Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Robert's Your Mother's Brother

A while back whilst discussing in a reckless manner the relative merits of atheism and theism (was I doing that?), I said something to the effect that I myself didn't have any definite solution to propose (to the philosophic/metaphysical/social stalemate and conundrum). Well, now I have.

I'm sure I have at times sounded hostile towards the idea of atheism, but there's at least one situation in which I very much approve of it. And that is, within the clergy. There is no doubt in my mind that the church is the proper place for the atheist. It is the perfect venue for the fetishism of stained-glass windows, of ecclesiastical vestments, of ritual, tradition, incense, liturgy, hymn and prayer, without all the fuss of having to 'believe' in 'God'.

I myself have at times longed to wear a dog collar.

I understand the call of the cloth. When one is pulling one's surplice over one's cassock in the vestry, rehearsing one's sermon, the feel of ancient and solemn stone all around, the worn slabs beneath the feet, the anticipated tossing of censers in the air, what need is there for that superfluity known as belief? God, they say, is in the details, and when you have as many details as these, you can find that he is mercifully lost in them, as in the folds of your frock and the flocking of your flock.

Who better to understand the subtleties of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer than your local vicar? Who is more strategically placed to fathom the depths of the Ligottian cosmic nightmare than a member of the Holy See?

Not only do I think that it is a good thing for priests of all denominations under the Cross of our Lord to be atheist, I think it should be mandatory. Although, I suppose there is some room for agnosticism, for instance, amongst wacky heterosexual priests and so on.



By the same token, it should be obligatory under international law, for all scientists, of whatever field, to be devoutly religious, and, so as there are no shirkers, let's be specific and say that they should be.... Quakers. It'll work something like this. A group of scientifically minded Friends will seat themselves together in a modest laboratory, bare of equipment, in complete silence. After some minutes, perhaps, at the moving of the Inner Light, one of them will rise to his feet and say:

"Friends, I have something I wish to share with you. Energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. Thus within any closed system, the level of energy, and by extension, also of mass, must remain constant."

"Thank you, Friend, we hear you." (Comes the chorus of response.)

The Friend seats himself once more, and again, some minutes pass in silence until, by the promptings of the Inner Light, another Friend stands and says:

"Friends, I feel that I, too, have something to say, and that a voice within me is asking me to pass on that no physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics."

And so on.

However, since, Quakerism, is, obviously, slightly too congruous with atheism and with science as it stands, perhaps it would be best to go a little further, and from there to legislate that all scientists, must, by law, become yogis. They will then, therefore, sit in their laboratories (or stand etc.) in various forms of yogic practice, such as suspending lead weights from their testicles by string, balancing on the top of a broomstick, and so on. Experimentation is definitely to be encouraged. The Hindu cosmology should be on a scale sufficient to accomodate the needs of science (unlike parochial old atheistic Christianity), and yogic practice should both stimulate and temper the mind to the most blessed and fertile invention.

In such a world, viola! Bob is, literally, your uncle.

I imagine the following discussions taking place between men of science and men of the cloth in our coming world:

Father Coombes: But you see, my dear man, the true function of religion is to lead us on the path of renunciation - the renunciation of belief. At last to feel the air on one's naked defences is quite a relief.

Professor Guessit: You priests are so nihilistic. In your focus on the paraphernalia of celebration, you forget the creative principle.

Father Coombes: I'm afraid that setting your eyebrows on fire and wishful thinking are not enough to protect us from the divine and terrible non-existence of God, that comes upon us, in the end, like a trembling thunder of sunlight on a mid-afternoon tea party in June.

Professor Guessit: Can't you see the chauvinism implicit in such rational gnosticism? With our tongue-nailing practice we've already achieved great things, and there's no reason why we should not achieve more. Just the other day we made a huge leap in our development of teleportation. Admittedly, the development was actually to take a huge leap. But we're getting there.

Excellent!

Any form of teleportation developed through tongue-nailing meditation is a teleportation for which I would be willing to volunteer as a guinea pig.

Labels: atheism, Bob, Christianity, Hinduism, Science

I have a dream

Insomnia strikes again. So, in that sense I don't actually have a dream. Or not tonight. Josephine.

However, as Robert Plant once said (almost):

I have a crazy dream, in which turquoise, yellow, black, white, copper and brown are all united, as one, in tearing their leaders limb from limb.



I'm finding David Korten's The Great Turning to be increasingly stimulating reading, and, as the slogan goes, don't just take my word for it. Here's an excerpt:

The public version of the Grand Area strategy, which was intended to rally the support of those who would be the imperial subjects, called for the creation of a free and equal community of nations and gave birth to the United Nations.

The real intention of the United States was articulated in U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study 23, a top-secret document written in 1948 by George Kennan, a leading architect of the post-World War II world:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our intention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives... We should cease to talk about vague... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

This was the real agenda, and the agencies of its implementation would be the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the less powerful GATT.

Here's another:

In 1823, even as the westward expansion was still in progress, President James Monroe enunciated the Monroe Doctrine as a cornerstone of U.S. policy. The publicly expressed intent was to protect independent Latin American and Caribbean nations from efforts by European powers to recolonize them; the implicit message was that the United States claimed hegemony over the Western Hemisphere.

Theodore Roosevelt took the Monroe doctrine a step further during his presidency (1901-9), announcing that the United States claimed the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any nation that engaged in "flagrant and chronic wrongdoing." Future U.S. administrations defined this to mean any nation that transgressed against a U.S trade or investment interest. A 1962 U.S. State Department report to the Congress listed 103 U.S. military interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895, including interventions in Argentina, Japan, Uruguay, China, Angola, Hawaii, and Nicaragua. The reasons were often obscure but usually related to the investments of one or more U.S. corporations.

I've written a little about racism in recent months. Perhaps I'm slow on the uptake, but I am coming more and more to see racism as something deliberately engineered by our leaders to divide us. I hope that we, the deceived and exploited, shall soon reverse this situation by dividing them. With machetes.

Labels: America, David Korten, imperialism, Racism

Making the world feel less English since 2004

First of all, apologies are in order to just about everyone for just about everything.

Secondly, I'd like you all to think of England.

I know I do, frequently.

It is actually a scientific fact that it's ridiculous of me to be critical of England, unto which Stevie Smith likened happiness, however, I live only to be ridiculous in the eyes and bosoms of all those who behold me, and so, let me proceed.

First of all, I've linked to this before, but I do think it's an excellent essay and expresses a lot of what I also would like to express. I differ from the opinions of Momus management here and there. For instance, it looks like I'm not a real man, since I don't really like gadgets (apart from my digital camera). But that's not really a surprise to anyone, now, is it? Errr... Am I referring to the same essay? Haven't got time to re-read it. To continue...

Oh yes, so there's not much left to say after that, but I shall say it, anyway.

The other day, lamenting the existence of my blog to a friend whilst soaking a whole boxful of mansize tissues, I found myself confronted with the following reply:

I like your blog. I think you should carry on writing it. It makes the world feel less English.

(Before I go further, let me point out I'm not treating England and Britain as interchangable, even though they are... No, I'm just joking.)

A couple of days later I came across the following collection of British adverts on Youtube:



Now, I do actually have a sense of humour somewhere, if I could only find it, BUT, just how many layers of 'brilliant' English/British irony (everyone wants some if it's irony we're talking about) are there in these adverts? What finally comes out on top? The beer is being sold as 'no nonsense'. That's what comes out on top. I'm not having a go at Peter Kay. He's talented and funny enough not to need my permission to exist. But let's analyse in a very (un)English way, the first of these adverts {actually the last one is not bad, and perhaps shows the genuinely good side to British (but not English) 'no nonsense'}. Okay, I'm not well up on sports, but some kind of international sporting event. Some foreign Johnny types do some fancy twirly things off the diving board. Then it's 'good old' John Smith from 'Great Britain'. "What can he do?" we're asked, almost as if it's a rhetorical question. Because we're crap, aren't we? (Is the subtext.) And what he does is 'a running bomb'. The foetal version of a bellyflop, or perhaps the Dambusters version, eh? Anyway, needless to say he wins. That's the spirit! And, the advertising slogan for this horrible beer that tastes like Fairy Liquid is 'No nonsense'. Really? I think there's quite a lot of nonsense in there. However. 'No nonsense' is what the British, and specifically the English, pride ... I want to say 'ourselves', to be inclusive, but I can't, because I don't share these sentiments... is what they pride themselves on. What does 'no nonsense' really mean? Not trying. Being crap. Hating other people for being better than you. Hating to see your mates do well. Etcetera. He hasn't been in the pub since Tuesday, his new girlfriend really has him under the thumb etcetera etcetera. (Oh yeah, the one about the old people's home is particularly horrible. Funny? Didn't raise a titter.)

Sorry, but I don't find it funny. Even as a joke, it's lazy. How ironic can a pint of beer be?

I do enjoy a drink, but... there is more to life than beer and 'a running bomb'. There really is. Open your eyes, if you don't believe me. There is... Well, let's start with Momus. There's Momus, criminally underrated Scottish musician and blogger. There's.... Justin Isis, Mark Samuels (ha ha, no I'm not going to just list all my friends, sorry), Bruno Schulz, Juana Molina, Chinese landscape painting, flying gliders, entomology, Arthur Machen, that really grim Polish artist who was knifed whose name I can never spell and I'm probably embarrassing myself and getting the country wrong, too, Maruo Suehiro, C.G. Jung, Stanislav Grof, Gurdjieff, Kate Bush, Sifow, Maeda Ken, Zhongguo Wawa, Jorge Luis Borges, Jeremy Reed, The Tindersticks, some people that I have unforgivably not kept in touch with (sorry again), Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Naruse Mikio, Takahashi Rumiko, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ivor Cutler, William Blake, Yang Lian, Wang Wei, Li Bai, tai chi, Six Feet Under, the Peter Harris Experience, Andre Gide, Immanuel Kant, Fucking Amal, Thomas Ligotti, Kierkegaard, Ann Kavan, tree frogs, duckweed, two-tone, wolf-children, Marcus Aurelius and Norman Lovett in my living room alone. And that's still a very, very biased list, it has to be said. (Oh, and Kahlil Gibran, he quipped.)

And some of them are even English.

And some of them are even British.

Errr. I think that's all I really needed to say. I'll leave the last word to Kit Wright, a poet. I know nothing about Kit Wright except that he or she wrote the following poem. (If there are any copyright problems, will Kit Wright please get in touch with me, and I promise that the John Smiths will be on me for the evening):

Everyone Hates the English

Everyone hates the English,
Including the English, they sneer
At each other for being so English,
So what are they doing here,
The English? It's thick with the English,
All over the country. Why?
Everyone ever born English
Should shut up, or fuck off, or die.

Anyone ever born English
Should hold their extraction in scorn
And apologise all over England
For ever at all being born,
For that's how it is, being English;
Fodder for any old scoff
That England might be a nice country
If only the English fucked off!

Labels: Britain, England, John Smiths, Kit Wright, Peter Kay

Interview with Rroland

When I write, as part of the ritual necessary to putting me in the right frame of mind, as well as making myself a pot of tea, I tend to put on some music. This is usually instrumental (with one or two exceptions). For instance, favourites include the soundtrack the from film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters by Philip Glass and (currently) Mum's Finally We Are No one. Another disc that has graced my player during the ritual of writing, and at various other times, is Reflections on a Past Life as Played on the Roland Synthesiser, by Rroland. Rroland's music is, to offer a very general description, instrumental, electronic and ambient. However, I'm not sure I could really give and idea of genre here, and even the word 'ambient' seems misleading. Sometimes, when I'm writing, I find that the music refuses to be background music. Some of the pieces are too structured to really be 'ambient', seeming to build themselves in cyclopean blocks before the mind's eye, and even those that have a drifting quality are only really misty - if at all - at the edges. If this is drifting, then it is drifting as experienced by Walter Gilman in H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Dreams in the Witch House', who finds himself nocturnally travelling in dream through regions that "lie beyond the three dimensions we know" in "plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain."

In the case of Reflections on a Past Life, however, there is some explanation, and that explanation is in the title. The fifteen tracks on the disc are a musical representation of a past-life re-lived, and, I must say, they do rather feel that way, like a therapeutic session, perhaps, with the likes of R.D, Laing, whose aim is to re-experience and thus to exorcise buried trauma. The reviews I have read of the disc use phrases such as "Candyland-on-crack", but my own experience is not of 'electronic popsicles'. To give an example, The Road up to Hell sounds to me like a cryogenically frozen soul watching paralysed as bits of karmic space debris burn up in the atmosphere of its aura.



Just the other day, Momus invited the readers of his blog to interview each other in his comments section. I wrote down an impromptu list of questions, and a number of people were generous enough to answer these (and all of them interestingly). Among these people there was Rroland, who has kindly given me permission to reproduce the interview here:

Q: What was the last book (s) that you read?

R: Street of Crocodiles Bruno Schultz

Q: How was it?

R: Funny, sad, inspiring made me want to compose new stuff

Q: Do you have any pets?

R: no, a mouse once lived with me but my landlord killed it

Q: What's your favourite non-alcholic drink?

R: Trader Joe's Bedtime tea

Q: What would be the preferred manner of your death?

R: in the backcountry while hiking, or with my head on my keyboard playing an endless distorted note

Q: What is the oldest article of clothing that you still wear?

R: that's a long answer, i wear everything until it falls apart

Q: What is your favourite kind of weather?

R: thick fog

Q: What is the least touristy place you have ever been?

R: San Diego, CA

Q: What place names make you laugh?

R: San Diego

Q: Have you ever been personally involved with someone born on an island smaller than Taiwan?

R: No

Q: Do you prefer to use chopsticks, knife and fork, or hands?

R: Chopsticks when possible

Q: Have you ever walked out on a film in the cinema, and if so, what was it?

R: 'I'm not There', The Heath Ledger parts were pissing me off

Q: What's your least favourite cartoon and why?

R: He-Man, because i am a mis-anthropist

Q: Who is the world's funniest comedian?

R: Franz Kafka

Q: What do you want to do next week?

R: Yoga

Q: Have you ever admired someone for political reasons?

R: yes, Momus

Q: What is the most psychologically formative event of your life before the age of nine?

R: when I burned my dad's porn collection and started a field on fire and got in trouble with the fire department

Q: Where did you last go for a daytrip and why?

R: I walked about 10 miles across the GG Bridge from my house in SF and took the ferry back from Sausalito

Thanks for interview Quentin!

You may listen to some of Rroland's music at his Myspace page, here.

Labels: H.P. Lovecraft, Momus, music, Rroland

Grotesque

Kirino Natsuo seems to be something of a phenomenon.

She is a Japanese author of, to my knowledge, what might be described as thrillers or crime novels. I know enough to understand that crime is big at the moment. For many horror and supernatural writers, for instance, it's the 'new horror'. I hear murmurings that the crime genre is considered pretty cutting edge right now, and I'm sure there are readers who will corroborate.

Justin Isis turned me onto Kirino Natsuo, describing her as an example of 'obasan rage'. 'Obasan' is Japanese for 'aunt', but is also used to refer generally to middle-aged women.

In London recently, I popped into a bookshop, saw a copy of Grotesque and bought it on impulse. I started reading it that day, and soon found it addictive. Here's what some of the blurbs say:

'Cool, angry and stylish,' The Times.

'Delves so deep beyond its own shock horror premise that much contemporary crime fiction appears cheap and exploitative by comparison...' Metro.



There are more, but I'll leave it at that.

After a couple of days of reading it, I met up with Mr. Wu in London (for those who are new to this blog, Mr. Wu is a pseudonym), and spoke to him about it, even then thinking I'd like to write a review of it.

"It's a Japan I recognise," I said.

"In what way?"

"Well, lots of people made utterly dull and spiteful by conformity."

"Hmmmm. It's funny you should say that. That's exactly, word for word, how I would describe Britain."

(If you're using this blog post for any kind of sociological study, well, I'm afraid that's about as incisive as my social observation is going to get.)

Anyway, the other day I finally finished the book, and now I'd like to write a little about it. I'll try not to give too many spoilers, though I'll have to discuss some aspects of plot. Basically, as explained on the back cover, the story is that of two women educated at the same elite school for girls, who both go on to become prostitutes, and who both are murdered. The story is largely told in the voice of the older sister of one of these women. Ironically, I don't think I can remember the older sister's name now. Damn, that's terrible, and I'll tell you why - because no one really seems to remember her name at all (maybe the author omits it on purpose, but I'm not sure). She lives in the shadow of her younger sister, Yuriko, who is extraordinarily beautiful. People think of her simply as 'Yuriko's (ugly) older sister'. Other parts of the story are told by Yuriko, the second woman, Sato Kazue, and the apparent murderer.

The sister tells us early on that if she had to describe Yuriko in one word, that word would be 'monster'. This seems a startling claim, but she makes good on it as the story unfolds. And the reason her sister is a monster? Not because she was born with an evil soul or any such thing, but merely because of her beauty. Beauty is monstrous because it is the focus of desire, and specifically male desire. This is a book that could be summed up as an unfavourable review of the male sex through the eyes of those most qualified to know them - prostitutes. Kirino Natsuo seems to have arrived on the scene like a brilliant party pooper at an office party, the razor sharp obasan casting a withering eye on the other office girls flattering their bosses and on the bosses simpering in return.

This is a book of unapologetic extremes, successfully pulled off. Just as Yuriko is described straightforwardly as a monster, so society is depicted in more or less absolute terms as a bullying hierarchy, and characters are divided starkly into 'insiders' and 'outsiders', 'sluts' and 'virgins' and so on. Although this could result in a dull simplicity if not skilfully handled, such polarisation is effective here for a number of reasons. The extreme views give a certain incisive power, like the stabs of a sharpened blade. Also, because the story is told from the viewpoints of different characters, and the characters not only reveal different sides of the same events, but different aspects of themselves over time, the narrative blade that Kirino Natsuo uses is not only sharp, but could also be described as double-edged. There's something else, too. Early on in the story, during the section set in the school for girls, where pupils are naturally divided into the 'insiders' who were at the school from the beginning, and the 'outsiders' who enrolled later, there is the following dialogue between the older sister and her best friend:

Best friend: "I didn't think there could ever be such a student here."

Older sister: "Even among the outsiders?"

Best friend: "Outsiders? Damn, you're like an alien, you know. No one laughs at you or tries to bother you. You just go about your business without a care in the world!"

As soon as I read this, and other similar descriptions pertaining to the older sister character, I had a strong feeling that they also applied to Kirino Natsuo as an author. She is 'not even an outsider', and this gives her angle a complexity that belies the seeming simplicity of 'outsider/insider', 'virgin/slut' and so on. It also leads me to imagine the office party that I mentioned earlier as a metaphor for the literary world, full of complacency and mutual back-slapping. I would like to think, and can well imagine, that the presence of Kirino Natsuo makes a lot of the old phoneys in the world of writing and publishing rather nervous. She might just spoil the easy game for everyone, and show up what cheats and slackers they all are.



Although none of the characters in Grotesque are exactly sympathetic, and certainly not admirable, it's definitely men who come off worst:

I can't think of any creature more disgusting than a man, with his hard muscles and bones, his sweaty skin, all that hair on his body, and his knobbly knees. I hate men with deep voices and bodies that smell like animal fat, men who act like bullies and never comb their hair. Oh, yes, there is no end to the nasty things I can say about men. I'm just lucky to have a job at a ward office so I don't have to commute to work every day on the crowded trains. I don't think I could stand riding jammed in a car with a bunch of smelly salary men.

Being a member of the male sex myself, you might imagine I would find this offensive, but I don't. Not in the least. I'm not sure why that should be except that it simply seems honest to me. It's not some sly political statement, not some part of the power struggle. The main narrator (and perhaps the author) is smart enough to disown any ideology such as feminism. Her hatred is personal, and that's something I can respect completely. In fact, I very much appreciate the opportunity to see the world in such a way, and hope that this is a vista that many men (and women) will find themselves subjected to unwittingly. Even if the picture painted in this book of the male sex is not the 'whole truth', I see no reason to give counter-arguments, which have been given for so long now, anyway, that they resemble excuses. For now, let us bathe in the pure hatred. The hour of obasan rage is upon us!

Yes, indeed, Kirino Natsuo is smart. Her style seems to me like that of someone so sharp she doesn't have to try too hard to prove anything, who can let things drop almost off-handedly here and there. For instance, I love this kind of thing:

Yes, I can well believe you don't want to hear any more about my grandfather and Mitsuru's mother and their disgusting love story.

What fascinates me is how Kirino Natsuo has taken an angle that is almost the opposite of cool - for instance, the obscure life of the frumpy, middle-aged woman who is the main narrator here - and turned it around to create something that is, to quote The Times once more, "cool, angry and stylish", and how she has done so seemingly without compromise. A work that concentrates solely on hatred, violence and ugliness could be accused of being shallow, and I suppose such a criticism is possible, and yet I feel that there is something in the sharpness and smartness of what Kirino Natsuo has acheived here that is not shallow. Its depth lies in the depth of suffering and the depth of hatred, the care with which the sharp blade of the narrative has been honed, and in all that has been left unsaid.

And, if you want pathos, how about the pathos revealed in small details, such as an aging and 'grotesque' prostitute, of good educational background, putting her finger to her chin as a deliberate expression of little girl cuteness in order to try and win some kind of sympathy from the man who is her oblivious customer?

Not that I would say this is a perfect novel by any means. I did not find, for instance, the narrative voice of the murderer as compelling as that of the older sister. Also, I understand that the author is influenced by Stephen King, and here and there I felt the prose (whether due to poor translation or not, I don't know), lapsed from sharpness into the kind of passable, plodding, action-driven prose characteristic of King. My overall verdict, however, is that I want to read more.

I looked up a little on Kirino Natsuo after I started reading the book. There were two points of interest for me. Perhaps three. I was surprised to find that she is a married mother. I shouldn't have been really. As a writer myself, I know very well that one should not necessarily take fiction at face value or look for a literal correspondence between the work and the author. However, I do admit that I was surprised - but not disappointed. I like the seeming disparity here. I like the fact that she is able so convincingly to project a persona that bears no resemblance to her outward circumstances. Yes, I still believe her work to be honest. Honesty in fiction is something very different to mere autobiography.

Secondly, I noted that although she has written thirteen full-length novels and a number of other books since 1993, only two of her books have been translated into English. This is utterly shameful. I don't know anymore whether to blame the publishers or the reading public for this kind of thing, but it does make me angry nonetheless. The proportion of novels being translated from English to other languages is much greater than the proportion being translated from other languages to English. Why? English literature is so dull and self-satisfied, and so is the English-speaking world. It seems like the only Japanese literature that most people can ever claim to have read (if they can claim any at all) is Murakami Haruki, in whose books, with their offensively coffee-table hip covers, we are currently drowning.

Did I say there was a third thing? Well, just that I looked up some images of Kirino Natsuo, too, and I find she has a rather wonderful face, as you can see above.

Labels: crime fiction, Grotesque, Kirino Natsuo