Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

But I'm still getting educated but I've got to write it down and it won't be forgotten

It must have been on Question Time, and I can't remember the precise context now, although it was probably something to do with ASBOs. One of the panel that week was Benjamin Zephaniah, and, with reference to bad behaviour amongst young people, he said something like the following (I'm afraid this is from memory, so I'm bound to be paraphrasing): "What can you do when young people resort to violence? You cannot tell them to look up to their elders and betters for examples. If they look to politicians for their examples all they see is that every time politicians have a dispute, they go to war." I thought this was possibly one of the best things I've ever heard said on Question Time.



It doesn't really matter if I write this blog or not, in the sense that nothing really matters, but today I have been given cause to think about my approach to writing here. I happened to look up the statistics for my blog, how many visitors I get, where from, how regularly and so on, and I was quite surprised. I am curious about this sort of thing, but I'm not obsessed. Honest! This is the first time I've actually looked this stuff up (hence the surprise). I'd always assumed, despite my relatively high ranking in the My Opera blog tables, that I have about a dozen readers and get maybe half a dozen hits a day or less. Not that I'd even thought about it that concretely, but my general sense was something along those lines. I won't give figures here. Or shall I? Would that be vulgar? I can't remember the exact figures, anyway. They're not that high, but they are much higher than I imagined. It's funny, writing a blog like this is a bit like giving a speech from behind a one-way mirror to an audience you can't see. Occasionally there comes a voice over the PA from someone in the invisible auditorium. It's quite eerie in a way.

Anyway, I just mention this because now that I know there are actually people out there who are kind of listening (and I assume that's what repeat visits indicate) I feel a little bit shaken up and that maybe I should be slightly more responsible, and less of an arsehole. I don't know, maybe that's a bit of a tall order. In any case, I do feel inclined now to make the most of this blog and the free publishing opportunity it provides me. So far - you've probably noticed - I've treated this as a place to toss off - in a slapdash way - whatever I happen to be thinking at a certain moment. I'm not even sure I can promise an improvement in quality, since I certainly am inclined to privilege my pen-and-paper fiction. We'll see. Anyway, I still have some more of that pen-and-paper writing to do this evening, so I'll try to keep this short.

Before I go, here are a few more things I happened to be thinking about. First of all, despite not being particularly able to respond with alacrity to the request made by Ashley Tisdale here, I have to say that, more often than not I do consider myself to be materially wealthy. To put that in perspective without being vulgar and mentioning figures, I don't own a car, or a house, or have a mortgage, I hardly ever buy new clothes (they're usually donated to me by well-wishers) or new CDs or go to the cinema, and I don't have annual holidays abroad etcetera, etcetera. But I do find that, as I said, most of the time, I basically feel materially wealthy. I don't know why that should be when plenty of people with more money than myself don't feel wealthy, but it does interest me. There are some ways in which I feel a lack of money, largely to do with issues of travel and time, but I have to adapt to those limitations. However, I have an inkling that the way I feel on this score is really pretty natural. I drink green tea in very attractive Japanese ceramic tea bowls. I sit in front of the fire and read Bruno Schulz or Graham Greene. I occasionally watch a DVD, such as I Walked With a Zombie, and I can post my thoughts to an audience of literally quite a lot of people, whenever I want (depending only on those time issues, really) here. Oh yes, and I can go for walks and take pictures of trees. Sometimes I even buy sun-dried tomatoes. So, what is this if not a life of luxury? I'm sure it sounds funny, because I'm sure I always do sound funny, but I mean it.

I mentioned a while back that I'm reading The Great Turning by David C. Korten. There are some interesting figures within:

More than 1.2 billion people now struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. Some 2.8 billion, nearly half the world's population, survive on less than $2 per day.

I'd like here to contrast some of this writing with what I consider to be academically influenced bad writing. In the comments section of a previous post I accused Albert Camus of this affliction, but having had a quick look at some of his essays online, I find them disappointingly well-written, and must go elsewhere to find my specimen of useless wank... No, I've just seen the time. I still have miles to go before I sleep, so must bring this post to a conclusion, I'm afraid. Please find below the sample of David Korten's text that I was going to compare favourably with with some piece of obfuscatory nonsense (maybe later):

Had the benefits of the sixfold increase in global economic output acheived since 1950 been equitably shared among the world's people, poverty would now be history, democracy would be secure, and war would be but a distant memory. Driven by the imperatives of dominator power, however, the institutions of Empire allocated more than 80 per-cent of the benefit of this extraordinary growth to the most fortunate 20 percent of the world's people.

Labels: Benjamin Zephaniah, David Korten, Terence McKenna

I've prepared a document legalising mass-abortion



I quote from An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States Security, by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall:

With inadequate preparation [there] could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth's environment. ... an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints such as:

1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production
2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patterns, causing more frequent floods and droughts
3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess

Labels: Bill Hicks, climate change, David Bowie

Shogyou Mujou

An earthquake in Britain. Although I hate to be alarmist, and hate even more to state the obvious, it is actually the end of the world. And yet, even as masonry falls about their heads publishers find themselves too timid to publish anything even remotely interesting, for fear it will shock the brains of the simpering, moronic readers they imagine to be their only hope of survival in this world, and upon whom they desperately wish to fawn.

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

WHY?

Come on. We're all dying anyway, you might as well do what you know very well you should do and publish me.



I'm just typing up my current novel Susuki. I have come, in my typing, to my translation of the beginning of Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki:

The flow of the river moves forever onwards, and the ever-changing water is not that which flowed here at the start. Bubbles that float in the backwaters now burst, now appear and burst again, and never have been known to stay for long. The people of this world and their habitations may also be likened unto this.

Susuki is chock-full of good stuff like this. I only hope I can pull off the ending and the embedded texts. But perhaps I've given away too much already, and it will probably be about fifty billion years till it gets published, anyway, when some publisher - the message not yet having travelled to his decayed brain that he no longer exists - picks up the manuscript again after tossing it aside fifty billion years ago, and says, "Okay, it's not bad, actually, we might as well go ahead with it."



Kamo no Chomei, some eight hundred years ago, was witness to a whole series of disasters in the then capital city of Kyoto, including fire, famine and earthquake. He ended his life as a wandering recluse living in a portable hut, rather like the shell of a hermit crab, which is when he wrote Hojoki, A Record of My Hut. So, the end of the world has happened before, and he told the tale. The only thing is, in those days the world was Kyoto; now it's Planet Earth. Not sure there's anywhere left for me to take my portable hut.

Anyway, must get back to my Nero-like fiddling.

Labels: Kamo no Chomei, the end of the world

The 'I Hate Pink Floyd' T-Shirt

It's funny how some blasphemies become almost sacred in a way.

I recently favourited this Youtube clip from South Park, and was going to e-mail it to someone, casually, but then decided not to:



I wondered why it was, at first, that I refrained from sending it. I had an instinct that there was something a bit crap about it, but it was hard to pinpoint.

I remember reading some quote from Britney Spears to the effect that South Park is "totally blasphemous". This is not really a mind-set to which I can relate, but I found it interesting. That 'blasphemous' was part of the vocabulary of a representative of the mainstream suggested that it might be a mainstream view that South Park was blasphemous. And, of course, that's a reason to like South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the guys behind South Park, reportedly hate all celebrities, and that's another reason to like South Park. Isn't it?

I'm sure Trey and Matt are great guys and would be great to hang out with, and I laughed a lot at Team America, but, after all, I do think the Goth scene is not quite spot on. Some of it is good, like the girl saying "whoah" after the line in Stan's poem, "my heart has been raped". That's a nice touch. But... hmmm... I don't know. I kind of feel like there's too much of an 'easy target' thing going on here. I get the impression that the Goth movement is slightly different (and more popular) in the US than it is back here in Britain, and for that reason feel a little hazy on the details myself. Nonethelss, I have by now used the internet enough to know that 'Goth fag' and so on are pretty standard insults in adolescent America.



The distance between being the angry subversive outsiders and being the boring bullies is probably not especially great. It seems easy to slip from the former zone to the latter, sometimes without even noticing. I feel that that's what's happening here. Yes, okay, so Goths pretend that they're being individualistic whilst actually conforming to the very strict social codes of their own peer-group. Okay, point made. But it's not that much of a point in the end. It is just as cliched and conformist as a point as the cliched conformist poetry being read out by the Goths here. Well, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be expecting subtlety, but more even than the bullying aspect - because yes, I do realise it's a 'joke' and that's it's meant to be funny - it's just the sheer laziness of it that gets me. It's like traffic warden jokes in Britain. Even if I hated traffic wardens (which, since I don't own a car, I don't), I wouldn't find traffic warden jokes funny, because they have been repeated to the point of meaninglessness. 'Goths' feels like a 'traffic warden' target to me.

And it interested me to suddenly feel that South Park was being boring, because South Park is one of those blasphemies that has become sacred. Criticising it, in certain circles, is just unthinkable. Hmmmm. That whole conformist theme in the Goth scene is beginning to look really ironic.

Then I remembered another scene in South Park that didn't quite do it for me. It was the scene about Scientology that exposes Scientologists beliefs with the legend "This is what Scientologists actually believe" written across the screen:



(That's the only clip I could find of it this time.) Again, easy target. I haven't investigated Scientology deeply. I used to pass some Scientology shop, or whatever they're called, near Goodge Street Station all the time, and they'd always ask me if I wanted a free stress test, and I would always say no. I know what a cult looks like, and I'm not drawn towards anything so transparently about building a pyramid of power in order to make money. If I have to spell it out - I HATE THAT SORT OF SHIT. I did appreciate South Park going into details about the beliefs of Scientology, because I get the feeling that Scientologists would really, really hate this kind of stunt. So, good. However, in another sense the sketch was just very weak. It was, "Hey, we're Matt Stone and Trey Parker and we're too clever to believe dumb shit like this, because we're South Park and we're clever, and stuff" (sniggering behind their hands). I wasn't impressed. It's not even the beliefs of Scientology that I find objectionable or silly. If they can and want to believe stuff about Zenon the Warlord or whatever it was, that's okay by me. At least it's reasonably imaginative. I don't find it any more silly than most people's beliefs. It doesn't ring true to me, but it seems to mean something to some people. No, that's not what I find objectionable about Scientology.



In the early days of punk, John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) described himself as causing a stir by wearing an "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt. I seem to remember him saying, "Which in those days was, 'Ooh, how outrageous!'" No doubt Pink Floyd, at the time were one of those sacred blasphemies, and Lydon had seen this. I wonder how long before people, wanting to be 'Ooh, how outrageous!' will be wearing, "I hate South Park" T-shirts. Being outrageous is fairly conformist, as the South Park Goth sketch illustrates. Maybe, for some people, it is also inevitable or natural. Still, if that's all you've got going for you, it's not much, really. I believe that Roger Waters described punk as "shallow and boring", and he has a point.

Not long ago John Lydon appeared on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! or some such thing.

After the "I hate South Park" T-shirt phase, maybe it will be okay to like South Park again. Or maybe we can just like whatever we want to like anyway, and be Goth if we want, or listen to Pink Floyd, or even the Sex Pistols. If we want to. I don't especially advise Scientology, though; I'm fairly sure they're only after your money. Being Goth is less expensive.

Labels: Goth, Pink Floyd, Punk, South Park

I told you so...

Look, I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I fucking told you so. I could have told you this years ago. How many more times am I going to have to say I told you so?

How many times have I had to take fucking pills just to placate other people when I could have told you years ago (and did) that they're placebos? How many other things have I told you that I'm going to have to say 'I told you so' about later?

Labels: Anti-depressants

The White Hands

Labels: Mark Samuels, The White Hands

Intermission

All of your doubts and questions will be answered in time. Please be patient until a full statement is issued. I can explain everything.



In the meantime, some thoughts:

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

- Nietzsche

To win is to lose. To lose is to win.

... I had held to the argument that the failures of our ruling institutions were the result of bad systems, not bad people. Yet a wave of exposes in 2002 and 2003 of pervasive corruption at the highest levels of corporate and governmental power suggested that many of our most powerful institutions are in the hands of ethically challenged human beings.

- David Korten

I am troubled. Caliban recoils from his own reflection. What am I if not someone who deals in fear?

Squares on the left of me, squares on the right. I am the only complete man in the industry.

Evil comes I know from not where. But if you take a look inside yourself, you just might find some in there.

- Jarvis Cocker

You are something that the whole world is doing.

If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon the stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of
the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber?... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and each play their part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager
frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.

- Erasmus

All things must pass.

You're the one for me, Fatty.

- Morrissey

I have blood in my veins, hatred in my heart, and dreams of paradise.

(I might add some more later. I've wasted too much time on this, already, when I should have been concentrating on my real writing. Music provided by The Books. Thanks to Nick. Check them out.)

Labels: The Books

Those who are capable of clear criticism must accept my opinion

I've been reading The Chinese on the Art of Painting by Osvald Siren. A translated excerpt from a text by art critic Teng Ch'un made me chuckle:

Someone said that Kuo Jo-hsu went too far, but I do not think so, therefore I now place the high officials and hermit scholars in two different classes, thus establishing my own humble opinion. Those who are capable of clear criticism must accept my opinion.

I'm not sure if English was Siren's first language, or whether he was just an academic, but his translations are clumsy and his general prose style is absent-minded, so translated excerpts tend to sound a bit babel-fish goofy anyway, but I really liked the idea of everyone having to accept Teng Ch'un's humble opinion. If they were capable of clear criticism, of course. Otherwise they could tell him to stuff himself.



Anyway...

I've long found myself far more drawn to traditional Chinese and Japanese painting than to the European tradition, and I do have some ideas why, but they recurred to me again this evening in a slightly different, or perhaps just very slightly more focused form. Really the refinement of attitude is only very minor, but it occurred to me that in Western art, traditionally, there has been much more of a tendency to murder by dissection. That is, I think, the defining tendency of Western thought generally. The reason I have had so little response to the great oil paintings in the various Western galleries I have wandered through, and such absorbed fascination when, for instance, seeing a Sesshu exhibition in Kyoto, is that, quite simply, to make the most ludicrous but necessary generalisation ever, Western art is completely dead. It has been pre-murdered by Western thought.

Let's go back to one of Siren's badly translated excerpts from the ancient Chinese texts of art criticism:

By revolving their thoughts and preparing the brush (licking the brush) the painters can represent the characteristics of everything, but there is only one method by which it can be done thoroughly and exhaustively. Which is that? It is called the transmitting of the spirit. People think that men alone have spirit; they do not realize that everything is inspirited. Therefore Kuo Jo-hsu despised deeply the works of common men. He said that though they were called paintings, they were not painting (as art), because they transmit only the forms but not the spirit. Consequently the manner of painting which gives the resonance of the spirit and the movement of life is the foremost. And Kuo Jo-hsu said that it has been practised only by high officials and hermit scholars, which is correct.

To me this is a mixture of what is so obvious that it hardly needs saying - although the obvious does seem to need repeating from time to time - and the frankly bizarre, in the form of weird, archaic Chinese hierarchical 'issues' that I don't claim to understand. (Perhaps there's a connection? I mean, part of the murderous dissecting quality of the Western mind is it's ridiculous dualism, which is also the dualism that leads to 'progress', real or so-called, because there is the constant dynamic of thesis, antithesis and - hopefully - synthesis, which can perhaps be seen in constant revolutions of thought and fashion. By contrast, Imperial China was, I believe, a place of great statis. Teng Ch'un himself, writing at round about, or shortly after, 1167, states: "Since olden times there have been many amateurs who have studied the art of painting very carefully. Consequently the records about it form more than one book. But in the T'ang period Chang Yen-yuan collected all the information about famous painters and classified them. His work reaches from Hsuan Yuan (prehistoric time) until the first year of Hui-ch'ang (841) and is called Li Tai Ming Hua Chi. In the present dynasty Kuo Jo-hsu wrote the T'u Hua Chien Wen Chih, which reaches from the first year of Hui-ch'ang to the seventh year of Hsi Ning (1074). These two books are the most important; other books are simply repetitions." In other words, there had been so little change in art criticism and the philosophy of art since prehistoric times, that you only really needed to read two books to know the whole lot. This sense of stasis actually fascinates me. I know many people would be appalled by it, but I find it in many ways attractive. I could go on about the implications, but this was meant to be a short post.)



The transmitting of the spirit... To me it can't really be argued that this is what art is all about, and, traditionally, Chinese art achieves this much more readily than the European tradition. I look at Chinese paintings with the same sense of refreshment and unwearying fascination that I have when looking at a tree, or at clouds. It truly is art created in the spirit of nature. It is alive, as opposed to dead Western art, upon which I can't keep my eyes resting for very long before I turn stalely away with a stifled yawn. (Ridiculous but necessary generalisation.) But no, actually, no, the generalisation isn't even that ridiculous for me. It's not really that much of an exaggeration. There's something of the textbook about Western art. Oriental art, traditionally... I can feeling it breathing back at me, the way the leaves of a tree breathe. And, of course, the fact that this 'can't be argued' is highly objectionable to Western artists and intellectuals, because they're all about argument. That's their thing. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. That's what they do. Personally, I prefer photosynthesis, but, you know, the Western artist can't sit still long enough for that. You have to overthrow the last thing and then overthrow the thing you've just replaced it with.

All this leads me, of course, to Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and since all roads lead to Tanizaki, where else? In particular I want to mention his long essay In Praise of Shadows, which is to me such a key text, and such a precious text, that I hardly even dare mention it here in case it becomes too popular or something and is dragged out of the shadows where its title tells us it belongs. I will continue nonetheless. In this essay Tanizaki laments the fact that Japan was unlucky enough to collide with a "superior civilisation" and therefore be forced to adopt the technology of that civilisation rather than develop a technology more suited to its own culture and spirit. Western paper, he tells us, is no good for writing on with a Japanese brush. The Western phonograph destroys the subtleties of the silence between notes on which traditional Japanese music depends. Technology is not culturally neutral; it comes with all kinds of cultural assumptions, which it forces upon any who find they must use it.



History has taken the turn that it has, but perhaps it could have taken another. If Western art is defined the tendency to murder to dissect, then how much more so Western technology? Western art is dead, and Western technology is death. But what if there could be another kind of technology that was full of the transmission of the spirit and alive, breathing the same air as nature? Wouldn't that be a better path to take than the one we presently tread?

Those who are capable of clear criticism must accept my humble opinion.

Labels: Chinese painting, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro

From Here to Obscurity

Not long ago I announced that my short story, 'Sado-ga-shima', is now available from Rainfall as a chapbook. Well, that is now most definitely true, since I have received my author's copies of the book this AM.

I'm actually very pleased with it. It's a quirky and rather elegant little thing.

There are illustrations from Bret Jordan throughout, and the serried typeface, for some reason or no reason at all, looks good to me.



Many thanks to John B. Ford and Bret Jordan for this. It's not a typical horror story, or a story easy to categorise at all, and I'm chuffed to have it put out in this form. I do feel a little like a musician who has been working very hard on a piece that's kind of understated but difficult to play (a musician's piece), and managed to pull it off. I certainly don't want to overstate the case, because this is no blockbuster, but I feel a tiny little bit like, say, David Bowie after making Low, knowing pretty well that it will take some people a few years to realise he's made one of the pivotal albums of the seventies.

But no, perhaps that's too much of an overstatement. Let me put it this way then, I feel a tiny bit like Morrissey, sneaking one of the best songs he's ever written, Michael's Bones onto a B-side, with no album release (well, it appeared on a compilation later, inevitably).

I shouldn't have said that really, should I? That's for others to decide. Anyway, that's how I feel.

Only a hundred copies of this available, so it probably won't be around for long. And nor will I.

Labels: Quentin S. Crisp, Sado-ga-shima

Remote control, of course

DEPRIVED OF THE VAMPIRIC ENERGY WHICH THEY SUCK FROM THEIR CONSTITUENTS, AUTHORITY FIGURES ARE SEEN FOR WHAT THEY ARE...DEAD, EMPTY MASKS MANIPULATED BY COMPUTERS. AND WHAT IS BEHIND THE COMPUTERS? REMOTE CONTROL OF COURSE -- WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I find myself to be a person who thinks with feeling. That is, feeling and thought are for me inextricable. I value feeling, but I suppose I tend to believe the idea put about by some that this makes my thinking weaker. For a moment I would like to reassert the value of feeling. I forget who I'm quoting now, and this won't be verbatim, but I was once struck by a quote that runs something like this: "When a man tells you that you mustn't be sentimental, that's usually because he's about to do something cruel, and when he says that you have to be practical, it usually means that he's going to benefit from his cruelty."

I only intend to make this a short post, as a kind of memo, since I imagine I will add to this theme later (and I've certainly touched on it before). I've been reading about Ray Kurzweil, advocate of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and so on. My constant feeling response to Kurzweil's words in speeches he makes and articles he writes, is one of being poisoned, like being in the presence of evil. I can certainly article this feeling in a rational way, but that's not what I'm going to do here (probably later). I simply want to make a note of this for the moment. So, having exposed myself to a reasonable dose of Kurzweil radiation this evening, I was feeling very sick with the world and with myself. I decided to settle down to some of my 'things to do' and catch up with some reading. I finished a novel and then got round to a book called The Great Turning by David Korten, which I was given recently. There's a quite thorough and interesting, been-there-done-that type review of the book here.

I noticed a few things. First of all, the book is very well written. It is a model of lucid prose, reminding me of my recent ranting about how many people think that being intellectual means having to write so that no one understands. Of course, this is a moronic tendency. That Korten's prose was concise and unjarring, that he was, in short, a good writer, immediately put me in sympathy with what he was saying. Secondly, I noticed that my mood was lifting. Where as Kurzweil seemed to be closing the future, this seemed to be opening the future.

Now, I've only really just begun Korten's book, and it is, apparently, meant to be the focus of a political movement, and, in the words of someone I know, "I'm not much of a joiner". I'm very much suspicious of movements and groups. Nonetheless, I was interested in this contrast between my feelings towards Kurzweil and my feelings towards Korten. I imagine I will write more on this subject when I have read some more.

I was particularly interested by the idea of ‘walking away from the king', mentioned in Korten's book, since this is the exactly the idea that had been revolving in my mind recently, of simply walking away from the manipulative games of those who currently control humanity, of not giving them your energy to feed on. Kurzweil, for instance, would like to present his man-machine future as inevitable, and suck us into his vision. Perhaps that feeling of being poisoned was something like the drain of energy that comes from accepting someone else's version of the world as inevitable. If such a thing is possible, I'd like to be able to walk away from vampires like Kurzweil.

Labels: David Korten, Ray Kurzweil

Fringe



It's really dawning on me that reading is a fringe activity, like campanology, or historical re-enactment. I suppose there's nothing that can be done about it, but it's quite peculiar to discover yourself on the fringe, when you always assumed, being yourself, that you were in the centre. No wonder I find it hard to make conversation with people in real life. I suppose my urgent desire to talk about the development of Nagai Kafu's style and themes throughout his life is a bit like... I can't even think of something it's like. We've already established that reading is about as mainstream as bat-husbandry, so I suppose talking about Kafu in mixed company would be like suddenly launching into a peroration on some of the more obscure cave creatures to share an isolated and only recently discovered subterrene ecosystem where evolution has taken an alternate course.

Actually, that sounds pretty damned exciting to me. I'm trying to think of something that would convey boredom and obscurity to 'other people' (who are hell). But I already know now that my finger's not on the pulse of the human race. Is it still alive? Is it dead? Who knows? Who cares, frankly, as long as I can read Nagai Kafu?



Anyway, I certainly can't talk to people about football. I mean, sorry. I try to be tolerant, but after a while I really just get pissed off with the way it's forced down your windpipe with a goose-fattening funnel everywhere you go. Why do men talk about sport? I once heard one writer ask another. And the conclusion was more or less because men are afraid to talk about anything at all and simply need something neutral to talk about to prove that they're not homosexual or something.

And any-fucking-way, why should I be tolerant of people talking about football in mixed company, when no one is ever tolerant of Nagai Kafu in mixed company? That's a metaphor, that is. For lots of things.



So, please excuse me if I don't hide my boredom on that subject, though I occasionally try.

So, yeah, this is me. I mean the Steve Buscemi character rather than the Thora Hird character.

Well, thank god for my blog, that's all I can say.

Hmmm. This was meant to be a short and pithy post.

IQ's a funny thing, isn't it? You know how you get albums, books, films and so on rated with stars or numbers? Don't you think they should stop doing that, and that it's the most infantile habit on Earth? Any review that is accompanied by a star or number rating is automatically a piece of shit that's not worth reading. I remember a hilarious comment left under one of these reviews online, which said something like, "So, what's the different between 71 and 71.4?", to which someone had replied, "Well, that's easy - 0.4". But IQ is exactly the same principle. Hasn't it ever struck anyone how ironic it is that people who are supposed to be defining intelligence are themselves so jaw-droppingly stupid that they think they can use the star-review system?

I just about hate humans. Really.

Anyway, I'll probably write another happening and finger-on-the-pulse blog entry later today. Maybe.

Labels: Nagai Kafu, reading

What Is and What Should Never Be

Yesterday I wrote a little about the Monkey's Paw principle of the universe, which one might describe, if one has a pathological need to rhyme things, as the 'Universe Perverse'. Briefly stated, this principle is that, contrary to, or further than, the lyric of the Rolling Stones that declares "you can't always get what you want", actually, you can never get what you want. To quote, as is my wont, from William Burroughs, "How long does it take for a man to learn that he does not, cannot, want what he wants?"



I'd like to explore this principle further today with an illustration provided by Annette Funicello, in the song The Monkey's Uncle's Paw, to which I posted a link recently. Despite the brash and upbeat surface of the song, a look at the lyrics reveal it to be an intricate piece full of implied tensions and secret trapdoors of unexplored obsession. In terms of our theme for today - wishes and how they never turn out the way you want them to - the most important line must be, "And I wish I was the monkey's aunt". Not a particularly unusual line on its own, the kind, in fact, to be heard in every other pop song since 1963 (when sexual intercourse began). However, juxtaposed with the previous line, "I love the monkey's uncle", it takes on new and complex significance. We must approach this with care.



First of all, let us ask, why "the monkey's uncle"? If the monkey's uncle is, in fact, a monkey, why not simply, 'I love the monkey'? We canot discount, in this case, the possibility that the word 'uncle' was included for rhythmical and metrical reasons, however, the relation, so to speak, with 'aunt' suggests that this is no accident. Is the monkey's uncle, then, not a monkey himself? Is he some kind of Lovecraftian Arthur Jermyn figure? Such a hypothesis is supported by a line elsewhere in the song which runs, "Call us a couple of missing links". However that may be, after stating her erotic love for 'the monkey's uncle' (Uncle Arthur?), Annette proceeds to wish that she was 'the monkey's aunt'. "What a nutty family tree!" she exclaims later. Indeed. If she and the uncle are siblings of different parents then no blood relation is necessarily implied, and this may, in fact, be the scenario painted in the song. Is such a scenario accidental, or are there esoteric reasons behind its surface pattern? If so, it would not be the only part of the song to present a cryptic aspect. Another example comes in the surprise scene of the wedding:

[BB:] Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa
[Annette:] On the day he marries me
[All:] What a nutty family tree!
[Mike:] A bride!
[Brian:] A groom!
[BB:] A chimpanzee!

And there is the peculiar denouement, the twist in the tail, if you like - who is the mysterious chimpanzee? What does this enigmatic wedding guest desire? The twist in the tail here is that there is no tail. The chimpanzee cannot be the groom's nephew (the eponymous monkey), since he is not a monkey, but an ape. Has he come, like Mr. Mason in Jane Eyre, to interrupt the wedding with the revealing of some dark secret? Or is he an indication of just how nutty the family tree is becoming?



I'm afraid that I'm wandering off into speculation now. Let us take the other fork in the road. What if the monkey's uncle and the monkey's aunt were siblings to the same parent? Is this not the true implication of the "nutty family tree"? As well as expressing a desire to break the bounds of the taboo proscribing inter-species love, in her passion she wishes she could add to this transgression the transgression of incest. However, inter-species love and incest are mutually exclusive taboos. One is the taboo that results from the lovers being too far apart on the great family tree of life, and one the taboo that results from them being too close together. Our Annette wishes to have both at once! And who can blame her? Such is the nature of human desire. How long does it take for a very talented singer and actress to learn that she does not, cannot, want what she wants? She wants a family tree so nutty that the closest relatives are also the furthest away. Can such a thing be?



At this point I'd like to such the resolution to this conundrum by means of a further complication. I wrote in my post yesterday that "I'd very much like to be Annette Funicello". What if, right? What if, Annette became the monkey's aunt and I filled in the position that she had just vacated? It sounds like a dream come true. But I'm sure you already know what would happen. As Annette I would find myself gazing enviously at the monkey's aunt as she carried on her incestuous relationship with the monkey's uncle, scornful of the world's regard. Annette as the monkey's aunt would find it no longer so extraordinary to be in a relationship with the monkey's uncle, despite the novelty of incest, and also the possible novelty that Uncle Arthur was a monkey-human hybrid, because she would now be her own primate world, and the glamour would have vanished. And what would have happened to the consciousness formerly inhabiting the monkey's aunt? That's anybody's guess, but perhaps she would have migrated to my former mortal habitation, and I can tell you, I'm pretty damned sure that she'd be disappointed with that.



What can I say? It's a depressing world.

Anyway, I hope you don't mind me going on about Annette Funicello so much. I mean, which would you prefer, for me to go on about Annette, or for me to go on about Morrissey? Or, if you like, you could have both.

I suppose you're wondering, if you're particularly dense, what the attraction of Annette actually is. Am I being ironic? Well, of course not. In one of the Annette clips on Youtube, someone has left the following comment:

Annette was so bloody cute! How could anyone not have adored her? These must have been the days, now all we have is Britney Spears :(

To which someone has replied:

I agree!

It wasn't me, but it could have been.

She even manages to laugh faintly but almost convincingly at Frankie Avalon's utterly abysmal joke about sand boxes.



So, I suppose that my attraction is precisely (?) the attraction that Annette herself has towards the monkey's aunt. If I were ever actually to meet Annette, I imagine that I would be invisble to her, since I exist on an entirely different frequency. She is one of those people who makes me think it's a very strange planet indeed that is home to both of us. Maybe it's something like matter and anti-matter. If they actually come together the universe implodes or something ridiculous like that (someone correct me here). And, I'm sure that's exactly what would happen if I were ever to meet, on the same frequency of existence, Annette Funicello. Wishful thinking?

Labels: Annette Funicello, H. P. Lovecraft, Morrissey, The Monkey's Paw

The moment that you're waiting for will never come

I pretty much hate Valentine's Day. I suppose that's fairly predictable of me, and it's not as if I care that much in the end.

I've often thought that, actually, although the Nazi master-race ideology could be seen as the antithesis of love, in practice love is all about Nazi master-race ideology. This is because love, as it is generally experienced, is controlled by sexual desire, which is really the desire to wed one's own genes to those of the best genes one can find in order to join in with the glory of genetic immortality. It's pretty foul, really. Which is why the sight of public affection between couples is often so offensive. "Hey, look, we're winners in the human race," they seem to be declaring.

And the results in the surge of this urge to romantically merge are all kinds of destructive folly, such as building new houses for all those new babies on flood plains. I suppose I don't feel as sorry for nature as once I might have. Lovecraft once wrote that the most merciful thing in the world was the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. For me, I think the most merciless thing in the world is that God or nature has planted within us inextinguishable desires for what can never be. For instance, I'd very much like to be Annette Funicello, but it doesn't look like ever happening. And if it did happen I'd no longer be able to appreciate it anyway. It's that old monkey's paw trick - those in the ministry of wish-granting have been given a remit to make sure ever wish granted carries within it some pointless moral lesson designed to teach you you can never get what you want, so you should just give up (that is actually the big lesson of Classroom Earth). You can never word your wishes carefully enough for the wish-granters not to find a way to perversely misinterpret them. This is peculiar, really. I mean, everything in existence is only here because it has elbowed something else out of existence, which is to say that existence is, by definition, the master race. And yet some force in existence seems bent on teaching us not to want anything anymore and to just fade back into non-existence. Hence the flooding. And hence the oestrogen pollution that is causing such problems with reproduction. It's enough to make you sick, really.

The human condition is one of waiting for things to be other than they are. But they are never other than they are.

I remember reading a story by Thomas Hardy in which a young woman falls for a handsome young man. They become separated by fortune at one point, and he returns later, to be re-united with her, but he has become disfigured in the meantime. She cannot bear to look at him. When you have clearly seen this in human nature, how can you believe in love? Everything then becomes an odious lie that you have no choice but to join in, to some extent, though you can at least, in a spirit of bottomless bitterness, opt out of that lie by not reproducing.

Naturally, I hate articles like this one, in ways so infinitely subtle and complex that I cannot hope to articulate them. Well, first of all there's that pressure to join the loved-up master-race, and then, next to the article itself, is a little thing for you to fill in which will eventually lead to you parting with money in order to enhance your master-race status. No doubt the person responsible for this propaganda, by plugging into all this cliche-ridden competitive shit, is also a 'successful writer' and therefore displays the value of her own genetic stock and becomes eminently eligible.

Shall I go through this point by point?

1) Some people think you don’t have to be all that attracted to the person you’re dating. I’m not one of those people. (And let’s be honest, who really is?)

Yeah, you're right. And that's exactly why John Merrick killed himself. He knew he would only ever know pity at best.

2) There’s a reason “sense of humour” is consistently at the top of every woman’s love list.

Because they like to think they have one.

3) My current squeeze was recently playing with my hair for the duration of an entire episode of Grey’s Anatomy (speaking of, is it too shallow to want the perfect boyfriend to watch Grey’s Anatomy with you?).

Yes, it is.

4) …comes out with our friends and plays the role of token adorable guy

This is the crux of the matter, isn't it? Token adorable guy or girl.

5) Like a designer coat you get for a steal, what’s the fun of talking about your big find if you can’t show it off? A perfect boyfriend isn’t just perfect when we’re alone; he’s perfect in public, too.

See, I told you.

6) …agrees to go splitsies when we order food

Splitsies?

I'm getting bored with this, so just one more:

7) I dated a bloke years ago who was big on guys’ and girls’ nights out. Which was fine, except that when he’d zip up his jacket and I’d say, “See you later,” he’d say, “Sure, unless I meet some other hot chick who wants me to come home with her, ha, ha, just kidding!” Guess what? Not funny. A perfect boyfriend makes a woman feel safe and secure.

See number two above. Sense of humour.

And another thing I hate is computers.

And another thing that I hate is

Labels: Nazism, Valentine's Day

The Monkey's Ant, Tall Paul and the Somoan Puberty Dance All Over Again

I have just discovered, to my sickened dismay, that the Youtube clips I posted earlier of Annette Funicello in Beach Party and Pajama Party have been taken down by some unspeakable party-pooper. I'm not sure it's worth living anymore, but I shall try to limp along, and in protest I shall post this clip of our Annette singing a very enlightened song about inter-species love:



For a better sound quality, go here. "I don't care what the whole world thinks/Call us a couple of 'missing links'." No? How about, "I love the monkey's uncle/And the monkey's uncle's ape for me"?

Thank you, our Annette, for going where few would dare.

But not even Annette singing Tall Paul can console me for the heartbreaking loss of the parties of beach and pajama, although it gets close:



I suppose I'll just have to make do with the trailer until someone kindly reverses the fiendish deed of the swine who swiped the other clips:

Labels: Annette Funicello

Less About You

Labels: Cocaine, Murray Lachlan Young

Active Resistance to Propaganda

I'm posting here, Vivienne Westwood's manifesto, Active Resistance to Propaganda, as a pdf link. I won't say, for the moment, what I think of it myself, partly because, on first reading, I'm not entirely sure. However, I would be interested in other opinions.

Labels: Vivienne Westwood

Sartre

The following is a brief sketch, skit or vignette from Justin Isis:

Beauvoir: Jean-Paul, we`re the most intelligent people in France, why don`t we get married?

Sartre: Well, yes, Simone, but don`t you see marriage is a bourgeois institution and also nothing of any value in a meaningless universe where existence precedes essence. Therefore, why don`t we continue to fuck while I retain the freedom to bang hot teen pussy whenever I want?

Beauvoir: (frowning) Well...all right...

Sartre: Uh, can you do my laundry too?

Beauvoir: ...

Beauvoir: ...okay.

Labels: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir