(Stoop)

Sorry, but I had nothing else in mind for today. When in doubt, drone on some more about Finnegans Wake.

(Stoop)

I have in the past written quite extensively on the subject of Finnegans Wake and my theory that the Wake has been somewhat misinterpreted over the years since its serialisation and publication. I have written on the influence of both Dante’s Divine Comedy and James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, as well as an entire essay largely dealing with the Wake’s opening word. So I want here to offer some fairly unorganised notes on some of the other observations I have made in trying to decode Finnegans Wake.

The following observations mostly relate to the first half a dozen pages or so of Finnegans Wake. I offer them purely because there are elements here that jump out of me, but are ignored by any and all of the standard texts that deal with the Wake.

For instance, the second paragraph of the Wake replays the whole of human history from the present day back to the time of Noah and the great flood. The third paragraph deals with the fall of man. Into the mix of this world history is thrown in elements from Irish history. To pick out a couple of phrases which seem significant, first consider:

Not yet, though venisson after, had a kidscad buttended a bland of isaac:

The repetitions of ‘not yet’ throughout the paragraph seems to play with the concept of time, taken at one level to indicate that something has not yet happened, but also saying, not yet, keep going, back even further.

Isaac Butt was a nineteenth century Irish political leader who established a number of organisations in favour of Irish Home Rule. He was later succeed by Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish politician whose fall from grace due to his affair with a married woman forms one of the many subplots in Ulysses.

However, the influence of Frazer’s Golden Bough is felt keenly throughout the Wake and so Joyce seems also to be drawing attention to Frazer’s theories about the biblical story where Abraham’s takes his son Isaac to the temple mount to sacrifice him, until God sends an angel to stay his hand. Frazer notes that at this time in history it was common place for tribal leaders, chieftains and kings to offer up their own children in sacrifice to the elemental forces that dominated the life of early civilisations. Originally it was the leaders themselves that would be sacrificed, once their powers started to dwindle, but as chieftains and kings became more politically sophisticated, they started to find substitutes to be sacrificed in their place, either from amongst the poor and mentally challenged, or the issue of their own loins.

As with many of the stories that form the book of Genesis, the story of Abraham and Isaac was not meant to be taken literally as an event that actually happened, but rather as an allegory and a covenant and contract with God to eschew the practice of human sacrifice in favour of animal sacrifices, variously interpreted as the sacrifice of a goat or ram.

This is I think is why Isaac (isaac) is described as being old and bland. Old suggests something well established or traditional, whereas bland means common place. The whole phrase therefore translates as, back before animal sacrifice had ended (‘buttended’) the practice of child worship amongst the Israelites.

The other phrase that I find intriguing is at the end of the second paragraph:

and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

Joyce, in his letter to Harriet Weaver Shaw, 15 November 1926, offers several key insights into the language in this passage:

rory = Irish = red

rory = Latin, roridus = dewy

at the end of the rainbow’s end are dew and the colour red

bloody end  to the lie in Anglo-Irish = no lie

regginbrow = Germ regenbogen + rainbow

ringsome = Germ ringsum, around

Now, in playing history backwards, the end of the second paragraph arrives at Noah’s Ark and God’s placement of the rainbow in the sky to signify his covenant with man never to flood the world again (a promise he’s certainly not keeping in the UK or the Republic of Ireland at the moment). Yet, Finnegans Wake for the vast majority of its narrative is telling two tales at once, one global and universal, the other local and domestic. The passage under consideration seems to be both a reference to Noah’s Ark but also to domestic violence. For a start, the Wake takes place at night, so how can there be a rainbow? Also, the meaning of the phrase using Joyce’s own key is that only the red end of the rainbow is to be seen on the face of the water. It is also ‘ringsome’, yet a rainbow is arc shaped.

In the Wake, bodies of water generally refer to women. The word ‘aquaface’ was written as ‘waterface’ in Joyce’s original draft. This therefore seems to mean that a woman, Anna Livia Plurabelle, has been beaten by her husband, HCE, and she has been left with a red ring on her face, most likely around her eye, which will no doubt become black later on. Man in the Wake is represented by the land and in the opening sentence, the river is described as being swerved by the shore and bent by the bay, which could also indicate domestic violence, being grabbed by the husband and having her arm bent into submission, before a punch is delivered. A bloody end and one which leaves both a red ring and dew in the form of tears.

There are also several phrases which jump out in the next two pages as reference to domestic and sexual violence, but which are not even deemed worthy of mention in the standard texts. For instance:

Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher.

Which seems to be clear reference to rape. Or:

Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe.

Which seems to simply note that alcohol leads to domestic violence. The cycles of death and rebirth are riffed upon time and again within the Wake, as seen when we consider that ‘fin’ is French for ‘end’ or ‘finish’ and therefore Finnegan can be translated as end and begin again, as reflected in the last unfinished sentence of the Wake being said to be completed by the unfinished sentence which begins the novel. However, I also think that the cycles of death and rebirth are as much about sex and misogyny, much of the Wake being about erections and ejaculation, which represent male domination of the female. Again, an example is presented in the first few pages:

His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a man merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see.

Walls, as with so much else in the Wake, represent male priapism, as the section in brackets makes clear (wall = erection). The Wake is written in its very own language, but often it says exactly what it means to say. It is tempting to translate, ‘He stottered from the latter’ into ‘He staggered from the ladder’, a reference to Tim Finnegan in the folk song, Finnegan’s Wake. However, I think that here latter means exactly latter. What is the latter? Well in the bracketed phrase, the latter is ‘erection’. It can then be seen to rather refer to ejaculation (i.e. stottered from the latter = he came out of his penis), after which, ‘he was dud’ or spent. The final phrase once again mixes the local with global, for when a man becomes sexually excited, he gains an erection that the whole world can see, given that men run the world.

The Wake, especially in the first chapter, is full of these keys and ciphers to read it. The second paragraph begins:

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea…

Which translates into, man, the violator of love, over throws women, who is the short sea. Later in the chapter we are told:

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many.

We must stoop because this is the tale of woman, who is shorter than man, and we must therefore alter our height and perception in order to hear her tale and see the world from her perspective.

Indeed, it is curious that the one section of the Wake that Joyce recorded himself reading from, although the recording was made many years before he had finished writing the Wake, is from the end of chapter eight, commonly known as The Washer Women at the Ford. This chapter puns within itself the names of hundreds upon hundreds of rivers from across the world. Given that rivers refer to women, this entire chapter can essentially be translated as, women, women, women, women, women, women, women, women, etc. Yet still the significance of this is overlooked as Joyce obviously knew it would be from the countless references he makes in the Wake to the reader’s obliviousness (‘Can you rede.. its world?). The section he narrated begins:

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it.

The truth will out, every story gets told sooner or later and that’s the he and the she of it. Every empire, every dictatorship and totalitarian regime comes crashing down eventually and the victors and new rulers remake history in their own image. It happened when the old pantheistic faiths were usurped by multinational monotheism and it is happening again now as those religions begin to wane in their influence and people rediscover the beliefs and ideas of which they tried so hard to destroy any knowledge.

So there you go, a few further thoughts on Finnegans Wake. It’s a never ending task and one to which I will return time and again in these posts. If nothing else, it’s an education.

Get it done.

See also (click links)

Bough-Wake

XXXIX Articles

Solve for 'riverrun,'

The Further Adventures of Captain Danny Roberts

Today we spend some time in the company of Captain Roberts

The Further Adventures of Captain Danny Roberts

Ship’s Log, day something or other.

May you live in interesting times, so the Chinese curse goes. Well life on board the Anna Livia Plurabelle has certainly been interesting for the last few days. And goddam noisy.

It’s a rarity that I sail as far north as the North Atlantic, but reading out a random page in the Wake (page 310 for anyone keeping count: The harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) etc.), I happened to find myself in that part of the world in some version of the summer of 1953 and some presentiment told me I should sail around for a time and see what I might find.

It may have been summer, but it was still raining and spraying sea water all over the shop, so I sealed the forward section around the instrument panels off from the elements, lowered and inclined the wheel on its housing, just to the right height so I could grab a copy of Toni Morrison’s Jazz out of the library, pull up a chair and rest my feet on the plane of the wheel and steer with my feet as I read.

The weather was atrocious, too rough for straight sailing, so I deployed the external engines port and starboard, the power of their tubular lengths reducing the pitching and rolling of the North Atlantic waters to mere pitching, which is more manageable. The hemisphere of holographic sensor displays hung in the air above my head. The sounds of Count Basie, Billy Holiday and Duke Ellington pumped through the ship’s speakers. Issy slept on a sofa in the alcove behind me.

I was fifty pages into Jazz when the sensors registered the first object in the water. I calmly finished the chapter I was on then turned hard to starboard. It wasn’t long before the on board cameras started to pick out the first bodies in the water.

Wrapped in an oilskin, I headed out on deck, giving control to Anna and telling her to bring the ship to manoeuvring speed. The engines retreated inside the ship’s trunk and we crawled ahead on thruster jets.

There were bodies everywhere. More than a hundred. Obviously a ship had gone down, but the was no sight of a wreck above the surface. Sonar was picking up a faint signal. I ordered Anna to launch one of the remote submersibles to get a fix on its location, but simply by heading in the direction of the greatest density of bodies, I figured I could get a rough reckoning. Whatever had happened had obviously happened fast, but I still wanted to scout around for any survivors in the water.

I wasn’t finding any. Everybody in the water had been there for some time and were starting to bloat. Some had injuries so horrific that I guessed they’d been dead long before they’d had time to drown. I thought about what Leonardo Da Vinci says in his notebooks, that drowned men float on the water face up, but drowned women float face down. I hadn’t really believed him until that point, but I could see that he was right. I morbidly wondered whether this was nature’s kindness to women or a cruel joke on those of us that would have to fish them out of the sea.

The submersible tracked the wreck to the ocean floor, a couple thousand feet down. From the video feed I guessed it to be a small passenger liner. Looked pretty obsolete even for 1953. I ordered it back whilst I brought the ship to as near above the wreck as possible and then sent out all three aerial remotes in sweeps of ever increasing circles to see if there was any Ishmael that had managed to survive by clinging to some piece of flotsam.  

Better than Ishmael, Remote no 2 (I call him Dick) sent back images of one wooden lifeboat. Whilst the other two remotes (Tom and Harry) increased their sweeps in the hope of finding anyone else, I steered the A.L.P. north-north-east in the direction of the lifeboat.

The craft had drifted fifteen miles away from the site of the wreck, which probably meant the ship had gone down in the last six to eight hours. I cleared the outer ring of bodies at a respectful speed then increased to full ahead in their direction, only slowing down for the last half a mile. Conditions had deteriorated fast. I could have sailed a couple of hundred yards from their location and they would never have even known I was there. Thank the maker (i.e. Andy) for infrared sensors. And thank the heavens for the weather, for I do love to make a dramatic entrance. I put on my captain’s jacket and hat and brought the ship abaft of them, where I could open the back doors to the dry dock.

“Looks to me like you folks could use some assistance.”

If you can’t get a cheer as the conquering hero, a woman’s plaintive tears of relief will do just as well. There were nine of them in the boat, the only nine survivors, as I was to discover, from the RMS Cairngorm. I threw out a rope to secure to a ring at the stern, then deployed the winch mechanism to bring the whole boat on board.

Nine survivors, two men, three women and four children, three boys and a girl. All but one of the women consisted to form two families. Clarissa, the one lone woman, had been travelling with her sister but they’d been separated in the melee and she feared the worst. Her demeanour quickly deteriorated into one of hysteria, but they were all suffering from a mixture of shock and relief and I thought the first thing I should do was get them up to the Ward Room and fix them all a drink.

Brandy, cognac is you please, is a great settler of mood and warmer of frozen limbs. The children aged between eight and fifteen, but I dished out the Remy Martin nonetheless, despite their parents half-hearted objections, doses given according to age, the youngest, Peter, receiving two tea spoons worth of bronze fire. He clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth like he’d been fed cough medicine. “Burns.” he said.

“Means it’s working.” I said, winking.

I was keen to hear their story, but everyone was soaked to the skin from having spent uncertain hours being tossed around by the North Atlantic waters, so I thought it best to get them shown to their quarters so everyone could get cleaned up and dry their clothes and meet up later for something to eat and hear their tale.

Ship’s protocol was easy enough to decipher in this instant (it isn’t always so easy, even though I made the rules up myself). The two families would take the state rooms, the Isis and Lucia cabins, Clarissa was given the V.I.P. quarters in the Barnacle Suite. I made sure the heat in each set of rooms was turned up hot enough that everyone would feel drowsy. I figured what they most needed now was a few hour’s sleep.

Clarissa was the first to emerge a few hours later, the evening light starting to fade. She took an immediate interest in Issy (it’s not every day that you meet a Jaguar on board a ship), but was understandably pensive, petting the amenable Issy with a faraway look in her eye. She wanted to know if there was only the two of us aboard and how I could sail such a ship all by myself. Given the time period, I had powered down all of the computer and holographic readouts. Anna held her silence. I received all on board information projected through a single contact lens in my left eye and an microscopic earpiece in my right ear.

The families emerged soon after. There was Malcolm and Agnes, with their son, Peter, and Terrence and Marjorie, with their sons, Terrence and Clive and daughter, Jane. I knew Terrence, Snr was going to be a royal pain in my arse right from the off. His family “had had a gander” around the ship and wanted to know why Clarissa had been given the much larger Barnacle Suite when him and his family were crammed into the Isis Cabin. Crammed, I ask you, on any other ship the Isis Cabin would be the state room. I explained that ship’s protocol demanded that two families of equal status receive equal living space. He started on about how it wasn’t fair, he had three kids compared to one in the other family, and growing bored with his shitty attitude I matter of factly told him it wasn’t my fault if he couldn’t keep it in his pants. He made to start afresh, but an angry growl from Issy brought his gob shutting with a pop. I love that cat. Such a good judge of character.

As they’d slept, I’d already set to work preparing a meal down in the main kitchen, a novelty given that I usually only need to cook for myself and rarely stray away from the smaller kitchen in my own quarters. I went for something traditional, roast beef and potatoes, boiled carrots, cabbage and corn on the cob, along with an excellent batch of Yorkshire pudding that Gaynor taught me how to make back before the rift. You superheat a glass dish in the oven, coated in olive oil, then pour the pudding mix into the heated dish and cook for quarter of an hour for perfect results. Apple crumble and custard or ice cream followed for desert and as we ate at the Captain’s Table, they told me what had happened.

As far as anyone could tell, they’d hit a mine. Probably left over from the war. Actually, there was some disagreement, with Terrence Snr thinking it was a mine, but Malcolm, Agnes and Clarissa thinking it sounded more like two mines had exploded. Certainly they had heard two explosions. Loathed as I was to agree with Terrence Snr, the injuries that I had seen on the corpses in the water suggested that an engine had exploded, which would have accounted for the two explosions, one a mine going off in near enough proximity to cause something mechanical to explode.

It had all happened so fast, it was only because the two families were at that point taking some air on the observation deck and Malcolm had reacted quickly in getting one of the lifeboats deployed (Malcolm had served in the Royal Navy during the war and been torpedoed by a German U-Boat during convoy duties) that they had lived to tell the tale. Clarissa, getting lost in the confusion, had come floundering onto deck just as they’d been in the process of abandoning ship and been manhandled aboard the lifeboat despite her protestations.

Everyone became quiet after a while and seeing no right time to bring the subject up, I asked what was to be done about the bodies. “Leave them.” was Terrence Snr’s predictable reply. “Sea creatures will take care of them. We just want to get home to Blighty.”

“You can’t just leave them.” Malcolm responded. “They’re human beings, they have the right to simple dignity. Their families have the right to give them a proper Christian burial.”

“Well what are we supposed to do about it?” Terrence Snr asked.

“Captain Roberts, I take it that you would have no objections to retrieving the bodies. You seem to have the space”

“None at all. I have a small infirmary on board that’s served as a morgue on more than one occasion. There’s also a utility room on deck and the dry dock. Any room can be made a cold as ice or as hot as hell. It’s a grim job, but manageable.”

“This is ridiculous, I won’t have any part of this.”

“Mr Madden, I am captain of this ship and I will decide what is to be done. What’s more, so long as you are on board my ship, you will be treated as guests or crew as I see fit. If you don’t like that, I can always put you back in your lifeboat and you can float home on your own. Blighty is about eight hundred miles west of here, though I’d be happy to loan you the use of a compass and sextant. Do I make myself completely and unemphatically clear?” He grunted. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“You do.”

“Good.”

“Though I should like to say that I think you are a bully.”

“And I should like to say that I think that you are a self-centred cunt.” There was a gasp. “Excuse my foul language ladies, but sometime a Captain has to stamp out a mutiny before it gets started. Do not test me Mr Madden, or you will discover just how much of a bully I can be. If you wish, you may try to gain control of my ship, though I should warn you, she has eyes and ears only for me.”

“If I may speak at this point. “ Clarissa spoke up.

“Of course.” I said.

“I should like to help recover what bodies can be recovered as I should like to find my sister, if she is out there. Oh I know she may have gone down with the Cairngorm, but even if we don’t find her, I know that anybody we can recover will save a family the anguish of never knowing.” She burst into tears at this point and even the shameless Terrence Snr was sufficiently moved to become misty eyes. Everyone around the table shed a few tears at least.

“It’s settled then.” I said, clearing the lump in my throat. “We’ve been treading water here since I picked you up. At first light I’ll turn the ship around and head back. I don’t think there’s any need to involve the children and there’s plenty of entertainments on board to keep them distracted. Yet even between the six of us, it shouldn’t take more than a day or two to get everyone stowed on board. Madame et Monsieur, I know that you’ve all had a sleep already this afternoon, but I think it’s best if you all retire for the evening. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

The following day came and some of what I saw that day will haunt me for years, even after having travelled to some of the least civilised periods in human history. I’ve seen hangings and beheadings, poor souls burned at the stake and corpses left to rot upon high as a warning to others, but there’s nothing quite as disturbing as body that’s been left in the water for a day or two. I’ve heard talk of bodies literally falling apart as they’re being pulled out of the water, but luckily we didn’t have any of that nonsense. I said it was nature’s cruel joke to let women float face down and the way the facial features start to dissolve are not something I will soon forget.

It took a day and a half to get the 126 corpses aboard, deploying the smaller boat, Issy-la-Chappelle for greater manoeuvrability. Myself, Malcolm and Terrence, Snr retrievied the bodies and returned them to the A.L.P. for the women to move into storage. The infirmary above the dock quickly filled up, at which point we used the utility room. The last forty bodies or so were laid out on the deck of the dock once the Issy-la-Chappelle was safely back on board. Peter, Clive and Jane happily played games on deck as we worked, but Terrence, Jnr showed great fortitude in helping the women with moving bodies. Greater fortitude that his father, certainly. I lost count of the amount of times we had to stop to let him be sick over the side. Sea sickness he claimed. Cunt.

A grim task but we got it done and then it was time to sail for England. The Madden family were Londoners, the rest of the passenger from Scotland, so I decided to compromise and head for my favourite port of Liverpool, radioing ahead with news of our unpleasant cargo. At near full speed, we were able reach port in a little under a day. The authorities were waiting for us and despite the year, they did a fine job of continuing the respect we had shown in bringing so many loved ones home. We never did find Clarissa’s sister, Emily. It’s my one regret.

Despite our disagreements, Terrence thanked me for saving his family and offered me his hand. I gave him a hug instead and apologised for what I had called him. I hoped that he now saw that it was right what we had done and he agreed that it was. We left on reasonably good terms.

The family were put on a train for London and I ended up sailing the Scottish contingent home as far as Ayr. It was good to be heading back to the country in which I was born and nice to enjoy the company of my guests without Terrence, Snr’s bullish attitude. I usually have little patience for children, but I found Peter to be pleasant company, so inquisitive and full of questions, which I did my best to answer. After they disembarked, I did some checking. He went on to be an engineer. Ship design. Excellent career choice.

Well the ship’s been hosed down and disinfected, but the nightmares are quite bad for the moment. Apart from having so many dead things on board, I always get like this when I’ve had company on board. Nothing to do now but get stoned and stare into space. Maybe watch The Abyss. I’m joking of course. I quite like the 1950s. Bought myself some 50s shirts while I was on Merseyside, waiting for the inquest to conclude. Heading back across the Atlantic at the moment, heading for a break in the Caribbean while I figure out what to do next (m’m, black women). Might head for Cuba, see if Hemingway’s knocking about. If I remember rightly, he’s either there or in Africa about now.

“Hey Anna, do we have Michael Palin’s Hemingway series in the data banks? Excellent, be a love and pull up the entire thing and rout it through the digital projector in the alcove. Full speed ahead for Cuba.”

Until next time…

Get it done.

Review: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes/ But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes – Anita Loos

Book review. 'Nuff said:

Review: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes/ But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes – Anita Loos

“I set to work at once on your esteemed order and so hard indeed that I almost stupefied myself and stopped, reclining on a sofa and reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for three whole days.”

          James Joyce, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 8 November 1926

Recently I was rummaging around Oxfam’s second hand book store in Preston (always the highlight for me of any trip to Preston), when I happened across a copy of Anita Loos’s novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

If people remember the name at all these days it’s likely to be thanks to the 1953 movie starring Marilyn Monroe, yet when the book was published in 1925 it went through forty-five editions before demand started to wane. The second edition alone ran to sixty thousand copies and was snapped up in days.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes takes the form of the diary of New York socialite, Lorelei Lee, the blonde in question that gentlemen seem to prefer. As Loos tells it in her introduction to the 1963 edition, she was returning from New York to Los Angeles by train with a group of the elite of Hollywood, including Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. There was a blonde girl travelling with the group and Loos could not work out why staff onboard seemed keener to assist this one blonde girl than the darker haired Loos.

Apparently the rather prosaic truth hadn’t occurred to anyone before, that blonde women are generally more popular. From this one incident Loos reflected on all of the blonde girls that she had known in her life and realised the truth. She noticed that even the greatest intellectual minds in America that she knew seemed to fall for ‘the dumbest blonde of all’ (her words) and she presently wrote a sketch which became a series of sketches that appeared in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, before finally being published as a full blown novel (the first edition sold out on the day it was released).

Edith Wharton called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ‘the great American novel’, a title that has been given to many novels, especially from that time of prohibition and the Jazz Age. Indeed, in many respects Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is no different than many novels from that time. It’s heroine is a social high flyer, being wined and dined by one American industrialist and English lord after another. She travels to London and Paris and Vienna and home to New York again, always paid for by one of her many gentlemen friends. As Loos notes, if any male writer had written about such things, their efforts would have been met with massive indignation, yet she ‘with my infantile cruelty, have never been able to view even the most impressive human behaviour as anything but foolish’. Lorelei is essentially a gold digger, always scheming for new clothes and diamond tiaras on somebody else’s account, yet Loos’s simple prose style lends her a great deal of sympathy. Besides, most of the men she dupes deserve it.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a short book, a couple of hours is all it takes to get through, which makes James Joyce’s claim to have spent three days reading it rather curious. The introduction notes, ‘James Joyce, who had begun to lose his eyesight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee’. Which isn’t quite true, as Joyce was reading the book a year after publication. More likely, he was gathering material for Finnegans Wake. Lorelei Lee’s style is one of near perfect grammar and punctuation, but with her own peculiar style of phonetically spelling words, some of which Joyce obviously appropriated. She spells Eiffel Tower, Eyefull Tower for instance, which in the Wake becomes, ‘a skyerscape of a most eyeful hoyth entowerly’ [my italics]. Failing eyesight or not, spending three days reading a two hour novel suggests that Joyce wasn’t merely reading, he was studying in detail.

Joyce appears briefly by name in the 1927 sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. The Picador edition that I bought from Oxfam includes both books back to back, so that you read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, then vertically rotate the book by 180^O to read But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Not enough twin editions of novels are produced in this way in my opinion.

But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes is not quite as good as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Again, Lorelei Lee is the narrator but here she tells the story of the early life of her friend and fellow socialite, Dorothy Shaw. The problem is that Lorelei Lee is charmingly dumb in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but in order to accommodate the story of Dorothy she has to be much more knowing and the only thing that remains of the style of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is Lorelei’s idiosyncratic spelling. It’s ok, but nowhere near as good as the original story.

I haven’t seen the film, but then my film knowledge is woefully lacking. Not a patch on my literary knowledge. Now though I will have to track down a copy to watch, because I imagine there are few actresses more suited to playing Lorelei Lee than Marilyn Monroe. I’ve never engaged in the fascination with Marilyn, but then I’ve never really engaged with  the fascination with blonde women either. Each to their own. I guess this means that I’m not a gentleman. Well all I can say to that is, phew! close call.

Get it done.

The Internet Void versus The Infinity of Fools

With apologies to passive-aggressive Facebook posters (you know who you are).

The Internet Void versus The Infinity of Fools

“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”

                                                Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

There was a time when I believed that the internet would set us free as a species. That so much virtual space would open up the borders to infinity and we would never have to deal with anyone we didn’t like ever again. Yet you only have to take a cursory glance at the comments section under any YouTube clip or newspaper article to realise that people seek out conflict on the virtual plain more now than ever before.

I think that ‘internet troll’ is far too polite a term for people who attack others online. Troglodyte is more apt. Trolls merely live under the bridges of the information superhighway, but troglodytes live in darkened caves beneath its surface, blind to all but their own non-thoughts and nonsense, only poking their heads out into the daylight to vomit up some piece of bile onto Twitter or an article on climate change.

Most of the kind of nonsense that happens on the internet these days is borne out of personal cowardice and fear. The internet offers anonymity, as well as an uncensored, unfiltered funnel down which to pour our own self-hatred. Hatred is really just another name for fear, redirected and amplified away from self.

In my experience, people judge others by their own standards and most manifestations and excuses for prejudice can ultimately be traced back to negative self-image. Men who are homophobic are either afraid of confronting doubts about their own sexuality or else they are scared that gay men will treat them in the kind of inappropriate ways in which they act towards women. People who hate a particular religion or race because they think they are sneaky or dishonest are themselves not to be trusted. People who accuse other people of smelling bad are usually the ones with the questionable personal hygiene habits. We each reflect in others what we find lacking in ourselves, in the same way that we seek out friends and partners who have the strengths and skills that we wish that we possessed.

I began this article by quoting my favourite aphorism in the whole of philosophy. The internet has become the void, the abyss. It is so big and so unwieldy, with so much that is horrific and vile just a few short keystrokes away, that it fills us with a kind of primal terror. Like staring into the night sky or snorkelling above the falling away of a continental shelf, the fear of the unknown terrifies us and sends us paddling back to shallower waters. Rather than stretch our horizons, we stick to familiar territory. The internet is an infinite expanse, yet most people obsessively circle around the same dozen websites time and time again.

Most of our fears about content in cyber space are really just reflections of the fears inside our own heads. Yet rather than immerse and marvel in the intensity of our own imaginations, we cower away from them and blame anyone but ourselves for the images, thoughts and ideas that run through our heads. We can, for instance, worry that our children are exposed to pornography online like never before. Yet children, certainly boys, have always been able to get hold of porn. It may be extreme, but by virtue of the fact of it being freely available, it becomes ultimately worthless. It’s very rare that I watch pornography, given how mind numbingly boring it is, mainly designed as far as I can see for men dishonest about their own sexual preferences to watch other men get sucked off while still kidding on that they’re 100% straight (just be honest and free yourself). Yet the most graphic pornography I’ve ever been exposed to was German and seen when I was eleven at scout camp, from the personal collection of the dad of the kid passing it around the tent. His dad was Akela, the head of the Scout Group. It’s easy to fall into the trap that the internet is making the world a worse place for children to grow up in, but the truth of the matter is that things are at worst just as bad as they always were. Yet by blaming new media it becomes so much easier to abnegate ourselves of the responsibility of honestly educating our children. Pornography isn’t the problem. The problem is the attitude of society towards women that makes their mistreatment a viable voyeuristic activity.

What the internet is doing is making us more claustrophobic. In captive chimp colonies when numbers become too high or not enough personal space is allowed, individual members will eventually turn on one other. We are becoming an infinite number of monkeys shoehorned into a finite cage. There was a time when any person could hold a particular view about the origins of the universe, even if that view was enforced by church and state, and they could remain blissfully unaware that anyone could hold a contrary view. These days, you can express an opinion online on anything from evolution to England’s starting eleven and be told you’re not only wrong but also a cunt by ten thousand random idiots in a micro second. Is it any wonder if we become claustrophobic? Is it any wonder if personal responsibility starts to dissolve when an inner monologue and self-checking is lost to the hive mind?

Look at any newspaper website comments section and you can see that the majority of comments are posted by people who don’t even read that paper or subscribe to its values. Guardianistas attack Mailites, Sun ‘readers’ (<even I’m doing it) post on The Daily Mirror. Rather than exploring the untouched plains of the internet, we seek out people we hate, like we’d rather be with someone we hate, just so we don’t have to face life alone. We have to have someone to push against, be in dynamic opposition against. Not much point being a racist if you don’t seek out Muslims to shout ‘Paki’ at. Not much point hating women and blaming them for your own inadequacies if you don’t make cowardly rape threats from behind the safety of a plastic screen. How brave of you. Well done you (sarcasm emoticon).

The internet makes idiots of us all and somehow reduces us to the belief that anything that we have to say is of equal value and deserves to be shared with the whole of humanity. Again, check the comments on YouTube or any article touting the 10 Greatest Albums/Films/Garden Hoes of All Time to witness an abject lesson in banality. “I don’t agree with your choice. I think The Godfather should be no 1 and The Godfather 2 no.” or “Typical left wing, bleeding heart liberal press.” quickly descending into comments about 9/11 being an inside job or Americans ranting at British people about how we’d all be speaking German if not for them, like they were personally at fucking Normandy on D-Day. We need to be saved from ourselves. Who cares what you think? If you’ve got something to say, start a blog to ring fence your opinions and save us from your non-thoughts. Or take a course in journalism so at least you’ll have an editor to reign in your exuberant hatefulness.

Mind you, the internet renders even traditional forms of journalism meaningless. Most newspapers these days are more full of editorials and personal opinion pieces than anything like actual news and much of it is as badly thought out and written as your average Facebook post (‘I am a beautiful flower and if you don’t appreciate that then the problem is with you not me, even though I’m the one posting this passively aggressively, clearly demonstrating in the process that I’m the one that needs to work on my self-image. How many likes for my maudlin post? I’m so alone.’).

Yet here’s the nub of the matter, folks. I still believe that the internet will eventually set us free. Or a version of it. We are only at the beginning of our journey into cyber space and this is a period of adjustment that we need to go through. After all, Dunbar’s Number is the number of relationships that the average person can comfortably maintain at any one time. Dunbar’s number has a value of 150. Just 150 friendships that we can maintain, which shows that despite living in towns and cities and supporting national sports teams, we are still essentially villagers who haven’t yet evolved to live like city dwellers. Like Dunbar’s Number, we haven’t evolved beyond basic expressions of intolerance and hatred. We can talk about national pride, but our brains aren’t sophisticated enough to think like members of multi-racial, multi-opinionated societies, comprising millions of individuals. We want everyone to think in the same way that we do in order to validate our belief systems.

I blame monotheism. The idea of one god was originally imposed upon western society in order to set in the public’s mind the idea of their being one ruling family, chosen by god to rule in perpetuity. Monotheism has infected us with a kind of monomania, where everyone must worship one god and be of one sexuality, one nationality and one personality.

What the internet has done is to confront us with how erroneous this mind-set is. In my personal fantasies, I believe that what we are going through at the moment is the first step towards the annihilation of nation states and the establishment of new countries dedicated to more useful criteria for patriotism, like knitting or Game of Thrones or Star Trek or Justin Bieber or Joyce or Dylan or Nina Simone or Creole cooking or football or golf or cricket or redheads etc. etc. Which must terrify the ruling elite, if they ever envisage such a situation. Western capitalism and hierarchical systems in general have always ruled by the principle of divide and conquer. Get us to hate the least powerful, immigrant workers, the unemployed, the disabled, etc., in order to focus our rage away from the real enemies of society (i.e., them). Yet if we were to once again form mini-societies based upon common ground then capitalism would eventually give way to collectivism. No mega-rich is the wealth is passed around between is us.

Eventually we will probably all retreat into a virtual environment anyway, where everyone’s tastes can be catered for, whether that’s enrolling in your very own version of Hogwarts or abusing virtual children. Unhealthy behaviour on both counts, but it will be our children who will have to discuss what’s acceptable behaviour when they get there. Eventually cyber space will cure even death and then, essentially, we will all remain children forever anyway. As we start to take our first steps into the tide pool, it seems that we are already learning how to remain childish.

(this article is open for comments, but I won't read them. It might be more productive to cut out the middle man and just smear shit on the wall).

Get it done.

Schmidt

Today's post is the left overs from my story, Cadaver. Originally I was going to write the story from the point of view of a character called Alexander Maximillian Schmidt, but decided to go in a different direction. The ''testament to the eternal folly of the young' to which he refers has already been published this year under 'Youthful Angst', but I have provided the link at the beginning, as well as a link to the published version of Cadaver, which, as you will see, ended up being completely different. 

Schmidt

“If anyone should keep a diary it’s me, to aid my memory a little. After awhile if often happens that I completely forget what reasons motivated me to do this or that, not just in bagatelles, but also in taking the most decisive steps.”

                                                          Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Youthful Angst

A new year. Rummaging around in this bone yard that passes for my literary career, I found this; a testament to the eternal folly of the young: optimism. It is quite illuminating to be reminded of a time when one still held out hope for anything. The last of these passages was written just five years ago. My fall since then has been worthy of Milton.

Oh, ok, you’re right, I’m being melodramatic. Me, Alexander Maximillian Schmidt being melodramatic, who could have seen that coming? I blame it all on my ridiculous name. How else can one act with a name like Alexander Maximillian Schmidt? I suppose I should change it really. One day. One day. My motto I fear (note: look up the Latin translation). You see, I suffer from a crippling lethargy, a laziness that is very hard to describe, being not exactly active, but hardly unindustrious. Deep inside, the pistons are whirring, but instead of doing anything with my ideas, I stare at the ceiling for hours on end, lost in ridiculous trains of thought.

Clearly what I need is some kind of outlet, a pressure valve. Well, I used to be a good writer, even at school my English teacher was always complimenting me on my writing style. Not only that, but, well, if you want to hear melodramatic, I thought that maybe if I wrote here, beneath all this youthful optimism, some of it might float down and inspire me to make something with my life. Pathetic, I know. I guess I’ll take what I can get right now.

Remember those pretensions you had to be a writer? An artist? What happened to those dreams? You spent so long avoiding life that you never quite got around to living. Alexander Maximilian Schmidt, what has happened to thee?

It’s not an easy thing to face one’s isolation. To look into the abyss that is one’s life and find nothing here but despair. The evening of the second day of the new year and all I can see ahead of me is another 12 months of the same old misery. New Year’s Eve was spent in the company of my all so much more successful friends, all married with careers and young families and I thought how much less alone I feel when I actually am on my own, sat in this sad little flat, leading the sad life of the misanthrope. It is better this way. I think these days that I only get invited out for events that mean little enough to them to risk my presence: New Year and my birthday that is, otherwise a respectful distance is kept. It is a lonely life being the only single one left, but then they never really approved of my choice when I was with ‘Her’: The Nameless One. Couples see singledom as a disease and they must quarantine all it carriers lest they should become infected. Such is the faith placed in the modern day relationship.

George Orwell once wrote than the artist cannot survive in a dictatorship. For an artist to flourish, he needs the freedom to display his work and discuss his ideas amongst likeminded individuals. Only in a critical environment, where feedback and dissent are allowed, can he thrive, pushing back the boundaries of what is permitted. Under a totalitarian regime all free thought is barred. Discussion takes place underground, in dark, dank cellars, away from the prying eyes of the orthodoxy. And so art withers on the vine and the few braves souls who dare stand up, stand out to challenge the establishment soon find themselves locked away or shot in the back. It can take centuries before the patient cowardice of the mass is overcome by a greater sense of national shame. I maintain that humanity are moles: Secure in the darkness, blinded by the light.

But then, how are you any different? You live in self-imposed exile. You have extracted so much from your life, alcohol and clubs and dancing and karaoke and reality TV and women who were right for you but were rejected for not being enough like those that had come before. You have isolated yourself from all these social norms because you arrogantly declare that they hold for no interest for you. You want something higher, something of real value rather than the cultural dearth that has replaced once noble ideas. You wanted so much to show the world its true face, to hold a mirror up to itself so that it could see how ugly it had become, to be a man of letters and of ideas, a great philosopher or playwright, and yet here you are, alone and worthless, forgotten like the reject that you always knew that you would become, a fate you fell into voluntarily. You were suicidal by five, yet you have always lacked the courage to remove yourself from the gene pool and so you took the next best, least noble option, a life without ambition, a living death, shuffling towards oblivion with a lethargic moan of discontent. So here’s the question that you should be asking yourself Alexander Maximilian Schmidt: Are you prepared to fight the tyranny or meekly pull on a black shirt and join the massed ranks of slaves marching for the world domination of the orthodoxy? It is time to decide which side you are on.

Cadaver

Get it done.

Confessions of a Chronically Depressed Mind

Allow me to inject a depressing note into your weekend. I apologise in advance. 

Confessions of a Chronically Depressed Mind

“I want to. I want to be someone else or I’ll explode.”

                                                          Radiohead, Talk Show Host

I remember, I was five. We were living in Birmingham for no adequately explored reason, given that my dad was in the Royal Navy. Birmingham is inland.

I remember it was night and I was upset because my mum was upset. In my hazy memory, she was upset because my dad was always away at sea (at this time we were waiting for his new submarine to finish sea trials) and she had no friends in the area. I remember being upset and hating the world on her behalf and wondering if life would always be this way. And in that one moment I remember very clearly for the first time wishing that I was dead.

What this tells us is that I’ve always been depressed. Always visited by dark moods. Always obsessed with death and taking my own life. Then, I’ve always lived in my own little world, always too spent much time in my head. I think it’s partly from having moved around the country so often as a child and always having to make new friends and settle into new schools. Sooner or later that level of disruption sends a child into a fantasy world of their own making. In any hobby or profession where one overuses a particular part of the body there is always increased risk of injury. Singers are more prone to colds and footballers more prone to tears of the Achilles tendon. Black moods, by the same measure, are inevitable when you spend so much time in your head.

I should say at this point not to worry about me. If I was going to take my own life, I would have done it a long time ago. Thinking about suicide is as much a coping mechanism as it is anything else. When things go wrong, you get yourself into a state where you imagine the scene where you’ve done the deed and your friends and family are hearing about it on the grapevine. If you’re in a really dark mood you might even picture your own funeral. As sick and pathetic as it sounds, it’s a fantasy that actually makes you feel a lot better, knowing that people would miss you and people actually would give a shit if you were dead. And yes, I am aware that I am speaking in the second person here (I’m a writer you cheeky fucker). I’m speaking generally here, as I’m certain that I’m not the only person who goes through this process.

It’s a coping method through which many artistic and intellectual types put themselves. I’m fortunate enough not to know anyone who has taken their own life, but I have friends who have sadly gone through the heartache of losing friends and family to suicide. I hear the same story time and time again: I only saw him the day before, he was such a happy chap, not the kind to get depressed. Which is the problem. If you have a history of depression and low self-esteem then you become accustomed to dealing with the spanners that life likes to throw in the works. Oh you can sink into the darkest of dark moods, be unable to get out of bed for days at a time, but there is some survival instinct inside you that knows that it will pass. If you’ve not gone through that process before and then something happens to derail your whole outlook on life, redundancy or being cheated on by a partner, then the sudden crash in serotonin coupled with a night pouring alcohol down your throat can be enough to send you over the edge. Literally.

The same applies to music. People who aren’t naturally predisposed to self-doubt tend to find depressing music depressing. Yet what unnaturally upbeat people call depressing, I call soothing. Music soothes the savage beast and you’ll often hear me listening to the entire back catalogue of Radiohead, Alice in Chains, Suicidal Tendencies, Joy Division, the first five Black Sabbath albums and the like. Pop music, now that’s depressing in its undiluted soullessness. I guess I find something suspicious about people who are happy all the time, because there’s obviously something they haven’t understood about the world.

I have had many conversations over the years with friends and girlfriends that I should get counselling or see the doctor about anti-depressants. My answer is always, what would be the point? I’m depressed because I can’t know what it’s like to be a photon of light working its way up from the centre of a star or a wave crashing on the shore. I don’t think Prozac or talking through my feelings is really going to do much to help. All they could do for me is tell me to modify my expectations. Well excuse me, but reality is the one with the attitude problem, not me.

It is my considered opinion that eventually we will all download our consciousnesses to virtual reality, because only in an artificial sphere will we all be able to live out our dreams. I think that’s why we have so far failed to make contact with sentient life in the universe. Faster than light travel probably is possible with a little cheating, but most species master cyber space long before they break the light barrier. Why bother to fly around in a spaceship if you could pretend to fly for real? In The Matrix, humans beings have to be conned into living in an artificial reality. In reality people will be queuing up for the opportunity. There’s a reasonable chance that we’re already there.

I decided not to wait. Most of my waking life is spent avoiding reality. The truth of the matter is that I’m much happier existing in my own head. It was inevitable that I would become a writer of some description, writing is the only way in which I can comfortably express my thought processes and inner turmoil. I have to engage in the creative writing processes in order to put all the years wasted in which I pointlessly re-enact scenes from my life in which I become the hero. After all, I’m short, shy and quiet. I’m never going to be a great orator, guitarist or fire fighter heroically saving a newborn from a burning building. But I can imagine what it would be like to be each of those things and to describe the scene in a pleasing form for the enjoyment of others.

Indeed, like most people who spend this much time complaining about their lot, I really have nothing to complain about. Enough friends have described me as the smartest person they know that you would think that some of that praise would start to wear off on me. And yes, I know that in certain areas of expertise I am extremely clever. I can’t bang a nail into a bit of wood, but I can rattle off the gravitational constant of the universe or give you five and half thousand words on the opening word of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The issue with me is and always has been about self-confidence. When I’m on form there is no one that can touch me, but when I’m down, there’s no reasoning with me. I can go from thinking I am the Lord God Almighty to the scum of the Earth and back again in the space of half an hour. It gets pretty exhausting.

Likesay, over stimulation of a body part increases the risk of injury. Depression and a distracted aspect are commonplace amongst writers. Many writers deal with the inner-turmoil through alcohol, often to the point of addiction, but I have rarely ever drank. If I’m honest I’ve always had a shitty attitude towards people who drink. I don’t like being with large groups of people generally, but I find pubs and bars just about the most depressing places in the entire universe. One day I’m going to write a book of the excuses I have used to get out of going on night’s out or reasons for leaving after an hour. Sorry, I just find drunk people boring.

My drug of choice, the only one I ever really taken, is cannabis. A lot gets said and written about cannabis causing depression or schizophrenia, but I’m not sure how much of this I believe. Yes, cannabis can cause an increase in depression, but usually only when you stop smoking it and usually only for a couple of days, which is mild compared with my normal cycles of depression. As I indicated at the beginning, I have been depressed since at least the age of five and the most that cannabis does is to amplify a pre-existing state of mind. I can become paranoid when stoned, but when I was ten I became convinced that my parents had been replaced by imposters so that’s nothing new either. The only difference between a writer and a schizophrenic is that a writer makes a living out of their delusions. Pot for me is like sitting at the top of a hill with a panoramic vista upon the world. It opens up my mental space and relieves the pressure on my brain to the point where I can actually think. It was only whilst stoned that I was finally able last year to figure out the mechanics of writing and become a writer. This year I’m trying to keep up writing everyday and staying mostly sober. That’s a pride thing. I need to know that I can write in any state of mind. Deep down I know that smoking is only a catalyst to what’s already inside of me. So far, I seem to be doing ok.

In conclusion I should repeat that right here and now I am fine. I have some issues, mostly to do with not having a job and being in debt, but the thought and exercise of writing is keeping me on the straight and narrow, emotionally speaking. I’d like to make some money out of writing, for writing to be a profession rather than an albeit time consuming hobby. Yet I know that I’d rather be prolific poor than rancid rich. I also know that I’d like to keep writing sentences as well constructed as the one previous.

My depression is pretty mild compared to other people I know that have proper bi-polar disorders and need regular medication. I don’t tend to get manic or act out my self-loathing. I’ve never been a self harmer or made any serious attempt to kill myself, even as a cry for help. To me it has always been a point of pride that I work these issues out for myself and after more than thirty years, I’m getting there. I wouldn’t decry anyone else’s methods for coping, unless they are needlessly self destructive. Whatever works for you works and you should get all and any help that you need. For me its writing, smoking, long walks and listening to depressingly soothing music. For you it will be a whole other cluster of coping mechanisms.

Besides, there is that phrase that Stephen Fry has quoted when talking about his own battle with depression: Don’t take away my demons for you take away my angels too. Any emotional state is like a pendulum, the further it swings one way, the more it must inevitably swing back the other way. That’s just physics. It is therefore comforting to know that to be depressed or manic is ultimately to be at one with the universe.

Get it done.