Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Skinstorm

A while back I wrote about the scientist James Watson and the comments he made about lower intelligence among Africans, which apparently led to him being asked to resign. At first I was hesitant about saying that he was racist, then I said he probably was, then I felt uncomfortable with this and ammended my comment. After that my discomfort with any accusations of racism I had levelled grew, so that I wanted to write something else on the subject. I even felt sorry for Watson. He, like many people in recent years, has effectively been blacklisted for speaking in an unguarded manner. In being asked to resign, he has basically, it seems to me, been told to shut up. Although I think my own worldview is very different to Watson's and I even rather despise some of what he seems to stand for, I don't really want to live in a world where if certain people don't like what you have to say, you must shut up.

Well, before I could get round to writing anything new about Watson, something else caught my attention and has, for some reason, been preoccupying me. A while back on the Morrissey Solo site someone anonymously posted some news (or a rumour) that a "skin storm" had once again taken place between Morrissey and the music magazine NME. On the discussion thread of that entry, NME's editor, Conor McNicholas, denied that there had been any fall-out, describing such rumours as "unsubstantiated noise".

Soon afterwards there came a statement from Morrissey's manager, Merck Mercuriadis, with the text of a lawyer's letter addressed to the NME.

It seems to be a complicated sort of story, but apparently the text written by the original interviewer, Tim Jonze, was entirely re-written by the NME editorial staff, and Jonze subsequently disowned the feature. The issue of NME in question features a picture of Morrissey on the cover with the quote, "The gates of England are flooded. The country's been thrown away." Above and below this are the rather unsubtle headlines, "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and "Oh Dear, Not Again". On the NME site, a caption tells us that "Cover star Morrissey gives his most contentious interview in years."



The bone of this particular contention is that of immigration.

And it truly does seem to be a contentious issue. The discussion threads on the related news items on the Morrissey Solo site, here and here, make for interesting reading, not so much for the articulacy of what is said - since the comment are seldom very articulate - but because of the strength of the division between those who seem to believe that saying anything negative about immigration amounts to racism and those who think the negative aspects of immigration are simply facts that must be faced.

Here are a couple of articles giving the whole story in brief, with quotes from the interview in the former, from Sky News and Drowned in Sound.

I don't actually have a 'position' on immigration because, quite simply, I don't feel like I have enough information on the subject to come to any conclusions, but it's not something to which I have given no thought. In fact, I have given quite vigorous thought to immigration and race relations in general ever since living in Japan and experiencing what it was like to be part of a racial minority.

I'll attempt to jot down some of my thoughts on the subject now in no particular order:

I don't know how widespread this view is, but I've always felt that it is quite possible to become British, not only in a legal, but in a cultural and social sense. Trevor McDonald? British as tea and crumpets. Salman Rushdie? I would have said he was British, too, but I saw him once in an interview saying that he didn't feel British. Fair enough. His choice. Kylie Minogue? You get the picture. In Japan, such a thing is impossible. You are either born and bred Japanese, or you are not and never will be Japanese. I did not like this. I felt that the Japanese had cut themselves off from the rest of humanity. I began to feel a poisonous resentment at the invisible social wall that existed, and grew contemptuous of Japanese society. Did that make me racist, I wondered? Maybe I am racist, I thought - racist for thinking that the Japanese are racist. It seemed to me an immensely depressing dilemma, and I began to feel that the whole question of race will never be solved. There are differences between peoples (and people), on all kinds of levels, and differences seem inevitably to lead to conflicts. What can be done apart from making everyone the same, which would be another very depressing solution, even if it were possible. Perhaps, I thought sometimes, the Japanese were even right not to want foreigners becoming part of their society, since the whole society was, anyway, so etiolated and hidebound that it would probably fall apart if it tried to integrate one or two people who had not been indoctrinated into the unwritten rules since birth. "Make sure they come. Make sure they go." That, as someone who taught me Japanese, was the attitude towards foreign students and foreigners in general. Nice to have guests to admire your quaint little home. But you don't want them hanging around for long.

I came to a determination that individualism was the only viable way of interacting with the world, although I could see problems with this, too. In any case, I didn't want to interact with anyone as the representative of one group with the representative of another. Even to think in terms of groups seemed to me inevitably to lead to racism. On the other hand, I recognised that there are, indeed, such things as national traits. Is it racist to recognise and criticise such traits? I decided it was not, since criticism would be based on attitudes and social practices and not on any racial attributes. No culture or group of people can possibly be exempt from criticism.

I basically despise political correctness. I know there are many intelligent people who support it, but I simply do not believe that you can systematise tolerance. Such systems, on the contrary, breed intolerance and witch-hunts. They stop people thinking and they stop people talking openly. There can no longer be any honesty and no longer any celebration. I remember a conversation I overheard in a restaurant. The speaker appeared to be a headmaster. He was talking about how any Christmas celebration had been banned at his school (apparently against his wishes) since it would make non-Christians feel left out or alienated. After that ban, requests had been made for (I believe it was) Ramadan to be celebrated at the school. The headmaster, grimly and wearily, told of his satisfaction at having quashed that particular request. "If we can't have Christmas, they can't have Ramadan." No celebration, but instead a sullen resentment on both sides - that is the price of political correctness.

Britain once had an empire, through which we acquired considerable national wealth, though naturally this was never distributed in a particularly even way. Considering that our wealth has come from foreign lands, it seems only right that we should share that wealth with the rest of the world now by accepting immigrants. However, there does seem to be a certain measure - quite a strong measure, in fact - of self-hatred in the 'liberal' position that even to question immigration is racist (and the equivalent of wishing to set up death camps). I can understand that. I mean, I know all about self-hatred, and I often think that Britain has had a worse influence in world history than just about any other country on the planet. But I don't think it's at all constructive to base social policies on self-hatred. I think there should be an open, and, if possible, unbiased enquiry into the real impacts of immigration and that any policies should be decided according to the findings of such an enquiry. Having said that, I'm not especially optimistic about political solutions to any social problems.

The 'liberal' view that questioning immigration is tantamount to racism implies that there should be no limits on immigration whatsoever, since to apply a limit surely one has to question where that limit should be. If there is a reasoned principle behind this view (and perhaps there isn't) then logically it can only be the utopian idea that nations should not exist. Perhaps they shouldn't. Will there be wars as long as there are nations? It's hard to tell with certainty, but it could be the case that nationhood is inherently destructive. Perhaps it would be magnificent if the British were so welcoming and self-effacing that there were no controls on who crossed our borders and lived here. That would mean we were laying no claim to territory, that we had, effectively, dissolved the nation. I don't think that will happen unilaterally, however, if it happens at all. And round about here is where I get stuck, I think. Isn't it, in the most basic sense, identity that leads to conflict? I am me because I am different to you, because I am different I do things differently. I don't like it when you do this or that. These are my camels, not yours. Etcetera. And nationhood is group identity. And yet, however many times I ask myself whether it is imperative for nationhood to be dissolved, I cannot come to a conclusion. Let's imagine that nations were dissolved politically - there would still be language groups, religious groups, other kinds of groups. Would these be new, slightly more amorphous nations? And do we really want to wipe from the globe all the differences that cultural and other identity brings?

I actually think this - and pure survival in a ransacked environment - is the biggest issue facing the human race at the moment, and I must apologise if I can't solve it in a brief blog post. Anyway, whether you agree with Morrissey's (alleged?) comments or not, I think he has touched upon an issue that must be talked about, and not swept beneath the carpet by the arbiters of political correctness.

Banned and Creepy

I saw this animation some time back on Ligotti Online, where it was posted as an example of something 'Ligottian'. I came across it again just now on YouTube while browsing idly:



There was a whole list of banned cartoons and commercials in the related videos list. I watched a few of these, too. I was particularly struck by the Calvin Klein advert. In the comments, someone observes that it looks like the start of a snuff film. I would add that the unseen voice behind the camera addressing the urchins in front of it reminds me of that guy in one of the Airplane films who is charged with showing a young boy around the cockpit and begins to ask questions like, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" "Do you like watching gladiator films?" and so on.

Joss Stone - She's Bad

I don't know much about Joss Stone. I think if I initially noticed her at all it's because she was a Devon lass, at least for some of her upbringing, and it's rare for anything famous to come from Devon (apart from the fact that the entire United States could have been said to 'come from' Devon, of course). Anyway, I've never liked the little of her music that I've heard. It reminds me of Charlie Brooker's bewilderment at the winners on Simon Cowell's dreadful cultural vandalism project (I forget its name) - singers who are, in Brooker's words "apparently good". I've never really understood what was ever meant to be good about Joss Stone or any of her ilk. However, there is now apparently supposed to be something bad about her. My attention was caught by this article. In particular it caught my attention because I had seen some list of 2007's most annoying people (or some such thing) on television, and she was amongst them. The gist of the backlash against her seems to be that she went to America and picked up an American accent (plus various assorted American idioms). I find this in some ways curious.



Please allow me to explain. From late 2000 to early 2003 I spent time away from Britain in Taiwan and Japan. I noticed a number of things about Britain when I returned. Obsession with the property ladder. Increased marketing everywhere you turned your eye. And a new wave of Americanisation of the English language. This is nothing new. It has been occurring at least since the Sixties and probably long before then. One small example is the fact that before I went to Taiwan most people in Britain favoured the word 'film' over the word 'movie'. After I got back from Japan the situation was reversed. Ever since the onset of the nineties I have noticed wave after wave of Americanisms. Before we had Seinfeld here no one used the word 'wuss'. Before The Simpsons no one used the word 'butt'. Now these are in common use. Even our grammar has changed. Where once people would have said "I have", they now say "I do" (can't give a good example right now), they tend to use the present perfect tense less often, and so on. The extent of this is such that I picked up a British book of linguistic cliches recently and, flicking through its pages discovered that not only were well over half of the cliches American in origin, but this fact was so taken for granted, or so invisible to the authors, that it was at no point even commented on.

To a certain extent I think this is inevitable. I'm not going to neurotically weed out the Americanisms from my speech patterns. What I find strange is that I seem to be far more aware than those around me of what are Americanisms and what are not. For me to use the word 'movie' would actually take an effort on my part, as if I were deliberately slipping a French word into conversation for effect. This makes me suspect that people are actually watching American films and taking notes and adopting the idioms. I see no other explanation. Why? Because they want to be American. And yet there is a broad public rejection of Joss Stone because she picked up some Americanisms after actually going to America. Americanisation is so general here that I do not believe all former Joss Stone fans were remarkably uninfected. There must be at least a ninety per cent hypocrisy rate there.



It's not merely linguistic hypocrisy, either. Why do the British believe themselves to have any less blood on their hands than the Americans over Iraq, for instance? Who voted the mass-murderer Blair back into Number 10? You - the great, morally superior British public. When you condemn Joss Stone, you protest too much. Increasingly, Britain disgusts me.

Where I'm At

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The VP Team

I have just been informed that sections of The VP Team have gone up on Youtube.

The VP Team is a film project by Wolf and Water Arts Company, with whom I used to work (and still do occasionally). The publicity states:

During 2003 we were invited by a group of adults with learning difficulties to come & help them make a video about the government’s “Valuing People” white paper, which is the document which sets out how people with learning difficulties should be treated by the services that serve them & society in general.

The obvious danger from the outset was that making a video about a government white paper ran the risk of being as exciting as making a film about paint drying…that is until one of the group suggested we do it in the style of the 80’s action series “The A Team”

Here are the clips on Youtube:

Fate has just handed it to me

Hello.

Recently, in Waterstones, I picked up a book called It Is Just You, Everything is not Shit, which was a reply to the book, Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit?.

Basically, where the latter is an encyclopedia of everything that makes life shit, the former is an encyclopedia of everything that makes life great. Simple really.

Anyway, I picked up this book and started reading. I appreciated the idea, actually, but I had my quibbles with some of the entries. For instance, Harold and Maude. I know it's Mary's favourite film (in There's Something About Mary (have I got the right name there? Mary suddenly sounds strange for some reason. I know that the film has a great many admirers, but sadly, I cannot count myself one of them. I don't know, I was a bit blitzed when I watched it, so maybe my judement wasn't the best, but I found it embarrassing. And then there are entries like 'Falling in Love'. I suppose he had to include that one, and he even apologised for its cheesiness.

The point is, I thought that I could probably make a better list. Perhaps I couldn't, actually, but then again, I think I probably can. It won't be as long as Steve Stack's (I think that's his name, not sure) list, because I haven't got the time right now, but, after all, as I'm so keen on pointing out, it's quality not quantity that counts, so without further ado:

1) Where to start? This will have to be random order, so... Kate Bush. We live in a cynical age, but somehow I just find it impossible to believe that Kate Bush is not a lovely person. I'm not even envious of her success (maybe just a bit) because there's no way I can begrudge it.

2) Working with the writer Justin Isis on the blogzine Chomu and in other ways. Justin is one of the best writers I've ever read.

3) The fiction of Mark Samuels. Underrated, if you ask me.

4) Bettie Page.

5) The smell of an extinguished match.

6) The extreme pessimisn of Thomas Ligotti.

7) The fact that Mark McGuinness is doing this.

8) Sheridan Quaint. I'm a big fan of.

9) Lawrence Maynard aka Le Soldat Perdu.

10) Momus aka Nick Currie, scottish singer/songwriter and best blogger on the planet, not to mention, a great lyricist.

11) Robin Davies calmly and steadfastly debating with me about science on this blog.

12) Sarah giving me an 'I love your blog' award, which I was too curmedgeonly to pass on to anyone else.

13) Pete Black. Great guitarist and all round great guy. (The Dead Bell, Dorothy etcetera.)

14) Ed Gaughan, the most talented comedian on the planet.

15) Lots and lots of people who I am too shy to mention here, mainly because they don't have a public profile, and that's GREAT!!!!

16) Discovering Flight of the Conchords.

17) Discussing obscure Bowie tracks with Mr. Wu.

18) Morrissey keeping on going.

19) Tony Crisp, dream interpreter.

20) Marmite on toast.

21) Interbreeding, because it's definitely one of the best blogs on the planet.

22) Ian Dury, diamond geezer. Reasons to be Cheerful, indeed.

23) Everyone who's helped make my current move more bearable.

24) Talking with Stuart Young in the pub about Ken Wilbur and other such things.

25) Gordon Ramsey mentioning on Jonathan Ross that it's not good to eat cod, because they're almost extinct, even though Ross was a bit of a tosser and said that it didn't matter because science would invent a new fish called the crod or something.

26) Going for walks. I like going for walks. I don't really explore, to tell the truth. I'm a creature of habit. I stick to the same old circuits. But sometimes (every day) I feel the need to get out of the house and take my constitutional stroll.

27) The memory of Emily.

28) Underwear.

29) Reading Japanese novels in the original (I'm just showing off now).

30) Getting messages from strangers over the Internet telling me they love my writing and then they never contact me again, probably out of shyness, of because they have realised that I'm a complete idiot.

31) Lord Whimsy, mammal of paradise.

32) Rroland and his strange celestial music.

33) Cheese on toast. Also known as Welsh rarebit, or is that something else.

34) The extreme dementia of Aidan Smith and his Panda Shaving Torture.

35) Handy bendy Ghandi.

36) The writers group in Twickenham and Langton's bookshop.

37) Fantasy Centre on Holloway Road.

38) The lyrics of 'Painting and Kissing' by Hefner.

39) My ongoing depression.

40) Kate Winslet.

41) Dr Magnus Pike.

42) Free porn on the internet.

43) Choosing to spell 'internet' with a lower case 'i'.

44) Bill fucking Hicks.

45) People who want to write, but never get around to it.

46) The poetry of Jeremy Reed.

47) The walk along the Thames from Twickenham to Richmond.

48) Suehiro Maruo.

49) People who actually get round to writing.

50) Eckhart Tolle.

51) Wales.

52) The fact that I can more or less like Prince, even though a friend archly said to me that it's just a short step from Prince to Tina Turner.

53) Weird Al Yankovic.

54) Going around doorknocking talking to people about the environment as if it were a proper job.

55) The fact that, on the Late Edition, whatever his name is, I can't remember, severly dissed Jeremy Clarkson and the Hamster bloke.

56) The word 'bloke'.

57) The fact that I can use American slang such as 'dissed', because I'm English (mixed blessing, perhaps).

58) Philip Larkin, whatever anyone says.

59) Sexual innuendos concerning Smow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

60) Extravagant and crippling shyness.

61) Quoting Morrissey and just not caring.

62) Nabil Shaban.

63) The fact that I can write all this without the intermediary of a publisher and editor.

64) The fact that I'm not making any money doing it.

65) J-pop.

66) Paul Whitehouse. Brilliant.

67) Leonard Cohen getting into Zen.

68) The group unconscious.

69) LSD.

70) I'm sure the world's authorities are actually very scared.

71) Yann Martel sending a new book every two weeks to the Prime Minister of Canada.

72) Michael Moore getting flack from liberals because he 'gives liberals a bad name', but doing it anyway.

73) Monty Python.

74) Terry Gilliam.

75) Not being 'autistic' (surely that word has got to drop its negative associations soon) about the world, as Momus wonderfully says that rock music is.

76) Author's reading their own work, even if they do it badly.

77) Nagai Kafu.

78) Mishima Yukio actually fucking disemboweling himself.

79) The fact that the Final Fantasy musician bloke linked Morrissey and Mishima in an interview, and that a reviewer described my story 'The Tattooist' as a blend of Mishima and Morrissey.

80) Spike Milligan. And Peter Sellers, too.

81) I think I'll keep going to a hundred and then stop there, or this will go on forever.

82) Tartarus Press.

83) People organising farewell dos for you, because you're too busy writing blog posts. (And packing and stuff, to be fair to myself.)

84) Being able to hate George Bush even though everyone else does.

85) New Scientist magazine. I know that I'm a bit of a wind-up merchant about science, but it is asking for it, really. Anyway, this is a quality magazine and everyone should read it. And the graphics are fantastic.

86)The comic 2000AD still being called 2000AD even though we've past that year now, so that implications of futurism there are appropriately fucked.

87) Moaning about people not keeping in touch with me, and then being lazy myself about being in touch with others.

88) Tom Butterworth, whether he likes it or not.

89) The fact that I think I probably will succeed as a writer, whatever that means.

90) Tom Baker's Doctor Who. You know it's true. And Lalla Ward, too.

91) Death.

92) H.P Lovecraft, and the fact that Michel Houellebecq severely digs him.

93) Fireworks - remember remember the fith of November. One of the strangest national festivals ever, whose Macabre overtones fascinated T.S. Eliot.

94) Syliva Plath and Ted Hughes.

95) Me fucking up a lot of interpersonal encounters by appearing to be standoffish, or too eager or something stupid like that.

96) Unashamedly being a Momus fanboy.

97) Being sexually unattractive.

98) We're almost at the end now, but there's still so much more to say, like John Lydon digging Kate Bush.

99) The Cure, whatever Morrissey thinks.

100) David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Surely enough to turn the heads of even the most red-blooded heterosexual male. And I'm going to cheat here by including an extra one about me actually having been christened Quentin Crisp, whereas the more famous Quentin Crisp was born Dennis Pratt, before he 'dyed' his name.

I'm sorry for everyone and everything I've missed off, but I had to finish somewhere. And, to unashamedly quote Morrissey appropriating a cliche and recontextualising it, "Good Night, and thank you."

From Now On Only Bad Things Will Happen to You

There's an episode of Six Feet Under, in which the character Nate has a vision in which his dead wife tells him, "From now on only bad things will happen to you."

I felt I knew exactly what it meant, with an almost mystic recognition.

What is it that is so fascinating and 'true' about such a statement? I think there would not be such fascination about it without the beginning clause, "From now on". This suggests that once upon a time it had been possible for good things to happen. I seem to remember such a world, too. And now I find myself in a world in which it is no longer possible for good things to happen. It is this contrast, of things going wrong, that seems to constitute the nightmare quality of human existence, because it is a nightmare. What could be better calculated to torture consciousness than to suspend it between two realms of infinite void - void in the sense of the unknown, since that is what they are - without memory of where it came from, knowledge of what it is or means of guessing what will become of it?

And yet I once knew life as something other than nightmare. How did the transition occur?

I have noticed that on the occasions - not that frequent, since I tend to downplay the nightmarish quality of existence in conversation and social interaction generally - that I have mentioned to people that it's actually impossible for good things to happen, they have either never admitted that it was true, or they have not understood what I was talking about (perhaps both). I can't really blame them for the latter if their experience is different to mine, since my attempts to explain this impossibility have usually ended with me uselessly opening my mouth like a goldfish, and finding no words. I'm sure it must sound like a very stubborn, emotional insistence. But it's not really like that at all. It's not something stubborn. It's something so fine that it slips through my fingers. It is something that, having permeated everything, is now no longer susceptible to the categories and divisions of language that would be needed to adequately describe it.

I was walking home earlier today and a mother was walking along with her children. Her little girl was saying something like, "Where's my sticker? I've lost my sticker." And it sounded as if she were about to cry if she did not find her sticker. Does human happiness really depend on the presence or absence of a piece of paper with adhesive on its back? You may think I'm only talking about children, but really adults are just the same. What's a job apart from a sticker that says, 'useful member of society'? What's a lover apart from a sticker that says, 'attractive, worthwhile human being'? Does the sticker really make a difference? However many stickers you stick on yourself, does it ever constitute something good happening? No, it's just a sticker, and you're going to lose it, anyway. And then you'll cry, probably. What else can you do? Because you suddenly know that from now on only bad things will happen to you.

(Well, I've just been interrupted by a phonecall from Mr. Wu, still suffering the ravages of a sore throat, I noticed, so I've probably lost my train of thought now. The last thing we were talking about before ending the phone conversation was Daisy Pulls It Off, but that doesn't help me now.)

Ah yes, I was going to say that, I have really got to the point in my life where I wonder how people are even able to have children. I like children, actually. Well, in a general sense. When I'm not forced to be at all responsible or that kind of thing. But it's because I like children that I don't understand really how people can continue to have children.

When I was a child, the world certainly seemed like a place where... I'm not sure how to finish that sentence. It didn't seem, anyway, like a place where only bad things happened. I think it must be something to do with the onset of the sense of time. Time destroys EVERYTHING.

I don't think there's really one point at which the transition occurred. Its conquest was stealthy and inexorable. I remember, for instance, that by the age of about thirty I was definitely aware that I had for some considerable time been living a nightmare. Horror, I reflected, as a literary or cinematic genre, is often seen as something that presents you with 'another world'; you are invited to enter in, to stray from the 'normal world', if you dare. But I realised now that, for instance, the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, was merely daily life. Normality was horror, or horror was normal.

Last night was Hallowe'en. I attended a reading at a branch of Waterstones in London. This was, specifically, a reading from authors anthologised in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #18. After the five authors present read, there was some discussion, chaired by the editor, Stephen Jones. I can't remember now exactly who said what or repeat it verbatim, but there was a question as to why the writers assembled were drawn to horror in particular, and at least two of the authors responded to the effect that no other genre is really adequate to dealing with how people actually feel about their lives any more. "Science fiction has missed predicting the future again," I seem to recall someone saying. And someone else said, I believe, "Well, it predicted the future, but it failed to get past, to leap over the two million corpses we're now heading towards." (I think that figure is a significant underestimate.)

If everyone waited until they were old enough for disillusionment with life finally to set in, for that transition to horror to take hold, before having children, I wonder whether that would do the trick. And yet, there are people who have children later in life. Presumably they have never been disillusioned. Or perhaps they never had illusions to begin with. Perhaps they always considered life as the cruel spiritual torture it is, but never saw this as a reason to refrain from procreation, because they never had anything else with which to contrast it. I don't know. It truly baffles me. You would think that now, in the 21st century, when it is becoming apparent to human beings collectively that we are vile and life is vile and there is no future but suffering, disappointment, death, mayhem etcetera, that the population would start to dwindle significantly. But no, it continues to grow.

I am mystified.

I don't really know why I write this, except that I'm here now, anyway, so I might as well. Sometimes I worry that I might be insane. I don't mean in any interesting way. I just mean in some way that will cause me unbearable anguish as my soul gradually unravels towards extinction or some psychic doom worse than extinction.

I suppose I shouldn't worry on other people's account, though, since if I am insane, then no one's likely to notice, anyway. Perhaps I should be more worried that I might be sane. That would surely be a much more terrible possibility.

There does seem to be a flaw in my thinking somewhere... I am perplexed.