ARGH!
What with this, and the weird, badly spelled 'non-religious' guides I've had pushed through my door - bearing a soft-focus picture of the scary Isaac Hayes - I'm finding this all a bit worrying. Trying to recruit members amongst the police - eek.
Please make them go away.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
No Nadine
This article was in the Guardian last week and it's worth reprinting in full considering what MP Nadine has just been ranting about.
It's 39 years since abortion was legalised in this country, yet these days it's rarely discussed without mention of 'shame', 'mental trauma' or 'viability'. With pro-lifers dominating the debate, and even leftwingers describing abortion as a 'necessary evil', women's hard-won rights could soon be under threat. In an introduction to an eight-page special, Zoe Williams asks: are we just going to roll over?
Today marks the 39th anniversary of abortion becoming legal in Britain. Yes, yes, there would have been an argument for waiting for the 40th, but I really think, in the current climate, that it needs to be celebrated as often as possible. On Halloween, mindful or not of this anniversary, the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries will be introducing her 10-minute-rule bill, proposing a reduction in the time limit on abortion in this country to 21 weeks (down from 24 weeks at present), and a "cooling-off period after the first point of contact with a medical practitioner about a termination" - so far as I can make out, she wishes to slow the abortion process down still further, and then penalise women who have left it too late. Her rationale? She just "has a feeling it's right". Honestly.
I remember the first time that I wrote about having had an abortion; it was in the mid-90s (the abortion, I mean. And the article, too). A survey had come out saying that one in four women had had availed themselves of termination services; I was surprised by how low that figure was, but it also made me think: if 25% of women have had abortions, then surely every one of us, male and female, has a friend or partner or family member, someone very close anyhow, who has had an abortion. Seriously, unless you are very cloistered or you are incredibly judgmental and uptight and nobody ever tells you anything, you will have been aware of an abortion at very close quarters, even if it was not your own.
So why does nobody talk about it, I pondered then, and do again now. Why are there never any abortion jokes? Why is it unthinkable to discuss it without prefacing everything with "of course, it's terribly traumatic, no woman enters into this lightly"? I found it no more traumatic than any other operation I have ever had, no more psychologically scarring, way less painful than anything involving my teeth and considerably less annoying than anything I have had done on the NHS (whose "resources" in this area - which I will complain about later - meant I had to go private, which is entirely against my principles, but did make it very convenient).
Even writing that, I am furious - it is considered a given, an unarguable tenet of modern society, that you would feel ashamed of having a termination, that you would, in some cutesy, feminine, inarticulate way, feel "bad" about it. You are not allowed to talk about this operation unless it is to say how dirty it made you feel. We are all expected to have these moral objections and yet suffer the business anyway, in the name of pragmatism. Ethically, this is a far dodgier and more repugnant position than mine, which is that I am entirely pro-abortion because I do not consider it murder; if you do not consider this foetus human, then it becomes no more of an issue than getting a tumour removed. If I have any shame at all, it is because, when my health was at stake, I immediately opted out and went private, and I would have hoped before that happened that it would have taken more than an unwanted pregnancy. Never mind. The NHS doctor made me feel that if I had stayed in the system, I would be wasting resources that rightfully belonged to poorer, younger mothers. I was 25; if I had been the age I am now, I would not have taken any notice of her.
This is worth revisiting. The prevailing attitude these days seems to be that abortion is state-sanctioned murder and we put up with it because if we didn't, women would have them in back alleys anyway. It is the lesser of two evils, therefore, and as such, must be cloaked in silence, since whichever way you look at it, it still has an evil at its core. This line has taken hold because it is the least controversial way of supporting the right: so an MP standing up and saying "Women need this right, because otherwise they will put their health at risk having illegal terminations" will not find the pro-life lobby instantly rearing up against them, petitioning their constituents with what a murderer he or she is. If, however, an MP were to stand up and say "I am pro-choice because I do not consider this to be murder. I do not consider it to be evil. I do not consider a foetus which a woman has a one in three chance of involuntarily rejecting anyway to be a viable life unless she deems it so. I do not buy this craven sentimentality about the unborn, this pseudo-spiritual cleanliness we ascribe to it. In fact, it makes me sick", then votes will be lost. In other words, there are no votes to be won supporting abortion in an ideologically honest way, and lots to be lost. The taboo started in Westminster, I believe; not everything starts in the Daily Mail.
Back to this article. I got a lot of weirdos sending me pictures of tiny bloodied babies' fingers, Photoshopped on to a pair of abortionist's rubber gloves, with captions along the lines of "Just a collection of cells? Tell that to the baby". Those were pretty lurid, but also amusingly put together. What irked me more, though, was all the traffic from the "voices of reason" saying words to the effect of "Why do you have to push everything? We all value the right to abortion, we're all glad it exists. Why on earth would you want to fight for the right to be able to joke about it? When it's not even funny?" But I was not saying abortions are, in and of themselves, hilarious. I was asking why they never crop up in jokes. Cancer does, cheese does, shagging and gonorrhoea and disabilities and dogs and flowers and terrible, terrible diseases, and all other foodstuffs, and all other genres of people ... There are taboos in political rhetoric, yes, tonnes of them, but in comedy, even in very mainstream comedy, there are almost no taboos. You could make a joke about September 11 before you could make a joke about abortion. And this is not irrelevant, it is not as if the right is inviolable, and the joking is a side issue. If you allow a taboo to hold, you leave all the cultural space open to anti-abortionists.
Ten years on, we can see the results of this. Culturally, there is an even greater silence around abortion, and an even greater refusal to discuss it except in terms of its terrible psychological toll on women. Research in both Britain and America repeatedly shows this not to be the case - that abortion, unlike bringing to term an unwanted pregnancy, does not increase the risk of depression; and furthermore, that the uptake on the compulsorily offered post-abortion counselling is staggeringly low (in some areas it is just 1%). And even she is probably just being polite.
Meanwhile there is an increasing foetus fetishisation in mainstream media - all this "miracle of life" stuff, with six-day-old embryos bouncing around, looking deliciously as if they are playing football with the placenta. It is hard to take this any more seriously than you would those pictures of baby bats in socks (non-readers of the Daily Mail will at this stage start to wonder what on earth I am on about) but, operating in this chamber of cultural silence where mature commentary about women's rights, health and beliefs vis-a-vis abortion simply is not happening, it is not a huge leap of the imagination to think that these dancing-foetus babies are jeopardising the gynaecological freedoms of the next generation.
Noises from parliament are ineffectual but nevertheless damaging. It has become de rigueur not to criticise the right to abortion, but rather to attack the time limit. During the tedious Tory leadership election, there was briefly some ham-fisted tub-thumping by Liam Fox (who wanted the time limit reduced to 12 weeks), but since then there have been cross-party rumblings, with early-day motions and other unhelpful motions made by Labour MPs Geraldine Smith and Claire Curtis-Thomas, as well as Liberals (notably Evan Harris).
There is a huge amount of evidence for the disingenuousness of this strategy. Firstly, anyone with a serious interest in reducing the (already terribly small) number of late-term abortions would make it their priority to improve provision of pre-12 week terminations on the NHS. They would roll out the pre-nine-week abortion pill as something nurses could administer without doctors; they would, of course, overturn the ludicrously old-fashioned system of having two doctors on hand to ratify every abortion; they would lobby against the tacit but anecdotally widespread NHS policy of not even bothering providing pre-12-week abortions, on the basis that anyone who is in that much of a rush could go private.
Sufficient interest in late-term abortions to actually research them would, furthermore, show that the functional NHS time limit is not 24 weeks but 19, after which public health services become so foot-draggingly obstructive that women have to go private. Since the second scan during a pregnancy occurs at 20 weeks, sometimes later, and it is generally only at this point that many birth defects become clear, there would seem to be an active, perverse, unlegislated barrier to late-term abortions.
Furthermore, late-term abortions constitute the truly pitifully small proportion of 1.6%; that was in 2003, since when the trend has been downwards. The late-term argument always rests upon so-called "scientific advances", which have made foetuses marvellously hardy, so that the laws of 1967 are blatantly out of date. We are like a crowd of Victorian idiots marvelling at some fairground quack who claims to cure constipation. The truth is that no significant scientific development in foetal viability has occurred since the late-term law was brought down from 28 to 24 weeks in 1990. In all respects, you are better off dealing with those politicians who openly admit their anti-abortion stance: such as the Tory MP Laurence Robertson, who, in May last year, used his windfall in the private member's ballot to propose a blanket ban on all abortion. Robertson is not only a lot more honest than your Harrises and your Foxes, he also provides the useful service of reminding us that this right is still something we must be ready to fight for.
The other thing to remember, of course, is that the one thing we have in common with America (where, of course, the situation is much direr - see Suzanne Goldenberg's report on page 12) is that this boils down to a class issue. In the US, while the Christian right campaigns feverishly against late-term abortions, there are women leaving it to 18 or 20 weeks because they literally cannot afford the operation or even the transport to get to it. In the US, abortion laws are effectively working only for middle-class women already. In Britain, while some care trusts offer a good abortion service pre-12 weeks, it is by no means nationwide, so a very large proportion of women are having to wait till after their three-month scan unless they can afford to go private. And yet, many women who count as late-term abortions, at 18 weeks or more, report that the reason their pregnancy got so advanced was because that at any point from 15 weeks, their GPs became obstructive and unhelpful. So really, the window for an abortion on the NHS can be as narrow as three weeks, and all it takes is some garden-variety inefficiency for that window to be shut altogether.
So it boils down to this: for those of us with the cash, abortion is still an inviolable right, and for those of us without it, things are a lot more sticky. Let's not forget, this is exactly what the situation was before 1967. Not since the dawn of medical capability has it been impossible for a rich woman to get a termination. This battle was fought for all women; if, as middle-class women, we stand by and watch while the right is clawed away from the bottom up, and then if, in 50 years' time, it has been rescinded altogether, it will be no more than we deserve. Anyone interested in findiing our more on abortion rights should contact Abortion Rights (Abortionrights.org.uk).
Abortion
The facts
· The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal in the UK up to 28 weeks gestation. In 1990, the law was amended: abortion is now legal only up to 24 weeks except in cases where it's necessary to save the life of the woman, there's evidence of extreme foetal abnormality or there is grave risk of physical or mental injury to the woman.
· Abortions after 24 weeks are extremely rare, accounting for 0.1% of all abortions (fewer than 200 a year).
· The act does not extend to Northern Ireland. Abortion is only legal there if the life or the mental or physical health of the woman is at "serious risk". There are no clear guidelines, however, and provision depends on the moral outlook of individual doctors.
· In 2004/05, 64 women had an abortion in Northern Ireland, according to the Family Planning Association.
· In 2005, 1,164 women from Northern Ireland travelled to England for an abortion. Women travelling from Northern Ireland for an abortion cannot have them on the NHS.
· According to the Department of Health, the total number of abortions in England and Wales last year was 186,400 (compared with 185,700 in 2004 - a rise of 0.4%).
· The abortion rate was highest, at 32 per 1,000, for women in the 20-24 age group.
· The rate for under-16s was just 3.7 per 1,000 women and the under-18 rate 17.8 per 1,000 women, both the same as in 2004.
· 89% of abortions were carried out when the foetus was less than 13 weeks old; 67% at under 10 weeks.
· 1,900 abortions (1%) were classified as having been carried out because of a risk that the child would be born with disabilities.
· According to pro-choice campaign groups, 1.6% of abortions fit the classification "late-term", being performed at 20 weeks or more.
· Scotland keeps its own statistics and in 2005 there were 12,603 abortions performed, compared to 12,461 in 2004.
It's 39 years since abortion was legalised in this country, yet these days it's rarely discussed without mention of 'shame', 'mental trauma' or 'viability'. With pro-lifers dominating the debate, and even leftwingers describing abortion as a 'necessary evil', women's hard-won rights could soon be under threat. In an introduction to an eight-page special, Zoe Williams asks: are we just going to roll over?
Today marks the 39th anniversary of abortion becoming legal in Britain. Yes, yes, there would have been an argument for waiting for the 40th, but I really think, in the current climate, that it needs to be celebrated as often as possible. On Halloween, mindful or not of this anniversary, the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries will be introducing her 10-minute-rule bill, proposing a reduction in the time limit on abortion in this country to 21 weeks (down from 24 weeks at present), and a "cooling-off period after the first point of contact with a medical practitioner about a termination" - so far as I can make out, she wishes to slow the abortion process down still further, and then penalise women who have left it too late. Her rationale? She just "has a feeling it's right". Honestly.
I remember the first time that I wrote about having had an abortion; it was in the mid-90s (the abortion, I mean. And the article, too). A survey had come out saying that one in four women had had availed themselves of termination services; I was surprised by how low that figure was, but it also made me think: if 25% of women have had abortions, then surely every one of us, male and female, has a friend or partner or family member, someone very close anyhow, who has had an abortion. Seriously, unless you are very cloistered or you are incredibly judgmental and uptight and nobody ever tells you anything, you will have been aware of an abortion at very close quarters, even if it was not your own.
So why does nobody talk about it, I pondered then, and do again now. Why are there never any abortion jokes? Why is it unthinkable to discuss it without prefacing everything with "of course, it's terribly traumatic, no woman enters into this lightly"? I found it no more traumatic than any other operation I have ever had, no more psychologically scarring, way less painful than anything involving my teeth and considerably less annoying than anything I have had done on the NHS (whose "resources" in this area - which I will complain about later - meant I had to go private, which is entirely against my principles, but did make it very convenient).
Even writing that, I am furious - it is considered a given, an unarguable tenet of modern society, that you would feel ashamed of having a termination, that you would, in some cutesy, feminine, inarticulate way, feel "bad" about it. You are not allowed to talk about this operation unless it is to say how dirty it made you feel. We are all expected to have these moral objections and yet suffer the business anyway, in the name of pragmatism. Ethically, this is a far dodgier and more repugnant position than mine, which is that I am entirely pro-abortion because I do not consider it murder; if you do not consider this foetus human, then it becomes no more of an issue than getting a tumour removed. If I have any shame at all, it is because, when my health was at stake, I immediately opted out and went private, and I would have hoped before that happened that it would have taken more than an unwanted pregnancy. Never mind. The NHS doctor made me feel that if I had stayed in the system, I would be wasting resources that rightfully belonged to poorer, younger mothers. I was 25; if I had been the age I am now, I would not have taken any notice of her.
This is worth revisiting. The prevailing attitude these days seems to be that abortion is state-sanctioned murder and we put up with it because if we didn't, women would have them in back alleys anyway. It is the lesser of two evils, therefore, and as such, must be cloaked in silence, since whichever way you look at it, it still has an evil at its core. This line has taken hold because it is the least controversial way of supporting the right: so an MP standing up and saying "Women need this right, because otherwise they will put their health at risk having illegal terminations" will not find the pro-life lobby instantly rearing up against them, petitioning their constituents with what a murderer he or she is. If, however, an MP were to stand up and say "I am pro-choice because I do not consider this to be murder. I do not consider it to be evil. I do not consider a foetus which a woman has a one in three chance of involuntarily rejecting anyway to be a viable life unless she deems it so. I do not buy this craven sentimentality about the unborn, this pseudo-spiritual cleanliness we ascribe to it. In fact, it makes me sick", then votes will be lost. In other words, there are no votes to be won supporting abortion in an ideologically honest way, and lots to be lost. The taboo started in Westminster, I believe; not everything starts in the Daily Mail.
Back to this article. I got a lot of weirdos sending me pictures of tiny bloodied babies' fingers, Photoshopped on to a pair of abortionist's rubber gloves, with captions along the lines of "Just a collection of cells? Tell that to the baby". Those were pretty lurid, but also amusingly put together. What irked me more, though, was all the traffic from the "voices of reason" saying words to the effect of "Why do you have to push everything? We all value the right to abortion, we're all glad it exists. Why on earth would you want to fight for the right to be able to joke about it? When it's not even funny?" But I was not saying abortions are, in and of themselves, hilarious. I was asking why they never crop up in jokes. Cancer does, cheese does, shagging and gonorrhoea and disabilities and dogs and flowers and terrible, terrible diseases, and all other foodstuffs, and all other genres of people ... There are taboos in political rhetoric, yes, tonnes of them, but in comedy, even in very mainstream comedy, there are almost no taboos. You could make a joke about September 11 before you could make a joke about abortion. And this is not irrelevant, it is not as if the right is inviolable, and the joking is a side issue. If you allow a taboo to hold, you leave all the cultural space open to anti-abortionists.
Ten years on, we can see the results of this. Culturally, there is an even greater silence around abortion, and an even greater refusal to discuss it except in terms of its terrible psychological toll on women. Research in both Britain and America repeatedly shows this not to be the case - that abortion, unlike bringing to term an unwanted pregnancy, does not increase the risk of depression; and furthermore, that the uptake on the compulsorily offered post-abortion counselling is staggeringly low (in some areas it is just 1%). And even she is probably just being polite.
Meanwhile there is an increasing foetus fetishisation in mainstream media - all this "miracle of life" stuff, with six-day-old embryos bouncing around, looking deliciously as if they are playing football with the placenta. It is hard to take this any more seriously than you would those pictures of baby bats in socks (non-readers of the Daily Mail will at this stage start to wonder what on earth I am on about) but, operating in this chamber of cultural silence where mature commentary about women's rights, health and beliefs vis-a-vis abortion simply is not happening, it is not a huge leap of the imagination to think that these dancing-foetus babies are jeopardising the gynaecological freedoms of the next generation.
Noises from parliament are ineffectual but nevertheless damaging. It has become de rigueur not to criticise the right to abortion, but rather to attack the time limit. During the tedious Tory leadership election, there was briefly some ham-fisted tub-thumping by Liam Fox (who wanted the time limit reduced to 12 weeks), but since then there have been cross-party rumblings, with early-day motions and other unhelpful motions made by Labour MPs Geraldine Smith and Claire Curtis-Thomas, as well as Liberals (notably Evan Harris).
There is a huge amount of evidence for the disingenuousness of this strategy. Firstly, anyone with a serious interest in reducing the (already terribly small) number of late-term abortions would make it their priority to improve provision of pre-12 week terminations on the NHS. They would roll out the pre-nine-week abortion pill as something nurses could administer without doctors; they would, of course, overturn the ludicrously old-fashioned system of having two doctors on hand to ratify every abortion; they would lobby against the tacit but anecdotally widespread NHS policy of not even bothering providing pre-12-week abortions, on the basis that anyone who is in that much of a rush could go private.
Sufficient interest in late-term abortions to actually research them would, furthermore, show that the functional NHS time limit is not 24 weeks but 19, after which public health services become so foot-draggingly obstructive that women have to go private. Since the second scan during a pregnancy occurs at 20 weeks, sometimes later, and it is generally only at this point that many birth defects become clear, there would seem to be an active, perverse, unlegislated barrier to late-term abortions.
Furthermore, late-term abortions constitute the truly pitifully small proportion of 1.6%; that was in 2003, since when the trend has been downwards. The late-term argument always rests upon so-called "scientific advances", which have made foetuses marvellously hardy, so that the laws of 1967 are blatantly out of date. We are like a crowd of Victorian idiots marvelling at some fairground quack who claims to cure constipation. The truth is that no significant scientific development in foetal viability has occurred since the late-term law was brought down from 28 to 24 weeks in 1990. In all respects, you are better off dealing with those politicians who openly admit their anti-abortion stance: such as the Tory MP Laurence Robertson, who, in May last year, used his windfall in the private member's ballot to propose a blanket ban on all abortion. Robertson is not only a lot more honest than your Harrises and your Foxes, he also provides the useful service of reminding us that this right is still something we must be ready to fight for.
The other thing to remember, of course, is that the one thing we have in common with America (where, of course, the situation is much direr - see Suzanne Goldenberg's report on page 12) is that this boils down to a class issue. In the US, while the Christian right campaigns feverishly against late-term abortions, there are women leaving it to 18 or 20 weeks because they literally cannot afford the operation or even the transport to get to it. In the US, abortion laws are effectively working only for middle-class women already. In Britain, while some care trusts offer a good abortion service pre-12 weeks, it is by no means nationwide, so a very large proportion of women are having to wait till after their three-month scan unless they can afford to go private. And yet, many women who count as late-term abortions, at 18 weeks or more, report that the reason their pregnancy got so advanced was because that at any point from 15 weeks, their GPs became obstructive and unhelpful. So really, the window for an abortion on the NHS can be as narrow as three weeks, and all it takes is some garden-variety inefficiency for that window to be shut altogether.
So it boils down to this: for those of us with the cash, abortion is still an inviolable right, and for those of us without it, things are a lot more sticky. Let's not forget, this is exactly what the situation was before 1967. Not since the dawn of medical capability has it been impossible for a rich woman to get a termination. This battle was fought for all women; if, as middle-class women, we stand by and watch while the right is clawed away from the bottom up, and then if, in 50 years' time, it has been rescinded altogether, it will be no more than we deserve. Anyone interested in findiing our more on abortion rights should contact Abortion Rights (Abortionrights.org.uk).
Abortion
The facts
· The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal in the UK up to 28 weeks gestation. In 1990, the law was amended: abortion is now legal only up to 24 weeks except in cases where it's necessary to save the life of the woman, there's evidence of extreme foetal abnormality or there is grave risk of physical or mental injury to the woman.
· Abortions after 24 weeks are extremely rare, accounting for 0.1% of all abortions (fewer than 200 a year).
· The act does not extend to Northern Ireland. Abortion is only legal there if the life or the mental or physical health of the woman is at "serious risk". There are no clear guidelines, however, and provision depends on the moral outlook of individual doctors.
· In 2004/05, 64 women had an abortion in Northern Ireland, according to the Family Planning Association.
· In 2005, 1,164 women from Northern Ireland travelled to England for an abortion. Women travelling from Northern Ireland for an abortion cannot have them on the NHS.
· According to the Department of Health, the total number of abortions in England and Wales last year was 186,400 (compared with 185,700 in 2004 - a rise of 0.4%).
· The abortion rate was highest, at 32 per 1,000, for women in the 20-24 age group.
· The rate for under-16s was just 3.7 per 1,000 women and the under-18 rate 17.8 per 1,000 women, both the same as in 2004.
· 89% of abortions were carried out when the foetus was less than 13 weeks old; 67% at under 10 weeks.
· 1,900 abortions (1%) were classified as having been carried out because of a risk that the child would be born with disabilities.
· According to pro-choice campaign groups, 1.6% of abortions fit the classification "late-term", being performed at 20 weeks or more.
· Scotland keeps its own statistics and in 2005 there were 12,603 abortions performed, compared to 12,461 in 2004.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Warner reads
... here
Click Thursday to hear our hero reading a new story commissioned by the Chelteham Literature Festival. It's a good 'un.
Click Thursday to hear our hero reading a new story commissioned by the Chelteham Literature Festival. It's a good 'un.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Just one last jab
Banksy Identity Revealed In Self Portrait
(Reuters, Bristol, UK) Art revolutionary Banksy, whose identity has hitherto been a matter of massive public speculation, has finally chosen to reveal himself through a stunningly accurate self portrait. "Yeah, it's all like a big laugh really, I've been drawing me self portrait everywhere fer years. Sort of mockin' an' tauntin' me oppressors an' them Palestines who wants me locked up," the artist said in an official statement yesterday.
I love you Brooker
Supposing ... Subversive genius Banksy is actually rubbish
Charlie Brooker
Friday September 22, 2006
The Guardian
Here's a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.
Banksy first became famous for his stencilled subversions of pop-culture images; one showed John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in a famous pose from Pulp Fiction, with their guns replaced by bananas. What did it mean? Something to do with the glamourisation of violence, yeah? Never mind. It looked cool. Most importantly, it was accompanied by the name "BANKSY" in huge letters, so everyone knew who'd done it. This, of course, is the real message behind all of Banksy's work, despite any appearances to the contrary.
Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her.
Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff. Wow. In an instant, your worldview changes forever. Your eyes are opened. Staggering away, mind blown, you flick v-signs at a Burger King on the way home. Nice one Banksy! You've shown us the truth, yeah?
As if that wasn't irritating enough, Banksy's vague, pseudo-subversive preaching is often accompanied by a downright embarrassing hardnut swagger. His website is full of advice to other would-be graffiti bores, like: "be aware that going on a mission drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells". Woah, man - the cells!
He goes on to explain that "real villains" think graffiti is pointless - not because he wants you to agree with them, but because he wants you to know he's mates with a few tough-guy criminal types. Coz Banksy's an anarchalist what don't respect no law, innit?
One of his most imbecilic daubings depicts a monkey wearing a sandwich board with "lying to the police is never wrong" written on it. So presumably Ian Huntley was right then, Banksy? You absolute thundering backside.
Recently, our hero's made headlines by sneaking a dummy dressed in Guantánamo rags into Disneyland (once again fearlessly exposing Mickey Mouse's disgusting war criminal past), and defacing several hundred copies of Paris Hilton's new album (I haven't heard her CD, but I'm willing to bet it's far superior to Blur's godawful Think Tank, a useless bumdrizzle of an album, whose artwork was done by Banksy - presumably he spray-painted it on a brick and hurled it through EMI's window, yeah?).
Right now you can see some of Banksy's life-altering acts of genius for yourself at his LA exhibition Barely Legal (yeah? Yeah!), including a live elephant painted to blend in with some gaudy wallpaper. This apparently represents "the big issues some people choose to ignore" - ie pretty much anything from global poverty to Aids. But not, presumably, the fat-arsed, berk-pleasing rubbishness of Banksy. We're all keeping schtum about that one.
Charlie Brooker
Friday September 22, 2006
The Guardian
Here's a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.
Banksy first became famous for his stencilled subversions of pop-culture images; one showed John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in a famous pose from Pulp Fiction, with their guns replaced by bananas. What did it mean? Something to do with the glamourisation of violence, yeah? Never mind. It looked cool. Most importantly, it was accompanied by the name "BANKSY" in huge letters, so everyone knew who'd done it. This, of course, is the real message behind all of Banksy's work, despite any appearances to the contrary.
Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her.
Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff. Wow. In an instant, your worldview changes forever. Your eyes are opened. Staggering away, mind blown, you flick v-signs at a Burger King on the way home. Nice one Banksy! You've shown us the truth, yeah?
As if that wasn't irritating enough, Banksy's vague, pseudo-subversive preaching is often accompanied by a downright embarrassing hardnut swagger. His website is full of advice to other would-be graffiti bores, like: "be aware that going on a mission drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells". Woah, man - the cells!
He goes on to explain that "real villains" think graffiti is pointless - not because he wants you to agree with them, but because he wants you to know he's mates with a few tough-guy criminal types. Coz Banksy's an anarchalist what don't respect no law, innit?
One of his most imbecilic daubings depicts a monkey wearing a sandwich board with "lying to the police is never wrong" written on it. So presumably Ian Huntley was right then, Banksy? You absolute thundering backside.
Recently, our hero's made headlines by sneaking a dummy dressed in Guantánamo rags into Disneyland (once again fearlessly exposing Mickey Mouse's disgusting war criminal past), and defacing several hundred copies of Paris Hilton's new album (I haven't heard her CD, but I'm willing to bet it's far superior to Blur's godawful Think Tank, a useless bumdrizzle of an album, whose artwork was done by Banksy - presumably he spray-painted it on a brick and hurled it through EMI's window, yeah?).
Right now you can see some of Banksy's life-altering acts of genius for yourself at his LA exhibition Barely Legal (yeah? Yeah!), including a live elephant painted to blend in with some gaudy wallpaper. This apparently represents "the big issues some people choose to ignore" - ie pretty much anything from global poverty to Aids. But not, presumably, the fat-arsed, berk-pleasing rubbishness of Banksy. We're all keeping schtum about that one.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Live from the kitchen
I've offically moved into the kitchen of our basment cavern, along with Pyjamas. Pleasingly, my whole bed fits in there. Never had a room mate before but PJs is pretty good. Shame about the regular hammering that starts at 7.30am.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Plotting
I've been trying to come up with a proper crime thriller plot for a few days, amongst trying to salvage records and trainers from the sewage flood (see above.) It's really difficult, and has made me realise how forward thinking the great detective fiction writers are, and how much vision they have. It's brain-hurting to try and think the entire story through.
The picture that looks like the kind of place they find emaciated kidnap victims is the inside of the weird cavern at the end of my room. And, there at the far end, is the sewage drain. Nice huh?
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
The Tape 2
New ending for this...
She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even to go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
Much later, as she sat on the living room sofa in her dressing gown nursing her cup of tea, she felt better. Her husband hadn’t minded at all. He’d smiled and held her and said ‘everyone’s made their mistakes.’ Then as she sat she started to wonder, idly at first, what his mistakes might have been.
She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even to go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
Much later, as she sat on the living room sofa in her dressing gown nursing her cup of tea, she felt better. Her husband hadn’t minded at all. He’d smiled and held her and said ‘everyone’s made their mistakes.’ Then as she sat she started to wonder, idly at first, what his mistakes might have been.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Wiley gets wild
Wiley is sounding more and more animated as 2006 rolls on. He's just posted the main part of his new mixtape up here as a free download, and I'm feeling very grateful indeed. Track six is my initial favourite - no repeated lines, lots of controlled anger and rolling lyrical themes, plus great production.
Bring on volume 2!
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Wallace writes...
As anyone who's read Infinite Jest will know, Dave is a big fan of tennis, and here he describes Federer's mammoth talent in his idiosyncratic, opinion-ridden style. Always exciting to read new articles from him, and nice to see he has good taste in shirts.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Ellis
There are lots of great little audio clips of Bret Easton Ellis talking about last year's 'Lunar Park' on this promo website.
The book is really amazing. It's the first one of his I'd read (having been put off, to my shame, by everyone reading American Psycho as a kid) and his writing is extremely compelling, masterful, funny and artful. The paperback came out recently too.
The book is really amazing. It's the first one of his I'd read (having been put off, to my shame, by everyone reading American Psycho as a kid) and his writing is extremely compelling, masterful, funny and artful. The paperback came out recently too.
Friday, September 01, 2006
The Tape
She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Today
I've been having one of those days where blogging seems like a really self-important and ultimately indulgent pastime, but I think I'll carry on regardless.
According to his publisher, advances of Uncle Tom's new book won't be available to anyone until publication date on December 5th, but they've put me on the list which is double exciting.
Martin Amis' latest attack on humanity comes in the form of a short story entitled The Last Days of Mohammed Atta, and it can be found in full in the Observer Magazine this weekend. I just read an excerpt and it's actually quite good.
I officially need to stop ordering books. I now have at least 5 mouthwatering ones waiting for me; The Rifles - Vollmann (arrived this AM and looks great,) The Human Stain - Roth, Lord of the Barnyard - can't remember the author but it also looks great and will probably be next, A Void - Perec, and Slow Learner - Pynchon.
According to his publisher, advances of Uncle Tom's new book won't be available to anyone until publication date on December 5th, but they've put me on the list which is double exciting.
Martin Amis' latest attack on humanity comes in the form of a short story entitled The Last Days of Mohammed Atta, and it can be found in full in the Observer Magazine this weekend. I just read an excerpt and it's actually quite good.
I officially need to stop ordering books. I now have at least 5 mouthwatering ones waiting for me; The Rifles - Vollmann (arrived this AM and looks great,) The Human Stain - Roth, Lord of the Barnyard - can't remember the author but it also looks great and will probably be next, A Void - Perec, and Slow Learner - Pynchon.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
WWWHUT!?
It's becoming a bit of a slog this night. Saturday was good in terms of exciting performances but wasn't worth the effort financially. I think it really is the last time I'll do grime, excluding Wiley. Turning up 1.5 hours late when you have about 3 fans is just plain dumb, no wonder everyone's pretty sick of the stuff.
Next one is gonna be myself, Space Hail and Luke 'Hot Knives' Morano. Oh god, the silly shoreditch infection that Hold Tight! caught is spreading. Still, it'll be more fun and probably more popular.
Nice email from the badly run venue this AM telling me that September needs a 'real push.' Fuck off.
Next one is gonna be myself, Space Hail and Luke 'Hot Knives' Morano. Oh god, the silly shoreditch infection that Hold Tight! caught is spreading. Still, it'll be more fun and probably more popular.
Nice email from the badly run venue this AM telling me that September needs a 'real push.' Fuck off.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Thorne on Wash On
Good old Thorne soars up the league tables of all round good guys by writing the most accurate piece yet on Will Ashon. Does that make the latter a New Puritan? Nah.
What next? Thorne records live webcast with Uncle Tom from NYC hot tub? If only.
What next? Thorne records live webcast with Uncle Tom from NYC hot tub? If only.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Smoke
It's day three of no cigarettes and going pretty well, although yesterday I was extremely moody and emotional! Last night I had two beers and it felt like my gums were screaming for nicotine. I had the strange, schizophrenic experience of having to force myself away from a cashpoint and the shop in Liverpool St. station on the way home. I managed to get back there and drink lots of water while watching V for Vendatta though, and woke up feeling pretty good.
Tonight is gonna be bad though. Me versus the psychological power of a Friday night? Eeek.
If I do succeed in not smoking til tomorrow AM i'll have hit the magic three day mark, and I may reward myself by buying Vollmann books; The Rifles and The Royal Family (my copy disappeared.)
The main upsetting thing about yesterday is that the copy of Slow Learner that I ordered last week was sent to my dodgy-communal-post home address, and has disappeared. I was fantasising about seeing someone leaving the block with it in their bag and righteously beating them about the head with it.
No fags = weird stuff.
Tonight is gonna be bad though. Me versus the psychological power of a Friday night? Eeek.
If I do succeed in not smoking til tomorrow AM i'll have hit the magic three day mark, and I may reward myself by buying Vollmann books; The Rifles and The Royal Family (my copy disappeared.)
The main upsetting thing about yesterday is that the copy of Slow Learner that I ordered last week was sent to my dodgy-communal-post home address, and has disappeared. I was fantasising about seeing someone leaving the block with it in their bag and righteously beating them about the head with it.
No fags = weird stuff.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Good advice for Chris Hale
Here's Warner on ecstasy use.
take note space boy.
AW: That (the chemical generation) was something invented by an editor called Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the 1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t think you can base a whole literary movement on writing about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers than the writing, there was something egotistical and silly about it, "Look, we go to nightclubs but we are writers," so fucking what. I’m interested in great books not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls, colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar there. No bouncers either, just kangaroos.
Showreel 3
Here's a P51 called Susy which had just started its prop up about 10 feet away. It was, to say the least, windy.
And, perhaps more interestingly, here's a sneak preview of the next Hold Tight! mailout.
This disgusting individual has posted his new song up on his blog, but to stop people visiting the horrors that dwell there unwittingly, here's the link.
And, perhaps more interestingly, here's a sneak preview of the next Hold Tight! mailout.
This disgusting individual has posted his new song up on his blog, but to stop people visiting the horrors that dwell there unwittingly, here's the link.
WWWHUT!?
Scorcher definitely seems to be making some noise at the minute, I just hope the word has spread that he's appearing on Saturday. I didn't get a chance to do much fliering.
Apparently there's a new blog dedicated to campaigning against FWDs no grime policy, and people have been desperate to see Scorcher appear somewhere east. Well, here he is!
Monday, August 21, 2006
Thorne V Vollmann
Fantastic interview over the weekend, here, between William T Vollmann and Matt Thorne. Two of my favourites, as made obvious below. Maybe not as in depth as the previous Vollmann interview, but great to read one of my favourite British writers covering such a great US contemporary.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Thorne
Personally, I really like Thorne. He's ambitous, very English, clever and readable. 8 Minutes Idle is a really disturbing book simply because the average, (well, not too average but...) middle English story it tells is frightening in its disaffected, damaged, desperate way.
Anyway, he likes some other writers, and here's his top 10 books that are from or have had an influence on his 'new puritan' movement.
More please, Matty.
Anyway, he likes some other writers, and here's his top 10 books that are from or have had an influence on his 'new puritan' movement.
More please, Matty.
Grass
Hmm. What to think about Gunter?
Initially I thought he'd just been called up on a conscription, but it seems he did volunteer to fight for the Nazis, although he didn't realise it'd be in the SS. Apparently he was a Nazi sympathiser in his early years, but this revelation has definitely caused a fuss. A few weeks before his memoir is due out? It's got to have been timed to garner ample attention no?
Still, he's got Salman on his side.
Initially I thought he'd just been called up on a conscription, but it seems he did volunteer to fight for the Nazis, although he didn't realise it'd be in the SS. Apparently he was a Nazi sympathiser in his early years, but this revelation has definitely caused a fuss. A few weeks before his memoir is due out? It's got to have been timed to garner ample attention no?
Still, he's got Salman on his side.
Hot bitches
As much as I don't condone the rubbish usually posted on this degenerate blog, it has got some good pics from last night. MORE DOGS!!!
Mitchell
Big On Road
No quite sure what I think about Mitchell. I know that I really enjoyed reading Ghostwritten, and Cloud Atlas was very addictive and clever, but I'm not sure I was left with very much afterwards. Cloud Atlas is almost a set of perfectly conceived pastiches, rather than a bold new voice dazzling with relevant content and exciting form.
It's as if the writing is dressed up as very modern and literary, lots of intersecting narratives and fragments etc, but at heart it's traditional English literature with a central moral message and a nice neat ending.
That said, it's probably just snobbery really. His prose is utterly incredible, rhythmic and deceptively simple; meaning is everywhere. Gotta be a good thing for writing from Britain, even if he is moving back to Japan.
No quite sure what I think about Mitchell. I know that I really enjoyed reading Ghostwritten, and Cloud Atlas was very addictive and clever, but I'm not sure I was left with very much afterwards. Cloud Atlas is almost a set of perfectly conceived pastiches, rather than a bold new voice dazzling with relevant content and exciting form.
It's as if the writing is dressed up as very modern and literary, lots of intersecting narratives and fragments etc, but at heart it's traditional English literature with a central moral message and a nice neat ending.
That said, it's probably just snobbery really. His prose is utterly incredible, rhythmic and deceptively simple; meaning is everywhere. Gotta be a good thing for writing from Britain, even if he is moving back to Japan.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
£25 well spent
The heat is rising. Here's a big piece in the Independent from today, all about Uncle Tom. it reprints his statement re. the new book in full. It really is an event. I'm off to try and find a copy of 'Slow Learner,' Amazon never has it but the excellent www.abebooks.co.uk might well.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Wallace
David Foster Wallace doesn't do interviews anymore, but he's given some great ones in his day. Here he is talking to good ol' Larry McCaffery and getting annoyed with the constant lit. theory terms the latter is so fond of. He's an impassioned man, that's for sure.
Here's an excerpt:
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's a cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house.
It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means "we're" going to have to be the parents.
Here's an excerpt:
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's a cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house.
It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means "we're" going to have to be the parents.
Legions
Don't forget about Hold Tight! tomorrow night at The Legion in Old Steet. Myself and DJ Sace Hail will be, as usual, seamlessly melding music we like into music that makes girls dance on tables. 8.30 - midnight, don't miss.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Wash On
Here's a piece I wrote for Flux on Will Ashon. His debut book is here, and it does for England what the best Americans to for the U.S.A. Buy it here
---
What do you do when you've already made a name for yourself as the country's foremost hip-hop journalist, then set up one of the genre's most artistically worthwhile record labels? Well, in Will Ashon's case, you write a novel, and one that has nothing to do with hip-hop.
'Clear Water' is a darkly comic critique of Britain, breaking the national convention of class literature and treating the collision of it's central characters in the ambitious, far-ranging manner of the best American writers. Flux caught up with Will near Big Dada's south London HQ.
'I try not to introduce myself at all, I'm not very good at small talk, or big talk either,' he laughs when asked about his schizophrenic career paths. 'My wife gets very annoyed with me because she thinks it's rude, but I was brought up to think it was immodest and wrong to talk about yourself, very un-English!' And the book's introduction? 'It's a book about contemporary England, a bleak but funny book I hope. It's the Da Vinci code of literary fiction!' Queue another laugh. 'If the person was still interested, I'd tell 'em a bit about the characters.' And what characters they are. A lifestyle journalist starting to seriously doubt the impact of his career, a burnt out, addict cricket player, a wartime temptress and a would-be messiah, all of whose lives connect in a dramatic, resonating conclusion.
Having written one novel in the past ("I was into my French avant-garde writers, but I guess there wasn't much room for the avant-garde in the mid 90's") hip-hop writing, even 'the really bad reviews' took up most of the subsequent creative energy. A sense of time running out provided 'Clear Water's' genesis, and it was time, not motivation, that proved the problem. 'The only time I could find was on the tube.' If the story wasn't interesting enough already, it turns out the entire novel was written on a PDA to and from the office!
The most exciting thing about 'Clear Water' is that it's every bit as encompassing and epic as a Don Delillo, or Pynchon novel, but is uniquely concerned with Englishness. 'It's what I know about to some extent, and I didn't want to write the middle-class campus novel or a story about the working class, I wanted it to include those things but not be limited by them.' 'Clear Water' combines all these ambitions, and achieves them in an entirely, extremely compelling book.
---
What do you do when you've already made a name for yourself as the country's foremost hip-hop journalist, then set up one of the genre's most artistically worthwhile record labels? Well, in Will Ashon's case, you write a novel, and one that has nothing to do with hip-hop.
'Clear Water' is a darkly comic critique of Britain, breaking the national convention of class literature and treating the collision of it's central characters in the ambitious, far-ranging manner of the best American writers. Flux caught up with Will near Big Dada's south London HQ.
'I try not to introduce myself at all, I'm not very good at small talk, or big talk either,' he laughs when asked about his schizophrenic career paths. 'My wife gets very annoyed with me because she thinks it's rude, but I was brought up to think it was immodest and wrong to talk about yourself, very un-English!' And the book's introduction? 'It's a book about contemporary England, a bleak but funny book I hope. It's the Da Vinci code of literary fiction!' Queue another laugh. 'If the person was still interested, I'd tell 'em a bit about the characters.' And what characters they are. A lifestyle journalist starting to seriously doubt the impact of his career, a burnt out, addict cricket player, a wartime temptress and a would-be messiah, all of whose lives connect in a dramatic, resonating conclusion.
Having written one novel in the past ("I was into my French avant-garde writers, but I guess there wasn't much room for the avant-garde in the mid 90's") hip-hop writing, even 'the really bad reviews' took up most of the subsequent creative energy. A sense of time running out provided 'Clear Water's' genesis, and it was time, not motivation, that proved the problem. 'The only time I could find was on the tube.' If the story wasn't interesting enough already, it turns out the entire novel was written on a PDA to and from the office!
The most exciting thing about 'Clear Water' is that it's every bit as encompassing and epic as a Don Delillo, or Pynchon novel, but is uniquely concerned with Englishness. 'It's what I know about to some extent, and I didn't want to write the middle-class campus novel or a story about the working class, I wanted it to include those things but not be limited by them.' 'Clear Water' combines all these ambitions, and achieves them in an entirely, extremely compelling book.
At the Computer Class
At the facility’s computer class, one of the projects we had to work on one morning was ‘computer personality.’ Each machine was set to run a program which asked us to write the warnings and messages and announcements which pop up on the screen when the user needs to know something. The machine asked me to write a message telling the user to plug the machine into the wall when the batteries were low. ‘WARNING,’ I wrote, ‘Low battery. Please connect machine to mains immediately!’
Lucy, who sat to my right, was giggling at her screen, which made me cringe. She had her hair in bunches, which trembled when she laughed.
The machine asked me to make up a message for when the program you were trying to run might not be very safe.
‘STOP!’ I put, ‘check for virus before loading!’
The teacher was a fat man with a bald patch in the middle of the back of his head. The hair was brushed neatly around it. He wore a red woollen jumper with black bits, and sandals. I was suspicious of him because he was always so friendly.
The computer asked me what the pop-up box should say when a new message had arrived. I wrote ‘You have a new message!’
Lucy was typing a lot. I sneaked a look at her the way I can sometimes do without someone noticing. She has a roll of her stomach that sits over her jeans. She wears too bright clothes, and when I looked really close, I saw she had flaky skin around her mouth.
The program said to write something for when you were accidentally going to close a window without saving your work.
‘STOP! Save before closing!’ I said. I was pleased with this one.
Lucy dressed like she was a little girl, when she was at least thirty, and it made me feel angry that she was so stupid. I didn’t believe her when she giggled.
The computer asked me to write the message for when you have to type in your password. I wrote ‘KILL LUCY.’ I felt much better.
When we had written a few more messages, the teacher walked around talking to people and they all started moving chairs around and fussing which was noisy and made me anxious. He came over to me and talked to me and Lucy. He said ‘Ok you two, swap machines. Time to discover each other's personalities!’
I got up and walked out without saying anything. I never went back to computer classes.
Lucy, who sat to my right, was giggling at her screen, which made me cringe. She had her hair in bunches, which trembled when she laughed.
The machine asked me to make up a message for when the program you were trying to run might not be very safe.
‘STOP!’ I put, ‘check for virus before loading!’
The teacher was a fat man with a bald patch in the middle of the back of his head. The hair was brushed neatly around it. He wore a red woollen jumper with black bits, and sandals. I was suspicious of him because he was always so friendly.
The computer asked me what the pop-up box should say when a new message had arrived. I wrote ‘You have a new message!’
Lucy was typing a lot. I sneaked a look at her the way I can sometimes do without someone noticing. She has a roll of her stomach that sits over her jeans. She wears too bright clothes, and when I looked really close, I saw she had flaky skin around her mouth.
The program said to write something for when you were accidentally going to close a window without saving your work.
‘STOP! Save before closing!’ I said. I was pleased with this one.
Lucy dressed like she was a little girl, when she was at least thirty, and it made me feel angry that she was so stupid. I didn’t believe her when she giggled.
The computer asked me to write the message for when you have to type in your password. I wrote ‘KILL LUCY.’ I felt much better.
When we had written a few more messages, the teacher walked around talking to people and they all started moving chairs around and fussing which was noisy and made me anxious. He came over to me and talked to me and Lucy. He said ‘Ok you two, swap machines. Time to discover each other's personalities!’
I got up and walked out without saying anything. I never went back to computer classes.
Everybody loves a list...
especially when it's this good.
Lots I've read but loads I haven't and want to. Pale Fire is high on the list. Hogg sounds like an interesting prospect too. I read some extracts online and it read like hardcore gay snuff porn. But better, obviously.
Anyway, it's here
and here's an improvised top 20 from me, self-important as i am. Definitely not in order of preference.
1. Infinite Jest - david foster wallace
2. Life A User's Manual - Georges Perec
3. Underworld - Don Delillo
4. Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
5. Alan Warner - the man who walks
6. Phillip K Dick - a scanner darkly
7. Phillip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre
8. Jonathan Letham - as she climbed across the table
9. Paul Auster - New York Trilogy
10. William T Vollman - The Royal Family
11. Alan Warner - these demented lands
12. Hemingway - The Sun also Rises
13. Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man
14. Thomas Pynchon - V
15. Italo Calvino - if on a winter's night a traveller' - this should
actually be in the top 5 it's amazing
16. Faulkner - the sound and the fury
17. Melville - Moby Dick
18. Will Ashon - clear water - I reckon it really is actually!
19. Orwell - 1984 - obvious but it was amazing and it was the first and last
book that made me cry. What a bitch.
20. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
gosh. they're almost all yanks.
Lots I've read but loads I haven't and want to. Pale Fire is high on the list. Hogg sounds like an interesting prospect too. I read some extracts online and it read like hardcore gay snuff porn. But better, obviously.
Anyway, it's here
and here's an improvised top 20 from me, self-important as i am. Definitely not in order of preference.
1. Infinite Jest - david foster wallace
2. Life A User's Manual - Georges Perec
3. Underworld - Don Delillo
4. Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
5. Alan Warner - the man who walks
6. Phillip K Dick - a scanner darkly
7. Phillip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre
8. Jonathan Letham - as she climbed across the table
9. Paul Auster - New York Trilogy
10. William T Vollman - The Royal Family
11. Alan Warner - these demented lands
12. Hemingway - The Sun also Rises
13. Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man
14. Thomas Pynchon - V
15. Italo Calvino - if on a winter's night a traveller' - this should
actually be in the top 5 it's amazing
16. Faulkner - the sound and the fury
17. Melville - Moby Dick
18. Will Ashon - clear water - I reckon it really is actually!
19. Orwell - 1984 - obvious but it was amazing and it was the first and last
book that made me cry. What a bitch.
20. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
gosh. they're almost all yanks.
Warner
Here's a piece i just wrote for Blowback on Alan Warner. Buy his new book here
it's incredible, a stunning departure from The Port that's freed him up to let loose in a whole new setting. As usual, it's eerily convincing.
-----
Allan Warner should need little introduction. His debut novel about the existential journey of a vivid, unforgettable young woman, ‘Morvern Callar,’ stunned readers on it’s publication in 1997. Quickly followed by ‘These Demented Lands,’ an astonishing amalgamation of mythology with Scottish grit, Morvern found herself being played by Samantha Morton in a feature film, and Warner went on to create equally vital characters in the school girls of ‘The Sopranos’ and the intellectual, crazed nephew of ‘The Man Who Walks.’ It might be a surprise then, to learn that most of the time he introduces himself as ‘someone who works in computers.’
‘Morvern Callar’ was a hopeless title for taxi drivers,’ he laughs, comically detailing some of the mispronunciations he’s encountered. ‘When you say, “ooh, I’m a writer,” it’s embarrassing y’know?’ But a writer he is, his fifth novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ having just been published. His introduction to the book? ‘It’s literary stuff, don’t bother with it!’ he quips. The cover of the novel shows a gleaming pool, with the novel’s talismanic model aeroplane, the DC-8 Stretch Series, afloat within it. ‘You can’t say anymore, “I want some guys on a beach, playing pool on a table that’s submerged in the water” anymore. The publishers say “Oh fuck off, we spent the budget on Salman’s last novel. They shot the swimming pool in LA!’ he says, ‘they were going on about the light.’ It’s a light hearted, funny, conversational style that will continue throughout our interview, revealing Warner to be as compelling to talk to as to read.
His thoughts on the book’s reception reveal a philosophical side that forms another trait, coming with the first of many enthusiastic references to other writers. ‘Ken Kesey once said about reviews, and this allows me to sleep at night, that “the bad stuff still hurts, and the good stuff doesn’t teach me anything.” You only learn things from other writer’s books.’ The current state of literary criticism is definitely a concern. ‘It’s very hard for literary fiction these days, the bottom feeders have been let loose. I call ‘em the town councillors of literature, “ooh, I don’t like him because his lawn has grown too long.’ Again, he comically draws out his vowels in a lilting fashion that has us both laughing out loud. It’s not always a funny though. ‘The most wonderful books can get destroyed, for example Andrew O’Hagan’s just written a storming new novel, and I just hope it gets the respect it deserves. My heart goes out to the new writers.’
‘The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven’ is a departure for Warner in more ways than one. It centres around his first character, Manolo Follana, to come from the middle classes, but more noticeably, it’s his first book to be set outside of the Scottish port of his previous four. As Follana’s name suggests, this is a novel set in Spain. ‘I suppose in some ways the Port did feel limiting. I think any artist is trying to push into new territory, if you’ve got any balls I guess. I thought it’d be interesting to write about a character who has power and economic security, but who still suffers from the same existential problems that schoolgirls do in the sopranos.’
Like Morvern or the nephew, Manolo feels extremely real and vividly imagined, and it’s the characters that Warner thinks up initially, before their meaning. ‘I think the characters and their situation come first, then it very much happens on the page. You can have has many ideas as you want but you work through them in writing. I abort novels all the time, and sometimes I use bits that didn’t fit in one book in a different book.’ These aborted novels come when a dramatic idea doesn’t prove practical in the actual writing. ‘If you decide to write a novel called ‘Climbing Everest,’ and it’s about a husband and wife who decide to climb Everest and work out their marital problems. You think “wow, what an exciting and dramatic idea.” Then you find out your novel is actually called ‘two people talking in a tent.’ You couldn’t talk on a cliff face, there’d be these huge tracts of silence!’
Warner pinpoints his passion for the dramatic back to extensive reading of the modernist icon Samuel Beckett. ‘I think because of him, I have these really dramatic ideas, but when I get to the page it becomes slow and meditative.’ He asks if I’m familiar with the infamous trilogy, which unfortunately I’m not. ‘People think he’s very intellectual, but he’s so fucking funny y’know? There’s a bit where Mallone is freezing, so he wraps himself in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, which he says are “excellent for concealing the pungency of his farts.” It’s fantastic stuff.’
Whilst Spain has featured as a promised land in previous novels, a bright counterpoint to the cold darkness of The Port, I wonder why Warner decided to set an entire novel there. ‘I have no pretensions of being an Espanicist, the Spain I know is very much one of the pint and the full English breakfast. Beach Spain.’ There is a rather close connection however. ‘My wife is from down here and grew up here, so that’s a big influence, she’s my muse. A lot of the stuff from the Sopranos is from her!’ Anyone familiar with that book will know that its detailing of the lives of a group of energetic, rowdy, tender teenage girls is astoundingly rendered.
‘I think what I try to do is put a character into a situation that’s very unfamiliar to me. I write what I don’t know, try to make it difficult for myself. People just assume you’re an expert.’ That said, the psychology of the provincial, proud Manolo seems highly convincing. ‘I watch a lot, I’m one of those creepy guys that sits in cafes watching,’ he laughs warmly, ‘so I guess that’s where that comes from. Manolo spends a lot of time doing that too.’
Perhaps the main trait of an Alan Warner novel, one which is difficult to express simply, is the odd mixture of darkness and light, or purposeful, keenly felt intellectualism opposed to brutal lack of thought. ‘I guess personally there’s a struggle for identity in a sense. I’ve always been a very big reader, but I would never call myself a down the line intellectual, although some of my friends see me as one. I’m not quite sure where I stand. But I think it’s a good thing for a writer to live on the margins, I’m not sure an Oxford degree in critical theory is a perfect thing for a novelist. It’s too much information, you know?’
‘I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable about books that are too intellectual, but at the same time I’m very uncomfortable with things that are dumbed down. For example I don’t like genre fiction. I know that’s shooting myself in the foot and sounding like a terrible snob, but I wonder what the motivation of the writers must be. A genre is like tying both hands behind your back.’ But this isn’t to say that linguistic gentility is something he approves of. ‘I think Scottish writers of the last ten to twenty years have been questioning the power structures of English literature, that idea that all great writing should be like Henry James. I think James’ prose is terrible, and I believe he spoke the same way he wrote, so I’m glad I never had a conversation with him! That idea that ‘fuck you’ can not be in a work of great art, I’ve always been suspicious of that.’
This leads to a meditative discussion on the nature of language itself. ‘Language controls everything, but language has great inadequacies. I’m trying to question the medium through which the novel is transmitted. It’s true in life as well, the feelings we have are never encapsulated perfectly linguistically. There’s a world within us that’s none linguistic; ‘I am in love, I feel fear, I feel disgust,’ whatever it is we wish to discuss, there’s always an element of doubt, but through the language you’re trying to reach some kind of truth of the human condition.’
Warner doesn’t re-read his books, and his warmest enthusiasm is reserved for the discussion of other writers’ work, be it the short stories of James Kelman, the wonderful, overlooked novels of the German W.G Sebald, the philosophical realism of John King’s ‘Football Factory,’ the youthful British talent of Gwendolen Riley, even the ex-Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock’s modernist, mystical novels. And of course, he’s interested to know my favourites, having read David Foster Wallace and Italo Calvino. When he hears I’m reading Phillip Roth, he recommends ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ ‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about wanking that becomes tragic!’ His friend Michael Ondaatje is also high on the list, the crystalline prose of ‘In The Skin of a Lion’ in particular. Like Warner, he writes and removes huge tracts in his novels, reducing what remains to something of enormous power.
So many books and so little time. ‘There’s so much art out there, there’s not enough time to absorb it all. There’s something quite inhuman about that,’ muses Warner. ‘As Follana says, “there wasn’t enough time in a human life to read all of great literature. What a swindle.’ Luckily, there’s plenty of time to read this best of British novelists, time very well spent indeed.
it's incredible, a stunning departure from The Port that's freed him up to let loose in a whole new setting. As usual, it's eerily convincing.
-----
Allan Warner should need little introduction. His debut novel about the existential journey of a vivid, unforgettable young woman, ‘Morvern Callar,’ stunned readers on it’s publication in 1997. Quickly followed by ‘These Demented Lands,’ an astonishing amalgamation of mythology with Scottish grit, Morvern found herself being played by Samantha Morton in a feature film, and Warner went on to create equally vital characters in the school girls of ‘The Sopranos’ and the intellectual, crazed nephew of ‘The Man Who Walks.’ It might be a surprise then, to learn that most of the time he introduces himself as ‘someone who works in computers.’
‘Morvern Callar’ was a hopeless title for taxi drivers,’ he laughs, comically detailing some of the mispronunciations he’s encountered. ‘When you say, “ooh, I’m a writer,” it’s embarrassing y’know?’ But a writer he is, his fifth novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ having just been published. His introduction to the book? ‘It’s literary stuff, don’t bother with it!’ he quips. The cover of the novel shows a gleaming pool, with the novel’s talismanic model aeroplane, the DC-8 Stretch Series, afloat within it. ‘You can’t say anymore, “I want some guys on a beach, playing pool on a table that’s submerged in the water” anymore. The publishers say “Oh fuck off, we spent the budget on Salman’s last novel. They shot the swimming pool in LA!’ he says, ‘they were going on about the light.’ It’s a light hearted, funny, conversational style that will continue throughout our interview, revealing Warner to be as compelling to talk to as to read.
His thoughts on the book’s reception reveal a philosophical side that forms another trait, coming with the first of many enthusiastic references to other writers. ‘Ken Kesey once said about reviews, and this allows me to sleep at night, that “the bad stuff still hurts, and the good stuff doesn’t teach me anything.” You only learn things from other writer’s books.’ The current state of literary criticism is definitely a concern. ‘It’s very hard for literary fiction these days, the bottom feeders have been let loose. I call ‘em the town councillors of literature, “ooh, I don’t like him because his lawn has grown too long.’ Again, he comically draws out his vowels in a lilting fashion that has us both laughing out loud. It’s not always a funny though. ‘The most wonderful books can get destroyed, for example Andrew O’Hagan’s just written a storming new novel, and I just hope it gets the respect it deserves. My heart goes out to the new writers.’
‘The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven’ is a departure for Warner in more ways than one. It centres around his first character, Manolo Follana, to come from the middle classes, but more noticeably, it’s his first book to be set outside of the Scottish port of his previous four. As Follana’s name suggests, this is a novel set in Spain. ‘I suppose in some ways the Port did feel limiting. I think any artist is trying to push into new territory, if you’ve got any balls I guess. I thought it’d be interesting to write about a character who has power and economic security, but who still suffers from the same existential problems that schoolgirls do in the sopranos.’
Like Morvern or the nephew, Manolo feels extremely real and vividly imagined, and it’s the characters that Warner thinks up initially, before their meaning. ‘I think the characters and their situation come first, then it very much happens on the page. You can have has many ideas as you want but you work through them in writing. I abort novels all the time, and sometimes I use bits that didn’t fit in one book in a different book.’ These aborted novels come when a dramatic idea doesn’t prove practical in the actual writing. ‘If you decide to write a novel called ‘Climbing Everest,’ and it’s about a husband and wife who decide to climb Everest and work out their marital problems. You think “wow, what an exciting and dramatic idea.” Then you find out your novel is actually called ‘two people talking in a tent.’ You couldn’t talk on a cliff face, there’d be these huge tracts of silence!’
Warner pinpoints his passion for the dramatic back to extensive reading of the modernist icon Samuel Beckett. ‘I think because of him, I have these really dramatic ideas, but when I get to the page it becomes slow and meditative.’ He asks if I’m familiar with the infamous trilogy, which unfortunately I’m not. ‘People think he’s very intellectual, but he’s so fucking funny y’know? There’s a bit where Mallone is freezing, so he wraps himself in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, which he says are “excellent for concealing the pungency of his farts.” It’s fantastic stuff.’
Whilst Spain has featured as a promised land in previous novels, a bright counterpoint to the cold darkness of The Port, I wonder why Warner decided to set an entire novel there. ‘I have no pretensions of being an Espanicist, the Spain I know is very much one of the pint and the full English breakfast. Beach Spain.’ There is a rather close connection however. ‘My wife is from down here and grew up here, so that’s a big influence, she’s my muse. A lot of the stuff from the Sopranos is from her!’ Anyone familiar with that book will know that its detailing of the lives of a group of energetic, rowdy, tender teenage girls is astoundingly rendered.
‘I think what I try to do is put a character into a situation that’s very unfamiliar to me. I write what I don’t know, try to make it difficult for myself. People just assume you’re an expert.’ That said, the psychology of the provincial, proud Manolo seems highly convincing. ‘I watch a lot, I’m one of those creepy guys that sits in cafes watching,’ he laughs warmly, ‘so I guess that’s where that comes from. Manolo spends a lot of time doing that too.’
Perhaps the main trait of an Alan Warner novel, one which is difficult to express simply, is the odd mixture of darkness and light, or purposeful, keenly felt intellectualism opposed to brutal lack of thought. ‘I guess personally there’s a struggle for identity in a sense. I’ve always been a very big reader, but I would never call myself a down the line intellectual, although some of my friends see me as one. I’m not quite sure where I stand. But I think it’s a good thing for a writer to live on the margins, I’m not sure an Oxford degree in critical theory is a perfect thing for a novelist. It’s too much information, you know?’
‘I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable about books that are too intellectual, but at the same time I’m very uncomfortable with things that are dumbed down. For example I don’t like genre fiction. I know that’s shooting myself in the foot and sounding like a terrible snob, but I wonder what the motivation of the writers must be. A genre is like tying both hands behind your back.’ But this isn’t to say that linguistic gentility is something he approves of. ‘I think Scottish writers of the last ten to twenty years have been questioning the power structures of English literature, that idea that all great writing should be like Henry James. I think James’ prose is terrible, and I believe he spoke the same way he wrote, so I’m glad I never had a conversation with him! That idea that ‘fuck you’ can not be in a work of great art, I’ve always been suspicious of that.’
This leads to a meditative discussion on the nature of language itself. ‘Language controls everything, but language has great inadequacies. I’m trying to question the medium through which the novel is transmitted. It’s true in life as well, the feelings we have are never encapsulated perfectly linguistically. There’s a world within us that’s none linguistic; ‘I am in love, I feel fear, I feel disgust,’ whatever it is we wish to discuss, there’s always an element of doubt, but through the language you’re trying to reach some kind of truth of the human condition.’
Warner doesn’t re-read his books, and his warmest enthusiasm is reserved for the discussion of other writers’ work, be it the short stories of James Kelman, the wonderful, overlooked novels of the German W.G Sebald, the philosophical realism of John King’s ‘Football Factory,’ the youthful British talent of Gwendolen Riley, even the ex-Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock’s modernist, mystical novels. And of course, he’s interested to know my favourites, having read David Foster Wallace and Italo Calvino. When he hears I’m reading Phillip Roth, he recommends ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ ‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about wanking that becomes tragic!’ His friend Michael Ondaatje is also high on the list, the crystalline prose of ‘In The Skin of a Lion’ in particular. Like Warner, he writes and removes huge tracts in his novels, reducing what remains to something of enormous power.
So many books and so little time. ‘There’s so much art out there, there’s not enough time to absorb it all. There’s something quite inhuman about that,’ muses Warner. ‘As Follana says, “there wasn’t enough time in a human life to read all of great literature. What a swindle.’ Luckily, there’s plenty of time to read this best of British novelists, time very well spent indeed.
hello
Gosh, a blog. I've set this up to record my scribbles online and in one place. Unless you're interested in literary fiction and, occasionally, music no-one likes, you probably won't like it, but it's here all the same.
Jamie
Jamie
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