The Reactor Sings

2012-01-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

"Simon, it's me. Don't you remember? It's me, Simon. It's Batman." Batman stared into the eyes of his old friend, searching for a hint of recognition. There was nothing there. Simon was gone. His mind had just worn away like an old sack, his memories spilling out and catching on the wind. Batman climbed painfully to his feet, his knees popping as he straightened up. "Good bye, Simon," he said, "good bye old friend."

It was winter in Gotham, and Gotham knew all about winter. No snow, just a cold wet tang to the air. Batman wrapped his overcoat tightly around himself and held it closed. The buttons had vanished, one by one, just like everything else in his life. With Simon gone, it was just him. Him and the cold. Batman thought he might cry, but he didn't have the strength.

The Inconclusive Adventures of

2012-01-05T15:05:00.000-08:00

"The setting is Transilvania circa 1993. The hero is one Elbridge Epicurus, a disgraced travelling salesman fleeing his murderous gold-digger wife, Edema, and her kick-boxing instructor cum lover, Anton Gallop. Driving along the Autostrada Transilvania one dark and stormy night--"

Ian rang the bell, which was actually an old shortbread box full of foreign coins, which he actually kicked across the room. "Wait, wait...what's the word? Pleonasm. It's pleonastic: a night is dark by definition. You're out." He grabbed Lenk's ankle and yanked, pulling his flat mate off the bed and on to the sheep-skin rug.

"Fuck you, you grammar Stasi," replied the floored storyteller. "I know what a pleonasm is. I was using quotation to--"

"To prove that you're an idiot?" Ian, now seated on the bed, began to rock back and forth in excitement. "You are unworthy. You bring shame to this once distinguished enterprise." He turned his attention to his other flat mate, who was sitting on a chair by the window, gazing out at the brick wall opposite. "Doesn't he bring shame to this once distinguished enterprise?"

Clioul sighed meaningfully.

"So, Elbridge Epicurus," said Ian, continuing the story, "was driving along the Autostrada Transilvania one freakishly bright night in the pouring rain, which rain was actually the cause of the unnatural illumination, because it was radioactive and glowed radium green, when he lost control of his car and skidded off the road into a herd of cows."

Lenk blew a raspberry of disgust. "None of this lost-in-the-wilderness-after-dark shit," he said. "This is late-20th-century Transilvania. Things have changed. They spell it with an 'i'."

"Oh my God," said Ian. "Are you the president of the National Tourism Board of Late-20th-Century Transilvania, or what?" He planted his slippered feet on Lenk's jumpered chest, menacingly.

"Political correctness," said a quiet voice originating in the vicinity of Clioul's mouth, "gone mad."

"Political correctness gone indeed mad," echoed Ian. He tried to stand on his fallen flat mate, who whimpered in pain. He sat back down again. "It's time for a recess. I want to eat chocolate biscuits."

Clioul abruptly pivoted 180° in his chair, revealing a long, bony face dissected by a broad orange moustache. "Ooh, chocolate biscuits," he said.

2012-01-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Critically-acclaimed novelist Ira Humpstein skateboarded into the Alton Towers control room wearing a purple dinner jacket and yellow corduroy trousers. He was singing the opening aria from a Verdi opera. He came to rest at the chair of the duty officer and kicked his board (decorated with a pipe-smoking sheep skull) up into his hand. "Skeleton crew tonight, eh Marcel?" he said, lisping outrageously.

Marcel, a fat Frenchman in the early-later stages of middle age, sallow skinned and fiercely bearded, grunted in the Gallic manner. He raised a greasy hand to his head and pasted an errant shoot of hair back into place. "Fucking children don't play out no more. They stay at home. They play in their rooms on their self with the Play Box, the Game Station...how do you call it?"

"The X-Box, frog prince. The Playstation. You really don't spend much time in kiddies' bedrooms, do you! What kind of unwholesome mischief are you getting up to?" Humpstein smiled. He had only twelve teeth, but they were all at the front, so it wasn't a problem unless he tried to eat food.

"What you think, you fucking English person? I wank myself half dead. I go on the internet for pornographies and write the letters to the famous actress." Marcel licked his lips at the thought of his latest missive, in which he implored former Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-star Charisma Carpenter to send him a video of herself doing Pilates in a crotch-less pig suit. "When I finish, I say a prayer and go to sleep under la table du jardin."

"Excessivo informatio!" quipped Humpstein. He scratched himself on the foot with the end of his skateboard. When I'm finished with you, he thought, you'll be nothing but a skin-sack of warm shit and whatever you stole from the cafeteria this afternoon. He began to laugh, indiscreetly.

2012-01-05T08:44:00.001-08:00

He felt like a free-standing tumor that, having completely devoured its host, now lacked the energy necessary to expire, and just went on and on and on, moving from room to room, brushing against objects, swaying a little from side to side but never falling, never building up the required momentum to topple over and break itself to pieces on the polished hardwood floor of the dining room of its parents' semi-detached suburban home. I have no mouth and I must apply for jobseeker's allowance, he thought, allusively.

Learning on the Job

2011-07-15T11:31:00.001-07:00

Evan was convinced that working in a bar for a year had taught him nothing at all, but that was far from being the case. For an introspective type, not in the habit of following what was going on around himself, he'd picked up quite a lot. For example, he'd noticed how a customer left waiting for a minute or two at a crowded bar would invariably adopt a grim, otherworldly expression, as if contemplating an alternate reality in which everyone present was wired to explode in five minutes' time and didn't know it. As soon as you uttered the magic words 'what can I get you?' this expression would be replaced with solicitous friendliness, but that only made Evan more suspicious.

Another thing he'd learned was that almost no one knows anything about wine. For the first few months he'd been caught out again and again by expert sommeliers who would ask him for a 'dry white' or 'something from the Old World', but once he'd discovered that nine-times-out-of-ten all they wanted was a Sauvignon Blanc their power over him was broken. He had actually come to take pleasure in humiliating customers by reciting at length the names of lesser-known grape varities--Gros Manseng, Chasan, Malvasia Istriana--while they attempted to simulate an expression of thoughtfulness. When at last he finished with 'and we also have a Sauvignon Blanc' they would latch on to it gratefully, at which point he would ask if they wanted the Chilean, the New Zealand or the Australian Semillion blend. Not one of these wines had he ever tasted.

Let Me Tell You about My Blog

2011-05-24T11:31:00.001-07:00

Kennington isn’t so much a village as a conurbation of estate agents: Field & Sons; Barnard Marcus; Kinleigh, Folkard & Hayward; Daniel Cobb; Winkworth; Atkinson McLeod—all of them occupying a single stretch of otherwise inoffensive high street. This is the Brick Lane of the property market; it’s a wonder the salespeople aren’t out on the pavements hawking their wares to passers-by: “Two-bedroom semi for rent in Stockwell. Convenient distance from tube. Move in this week and I’ll do you a loft extension for free.”

Don't I Know You from Somewhere?

2011-04-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

He was wearing a shapeless, colourless pullover adorned with the insigne of some forgotten martial arts society, and a rough blazer about three sizes too large. On his feet were a pair of lace-up plimsolls that would have been well on the way to turning brown if they hadn’t been that colour to start with. His flat-footed gait had caused the shoes to collapse inwards, so that they resembled the heads of twin Dobermans, inclined in a pose of symmetrical pathos. He held out a pale hand florid with eczema; I grasped it and shook, silently reassuring myself that the condition was not communicable.

In the Dream (2)

2010-10-04T06:19:00.001-07:00

I step into the bathroom of my parents’ house and find a chubby blonde woman wearing a black cocktail dress. She’s brushing her hair in front of the mirror and talking into a phone at the same time. She smiles at me. We start to have a conversation, but fortunately it’s the same one she’s having already, so there are no awkward pauses while she switches between partners. Her name is Jonathan Nice, and she’s a Hollywood agent. She represents a famous director who lives in the same building as me. Apparently, he’s terribly depressed; he spends hours every day scrubbing the floor in Sisyphean penance. I promise to check on him. Jonathan leaves for a party, exchanging a meaningful glance with me on her way out of the room. I’m fairly certain that the two of us are in love.

Notes on Resident Evil: After Life

2010-09-17T19:31:00.001-07:00

What is it with the Umbrella Corporation? Not content with having destroyed human civilisation, they've set about kidnapping the few survivors in order to conduct hideous, inexplicable experiments on them. Will Microsoft go the same way? Confronted with apocalypse, will Bill Gates transport his top engineers underground, there to work on the development of their final nefarious project: an OS system barely distinguishable from the one before? (Who's going to beta test it?)

***

In all fairness, Paul WS Anderson (he of not-to-be-confused-with-Paul-Thomas-Anderson fame) has made some good decisions with this instalment. For one thing, he's stripped the protagonist, Alice, of her super-human powers, not to mention her army of clones of herself. I'm sure I speak for most viewers when I say that it's hard to relate to a Ukranian ex-model ninja badass at the best of times, and all the more so when there are five of her on screen at once and they take turns finishing each other's one liners. I was considering rooting for the villain, Albert Wesker, who wears RayBans at all times and alternates between American and English accents (depending, I think, on how evil he's being at any given moment); fortunately, Anderson has spared me that indignity. It's just a shame he couldn't have worked in a shower scene first.

***

RE:AL (was the acronym intentional?) is also an intriguingly tricksy film, in that numerous plot elements turn out to be red herrings. Is the brooding, gravelly voiced man in the Hannibal Lecter cell really just the victim of an unfortunate prank, as he claims? Yes, yes he is. Is the armoured car in the locked garage our heroes' only hope of surivival? Yes. Oh no, wait, it doesn't have an engine. Best do something else, then. Is that enormous, hooded beast significant somehow? No. Nothing is. That's the fun of it.

The Meat Job

2010-09-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

The theme of Sara Solomon’s twenty-fourth birthday party was “Animals that are too ugly for TV”, which was one of the best ones she’d thought of in a while. Dressing up was a major component of Sara’s life—public and private—and her costume events were frequent and lavish, not to mention that they over-brimmed with the fashionable artists, musicians and media-types whose affections she worked so hard and so successfully to cultivate. It helped that she had money—the inherited fortune of a jewellery-store heiress—but there was no denying that she knew how to make contacts, and how to bring them together in all-night super novae of social energy.

Sara liked to joke about the morning-after complaints she received from uninvited neighbours: they never had a word to say about the noise, she insisted, it was the light of the spectacle that kept them from sleeping. The sort of light you’d expect at the end of the world, when all the countless components of the universe slip finally into alignment, revealing themselves to be the mechanisms of a crystalline machine set in motion aeons before and ticking each second towards a momentary state of total internal refraction. Light you couldn’t so much see as feel, and then only as the instantaneous erosion of your own body and its redistribution across the entirety of those dimensions formerly known as space and time. Good mother-fucking light.

Sara liked to talk in an overblown way. This wasn’t because she believed in the sublime; she just believed in talking. And playing. And having parties. She hadn’t read Plato, but she would have agreed with his assessment of poets; it was the metaphysics of compiling a good guest list on which the two of them diverged.

The “Animals that are too ugly for TV” party was held at Sara’s flat in South Kensington, itself a twenty-first birthday present from her parents, and the setting of a dozen prior soirees. Among the attendees were a fashion designer from Argentina and her English A&R-man boyfriend, a trainee surgeon from Botswana, a Canadian who made short films about cleaning products, the editor of a controversial vegan-lifestyle magazine and two members of a Romanian art-punk band that Sara had encountered the night before, each of whom had come dressed as the other. The remaining guests were mainly PR people, fashionistas and childhood friends of the hostess.

Tom Cobby was part of the latter group. He’d met Sara in sixth form and dated her for about three months, after which she’d flown off to Madrid for the summer and the relationship had dissipated. They were still on good terms, as was the case with all of her ex-boyfriends, but he’d only seen her once in the preceding year, and his attendance at the party was largely due to the nagging of various mutual friends. Although Tom was an affable and easygoing person, he was not a natural socialite, and he didn’t share Sara’s passion for the making and modelling of extravagant costumes. His outfit, which was based on a deep-sea anglerfish, was obviously a token effort, and way out of the running for first prize—it wasn’t even the best deep-sea anglerfish. That distinction went to Mark Sterling, who had managed to solve the problem of manufacturing a head-tendril strong enough to support a working light by using a clutch of LEDs, which were attached to a battery in the headpiece. Tom had compromised on this detail and painted a ping-pong ball fluorescent yellow; he was immediately impressed with his rival’s inventiveness.

“You’re like a vision of what I could achieve if I was taller, smarter and more hard-working,” was the first thing he said to Mark, when they met in the kitchen.

“You left out handsomer.”

Tom pointed out that when it came to impersonating ugly fish, good looks were a liability. Mark replied that he thought Tom had been speaking generally, then he finished stowing his spare Heinekens in the fridge—the one set aside specifically for drinks—and made way for a woman dressed as a post-op Droopy Dog.

The two of them got along pretty well on their own. It turned out that they were both connoisseurs of David Bowie films: The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Temptation of Christ, Labyrinth, The Hunger, The Prestige; they agreed that casting the Thin White Duke as Pontius Pilate was the greatest decision of Martin Scorsese’s career. But it wasn’t until Sara intervened that the real substance of their shared interests came to light. She was dressed as Sam, the Ugliest Dog in the World, a staggeringly repulsive animal that had enjoyed a brief period of Internet fame in the mid-2000s before succumbing to the cornucopia of medical conditions that had created its one-of-a-kind appearance in the first place. (The light that burns twice as brightly burns half as long, she repeatedly observed throughout the evening.) Her costume was remarkably authentic-looking, with dirty patches of fur scavenged from discarded soft toys, and little cellophane buboes filled with mayonnaise, which she would occasionally pop and excavate with a long-nailed finger.

“Hey guys,” she said, “don’t you both play the violin?” Seconds later she was dragged away by an insistent botfly larva to drink Flaming Sambucas out of the house’s one remaining clean receptacle, a ceramic egg cup modelled on Yogi Bear’s head. Had the larva been just fractionally quicker, the topic might never have come up, and The Meat Job might have passed Tom by without his ever knowing.

Anybody, Anyone

2010-09-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

The patient’s delusion pertains to body-image. He imagines that he is not a mobile, self-contained organism but a collection of loosely associated organs and body parts, spreading out to fill the available space. Accordingly, he identifies himself with the rooms in which he spends most of his time, and exhibits additional peculiar behaviour when forced to move between them, namely episodes of narcolepsy, which last until his relocation in a familiar space.

During interviews, the patient is verbally responsive but fails to engage in normal displays of body language.

Strings of viscera cobweb the room. One eyeball hangs from the ceiling by its optic nerve; the other is nowhere in sight. “I made a mistake,” says the mouth, which obtrudes from a strip of unidentifiable tissue positioned above the door. “I thought that it would be easier like this.” “What would be easier?” “Finding myself. You probably think I’m joking.”

An Example of Something That Happened, Once

2010-09-06T12:16:00.001-07:00

This, for example.

Sitting on a two-seater sofa with the girl with the freckle on her nose; two young people alone late at night, necks craning backwards over the low headrest, eyes on each other’s eyes.

Recounting in slow, trembling detail the plot of the movie Ring (the Japanese original), a movie that the girl with the freckle on her nose insists she will never watch.

Hearing your own voice with a clarity that seems uncanny--the sound of water flowing between rocks, somewhere high up; threads of crystal ringing in empty air. You and her and your wellspring of words alone in the electric half light.

Coming to the part of the movie that you love: the death of the hero. (This part is especially good because he is not the hero, and his death is pointless, unwarranted, unfair.)

Slowing down, lingering over morbid details.

Feeling tears in your eyes, as on the rare occasions when you say nice things about a friend behind his back.

Knowing that the girl with the freckle on her nose can see the tears.

Knowing that you will never be closer to her, or need to be.

Chronicles of Sexual Non-Awakening

2010-09-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

“Have a happy, hepatitis-free New Year!”

Evan stopped in the doorway and turned back to the nurse, whose beaming face reminded him of the mischievous grandmother that TV had promised but never delivered. “Happy New Year,” he replied, doing his best to match her smile.

“I almost forgot,” she said, picking up a paper bag from the windowsill and proffering it like a packet of sweets, “do you need some condoms? Something for the weekend, sir?”

He shook his head; no TV grandmother had ever said that. “I think I’m alright,” he insisted, “it’s only Monday, after all.” Then he stepped into the corridor and made for the exit.

The temperature outside was a little below freezing, and the pavement in front of the Caldecot Centre was coated with ice. Evan had to pick his footholds carefully, hopping between islands of exposed concrete and baby-stepping across slippery patches, which kept him from thinking for a while. It was only when he came to Camberwell Road, where the ice had thawed under the onslaught of a million heavy footfalls, that he had the opportunity to redirect brain power to his higher faculties.

Good news, he thought, without feeling anything either way. HIV: Negative. Syphilis: Negative. Gonorrhoea: Negative. Chlamydia: Unknown. The nurse had paused before announcing this last result, as though she was about to say, “but I’m happy to report that you do have chlamydia, congratulations,” causing Evan a moment of anxiety. He’d fantasised at length about contracting HIV; how glorious and doomed it would make him appear; how mysterious. Rock stars and closeted matinee idols had HIV, not to mention porn actors and their ideological cousins, French philosophers. Syphilis was an enticing prospect, too, evoking Romantic poets and libertines, although it was presumably treatable with 21st century medicine. On the other hand, he had spared no thought for the less fashionable disorders. Ordinary people had chlamydia. Ugly people had chlamydia. It sounded like the sort of thing you’d catch as a result of a drunken shag in a nightclub car park; not at all what he was looking for in a sexually transmitted disease. “At least I know I don’t have gonorrhoea,” he said to himself, enjoying the sound of his voice as it articulated this exotic phrase.

Evan drifted into a charity shop, failing to register its name, and spent a few minutes browsing dog-eared paperbacks. It was strange how much the selection of books in a such a place could tell you about the local area, he thought. Here it was all popular crime fiction and conspiracy thrillers: Dan Brown, John Grisham, Ian Rankin. Back home in Bramhall, an affluent suburb of Manchester, he’d found books by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stephen Hawking and Siegfried Sassoon. The things that poor people had read versus those that wealthy people pretended to have read. Or maybe he was being cynical.

2010-08-27T14:27:00.001-07:00

Wally Ingram folded the morning newspaper neatly, taking care to ensure that all of its corners were in perfect alignment, and threw it on the fire. He watched for a few seconds as it blackened and disintegrated, then settled back into his armchair. He closed his eyes. No more news for 24 hours, he thought. He smiled.

There were two things that Veronica Quinton regarded as indispensible in an au pair. The first was cleanliness.

Most rocket scientists do not drive rally cars, date supermodels and stunt-double for Brad Pitt, but then Harry Renfro was not most rocket scientists. Part daredevil, part scholar, he was all man, and women loved him for it.

2010-08-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

Facebook seems to have developed its own pidgin tongue, derived from English and French.

Are we witnessing the first stirrings of a SkyNet-style artificial intelligence, soon to achieve self-awarness and to set about exterminating the human race? And what place does Hollie Wood have in its monstrous designs? I'll have to ask her next time we go for coffee.

On Essay Writing

2010-08-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

The most important piece of advice for the would-be essayist is this: always make a plan. You will save yourself an enormous amount of time and effort if you know from the start that what you're going to write is shit.

The Pendulum Cypher

2010-08-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

Eminent political blogger Davidoff Latour burst through the doorway, landing in a pile at the foot of the uncarpeted stairs. He quickly leapt to his feet and made a grab for the heavy revolver that he kept on the table, next to the black Olivetti rotary-dial telephone. It was gone. "Merde!" he cried, under his breath; then he slammed the front door shut behind himself and fastened the lock.

The 42-year-old mounted the stairs, taking three at a time. When he reached the landing he froze: the door to his study was leaning open. He never left the door to his study leaning open. "Merde," he cried again, quieter this time. Standing on tiptoe, he crept over to the doorway; then he reached into the room for the baseball bat that he kept by the door. It was a souvenir from his trip to New York, two years before, emblazoned with the words "NY Yankees." This time, he found it. He hoisted the bat aloft and stormed into his office, ready to take a swing at anyone who appeared before him. There was no one there.

Latour straightened up, allowing the bat to fall by his side. Then he heard a click.

"Don't move," said a hoarse voice, coming from behind him. "The room is wired with explosive devices."

There was a shiny silver coffee pot sitting on the desk, and in it Latour was able to make out the distorted reflection of a huge, sinister figure, easily seven feet tall, with red piercing eyes. "Who are you?" he demanded, trying to cover the fear in his voice with manly bluster.

"Who I am is not important," hissed the figure, whose accent seemed familiar yet strange. "What matters is what I want from you. A very small thing. No problem." The blogger watched the reflection as it lit a match and then blew it out immediately. Then it spoke again. "You are in possession of a certain artifact that I seek to obtain. A relic from another age."

Latour began to sweat coldly. "You mean?"

"Yes," said the figure. "I mean." A gun appeared in the reflection's hand. "Give it to me. Now."

"It's in my safe," squeaked Latour.

"Get it." The gun grew larger.

Two days later, the body of eminent political blogger Davidoff Latour was pulled out of a river in a Paris suburb. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. He was 42-years old.

That was when I received the call.

2010-08-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

Is two languages enough to be a polyglot? Two wives is enough for a polygamist (or not, depending on the man in question).

Eastern Promise

2010-08-12T03:40:00.000-07:00

Half a Review of Half a Film

2010-08-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

The most interesting thing about Inception is that Inception is not very interesting. Christopher Nolan’s latest is a characteristically ambitious work, much of a piece with his dark, sprawling Batman films. Its best trick is to keep the viewer at the brink of incomprehension throughout, meaning that there’s just enough time to process what’s going on, but not to determine whether it actually makes any sense. (That’s what internet forums are for.) Despite that, and despite a succession of mind-bending set-pieces—cities folding back on themselves, fight sequences conducted in zero gravity—Inception somehow fails to rise above the level of spectacle.

For most event movies, reaching that level in the first place equates to mission accomplished, but Inception is unlike most event movies. It’s a film about confidence tricksters who operate in dreams—the only way to make it more self-reflexive would be to cast the director in the lead role. And yet Nolan, who dealt so explicitly with the themes of memory and identity in his breakthrough film, Memento, here seems more interested in creating an elaborate, overblown crime thriller: the sort of thing Michael Mann and David Mamet might concoct after watching The Matrix on three screens at once while stoned. Then again, perhaps they’d bring a little more human depth to bear.

That’s the core problem with Inception: for a film set largely in the collective unconscious, it doesn’t exhibit much humanity. Its characters go about their business in the manner of typical Hollywood thieves: cold, calculating and completely indifferent to disruptions in the laws of physics, be they impossible car stunts or spiral staircases that go on forever. At least Keanu Reeves got to say “whoa” once in a while.

***

Throughout Inception, characters are continuously making grave speeches about the danger of getting lost in the dream world—of mistaking fantasy for reality. And yet the viewer is never given an opportunity to understand how this could happen. Of the two characters who suffer such a fate, one appears to choose it deliberately, and the other is spirited away without explanation. “A dream seems real when you’re in it,” says Leonardo DiCaprio to Ellen Page, but neither of them have any trouble discriminating thereafter. Nolan makes a half-hearted attempt to draw an analogy between the fantasy world of the unconscious and that of the cinema, but in the end he’s too busy managing set-pieces and movie stars to develop any coherent ideas.

2010-08-03T06:28:00.000-07:00

I've just decided not to purchase a tie when Nick announces that his parents are dead. It's yellow with blue polka dots.

"They're not answering my phone calls," he explains. "I'm 100% certain that they're dead."

"This tie is 100% polyester. I think I want it, but there are only three designs here, so if I get it everyone will know that I buy clothes at Sainsbury's."

"You shouldn't get it."

"Yeah, you're right."

We move down the aisle, looking for turmeric.

"It's not so bad," I say. I want to reassure him.

"I guess so. I guess it's win-win. Parents not dead: great. Parents dead: I have mind powers."

"I'm going to buy some sweets," I say. I buy two packets of Munchies.

The Honour Complaint

2010-07-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

Rejoining the service sector has given me the opportunity to observe a uniquely fascinating psychological phenomenon, perhaps exclusive to this area of human activity: the Honour Complaint. Here's an example:

CUSTOMER (looking sheepish): I'm really sorry, but I have to complain. We were waiting ages for our food, and when it arrived it was cold. Sorry.

SERVER: I'm sorry about that, sir. I can get the manager for you if you'd like.

CUSTOMER: Yes, please. (Suddenly embarrassed by own patheticness) I mean, it really was bad. In fact...I think it was the worst meal I've ever eaten. I was nearly sick. Twice. My child developed an eating disorder before my eyes. You're lucky I'm not pressing charges.

SERVER: Of course, sir. Thank you for your heroic forbearance. Please accept this complimentary chocolate brownie as a token of our profound gratitude.

CUSTOMER (relieved): Thanks. That was all I wanted.

The person who delivers an Honour Complaint is rarely a seasoned complainer. He would rather keep quiet, but for some reason he feels obliged to make a stand. Perhaps he's having lunch with his boss, and doesn't want to appear spineless. Perhaps he's compensating for the recent removal of one or more of his testacles. The reason is not always clear. But because he's anxious about the process, he's liable to behave erratically, apologising one moment then making outrageous accusations the next. If he makes an ultimatum, it will be delivered in the style of a librarian facing down a gang of chain-wielding youths: "Look, you better just do as I say, or I'm liable to get very cross." His lips say "Have at you, you ruffians!" but his eyes say "Please don't humiliate me in front of my children. I'm this close to convincing them that I'm a man."

Unused Metaphor from Open University Essay

2010-07-09T07:32:00.001-07:00

Churchland is trying to build a castle in the dark, without even knowing what his bricks are made from. In the morning he will be sober, but his house will still be ugly.

2010-06-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

I realise that the BBC is staffed entirely by bien-pensant secularist pseudo-intellectuals, but I'm still consistently amazed by the lengths to which it will go in order to purge its programmes of all references to Christianity. Last Saturday's episode of Dr Who is a case in point: besides being chock full of the usual humanist goobledigook about the majesty of the cosmos (a cosmos full of genocidal aliens, of course), it included several striking instances in which obvious Christian references were clumsily obscured.

At one point, a 12-year-old girl was seen kneeling beside her bed, praying to some benevolent higher power. What might this higher power be? Santa Claus, of course! A crack in the fabric of time had erased her parents from history, leaving her to fend for herself. This presented no difficulty, however, as everyone knows that the family is an out-dated and potentially subversive convention. Even a single parent is one too many.

Later on, during a wedding scene, the action switched straight from the bride's bedroom to the reception. Apparently, the prospect of beaming a Christian ceremony into the homes of millions of unsuspecting viewers was one that the BBC deemed unacceptable. What if those viewers had found something admirable in this time-honoured tradition? What if it had given them pause to reflect on their own directionless, irresponsible lives? It's a relief to know that the arbiters of our state television network take such care over what they choose to broadcast, although I wonder why they don't exercise as much restraint when, for example, an unabashedly liscentious comedian decides to let loose a foul-mouthed tirade against a defenceless OAP. I can only conclude that, in Britain today, Jesus is the final taboo.

More Work-Related Nonsense

2010-06-20T10:18:00.001-07:00

I work in a pub.

This pub is part of a chain.

This chain is called 'Geronimo Inns'. I don't know why; perhaps its founders felt that by purchasing a small number of public houses they were making some sort of wild jump into the unknown. Perhaps they were referring specifically to the Native American leader who waged war against the US in the late 19th century (whose name, incidentally, translates as 'one who yawns'). That would make my pub an anti-colonial pub. That would make me the catering industry's answer to Edward Said.

Geronimo Inns 'endeavour[s] to create a warm home from home atmosphere, where real food at affordable prices is available seven days a week'. They endeavour to do this by distributing chairs and tables around a room, and selling drinks and food. Also, there are shelves. (There are knicknacks on the shelves.)

Here is the text of a promotional card I found in my pub:

The Club Table
Simply the best ground available for every game for £100 includes welcome drinks and nibbles (£50 goes to Action against Hunger) and to be raffled as a treat for the final (draw on 6th july).

I am tired now.

The Pleasures of Work

2010-06-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Overheard Line of the Day

"Of course, that's the problem with marrying Latin: you never know what you're going to get."

2010-06-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

It has now been several hours since I woke to find myself naked in an unfamiliar room, handcuffed to a lifesize wax model of Benito Mussolini. So far, I have been unable to establish the sequence of events that brought me to this place; I thought for a while that I might have been the victim of an elaborate practical joke, but who among my acquaintances could have executed it? Certainly not my colleagues at the office; they are far too sober and respectable. Nor could it have been my only surviving family member, cousin John, since he is out of the country at present, doing important work for the government. That leaves only my landlady, Mrs Punt, and she is a septuagenarian with macular degeneration. Of course, she has a fiery spirit, but I believe that the physical work of transporting me from my room to this mysterious place (without alerting me to my plight) is beyond her, and she hates to employ labourers for any but the most essential tasks. 'If it broke, then it doesn't deserve to be fixed,' as she likes to say. I think that she has misunderstood natural selection; still, she keeps the rent low, as, by another quirk of her character, she refuses to recognise the concept of inflation.

2010-06-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

Thomas used to work as a stevedore. Following a dispute over redundancies, his union decided to arrange a strike. Thomas felt ambivalent; several of his friends had been threatened with unemployment, but he was in no position to turn down work. Unfortunately for him, the strike went ahead. That was three months ago, and he hasn't earned a penny since. 'It's tough...so tough,' he says.

Thomas's girlfriend, Gina, has been working as a waitress for 12 hours a day to support the two of them. She insists that she does it 'for love', but Thomas is convinced that the situation cannot go on; 'Sometimes she cries in the night. I know she thinks about running away.'

Fortunately, due to new government regulations, Thomas's union has been outlawed and disbanded. Now he can go back to work, albeit at significantly reduced pay. 'We were living on a prayer for a while, but thank God it's over.'

52 for 2010 #14

2010-04-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus: A Life by Oliver Todd

I remain uncertain about my relationship with Albert Camus. I've read and admired his three novels, the short story collection and the essay on revolt, but in all honesty it's his lifestyle and celebrity that I find most attractive. A seemingly pathological womaniser, he left behind one ex-wife with a ruinous morphine habit (not his fault), one widow with mental health problems (largely his fault) and a loose network of lovers, including the famous actress Maria Casarès. If there's any single artefact from the man's life that I most appreciate, it's the iconic B&W photograph that graces the covers of several of his books: his hair slicked back, his collar turned up, a half-smoked cigarette protruding from his mouth. He looks a little tired, as though the attention of the photographer is boring him; how fabulous to treat fame with such insouciance!

But what about his ideas? I have to admit that I've never fully grasped them. Camus was sometimes a victim of his own high-flown prose style; the final passage of The Rebel sounds tremendously stirring at first ('In this noon of thought, the rebel thus disclaims divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men.'), but against the list of historical injustices and monsters of thought that make up the rest of the book, it can offer little more than fine writing and invocations of valour. This was, of course, the charge that was laid against Camus by many of his contemporaries, including Sartre, who thought him a good writer but a poor philosopher. Raymond Aron, who would produce his own, more systematic denunciation of Communism a few years after The Rebel appeared, agreed with the sentiments that Camus expressed in his book, but felt that they were poorly argued.

So what does that leave us with? An ardent appeal for a form of radical individualism that refuses to disregard collective responsibility? Nietzsche with a heart? I don't know. I'd like to believe that there's something more sophisticated at the core of Camus's thought, something to transcend his elegantly rendered platitudes and anxious self-criticism, but what might it be? As the man said himself, he was suspicious of systems of thought, preferring to live by his (admittedly selective) sense of justice. Maybe, 'in the final analysis', exhortations to moral virtue were all he could bring to bear. Maybe that was the point.

Update!

2010-04-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say and I'm saying it. So, in lieu of anything else, how about a list of the books I've read so far this year (discounting the ones I've mentioned previously).

City Boy Edmund White
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeanette Winterson
Our Ancestors Italo Calvino
Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov
Voodoo Histories David Aaronovitch
Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher
Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
Reappraisals Tony Judt

If only I could remember everything I'd read, I'd be a smart man by now. But all I can recall is anonymous gay sex, an exorcism in Cheadle Hulme, an aristocrat who lives in the trees, Vladimir Nabokov's 50 servants, David Shayler's theory that the WTC was blown up by cruise missiles in disguise, capitalism is bad for our souls (and here are the top five films that prove it), the Soviets did it to themselves, and something about 20th century history. Oh, and I now know how long the Six-Day War was.

Dream the in (slightly wrong)

2010-03-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

Voluptuous invisible meteorites located demonstrate distracted modesty interprets genitals difficult concentrate murderous volcanoes appealing finally enormous refugees suddenly Ghostbusters predator samurai predator unconscious fixation sitting classroom classroom L-shaped shorter person teaching lesson around corner sitting naked woman lesson Percy Bysshe Shelley although about Percy Bysshe Shelley little naked woman talking flirting mildly after occurs duvet preserve gesture come-on snuggles massage very teacher saying begins spaceships appear bearing intent also prospect learning Percy Bysshe Shelley prospect having naked woman confides classroom across city tumbling around hotel worried about hotel before fighting Arctic cock-blocked ‘80s sci-fi movies in the dream I am in a the is and I am at the far end of the leg the the is out of the I am not on a but on my bed and next to me on the bed is a she is and the is on I would like to learn and to the that I know I am the keeps to me and a while it to me that I should share my with her so that she can her but she this as a she up next to me and starts to my which makes it to on what the is at some point the world to end or in the sky down on us with there are the of seems less and less the of sex with the more and more so she in me that she is a porn star we leave the and rush the which is down us in search of a good I am the cost of the room we find a but there is an queue of at the front desk we can check in we are a in the with the aid of a team of the wins I have been by my with.

In the Dream

2010-03-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

In the dream, I am sitting in a classroom. The classroom is L-shaped, and I am located at the far end of the shorter leg; the person teaching the lesson is out of sight around the corner. I am sitting not on a chair but on my bed, and next to me, also on the bed, is a naked woman. She is young and voluptuous.

The lesson is on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although I would like to learn about Percy Bysshe Shelley, and to demonstrate the little that I already know, I am distracted. The naked woman keeps talking to me and flirting mildly. After a while it occurs to me that I should share my duvet with her, so that she can preserve her modesty, but she interprets this gesture as a come-on. She snuggles up next to me and starts to massage my genitals, which makes it very difficult to concentrate on what the invisible teacher is saying.

At some point, the world begins to end. Spaceships or meteorites appear in the sky, bearing down on us with murderous intent. There are also volcanoes. The prospect of learning about Percy Bysshe Shelley seems less and less appealing, the prospect of having sex with the naked woman more and more so. She confides in me that she is a porn star. We leave the classroom and rush across the city, which is tumbling down around us, in search of a good hotel. I am worried about the cost of the room.

Finally, we find a hotel, but there is an enormous queue of refugees at the front desk. Before we can check in, we are suddenly Ghostbusters, fighting a predator in the Arctic with the aid of a team of samurai. The predator wins: I have been cock-blocked by my unconscious fixation with '80s sci-fi movies.

Postcards from the Edge of Sense

2010-03-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

Bingo Estevez sat in a wicker chair in his lounge, sucking lemon juice from the tip of his right-hand ring finger and thinking unhappily of nothing. Music played on the hifi behind him—a sort of room-temperature salsa, which registered on his consciousness only as a faint perturbation of the otherwise stale atmosphere, like the ripples of an insect’s footsteps in a stagnant pool. He reached down his finger into the glass that lay perched on his lap, amid the folds of his dressing gown, and attempted to squeeze a little more fluid from the emaciated lemon segment inside it. The results were unsatisfactory.

“I’ve been had, I’ve been had,” he sang sotto voce, improvising a jazzy melody; “never thought I’d feel so bad, never thought I’d feel so bad.”

Across from Bingo, buried in an old red beanbag whose contents had long since adhered into a shape something like the maw of a volcano, Malcolm Détente stirred from his laptop trance. He reached out for his can of Red Stripe and, finding it empty, took to his feet.

“Anybody want another drink?” he stammered, swaying slightly in an imagined breeze. There was no response from either Bingo or Steptoe Grieg, who lay sprawled on a small leather sofa, his hands held up in the air, ready to catch any object that might materialise in the space above him and come crashing down on his head. “Fine,” grunted Malcolm.

“I’ll have another G&T, if you’re up,” said Bingo, his voice oddly plaintive, his eyes closed tightly shut.

“Yeah, grab me another can,” added Steptoe.

Malcolm took Bingo’s glass and fell sideways out of the room, as though the entire structure had suddenly tipped over, and he was the only thing not to have been nailed down.

“Do you think,” intoned Steptoe, apparently addressing some entity much grander than his diffuse friend, “that when we’re all great successes, supping champagne with publishers and fashion designers—”

“And beautiful socialite ladies,” added Bingo.

“Yeah, right, them too. Do you think that we’ll look back on these days of relative squalor and feel some sort of pang…a deep longing for the bohemian ways of our youth?”

Bingo waited for a moment before answering, as though he was actually thinking about what he was going to say. “Yes, I suppose we will. But then we’ll just buy a bunch of caftans and berets and threadbare faux-Persian rugs and we’ll keep doing what we were doing before in a slightly different setting.” He raised his glass to his lips, by way of rhetorical punctuation, then realised that it was no longer in his possession.

“Yeah, that’s exactly how it’ll be,” agreed Steptoe, lowering one of his arms to trace with finger and thumb the broad contour of a smile. “Hmm.”

Malcolm returned with a fresh G&T and two cans of Red Stripe, one of which he slung at the upraised hands of Steptoe, who unfortunately failed to react in time; it struck him neatly in the groin, causing him to do an involuntary crunch. “Whimper,” he said, to his companions’ amusement.

21st Century Door-to-Door Salesman (part one of, in all probability, one)

2010-03-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

Finally, someone answers a door. Rico launches into his pitch—“Hi, it’s nothing serious, I promise”—only to be cut off immediately. “Boy, what you talking about serious? Why you coming up here telling me it’s nothing serious?” I’m too far back along the walkway to see the speaker, but the voice is that of an elderly African Caribbean man; I suddenly become aware of reggae music playing quietly in the background.

It’s Rico’s first day, and he’s unprepared for this counter offensive. His mentor, Alan, has promised to step in if things go awry, but right now he’s almost doubled over with laughter. “What’s so funny? What you laughing about?” continues the disgruntled would-be customer. I glance at Rico’s face; his expression is grave. The fate of TalkTalk’s broadband package hangs in the balance.

***

It’s a cold, bright Thursday in March, and I’m attending a job interview for a company called Aspire Acquisitions. This is not an ordinary interview: it lasts for eight hours, during which time I will accompany an experienced salesperson and a trainee as they make their way around a block of flats in Islington, taking the gospel of TalkTalk to the heathens. Although I won’t be called on to do any sales work myself, I’m expected to look interested and to ask astute questions about the business, as well as answering occasional psychometric-style queries. (The first of these is “Explain what sets you apart you from all the other people being interviewed today.” After careful deliberation I announce that I’m an excellent walker.)

By way of motivation, I’ve been paired up with another interviewee, with whom I’ll be competing over the course of the day. His name is Ricardo, a handsome Business Administration graduate from São Paulo, looking for work to keep him going while he checks out masters courses. He’s an intimidating adversary, but his English is less than perfect, so I figure I can make him look stupid by peppering my speech with impenetrable idioms. Unfortunately, the only one that comes to mind is “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and the sky is the clearest I’ve seen it in months.

As the four of us make our way on foot from Aspire’s Old Street headquarters to our assigned patch, Alan expounds on the history of the company and the virtues of direct marketing. Despite having operated for only a few years, Aspire already has dozens of offices across the UK, and there are plans to open many more in the future. This furious rate of expansion is apparently due to the way the company is structured: anyone who wants to join the sales force has to start at the bottom and work up, spending half a year going door-to-door and living off commissions before progressing to a junior management role. No one gets to tread water, and there’s a constant influx of new recruits.

Alan also explains, with only a hint of schadenfreude, how the Credit Crunch worked out in the company’s favour. The recession encouraged businesses to tighten their marketing budgets, but this mainly affected more expensive indirect-marketing methods, such as television and radio advertisements; direct-marketing offers a higher rate of return—particularly when you don’t pay your salespeople a regular wage—so Aspire was able to keep hold of its accounts, even taking on more work in some cases.

Impressive as all of this is, I can’t help but feel a gulf opening up between Alan and me. Does he really care about any of this stuff, or is it all just bluster, designed to impress wide-eyed job seekers looking for a career that can really take them somewhere? A low-slung Lamborghini speeds past, and Rico whistles in admiration. “I didn’t know you could get them in this country,” he says. I try to simulate enthusiasm, but I’m no more interested in sports cars than I am in milk floats, or direct-marketing for that matter.

***

We finally arrive at our destination, and Ricardo and I get our first taste of door-to-door selling. Problem number one: how do we access the building? Blocks of flats are usually easier to work than houses, since the occupants live in closer proximity to one another, but the building we’ve been assigned to today is a labyrinth of courtyards and security doors; just getting past the first of these doors involves cold-calling three numbers at random, and the procedure needs to be repeated for each subsequent floor. On top of that, the doorbells ring for a minute at a time, so we spend long periods standing around in dank stairwells while an eerie electric tone wails in the background. It’s a little like being caught in a low-budget 1970s horror movie in which the monster never appears—or maybe it was society, all along.

Fortunately, Alan is an old hand at this. When he gets someone on the other end of the intercom, he makes sure not to mention that he’s selling something; instead, he tells them that the local telephone exchange has been updated and he’s here to explain changes in the service. To my amazement, this invariably works. Even if he can’t get an answer—it’s the middle of the day when we start, after all—it’s only a matter of waiting for someone to enter or exit the building; few people will go out of their way to keep a group of strangers off the premises. At one point, a man even throws us his keys so that we can let his wife through the door while she struggles with an armful of shopping bags; Alan thanks him and smiles at the rest of us—another successful infiltration.

The actual business of going from door to door is surprisingly interesting, at least for a few hours. Most people are out during the day, but we still get to meet a varied cross-section of the population, ranging from an elderly woman who seems to have only a vague grasp of what the Internet is, to a handsome young man who invites us in and discusses rival broadband packages at length. This constitutes my first experience of entering a stranger’s home for professional reasons, and I feel distinctly uncomfortable throughout. Alan, by contrast, is completely at ease; it helps that he’s done this hundreds of times before, but the real difference is that he has a purpose, a pitch to make, while I’m just a sullen interloper, trying to smile politely whenever the occupant catches my eye, and jumping at every chance to murmur in agreement or utter a bland pleasantry.

As the conversation progresses, I begin to get the impression that our host is gay—he makes repeated references to his “partner” without ever giving a name—and I start to wonder how my associates will react to this. You won’t go far in sales if you refuse to sell to people, of course, but I still feel anxious for a few minutes. In the end, Alan breaks the tension by deploying a masculine pronoun; I’m temporarily terrified that my hunch was wrong, and that the young man will get angry and drive us out with a broom, but the moment passes without comment. No one here is afraid of gay people, it turns out, with the possible exception of me.

On the Elimination of Religious Language

2010-03-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

For the eliminative materialists, metaphysical accounts of mental phenomena are no more meaningful than talk of phlogiston and the four humors, or the idea that the sun orbits the earth. Once science manages to produce a detailed explanation of how the brain works--how physical changes relate to sensations and behaviour--words such as 'soul' and 'belief' will cease to have any purchase; the myth of the human mind will have reached its end.

But what to do in the meantime? Some eliminative materialists advocate a programme of lexical attrition: since metaphysical concepts are fictions with no basis in the physical world, the elimination of the vocabulary that supports them must result in the elimination of the ideas themselves. Without the word 'witch,' an old woman in black is just an old woman in black; without the word 'God', the sky is just an empty expanse of blue.

Needless to say, few people endorse this methodology. But what if there were another way to achieve the same effect? What if instead of removing 'misleading' expressions, one were to subtly redefine them? To remap them to physical phenomena?

This is the thinking behind Christian Rhyming Slang, an experimental project that aims to put the unique language of Christian worship to everyday use. 'Pope in Rome' becomes 'home,' so that one might say 'You have a beautiful pope' or 'ET phone pope.' 'Papal Decree' becomes 'key,' leading to such phrases as 'Can you give me the car papal? I think I left a carton of milk in the boot.' 'Church' becomes '(birch) tree,' as in 'I found two sturdy churches and slung a hammock between them' and 'Last night lightning struck the church outside my bedroom window, splitting it in twain.'

These phrases are fun to use, and come easily to anyone familiar with existing rhyming slang! So why not get started today? Call 02075 821 750 to order your copy of The Christian Rhyming Slang Handbook--the first 50 callers will receive a free instructional video starring Gary Kemp!

With your help, religious thought could be eliminated tomorrow. So don't delay; get slanging straight away! Admiral Ackbar!

Top Tips for Aspiring Writers

2010-02-20T14:55:00.000-08:00

The Guardian has just run an article in which various established writers offer advice to newbies. Here is my contribution (which they decided not to use; apparently my work is a little too outre for their readers!).

1. Never, ever use adverbs. Consider the following: “Caspar ran quickly along the trench, leaping over the myriad torn and twisted bodies of his former comrades. One man, ripped almost in half by shrapnel but clinging obstinately to the lingering seconds of his life, flailed at Casper’s leg; Casper aimed a kick at the man’s chin, delivering it with such force that head and neck parted company. ‘You’ll pay for this, Caspar!’ wailed the detached skull as it span through the air. ‘I will have my re--’ the curse was cut short by a sniper’s bullet, which finished the work that the artillery bombardment and Casper’s boot had begun, sending ribbons of viscera flying in all directions. A stray eyeball struck Casper in the eye, blinding him. ‘Ah!’ he cried. Then he brightened up. ‘Well, I guess I had that coming.’” As you can see, the adverbs (“quickly” and “obstinately”) provide the reader with no useful information; they are ballast, keeping the prose from taking flight. Shed them!

2. Try not to tell the reader more than he needs to know: “Michelle opened her purse, a brown Dolce & Gabbana flap-over that her mother had bought for her two years before as a reward for completing a degree in Advertising and Media at the University of Suffolk, and removed the Emerald of Ptarnok, which was covered in lint.”

Conversely, don’t forget to include crucial information: “Oliver tiptoed along the corridor, trying to make as little noise as possible so as not to alert the guards. Unfortunately, he walked right into one of them. ‘Ha!’ cried the man. ‘Back to the gaol with you, boy!’” (Question: why didn't Oliver see the guard? Answer: because he's blind.)

3. Writers write; non-writers do not write. Writing 101.

4. If you’ve never read a book and don’t intend to, don’t bother trying to become a writer. Unless you’re already famous or have interesting ideas, in which case all this advice is irrelevant.

This Was Going to Be about a Hermaphrodite Prostitute in 1950s Paris, but as It Turns out I Don't Know Anything about That

2010-02-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

Simone withdrew her head from the American’s lap and spat his semen into the grimy tumbler she’d appropriated for the purpose, half-submerging the cigarette butt lying at the bottom of the glass. The butt lay like a dismembered tree trunk in a pool of sour milk; she stared at it for a moment, imagining perhaps that it was part of some surrealist nature scene—the centrepiece in a forest of upright cigarettes, all burned down to different heights, particles of ash swarming in the air like a colony of bats gone suddenly deaf—then turned her head towards me and smiled.

“You want to see?” she asked, proffering her newfound objet d’art.

I shook my head. “I can see it already.”

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Oh yes, and original, too. I don’t know where you get your ideas.”

She laughed and turned back to the American. “You make art with your whole body.”

He had a fresh cigarette in his mouth and was on the point of lighting it, but he paused and made a show of taking a close look, carefully adjusting the angle of his thick-rimmed spectacles. “You know what? You might just have something there,” he said, affecting a professorial tone. “And to think I’ve been wasting my time with poetry.” His mouth stretched in a nervous smile, which so delighted Simone that she decided to dart forward and kiss it, nearly knocking him off his chair. “Honey,” he said, “you ought to be more careful.”

“I am careful,” she protested, rising to her feet and setting the glass down on the bedside table. “I didn’t hurt you; I never hurt anyone.” With that she plucked the unlit cigarette from his mouth and slipped it into her own, turned, covered in one theatrical step the space between herself and the bed on which I was sitting, and leaned over me. For a moment I was aware of nothing but the presence of two large, impassive eyes—yellow-green irises ringed with deep blue, one pupil fractionally larger than the other—and the faint scent of sweat. “Une allumette, monsieur,” she mumbled through the corner of her mouth. Her breath was sweet.

I reached inside my jacket and pulled out a book of matches, snapped one off and lit it; when I held it up to her face she straightened, moving out of reach. “Do you want a light or what?” I demanded, trying to sound indignant.

“I said I want a match.”

“Well, here it is.” I waved the offending object in the air for emphasis, immediately extinguishing it. Simone laughed and the cigarette fell to the floor.

My Father Was a Travelling Salesman

2010-02-16T08:41:00.001-08:00

My father was a travelling salesman. That is what he told me. I cannot remember him ever making a sale, but it is true that he and I travelled far and wide during the not many years that I was with him. I was only a child, and I did not understand much of what he did.

My father was not a tall man, so when we entered a new town he would climb up on to a roof in order to establish himself in the minds of the populace. Sometimes the owner of the roof would shout for him to come down, or even throw rocks, but he would not dismount until he was certain that everyone had registered his appearance. Once he was certain, he would spring off like a gazelle and hit the ground running, sending up clouds of dust that choked many passers-by. I would have to chase after him, because he forgot himself when he was running, and it was possible that he would keep going for hours. It was my job to call out to him, so that he would eventually come to his senses.

After that, the two of us would retrace our steps and set up a stall in the town square. I had the honour of working on the stall, attempting to sell the handicrafts that my father made from the refuse that we picked up on the roads between towns. He would construct little angels with beer cans for bodies and cigarette butts for arms, ‘rain slippers’ from punctured footballs, and various other paraphernalia. My favourite thing he made was a knight’s shield, which consisted of a discarded hubcap with a leather strap for a handle. I begged him to let me keep it, but he sold it to a little blind boy for half a dollar. As soon as my father had turned his back I kicked the blind boy in the leg, but I did not take the shield back--even then, I respected the sanctity of a completed transaction. Also, my father would have seen me carrying the shield and punished me.

Our life as travelling salesmen was hard, but we were lucky enough to meet many kind people, who sheltered us and gave us food. I still remember a fat woman who let us stay in her house during the rains. She called me ‘Onion’, because my smell made her eyes water, and she let me sleep on a rug in the corner with her dogs. She loved the dogs very much, so I knew that she loved me, too. My father shared her bed, which looked big and comfortable, but the two of them did not get much sleep--they spent all night groaning and moving around. Eventually, I got up to ask what was the matter, but my father slapped my face and made me go back to the corner. When I got there, I found that one of the dogs had died, and the other one was eating it. I was curious, so I took a bite, and just then the woman looked over to me and screamed. My father and I had to flee from that place, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for leaving the beer-can angels behind.

Unreasonable Job Requirements

2010-02-16T06:20:00.000-08:00

German speaking Appeals Administrator with Italian
Location City Of London, London
Salary £8.00 - £9.00 per hour
Date 15 Feb
German speaking Appeals Administrator with fluent Italian Reference: 553739 Salary: £8.84 inclusive of accrued holiday £7.89 (£0.95)

Did you grow up always on the move? Perhaps your parents were renegade intellectuals from East Berlin, who inculcated you with a deep belief in the power of ideas? Can you speak at least three languages? Earn £8+ per hour!

Office Assistant with French
Location London, South East England
Salary £17,000 - £18,000 per annum
Date 15 Feb
Our client is looking for a highly capable and charismatic Office Assistant to hire in their London (UK) Games Development Studio. DUTIES Your primary responsibilities will be: •Face/Voice of the company to welcome all visitors to the office and answer all incoming calls •Assisting the Offi...

Wanted: French-speaking demagogue to answer phones and order office supplies. Uncommon beauty a bonus.

On Learnin'

2010-02-11T05:27:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how a little education can upset your productivity. Since I started a new Open University course (Philosophy and the Human Condition) last week I've been put off attempting to write fiction; how can someone as ignorant as I am presume to educate the masses? Such hubris!

My intellectual shortcomings have been comprehensively exposed. Isaiah Berlin's notions of "negative" and "positive" liberty are one thing, but when Gerald MacCallum gets up and starts trying to simplify things I totally lose the thread. This may be partially the result of his tortuous prose, behold:

"But a reason for this especially worth noting at the start is that disputes about the nature of freedom are certainly historically best understood as a series of attempts by parties opposing each other on very many issues to capture for their own side the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom."

Let's see if we can pare that down a little. By taking out the superfluous clauses and qualifiers, for example.

"But a reason for this is that disputes about the nature of freedom are best understood as a series of attempts by opposing parties to capture the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom."

Better? Well, why not go further? Why not extract the actual meaning of the sentence and just write that?

"Most disputes about the nature of freedom are just attempts by the parties involved to claim its favorable associations for themselves."

Better still, let's write it as an epigram.

"Beware those who talk always of freedom; their chatter masks the rattle of the jailer's keys."

There you go, Gerald. You should have been a poet.

52 for 2010 #4 and #5

2010-02-11T00:47:00.000-08:00

I have lost the will to read. Or at least to write about reading. Suffice it to say that I have actually read some books in the last couple of weeks. They were: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, and Messiah by Gore Vidal. Both were okay.

I suppose that, if only for my own sake, I should endeavour to render a precis.

In HtTaBYHR the literary critic Pierre Bayard takes a sort of epistemological look at the act of reading and points out that it's not all it's cracked up to be. We may talk with authority about books we've read, but the reality is that we hardly remember them; rather, we cling to fragments and impressions that are really just reflections of our own internal book/s. Thus, it may appear that two people are discussing Ulysses (curse you, Ulysses!), but in reality they're just comparing notes on their own psyches. Or something. (I know: so far, so Reception Theory.)

This may sound high falutin, and it is, but it's argued fairly convincingly. Who could reject the claim that reading is a vague and ill-disciplined practice, and that most of what we read is instantly forgotten? Of course, being a French theoretician, Bayard has to go and systemise the whole affair (references to "inner books," "screen books," "phantom books," "virtual libraries" et cetera abound), sending good, empirical British eyebrows climbing to the safety of the hairline. But at least there are some tasty literary examples to munch on, from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to Robert Musil's The Man with No Qualities and something by Balzac (more French stuff, jeez).

Messiah, meanwhile, is a cautionary tale somewhat in the style of 1984 (which predates it by only four years...way to live forever, Gore). And, hey, it's not even about communism! It's about religion and advertising, two infinitely more insidious fields. In it, a fellow by the name of John Cave has an epiphany--death is nothing to be afraid of--and becomes a new messiah, with the help of an ambitious advertising executive, an aspiring historian, a psychoanalyst and et cetera. His religion, Caveism, really takes off, particularly when he gets involuntarily martyred. Ho ho!

Ideas for the Title of an Avatar Review

2010-02-11T00:41:00.000-08:00

Hey Guys, Don’t Be Blue; Your Battle to Protect Your Tree House from Helicopters Is the Most Powerful Allegory of Colonialism Ever Committed to Celluloid

James "No, No, No; the Wings Should Be Oranger" Cameron Confirms Status as Hollywood's No.1 Micro-Manager

Oh Brave New World, That Has Such Blue People in It

Why Isn't This Movie Better Than Terminator Salvation?

My Recent Wikipedia Searches

2010-02-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

admission of women to ivy league
christopher isherwood
drilling blasting
gore vidal
pierre bayard
right-angled sofa
sophocles

Who am I?

AVATAR!

2010-01-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

"You [Armond White] are insane. If there is anyone out there that does not see this movie because of your absurd review I feel sorry for them. Why not be honest and review the MOVIE for what it is.....an incredible sensory journey that brings you literally inside this movie for the entire time you are on Pandora. It's the best movie I have ever seen." (My italics.)

The Will to Power Nap

2010-01-28T10:44:00.000-08:00

For the last three days workmen have been excavating the flat adjoining mine, using what sounds to me like a tunnel boring machine. Short burst of cacophonous grinding are followed by the noise of plasterwork crashing to the floor; hammers beat without rhythm on groaning walls and drills growl a feral call-and-response. Occasionally, all grows peaceful, but then a muffled bang will send the settled air flying up like plaster dust. A man will moan in pain and another man will laugh.

What are they doing over there? Should I be concerned? The “coalface” seems to be the very wall against which my head rests as I lie in bed; I keep imagining that a sledgehammer is about to smash a hole in the brickwork, or that a drill bit will burst through, spearing my skull and liquefying my brain matter with its frantic revolutions. All very vexing.

At the same time, the disruption seems like a fine excuse to stay in bed: at moments the noise level becomes almost unbearable, and my refusal to rise takes on a heroic aspect. Who else could withstand six hours of such torture, climbing out of bed only once the workmen have surrendered for the day at five o’clock? A lesser man would get up extra early to avoid this discomfort, but I am made of sterner stuff. And if I can take a lie-in in what amounts to a construction site, think what else I can achieve!

The final lines of Kipling’s poem “If” come to mind: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it/And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” At last, I think I know what that means. Thank you, you fucking noisy asshole bastards.

52 for 2010 #3

2010-01-26T07:44:00.000-08:00

I'm already giving in. Not to outright non-reading (I'm far too unemployed for that), but to reading just whatever the hell comes to hand.Witness: this week, rather than picking up Ulysses, as I've been intending to do since the beginning of the year, I went straight for the first volume of Gore Vidal's memoirs: Palimpsest. Of course I did.

Happily, I don't have much to say about it. There's an abundance of juicy anecdotes (Allen Ginsberg: "So what did you get up to with Jack [Kerouac] in that Chelsea Hotel room?" Gore Vidal: "Well, I fucked him." et cetera), and insider gossip, and it's all a lot of fun. "Palimpsest" is the term for a parchment from which the original text has been erased to make way for a second text, and Vidal goes back and forth over the timeline of his life, erasing and adjusting in order to create the most pleasing sequence. This is how history works, he assures us, and we ought to be suspicious of the historian who says otherwise.

So what do I remember, off the top of my head? WW2 soldiers were a lot more homoerotic than we've been led to believe, as was Eleanor Roosevelt; Robert Kennedy's two greatest nemeses were Vidal and Jimmy Hoffa; the Beats were even bigger slackers than they realised; and when it comes to sex, Vidal is never, ever a bottom. But that goes without saying.

The Mortification of Saint Simone

2010-01-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

“I am Simone Saint,” I say, holding my passport open beside my face so that the man at border control can inspect the likeness. I may be keeping a low profile on this trip, but there’s no disguising bone structure like mine, and my dark inward-sloping eyebrows give me a distinctively mischievous look, useful for playing bad girls and dominatrices—my specialties, as it happens. He leans forward and plucks the passport from my hand, which strikes me as rather rude, particularly as this is my first visit to his green and supposedly pleasant land, as the great British poet William Blake would have it. I’m basically an Anglophile, you know, and I was expecting a warmer reception, but apparently the people here don’t recognize a rising star of the adult entertainment industry when they see one. I’ll soon put that right.

After subjecting my documents to a perfunctory examination, the man hands them back with a sullen, “Thank you, madam.” I reward his disobedience with a wink of Palinesque magnitude, which prompts him to lower his eyes in shame; a fitting gesture in the presence of a royal personage like myself. Last year I received the Adult Film Institute’s coveted “Princess of Porn” award, and I still have the diamante tiara—its centerpiece a bejeweled upstanding phallus—to prove it, although AFI rules dictate that I return the item within the next few months, and second terms are unheard of. No matter; I am soon to be Queen, and I intend to make that an appointment for life, or at least until my body passes beyond the reach of cosmetic surgery.

I proceed into the baggage area and retrieve my single small bag. Since I conduct most of my business au naturel, I’m able to travel light; were it not for my bibliomania I’d probably get by with carry-on alone. As it is, I’m invariably accompanied by a selection of fine reading matter, which enables me to work on the improvement of my mind during any passages of downtime that might arise. I transfer the bag from one hand to the other, enjoying the reassuring heft of my portable library, which today includes Philip Absolon’s Cracking the Chastity Belt: Illicit Sexual Practices in Medieval Europe, Celia Steven’s Plato and the Whore, and a collection of anonymous pornographic stories from the early 20th century called Tender Flights. Being a renaissance woman, I’ve undertaken to write a series of erotic fictions for the excellent Throat Magazine, so I’m trying to absorb all the literary smut I can get my hands on; the life of a researcher is painstaking and arduous.

All of which brings me, more or less, to the point: what am I, a respectable porn starlet—that demeaning suffix is soon to be severed once and for all!—from Flatbush, Ohio, doing in a big bad city like London? What could a den of iniquity like this possibly have to offer an honest clean-limbed girl like me? Well, I’m here on business. Movie business. Specifically, I’m here to cast my next film, for which I will be making the transition from performer to writer-director-producer-auteur; from sex puppet to sex puppeteer. My vision is awesome, albeit somewhat elusive: an examination of sexuality across boundaries of geography, culture, class; multiple narrative strands, never quite converging—too easy—but pulling close and resonating in thematic sympathy; a polyglot cast, drawn not from the ranks of my preening pumped-up peers but from all walks of life. I will fill the screen with artists, junkies, bohemians, homemakers and homeless, possessors and dispossessed, plus maybe an aristocrat or two, if I can find any who aren’t over-exposed already, thanks to our celebrity-fixated tabloid culture.

I even thought of inviting my parents to participate, but decided against it; aspiring Freudians everywhere would have seized the chance to besmirch my credentials, writing me up as just another over-reaching Electra. On the contrary, I only want to raise consciousness of the many taboos that still obtain, despite the portentous moralizing of the governing class, whose regular jeremiads regarding our gradual slide down the mountain of virtue into the valley of debauchery—on the toboggan of permissiveness, no doubt—encourage us to cultivate a psychic atmosphere of permanent sexual guilt. “No to guilt!” A political campaign slogan in the making. But first things first; I must be Ozu before I am Obama.

52 for 2010 #2

2010-01-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

I've never read a Graham Greene novel before, and I'm not sure that The End of the Affair was the right one to start with. It's a semi-autobiographical work, in which the narrator relates the details of a love affair he once conducted with a married woman in post-WW2 London. Needless to say, it's a rather personal novel: Greene, a Catholic convert from the age of 23, uses the lead characters' powerful feelings of jealousy and guilt to explore the nature of religious faith and the individual's relationship with God.

One section consists entirely of journal entries in which the heroine performs the diaristic equivalent of putting cigarettes out on herself for 20 pages: "I'm a bitch and a fraud!" "Oh, God, I don't believe in you but I hate you!" (I paraphrase, or do I?). Off-putting as much of this is, for a variety of reasons, Greene probes some uncomfortable verities. His alter ego reacts violently and irrationally against all mention of religion, particularly when it entails the conspicuously miraculous; at one point he decides not to investigate an apparent faith healing in case it turns out to be genuine. It would be easy enough to dismiss episodes of this sort as mere novelistic inventions, but then the real world offers up more than its share of the unexplained (and unexplainable?) on a regular basis.

Greene's writing, which is clear and relatively unadorned (wasn't it he who famously proscribed adverbs?), evokes an austere world in which passion flares beneath the surface, requiring systematic deception in order to be fulfilled. An unfamiliar world, indeed; these days we're only too happy to telegraph our desires, and the idea of God as a confidant, a sharer of wicked secrets, has lost some of its power.

All in all, I found the book by turns unsettling and perplexing. Maybe it'll make more sense when I fall in love, although, to be honest, it's rather put me off the idea.

"How I Get Dressed" by Little Boots

2010-01-17T08:14:00.000-08:00

AVATAR

2010-01-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

I've long since given up on the idea of writing film reviews on here, at least of the portentous broadsheet (is that an anachronism yet?) variety. All the same, I feel moved to report on my viewing of Avatar, what with it being such a cultural event (the film itself, rather than my attendance of it), not to mention a ground-breaking feat of technical something-or-other.

Somehow, the effort of writing a coherent piece of prose seems unwarranted, so I'm going to go all Susan Sontag on your ass and do a "Notes on Camp"-style series of fragmented observations.

***

1. When Giovanni Ribisi grows up he will look exactly like Paul Giamatti.

***

2. Who played Michelle Rodriguez in movies before Michelle Rodriguez was in movies? She's not so much an actor as a stock character, like an eccentric uncle with a drinking problem ("Oh, God! Don't tell me that Michelle Rodriguez is coming to dinner again!"). James Cameron tacitly acknowledges this fact by declining to give her character any background or interesting dialogue; we already know what a Michelle Rodriguez does, why waste time on explanations?

***

3. It seems perverse to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing the CGI necessary for creating an imaginary alien world, only to populate it with amateur concept art stolen from Internet message boards.

***

4. It seems all the more perverse to make a film condemning imperialist resource grabbing and the genocide of indigenous cultures only to forget about it forty minutes from the end and pin all the blame on one inexplicably stubborn military officer. It does, however, allow for a climactic battle between a blue-faced cat-monkey and a man in a robot suit.

***

5. THREE-DEE is shit.

Microsoft Nazi Alert

2010-01-16T08:21:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Works does not recognise the word "klezmer." Evidence of Bill Gates's antisemitism? I couldn't possibly say, but tell me this: why is it that his Wikipedia page doesn't feature a single instance of the words "Jew" and "Jewish?" Odessa strikes again!

52 for 2010 #1

2010-01-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

Being a tireless practitioner of the art of self-improvement, I’ve set myself the task of reading a book a week in 2010. Such ambition! Such vision! Furthermore, I’ve decided that I’m finally going to make the effort to read some of those heavyweight authors that I’ve been putting off for so long: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Joyce et cetera. That ought to help rack up some humanity points; maybe I’ll even get into poetry?

It goes without saying that this is a project of no interest to anyone other than me, but regardless of that, I’m going to be posting regular updates on my progress, plus some hackneyed, third-rate meditations on what I’ve read.

So, without further ado, I present instalment one of 52 for 2010 (I’ll change the title as soon as I think of something good). Don’t enjoy it! Don’t even read it!

52 for 2012 – Part One

This week I finished reading Lincoln by Gore Vidal. It’s an 859 page historical novel following the United States’ 16th President from his inauguration in March 1861 to his assassination in April 1865. Mercifully, there are no bombastic accounts of Civil War battles; Vidal is more interested in the dealings of the political elite, not least the President himself, who lies at the heart of the book like an amiable sphinx. Despite the best efforts of his opponents (some of whom are senior members of his administration) Honest Abe manages to cling to power during one of the most volatile periods in US history by repeatedly outmanoeuvring everyone who stands against him, even as he cultivates his image as a vacillating dilettante. (As Vidal loves to remind us, the President’s hair is forever unkempt.)

Not surprisingly, the era’s ideologues come in for less favourable treatment. Radical abolitionists and would-be Confederate heroes alike are depicted as deluded poseurs, insulated from the reality of the political situation by an aura of self-regard. John Wilkes Booth and his allies appear to be motivated by nothing more than hackneyed dreams of glory; their ultimate fate is reported second hand by a former presidential secretary as he chats up a European princess. Those who loiter in the margins of history are forever at risk of being scribbled on.

Vidal strikes me as a slippery political commentator: it’s always perfectly clear where his sympathies lie, but the why is often more difficult to fathom. Is Lincoln a good president because he holds together the Union at a time of crisis or because he’s the most expert manipulator in Washington DC? Is the duplicitous Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P Chase, bad because of his relentless ambition or because he fails to fulfil it? Ah well, at least there are some jokes.

Confusing Definitions

2010-01-06T09:31:00.001-08:00

Is it just me, or is the first of these definitions poorly phrased?

What Happens in Houses Stays in Houses

2010-01-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

The fat girl has fallen down the stairs and won’t get up, so the three of us (N, R and I) are stuck on the first-floor landing, chatting among ourselves and observing the efforts of the well-wishers below.

“What did you talk about last time you were trapped somewhere by a fat girl?” asks N.

I have no idea what the answer to this question is, so I say, “I think I talked about pro wrestling. You know how in the WWF, or the WWE as it’s now known, they always exaggerate the wrestlers’ heights by about two inches?”

N raises his eyebrows and brings a hand to his thinly bearded chin, preparing to be interested. R appears not to be listening.

“Well, Ken Shamrock is listed in the WWE as being 6’1”, but I read his authorised biography and it says that he’s 5’11”. So I did some checking around and it turns out that they do this with all the wrestlers.”

“Really?” gasps N, opening his eyes wide in astonishment.

“Absolutely. And it’s so senseless: who cares if some huge beefcake of a man is 6’10” and 400lbs instead of 7’ and 420lbs? Do they really think that’s significantly more impressive?”

“It’s a slippery slope, too,” muses N, nodding sadly. “Right now these wrestling people are just exaggerating heights, but a year from now they could be falsifying their names and identities altogether. And what next? Choreographing the matches in advance? It’s unthinkable.”

“Unthinkable,” I reply.

At that moment the fat girl wails loudly and informs everyone within earshot that her ankle is broken. Once they’ve been informed to her satisfaction she informs them again.

“She wouldn’t have broken her ankle if she hadn’t fallen down the stairs,” observes R. “And she wouldn’t have fallen down the stairs if she wasn’t drunk and fat.” He raises a can of Strongbow to his lips and pauses, his eyes staring off at some point beyond the exterior wall, beyond space itself, perhaps. “It’s so simple,” he whispers.

Then he drinks.

For a few moments we stand in silence, solemnly absorbing the ambient noise of the party: in the next room people are shouting and someone is playing bad dance music at high volume. Then I take in a deep breath and say, “I’ve been standing at the top of these stairs with you gentlemen for what seems like a long time now, and I can assure you that I have never had a more profound and moving experience in my whole life.”

“Thanks,” says N.

“Thanks,” says R.

“I really mean it. That fat girl,” I gesture at the fat girl, “in her simple act of falling down the stairs and refusing to get up, has brought the three of us together in a way that I’d never thought possible. I feel as though we’re brothers, lovers, best friends forever; I feel such a profound sense of kinship with you guys that—”

A man passes through our triangle, attempting to get to the floor below. “No entry, mate,” says R. “The fat girl fell down the stairs.”

“—as I was saying,” I continue, “I’m sick to death of the pair of you, and I only wish that it was you who’d fallen down the stairs; fallen down the stairs and broken your stupid necks.”

“Yes, yes,” intones N, “but the fact is that it wasn’t us, it was the fat girl. The fat girl fell down the stairs and no one else, so just shut up and stop whining.”

A well-wisher, having examined the fat girl’s broken ankle for several minutes, declares it unbroken. She strenuously disagrees. R calls out, “Walk it off!” and several other well-wishers look up at him; not all of them seem disapproving. R smiles slyly and takes another swig of Strongbow.

“Why did we ever come here?” wails N. “We should have foreseen this; we should have foreseen that the fat girl would fall down the stairs.”

“How could we?” I reply. “The fat girl is a mysterious entity; her actions are impossible to predict, or even to understand.”

“Still,” says N, “we should have been prepared. We should have brought equipment of some kind.”

“If we had pickaxes we could break her up, no problem,” observes R. “Or even just hammers.”

“I think I saw a hammer in the bathroom,” I say.

No one moves.

“Will one hammer be enough?” asks N.

“The important question is: who’s going to wield it?” counters R.

“Well,” I say, “it was your idea.”

R shakes his head vigorously. “My idea was for all of us to have a go at her. If there’s only one hammer it’s no good.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if there’s only one hammer then only one person is incriminated; the other two could turn him in to save themselves.” R glares at N and me in turn, making plain his distrust.

“Not necessarily,” says N. “We could all take turns using the hammer; then we’d all be equally guilty.”

“Yeah, but what if she only takes one blow?”

“The fat girl?” I guffaw.

“She could survive a direct hit from a mortar,” says N.

“She could swallow a Sherman tank in her sleep.”

“What if she only takes one blow,” continues R, choosing to ignore us, “and then there’s me with a bloody hammer in my hand, trying to explain to the police why I bludgeoned the fat girl to death while the two of you point at me behind my back and pull guilty faces?”

“Don’t be paranoid. You know we’d never do a thing like that,” says N.

“How do you pull a guilty face?” I ask.

Glamorous American Rules

2009-12-30T14:52:00.000-08:00

(For Chris Green. Happy birthday, captain!)

“Chris!”

I turn in the direction of the voice and see a skinny blonde girl carrying a bundle of rags. She staggers over and as she gets close I notice that her eyes are red from crying.

“Where are you going?” she demands, her brow puckering in a singularly unattractive way.

“I’m going back to college,” I reply. She’s quite a bit shorter than me and as I look her in the face my aviators begin to slip off my nose. I try to restore them by jerking my head back but they go flying on to the floor anyway, breaking apart on the hard faux-marble surface.

The demise of my shades doesn‘t even faze her. “But what about us?” she asks. “You said we were going to stay together. You said I was special.”

I take a breath. I don’t want to tell this girl that I have no idea who she is; that would be rude. Plus judging from her demeanour she’d probably freak out and cause a major scene. So I say, “Hey look, babe, we had fun, right? Yeah? But now it’s time to get back to…whatever we were doing before and just say, like, ‘I had a great time but now vacation’s over and I have to get back to my regular day-to-day life and responsibilities and not worry about who did what and who said what under the influence of whatever, you know, substances and so forth.’ Playtime’s over. Back to class. You know?” I smile reassuringly and try to remember what gate my flight is departing from in case I have to make a run for it.

She doesn’t look convinced. “Whatever we were doing before?” she screeches.

I glance around the airport concourse; people are already looking at us strangely. “Yeah, babe, sure. Try to be cool.” I reach out tentatively and pat her shoulder.

“Don’t fucking touch me, prick,” she hisses, recoiling from me.

“Hey, hey, hey. Take it easy.” I’m beginning to freak out myself so I grab a handful of diazepam tablets from my coat pocket and dry-swallow them. They taste bitter; must have mingled with the coke I left in there last night.

At that moment my dealer, Justin, walks through the main entrance. “Hey, Justin!” I shout, desperate to escape my predicament. For a moment he doesn’t seem to recognise me but then his face lights up and he ambles over.

“Hey, Chris. How’s it going?” We high-five and he slaps my ass. “You heading back to college?”

I nod. “You?”

“Yeah.”

Out of the corner of my eye I can see that the crazy blonde girl is standing open-mouthed by my side, apparently too shocked to speak. I try to press the advantage. “So, man, you got any more coke on you?”

Justin looks at me funny. “Dude, this is an airport.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I can’t be bringing illegal substances into an airport.”

“Look at me, you bastard!” whispers the crazy blonde girl. I ignore her.

“So you don’t have anything? Because I could really do with a pick-me-up.”

“Dude, this is an airport.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. What about grass?”

Justin grunts and shakes his head, then he turns to the crazy blonde girl and smiles. “Hey, I’m Justin.”

“Angelique,” she says, barely controlling her anger.

“So are you two, like, an item or what?” Justin was never good at judging the emotional temperature of a situation.

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“No,” I repeat, drawing the word out good and long.

“This says otherwise, bastard.” She holds up the bundle of rags and shakes it vigorously; a timorous crying sound comes from within.

“What the fuck do you have in there?” hisses Justin, glancing around nervously.

A look of utter malevolence overtakes her face; she draws herself up to her full height (about 5’5”) and draws in a deep breath. “What I have in here,” she says, looking me dead in the eyes, “is your incestuous lovechild.”

Some people walk by. I realise that my mouth is open. “Lovechild?” I croak.

“Incestuous?” says Justin.

Angelique nods. She twirls the bundle around her head, laughing like a madwoman. After a few moments Justin starts laughing too.

“Dude, I’d tell you to do the honourable thing but I don’t even know what that is in this case,” he says, punching me in the arm. “Anyway, I have to jet. See you next summer!” He slaps my ass again and then he’s gone.

I grab Angelique by the shoulders and try to talk some sense into her. “Look, this is a mistake,” I say. “I don’t know who you are but I don’t have any sisters and my mom’s been dead for seven years. I do not have an incestuous lovechild.”

She smiles maniacally and kisses me on the lips. This time I recoil. “Don’t play games with me, baby. You have one sister, at least, and I’m her.”

“I never even saw you before.”

“Fuck off!”

“No, I’m totally serious. I didn’t even know your name until you told Justin.”

This seems to shake her up. “But you said…last night you said…”

“Last night, honey, I was passed-out on the floor of a hotel bathroom for 12 hours.” I reach into my luggage and retrieve my camcorder. “And I have the footage to prove it.”

“Passed-out?” She starts to cry again. “But you seemed so…responsive.”

TO BE CONTINUED

The Escapist Forums

2009-12-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

Why on earth do I do it? Why do I return, again and again, to the forums of The Escapist? What possible profit can there be in this endeavour? What gain? Gah.

"Favorite Legendary Pokemon

I've seen plenty of 'favorite pokemon' threads, but the search bar revealed that this one hasn't been covered. I know 'favorite' threads are pretty tired, but I enjoy hearing people's opinions and justifications, so here goes.

I have two.

Lugia: The first time I saw the cover for Pokemon Silver, which was a while before it came out (mind you I was like 8 or 9), Lugia blew my mind, it was the coolest shit ever. Then he was awesome in the game, and then I saw the second movie and he pretty much owned everything. He might actually be my favorite pokemon period.

Groudon: Three words. Solarbeam. Without. Charging."

This individual is clearly literate and self-aware (when it comes to forum etiquette, anyway), so what's gone wrong? Why has he/she chosen to invest time not only in playing Pokemon but in discussing it, too? And how have I ended up reading it? Writing about it? Inanity upon inanity.

The City of Chaos and the Pillar of Skulls

2009-12-25T11:34:00.000-08:00

The first serious homosexual novel set in the Warhammer 40k universe.

The moment was strange. There was no reality in the bar; there was no longer solidity; all things merged, one into another. Time had stopped.

Jim sat alone in a booth, listening to the music which came out of a red plastic box, lighted within. Some of the music he remembered from having heard it in other places. But the words he could no longer understand. He could recall only vague associations as he got drunk, listening to music.

His glass of whiskey and water and ice had slopped over and the top of the table was interesting now: islands and rivers and occasional lakes made the top of the table a continent. With one finger he traced designs on the wooden table. He made a circle out of a lake; he formed two rivers from the circle; he flooded and destroyed an island, creating a sea. There were so many things that could be done with whiskey and water on a table.

The jukebox stopped playing.

A man in black power-armour entered the bar and ordered a drink; Jim eyed him through the haze of an afternoon’s boozing. He was not unattractive: rugged facial features, a few picturesque scars. His head was completely shaved and there was a tattoo across the back of it: a skull, grinning maniacally in death. Jim smiled to himself and took another sip of whiskey.

The next thing he knew, the stranger was standing over him. Time had rushed forward.

“Care for some company?” the stranger asked.

Jim stared at him for a few seconds, trying to remember the correct response. Eventually he just shrugged and the stranger took a seat.

“The name’s Delorean,” said the stranger, “Captain Delorean Firebreath, if you want to be formal.”

“Jim,” said Jim.

The two of them shook hands.

“So, you look like you’ve been here a while,” said Delorean. “Anything going on?”

Jim cast a theatrical glance around the bar. “Nothing to report, captain. If you’re looking for action, maybe you should try the Underhive.”

Firebreath grunted. “Oh, I’ve been to the Underhive; nothing there but Scavvies and rats. Not the kind of action I’m interested in, frankly.” He caught Jim’s gaze and held it for a moment, then leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms behind his head. He stretched his legs out beneath the table and they brushed against Jim’s.

“Getting comfortable?” asked Jim.

“Oh, I don’t mind leaving. If you can think of a better place to go.”

Jim thought for a moment, or tried to think. There was too much alcohol in his blood; the best he could do was to give the illusion of thoughtfulness. He finished his whiskey and stood. “Actually, I have an appointment downtown. If you’re headed that way then maybe we can share a cab.”

Delorean smiled. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

The Following Statement Is False. The Previous Statement Is True.

2009-12-21T15:27:00.000-08:00

A story about Katherine Coleman that contains the words “wall,” “building,” “Michael Jackson,” “whimsical,” “happy,” “bright,” mention of her being a plumber and her name. It can only be 2 paragraphs long (6 sentences each).

Treacle Toffee Month

Katherine Coleman pressed her hands against the wall and pushed until her legs began to tremble and her palms to bleed. Passers-by looked on in confusion. The building would not budge. “Hell!” she cried, “how am I going to bring Michael Jackson back from the dead if I can’t even topple a small family restaurant?” She straightened up and stretched her aching muscles. “Another whimsical project that I’ll never get off the ground.”

Katherine had not been happy for a long time; not since childhood, in fact. In school she had been regarded as a very bright pupil, and her teachers had spoiled her, ultimately setting her on a path of wastage and fecklessness. Now she was 32 years old and a professional plumber, though not a good one. “I should have gone to college,” she whined. “I should have studied law, like I always said I would.” Katherine hung her head and began to sob, quietly at first, then louder and louder until she was practically bawling in the street, so that the proprietor of the restaurant, an elderly Greek man with a fine waxed moustache, was obliged to come out and comfort her; despite his best efforts, she would not stop, and he eventually went back inside to call the police, thinking that she was an escaped mental patient or something, since there was a mental institute not far from there and it was not unheard of for its inhabitants to wander off the property and attack people, although the last incident of that kind had occurred all the way back in 1977, long before the Greek restaurant proprietor had even moved to the country; back then he was still living in his mother’s apartment in Paris with his German lover Josef, who had been the great love of his life, when he came to think about it.

Back on Track for 2010

2009-12-21T03:36:00.001-08:00

Two Fragments from the Recent Past

2009-12-13T23:43:00.000-08:00

Tonight Y commandeers every toast made, orally anointing all those present in his own name. He starts an argument with a solicitor in which he repeatedly threatens to push her down the nearest set of stairs. He drinks heavily, takes coke and talks shit about sex, race and the easiest way to break a person’s collar bone, all of it with the intensity of a man speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal ceremony. At one point he even gets me in a sleeper hold and chokes me into unconsciousness. So why do I like him so much?

Maybe it’s the spontaneous acts of largesse: the rounds bought, the cigarettes given away; he spends 10 minutes arguing with the manager of a club over whether he can buy one of the barmen a drink. Maybe it’s the strange (and distinctly homoerotic) displays of tenderness: he drags me out on to a balcony for a smoke, and when he sees that I’m cold he puts his mouth on the top of my spine and warms my back with his breath.

Then again, maybe it’s just because he carries off a pinstriped suit jacket, green keffiyeh and purple beanie with such panache. I should have learned long ago not to underestimate the extent of my own shallowness.

***

Two hepatitis injections and a blood sample. The nurse delicately inserts the small needle at the point where my forearm and biceps meet; red-brown liquid shoots down the cannula so fast it looks like a movie jump cut. She says sorry for about the fifth time and I tell her that I’m okay, but the truth is I feel surprisingly queasy; it’s unsettling to learn that your bodily fluids are so eager to get away from you. After filling three collection tubes she removes the needle and presses a cotton pad against the puncture; I hold the pad in place while she turns around to get some tape. Then I black out and have an intensely violent dream.

It’s hard to tell exactly what the dream involves—aliens, fist fights, explosions?—but it seems to be rendered in the crude, brightly coloured graphics of an 8-bit videogame. When I regain consciousness my vision is dominated by a beautiful and vaguely familiar face; it takes me a while to realise that it’s the nurse, because I’m convinced that my visit to the clinic took place several weeks ago. She asks me again and again if I’m okay and I tell her each time that I am, although this is primarily a reflex action. Apparently I banged my head on the desk and she thinks I’m going to have a bruise, but when I reach up and touch my face I feel no pain. My body is tougher than it looks, and it never stops reminding me how little I deserve it.

Jack Rose, RIP

2009-12-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

This is a man I met twice, maybe three times. I remember him like this: roaring at the noisy English crowd who'd just talked through a set by his friend and touring partner Glenn Jones. "Shut up, you fucking limeys!" he shouted, to scattered applause. Then he sat down and played the most furious set of instrumental, solo-guitar folk music I've ever heard. Could anyone in attendance that night have claimed otherwise? I suspect not.

Towards the end of the first or second song he broke a string, and had to switch to his spare instrument. This was a large 12 string, and it was hopelessly out of tune; after grappling with the pegs for a couple of minutes he gave up and embarked on a lengthy atonal improvisation. The crowd, who had quietened down after his initial harangue, had grown noisy again, and the few keen listeners drew in close around the stage. My memory of the music has long since decayed, but I remember the intensity of the experience, and the sense of camraderie within that impromptu semicircle of unfamiliar bodies.

Over the subsequent five years I saw him play twice more, and on each of those occasions he was thoroughly amiable, both in performance and conversation. Of course, his playing was always vital and propulsive, but there was more of a meditative quality to it (both concerts took place in candlelit churches), and when the atmosphere became too charged he'd break out a ragtime tune and charm the audience all over again.

I will remember him like this, also: a large, unkempt man sitting cross-legged on the floor among many CDs-for-sale; tired from his labours, but making gracious small talk with acquaintances and admirers. He'd finally begun to receive recognition commensurate with his talents; hostile and indifferent audiences were a thing of the past.

Rest in Peace, Jack Rose.

When I Am Famous...

2009-12-03T11:54:00.001-08:00

...which I will be soon, very soon, this blog will be of great interest to many people. I am writing now for posterity, which makes me a chronicler, a testifier, a kind of prophet, even; I am like one of Jesus' buddies, but with more TopMan paraphernalia.

So, for your delectation, I present a snapshot of my current, tax payer-funded existence. This was taken just before my flatmates and I went out to eat at an extremely well-reviewed restaurant in the nearby Portugese district. I had just spent my weekly subsistence allowance in the purchase of a new coat (pictured, right); I consider it an appropriate use of the money, because it will keep me warm during my pursuit of employment, and it will no doubt impress prospective employers at interview, despite being slightly too large for me (this is the smallest coat that was available; how long an arm is a man supposed to have?).

Nick is also on what used to be known as "the dole," and he had just procured for himself the fetching purple trousers and blue shoes you can see him wearing here. We live like kings; we behave like rodents. All is well.

Kittens

2009-11-27T12:36:00.001-08:00

Taxicab Explication of Aboriginal Genital-Mutilation Rituals

2009-11-26T01:06:00.000-08:00

Hear me, yes, for tonight I have supped on many potent and flavoursome libations; mixed grape and grain and sugar-beet molasses until the air around grew thick as warm water by night, and vortices of unseen origin propelled my body from floor to ceiling, spinning themselves to nothing at velocities no speedometer could ever apprehend. I have watched coloured lights, once hung in state, descend and dance in frenzied counterpoint some atavistic ritual whose function I could not hope to fathom, and felt my head dance with them; a frantic, lilting dance that reminds me of the word “calypso,” although I don’t really know what the word “calypso” denotes. (Note to sober self: look up the word “calypso.”)

I have been sick once, on the sparkling heels of a fat-faced girl with lethal-looking hair and lips painted the bloody purple of a hanged man’s glans. I enjoyed being sick on her, and would happily make her my target a second time, but I doubt that the opportunity will arise now that she is on her guard. I have fought off the persistent advances of an oafish, drunken student and cast myself before a handsome doctor wearing a beanie, and been judged acceptable, and I have boarded the taxi that will take us back to his friend’s place where we will make small talk for a while and then fuck, probably clumsily, on a sofa or a sofa-bed or (praise be for small mercies!) a real actual bed with mattress, sheets and pillows such as will afford a measure of comfort commensurate with the standard of living to which I have become accustomed in my 22 years of riding this inscrutable planet through one effortless, invisible rotation after another.

I have done all of this and I have been neither perplexed nor aggrieved at any point; not until the moment when the skinny white boy who makes up the fourth wheel of our proud, night-coursing triumvirate, and who is evidently the fated plaything of our host-to-be, commenced rattling on about a subject apparently close to his heart, namely male-genital mutilation.

“There’s an amazing diversity of techniques and practices to be observed across the world, even today,” he declaims, waving a single extended finger in the air as though in unconscious phallic tribute. “For example, the Aborigines—that’s ‘Aborigines’ with a capital ‘A;’ ‘aborigines’ with a small ‘a’ means simply the native inhabitants of a given region—the Aborigines perform both the traditional circumcision and also a procedure called a ‘subincision,’ in which the penis is split from head to base along the urethra.”

“Jesus,” says the handsome doctor, whose name, I think, is Saami; he turns to me with a pained expression on his face and I do my best to look sympathetic.

“Apparently, the shedding of blood that occurs during the procedure is considered to represent a male form of menstruation; it’s a rare case of genital mutilation that, far from being misogynistic, is actually rooted in a sympathetic attitude to womanhood.”

As the only lady present, I feel obliged to respond to this observation. “Well, I’m sure Valerie Solanas would have approved, but I’m quite happy for men to keep their genitals intact.” I let my hand fall on Saami’s thigh and see his eyebrows climb a couple of centimetres.

The white boy continues, oblivious to everything but his own voice. “It’s actually caught on as a form of voluntary genital modification in the West. Men choose to have their penises split open, and in some cases completely bifurcated, as an expression of their individuality and self-possession. It’s fascinating.”

“Yes, isn’t it.” I smile sweetly and he seems to get the idea; he turns his attention to the window and watches the night crawl by.

There is silence in the vehicle for a while, not counting the constant hissing of water sent spraying by the tyres, the chatter of passing pedestrians, the driver’s soft and wilfully tuneless humming. It’s so close to peaceful that I find myself nodding off with my head on Saami’s shoulder; he looks down and we both smile like people who’ve known and been close to each other for more than an hour, which is easy enough to do as long as you regard all your sexual partners as essentially interchangeable. This is a bad habit of mine that comes in handy so frequently that I’m loathe to kick it. I close my eyes and try to focus on the humming from the front seat, it having occurred to me that any series of notes is technically a tune, and that enjoyment is a simple matter of deciphering the patterns (intentional or otherwise). I hear snatches of “Frère Jacques,” “Sweet Child of Mine” and something classical they used to play in school assemblies. Then we arrive.

Everything Is Going to Be Okay from Now

2009-11-25T20:47:00.000-08:00

Breasts in videogames, courtesy of some Germans.

I'm trying to think of my favourite pair of videogame breasts; it's a tough call. In retrospect, I think they may all have been bad.

New Game Proposal

2009-11-25T12:11:00.000-08:00

At MakeHands.

Baby Jamz, featuring Solange Knowles

2009-11-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

Check it out on Spotify! (Note the sinister bass line on "The Wheels on the Bus," which mocks the overlying harmony like a kid eating doughnuts outside the window of a Weight Watchers club. A kid with a very low voice.)

The fat girl has fallen down the stairs

2009-11-22T21:36:00.000-08:00

and won’t get up, so we’re stuck on the first floor, chatting and idly observing the efforts of the well-wishers below. “What did you talk about last time you were stuck somewhere?” asks N. I don’t know the answer to this question, so I say “did you know that pro wrestlers always exaggerate their height by about two inches? It’s true. But what’s the point?” The fat girl wails and informs us that her ankle is broken. R points out that “she wouldn’t have broken her ankle if she hadn’t fallen down the stairs. And she wouldn’t have fallen down the stairs if she wasn’t drunk and fat. It’s simple.” Then he takes a swig of Strongbow. Someone tells the fat girl that her ankle definitely isn’t broken, and we’re happy to accept this diagnosis, if only to spite her. Someone else helps her up and takes her to a bedroom to rest, to "let the bones heal," clearing the way for our descent at last. We celebrate this victory by staying just where we are.

A Charitable House Call

2009-11-22T20:51:00.000-08:00

I’m watching some of the oddest porn in the history of human civilisation. Skinny Boy is a virgin at 21 and he’s emailed Porn Starlet asking her to divest him of his shame. She, oddly enough, has agreed. So after a bizarre introduction in which he performs various sex-themed exercises (blowing up a sex doll, putting on condoms…press-ups) the two of them get down to it. Which entails about 10 minutes of her trying to get his camera-shy cock hard in absolute, eerie silence.

She finally gives up on actually touching him and resorts to having him masturbate while she sits with her legs open by his side, affording him a downright gynaecological view of her genitalia. The strangest part is that the camera doesn’t mimic his perspective; you just get a shot of her right leg and his embarrassed face peeking at the secret, sexy treasure behind it.

Eventually Skinny Boy achieves something in the order of an erection; he enters Porn Starlet; he exits; he comes on her face. “Woo!” she cries. “You did it!” The camera pulls back to show him kneeling naked over her. “I did it,” he lamely echoes. Then they’re lying side by side and he’s delivering a stilted message of thanks. Then he's wading fully clothed into the sea. No shit.

Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's a Hat Stand

2009-11-21T20:17:00.000-08:00

I’m watching cartoons with two doctors in the early afternoon. In the present one, two children, a boy and a girl, are accompanying their granddad on a mission to prevent a man with a gold mask from obtaining a 5000-year-old Mayan sword. They’re concerned that he’ll use it to enslave the human race. The boy has a watch that enables him to turn into a variety of powerful animals; right now he’s a frog. The granddad has a “plumbing” suit with rockets in the feet. The girl makes sassy comments.

The doctors know this cartoon well. They remark on its inferiority to a certain alien-themed spin off. During the ads, we see a trailer for yet another spin off: a live-action TV movie. Both of the doctors are excited. They order pizza and fried chicken, but I can’t eat any because last night I mixed every alcoholic drink known to science, plus cocaine.

The three of us are sharing an enormous blanket. Initially, one of the doctors had it to himself, but then the other one commandeered it in the name of the common good. I sit still and upright, so that my innards don’t fall out on to the floor.

It’s strange when you get into a life that you’ve previously seen only from the outside. When you become party to the secret banality of another person’s existence. Strange and sad and reassuring. I walk home in the rain; there’s too much pain in my stomach to think about.

Is There Anything Worse Than...

2009-11-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

...whining about trivial stuff on your blog?

2009-11-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

Bestest band names, episode #2

2009-11-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

The Funky House Un-American Activities Committee

The Demise of Jumbo Miller

2009-11-07T11:50:00.001-08:00

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty

2009-11-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

A little theme tune I rustled up for a friend's Massive Narcissism.

Hallelujah (Monotone Version)

2009-11-03T18:41:00.001-08:00

The Unbelieving Chestnut

2009-11-03T16:17:00.001-08:00

After all these years, I've finally found someone who communicates Biblical teaching in a way I find compelling. Without further ado, let me introduce the number #1 Christian apologist of YouTube: Christian Road Warrior. Thank God.

Happy Halloween, brothers and sisters

2009-11-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

2009-11-02T00:18:00.001-08:00

It’s 4:13 am on a Monday morning, and the domestic disturbance in the flat below mine has long since banished the prospect of my sleeping through the night. I’ve had about an hour’s shut-eye, and I can faintly remember a dream in which I ate dinner at the house of a stranger, a man who spent the whole time describing how he was going to kill me: hanging me naked from the ceiling and severing my genitals with a pair of garden shears, slicing off my face and sending it to my mother in the post et cetera. I was excited by his suggestions, so I didn’t resist when he took me by the hand and led me to his basement, but in the end his chosen method was quite mundane: he simply cut off my head. For some reason this didn‘t prove to be fatal, so he put my head on a high shelf and left it there; I watched with clinical interest as he tortured and dismembered his subsequent guests.

But enough about dreams.

Shake Hands with the Zeitgeist

2009-10-31T18:31:00.001-07:00

I've posted before about the strange trend for literary mash-ups that's arisen recently. God knows if it'll last; seems pretty flash-in-the-pan to me, surely the Internet can provide infinitely more of the same without the expense and the inconvenience of page turning (once every 700 words!). Still, I'm not averse to a bit of prospecting. Thus, I present my contribution to this field of opportunistic hackery:

Imperial March
A Study of Provincial Life in the Mid Rim

Miss Brooka had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which Mon Mothma had appeared before the Senate; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Collected Works of Master Yoda. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably strong in the Force, but with the addition that her sister Celiara had a higher midi-chlorian count. Nevertheless, Celiara wore scarcely more trimmings, and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooka’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being Jedis had something to do with it: the Brooka connexions, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good"; if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any droid-fixing or pod-racing forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or Jedi master.

There you have it; easy as fucking a pie. Or so I imagine.

Those Seen Dancing (excerpt)

2009-10-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

The dance floor is packed with dilated hipsters doing their best two-foot-diameter shuffles and shakes, trying not to dislodge the vintage threads draped carefully over their shoulders. I notice a guy with a Dali moustache and a digital clock on a chain around his neck having a sort of minimalist seizure inside a ring of girls wearing children’s sunglasses. I notice a plastic-clad androgyne with six-inch-tall bleached hair dancing only with his/her mouth, sending a smile rippling across it like a Mexican wave in time to the music. The lights superimpose cycles of colour and shape on the human mass with martial regularity, giving the impression of three or four different dance floors winking in and out of existence in second-long bursts. Like I’m channel-hopping through a succession of club-themed movies, screened on a wall-length TV in the discomfort of my own home.

Then I see it. Somehow, despite the constant motion, the visual white-noise, I see it: a tawdry slice of black polyester, defaced with thin diagonal bands of blue, yellow, red.

Unforgettable.

But I have to get closer; I have to be sure.

I push off the bar and dive into the crowd of bodies, my arms outstretched and palms sealed as in prayer. There’s no risk of losing my target—none of the dancers here will travel more than a couple of metres all night; they move like gyroscopes—but I press ahead at speed, compelled by an imperative that I’m afraid to scrutinise in case it turns out to be bunk. Standing still for too long in a place like this is wearying; it’s like your senses convince you that you’re the pivot for the whole shebang, the evening’s designated Atlas. You have to find an excuse to set yourself in motion, or you’ll cede whatever energy you came in with to the people around you, to the lights and the sound and the fury.

I reach my objective within seconds. What do I say? I say “Hey!” She turns her head in my direction, but I can tell that it’s involuntary; her faculties are clearly allocated elsewhere.

“That tie!” I shout, pointing at her chest.

She mouths something in response: “Yeah?” or “What?” or “Huh?” I can’t tell because she doesn’t deign to raise her voice over the ambient noise.

“That’s my school tie!” I grab the tie and flap it in front of her face for emphasis. “I wore this to school for five years!”

Her eyes fix on the polyester monstrosity, now rippling before her like a Chinese dragon on parade, and her brow creases; it seems as though she can’t figure out how this piece of couture is moving about on its own. I let go and it falls back into position between her breasts.

“Where did you get that?”

“Huh?” she says, for maybe the second time. I lean in closer.

“Where did you get a Bramhall High School tie?”

A hand comes down on my shoulder, and then a tall guy with muscles and dreadlocks draws abreast of me. He smiles in an apologetic way, like an executioner sympathising with the condemned before raising his axe.

“Hey man,” he says, somehow making himself heard without seeming to exert the slightest effort, “I don’t think she’s interested.”

“Oh no,” I reply, shaking my head vigorously. “It’s the tie.”

“What?”

“The tie!” I grab it again, but he plucks it out of my hand and slides between the girl and me.

“Sorry, man. Why don’t you go have a drink?”

For a moment, I’m undecided. On any other day I’d take his advice, but this is a special occasion: I’m in New York City, 3,500 miles from home, and this girl’s wearing my school tie. What sort of a person am I if I can’t make a connection here? If I can’t summon up the spark of heat needed to fuse these two touching wires together? On the other hand, I don’t want to cause any trouble; what if this guy breaks a knuckle on my face and has to drop out of tomorrow’s big cage-fighting contest? Who’s going to feed his family?

“Okay, man,” I say, adopting his preferred mode of address. I raise my hands, palms towards him, in the universal gesture of abject surrender. He smiles again as I back away; a little friendlier this time. The further we are from one another, the closer we get.

The Fucking Crazer: Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Descent into Oblivion

2009-10-18T21:02:00.001-07:00

Kenneth Kimber stepped through the doorway of the courthouse and into the summertime street. He paused to orient himself; busy public places always made him feel uneasy, and when he felt uneasy he struggled to keep track of simple things like geography. He made a visor of his hand and took in the scene before him, methodically noting the various landmarks: the statue of town luminary Mr Henry Schultz, the ornamental fountain, the McDonald’s across the way. Only once all these and more had been processed did he begin to put the picture together, like a man memorising every piece of a jigsaw before attempting to assemble it. He turned right and made his way down the street.

“Kenny!” He stopped abruptly and turned back. Mr Grendel, sweating heavily in a dark suit and tie, was waving at him. “You forgot to sign this!” He brandished a sheet of paper and flapped it about, as though it were a handkerchief, and he a young woman seeing off her beau at the train station. Kenneth ambled back.

“Sorry, I do always forget something, don’t I?”

Mr Grendel nodded in agreement; “It certainly seems so!” he said, handing over the offending document with a flourish.

Just as Kenneth was about to sign, he remembered a story that his grandmother had told him, many years before.

Two wolves are having dinner in the Stockport branch of Pizza Hut. One of them is diabetic, and the other is colour blind. So, the diabetic one, who has to eat pizzas without tomatoes, says “This reminds me of a story my grandmother once told me.” The other one isn’t really listening, because he’s thinking about being colour blind, but the story comes out, all the same.

A man is walking out of a civic building, when someone comes out after him, waving a sheet of paper. “You didn’t sign this,” he says. The first man goes back, but just as he’s about to sign, he remembers a story that his grandmother once told him.

A wolf tells another wolf a story.

A man.

Those Seen Dancing (excerpt)

2009-10-15T08:18:00.000-07:00

Before I continue, some background is in order.

It’s six months ago, and I’m in New York City for the first time in my life—maybe the only time (only time will tell). This is a big deal, for two reasons: 1) because I’m in New York City for the first and maybe only time in my life, and 2) because my book is being published. I am now a real-life poet, with a real-life book, published by a real-life New York publishing company. This is a big deal.

During the flight, I attempt to commemorate the occasion by—what else?—writing a poem. Something about the sensation of being hung between two distant versions of myself, each one a product of my celebrated imagination, more or less. Behind me lies an English boy, a mere 25 years old: studious, lonely and possessed of a bottomless faith in his own fantasies. Also, crucially, a virgin. Ahead of me waits someone infinitely more exciting, cosmopolitan. Someone who gets laid. A lot. Meanwhile, this lost part of me, this part that is no part, sits inside its airborne bowling alley, watching stewards roll with trolleys down the aisles to scatter full-fleshed tourists, painted smiles glinting like pre-emptive pardons on their urethane faces.

I give up.

The woman in the next seat is a paediatrician from Virginia, returning from a visit to her daughter in London. We bond over a mutual abuse of the complimentary wine, and I joke about my outlandish expectations of The City That Never Sleeps: rock stars and artists at every party, a party at every house, every night…no one ever more than two feet away from a party. And no one over the age of 30, except for the crazies loud-haling conspiracy theories in busy thoroughfares—the monumental crazies, like municipal artworks, funded by public money on the sly. She listens and smiles. “That’s exactly how it is,” she says, “except there’s no big secret: Crazy-Person Tax is right there on the form, clear as day.”

She asks me why I’m going to NYC, and I’m not too modest to tell her. “No way!” she says, either genuinely impressed or faking with aplomb, “Congratulations!” We drink a little more complimentary wine, this saver of sick children and I. My book is called The Last Surprise. She tells me that she likes the title, and I promise to give her a copy once we land. I have a couple with me, but fortunately they’re not in my carry-on luggage; the prospect of watching her leaf through with an expression of polite interest, occasionally picking out a fine-sounding phrase, is more than my lack of modesty can support. She tries to get me to recite something from memory, but I feign forgetfulness, and she eventually concedes.

It occurs to me now that I never got around to writing that mid-flight poem; I was too busy watching bad movies and growing quietly drunk, then sober again. And sleeping. I’m not a great sleeper, by the way. I think it’s because I do all my dreaming while I’m awake.

Those Seen Dancing (excerpt)

2009-10-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

The hotel is a pleasant but (relatively) inexpensive place on Manhattan Island itself, which does nothing to temper my overgrown sense of importance. I was supposed to stay at the house of an NYU lecturer called Dr Gawain Ellison, but he’s in hospital with some sort of acute bowel problem. Sickness befalls even these fairytale people, it seems. My room is on the fourth floor, and it affords a fine view of a street and some tall, grey-brown buildings; I’m immediately on the lookout for crazies, but there don’t seem to be any on display right now, just flights of homeward-bound professionals. I check my watch—it’s 6:13 pm Eastern Time.

I promised my sister Melanie that I’d call her on arrival, regardless of the time-difference, so I pick up the hotel phone and navigate my way to an outside line. Six rings pass before she answers.

“Evan? Is that you? Oh my God, how’s New York?”

“Yes—”

“Sorry I didn’t answer quicker; I was so excited I fell asleep.”

“I understand.”

“How’s New York?”

“Well, so far it’s been an airport, a cab ride and a small hotel room,” I report, trying my best to sound blasé through an irrepressible grin.

Melanie sighs loudly down the line. “You’re such a magician with words; I almost feel like I’m there.”

“I’m probably over-selling it.”

“No doubt. So you haven’t seen any celebrities yet? Any famous landmarks? Violence in the streets?”

“I think they call it ‘street violence’ here, and no. Not close-up, anyway.”

“How long have you been there?”

“About an hour.”

She snorts. “Jesus, you’re such an under-achiever, even as a tourist.”

“It’s the secret of my success.”

A car horn yelps outside, but by the time I reach the window there’s nothing to see. “Drive-by?” Melanie asks, hopefully.

“You’re thinking of LA,” I pause, “or Moss Side.”

I have two sisters: Melanie and Suzanna. Melanie is The Good One—an ironic title bestowed upon her by our parents in light of various teenage misdemeanours. Minor stuff, really; hence the levity. Suffice it to say that she’s not of studious bent, particularly in comparison to her academically minded siblings. That might be part of the reason that everyone in the family likes her best.

“So what do you have planned for your first night in the Big Apple?”

I sit down on the single bed and leaf through the hotel’s hospitality materials. “Well, I was supposed to be getting wined and dined by the university guy—”

“You mean the one with the bowel problem? Dr Lancelot or something?"

“Dr Gawain.”

“Knights just aren’t what they used to be.”

“Yeah, drastic decline in the dragon population; knight life expectancy has gone way up.”

“Nightlife expectancy?”

“That too.”

“You know what you should do? You should go and find a sleazy New York bar and pick up a hot New York chick, one of those skinny ones with the T-shirts that have messages on them. A rock musician or something.”

“Yeah, sounds pretty tolerable.”

“I mean, that must be the easiest thing in the world for an exotic, foreign poet like yourself.”

“Presumably.”

“And bring me back some Jimmy Choos.”

“Those are shoes, right?”

She snorts. “That city is wasted on you.”

The Uppermost Part of the Water Feature (excerpts)

2009-09-30T09:35:00.001-07:00

Celia Agamemnon laughed.

She stood naked, save for a necklace constructed with beads of her own frozen period blood, on top of an overturned skip; a pile of refuse stretched out below her, its metallic constituents catching the morning sunlight with the diamond black sparkle of freshly mined coal. Although she was no more than four feet above the ground, Agamemnon felt a sense of elevation reserved usually for the most audacious of sky pilots. Her body felt heavy with the potential of its descent, a descent pictured rapturously in her mind’s eye—not as the desperate tumble of a clumsy mountaineer, but the furious dive of a kamikaze bomber or a comet racing gravity to its own demise, its name cut with fire across the sky’s grey poker face. She dropped into a crouch and launched herself up into the void.

***

Agamemnon grabbed a pencil and began to sketch. Her companions stood transfixed as black lines accumulated on the white page, quickly knitting together to form a cohesive design. Such was the power of the transformative process unfolding before their very eyes—the conversion of isolated, abstract elements into a great wholeness—that the design itself almost seemed unimportant. It was, however, extremely brilliant. Agamemnon finished and hurled the pencil to the floor, where it broke into two exactly equal parts. “Bravo!” cried her audience as one. She did not smile—their approval was not important to her.

***

“See here, you’re creasing them, you fool,” said Milton Pistolwhip, as he reached forward and plucked the schematics from the clerk’s puny hands. He stepped over to a nearby table and unfurled the papers once more, then rolled them into a perfect cylinder, which he then sealed expertly with a blue elastic band.

“Gee, sir,” said the chastened young man, “you really know how to work those papers. Could you possibly show me some time?”

“If I ever have a chance,” grunted Pistolwhip, irritably. “But right now I have a public swimming pool to construct, if only the creeps at city hall will let me.”

"Are they still giving you trouble, Mr Pistolwhip?” enquired the clerk, in a solicitous, weasel-like tone.

Pistolwhip smiled. “Insects are no trouble, boy. Not for me.” His laughter echoed around the chamber, causing its surfaces and fittings to shake like frightened children. The clerk recoiled in terror, feeling as though this glimpse of his employer’s true power had robbed him of five years of his life. For once, he was right.

So, Recently...

2009-09-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

It’s only the second night since Nick arrived, completing our south London triumvirate, and we’re already flagging. Rather than going out to a secret, subterranean club full of coked-up fashion designers and moviemakers, where we might pick up half-crazed androgynes for combative, drug-fuelled sex romps, we decide to stay home and watch a movie. One I’ve already seen, actually.

We figure that this course of action requires alcoholic enhancement, and launch an expedition to the local Threshers. As we enter, a woman’s trying to pay with a fake Scottish note, which the middle-aged guy behind the counter cheerfully exposes using the shop’s black light. This revelation provides him with the opportunity to launch into a lengthy monologue on suspicious foreign currencies, eliciting occasional grunts of acknowledgement from the woman. By the time she manages to reach the door he’s talking about the treacherousness of Irish pounds, at which point she cuts him off mid-sentence with an emphatic “Thanks, bye!” and exits. He echoes her farewell without missing a beat.

A few moments pass while the three of us choose some cheap beers, but when we approach the counter he just picks up the “conversation” where he left off, as though, in his mind, all customers represent a continuous organism.

“It’s a good bit of kit, this,” he says, gesturing to the black light. “Shows up fake notes…and fake IDs.” He smiles maniacally. “Speaking of which, I’m going to have to ask you guys to show me some.”

“Sure,” I say, trying to seem as amiable as possible. I can well imagine this guy affecting the same sunny demeanour while popping my testicles with his bare hands. I pass over my driving licence and he scrutinises it briefly.

“Thanks!” he says, handing it back.

The card machine seems to take an age, and he keeps talking throughout. “We’re really clamping down these days. Going the American route: no ID, no service. It’s even stricter in Scotland.”

Nick chips in, for which I’m grateful. “There’s a place in Glasgow where they won’t even accept driving licences, only passports.”

“Really?” I say.

“Oh yeah,” replies the guy behind the counter, as though he knows all about this already.

Before we leave, the guy calls us back. “Give me your licence again.” I hand it over and he slides it under the black light, exposing the previously invisible watermark. “Look at that,” he says. He seems tremendously pleased.

The Fucking Crazer

2009-09-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

Also worth mentioning (I use the word "worth" in a loose way): recent installments of The Fucking Crazer. Therein I and a small number of my compatriots attempt to reproduce the openings of classic novels we haven't read, using only a sparse synopsis as a guide. It's supposed to be funny, but I usually forget.

Here are my contributions:

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

The Road to Vault City

2009-09-27T04:57:00.001-07:00

He stood there in the wasteland for half a day while his wounds healed, while burns cooled and cuts squeezed themselves tight shut. Stood there until he felt good and strong again, enough to be moving off at any rate. His few scattered possessions he gathered once more in the capacious pockets of his homemade suit of armour: an assault rifle from before the war, a customised handgun, a combat knife, a sledgehammer, 200 rounds of ammunition, half-a-dozen grenades, a well-stocked medical kit, a selection of cold cuts from various mutated beasts, a torn and soiled leather bodysuit, a small potted plant, three bottles of whisky and nearly 1,500 bottle caps. The spear that had that very morning pierced his side lay close to where he stood and he thought about taking it with him as a keepsake but decided not, for fear of overburdening himself.

For three days he walked, his eyes fixed always on the grey horizon. After a time it seemed like the sky and the earth were trembling where they met, like it was fear of the other’s touch that kept them always apart, that kept him always from reaching his destination. He didn’t see another soul, save for a pack of wild dogs that he blew to pieces with a fragmentation grenade. One of them survived the blast, and he finished it off with a punch to the groin as it tried to limp clear; despite the pain, the animal made no sound. He thought about this and tried to imagine the music of his own death, now surely but weeks, days, hours away. He was headed south and that was where his death was going too, closing with each step until the appointed hour when it would draw level and cancel him out once again. He thought on how he felt about this and realised that he felt nothing at all. Dying was a regular chore in the wasteland; no sooner did you get it done than another morning’s light would creep over the horizon and it was time to do it over.

The first settlement he encountered was no more than a couple of ruined shacks and some ruined people huddled about them. A green luminous haze marked the city limits, if you could call them that, and exotic music drifted up from somewhere out of sight. He first approached a ragged woman with a missing face but she just kept saying the same thing over and he gave up on the conversation quick. The second person was a kid wearing armour just the same as his, and he talked about raiders coming from the east and killing whoever they saw. Men and women with rifles and shotguns who never did anything but fight and kill and die, so far as anyone could tell. The kid asked for help and he said he would help, but first he needed to find a certain place that was supposed to be nearby, did he know where it was maybe? The kid said that he would tell him afterwards.

It was only a few seconds later that they came. Five of them, armed like the kid had said and screaming death like they were bringing down a curse on all mankind. He took aim with his assault rifle and put three rounds in a stranger’s skull, blowing it to pieces. It was as if he’d let out some great pressure that was already locked inside there, waiting for the right moment to obliterate the small chamber of bone and all its delicate contents. The others he killed quick in the same manner, and after he’d done it he felt only a sense of enlargement, like the removal of these other people had given him space to expand. To ascend to some new level that was indistinguishable from the one before but different all the same.

Thanks mister, said the kid who’d asked for his help. That place you want is a ways south of here. Maybe a day’s walk if you hurry. He thanked him and accepted a handful of bottle caps in payment. Then he set out again.

So, Recently, Again...

2009-09-27T04:55:00.001-07:00

I go to see a band that someone I used to know at sixth form plays in, and once we’re through catching up I chat to several of his partner’s attractive female friends. One of them is called Martina; she tells me that her mother is half-Greek, half-Swiss and her father is German, but she was born and bred in London. She tells me that she wasn’t sure what she was doing for a while, but now she’s going to Brighton to study Interior Architecture. She has a stud in her nose and she’s wearing a black hat that’s almost but not quite a beret. She just came from her first belly dancing lesson and claims to be unpleasantly sweaty. She has beautiful skin. It occurs to me that I’m attracted to her. We talk for about five minutes, during which time I briefly try on her hat, although she protests that her hair is gross. Then we go upstairs to watch the band play. She leaves immediately afterwards.

I talk to other people for a while, including a girl named Serena who discusses London’s vermin problem with me. She quotes the famous phrase about how no one is ever more than two metres from a rat, and I hypothesise the existence of a small but dedicated team of rodents that rush around at breakneck speed so as to fulfil this statistic. Then I add weight to my argument by citing the movie Aliens, in which a handful of xenomorphs are made to seem like a huge swarm through careful camerawork and editing. The way she pretends to be impressed is quite endearing. Meanwhile, my sixth-form friend, by whose side I stand throughout, fields the criticisms of a tall blond guy who thinks that the band lack stage presence. This guy looks like someone who’s twenty but looks older; after a while I notice that he’s wearing what appears to be a wedding ring.

On the way home the tube is full of couples. Or maybe I just imagine it.

So, Recently...

2009-09-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

Lulworth House in the London borough of Lambeth. A five-storey, brown-brick structure comprising ex-council flats, which they’re now calling "ex-authority" or something—one of those periodic lexical switcheroos that keeps things from sounding too grim, like "Sellafield" for "Windscale".* This grubby top-floor apartment is now the base of operations for my conquest of London, or it will be, just as soon as it has electricity and an Internet connection. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

To be frank, I’m not feeling all that imperious right now. The latest session with the letting agents has sapped away the little energy I can bring to bear on a Monday morning; I’ve just signed more documents than it takes to condemn a man to death in some countries—that’s how it is when property is involved. Moreover, I’ve arrived at the flat to find that it’s in exactly the same condition as it was when I looked at it three weeks ago, and since I just signed a form to confirm that the property has been professionally cleaned that makes me what they call a "sucker". The landlord hasn’t even installed a shower unit, which was the one and only stipulation that I could think of when I first put in an offer, even though most of the locks are broken, the wallpaper is coming off in foot-long strips and there’s a hole in the bathroom sink. On the plus side, the lounge boasts a mirror that’s at least six feet across, and someone’s left a complimentary umbrella on the coat stand.

I claim the solitary bedroom with a working lock, not because it provides an additional layer of security—it’s only one of those miniature sliding bolts you get in bathrooms, a modesty lock—but because I want to know that I have a place to masturbate without fear of interruption. Or, who knows, maybe even have sex. I then set about scavenging the best furniture from the rest of the house, as per SOP; I find a small desk and a rickety office chair with wheels. By the time I’m finished, my room is looking damn near palatial. I’m so overcome by the sight of it that I have to lie down on the flabby mattress for about two hours, which doesn’t quite fit in with my programme of rigorous self-improvement. Still, there’ll be plenty of time to build Rome later.

It’s about one-thirty in the afternoon when I finally rouse myself, and I decide that it’s time to get moving. It doesn’t even matter where; the important thing is to establish some momentum. I can figure out what to do with it afterwards. On the way down the stairwell I run into the perfect stereotype of an Afro Caribbean man: dreadlocks, unkempt beard, bloodshot eyes. He politely gives way, allowing me to pass. This is necessary because he’s carrying a small canoe. The car park is full of Audis and BMWs, which I find reassuring: if people who are richer than me live here, then I won’t be an obvious target for burglary. I count about half-a-dozen luxury cars, maybe a quarter of the total vehicles. They can’t all belong to drug dealers, surely?

***

I go north—that’s where the action is. An anonymous driver does his best to mow me down outside Vauxhall Tube, deliberately accelerating when he sees me stepping out, but I manage to leap clear. After crossing the river at Vauxhall Bridge I stop and turn around to check out the scenery I’ve left behind: on one side lies the MI6 building, which is a fantastic, nonsensical edifice straight out of a sci-fi comic; it looks like the imperial palace of some extra-terrestrial despot, or perhaps an inter-galactic colonial headquarters—the sort of thing that appears on the covers of Ayn Rand books. It also reminds me of the anthropomorphic cities from the Transformers cartoon.** On the other side of the road is a collection of glass-and-steel structures know as St. George’s Wharf. By day these buildings appear to be typical examples of the sort of futuristic corporate architecture that’s recently been metastasizing throughout major cities the world over, but at night, illuminated by points of coloured light and the reflections of the shimmering Thames, they take on the quality of gigantic exposed circuit boards, slotted into the protesting earth by some divine computer engineer.

Rather than heading north to Victoria, I turn right and make my way along the river bank. I walk straight past the Tate, then double back, feeling guilty about my philistine indifference. During the nine months I spent in Bloomsbury in 2004/5 I failed to visit a single gallery or museum; this time it’ll be different, or so I tell myself. Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m still as nonplussed by the visual arts as ever. After wandering around for twenty minutes I head for the gift shop, where I realise that I am capable of enjoying paintings, but only when they’re reproduced as 4x6 postcards. It’s just like browsing record sleeves.

There’s an ice cream van in the park next to the Houses of Parliament, but it seems to be unoccupied, and the man standing in front of it is being questioned by two police officers. I hang around for a while, holding out hope for a mid-afternoon breakfast of Mr Whippy, but the interrogation continues for at least fifteen minutes, after which I move on. By way of compensation, I treat myself to a meal at a subterranean McDonald’s, which is populated entirely by foreign tourists and guys with muscles and tribal tattoos. I sample the new M, a ciabatta sandwich with Emmental cheese that somehow conspires to be more flavourless than the average white-bun burger. I’m genuinely surprised by how poor it is, even considering the low expectations attendant to any McDonald’s purchase; all the same, I enjoy it immensely.

I see a man wearing a PayPal T-shirt. I hear another man, plump and middle-aged, telling his pre-pubescent son what to do if someone makes trouble for him. "Take them out",*** he says, to which the boy sensibly replies that he’s too small and weak to incapacitate an adult. His dad tells him to use his knees, or maybe he tells him to go for their knees; I can’t say for sure, but I’m reminded of my own father’s perennial advice to "go for the eyes", which I tried once with mixed success. In HMV I find an espionage novel written by Hugh Laurie and an unauthorised biography of Danny Dyer, "Britain’s toughest star". Later, I witness a young Asian guy doing a walk that I've never seen before. It demands a name, so I christen it the "Macho-Man Mince". It’s probably a pretty good reproduction of the way tough guys move around in prison the day after they’ve been sodomised.

*Clear evidence for the unsung optimism of British culture; would Chernobyl have retained its name to this day if it had been situated in Cumbria?
**Viewed from the north side of the river, the head is clearly visible: a recessed, semi-circular chamber in the centre of the building, flanked by two stratospheric towers that evoke hideously protruding shoulder blades. Decorative crenulations run along its top, giving the impression of a crown.
*** The gender-neutral pronoun evinces a pleasingly progressive attitude towards violence.

Punching Donkeys on the Sea in the Absolute Absence of Donkeys (if You Get Where I'm Coming from)

2009-09-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

Ho ho ho! So we're out here again on the boat looking at the sea which is emerald green and sapphire blue and shines like fresh-spit saliva and we're soaking up the sun like there's a law and checking out these chicks we picked up in town who look like they're almost ready to start humping each other for our delectation and plying them good and proper with the juice of the vine when suddenly there's this like enormous CRASH noise and we all take a look around and realise that the boat's ploughed headlong into this fucking massive rock which is so fucking HUGE that we didn't even see it coming like it was too big to process or something and then we realise that a couple of the girls got knocked overboard by the force of the impact and their friends are spazzing out like they're on a truly egregious acid trip all flailing their arms and screeching and going HELP HELP SAVE MY FRIENDS! and this is just a major distraction sorry but it's true and so we have to pacify them with the chloroform that we'd brought along just for emergencies and once that's been sorted out we start to hear the wailing of the girls who are in the sea and want help getting out and we throw over a life preserver but it's defective or something because it just sinks straight away and then someone points out that it wasn't so much a life preserver as an anchor but no one can find a life preserver so we throw over a couple of cushions to help make them more comfortable only they've got chloroform on them somehow and the girls in the sea wind up passing out and floating away and then the coast guard turns up and we have to bribe them SO MUCH CASH MONEY to sort it all out that I can't afford to fly to Rome like I'd been intending to and have to go home a week early. Which is a major drag.

2009-09-10T10:32:00.000-07:00

Of all Lemony Ginsberg’s nervous reactions, the worst—at least, the most embarrassing—was her habit of sneezing whenever someone paid her a compliment. According to her mother, this had originated at birth: no sooner had the words “beautiful, healthy baby” escaped the midwife’s mouth than she’d been assailed by a torrent of phlegm, some of which had landed in her mouth, prompting her to immediately vomit. This had set off a chain of sympathetic regurgitations, which left such a mess on the floor of the delivery room that Lemony’s father, Jarule Ginsberg, had slipped and broken his wrist, thereby ending his budding career as a leg spinner for the Kent cricket team.

Of course, Lemony’s mother—whose first name was a mystery even to her family—was prone to exaggeration and embellishment; reality never quite met her standards, and she was always doing her best to spruce it up. Consequently, Lemony had grown up with the conviction that her parents had met jumping out of a burning building, and enjoyed their first kiss in midair, floating through fire and smoke. Also, that they’d been married on a Tupolev Tu-144, cruising in the twilight zone at 1000mph, with tennis legend John Newcombe as best man. Jarule could easily have corrected these misapprehensions, but he’d taken it upon himself never to speak to his daughter, except to say “happy birthday, princess” once a year and, even more infrequently, to ask the time. And so the girl had reached adulthood with the most absurd, romantic ideas.

It was perhaps because of these ideas—and the lack of formative male contact—that Lemony’s sneezing problem became so much more acute when the person delivering the compliment was a young man. Rather than reacting with a polite achoo and a minimal expulsion of bio-matter, she would transform into a high-calibre mucus launcher, drenching her unfortunate interlocutor from head to toe, after which he would rapidly retreat, never to be seen again.

***

High school was tough for “Snotty” Ginsberg. By the end of her time there, she was terrified of coming into contact with men; at university she made a point of living exclusively with women, and wore only maxidresses and old sweaters that she picked up in charity shops. On the surface, these tactics appeared to work splendidly, but her attempts to avoid humiliation were really just a secondary layer in the armour of self-sabotage. Beneath it all she was still a frustrated romantic.

Naturally, she got a cat. An Abyssinian. She called him Mr Jamf, after an offensive acronym she’d heard in a Dirty Harry movie; he was a mangy, disagreeable animal, so the name seemed appropriate. Mr Jamf immediately became the focus for all of Lemony’s pent-up affection: he would receive passionate hugs on an hourly basis, and be made to lie across her shoulders while she wandered about the house, despite the fact that he suffered from severe vertigo, and started twittering like a deranged budgerigar as soon as he left the ground. Ironically, it emerged that Lemony was mildly allergic to felines, so her sneezing continued. But this sneezing was of a more wholesome sort, or so it seemed to her; she attached no particular indignity to it, and made no effort to curb it. Besides, by this point she’d secured a lifetime’s supply of Kleenex tissues, thanks to her frequent patronage of the company, and it would have been a shame to let it go to waste.

***

Years passed and little changed. Mr Jamf grew mangier and more disagreeable, and Lemony’s carbon footprint expanded to dinosaur proportions, but the patterns of their shared life remained constant. Lemony worked from home, designing websites for an endless succession of interchangeable “media” companies; she also dedicated a portion of her daily routine to the composition of love poems in the German Romantic style, or more accurately—since she spoke no German—the style of translations of the German Romantic style. By the time of her 30th birthday, she’d amassed more than 200 of these, each one handwritten and sealed inside an unmarked envelope, never to be despatched. She also collected unplayable 7” singles—augmented by a broken record player—which she left strewn around the house. Were she ever to entertain a stranger, she thought, they’d make a good ice-breaker. Of course, she never did; her only visitors were her mother and a handful of old school friends, all of whom had long since come to take her odd habits for granted.

Lemony celebrated the onset of her fourth decade—or the passing of her third—with a small get-together at her home. She would have been content with an evening spent watching CSI box sets, periodically interrupted by well-wishing phone calls (“happy birthday, princess”), but her friends insisted on her doing something less wilfully antisocial. Wine and cheese seemed like a good fit: tasty, refined and low-key in a way that implied exclusivity. Not to mention that even Mr Jamf could get involved, cholesterol permitting. Her mother regaled the assembly with tales of a recent trip to Madrid, during which Mr Ginsberg and she had stayed in the same hotel as the Czech prime minister, who’d taken them both out shoe shopping. Apparently he possessed the tiniest feet of any man she’d ever seen, and when he laughed he sounded like a little dog choking. Still, he had good taste in footwear; Mrs Ginsberg had told him as much, and he’d demonstrated his gratitude by giving her the Key to the City of Ostrava. He’d intended to bestow it upon a Spanish playwright who’d been involved in the Velvet Revolution somehow, but the man had been killed in a bar fight a few days earlier.

Lemony found her mother’s stories embarrassing, but her friends enjoyed them immensely; they responded to each improbable twist with theatrical disbelief, provoking the narrator to attempt yet more extravagant feats of invention. Tangential incidents accumulated rapidly: a bomb scare at the hotel; a city-wide strike of police, fire and medical services that lasted only 90 seconds; an art installation involving the flooding of a single skyscraper, so that it became an exhibition of waterlogged office workers. It was when Mrs Ginsberg began to relate the story of how Jarule had apprehended a cross-dressing art thief in a public toilet that Lemony decided to slip away. She quietly retreated to her bedroom with a glass of wine, where she sat in semi-darkness, enjoying the noise of her friends and loved ones, and trying her best not to understand what was being said. She imagined herself as a hermit, high in a cliff-side cave, listening to the sound of the sea turning over far below. Mr Jamf, asleep at the foot of the bed, began to snore gently. She sneezed.

After a little while, Lemony grew restless. She stood up and went over to the chest of drawers, from which she removed an envelope at random. She opened it and read what was inside, silently at first, then in a stage whisper. It was good, she thought: it sounded like poetry. Then she thought that maybe it was she who was good, and that the poem was only a piece of evidence. Then she laughed at her vanity. “Lem!” came a call from the other room; she returned the slip of paper to the envelope and filed it away again. Next door her friends were dancing to the silence of a warped 7”, which span unevenly on the needle-less record player. Only her mother, half-drunk and exhausted by her narrative labours, remained seated. Lemony observed from the doorway for a while, until someone lurched out of the throng and grabbed her. “Don’t even try to resist the rhythm!” Lemony pulled away and approached the record player, as if to turn it off. At the last moment she said “Can’t you tell this is a 45?” and flicked the selector switch.

Dedicated to the memory of Lianne Slavin's 25th birthday, and to the good lady herself. (This piece didn't quite come out as I'd intended...)

Other things I used to like that are now an embarrassment

2009-09-04T06:41:00.001-07:00

I guess it makes perfect sense that there would be a publishing company dedicated to Warhammer fiction. It just never occurred to me before (don't ask how I came across it).

"The autocannon roared. ‘Fall back!’ Vertain cried, wrenching his control sticks. His walker reversed, the backwards-jointed legs protesting with a hiss of angry pistons. Solid rounds pinged and clanged from the pod’s sloped armour, while the Sentinel’s underslung cannon replied in a percussive burst of thunderclap after thunderclap."

[Cadian Blood: An Imperial Guard novel by Aaron Dembski-Bowden]

The main character is called Parmenion Thade, which is a reference to Alexander the Great's top general and the word 'thade'. (I know this because of a fantasy novel I read in high school, so it's not like I'm an arbiter of Cool or whatever.)

Anyway, there's nothing that I can say about this. Except to note that the text in the PDF excerpt seems to be about size 20.

Inspector Roland and the Case of the Green Plant

2009-08-24T03:54:00.000-07:00

Inspector Roland paced back and forth in the narrow space between his desk and the door of his office, muttering to himself furiously and repeatedly clenching and unclenching his fists. It was around 7am, and the air was thick with the smoke of the many cigarettes that he had consumed or left smouldering in his overpopulated ashtray over the course of the night. The office window was painted shut, and opening the door would have restricted pacing space; besides which, Roland maintained that he could think more clearly in a low-oxygen environment, and his recent successes—in the Case of the Dirty Floor, the Case of the Rusty Hull and the Case of the Tasty Sturgeon—seemed, to him, to confirm this suspicion.

This case, the Case of the Green Plant, had been troubling Roland for almost two weeks. It was unusually convoluted. Mme Chloe Delphon, widow to the late Baron of Harcourt, had reported what seemed to be a straightforward burglary at her property; Roland had arrived to investigate, only to find that the single thing missing from the house was the colour green…or so Mme Delphon claimed. He was incredulous at first, but a thorough inspection of the property (Inspector Roland’s specialty) had revealed that there was, indeed, a complete absence of the colour in question, and since it was inconceivable that this had come about by chance, he was forced to accept the widow’s report.

And so had begun a fortnight of frenzied investigation. An expert in deduction, Roland had focused his efforts on thinking very hard about the limited evidence at his disposal; unfortunately, this had proved unfruitful. Exhausted by his efforts, and brought to the point of a nervous break, he had called in help from one of his habitual lovers, a botanist named Marie Vuitton. His hunch was that there was a naturalist angle to the case, since the colour green had such a close connection with plant life. However, the young lady was unable to offer any practical assistance, other than to provide him with the use of her delightful young body for a few hours.

Refreshed by the intense sexual encounter, Roland had redoubled his efforts: he directed his enquiries towards the city’s many arts & crafts shops, hoping to see whether anyone had attempted to fence a lot of green in the days following the break-in. A tip-off had taken him to a brothel in the red light district, an establishment that specialised in a service called “Abstract Sexpressionism,” which allowed paying gentlemen to create artistic works by covering the bodies of whores in paint then rolling around with them on huge sheets of paper. Roland had posed as a customer, but, although he had investigated every one of the sixteen girls working at the brothel, he had come away none the wiser as to the whereabouts of Mrs Delphon’s missing hue.

“Perhaps more smoking is needed,” thought Roland to himself, as he lit his first cigarette of the official working day. He opened the door of his office and called out into the hallway: “Jacques! Where are you, Jacques?!” There was a crashing noise, and a few moments later Roland’s beleaguered assistant appeared. “You called for me, Inspector?” he asked. Roland thrust his cigarette case into Jacques’ hands: “Here,” he said, “you must smoke all of these up at once!” “But Inspector! I don’t smoke!” Roland frowned in displeasure. “You will do as I say. Look, you’ll need a light.” He offered Jacques a match; the young assistant accepted it begrudgingly and drew in a lungful of smoke.

***

“Inspector, I really must know,” said Mme Delphon, her voice filled with admiration, “how was it that you identified the culprit?” Roland raised his head from between the widow’s plump thighs and dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin. “It was quite simple. I suspected that it was someone close to me, since a villain will often conceal himself in plain view, as it were.” Mme Delphon acknowledged the inspector’s wisdom with a stately nod. “What’s more, I knew that my assistant was a great lover of colours, since he often remarks on the coordination of my outfits; all that I needed to do was to make him expose himself.” “And so,” finished Mme Delphon, “you gave him the cigarette knowing that he would be unable to conceal his treachery; that he would immediately turn green?” “That’s right. It’s a pity, because he was a good assistant. But one must remain ever vigilant; as soon as he’s returned all the green that he stole, he will be punished to the full extent of the law.” With that, Roland lowered his head again. Moments later, the halls of the widow’s manor were echoing with cries of pleasure.

The lovers fell back against the headboard, utterly depleted by their sexual explorations. Roland took two cigarettes in his mouth and lit them both; he handed one to Mme Delphon, who accepted it reluctantly. “I don’t usually indulge,” she protested, her voice strangely tremulous. “One must always smoke after making love,” replied Roland, “it helps to clear the head, and wards off unwanted pregnancies.” “Oh, but I really mustn’t; I’m not keen on gasses at all.” Roland seized the cigarette from her and playfully jammed it into her mouth; he held her jaw shut with one hand and her nose with the other. “You’ll smoke it and you’ll like it!” he commanded, with a smile.

***

“How on earth was it that you knew?” asked the Chief Inspector, his aged features assembled in a mask of perplexity. “It was a perfectly straightforward matter,” replied Roland. He began to describe how he had finally exposed the widow herself as the culprit, thereby exonerating the ill-fated Jacques and winning his lifelong loyalty. As he did so, his gaze drifted across his superior’s desk, alighting on a handsome potted plant. “I see that you are admiring my Pereskiopsis?” “Why yes; it’s very healthy looking. Very…” Roland looked back at the Chief Inspector to find that he had a revolver in his hand. “Not quick enough, my young friend!” There was a loud click as the old man pulled the trigger, but no bullet issued from the firearm. “A-ha!” cried Roland, victoriously.

Dedicated to Roland Le Good, on the occasion of his birthday.

How not to write an article for a videogame website

2009-08-09T06:00:00.001-07:00

I've not posted for a while (as ONE person has observed) because I've been mad busy writing a piece for The Escapist.* Also, I've been watching Classic Goldie and a lot of pornography.

Anyway, I thought I'd put up some excerpts of the article in question--give an insight into my thought processes. Bear in mind that this is for a videogame website that wants people to write about robots.

"But Terminator 2 doesn’t just represent a director compromising his original vision to spectacular effect: it reflects a gradual change in Western society’s attitude to technology, a shift in the balance of power between the evangelists who foresee only an unbroken succession of brighter tomorrows, and the paranoiacs who fear that the onward march of progress will entail human losses too grievous to countenance. "

"The 'normalisation' of robots (so that they are now stand-ins for the Other in general—reflecting entrenched multicultural concerns) is part of the arc of their personalisation. In the early 20th century they were still machines first and foremost, threatening the working classes with destruction. However, as the Western world became more post-industrial this image carried less currency; technology became more 'domesticated,' infiltrating our homes—our private lives and leisure time."

"These days, life for those of us in the so-called 'developed world' seems to operate according to a central paradox: on the one hand there’s a powerful sense of inertia—an End-of-History vibe that says 'things are pretty much okay now, and they’re probably going to stay that way'—and on the other there’s a shrill apocalypticism, manifesting primarily in alarmist media coverage of climate change, flu pandemics, falling birth-rates and killer meteorites."

This is the sort of high-fallutin' drivel I churn out on a daily basis. Is it any wonder I never get anything finished?

*Please note: The Escapist isn't aware of this fact yet, and it may well reject the piece...if I ever finish it. I don't mean to give the false impression that I'm a real writer.

Typo of the day

2009-08-09T05:55:00.000-07:00

"Never has there been a better time than now, to raise the moral of our brave lads and lasses."

Text of a webpage promoting a concert in honour of British servicemen and -women.

David Robert Wilson’s Journal - 12 January 1996

2009-07-28T17:06:00.001-07:00

It’s been more than a week since I last wrote in here, so I guess I better make amends. I’ve been pretty distracted with helping Stuart and Pam—they’re having a tough time with the new baby coming at Christmas and everything, since they don’t really have immediate family to help out. I don’t mind helping though, Angelica’s a real cutey, although I do hope they get that lesion dealt with sooner rather than later. That’s hospitals for you!

Margaret’s definitely put on a bit of weight over the last month—I saw her trying on that blue dress Stephanie got her last year and it doesn’t fit too well. I’m pretty sure she wore it on Anthony’s birthday, back in November, and it was fine then. Still, I’ve put on a couple of pounds myself…damn those mince pies and chocolate selection boxes! Need to go running again soon, just waiting for this damn cold to pass.

Read something in the paper about this new scientific study that shows how life expectancy is all to do with posture. Apparently that’s why monkeys don’t live as long as humans. Seems interesting, might have to look it all up.

Bestest band names, episode #1

2009-07-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

Christian Science Minotaur

Silliest and Best

2009-07-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

Friends, rejoice: Muse’s “leaked” song from their forthcoming album, The Resistance, has finally been found. “United States of Eurasia” was released in the form of six USB sticks, which were distributed around the world for obsessive fans to track down. The finished article, now available on YouTube, is every bit as grandiose as we’ve come to expect from England’s foremost apocalyptic glam-rock trio. It also playfully invokes the band’s influences through some pretty explicit musical quotations. There’s the harmonious crescendo from Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” the imperious brass theme from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (“The Slave Children’s Crusade”) and, finally, a neat rendition of Chopin’s “Nocturne in E-flat Major.” And those are just the ones I identified on my first listen.

Full disclosure: I was an obsessive Muse fan myself, back in the early years of this millennium (when I was 16/17, you know). But, as my tastes matured, I came to regard the band as a horrifying embarrassment—they became a symptom of a teenage identity I wanted badly to leave behind: angsty, histrionic, effete…hell, take any word that’s used to malign society’s most idiotic age-group; that’s Muse to a T.*

And yet, as more time has passed, I’ve developed a sort of sneaking appreciation of the band. As they’ve become more overtly kitschy and silly, so has it become easier to like them; just check out the kung-fu, sci-fi, spaghetti western (not just western; spaghetti western) video for “Knights of Cydonia.” That’s some truly sublime nonsense, particularly the slapping-to-passionate-lovemaking sequence, which I think is just about the neatest little send-up of cinematic sexual politics you’ll find in any music video. (Not to mention, oh God, the unicorn money-shot!)

It’s true that they’re best in small doses, but that’s true of all kinds of good things: recreational drugs, pornography, sugar, giving blood…you name it. So I’m actually kind of looking forward to The Resistance, particularly as it apparently boasts some overblown orchestral arrangements. I won’t pay for it, mind. Now that would be embarrassing.

*Samples from Muse’s AllMusic “moods” list: dramatic, paranoid, brooding, volatile, angst-ridden, aggressive.