Directory of Lost Causes

Accompany me, if you will, on a creative journey...

Down the road, by the river, where I just took a walk, and the beginning of some new lyrics came to me, as follows:

I Can't Help Smiling.

Before they killed her, the kids nextdoor
Put out her eyes with a white-hot poker
Because they were bored
And recorded it all on camera.

The ignorant pigs!
I'd like to break every one of their ribs!

Still, I can't help smiling
Every time I remember
Because there'll never be anyone else like her.

And that's as far as I've got so far. What do you think? I suppose you want to know where I get my ideas from. Well, the germ of this one came to me from watching the film Lars and the Real Girl last night. At one point - I don't want to spoil the plot, but - someone dies, and someone else says of her, "There'll never be anyone else like her." The phrase started to go around in my head, especially as the Lars character began to smile when he heard this.

I just really liked the idea of someone smiling in the face of adversity or tragedy for reasons that were not necessarily immediately obvious. (I'm really demystifying the lyrics here, aren't I?) Anyway, as I was walking along, the other words I've written down sort of came to me. They really fell into place when I realised the first words had to be, "Before they killed her".



I'm not sure where I'll take the lyrics from here, though. I've a notion that I might start the second 'verse' (as I conceive it), with the line, "He was a builder", but this might prove an unproductive route. Or maybe I'll just leave the whole thing as it is. Anyway, I'm hoping to include these lyrics in the project that I'm currently pursuing with Kodagain and Saša Zorić Čombe. I'm also working on a number of other lyrics for this project, which is now perhaps half way through, creatively speaking.

In terms of influences, for me, there's the obvious one, which I suppose I shouldn't mention. But there are others, too, including, well, me. And my life. But I also really like just early pop which had charming lyrics that actually rhymed, and were sort of quaint, and told a story. I'd love to write something like this. (Fantastic voice.) Or like this. I mean this. (I'm still mourning the loss of so much Annette Funicello material online; I've been getting used to non-ownership of music and films, which means not needing to find space for CDs, DVDs and so on, but the Internet is an unreliable archive. Oh, there's a case in point; that video clip no longer works. Try this, instead. Fantastic voice!)



I also like Noel Coward kind of witty lyrics, like this. I'm afraid that my wit and skill at rhyming don't quite match up to this, though.

I don't know why I'm writing this, really, except that, I've been looking through my favourite Youtube clips and thinking wistfully of all the people, living and dead, that I would love to meet, but probably never will.

Still, I can't help smiling.

Hmmm, there's a bit on an internal rhyme thing there. Maybe I could use that in the lyric.

Write what you know.

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 suppose there must be such a thing as an organised writer, but for me the particular curse of a literary life is perhaps best typified by the kind of despair that comes with an ever-growing collection of papers and reading matter, the limited space that results from lack of funds, and the disorder of the former within the latter exacerbated by a mind absent in dreaming and energy reserves brought low by the lack of reward for all one's best efforts.

Today, it seems, has been a day in which the despair of that disorder had to be confronted, at least to some extent, and so the hoover came out of the cupboard. Everything that had been on the floor was piled onto the bed, and the window was opened to let in the outside air, which hopefully would blow away the stale smell of dust.

I have never been very good at packing my luggage for travel, and it seems that being tidy in one's digs is a similar skill. How do you pack everything efficiently? I need to sort through all the papers lying about, but how to store them? It occurred to me that I could make use of the two computer bags behind the desk. Perhaps in one of them I could put my manuscripts, and those that have been sent to me. Oh, and letters, too, since I'm not sure where else to put them for the moment. And in the other, maybe I could put materials relating to 'work'. I wonder what that pile of papers under the bags is? As luck would have it, the pile of papers consists mainly of manuscripts. Why didn't it occur to me before to put them actually in one of the bags?

I'd forgotten some of these things. There's an autobiography, called Nenashigusa, that I started writing in Japanese. It seems unlikely I'll ever finish it. Oh, and here are some translations I made of some poems from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. One or two of them don't seem so bad:

#24

I came away in haste, without the usual offerings.
May the gods accept instead
The brocade of Mount Tamuke's maple leaves,
And bless this journey!

#37

A wind-beaten autumn field.
White beads of dew are scattered
Like pearls whisked from a broken string.

#70

Weary of my loneliness
I step outside to see
Everywhere, only the same autumn evening.

#87

Around the needles of cedar,
Still wet with the passing shower's dew,
The autumn evening rises with the mist.

I'll have to put these where I can remember them, on top of the other manuscripts in this bag.

I also discovered the xerographic copy I made of Higuchi Ichiyo's tale 'Umoregi', which I have not yet read. 'Umoregi', literally translated, means something like 'buried log' (my Japanese-English dictionary gives the definition as 'bog-wood', and my Japanese-Japanese dictionary gives some incomprehensible definition), referring, I believe, to a dead tree in a forest, rotting beneath undergrowth, fungus and so on. Apart from the literal meaning, however, this phrase is a metaphor indicating 'obscurity', as in, lack of worldly success, as in... Well, you know the story.

As I said, I haven't read this particular tale of Ichiyo's yet, and I believe that no translation of it exists in English, but I've read a synopsis of the plot, which involves a master craftsman of ceramics who fails, with depressing consistency, to make a name for himself. Then there are some shenanigans involving the marriage of his sister, I believe, and, in the end, disgusted with the world, ambition, and absolutely everything, he takes a hammer and smashes his masterpiece into smithereens. If I try to translate the opening of the story, it goes something like this:

When he began painting, from the tip of his single brush there would spring five hundred ancients and sixteen deities; towers were builded in the air, and grand designs were worked around on all sides. On three inch tea burners, or five inch vases, would appear personages of Yamato, and Cathay; the elegance of the age of Genroku lived again, and the age of the gods was summoned back. The armour of warriors he devised, the patterns of the costumes of courtiers in the palace he selected, or, painting around a vessel, his brush waxing ornate, he would decorate with birds and flowers, and scenes of nature's beauty...

There are, I'm fairly sure, some mistakes in that (in other words, I had to guess some of it), but I thought I'd just see how far I could get before I had to give up. Higuchi Ichiyo wrote in the classical style, without full-stops. The text as reproduced in a modern book has some punctuation, but it's mainly commas. In this story, there only seem to be full-stops at the end of each chapter.

I think I'll leave these sheets out somewhere, since I want to read this story, despite the difficulties involved. (It will also help me to keep up my Japanese.) But I suppose it will add to the general clutter that I am trying to reduce. And yet, if I put it away, will I forget it again? Will it become, as its title suggests, a buried log?

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.

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?

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:

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?

With the pace of modern life being what it is, you'd think that short stories would be more popular than novels. Surely, most of us haven't got time for things like 'character development', 'sub-plots' and so forth. And the fact is, I do know many people who really love short stories. Whenever I say to a real human being that publishers are not keen on short stories they scratch their heads in bewilderment and suggest that publishers should get out more. (Perhaps this would be a good place to note that anyone who publishes my stuff - to the extent that they do publish it - obviously gets out with sufficient frequency, and is a worthy human being.) The fact remains, however, that this prejudice against short stories in the world of publishing is so pronounced that one cannot find a literary agent unless it is with a novel. Short stories simply will not do. The reasons for this are unclear, although it's quite possible that they have their roots in the traditional Western attitude that short stories are, unlike a certain chocolate bar produced by the cunts at Nestle, for girls.

I think I would like to promote short stories, here on my blog, because there does seem to be this prejudice against them, and because they're great. One way in which they are great is the following - they are a reminder that little things can make life worthwhile. I think, as a writer, you often dream about having a huge canon of work which people will annotate and examine for centuries to come, studying the way that you have developed your themes over the grand sweep of your career. But is writing really about the grand sweep of the career? Isn't it - or shouldn't it be - more about the observations and insights that make even a single moment precious?



It's not the size of someone's oeuvre that counts, surely? It's that magical moment that at some point they reached, perhaps in a single scene or line, that makes you feel, for a moment, not alone, that you will never forget, which gives a writer's real worth. Writers with slender oeuvres whose work I adore include: H. P. Lovecraft, Higuchi Ichiyo, Philip Larkin, Mark Samuels (still alive, so I'm hoping his oeuvre is going to put on weight significantly), Kaneko Misuzu, Bruno Schulz and John Kennedy Toole. There are, of course, many more.

There are in this world short stories (and poems) that make one feel it is enough to have read just this, it is enough that someone has written just this. My life has been validated in reading it, and the life of the writer in writing it. And I would like, at intervals, perhaps even regular, but more likely irregular, to post on this blog links to such short stories (and perharps poems, too) with a few words of commentary from me. And this will be a bit like Richard and Judy's Book Club, only with short stories, and less likely to make you want to rip out your own intestines with an awning hook.

Here are some short stories, off the top of my head, which have made the writers in question immediately worthwhile to me, and which I might feature in this series, for the enormous boons that they bestow upon the reader:

'Separate Ways', by Higuchi Ichiyo

'Egnaro', by M. John Harrison

'Madam Crowl's Ghost', by Sheridan LeFanu

'Patriotism', by Mishima Yukio

'The Wendigo', by Algernon Blackwood

'Something Childish But Very Natural', by Katherine Mansfield

And others.

Please anticipate the first in this series excitedly.

(By the way, how to ruin a good poem.)

Well, I've just arrived in London and am marvelling again at how expensive everything is, and wondering how I ever managed to live here as an unsuccessful writer. The answer, of course, is that I didn't. I moved to Wales.

Anyway, my feet are sore. I've just come back from Waitrose with (hopefully) a week's worth of food. I'm vaguely looking forward to my birthday celebrations on Friday.

Before I went to Waitrose to buy tins of chopped tomato, pasta, and so on, I noticed a new review of my German collection, Dunkle Gestade (Aufgesang), online. I did the computer translation thing on it, and, well, it was pretty bad. Now, as I understand it, 'aufgesang' means something like 'volume one', but it's looking very much now like there's not going to be a volume two, after all. Every single review I have seen of my German collection has been bad. I believe sales have also been poor. Critics and public in Germany seem to be of one mind here: My stories are shit.



It's at times like this that I find that I'm forced to confront the unpleasant possibility that I might simply be a deluded no-hoper. I've often thought that there can be no worse fate than to be a 'bad poet'. Forever to be teased by the Muse, only to see her lavish her affections on everyone but yourself, to be, in fact, the Muse's cuckold, and a laughingstock. The very core of such an existence is embarrassment. Nobody wants to be this person, but somebody, some poor wretch, for the sake of cosmic completeness or some such thing, must be. And that person is me.

Faced with such overwhelming evidence that I am a complete failure, what do I do? I can't simply go on flying in the face of opinion, can I?

Hmmm. I suppose the logical thing to do would be to give up writing and find something to which I am more suited. Unfortunately, there is nothing to which I am more suited. I am a failure at the thing to which I am most suited. That's a bit of a bummer. There's nothing else I actually want to do, either. I mean, really, I'm so woefully lacking in motivation in every other area of my life apart from writing that... Well, I don't want to even tell you about it. Basically those other areas (and I'm not even going to mention them) have atrophied more or less into non-existence.

At times like this I want to believe in a god, just so I can tell him what a cunt he is.

Am I going to give up writing? Well, unfortunately, that seems unlikely. You know, I don't want to come across as indomitable, as some kind of unconquerable spirit, or anything. It's not really like that. It's more like - very much more like - someone who knows very well he will never be desirable simply carrying on in a resigned manner with his trainspotting. What else can I do? Quite simply, what else can I do?

Now, I'm sure that there are lots of glass-half-full people, who, if they read this, will want to point out that a few bad reviews does not a failure make. Well, maybe not. In which case we must ask, what is success? Am I happy with my stories? I don't know if I am, really. The point of stories for me is largely communication. I seem to be failing in my communication. But that's not quite it, either, is it? It's like painting a picture. You know if you haven't got that branch on that tree quite right, if the expression on that face isn't quite alive. My work is riddled with bad branches and dead faces. That, I think, is what really hurts. One can hope one is being too perfectionist, but one's hopes, then, rely on the feedback of reviewers and so forth. Apparently I haven't been perfectionist enough.



I was rather hoping that, since my success in the English-speaking world has been, shall we say, modest, that I would be like Edgar Allan Poe, whose reputation first took off in Europe. That must be the problem, I thought. They just don't understand me in the Anglosphere. But actually, my reception in Germany has been much worse than in Britain and America. So, that blows that theory.

I'm thinking now of Dazai Osamu, and feeling very close to him. I'm thinking of the odd-shaped tales in which he mentioned, here and there, how 'at that time' his stories never sold, or that he's been writing 'nothing but dasaku'. 'Dasaku' is a Japanese word meaning something like 'turkey' or, well, basically indicating artistic works that fail in their purpose. He says somewhere that he never understood the criticism that he was a talented writer who was unfortunately lacking in moral fibre, and that he felt it was the other way round. He was a very moral person with no talent, and knew no other way to write than simply to forge ahead blindly with the full force of his being. Yes, I understand these words very well.

Morrissey, I believe, once said that he was intensely interested in failure, adding impishly, "Only in other people, of course." And that's a telling qualification to his comment. Morrissey fascinates because he has made a success of failure. I am not like Morrissey. Rather, I am like one of the characters about whom he sings. Like, for instance, the 'hero' of Little Man, What Now?. "Did that swift eclipse torture you? A star at eighteen and then suddenly gone, down to a few lines on the back page of a faded annual." Except, of course, I have the consolation that I have never been a star, so 'eclipse', in my case, is inappropriate. No, more appropriate to me is the song Southpaw, but, once again, I don't even want to go into that. Basically, where Morrissey has made a success out of failure, I have only made a failure out of failure.

I am interested in failure, though. So interested that I seem to have to live it out quite thoroughly. In fact, only the other day, I was thinking of writing a blog post about why I am fascinated by Stuart Goddard, otherwise known as Adam Ant, of Adam and the Ants fame. Stuart Goddard was and probably still is, a fantasist, like myself. He threw himself with wonderful, deranged flamboyance into his silly, flimsy fantasy world, and for a while, the public supported him in his derangement. And then the trampoline was cruelly snatched from under him. Or so it seems.



"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!"

Yes, failure interests me, and I'm fairly philosophical about it. Even if I am a 'bad poet', I am also a bit of a contrary bastard, I suppose, and will simply go on writing bad poetry, literally or metaphorically, until I die. That will be my statement. That will my contribution to the world. I don't know if it's a choice or whether I just can't help it. It feels somehow like both at the same time - a choice that I can't help making. On his tombstone, Kafu wanted the epitaph 'Kafu the Scribbler'. Seidensticker, his translator and biographer, considered that Kafu had never written any single work worth translating. I love Kafu. Perhaps I will have something similar on my tombstone. "Quentin S. Crisp. 1972 - 2010. He wrote a load of really stupid stories."

Anyway, we'll all be turned into robots in two years, and live happily ever after, so it won't matter.

Just in case this sounds like unmitigated self-pity, I'll add something else from one of Dazai's stories here. I forget the title, but it was a story in the form of letters being written between two writers. The older writer (I believe) scolds the younger that he has a "masterpiece complex", that he is impatient to write a masterpiece so that he can get it over with and stop writing. But there is no end to writing. You simply have to pick yourself up, and pick your pen up, and carry on. And carry on. And because there's no ending, it's perpetually as if all you have done so far has come to nothing, and you are only just starting. And that's the way it has to be.

The title of this blog entry comes from a song by Momus called, I Was a Maoist Intellectual in the Music Industry:

I became a hotel doorman, I stood there on the doormat
Clutching my forgotten discs in their forgotten format
Trying to hand them out to all the stars who sauntered in
The ones who hadn't been like me, who hadn't lived in vain
I gave up ideology the day I lost my looks
I never found a publisher for my little red books
When I died the energy released by my frustration
Was nearly enough for re-incarnation

But if I could live my life again the last thing that I'd be
Is a Maoist intellectual in the music industry
No, if I could live my life again I think I'd like to be
The man whose job is to stop the men who think like me
Yeah! If l could live my life again that'd be the thing to be
The man who plots the stumbling blocks
In the lives of the likes of me!

Excellent stuff. I particularly like the use of the word 'nearly' in "nearly enough for re-incarnation". The narrator even fails to get re-incarnated through his frustration. I'm sure that's what will happen to me, too.

Oh, if anyone in Germany has read Dunkle Gestade and actually liked it, I would be quite interested to know.

Amongst the presents I got for Christmas this year was a copy of Alan Moore's From Hell, a graphic novel based on the story or legend of that seminal serial killer, Jack the Ripper. I found it to be a fascinating piece of work and I have, all of a sudden, conceived an interest in the Ripper case. However, I don't intend to write here about From Hell or Jack the Ripper. I mention From Hell because a certain section of it reminded me of something I've been meaning to write for a very long time. In Chapter Nine, the officer investigating the case expresses his disgust at the ghouls who have gathered at the scene of one of the murders, some of them selling souvenirs, such as walking sticks:

"It's all a load of tom, shifting a few old walking sticks off the back of some poor murdered tart. And 'er barely cold. Makes me sick."

He goes on to say:

"Mark my words, in 'undred years there'll still be cunts like 'im, wrapping these killings up in supernatural twaddle. Making a living out of murder."

The work is heavily annotated in its appendix, giving a thorough account of Moore's research and other commentary. As part of his commentary on this page, Moore writes:

Abberline's eerily precognitive comments on page 2 are my own invention. They are also, in their way, a form of shamefaced apology from one currently making part of his living wrapping up miserable little killings in supernatural twaddle. Sometimes, after all you've done for them, your characters just turn on you.

This was just one more example of an idea that I had been toying with for over a year, to wit, the inbuilt hypocrisy of the writer. I say 'inbuilt', because how could Alan Moore have possibly written about Jack the Ripper and not been, at some point or other, a hypocrite?

But perhaps I should try to clarify my point with further examples. I'm not sure when the notion first occurred to me - and maybe, in different words, it was actually years and years ago - so I won't attempt to put these examples in chronological order. However, before coming across this little detail in From Hell, I was thinking of starting this piece with a quote from Thomas Ligotti, if I could find it. As a matter of fact, I can't find it, but it was along the lines of, "There is no literary voice for depression". At the time I thought this a strange thing to say. After all, aren't a great many writers somewhat depressive, and does this not influence their writing? People are always saying this or that writer is depressing. However, I feel that I have come to understand what Ligotti means. However much a writer might wish to express depression, what he or she ends up expressing is fascination, or something else of the sort. Writing cannot reproduce the feeling of depression. As Ligotti says in another interview (or possibly the same one), "Literature is entertainment or it is nothing". If the reader is not feeling, in some way, entertained, then he or she will simply stop reading. And since depression is not entertaining as it is actually experienced, there is no literary voice for depression.

Well, that's my second example now, but I have many, many others, which I hope will display the many sides of this concept.

For instance, I remember thinking about the hypocrisy of the writer quite consciously whilst reading John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. I had long meant to, but I was doing it partially to prepare myself mentally for the coming armageddon. I know, it sounds ridiculous, and perhaps this motive helped to highlight for me the aspect of inbuilt hypocrisy. Because, if Mr Wyndham were really contemplating the apocalypse, would he sit down in his study and tap away leisurely at his typewriter to write a book about it, which he then published commercially, so that readers like myself could sit in the comfort of their own homes and pass away a pleasant few hours dreaming about the end of civilisation?

Perhaps the quintessential example of the inbuilt hypocrisy of writers, however, comes in the form of a jisei. A jisei is a kind of Japanese poem - often, but not always a haiku - that was written when the subject knew that he or she was going to die. It was a kind of farewell to the world, and there are many left to us from famous Japanese poets, Buddhist monks and so on.

The poem in question is by someone called Toko, who lived from 1710 to 1795:

Jisei to wa
Sunawachi mayoi
Tada Shinan.

Death poems
are mere delusion -
Death is death.

Hmmm. This begs the question, if death poems are mere delusion, or, as it says in the original, "Jisei are, basically, indecision, if you're going to die, die", then why the hell did he bother to write one? Well, because he really wanted to express the idea of how stupid and futile it is to express anything. We have here the same kind of logical contradiction to be found in a statement like, "Everything I say is a lie". Star Trek fans should be familiar with that one.

I remember once - and I've never been able to track down who this was or what it was all about - many years ago, I saw a trailer on television for a programme about someone (a scientist, I believe), who had come up with a theory that actually we don't exist. Great, I thought, if we don't exist, why are you bothering to tell us? I'm serious.

The examples of this hypocrisy are endless. How about this one, which is, inevitably, from the man himself, Morrissey, part of a song called Reader Meet Author?

You don't know a thing about their lives
They live where you wouldn't dare to drive
You shake as you think of how they sleep
But you write as if you all lie side by side

This is one hypocritical writer writing hypocritically about the hypocrisy of other writers. And I am a hypocritical writer writing hypocritically about the hypocrisy of another writer writing hypocritically about the hypocrisy of another writer.

Phew!

And it's not only the writers who are hypocritical. What about the readers? Aren't they basically in the same boat? They want the writers to give them something real, or something that feels real, but they don't want to know how this is done. And if they suddenly find themselves to be the writer's subject matter, and the result is not flattering, well, suddenly what the writer does is beyond the pale.

In this connection, I was recently sent a copy of a book in which I have an essay. That book is Horror Quarterly. My essay was on Japanese horror, and dealt in part with the questions of voyeurism and sadism in art. Here is a quote therefrom:

One day a friend of mine, who has since disappeared into the depths of the comic-book world, turned to me and said, "If you're not the audience, and you're not the cameraman, and you're not the assailant, you must be the victim." I have never been able to forget it. Shakespeare wrote grandly that all the world is a stage. Ladies and gentlemen, I tell you that the world is, in fact, nothing more than a vast snuff film. We are all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, assailants, and there's one thing else that's sure, we none of us get through this life without also being victims. Sadistic art, exploitation, fake snuff films - if these things sicken us then it must be because they confront us with this obscene and horrifying truth.

I suppose what I'm trying to get at by quoting myself here is that maybe this hypocrisy goes beyond writing and writers, and is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. To make my point clearer, let me ask the question, how could a writer avoid hypocrisy? Presumably the writer is trying to capture something real - a kind of raw experience of the basic meaningless universe in all its glory. Or, if they're more morally inclined, well, they might be searching for a different kind of truth, but, nonetheless, something 'real'. And this is what I do, too. However, just as light dispells darkness wherever it goes, so does language dispell meaninglessness. It cannot help but be a projection onto reality. If someone says, "Life is meaningless" they have created the kind of logical contradiction mentioned above. Meaning is inherent in language, and the effort of expression is nothing if not an attempt to create a meaning, even if that created meaning is that "life is meaningless". It seems to me that, contrary to what many people seem to think, it is not a meaningful life that is hard or impossible to come by, but a meaningless life. The writer strives for that meaningless reality - and the credibility that comes with it - again and again; again and again she fails. She ends up with mere meaning - in other words, hypocrisy. It's inbuilt.

This begs the question, is that meaningless reality anywhere out there at all?

Ultimately, of course, I don't have the answer. However, I will leave you with a few thoughts in connection with my own hypocritical writing. I find that the writing process is, for me, one in which synchronicity plays a large part. Call me a flakey crackpot if you will - and I probably am, so who cares? - but that's the truth of the matter. And in keeping with that truth, I have found this idea of the hypocrisy of writers worming its way into the novel on which I am currently working, Domesday Afternoon. Everything I'm living seems to go into the mix, as if I'm some sort of synchronicity blender. Anyway, here's an excerpt from a recent passage in the novel:

Sincerity. Reality. How far off these destinations still seem. If I could be single and alone, without mirrors, but maybe, after all, the human mind will always erect the mirrors of self-examination that keep us from being real and sincere. Sometimes, indeed, it seems to me that to write at all is to be a hypocrite. And to write, in the end, is no different than to think.

I tried to address this to no one, but I must confess that something looms and casts a shadow on these pages, so that, even in my greatest loneliness, I cannot help but address... address... someone or something. You, whoever you are, or perhaps myself, or God, or some combination of these three. In any case, I address.

So, it seems, the inbuilt hypocrisy of the writer is the closest I have come to proving the existence of God.

(Irony engine disengaged.)

Leafing through old notebooks, one is apt to come upon some very curious pieces of writing. Since I've been taking advantage of my unemployment to carry out a lot of the donkey-work of my fiction writing - wordprocessing and so on - I have had occasion recently to be looking through my stack of notebooks, and just now came across a short piece that seemed, at first, entirely unfamiliar to me. In fact, I thought it must have been written by someone else, and that for some reason I had copied it out in order to edit it for them, or something of the sort. However, I soon realised that this was, indeed, something I had written, which had become quickly buried under the shifting sands of my memory. Slowly I was able to unearth the dim recollection of having applied for a position as prison correspondent with a newspaper. The piece in question had been part of my application. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, but anyway, here's what I wrote, which I was able to read as if the words of a stranger:

Penal Reform

With recent advances in research on human genetics, the age-old debate on free will is receiving fresh attention. It is not unthinkable that this will prove the most important debate in human history. If human beings really are no more than complex, reactive machines then an individual can no longer be held responsible for his actions, and concepts such as behavioural reform and rehabilitation become, to a lesser or greater extent, obsolete. The pronouncement of the death of free will, if it comes, will necessarily raise new questions. Is it constructive, or even justifiable, to punish a person for something over which she had no effective control? Is social reform even possible? Perhaps the conclusion that free will is dead will be used to justify genetic methods of rehabilitation that treat human beings like machines in need of repair.

The assumption behind any philosophy of behavioural predetermination is that the mind is ultimately a closed system. As a means of considering the validity of such a philosophy we could view the closed system of prison as both a symptom of and a symbolic microcosm of the social system at large. If we are unable to think our way out of the system in which we find ourselves, we are doomed to cyclical patterns of behaviour resembling addiction.

My own interest in penal reform, unlikely as it may sound, stems from my artistic calling as a writer of horror fiction. Many of the issues that perplex me with regard to art seem to parallel issues of penal reform. Are the horrors I generate in a piece of fiction a symptom of morbidly addictive patterns of thinking? Can I, in fact, use creativity as a means to break out of those patterns?

Perhaps this last question is the most pertinent. If a denial of free will precludes any possibility of humane forms of rehabilitation, the only viable alternative must be the use of creativity and imagination – the positive declaration that there is free will. The human prisoner must first imagine a world beyond the closed system that imprisons him; only then can he hope to inhabit it.

Many of us are familiar with the lateral thinking test which is comprised of nine dots arranged in a square with the challenge to obliterate each dot by drawing four straight lines without doubling back or taking one’s pen from the paper. As long as the mind sees the dots as a square the task is impossible. It is only when the mind breaks out of this system by carrying one line into the blank outside the square that there is room for the challenge to be met.

Of course, all this is theoretical, but I have worked with one organisation that attempts to put this theory into practice. Using drama as a tool, Wolf and Water Arts Company encourages people to imagine themselves out of their addictive systems. Wolf and Water have run projects of this kind in prisons and areas of conflict such as Kosovo. Although my own work with the company was limited to other are