Horrid world
News stories illustrating the imbecility and unfairness of humanity are so commonplace as to be almost banal yet on a regular basis you come across stories that make you go ‘Bah! Horrid world! I want to get off this planet.’
This week two stories came around within about 24 hours of each other, which on their own might have been depressing enough, but coming together gave me a really big bah! moment.
The first was that a poll in the US suggested that the most trusted news source in the US was Fox (read). The second, the very next day, was that Wikileaks has gone offline for lack of funds (read).
Fox News is either a paradigm of right thinking, or if you don’t actually live under a rock, it is the paradigm of the thinking of the right — anthrax to the intellect, purveyors of fine propaganda on behalf of the radioactively plutocratic. It is also by any objective standard a behemoth of the media, owned by News International, the second biggest media conglomerate in the world, prop. one Rupert Murdoch.
The non-behemothian Wikileaks is, in its own words, “a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public,” and which publishes leaked documents from governments, corporations and religious organizations, documents the authors would prefer kept from public sight.
In other words, it is probably the bane of many of the people R. Murdoch has tiffin with.
But why am I explaining who Wikileaks are when you might already know, or when you could read a more coherent account here on Wikipedia?
The point is, while Fox, the fountain of untruth, goes from strength to strength, Wikileaks, exploder of porkie pies, is in danger of going offline for lack of money.
Just another tale of humdrum iniquity — well, what do you expect? Wikileaks should carry advertising and give up its independence from outside interests, let the free market control the flow of information.
Well, I’ve put my credit card where my blog post is and contributed to Wikileaks fundraising drive and I mention this story because there may be more people out there who would like to exclaim ‘Bah, horrid world!’ with me and then try to make a small difference.
Would you like relish with that court ruling?
A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. (Read here.) I love stories like this that illustrate the petty mindedness, rule obsession and control freakery of super-sized corporations.“We have found out … that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”
(At the end of the linked story, sense was enforced by a court that ruled that McDs were wrong to fire the employee and awarded damages against the company.)
Whither Weed?
Another abandoned Weed cover design
Weed is a catchy little name but, despite the genesis of the story (see last post) the story is not about dope. No, really.
There was a moment when the writing was done and I was thinking about putting it out there in the big wide world that I had an attack of cynicism in which I thought the name with its puffy associations might be a good marketing gimmick. I slap myself on the wrist for the thought.
Weed is named Weed because that’s the name it needs. It is not for or about pot heads— stoner stuff is just boring. I am bothered that I might be seen to be championing drugs. I am happy to champion drugs, but will do so on another occasion in another way. Possibly the easy associations with the name might put off certain people from reading the thing.
The story is about so much else that is far dearer to me than puff.
Back in the day, a weed was a person who was considered physically weak and who probably had poor social skills (probably as a result of being considered by others to be physically weak — how we love the Aryan!). These days, a weed might be called a nerd. A weed is actually a person who merely has different interests and priorities to the socially fragile and intellectually impaired cool kids and jockstrap brigade. There is no need for the weed-nerd to be like everyone else and it is very often the nerdy kids who go on to create cool stuff like spaceships and the internet. In the garden, a weed is something that does not fit in, that gardeners will pull up and throw away. A weed hasn’t been planted, chosen or cultivated — it is outside the control regime so bin it. However, weeds are tenacious things. You can’t get rid of them: they just grow back and multiply and if you take your eye off them for a minute they take over the whole garden. Weeds are an image of resistance. And then there is the kind of weed that you can smoke, which has its own associations of resistance to order (both mental and social).
Weed (the story) from its inception was more of a gesture or an impulse than a deliberate or reasoned thought. It came to be a free-ranging satire of this environment of manufactured pleasures, mass-produced satisfactions, pre-fabricated jobs, assigned lifestyles, and prescribed thoughts and emotions.
It has always seemed to me that getting on, getting ahead, in this environment requires a massive act of self-abnegation, one that neither Robert D Weed nor I are capable of or willing to make. To survive or progress in this made world, you have to adapt your entire identity. It’s not so much a case of playing the part as being the part. You have to give up your self. And it scares and repels me. We are trained into obedience and banality by school, colleges, the media, our employers (and eventually our own fears of exclusion). So, one of the big themes of Weed is identity. And being is another. I could now go into Marxian notions of species being but we’ll be here till the cows come home if I do. Anyway, the darn thing is a silly little comedic two-fingers at the world, so who wants to hear about Big Ideas?
So there you go. It’s not about pot. I’m off to tend the grow lamps.
Music: Craig Padilla and Zero Ohms
Mood: I wouldn’t mind one, thanks.
Reading: Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque — READ IT IF YOU HAVEN’T!
Whence Weed?
A very obvious first draft for the cover of Weed — abandoned. Design by Chris Page
Funnily enough, I was stoned out of my mind when the idea for the Weed story began to inhabit me.
When I say I was stoned, I mean I was quite profoundly stoned. I was nearly as stoned as the character Robert D Weed in the opening scenes of the story. Or I should say Weed is as stoned in the story as I was that night, though he is doing better than me, having consumed some very magic puff.
I have to be careful what I say about where in the world I was on this night because some authorities are a bit funny about people relaxing in ways that are not officially prescribed. Let’s just say this was long time ago in a galaxy that was, like, far, far out, man.
I have never had much physical tolerance for the stuff and this was my first smoke in a few years so the pot really did its job on me. I had been tense and uptight for quite some time and I felt myself relax like I hadn’t I ever relaxed before. See the description of Weed’s deeply comfortable state in the story for just how I felt that night — and just like Weed, I was in a flat, high up in a concrete block overlooking a very modern city with a brutally jagged topography. Just as in the story, there were police sirens and there was an elevated railway and an elevated motorway zoomed by the windows of my flat.
So, I smoked, and let go and sprawled on my living room table. I don’t think I had the rigidity to support myself on my elbows. It was like this that the main images of the story came to me and I wanted to write notes, I wanted to get it down to capture the mood but I was incapable of holding a pen or of making sentences. The next day all I had was a page of notepaper covered in squiggles and zigzags and cartoon faces whose eyes and ears and mouth and nose had all come adrift and were floating off in different directions. But I had achieved one legible phrase and here it is: “My umbrageous little sausage tree.” And that phrase, used twice in the final draft of the story, was enough for me to recapture the feelings of the night before and that was the core of Weed, the novel.
I didn’t sit down to write a novel. I was still waiting for the right idea to come along, one I could really throw myself at and in those days I was writing short stories to fill in time. (The Freebie came about in the same period.) I thought Weed was going to be a facetious throwaway short story, a quick two fingers at the world — perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 words when finished. However, appropriate to its name it went on growing and growing and growing. a few years later when I actually bought a computer and set to typing up what I had so far, I realized that I had 20,000 words and at that point I was about a quarter of the way through the story. It was only then that I realized that I had a novel on my hands and set to finishing it properly. The previous few years of desultory occasional scribbling on the story became a single-minded rush to get it all down.
I was so happy the night I realized Weed was a growing novel, I drank a couple litres of sake and played all my blur albums at full volume right through until about 3 or 4am, and kept the neighbours awake, as I discovered the next day.
From then on, I wrote on the train on the way to work, I scribbled in my lunch breaks, I bashed away at it days off and weekends. There were times I wrote standing on crowded trains just about resting my notebook on the back of the person in front of me. Despite this push, it still took an age to finish. Don’t ask me how long, I really don’t remember (these days, and with this dependence on red wine, time just sort of mooshes up into a homogenized and grey blob). It took a couple more years, I think, and then I continued editing while I was looking for an agent or a publisher. It seemed endless, no matter how much I wrote. But it was fun and the weed eventually flowered. Will it sow seeds?
So I suppose this is a moral tale: don’t muck around with soft drugs because they may lead to harder things, such as completed novels.
Why your boss is incompetent — the scientific explanation
This article possibly explains why someone ever thought we needed scientists to come up with the conclusions in this article.
Waterworld planet is more Earth-like than any discovered before
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427394.000-alien-planet-could-be-ultimate-water-world.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld-planet-earth-life
With a tachyon drive such as the one Weed is building, we could be there in no time at all.
The Freebie
The Freebie
The Freebie is the first story in the collection Shorts and is my first published-and-paid-for piece of fiction. It is about Billy Freeb, a wannabe musician, getting his shot at his moment of fame.
The story came to me one idle day in the early 1990s while I was washing dishes. I had been reading the NME (or New Musical Express for you non-musical types) and in particular an interview with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins was on my mind. I don’t remember what it was about Corgan’s interview — perhaps the earnestness and the subtly codified postures and language of ego — but it struck me then that the interviews and the articles in the music press might be the real objective of making music, not the tunes; that you wrote the songs and did the gigs in order to get the interviews, and that was what it was all about.
If I probe this thought it turns out to be a pretty unoriginal comment on celebrity and fame, but happily I didn’t pick at it. So my thinking took the next pretentious step and I sat down to write a dour little story about conceptual art that would have a po-faced and utterly dull interview at its heart, an interview with people who would no doubt be wearing black turtle neck sweaters and who may have been smoking Gitanes.
However, when I got down to it, the first image that came to mind was the hero Billy’s lopsided little squat in Stoke Newington (a diverse but sort of gentrified part of north London for you non-Stokey folk), and of him waiting by the phone for fame to come to him rather than going out to find it — and the story went off on its own way from there, and jolly lucky too, because the original I had in mind would have been unbearably dull.
The London I squatted during the eighties was full of musical wannabes and conceptual dilettantes and I was probably both, so there was plenty of material to draw on. And that was the age of the yuppie and the stock market crash of 1987; Thatcher, Reagan, the creed of Monetarism and I knew plenty of people in the money world too. From popular music it is only a short step to consumerism and facile disposable products, vapid branding, artificial value and stock markets and the rest of it, and from there in my imagination to the non-product, a purely notional commodity that carries whatever value we want to move around at any moment.
Eh? I thought this was a story about musical wannabes. Well, yes it is, but part of the fun for me in writing The Freebie was discovering that with the odd well-placed word or sentence you can make a story look beyond its own world; you can bring in whole extra dimensions of association and meaning with very little effort.
I have always been curious about whether readers have picked up on these associations. No one has ever made any comments. For me, the reader of The Freebie is invited to draw a connection between Billy’s musical compositions through all the real-world products of dubious use or social value (pretty well everything in the shops) right to internationally traded stocks and shares. See the almost off-hand remark about (Billy’s pal) Lucien Savage’s trade: the stocks he traded are “his cathode blips, his abstracts, his non-products; like an air traffic controller trading radar contacts.” Yes, and that little parenthetical remark in the story opens a window on how we produce, trade and consume under advanced capitalism.
I also tried to reinforce this idea with the motif of ‘non-’, which pops up all over. For example, “Billy […] laboriously explained that the cat he did not have had mistaken the big dog-eared memo pad on which he had not written the name and address of the place they were to meet for the big dog-eared Persian that had never lived next door — on which Billy’s cat would have certainly had a crush had they both existed …” (I’m also chuffed that I managed to use the descriptor ‘dog-eared’ twice in a sentence about cats.)
And then there is the name of the story, which gives Billy his family name: something for nothing — like Billy’s musical ambitions, like non-products, like the stock market. Notice that Billy has not acquired anything he has: the journalist calls him, not the other way round; his parents got his squat for him; he looks forward to a free lunch and free booze, and so on.
The Freebie was published in The London Magazine in July 2002, the second issue of its re-launch that year. The London Magazine (TLM) is a great place to first place a story. It goes back to the eighteenth century, has published the work of some very notable names, and the issue that included my story carried some work by Ben Okri.
I had actually forgotten I submitted the story to this magazine. After The Freebie went off in its big brown envelope I discovered that the magazine’s long-time and much respected editor Alan Ross had died and the magazine had ceased publication. This was utterly typical of my luck, I thought with appalling self pity and overlooking the death of a person, and forgot about it. Months later I got home from work to an email from TLM’s new editor Sebastian Barker saying that he very much liked The Freebie and was it OK if he used it? So I said no — OK, I said PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ. I pounded my feet of the floor and woo hoo-ed and hullaballoo-ed in jubilation and sprinted out the house to buy a celebratory bottle of wine and drank the whole thing without sharing with anyone.
According to Wikipedia, TLM’s notable contributors include: W. H. Auden, Frank Auerbach, Louis de Bernières, Bill Brandt, William S. Burroughs, Roy Campbell, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Cary, Charles Causley, John Clare, Hartley Coleridge, Allan Cunningham, Odysseus Elytis, Gavin Ewart, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Roy Fuller, W. S. Graham, Nadine Gordimer, Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries, Tony Harrison, William Hazlitt, Thomas Hood, Ted Hughes, Leigh Hunt, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Laurie Lee, Jack London, Louis MacNeice, Mary Russell Mitford, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Ben Okri, Harold Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Thomas de Quincey, Ethel Rolt Wheeler, Alan Ross, Richard Savage, John Scott, Iain Sinclair, Derek Walcott, Evelyn Waugh and William Wordsworth.
Yes, I have been included in a mag that published William S Burroughs, who I thought I was channeling when I embarked on the first draft of Weed (but emphatically not the later drafts).
Eventually, I submitted some more work to TLM and Sebastian Barker took the trouble to write by hand a note telling me it was “horrible”. He didn’t use it. And you are not seeing it.
OK. I have written way too much about The Freebie here. You’ll be so sick to death of hearing about it, you won’t want to read it. I’m off to blag a free drink.
Local supermarket comes out
It is a very brave retail outlet that expresses its true feelings in conservative Nara, Japan.
Harper’s Weekly — how religion brings peace and harmony
Extract from HARPER’S WEEKLY
December 1, 2009
The Swiss banned further construction of minarets; Christians in Jerusalem wanted Jews to stop spitting on them; and ten Florida middle schoolers were suspended for participating in Kick a Jew Day.
