarious. It was obvious, after all, that this was the work of Morrissey. I still want to track some of those clips down, but they included footage of Brigitte Bardot, some camp old hoofer singing to a girl in a tutu that he is the one she should confess to, some clips from an episode of The Untouchables in which there featured lots of dialogue about a villain, or victim, called Morrissey ("It's settled then. Tonight, we take Morrissey", etc.), an interview with Shelagh Delany, and probably more that I've forgotten.
After a pleasingly brief interval (sometimes these things do drag on), the drum intro track to The Operation started up, and the band and Morrissey entered the stage. All were wearing Playboy T-shirts, and the first number was, by great serendipity, The Last of the Famous International Playboys. It was obvious that it was going to be a great gig. Somehow, Morrissey had known when he had written his statement that it would be. Towards the end of the first song, Morrissey did one of his famous live lyric changes. "In our lifetime those who kill/The news world hands them stardom", became, "In our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom". We both laughed at this, Mr. Wu and I.
The second song was a Smiths song, Ask, which was a very pleasant surprise. In fact, the setlist was full of great surprises, including The Death of a Disco Dancer, Vicar in a Tutu, Stretch Out and Wait, Sister, I'm a Poet and Billy Budd. With the occasional lapse into hohummery here and there (All You Need is Me), the gig just seemed to get better and better. When The Death of a Disco Dancer started, I had the feeling that this was going to be the best song of the evening. The interesting thing about a Morrissey gig is that, even in the midst of all the physical confusion of a live performance, the words still seem to matter. This song felt, to me, incredibly zeitgeisty. "Love, peace and harmony/Love, peace and harmony/Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice/But maybe in the next world." The ironic bitterness of that repeated "very nice" came across quite chillingly. Surely we're at a point in history where that really is the decision facing us - love, peace and harmony, or "the next world", in other words, the end of this one.
Maybe it was just me, but APOCALYPSE seemed very much in the air. I mean, perhaps that should not be a surprise. Still, some of the lyrics struck me afresh: "Will the world end in the nighttime/I really don't know/Or will the world end in the daytime/I don't know", from Stretch Out and Wait. Perhaps tellingly, there was another lyric change here. The following line is usually, "And is there any point ever having children?/Oh, I don't know." This time the answer to the question was a single, emphatic, "No!" There was also the slight lyric change in Ask: "If it's not love, then it's the bomb/The nuclear bomb that will bring us together."
I suppose the apocalypse theme - also emphasised in a peculiar way by Morrissey complaining about the smell of roasting meat wafting over the park, "Putting death into your body, death into your body," he repeated a number of times, ending with the peculiar quip, "Oh, I've gone too far" - chimed in with some things I had been thinking anyway. I believe the crowd there numbered about 30,000. I thought, and not for the first time, about the tremendous amount of resources that are needed for such an event, in terms of electricity, transport and so on. Obviously, it would be hypocritical of me to be damning of such a use of resources, since I enjoyed the event, and I wonder if such mass public celebrations are, to some extent, necessary. Still, I also wonder how much longer we can keep this sort of thing up. Maybe, if we get the right energy sources, for a much longer time. But we don't seem to have the right energy sources at the moment.
What it did lead me to reflect on is the nature of stardom, and what I have long believed to be the very unhealthy relationship that our society (Britain, and I'm sure other societies) has with art. There is really no system for nurturing the artist in our society, outside of a few elitist institutions. When, back in the early eighties, Morrissey sang lines like, "No, I've never had a job/Because I'm too shy", what he was really expressing, in both a very direct, and very roundabout way, was the difficulty of being an artist in a society that does its very best to destroy artists. The usual response to anyone trying to 'make it' in any artistic sphere, before they have made it, is, "Who the fuck are you?" People resent artists. People wish to lynch artists. A huge event like the Morrissey gig, resembles, in some peculiar way, a sacrificial bonfire, complete with the smell of roasting flesh wafting across the field. The difference being that the sacrifice now is only symbolically of the artist ("Tonight, we're going to take Morrissey"). It is a bonfire erected to the artist's success. The artist has become god. How did he do this? He overcame death - the death that society tried (and failed) by any means necessary, to inflict on the artist and the artist's dream.
What kind of a relationship is this to have with artists? On the one hand they are despised as vermin, and on the other, revered as gods. And then people are surprised when occasionally those artists are human and act like arseholes. If you had had a whole country lusting for your blood one minute, and then worshipping you the next, the chances are, I reckon, you'd act like an arsehole sometimes, too.
All this is summed up for me in the words of that opening song, The Last of the Famous International Playboys: "See, in our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom/And these are the ways on which I was raised/These are the ways on which I was raised/I never wanted to kill/I am not naturally EVIL/Such things I do/Just to make myself more attractive to you/Have I failed?"
Well, on Friday night, in Hyde Park, at least, Morrissey did not fail.
The encore, and possibly the best song of the night, was another surprise, What She Said, from the album Meat is Murder.
"What she said/How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead/And decided to bury me/God knows I'm ready..."
Excellent stuff.
Shall we?
Saturday, 12. July 2008, 08:27:16
No one should be considereed a performer who cannot do the soft shoe shuffle.
I've been hoping for some time now that I Want to be in Dixie from the Laurel and Hardy film Way Out West, would be posted on Youtube, but after months of hoping there seems to be no sign of this happening, so I'll just have to buy the DVD or something, next time I'm in the human world.
The publisher drinks wine from the author's skull
Friday, 11. July 2008, 11:08:51
I am indebted, once again, to Justin Isis, for sending me the link to this blog article, written in two parts, here and here. The blog is his vorpal sword, by Hart Williams, more power to his elbow. The entry in question concerns the death by suicide of the writer Thomas Disch, and the utterly disgraceful treatment he received on a radio talk show prior to this event, which Williams says was probably not the cause of that suicide, but merely indicative of the current world climate that probably was the cause.
I realise that no one reads anymore, and that this blog entry (divided into two) is very long, however, I would urge anyone reading this to also read that. It is the kind of entry that makes blogging wothwhile. Of course, I am partisan here, in as much as I am also a writer, and I know exactly the climate about which Williams is writing. I don't think that those who are not writers can really quite grasp just how shockingly poorly writers are treated. The very fact that people think that we (writers) are exaggerating here, and should shut up (as they often seem to) is symptomatic of the unquestioned attitude that writers somehow deserve to die in poverty and misery with talk-show hosts and publishers by turns pissing on and digging up their grave for trinkets. Do YOU believe that's what we deserve? Do YOU believe that's what I deserve? Because, you know, I really, really would not be at all surprised if that's what I get.
Anyway, for those who can't be bothered to read the whole article, here are some extracts:
I realise that no one reads anymore, and that this blog entry (divided into two) is very long, however, I would urge anyone reading this to also read that. It is the kind of entry that makes blogging wothwhile. Of course, I am partisan here, in as much as I am also a writer, and I know exactly the climate about which Williams is writing. I don't think that those who are not writers can really quite grasp just how shockingly poorly writers are treated. The very fact that people think that we (writers) are exaggerating here, and should shut up (as they often seem to) is symptomatic of the unquestioned attitude that writers somehow deserve to die in poverty and misery with talk-show hosts and publishers by turns pissing on and digging up their grave for trinkets. Do YOU believe that's what we deserve? Do YOU believe that's what I deserve? Because, you know, I really, really would not be at all surprised if that's what I get.
Anyway, for those who can't be bothered to read the whole article, here are some extracts:
In an age that really doesn’t have much use for poetry, Disch was a poet. In an age in which Science Fiction has resoundingly triumphed — it seems incredible now to realize that in the 1950s, SF writers were referred to as “lunatics” and openly mocked for their silly ideas that anyone could go into space, or — folly of follies! — go to the MOON — SF is marginalized, a caboose on the train that is marked “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” and represents, fundamentally, concepts in Science Fiction that were outmoded by the 1930s.
It was the zeitgeist, finally, that did Disch in.
Think about it, the publisher actually SPENT TIME with the writer. It’s almost as though … writing MEANT something. As if the words of a gifted poet and writer were WORTH something, had VALUE, and were worthy of cultivation. If that sounds normal to you, you are sadly off the beaten track. You see, in the 1970s and 1980s, all those book companies were bought up by conglomerates, usually with a movie studio and a record company attached, BOTH of which made so much more money than the publishing arm, that landing as the corporate manager of the poor print arm of Engulf & Devour, Inc. was the corporate equivalent of being sent to an Alaskan Arctic Radar station, or in the old USSR, being sent to Siberia.
And, understandably, those sub-managers, often with very little experience in books, spent their days in corporate exile plotting their return, ultimately contemptuous of their low station, and the denizens thereof.
And, as the despised “crop” of the despised arm of the mega-conglomerate, the writer has been reduced to a cheap vaudeville act, driving his beat-up tin lizzy from city to city, “performing” on the radio, at book store “signings” and “readings,” occasionally picking up honoraria for speaking to a college or university, none of which is either facilitated nor promoted by the publisher.
The author is now responsible for his own bookings, he is his own theatrical agent, and often — as I watched ACLU President Nadine Strossen at the World Pornography Conference at the Universal Sheraton in Hollywood in 1999 — with an icy and desultury ennui, opposed by their very publisher! The publisher was to have shipped a box of books for Strossen to sign/sell, and either forgot or shipped on a slow boat to China, as the books never appeared throughout the Conference.
Given that her peers in the area of First Amendment law were all present, her publisher didn’t merely inconvenience the author, but actively FUCKED her – metaphorically, of course.
And if the President of the ACLU is treated thus by publishers, what chances have you, newbie authors? It is an obscenity that has robbed our society of thought, and our civilization of its very civility. The contempt of the subliterate for our literacy has actively promoted subliteracy — TV and movies by writers who aren’t really writers, who haven’t really, actually read.
Of all the horrors of media concentration, this is the subtlest, but the one with the most far-reaching consequences.
It has been established time and time again that both ends of the Bell Curve suffer from the same socialization problems: cut off from the Great Middle of the Bell. And yet, while we are happy to invest in programs, homes, special bathrooms, ramps, and the rest for our disabled and, yes, retarded, NO ONE has a moment to spare for the brilliant.
(We will throw truckloads of self-congratulatory charity at the disabled, but we will not invest in our equally ostracized brilliant? What the hell is wrong with us?)
If there were any investment that a society could make, it would be to simply wring a few more years of production out of our Tom Dischs, our Philip K. Dicks, our authors and our artists and our musicians, who NOW LIVE in a society that has turned them into Financial Untouchables, and, as with Tom Disch, lovers without survivorship benefits, to be evicted in old age from their homes because their dead partner, and not they themselves, had signed the lease.
Compared to the expense of one day’s misbegotten war in the Middle East, it would be such a cheap investment, and yet, churls like the New York Magazine commenter will always value the theoretical expense to their abstract wallet (rent control, therefore no compassion for him!) over the real suffering of real genius.
Our failure of decency is a fundamental betrayal of our very civilization. If it were just us that paid the price for that blindness, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, but it is, in fact, our children and our children’s children who will pay the price. Is there such a thing as generational Child Abuse? Hopefully not, because we would be adjudged guilty for stealing their culture, their resources, their health and saddling them with our debts.
Is it too much to ask that the publisher stop by occasionally and bring Chinese take-out? If that were the difference between a few more years and the Hemingway/Thompson/Disch exit strategy, is it really so much?
Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay F
Thursday, 10. July 2008, 12:11:59
Well, whatever you think of Sacha Baron Cohen, his new film, in production, already has the best title of any film ever. It wouldn't even fit as the title of this blog entry - that's how bloody good it is! Anyway, here, for your delectation, is the full title:
Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt
The pilot has already abandoned ship
Thursday, 10. July 2008, 10:35:27
I was talking to someone about this very thing just the other day. I expressed surprise that she had even been able to get through to Yahoo on the telephone (because apparently she had). It had taken about an hour of being put on hold, if I remember correctly what I was told.
I've long found it unbelievable how bad the service is in most online businesses. Well, when I say 'bad', what I mean is 'non-existent'. I've never understood how that's acceptable (zero customer service). It gives me a feeling like my lungs have just collapsed. How is it possible even to breathe with no one to complain to?
With Hotmail, for instance, and many other companies, they don't even give a phone number for you to contact them. There is actually no possible means of you connecting with some human element of their organisation. I have a theory as to why this is, and it's quite simple - no human element actually exists. All that exists in their offices - if there are even offices - now are recorded messages, skeletons and cobwebs, and perhaps a slavering fat man (no longer exactly human) in one corner, rubbing his naked, hairy belly with a paw that is red and greasy from the human remains he has so diligently - and lip-smackingly - been disposing of.
The pilot has already abandoned ship. Same goes for our governments. They're all just recorded, holographic messages, cardboard cut-outs at windows and so on, while we're left here on a doomed planet, and somewhere, in another cobwebbed, empty office, a time-bomb is ticking.
I've long found it unbelievable how bad the service is in most online businesses. Well, when I say 'bad', what I mean is 'non-existent'. I've never understood how that's acceptable (zero customer service). It gives me a feeling like my lungs have just collapsed. How is it possible even to breathe with no one to complain to?
With Hotmail, for instance, and many other companies, they don't even give a phone number for you to contact them. There is actually no possible means of you connecting with some human element of their organisation. I have a theory as to why this is, and it's quite simple - no human element actually exists. All that exists in their offices - if there are even offices - now are recorded messages, skeletons and cobwebs, and perhaps a slavering fat man (no longer exactly human) in one corner, rubbing his naked, hairy belly with a paw that is red and greasy from the human remains he has so diligently - and lip-smackingly - been disposing of.
The pilot has already abandoned ship. Same goes for our governments. They're all just recorded, holographic messages, cardboard cut-outs at windows and so on, while we're left here on a doomed planet, and somewhere, in another cobwebbed, empty office, a time-bomb is ticking.
We are the cyclists
Wednesday, 9. July 2008, 12:19:20
I like bicycles, but the peculiar thing is, I have often found cyclists to be even more breathtakingly obnoxious than motorists, and this news story is a case in point. Unfortunately, I have enough experience of these things to know that this is not an isolated incident*. That is, the resulting death may not be that common, but the unbelievable arrogance is common enough.
Of course, it would be better if there were proper cycle lanes. It would also be better if cyclists actually followed the highway code like everyone else (is supposed to). When I cross the road, guess who never stops for me at a zebra crossing. That's right, the cyclists. As I said, I like bicycles, but human beings are basically such complete cunts that they can ruin anything, no matter how good it starts out.
I remember when I was living in Kyoto, I took a bicycle everywhere. I avoided, as much as possible, riding on the pavements, since I know what a nuisance this is for pedestrians, with whom I have much greater sympathy than cyclists. I also stopped at traffic lights, and cycled on the right side (which was the left side) of the road. The amount of cyclists cycling on the wrong side of the road, towards me, in heavy traffic, was unbelievable, and I often felt like killing them. But I didn't. Not even accidentally, however close that came.
I had a friend at that time, a fellow of very high standards who has, therefore, inevitably, left me behind (hello if you're reading, you big gaylord!). Anyway, when we would walk on the pavements of Kyoto together, there would almost always be the impatient ringing of a bicycle bell behind us at some point, and he would simply ignore the person, or say, as if to no one, "That's right, ring your little bell." And I have to say, I do have some sympathy with this attitude. If you were a pedestrian walking along the pavement, ringing a bell to tell people to get out of the way, people would rightly think you were a complete arsehole. So, yeah, "We are the cyclists" and all that.
At the end of this, I have a confession to make. My own bicycle-riding was not beyond reproach. Because I often used to cycle long distances to places where I would be forced to get enormously drunk, and because leaving a bicycle in a public place meant the risk of having it impounded (which happened to me two or three times), I often used to cycle home, and often in lashing rain, in a state of stupid drunkenness when I couldn't even have walked straight. When I think back on this, it seems to me that it's miraculous I'm still alive. I knew another student who used to do a similar thing. One day he came off his bike and skidded across the concrete for some distance... on his face. He didn't look pretty afterwards. So, don't try this at home, kids.
[*Just in case anyone thinks it never occurred to me that this news article might be biased, well, actually, it did occur to me. In a sense there's not much more I can say than that. It might be - probably is - biased. One thing that interests me that I haven't written about EXPLICITLY in the above blog entry is this kind of dynamic that builds up in public debates of X versus Y, for instance, cars versus bicycles. Each side begins to accumulate arguments, ideologies and worldviews like barnacles, and after a while it seems like neither side can move. They have both become totally encrusted.]
Of course, it would be better if there were proper cycle lanes. It would also be better if cyclists actually followed the highway code like everyone else (is supposed to). When I cross the road, guess who never stops for me at a zebra crossing. That's right, the cyclists. As I said, I like bicycles, but human beings are basically such complete cunts that they can ruin anything, no matter how good it starts out.
I remember when I was living in Kyoto, I took a bicycle everywhere. I avoided, as much as possible, riding on the pavements, since I know what a nuisance this is for pedestrians, with whom I have much greater sympathy than cyclists. I also stopped at traffic lights, and cycled on the right side (which was the left side) of the road. The amount of cyclists cycling on the wrong side of the road, towards me, in heavy traffic, was unbelievable, and I often felt like killing them. But I didn't. Not even accidentally, however close that came.
I had a friend at that time, a fellow of very high standards who has, therefore, inevitably, left me behind (hello if you're reading, you big gaylord!). Anyway, when we would walk on the pavements of Kyoto together, there would almost always be the impatient ringing of a bicycle bell behind us at some point, and he would simply ignore the person, or say, as if to no one, "That's right, ring your little bell." And I have to say, I do have some sympathy with this attitude. If you were a pedestrian walking along the pavement, ringing a bell to tell people to get out of the way, people would rightly think you were a complete arsehole. So, yeah, "We are the cyclists" and all that.
At the end of this, I have a confession to make. My own bicycle-riding was not beyond reproach. Because I often used to cycle long distances to places where I would be forced to get enormously drunk, and because leaving a bicycle in a public place meant the risk of having it impounded (which happened to me two or three times), I often used to cycle home, and often in lashing rain, in a state of stupid drunkenness when I couldn't even have walked straight. When I think back on this, it seems to me that it's miraculous I'm still alive. I knew another student who used to do a similar thing. One day he came off his bike and skidded across the concrete for some distance... on his face. He didn't look pretty afterwards. So, don't try this at home, kids.
[*Just in case anyone thinks it never occurred to me that this news article might be biased, well, actually, it did occur to me. In a sense there's not much more I can say than that. It might be - probably is - biased. One thing that interests me that I haven't written about EXPLICITLY in the above blog entry is this kind of dynamic that builds up in public debates of X versus Y, for instance, cars versus bicycles. Each side begins to accumulate arguments, ideologies and worldviews like barnacles, and after a while it seems like neither side can move. They have both become totally encrusted.]
Last night of the Peter Harris Experience until next month
Tuesday, 8. July 2008, 20:12:59
the peter harris experience
show 15 tuesday 8th july 10 pm - midnight gmt
featuring tracks from
caroline martin, nalle, the ethiopians, the andrews sisters
some songs about how to wine & dine pete bishop, & what to do with a bucket of lobsters
featured artist = maelstrom
as the last show in this little series this will be an
appreciation of the wisdom & talent of james blunt
next week tuesday 15th july the return of pete bishop's deep sea ball
the peter harris experience will be back in august
108.6 fm in & around exeter
or on line at www.phonic.fm
www.myspace.com/thepeterharrisexperience
show 15 tuesday 8th july 10 pm - midnight gmt
featuring tracks from
caroline martin, nalle, the ethiopians, the andrews sisters
some songs about how to wine & dine pete bishop, & what to do with a bucket of lobsters
featured artist = maelstrom
as the last show in this little series this will be an
appreciation of the wisdom & talent of james blunt
next week tuesday 15th july the return of pete bishop's deep sea ball
the peter harris experience will be back in august
108.6 fm in & around exeter
or on line at www.phonic.fm
www.myspace.com/thepeterharrisexperience
Till you came with the key
Tuesday, 8. July 2008, 00:16:27
I am back in Wales.
I've also just discovered this, a great piece by the artist Vincent Chong, which, according to his website, is destined for my forthcoming novella, Shrike. The strange thing is, a piece of cover art, from the same artist, already exists. But maybe this is for the back cover, or something. Even then, there is a photograph that I believe is earmarked for the back. I'm rather impatient to see the finished item now to discover how it's all going to work together.
By the way, for those who have pre-ordered copies of the novella, thank you, and my apologies for the fact that its publication appears to have been delayed. I'd like to be able to promise to have something out in the meantime for you to enjoy, but I simply haven't acheived the status yet where I can guarantee that a publisher or editor will even read something new I've written, let alone publish it. I do tend to feel, with each thing written and published, that I'm basically back to square one; I don't yet get the sense of things 'snowballing', I'm afraid.
I've been reflecting on this a lot recently.
I'm glad to have had the supporters I have, in terms of publishers and readers, but have to say that I don't yet really feel understood by more than a handful of people, and this is frustrating. It's also scary in a way to have my marginal status increasingly brought home to me by encounters similar to the age-old pairing of head and brick wall. It would be nice to think I had my finger on 'the pulse', but it seems this sensation comes from me simply having my finger on 'a pulse', and, it turns out, some nameless and morbid pulse wholly different to that which titillates the fingertips of most of those with whom I share this planet. I frequently have experiences which seem somewhat like sitting with someone and holding their hand only to have them say goodbye and rise from the bench, leaving me wondering whose hand it is that I am still holding. Because I am alone again with this five-fingered beast.
Someone recently told me that he wasn't really keen on the kind of thing I write, but that he felt I was probably writing within a very particular field about which he knew little. Well, this is true, and yet it's false. I think if I really were writing in a particular field or genre, life would be much, much easier for me. But genres are tribal, and I think that none of these tribes - the most obvious candidates would be horror, science fiction and fantasy - would look at me and recognise me as one of their own. On the other hand, there's still too much of the ghetto-smell of genre about me for me to belong in the world of Booker Prize winners and other humanistic, literary writers who all produce utterly forgettable prose. I'm too tired to explain why this is at the moment. But...
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
'Alone', by Edgar Allan Poe.
No, I can't explain more right now. I must sleep. By the way, as mentioned, I did see Morrissey live on Friday, and will probably blog the event at some point in the near future.
I've also just discovered this, a great piece by the artist Vincent Chong, which, according to his website, is destined for my forthcoming novella, Shrike. The strange thing is, a piece of cover art, from the same artist, already exists. But maybe this is for the back cover, or something. Even then, there is a photograph that I believe is earmarked for the back. I'm rather impatient to see the finished item now to discover how it's all going to work together.
By the way, for those who have pre-ordered copies of the novella, thank you, and my apologies for the fact that its publication appears to have been delayed. I'd like to be able to promise to have something out in the meantime for you to enjoy, but I simply haven't acheived the status yet where I can guarantee that a publisher or editor will even read something new I've written, let alone publish it. I do tend to feel, with each thing written and published, that I'm basically back to square one; I don't yet get the sense of things 'snowballing', I'm afraid.
I've been reflecting on this a lot recently.
I'm glad to have had the supporters I have, in terms of publishers and readers, but have to say that I don't yet really feel understood by more than a handful of people, and this is frustrating. It's also scary in a way to have my marginal status increasingly brought home to me by encounters similar to the age-old pairing of head and brick wall. It would be nice to think I had my finger on 'the pulse', but it seems this sensation comes from me simply having my finger on 'a pulse', and, it turns out, some nameless and morbid pulse wholly different to that which titillates the fingertips of most of those with whom I share this planet. I frequently have experiences which seem somewhat like sitting with someone and holding their hand only to have them say goodbye and rise from the bench, leaving me wondering whose hand it is that I am still holding. Because I am alone again with this five-fingered beast.
Someone recently told me that he wasn't really keen on the kind of thing I write, but that he felt I was probably writing within a very particular field about which he knew little. Well, this is true, and yet it's false. I think if I really were writing in a particular field or genre, life would be much, much easier for me. But genres are tribal, and I think that none of these tribes - the most obvious candidates would be horror, science fiction and fantasy - would look at me and recognise me as one of their own. On the other hand, there's still too much of the ghetto-smell of genre about me for me to belong in the world of Booker Prize winners and other humanistic, literary writers who all produce utterly forgettable prose. I'm too tired to explain why this is at the moment. But...
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
'Alone', by Edgar Allan Poe.
No, I can't explain more right now. I must sleep. By the way, as mentioned, I did see Morrissey live on Friday, and will probably blog the event at some point in the near future.
I wish I didn't even know who Julie Burchill was
Thursday, 3. July 2008, 21:19:22
I don't know why I've just happened on this clip, but I have. All I can do, when I see this sort of thing, is think about how much I hate my native land. And once again post a link to Momus's essay on Britain, 'Nasty, British and Short'. Since some people may not click on the link, or may be put off by the length of the essay, I shall quote the most essential part of it here:
Watching the clip of Tony Prince, to which I posted a link, I asked myself which part of the British dichotomy I was - the middle-aged presenter, or the young, abusive, passer-by. Of course, immediately, the desire is to say that I am the young man, because, in a sly way, he is the 'victim' here. I'm sure Julie Burchill would say so. He is the 'target' of all that is reactionary in Britain. It is a moral imperative to side with him against the old fart. But, after all, I know I'm not 'cool' enough to be the lad. I must, therefore, be Tony Prince. Oh well. I almost have to sigh about it. Until it occurs to me that I have much more sympathy with Tony Prince, anyway, and, although we can all be judgemental and say he should have risen above the abuse, I thought his comeback was as dignified as lowering oneself ever can be. It wasn't witty, exactly, but it was good enough. The lad will never know how reactionary he is. He is the 'punk', and punk is subversive by definition. And subversive is good by definition, whoever you shit on, and however badly you treat your fellow human beings.
So, yeah, maybe I'm just Tony Prince.
Then again, I don't even have that middle-class dignity and... I want to say 'repose', though don't know if that even means anything in this context, but I'll say it anyway... repose that comes from whatever it is that the lad undoubtedly sees (not that he sees anything) as uncoolness and self-satisfaction.
In fact, I am both lad and Tony Prince. And neither.
I was thinking earlier, because of my other posts today, about regionalism. I grew up in Devon, in England, but it was not until adult life that I actually became aware of the kind of nasty, petty regionalism and tribalism that defines English and British life. Catholic/Protestant, working-class/middle-class, Manchester City/Manchester United, North/South and so on - all these divisions meant nothing to me. I was oblivious.
I went to university in Durham. I was looking forward to seeing a new part of England. The idea of spending a period of my life in the land of Geordies was peculiarly exciting, I suppose just because it would mean experiencing and learning about a part of the world I had only known by rumour before. "Getting to know you/Getting to know all about you/Getting to like you/Getting to hope you like me/Getting to know you/Putting it my way, but nicely/You are precisely/My cup of tea."
I wasn't prepared for the amount of hatred that existed in Durham and the North East generally for Southerners. (I'd never even thought of myself as a Southerner; I didn't know I was one until then.) I felt - that is, I learned to feel - much of the time like saying to people, as per Withnail and Marlowe(?) from Withnail and I, "I'm not from London, you know." Except I wouldn't have been lying. It probably wouldn't have helped even if I had been believed. Before I left Durham, amongst other incidents, a French exchange student was beaten to death in the street by locals.
I don't suppose it would have helped him, either.
And now, I wish I still never knew about the divisions I've named above. I wish I had never been made an expert in them, and made to feel they were a part of me, made to realise they have always been a part of me, and I wish I didn't even know who Julie Burchill was.
I recently saw Julien Temple's new Sex Pistols documentary, 'The Filth And The Fury'. It's a good film, with a few spine-tingling moments, but seeing the whole vomity, gobby story again was like drowning, and seeing Britain pass before my eyes. The livid hatred, the violence, the fear of sex (a value McLaren, the film's villain, wrote into the band's blueprint but Rotten disowned, famously declaring it 'two and a half minutes of squelching noises'), the adolescent nihilism (still hailed as cutting edge when it reappears in the work of PRML SCRM, Unkle, and the massed ranks of punky yuppies in combat trousers)... The film just underlined my belief that punk paved the way for Margaret Thatcher, that punk hated sex, that punk played into the hands of the tabloids (still the world's most Brutish, just like the censorship laws and just like the football hooligans) and that punk is one of the things that makes modern Britain so boring, so reactionary and so brutish.
Something else struck me. Lydon's evil cackle at the beginning of 'Holidays In The Sun' reveals him as an innocent who has decided to incarnate a malevolent view of human nature in the classic manner of the Dickensian pantomime villain. In The Sex Pistols, Lydon incarnates the British contempt for human nature. He becomes a parody of the malady, and is an immediate success in Britain. When, later, he and his nemesis McLaren try to embody the remedy to the Brutish disease, making records like 'Metal Box' and 'Duck Rock', the Brutish stay away in droves, fail to buy, and use bargepoles when parlaying. Bow Wow Wow with their sexy Eiffel towers and their odes to Louis Quattorze and home taping stiff too. The Brutish do not want the remedy. They want the malady. The remedy is always foreign, it involves a loss of identity. The malady, however horrible, is forever Brutish.
'Don't know what I want but I know how to get it/I wanna destroy the passerby'. Have you ever wanted to destroy the passerby, dear reader? I have frequently wanted to fuck the passerby, but never to destroy him or her. But dilute that sentiment a bit, until you simply wish to be unkind, unencouraging and unpleasant to the passerby, and you have in a nutshell the feeling of British life.
Watching the clip of Tony Prince, to which I posted a link, I asked myself which part of the British dichotomy I was - the middle-aged presenter, or the young, abusive, passer-by. Of course, immediately, the desire is to say that I am the young man, because, in a sly way, he is the 'victim' here. I'm sure Julie Burchill would say so. He is the 'target' of all that is reactionary in Britain. It is a moral imperative to side with him against the old fart. But, after all, I know I'm not 'cool' enough to be the lad. I must, therefore, be Tony Prince. Oh well. I almost have to sigh about it. Until it occurs to me that I have much more sympathy with Tony Prince, anyway, and, although we can all be judgemental and say he should have risen above the abuse, I thought his comeback was as dignified as lowering oneself ever can be. It wasn't witty, exactly, but it was good enough. The lad will never know how reactionary he is. He is the 'punk', and punk is subversive by definition. And subversive is good by definition, whoever you shit on, and however badly you treat your fellow human beings.
So, yeah, maybe I'm just Tony Prince.
Then again, I don't even have that middle-class dignity and... I want to say 'repose', though don't know if that even means anything in this context, but I'll say it anyway... repose that comes from whatever it is that the lad undoubtedly sees (not that he sees anything) as uncoolness and self-satisfaction.
In fact, I am both lad and Tony Prince. And neither.
I was thinking earlier, because of my other posts today, about regionalism. I grew up in Devon, in England, but it was not until adult life that I actually became aware of the kind of nasty, petty regionalism and tribalism that defines English and British life. Catholic/Protestant, working-class/middle-class, Manchester City/Manchester United, North/South and so on - all these divisions meant nothing to me. I was oblivious.
I went to university in Durham. I was looking forward to seeing a new part of England. The idea of spending a period of my life in the land of Geordies was peculiarly exciting, I suppose just because it would mean experiencing and learning about a part of the world I had only known by rumour before. "Getting to know you/Getting to know all about you/Getting to like you/Getting to hope you like me/Getting to know you/Putting it my way, but nicely/You are precisely/My cup of tea."
I wasn't prepared for the amount of hatred that existed in Durham and the North East generally for Southerners. (I'd never even thought of myself as a Southerner; I didn't know I was one until then.) I felt - that is, I learned to feel - much of the time like saying to people, as per Withnail and Marlowe(?) from Withnail and I, "I'm not from London, you know." Except I wouldn't have been lying. It probably wouldn't have helped even if I had been believed. Before I left Durham, amongst other incidents, a French exchange student was beaten to death in the street by locals.
I don't suppose it would have helped him, either.
And now, I wish I still never knew about the divisions I've named above. I wish I had never been made an expert in them, and made to feel they were a part of me, made to realise they have always been a part of me, and I wish I didn't even know who Julie Burchill was.
Journeys by Bus
Thursday, 3. July 2008, 17:58:34
I phone the 'customer service' number for the Cardiff-Swansea Shuttle 100 bus, 01792 572255. I ask if the timetable on the website is current, since it has the words 'winter timetable' in the URL, and I can't find a corresponding 'summer timetable', and even here in rainy Wales, I'm fairly sure that the beginning of July must be classed as 'summer'.
"As far as I know, the timetable is current," comes the reply. It's not a very reassuring answer. "If it's the same one I'm looking at."
Well, how big is that 'if', exactly?
"It says 'winter timetable' here," I reiterate, "so I just wondered if it was still valid."
"Does it have May the 6th on it?"
I look. I can't see any date written anywhere.
"I can't see any date anywhere," I say. "I'm looking at the Firstgroup website. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"So, that should be the right timetable then?"
Throughout this exchange I have sensed - without too much surprise, unfortunately - a general unwillingness to communicate. It's almost as if this man resents that fact that people should phone a number that is advertised as being for 'customer service' asking questions. And now there ensues such a poisonous silence in answer to my tentative question that I can virtually see the fissures in the cancerous old man's greying lips as he presses them tighter. It's possible that the man hates me because he's Welsh and I'm English, and I'm just ridiculous enough to feel guilty for that. It's also possible that this concentrated sulphur of silence is simply due to the fact that the man is British and works for a bus company. Service, in Britain, is... well, there's an old joke that goes like this: "I didn't come here to be insulted." "Well, where do you normally go?" British 'service' is basically where people go to be insulted.
I made my excuses and hung up, reminding myself how foolish I had been actually to expect anyone to be at all helpful on the end of a British 'helpline'.
This whole process of planning my journey to London by bus has taken me a few days. I did not expect it to take so long. Things have changed. Of course, I did start by looking things up on the Internet, but all the 'journey planners' turned out to be entirely useless. Like bureaucracy in the film Brazil (and in actual life), each webpage I found simply referred me to another. The actual task of planning a journey had been 'out-sourced' so many times that there was nothing left but the process of out-sourcing; the service itself, which should have been at its end, had been forgotten.
The assumption in this age being, however, that everything is done instantaneously at the click of a mouse, human service has atrophied shockingly. No one knows how to answer a phone any more, or answer a question. In the past, if I wanted to plan a coach journey, which I often did, I would simply make one phonecall, ask a number of questions of one person, who had the amazing ability to tell me times, prices and the locations of stops, and my journey-planning, and booking, was complete. The people were not always cheery - this is Britain, after all - but at least they could do their job.
I've had to resort to photographs of timetables in bus shelters and bus stops to help me fill in the final pieces of the puzzle. There is something refreshing in walking to a bus stop and seeing, laid out clearly, all in one place, the times and destinations of buses, without having to be redirected to anything, without having to turn a switch or click an icon, and without having to talk to some sour old cunt who is determined to find some reason to hate you because he hates the job he's too shrivelled and pickled with resentment and mediocrity to be able to do.
"As far as I know, the timetable is current," comes the reply. It's not a very reassuring answer. "If it's the same one I'm looking at."
Well, how big is that 'if', exactly?
"It says 'winter timetable' here," I reiterate, "so I just wondered if it was still valid."
"Does it have May the 6th on it?"
I look. I can't see any date written anywhere.
"I can't see any date anywhere," I say. "I'm looking at the Firstgroup website. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"So, that should be the right timetable then?"
Throughout this exchange I have sensed - without too much surprise, unfortunately - a general unwillingness to communicate. It's almost as if this man resents that fact that people should phone a number that is advertised as being for 'customer service' asking questions. And now there ensues such a poisonous silence in answer to my tentative question that I can virtually see the fissures in the cancerous old man's greying lips as he presses them tighter. It's possible that the man hates me because he's Welsh and I'm English, and I'm just ridiculous enough to feel guilty for that. It's also possible that this concentrated sulphur of silence is simply due to the fact that the man is British and works for a bus company. Service, in Britain, is... well, there's an old joke that goes like this: "I didn't come here to be insulted." "Well, where do you normally go?" British 'service' is basically where people go to be insulted.
I made my excuses and hung up, reminding myself how foolish I had been actually to expect anyone to be at all helpful on the end of a British 'helpline'.
This whole process of planning my journey to London by bus has taken me a few days. I did not expect it to take so long. Things have changed. Of course, I did start by looking things up on the Internet, but all the 'journey planners' turned out to be entirely useless. Like bureaucracy in the film Brazil (and in actual life), each webpage I found simply referred me to another. The actual task of planning a journey had been 'out-sourced' so many times that there was nothing left but the process of out-sourcing; the service itself, which should have been at its end, had been forgotten.
The assumption in this age being, however, that everything is done instantaneously at the click of a mouse, human service has atrophied shockingly. No one knows how to answer a phone any more, or answer a question. In the past, if I wanted to plan a coach journey, which I often did, I would simply make one phonecall, ask a number of questions of one person, who had the amazing ability to tell me times, prices and the locations of stops, and my journey-planning, and booking, was complete. The people were not always cheery - this is Britain, after all - but at least they could do their job.
I've had to resort to photographs of timetables in bus shelters and bus stops to help me fill in the final pieces of the puzzle. There is something refreshing in walking to a bus stop and seeing, laid out clearly, all in one place, the times and destinations of buses, without having to be redirected to anything, without having to turn a switch or click an icon, and without having to talk to some sour old cunt who is determined to find some reason to hate you because he hates the job he's too shrivelled and pickled with resentment and mediocrity to be able to do.
Devon Diaspora Poetry Posse
Thursday, 3. July 2008, 14:45:39
Just before Christmas last year, I managed to make a trip to London and met up with a friend whose acquaintance I made in Devon. Before I left he said, amongst other things, that he always enjoys catching up with Devon friends because there's that whole 'Devon thing' that the world at large doesn't know about, believing, as they do, the Devon accent to consist in farmers chewing straws, saying, "Ooh, arr!"
This reminds me of another little fragment of conversation that must have occurred at a party in London when, many members of the Devon posse all happening to be there at once, some urbanite or other remarked that there was a considerable and largely unobserved Devon diaspora in the UK, and possibly in the world at large.
Google 'Devon diaspora', and the most enlightening thing you'll find is probably this, which is as it should be. Nonchalance, Socratic irony, leaving-be-ness, general inability to take oneself seriously, animal-tracking and invisible omnipresence are some of our main weapons in the conspiracy to drink more cider in haystacks.
Famous things from Devon? There are few. Cream teas. Agatha Christie. Sir Francis Drake. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tarka the Otter. Part of the shared life of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Cider. (Not The Wurzels, who are, I believe, mainly from Somerset.) Chris Martin. The geological Devonian era. Sir Walter Raleigh. Lorna Doone. Donald Sinden. The United States of America. Johnny Kingdom.
That might, in fact, be exhaustive.
Good things that are not (yet) famous from Devon, there are perhaps somewhat more. Of these, I now present the poetry of Mark McGuinness, who, if he resembles anything at all on the list above, perhaps most closely resemblesDonald Sinden Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
This reminds me of another little fragment of conversation that must have occurred at a party in London when, many members of the Devon posse all happening to be there at once, some urbanite or other remarked that there was a considerable and largely unobserved Devon diaspora in the UK, and possibly in the world at large.
Google 'Devon diaspora', and the most enlightening thing you'll find is probably this, which is as it should be. Nonchalance, Socratic irony, leaving-be-ness, general inability to take oneself seriously, animal-tracking and invisible omnipresence are some of our main weapons in the conspiracy to drink more cider in haystacks.
Famous things from Devon? There are few. Cream teas. Agatha Christie. Sir Francis Drake. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tarka the Otter. Part of the shared life of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Cider. (Not The Wurzels, who are, I believe, mainly from Somerset.) Chris Martin. The geological Devonian era. Sir Walter Raleigh. Lorna Doone. Donald Sinden. The United States of America. Johnny Kingdom.
That might, in fact, be exhaustive.
Good things that are not (yet) famous from Devon, there are perhaps somewhat more. Of these, I now present the poetry of Mark McGuinness, who, if he resembles anything at all on the list above, perhaps most closely resembles
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