Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Dunkle Gestade (Aufgesang)

Well, the Royal Mail has very slightly redeemed itself in my eyes by delivering to me this morning a box full of books. The books in question are copies of my German collection, Dunkle Gestade. At last the book has been released. I don't actually have a great deal to say about the event. It's reassuring to me that something else of mine has been published. But I'm too tired to philosophise about it right now.

The book is published by Blitz-Verlag. It is part of their "Edgar Allan Poe's Phantastilche Bibliothek" line of books. This is appropriate because there is a Poe reference in the title of the book. The selection of stories on offer here is different to the selections in any of my English publications. For that reason it was necessary for me to think of a new title. I don't speak German, so I had to liaise with my contact at Blitz on this matter. I came up with a number of titles that were basically quotes from poems by Edgar Allan Poe (as well as some others that I made up myself). For a while it looked like we might use 'A Demon in My View'. Then my contact picked up on another suggestion I had made - a quote from Poe's 'The Raven' - which was 'Night's Plutonian Shore'. This he translated as, well, as 'Dunkle Gestade'. Translated back into English, this apparently means 'Dark Shore'. However, I am reassured by a number of German people that, in German, this is really a wonderfully poetic phrase. So, thank you to my contact at Blitz, Markus Korb.



The 'aufgesang' part of the title denotes this volume as one of two. As yet I'm not sure when Volume Two will appear. The tales included in Volume One are 'Cousin X', 'The Mermaid' (Die Meerjungfrau), 'Decay' (Verfall), 'The Recluse' (Der Einsiedler) and 'The Meat Factory' (Die Fleischfabrik). I find this an interesting selection. Most of these are very early tales, and 'The Meat Factory' has never been published anywhere before; it has its debut in German translation.

There are also very atmospheric illustrations from Mark Freier throughout.

Now I'm going to see if I can learn German by comparing the translation with the original.

One more slap can't hurt you

Well, this blog seems to be full of hate recently, but, unfortunately, that can't be helped. It's not something I feel proud of. I suppose I'm just not inclined to hide it. Not when I write, anyway. Sometimes I think I'm the kind of person who could end up taking a shotgun into a shopping centre out of sheer frustration. It's probably better all round if I only give it both barrels figuratively here on the blog, though. Speaking of which, my first target tonight is people who misuse the word 'literally'.

Let's look at the dictionary definition of literally, shall we:

...taking words in their usual or primary sense and applying the ordinary rules of grammar, without mysticism or allegory or metaphor...

Well, as usual, the dictionary definition is less than definitive, but we'll have to work with it, focusing particularly on "without mysticism or allegory or metaphor".

The other night, I saw a trailer for some history programme or other recounting the voyage of Columbus. The narrator, speaking of sailors suffering from extreme thirst and malnutrition, told us that their lives were "literally hanging by a thread".

Okay, first of all, no they weren't. What you meant to say was "figuratively hanging by a thread". Secondly, I don't think it's even possible for a person's life to hang by a thread in a literal manner. How would you attach the thread to the person's 'life'? Because that's what you would have to do if the phrase were to be literal. You could say the people themselves were hanging by threads, if that were physically true, although they would probably have to be very strong threads.

This abuse of the word 'literally' makes me angry for a number of reasons. First of all, I'm an unashamed pedant - or, anyway, only half-ashamed - and I think it's actually a good thing to care about language and the preservation of its proper use so that, like a delicate tool, it remains sharp, not blunted in the hands of the clumsy. I am not a snob. I did not have a great education. In fact, I rather resented the fact that by the time I was at school, it was deemed patronising to teach children how to speak English. I was taught virtually no grammar at all, and had to educate myself in this area afterwards. I am still in the middle of educating myself, so I know that we all make mistakes. I don't think that a person should be shot merely because he or she says "there's some plates in the kitchen" instead of "there are some plates in the kitchen". As I say, everyone makes mistakes. However, some mistakes are harder to endure than others. The abuse of 'literally' is a case in point. Why? Well, this brings me to my other reasons. In the case of 'literally', the word serves a purpose that is served by NO OTHER word in the English language. In other words, if this popular misuse of the word is eventually accepted as correct usage, because of the sheer number of people habitually committing the error, we no longer have any word to say what 'literally' is meant to say.

Let me give an example. When people misuse the word 'literally', they are generally trying to say that something is 'really' the case in an emphatic way. In other words, they are trying to say that they are not exaggerating. This habit has obviously come about because people are so prone to exaggeration in the first place. (Exaggeration, by the way, has ruined many good words in English. 'Awful' once meant what is says, full of, or inspiring awe. Now, something that is 'awful' is more likely to inspire contempt.) For instance, Brian may have found his friend Frank's jokes fairly amusing. They caused him to chuckle. He relates this to his other friend, Linda, and says, casually, that he was killing himself laughing. Linda senses that this is an exaggeration. She doesn't think he found the jokes extremeley funny, simply reasonably funny. Therefore, when she sees Frank accidentally cut off the tip of his finger with the paper guillotine, and laughs so much it hurts, she wants to convey to her friend Michelle that she is not exaggerating her mirth, and she says that she was "literally killing [herself] laughing". However, the use of the word 'killing' here is metaphorical. It is a figure of speech. For Linda to have been literally killing herself laughing, she would have to have succumbed to a heart attack on the spot, or, in her hysterical glee, siezed up a letter-opener and disemboweled herself with it.

Sorry for those of you who know this already. I am writing this in the (no doubt) vain hope that the narrator of that history programme has decided to browse the Opera blogs. And that brings me to the final reason this makes me angry. It's bad enough when people do this in daily life, but we can forgive them because, as I said, everyone makes mistakes. However, there are some people who should be setting an example in the language they use. These people are especially those in education and the media. Put the two together and you have, well, the narrator of a history programme. That such a person still does not know how to use the word 'literally' makes me want to approach him with the aforementioned shotgun and make him read this blog entry at gunpoint. "It says in my blog that you are an idiot," I will say, "That is assassination, but only metaphorically - assassination of your character. This, however, is literal assassination." And perhaps he would understand, finally, the difference between the two as I literally put the end of the barrel in his mouth, literally pulled the trigger and literally blew his head off.

My second target this evening is the Post Office - the Royal Mail. Now, the Post Office resembles the rail 'service' for me in that I theoretically support them both. I like the idea of public transport; I like the idea of writing and receiving letters. However, the reality of both is so utterly shoddy that I wish all those involved in Hell. Since it's late and I'm tired, I'm afraid my invective will have to be brief. Let me express my loathing for the Post Office, then, in the form of a question. If you were in a restaurant, and the meal was taking a long time coming, and you asked the waiter whether it was going to come at all, would you find it reasonable if he replied, "Well, it might do, or it might not. We couldn't really say. You'd have to pay for a registered meal, or a special order meal if you wanted to guarantee that sort of thing."?

I suspect the answer is 'no'. And yet, that is precisely the absurdity with which the drunken bandits at the Post Office get away every single day of the year.

In a recent post, I said that I would soon have some news about my writing. The news is that I recently signed a contract with a publisher. It's too early for me to give any details yet, and I know enough about publishing not to 'count my chickens' at any point. However, I am sure I will be able to give further details in the fullness of time. Anyway, I sent the contract I had signed to the publisher some weeks ago. It has yet to arrive. Since it seemed to have gone astray, and since I knew from bitter, anguished experience that the Post Office are jeeringly unhelpful if anything ever goes astray (IE, if one of their lackeys dumps your letter and five hundred others in a ditch somewhere while he's throwing up after a heavy night), I sent another copy of the contract, this time by recorded delivery. I sent it first class. A week later it still has not arrived. I know this because I phoned their number to 'track my item'. I told the man that my first letter had not arrived at all - no apology, nothing but the usual offensive cheerfulness, which seems designed to say, "It's not my fault. Don't blame me. There's nothing you can do, anyway." I then reiterated the fact that it had been a week since I had sent the second letter FIRST CLASS AND BY RECORDED DELIVERY. The letter, apparently, had not yet arrived, but was "still going through the system". This is code to make the process sound more complicated than it is. It means, "I haven't got a clue where your letter is. What are you going to do about it, mate?" I asked if there was some problem with the mail service at the moment. Apparently - I pause to give full effect to the heavy irony of what I am about to write - there was none. He asked me for the address. I gave it to him. Apparently there was no problem with mail going to that address, either. Well, I'm glad to know that. Nothing I send there is actually arriving, but I'm reassured to know that this is not a problem.

Well, what more can I say? I asked how long I'd have to wait before I could make some kind of claim. Fifteen working days, he told me cheerfully. But I don't want to make a claim. I just want my mail to arrive where it's supposed to. Either that, or I want to put my shotgun barrel in your mouth and teach you a lesson about 'service'. "Will I blow your head off, or won't I? I don't know. The impulse to pull the trigger is still going through my nervous system. If you want a guarantee one way or another, you'll have to pay me for it, although, it has to be said, it won't actually guarantee anything at all. But you will be able to get your money back... After I've scattered your grey matter to the four winds."

I do this far too often for people to think of me as anything other than obsessive, I'm sure, but recently I've been rather wondering about my relations with other human beings, and this rather struck a chord with me. I don't think I can say any more on the subject right now.

Why I Hate Japanese Translations

Recently I finished reading the novel Mon by Natsume Soseki. I read it in the original, but it is often my habit to have a translation of the original on hand when reading a novel in Japanese, since, when I come to any part that I don’t understand, it’s usually quicker to look up the corresponding page in the translation than to consult a dictionary. However, it’s not always more enlightening to do so, and it can be downright misleading. Since learning Japanese, my faith in translations and translators has plummeted. Having a tendency to be interested in foreign literature, I must have read a great many translations over the years, and prior to my loss of linguistic innocence, I implicitly trusted the translator – but no more. I have to say that, I think the situation in Japanese literature is particularly bad, because, academically, Japanology is still very much a Micky Mouse subject. It lacks the dignified tradition in the West that Sinology has. Any fool can go out to Japan with JET, pick up a smattering of Japanese, have a string of Japanese girlfriends with names all ending in ‘ko’, read a few crappy Manga comics, and think he is an expert. And this is usually what happens, too. I’m sure that translations from other languages are also full of inaccuracies and betrayals of the author’s original intent, but in the field of Japanese literature it seems like you don’t even have to be able to speak English for someone to publish your translation. This makes me spitting mad.

In the case of Mon, I had Francis Mathy’s translation on hand as guidance through the tricky bits. However, I may as well not have bothered. I know absolutely nothing about Francis Mathy, not even whether the name belongs to a he or a she, so all my comments are completely impersonal. However, the bits of the translation that I actually read made me so angry that I ended up feeling sick. The examples of his/her artistic and linguistic infidelity are so myriad that I cannot possibly list them. I will give one here, and let that stand as a representative for the many. Towards the end of the novel, much against his expectations, the main character, Sosuke, survives the restructuring of the civil service while companions lose their jobs all around him. Soseki writes as follows:

月が改って、役所の動揺もこれで一段落だと沙汰せられた時、宗助は生き残った自分の運命を顧みて、当然の様にも思った。又偶然の様にも思った。立ちながら、御米を見下ろして、
「まあ助かった」とむずかし気に云った。その嬉しくも悲しくもない様子が、御米には天から落ちた滑稽に見えた。

Tsuki ga aratamatte, yakusho no douyou mo kore de ichidanraku da to sata serareta toki, Sousuke wa ikinokotta jibun no unmei wo kaerimite, touzen no you ni mo omotta. Mata guuzen no you ni mo omotta. Tachinagara, Oyone wo mioroshite,
‘Maa tasukatta,’ to muzukahige ni itta. Sono ureshiku mo kanashiku mo nai yousu ga, Oyone ni wa ten kara ochita kokkei ni mieta.

It is particularly the last sentence at which I wish to look. Francis Mathy translates it as:

He [Sosuke] seemed neither happy nor sad about it. In fact, at that moment he looked to Oyone like a clown fallen from the sky.

Now, let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that the majority of those who translate Japanese literature have no sense of the rhythm of the English language whatsoever, and seem to feel it their duty to make their prose as plodding as possible. What I would like to ask here, is, what exactly does that last phrase convey to you? Like a clown fallen from the sky. Oh yes, I know the experience very well. Clowns are always falling from the sky in front of me.

I would not have even read this sentence if I had not wished to check on the particular nuance of the word ‘kokkei’ in the original. It is usually used as an adjective, but here was used as a noun (translated as ‘clown’). As an adjective it means something like ‘comic’ or ‘absurd’. I looked at the translation and found the ridiculous sentence quoted above. Checking in the dictionary I discovered that, as I suspected, nowhere does ‘clown’ appear in the definition of ‘kokkei’. Not only that, but what Mathy has translated as ‘sky’ is really much closer to ‘heaven’. Okay, I can accept that maybe he/she does not want to make a literal translation. However, what about making a translation that is at least comprehensible? My impression is truly that he or she just did not understand the original sentence and so wrote any old thing. And that’s why I am angry. “Oh well, it’s only Soseki, the most revered novelist in Japanese history. No one will notice if a fifth-rate hack like myself fudges a line here and there and there and there and there and there.” There is absolutely no respect for Soseki here, no respect for the reader, no respect for anything. Why on Earth did Mathy even bother? I can’t believe it paid very well. I think it must be some obscure kind of ego thing, to have ‘accomplished’ the translation of a novelist who clearly doesn’t even interest you very much. And Mathy is not alone in this at all. There are very few translations of Soseki that won’t give you the impression that the man was educationally subnormal. But what you have to remember is – you’re not reading Soseki at all; you’re reading some fucktard who took a degree a few points too pretentious for their IQ to deal with.

So, what does the original sentence actually say? Well, in a case like this, where I was not sure of the meaning – or nuance – of the original, what I would do, and what any responsible translator must do (what Mathy clearly did not do), is consult a native speaker. However, without consulting a native speaker, the best I can say is that ‘kokkei’, in context (remember context, Mathy?) appears to mean something like ‘absurdity’. Sosuke’s demeanour, neither happy nor sad, seemed to Oyone like an absurdity fallen from heaven. Such would be the literal translation. To render that into intelligible English, one might say something like, an absurdity ordained by heaven, or fate. You get the idea. Isn’t it beginning to make a bit more sense than ‘a clown fallen from the sky’?

Now, I don’t want to appear unduly harsh (and perhaps I have). All I want to say is STOP VIOLATING DEAD AUTHORS’ GRAVES. Just because you know a smattering of Japanese, it doesn’t mean you can translate great works of literature.

This brings me to my second big point. There is a golden rule in translating, that is ALWAYS TRANSLATE INTO YOUR MOTHER TONGUE. Because of the woeful dearth of good translators in the field of Japanese literature, this rule is unfortunately ignored by far too many Japanese people keen to introduce their great writers to a Western audience. I recently tried to read Takashi Kojima’s translation of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and I had to give up. The prose was so poor that it was hard work for me just to get through a page. And this is translated from someone so revered in Japan that the most famous Japanese literary prize is named after him – the Akutagawa Prize. Some Mickey Mouse academic called John McVittie, in his truly awful, patronising and trite introduction, which he has deigned to call “A Sprig of Cherry”, states that:

But what we might feel we lose from the fact that the English is not the translator’s natural tongue, is offset by our own awareness that the translator’s thoughts, his feelings, his character, are – as were Akutagawa’s – Japanese.

Really? What a fucking scoop that must be. After all, there are only about one hundred million Japanese people in the world. You’ve really set the bar high here. No wonder the translation is so good, when you’ve managed to find – somewhere – an actual Japanese person, just like Akutagawa himself.

This is obviously disingenuous bullshit. The translation is plain bad, and McVittie clearly knows it. He is casting around for something good to say in his introduction, or anything to say at all.

Quite probably, in this case, Takashi’s intentions are good, but they are misguided. Westerners who try to read this collection are liable to come away with the sneering opinion that if this is the best Japanese literature has to offer, then it’s clearly utterly eclipsed by Western literature, and not worth investigating. Rather than castigating Takashi, I would like to give a piece of my mind to all those he thanks in his Preface. Apparently they read his manuscript. If so, they are either illiterate or lazy, because the published work is simply not good enough. It needs to be sent back to the editor and put into readable English.

Takashi’s intentions may be pure, but one cannot assume that this is always the case. In my experience, there is no subset of human culture so small that it goes uninfected by corruption, and this is also true of translation. I have personal experience of this. A couple of years ago someone asked me to write the introduction to a translation on which he was working, since I had studied the author in question. I was happy to oblige. However, the translator shared in common with Takashi that incredibly rare trait of being Japanese, and as a consequence, needed a little help from a native-speaking editor. His usual editor did not speak Japanese, and was having more than the usual trouble in correcting the translator’s English this time. Hearing this, I offered to take a look at the translation and, if necessary, help the editor out on those parts he found most difficult. When I made this suggestion, the translator – whom I shall not name – leapt at his chance and asked me to edit the entire thing.

When I read through his manuscript, I was appalled. The English was so bad that much of the time it was impossible to tell what the translator was trying to say. Not only that, he clearly had not understood the author much of the time, and the text was full of schoolboy errors. For instance, a number of times, one of the main male characters was referred to as ‘she’. No wonder his usual editor had given up. I wrote back, politely refraining from telling the translator just how bad his work was, and told him I would require a month or two working full time to edit the piece, and that I would therefore like to be paid. In the meantime, I had sent him some samples of the work I had edited. He liked these and asked me to continue, but didn’t answer any questions about money. He continued to be evasive about payment, and continued to ask me to complete the work. Eventually, when pressed, he sent me a very irritable e-mail saying translating is harder to break into than I think, and that he would do for me what he had done for his other editor. When I checked, I found this meant that my name would be written in small print as someone who had ‘advised’ him on his translation. As I was, by this time, having to discard his translation almost entirely, and translate the book from scratch myself, this seemed wrong to me. He would get all the money and credit, while I did all the work. I realised that he had used the same kind of arrangement before, but had managed it because he had not picked on an author quite as difficult as this one. He was a vile, talentless, scheming opportunist. He did not even care about the author in question. He had chosen her because there had been much interest in her in the press recently, and he hoped to ride on the tide. I cut my association with this vile man. I sincerely hope that he has not found anyone else to do his work for him. I dread to think that he might have desecrated the grave of an author who means a great deal to me.

When you turn pro, you know, she'll let you know

I've just been leaping around in the kitchen in a manner deranged to the music of Sparks. Well, apart from my evening constitutional, I live a fairly sedentary existence, and we all need exercise, and, furthermore, I can't afford to go to the gym. And that's my excuse. I'm just grateful that there are still some places left in this country that are not fitted with CCTV and that no one came home from work early or anything.

The Sparks album - Kimono My House - was sent to me recently by a friend, with six other CDs. I realise I've come to it over thirty years late, but so far this is my favourite CD of the seven, and I've been playing it constantly. I don't really know much about Sparks, but I'll try and give my impression here in a really trite way - The Smiths crossed with Queen and Talking Heads. I can hear Morrissey's choirboy falsetto in Russel Mael's vocals, and there's a fair resemblance in the witty turn of lyrical phrase, too. I can also hear Queen's creamy guitar and light-opera melodies here. And I can sense David Byrne's nervous quirkiness in the stage presence of the brother's Ron and Russell. I know that Sparks are an influence in the case of Morrissey, and would not be surprised if the same were true of the other two bands mentioned.



Because of Russell's super-high-pitched vocals, it's not always easy to make out the lyrics, and I didn't have much idea what the songs were about until I looked up the lyrics online. At that point, many things fell into place. Certainly the first two songs on the album - This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us and Amateur Hour - are quite startlingly evocative depictions of awakening sexuality in adolescence, and all the competitiveness, excitement and humiliation that come with this. Reading the lyrics and then re-listening to the songs was like going back in a time-machine to a teenage that I'd almost forgotten, and not necessarily my own, since my own experience was more humiliation than excitement. Nonetheless, the lyrics were as familiar as if they were my own experience:

Zoo time is she and you time
The mammals are your favourite type, and you want her tonight
Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat
You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers
This town ain't big enough for both of us
And it ain't me who's gonna leave

Yes, I recognise the teenage panic of not knowing if you're going to be the one who gets the girl. This agony was to be expressed later in a somewhat more downbeat, but equally witty form in songs by The Smiths such as I Want the One I Can't Have:

On the day that your mentality
Decides to try to catch up with your biology

Come round ...
'Cause I want the one I can't have
And it's driving me mad
It's all over, all over, all over my face...

And if you ever need self-validation
Just meet me in the alley by the
Railway station.

The same theme, as I said, continues in Amateur Hour, and I have to say, I found the lyrics to this hilarious:

She can show you what you must do
To be more like people better than you

Amateur Hour goes on and on
When you turn pro, you know, she'll let you know.

I don't think the Mael brothers were actually teenagers when they wrote this, but the freshness of the expression suggests that they weren't writing entirely from the point of view of outside observers, and that maybe, even if it's buried, this teenage experience continues to be a vital part of us. Certainly, it still sounds vital to me, a thirtysomething old codger and curmudgeon. In recent years I have found music far less physically addictive than I used to and have tired somewhat of guitar bands who trade on the sheer energy of their performance. But I am listening to Sparks now in the way I haven't listened to music for a long time. I find myself really getting off on the energy of it. Just watch this YouTube clip of them performing This Town Ain't Big Enough.... I defy you not to get caught up in the wonderful rising tension of the whole thing:



Anyway, that's why I've been playing Sparks like a teenage guitar-addict recently. It also helps that the lyrics are actually witty, because then I can always fall back on the alibi of irony if I absolutely must. And wit in popular music is so rare, it's a real blessing when it comes; I'm never tempted to scorn it, in the manner of the jealous, as affectation. Some of it actually makes me laugh, which is no bad thing:

You mentioned Kant and I was shocked
You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues.

Okay, so it's slightly laboured, but it's still funny. Or how about a verse from Talent Is an Asset, sung from the point of view of parents proprietorial over their little Albert Einstein:

Albert is smart, he's a genius
Watch Albert putter, an obvious genius
Someday he will reassess the world
And he'll still have time for lots of girls.

No? Please yourselves.

I'm going back to do some more dancing. When I turn pro, I'll let you know.

Troubled Joe

Am I overdoing it with the YouTube clips? Oh well, what the hell. Overdoing it must be what blogs are for. If you can't overdo it on a blog, where can you?

Anyway, today I finished a new short story. It is called 'Troubled Joe'. I've had the idea for some years, but recently it just seemed to me that now was the time to write it. It's my usual practice to write copious notes before I begin a story, but not this time. This time I went straight in and spoke with the voice of the ghost who is the narrator. Yes, I suppose I felt like I was channeling.

I mentioned earlier on this blog that I got drunk on Friday and was later embarrassed at all the nonsense I had talked. I spoke to the friend I was with that night, and he brushed aside my embarrassment, assuring me that I was "on fire" on the evening in question. And I feel a little like that with my writing at present. I feel that Satan has, in fact, accepted my soul, and now it is given to me to play a literary fiddle till the strings catch fire. In fact, I will have some news about my writing at some later point.

Anyway, the story 'Troubled Joe' is built upon the premise that begins the song A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours, by The Smiths. I found a video of it on YouTube. It looks like someone has put the video together specifically for YouTube, but it's ingenious. The lines with which I preface my story are the opening lines:

"Hello, I am the ghost of Troubled Joe,
Hung by his pretty white neck some eighteen months ago.
I travelled to a mystical time zone,
And I missed my bed, and I soon came home."



I'm going to type up 'Troubled Joe' very soon. If anyone wants to read it, let me know, and I'll send a copy.

So Far From Where I Intended to Go

Humans Off Earth Now

I was reading New Scientist, as I often do, and came across an article entitled 'Earth Without Humans'. The article begins thus:

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.

The premise of the article is that the animals do vote us off the Earth, and their wish is, democratically, granted. What then? How long will it take for the Earth to recover from our poisonous influence? Because, let's face it, the only reason that we don't view humans, as did the King of Brobdignag in Gulliver's Travels, as "The most odious and pernicious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth", is because we are human. That is the only reason. All information available shows the King of Brobdignag's assessment to be true. Our influence upon the Earth has been wholly poisonous, and therefore, after our disappearance, the only sensible question is, how long till the stored up poison is flushed out of the system?

Of course, one little symptom of our pernicious nature is the way in which we project our own vile and selfish values everywhere. Would animals really vote us off the Earth? We would certainly vote off the Earth any species that did to us what we do to the rest of the planet. That's for sure. But perhaps animals are not as selfish as that. I once heard the story of a man who had survived a shipwreck and was adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. He would have starved, had it not been for some friendly dolphins who came up beside the boat and exposed their bellies for him to harpoon, so that he might have something to eat. Now, I'm not sure if this story is apocryphal, but let's suppose it's true. The wise, beautiful and gracious dolphins offer themselves to save the life of another. That other, the scraggy human, thinks nothing of it. I am a human, therefore I am at the apex of all things. Great, this dolphin's sacrificing itself! I can live! Mmmm, this is delicious! Would a human being ever dream of offering him or herself to, let's see, a pack of starving wolves? Of course not. See, whatever way you look at it, humans are utterly vile. And maybe the dolphins only actually wanted their bellies tickled, anyway, and the man, in his I-am-God's-gift-to-nature way, made his own interpretation.

Anyway, my point is, maybe nature would be too gracious to vote us off the planet. Then again, if you are into Gaia theory, not in James Lovelock's original form, but in its mystical reinterpretation, then you might think that nature is, in fact, in the process of voting us off the planet right now, and that the hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, viruses and so on, are going to get worse and worse until the human vermin are all finally exterminated.



Is this a depressing thought?

Well, reading the article, although some of it filled me with a sense of cosmic melancholy at the transience of all things, and the ultimate dominion of decay, I found this offered a way of looking at our current environmental problems that was more consoling than depressing.

"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

The article goes on to track the changes that would take place, immediately, then within days, then within years. The first thing to go, of course, would be electricity. Without humans to maintain them, roads, buildings, and so on, would begin to crumble surpringly soon. Offered as an illustration of this is the example of Pripyat, which lies inside the exclusion zone created by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster:

"From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city."



Apparently, for roofs to fall in and buildings to collapse takes a matter of decades. Wood structures are the first to go, and all buildings of a jerry-built nature. Then come all monuments to hubris, such as skyscrapers and suspension bridges, which are more precarious than masonry structures. The ruins, of course, will last some thousands of years before crumbling, Ozymandias-like, into oblivion.

I was particularly pleased and intrigued to read of wolves appearing in the Chernobyl exclusion zone:

The first few years after people evacuated the zone, rats and house mice flourished, and packs of feral dogs roamed the area despite efforts to exterminate them. But the heyday of these vermin proved to be short-lived, and already the native fauna has begun to take over. Wild boar are 10 to 15 times as common within the Chernobyl exclusion zone as outside it, and big predators are making a comeback. "I've never seen a wolf in the Ukraine outside the exclusion zone. I've seen many of them inside," says Chesser.



I won't go into all the details of what will recover and what won't recover, should Humans all be transported OFF EARTH NOW. Towards the end of the article, though, is this serene paragraph:

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

The article concludes:

The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

I'm well aware of the feelings of defiance that environmental causes can provoke. I have such feelings myself sometimes. Why did Mother Nature give birth to us in the first place if we are so inimical to her? Why were we ever cast out into the cold and hostile wilderness of this planet? We had to survive. We had to build shelters and find food, and make clothes. We were only trying to build some kind of comfortable life for ourselves. Is that a crime? And if one believes in a Cartesian deus ex machina - always handy if you want to be angry at something - one can rail against such a god, saying, "Why did you give us this hunger in our bellies, and this hunger in our hearts, and then put us in a world where all things are limited? Why did you tell us to go forth and multiply, knowing our numbers would choke the Earth?" And so on. I can even take the cold stance that, since everything is, in fact, a part of nature, it doesn't matter what happens. And, of course, it doesn't.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, but became violently depressed again after finding a link to this article on Momus' blog. The article concerns the fact that, due to overfishing, ocean life could be more or less wiped out within fifty years. Someone expressed the opinion on the blog that this was merely evolution. I replied as follows:

I don't think the problem is that fish aren't having sex, it's that we're eating them quicker than they can reproduce. Once numbers drop below a certain level, it's hard to ever get back to original numbers. Of course, all of this - anything you can think of - is within nature, and therefore could be called evolution. But that's another way of saying nothing's ugly, and another way of relieving ourselves of moral responsibilities. Personally, I do find human greed and short-sightedness ugly. I think human values are, in the main, wrong, and that they have created an ugly world. Just as in the film The Mission, we create an ugly world, and then we say, "That's just the way the world is."

Momus responded to my reply as follows:

We're not just talking about the natural cycle of extinction, we're talking about the possibility of all the wild species which live in the sea being wiped out, and within the lifetimes of people now living. When one species becomes so "successful" that it wipes out many of the others, it becomes very clear that this "success" itself is failure on a massive scale. We're failing the planet, and failing ourselves.

I responded to his as follows:

I agree completely. The most pernicious political concept ever is that of continual expansion. Things have really come to a head for the human race. People have talked about utopias in one form or another, and failed to acheive them, for centuries, but now, if we don't fundamentally change our values, it looks like we're done for, unless science manages to manufacture the kind of brave new world that will allow us to sustain our selfish habits even longer. But personally, I think that Mary Shelley was prophetic, and one way or another, our rape/enslavement/manipulation of nature has created and will continue to create monsters that will come back to us.

Whatever attitude we take in order to console or justify ourselves, as Momus has pointed out, when it comes right down to it, our 'success' is really our failure - failure on a massive scale.

Personally, I have more and more sympathy with the Church of Euthanasia and the Gaia Liberation Front. I know longer care so much if humans disappear. I even have more than a slight longing for a world without humans. My only regret would be that I could never be there to see it myself.

New Music and Old

I am a man of very limited means. Most of my clothes are what people have given to me. Recently, the same seems to be true of music. This morning I recieved no less than seven CDs in the post, from the same person, I might add. That's right, I have become very lazy in keeping up with the music scene. I used to read all the music papers, in a previous century, but no more. Now I have a secret agent out there in the world who keeps me musically informed and supplied. If you are reading this, thank you. I shall not reveal your secret identity. Anyway, the music I received this morning consists of music new and old:

Mono - You Are There.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra La La Band - Horses in the Sky.

Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise.

James Figurine - Mistake, Mistake, Mistake, Mistake.

Elliott Smith - Either/Or.

Sparks - Kimono My House.

Add N to (X) - Avant Hard

If you want to know what any of these are like, just ask me, and I'll let you know.

I also read Momus' blog today, and was reminded of my fondness for Okinawan folk music, which prompted me to look up clips on YouTube. It seems to me that Okinawan folk music has the mystery of Japanese samisen music with an added warmth. The songs are generally sung in the Okinawan dialect, so I don't have much idea what they are about, but they seem to swell with genuine emotion in a way that moves me. The songs don't seem to me to be merely curated museum pieces, but still to be very much alive, and yet, at the same time, they transport me to another place and another time. The best things in life are beyond words - even words are beyond words sometimes - and Okinawan music is a case in point. To be completely subjective, listening to Okinawan folk music makes me feel like a Japanese novelist from, say, the Taisho era - possibly Meiji - holidaying with a mistress in Kumakura, and smoking a cigarette in my yukata, fresh from the hot baths, as I gaze out of the window at the curving rooftops crowding higgedly-piggledly to the sea, catching here and there a glimpse of petals falling upon a gust of spring wind. Even though Kamakura isn't in Okinawa. (I said it was subjective.) I also like the fact that this kind of folk music seems to make the age of the singer utterly irrelevant. The power of the songs remains the same, and this difference to modern pop music seems instructive. Anyway, here are one or two that I like:

Fiction and the Reading Public

Recently I've been thinking about the following poem by Larkin. It's one of those that didn't mean a great deal to me when I first read it, but now, years later, I find every word of it to be on target. I say this both as a writer and a reader, but the attitude of the audience to the writer is often hugely hypocritical: Entertain me, but I don't want to know how you do it; write something that's real, but you're a swine if you write about someone and they find out about it. As a reader I am also frustrated with other readers, because my tastes are generally not represented by publishers. Do I have better taste? I would say that my taste has more to do with art for art's sake. I would say that is also a moral position. Anyway, here's the poem:

Fiction and the Reading Public

Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don't care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick.
Choose something you know all about
That'll sound like real life:
Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,
How you sleep with your wife.

But that's not sufficient, unless
You make me feel good -
Whatever you're 'trying to express'
Let it be understood
That 'somehow' God plaits up the threads,
Makes 'all for the best',
That we may lie quiet in our beds
And not be 'depressed'.

For I call the tune in this racket:
I pay your screw,
Write reviews and the bull on the jacket -
So stop looking blue
And start serving up your sensations
Before it's too late;
Just please me for two generations -
You'll be 'truly great'.

(Larkin)

I've also been thinking about a poem of his called 'Heads in the Women's Ward'. Interestingly, the couplet that I was thinking of is quoted in this article immediately after a discussion of 'Fiction and the Reading Public'; "Smiles are for youth. For old age come/Death's terror and delirium."

Here's the poem in full:

Heads in the Women's Ward

On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.

Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.

Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death's terror and delirium. (1972)

(Larkin)