In his poem 'Deceptions', from what is generally held to be his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, Larkin writes arrestingly of someone whose "mind lay open like a drawer of knives".
I believe it's fairly well-known that Philip Larkin was sexually attracted to Margaret Thatcher. From his correspondence we have the following:
Your anecdote reminds me of a brief exchange I once had with Mrs. T., who told me she liked my wonderful poem about a girl. My face must have expressed incomprehension. “You know,” she said. “Her mind is full of knives.” I took that as a great compliment – I thought if it weren’t spontaneous she’d have got it right – but I’m a child in these things. I also thought that she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines, not that I don’t kiss the ground on which she walks.
But I rather think that her mind - and her drawer, or drawers - full of knives must have been part of the attraction for Larkin.
In his song, You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side, Morrissey sings similarly arresting lines: "Someone kindly told me that you'd wasted/Eight of nine lives." Famous for his Freudian slip-like live lyric changes, during performances of this song he has been known to change the lyric to the seemingly nonsensical (so we are told): "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives". I remember it from performances I have heard as "very sharp kitchen knives". (I know people who collect very sharp kitchen knives.) (Incidentally, Moz also seems to have changed this lyric along the lines of, "Someone kindly told me that you'd thrown away, every day of your precious teenaged life.")
The website It May All End Tomorrow suggests that such lyric changes by Morrissey are flippant and without particular meaning. I would suggest that, like Freudian slips, they have more meaning than is at first apparent.
To indicate the direction in which I am thinking, imagine the line, "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives", as being sung by Philip Larkin. To Margaret Thatcher.
Which brings us to Mishima Yukio, and we've almost come full circle.
It's just occurred to me, what with things being what they are in the world, the credit crunch and the fact that I'm an abject failure in every conceivable sense of the word, I'm probably never going to meet Justin, with whom I have been closely collaborating on a number of projects, unless I actually kill him.
I'm probably not explaining myself very well. Yesterday, I invented - in theory - a new means of transportation that I've decided to dub 'homicidal teleportation', or perhaps 'telecide'. I haven't quite worked out the details, but it's a means of fuelling long-distance travel through the act of murder. I think I'm going to have to start simple with this, so the experimental prototype works as follows. We suppose the meeting of myself and Justin already to be established fact, but established only on the condition that upon meeting the two of us have a bare-knuckle fight to the death**. We work back from the hypothetically accomplished fact to the present, which is now, with me writing this blog entry and announcing that, if there's anyone out there with more money than sense who wants to see two obscure writers of dadaoist anti-life fiction slug it out in the ring, without gloves, breaking all known laws of the universe in the process***, and if they also wish to arrange a boxing ring, a camera crew and so on, I'd be more than happy to take the money et cetera.
Any offers?
If this sounds to you like something that is too good to be true, then MAKE IT TRUE. Use your initiative and get in touch with me.
Thank you.
[*For legal reasons the word 'kill' is not necessarily intended in a literal and absolutely fatal sense.]
[**For legal reasons, the word 'death' here might include such things as being badly winded or having a chipped tooth.]
[***For legal reasons, this phrase must be deemed to be a complete falsehood, whether or not it is in fact true.]
For some reason I felt like re-writing the lyrics of Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl. The original looks like this:
I thought I'd be really clever and witty when I re-wrote the lyrics, but then I realised that was completely beyond my ability. Anyway, here's what I wrote. Don't ask why:
This was never the way I planned; Not my intention. I needed a shave, razor in hand I bent over the basin. It's not what, I'm used to, To be goosed by a midget in frou-frou. I'm curious as to why You did that, actually.
I kissed a girl just after Mike did: The taste of his Marmite chapstick. I kissed a girl, it’s true, I can’t deny it. I wonder what my platonic companion will have to say about this, oh yeah. It felt so wrong. It is against both God and Nature. Don't mean I'm in love tonight, Because I’m rather keen on catching the latest episode of Doctor Who. I’ve heard it’s meant to be quite good this week, yeah.
No, I don't even know your name. It doesn't matter. I’m not very good with names anyway, you’ll have to excuse me there. It all stems from a childhood trauma to do with self-introductions, and that’s why I’m acting a bit weird. Damn, I’ve really fucked this up now, haven’t I? No, really, it’s cool. It’s cool. Just human nature. And the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Good god, do girls do This sort of thing usually? My head gets so confused, Hard to obey. But we can talk about it, if you like.
I kissed a girl and I felt ambivalent about it: The taste of her chap Terry’s stick. I dissed a girl just to try it. Everyone says that's the way to get laid, but she gave me a funny look. So I nervously retracted my comments about slugs and so on, and said it was just a really bad, inept joke, and we should just forget it. Perhaps fortunately, this was after I'd already kissed her, and she said, "Whatever!" and things kind of went okay from there for a while re the whole kissing thing: It felt so wrong. It felt so frankly bizarre. I had to go up to the flat roof of the building and ponder for a while, half hoping she’d follow me up and ask what had happened, so that we could play mind-games, but she didn’t. Don't mean I'm in love tonight. Though I will be for a while When it really sinks in that she wasn’t at all serious. Damn.
Girls, by all accounts, are extremely magical. Compared to a feller, about ten times more biological. Hard to resist their wardrobe. Too good to deny it. Ain't no big deal, I really want to try on that miniskirt and boob-tube.
I kissed a girl and I’ll have to think over the implications of this for the fragile identity I’ve constructed for myself and my future generally. The taste of Terry, her chap’s stick. I kissed a girl uninvited. The worst part is I’d really only bent forward to try and catch what she was saying over the noise of the party. It felt so wrong, I think I might have accidentally bitten her tongue. Don't mean I'm in love tonight. Because I’m well past that kind of adolescent excitement, unfortunately. I don’t suppose anything will come of it.
First of all, sorry if I've left some comments here on my blog unaddressed. I'm having difficulty catching up with things lately. My room - and life - is a mess, et cetera.
Secondly, I think that Chomu's greatness can be demonstrated in terms of the outre value of the search items by which strangers have happened upon it. These search items - as entered into Google and other search engines - are, of course, accessible to us at Chomu through the kind of Internet spying that is now universal. Here are some examples:
panama hats in japanese literature
pray as a dance team
sarah palin wet pussy
lovecraft butterfly
2 girls introducing a metallic fork in a pénis
funk not only moves it can also remove
i want a malay girlfriend
samuel johnson and masturbation
Because of this, we have decided to institute a policy of occasionally using such mantras as the magazine's tagline. If you find that your own search-engine mantra has been used, that means it's your chance to claim your special Chomu prize - an evening out with your favourite Chomu writer.
Having now demonstrated the greatness of Chomu, it only remains for me to say, to all those who want a Malay girlfriend to introduce a metallic fork into their Lovecraftian butterfly pénis and use the funk to move and remove it while Samuel Johnson looks on masturbatingly and Sarah Palin prays for a wet pussy dance team to devise a new interpretative dance piece based on panama hats and their use in Japanese literature - you've come to the right place! We accept you! One of us!
Some time back I wrote a few bits and pieces online about Thomas Ligotti's extended essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. There was, for instance, a thread I started on Thomas Ligotti Online, and one or two blog posts. The essay is, ostensibly, one dealing with the origins and development of the horror genre. It also carries in it, quite explicitly, an argument, or plea for, the voluntary extinction of the human race, not for the sake of the planet, or anything like that, but simply in order to reduce human suffering. I suppose it could be called something like the case for genocidal euthanasia, but that would be misleading, since the main solution to the problem of human suffering that is put forward is simply not to perpetuate that suffering by procreation.
At the time I was ambivalent towards such a conclusion and the arguments upon which it was built, and I suppose I still am. However, I feel like making a certain qualification now to the remarks I made then.
In as far as anything ever is right or wrong, I think that Ligotti is probably right here. Or to put it another way, unless there is such a thing as mass-enlightenment, there will always be a sense of intolerable suffering to human existence, and the only way to end this will be through extinction. Some means of extinction will be gentler than and preferable to others.
To state that even more simply: Yes, I agree; it's always better not to be born.
That wasn't the qualification I wished to make, actually. But before I make my qualification, I should perhaps qualify my qualification by saying, I think I am far less consistent in my views than Ligotti, and likely to vacillate wildly.
At one point in the thread - I believe at more than one point - a poster calling himself 'The Yellow Jester', who is, in fact, Thomas Ligotti, if, in fact, such an entity exists, makes a distinction between emotional pessimism and cerebral pessimism, claiming as his own the latter:
In my own case, I can say that my pessimistic outlook is a matter of cerebral introspection and not "emotional thinking." No matter how I felt on an emotional level, I would still say, "It would be better not to be born." That is a constant which could only change should I become the victim of a brain tumor or something of the sort that would derange my thought processes.
At the time I noted, but did not quite appreciate this point. I'm not sure that any thinking can ever be free of emotion, or at least, of something like 'personality'. My own pessimism (not that I especially want to own it) I have always thought of as emotional, of consisting in a sensation that no one else would ever understand, because I could never put it into words. It was an almost physical entity, as reasonless as any object on Earth, like a ball of fear and loneliness inside me.
Now, however, I appreciate this point much better.
At the time that the essay came out, my strong reaction to it was probably due to the fact that it was 'too close to home'. Now my reaction to it is less powerful. It seems little different to any other accumulation of letters that I may read or ignore at will. For the past few months I have not had the intense depression that I suffered for many years before. I feel relatively detached now, and it seems to me that, no, you do not need to be depressed to think that it's better not to be born. You might even be enjoying an ice cream - as I believe Ligotti himself remarked - and still think that to be born is a curse that should not be visited upon anyone. I agree.
What, after all, is everybody looking forward to? What have they been looking foward to throughout history? Why has it taken so long without finding that thing - which cannot even be conceived - and people still go on and on reproducing? I do not understand.
I noticed this very silly news story on which there is really no need to comment at all, but nonetheless I shall do so, merely in order to drag my soul further into the mud of other people's contempt.
I'm going to quote the whole thing here, because it's very short:
Sasha Baron-Cohen, best known for his eccentric character Borat, made a shock appearance on a Milan catwalk.
The actor brought the Agatha Ruiz de la Prada show to a halt, which resulted in security guards stepping in.
Baron-Cohen - who is in the Italian city making a new film based on his character Bruno, a flamboyant Austrian fashionista - was escorted off the catwalk and the show started again.
Despite the models keeping their cool, the Spanish designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of her show.
Ruiz de la Prada is famous for her brightly-coloured designs which represent humour, boldness and nature.
I've seen the clip. Or a clip. "Shock appearance" and bringing the "show to a halt" sounds like journalistic hyperbole to me. In the nanosecond of footage I saw, Sasha simply walked down the catwalk in a silly outfit. I'm surprised that anyone even noticed. Apparently people did notice, though. I wonder what the criteria were for deciding that the other models were serious and Sasha was an intrusion? It would be fascinating to find out. Anyway, as far as I can judge, what really brought the show to a halt were the security guards mentioned, whose black silhouettes appeared in the footage I saw, and were much more disturbing than Sasha. I wonder if the security guards were also part of Ruiz de la Prada's representation of "humour, boldness and nature".
If everyone wrote only what they knew then all novels would be in the first person.
I want to write some notes on some thoughts I've been having while reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Unfortunately, it's past midnight, and I really want to try and get some sleep if I can, so I'll just jot some notes here so that I don't forget, and hope to expand on them later.
The thoughts I've been having centre around a number of things: My wondering exactly what the appeal of this novel is to me when it appears to be an ambitious, realistic, topical novel of a kind that usually does not hold especial interest for me. The criticisms of McCullers's treatment of the 'mute' character, John Singer. The politics of the characters Dr. Copeland and Jake Blount. The character Mick Kelly, and her ideas of 'the inside room' and 'the outside room'. The same character's interest in music.
First of all, I have to ask myself, exactly why shouldn't I like ambitious, realistic, topical novels? This is something that has become an assumption on my part, and should be questioned, if for no other reason than to recapitulate how I got here.
There was a time when I was learning how to write stories. It extends as far back as I remember to the present day, in fact. As far back as I remember? Maybe not quite. I do remember one or two things that probably came before learning to write, such as, sitting in an empty passage, in a pram, alone, waiting. Nonetheless, I was conscious of the idea of having to learn a craft of storytelling from at least my teenage years, and had been writing stories for some time before that. In other words, the desire to write, to express something, came before I had had very much experience in the world at all, and early enough that some people might think I had nothing to express.
I think I did have something to express. I just happen to think that it was NOT OF THIS WORLD.
I expect I shall write more on this matter, but now I am tired, and I hope this tiredness shall bring me sleep.
I've just been sent the above lecture on various esoteric things, some of which are already familiar to me. It reminded me that I've recently put up a new piece at Chomu. I was considering taking it down for a while. I was a bit ******** when I wrote it, and it's possibly embarrassing for that reason. Also, I'm very much against sex scenes in writing, and I'm afraid it contains sex scenes (kind of). Damn. Anyway, there's some vague connection betweeeeeeeeen the above video and the piece, which is called, 'After 2012 and the Mouse'. Actually, it's not. Also, there's a new piece from Justin Isis up, called, "Fuck Off, Dad" Also there will be more stuff soon, I imagine. Please keep checking.
Last night an accidental taxi ride into the 'west side' of Chicago, apparently a largely Hispanic area. The driver was Latvian and spoke almost no English. He played Pat Benatar loudly (Meet Me at Midnight) [actually, there was some debate about who it was singing, and the genereal consensus was that it was Pat Benatar, but I am now beginning to doubt this]. Lost, unknowingly on our way to what we had been told was the no-go area of the west side, we passed a great many places to wash clothes. Back home these would be called laundrettes, but here they were on a larger scale. Low buildings sprawled, lit up with the sleepy glamour of yellow light and filled with nothing but row upon row of washing machines. I remember, in particular, one name - Bubble Land. As far as I recall, the sign was a dark blue, and there were cartoonish, overlapping circles on it, multi-coloured, to represent the bubbles. Somehow the colour scheme did not conjure up the primary brightness of Hollywood America. I seem to recall a story by Ligotti in which the narrator wanders an American small town - or mid-sized town - at night. I think it must be 'The Glamour'. He mentions the strange associations and feelings evoked by some of the names in the neon signs or above dark shop windows. "Playing nightly" is, I think, one of the phrases that exerts an eerie enchantment on him. When I first read it, I didn't quite get it, but this view of Chicago from the window of a taxi brought it back to me. Bubble Land. There was a kind of cosmic decrepitude here.
This is the America not portrayed in film. Even Lynch does not capture it. Film does not have the right texture for it, or else American film long ago took a turning away from the ability to create such textures. Ligotti, however, captures it in prose, despite his insistence on wishing to locate his stories in a place that is no place.
Much of America is a projection of Hollywood, or an international corporation, but there is still plenty that remains only internal. Company names like Texaco are now familiar, but there is a strangeness in them that may be rediscovered in the company names of those businesses that are not known internationally. In Britain, originally, all businesses were surely known by family names, or by staid, descriptive names such as 'the East India Trading Company'. Texaco, Toxico and so on are surely American innovations, the same corruption of language into strangeness that brought us the likes of 'Daz'. Some of these names are now associated with success, and primary colours, but some are shibboleths that might open the way to a dream or a nightmare world, to an eerie glamour, to Bubble Land.
Perhaps I should try to make a note of interesting ones.
I haven't been sleeping well recently. Perhaps it's jetlag. I think there might be other factors. Not sure I've ever had jetlag this bad for this long.
I'm very tired, but also very restless, and can't get comfortable. I think it's partly the knowledge that the world really is coming to some momentous changes. It's a bit scary, but I hope the changes will ultimately prove to be good. I'm well aware how many times optimism has failed in the past, but it seems like maybe we've got nothing to lose in trying to make things better this time.
I'd hate anyone to think that anything I said mattered (except in relation to me), as that would be embarrassing. But I don't suppose anyone thinks anything I say matters, anyway, so I'm probably embarrassing myself again by stating the obvious.
Earlier today I was listening to an interview on the radio with someone in Uganda. I realise that's a bit vague, but I didn't hear the whole programme. Anyway, the interviewer was saying, "What should the LRA do?" And the guy said, "They should come home." And the interviewer asked, "Should they be punished?" "No." "Even though they killed your relatives?" "Yes. They shouldn't be punished." "Why?" "Because if they are punished then the war will never end."
In light of that, I feel like everything I write is basically comedy.
I sometimes think I'd like to write a very thorough behind-the-scenes look at writing. I just feel like the whole thing is sickeningly wrong.
I don't know why it is that I sometimes suddenly take a liking to a particular writer. I don't think you can really work out a pattern. And yet, more often than not, I find that those writers I happen to like turn out to be those more than usually shat on by critics and the world at large. I do not do this on purpose. It makes me feel a kind of rage, and I get this feeling like, "So that's why I've never got anywhere in life! The world is full of cunts* that I'd like to kill." Just today I was thinking about how I'd like to kill lots of people, and how I'm tired of being nice to people. In a way perhaps it's related to your wall idea of... [Lots of writing about stuff that happened at the weekend.]
Anyway, I've gone off the track a bit.
I've been looking up stuff about Carson McCullers:
John Brown, one of her first editors in the 1940s... seems to wonder what could possibly prompt a full-length biography of Carson McCullers: "Granted, there are some fine texts, but, even so, she was not really much of a writer."
Apart from anything else, this doesn't even make sense. How can someone who's not much of a writer produce some fine texts? It makes me think there's some kind of unspoken agenda here. What would have made her much of a writer? Going to Harvard? Being friends with Edmund Wilson? Being a man? What? I really don't get it. And yet, whatever this hidden agenda is, it seems to crop up in all sorts of ways, just to ruin life on earth. I can sense it in a wordless way.
And then Arthur Miller says, "Moving, yes, but a minor author. And broken by illness at such a young age."
What kind of fucking non-sequitur is that? The kind that is hiding some portion of Miller's thought. But what? What is he trying to divert attention from by mentioning her illness and early death? What, is he saying she was irresponsible? A freak? The implication, of course, is that he is a major writer (rather than just a dried up old cunt) and is therefore in a position to judge who is major and minor, who has acheived the same kind of 'importance' as him, and who hasn't. And he's so important he can titter at McCullers's grave like this, using her very death as an insult against her (adding INSULT TO DEATH, let alone insult to injury), then get back to necking Monroe while he taps something out on his typewriter with his left hand, being, as he is, the accountant of important social problems.
So, these and other reasons lead me to feel like evil always triumphs.
Oh yeah, and it's typical that a writer would be shat on by her very own editor, like Carson was by that John Brown fellow.
[*Note to American readers. I've heard that in the States, as a slang phrase, this usually refers to women. I'm not referring to women when I used this word, but to bastards, though I suppose that may include women.]
I forgot to write in the e-mail that I appreciate Graham Greene's take on Carson McCullers. Of Greene, I've only read Brighton Rock. Overall, I liked it, although it took me ages to finish. Anyway, here's what Greene said:
Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.
As some of you may have guessed or known, I've spent the past three weeks in the U.S.
Of A.
Now I'm back.
While I was away I made some notes. Not many, but some. I might reproduce them here if I can overcome my general embarrassment. I was going to call them American Notes, but Dickens has already used that title. So I thought I could vary that a bit, and call them Hungarian Notes, but I wasn't sure if that would be appropriate. Then I thought maybe I could call them American Stoats. And I didn't have any more ideas after that, so I suppose I'll go with that - American Stoats. So, I may post the first in my series of American Stoats soonish.
