16 years ago I worked in a factory in Leeds.

It was a jewellery factory and the core of the day's activities was assembling orders: attaching a variety of pendants to different thicknesses of chains or backs to ear-rings, mounting them on numerous bits of card, assembling the different boxes that would dispaly them, boxing the mounted jewellery up and then passing it all on to be shipped out. There were a certain number of orders to be printed off and got through each day.

This work was done by a large group of women who, against all reason from my perspective, (my role was to run boxes over from the warehouse to the factory) seemed to enjoy their job. They got on extremely well together and the atmosphere in this part of the factory was always cordial, they were also extraordinarily efficient and had a good relationship with their boss Kath, who was in return friendly and respectful.

Higher level managers, and there seemed to be a severe imbalance of managers to workers in this place, were less respectful, often adopting unnecessarily curt and bullying attitudes toward a workforce that couldn’t have been more industrious or compliant, refusing to grant requests for a day off or peremptorily dismissing people who had been working in positions with no sickness or holiday pay, no meaningful contracts and at that point, no minimum wage, for years and in doing so often tearing people out of a social group that had become meaningful to and supportive of them.

The managers were of course much higher up the pay-scale than the women assembling the jewellery, and as is always the case with managers the question of what they actually did that was so valuable hovered around them: it seemed necessary that they bullied, sacked, monitored, and interfered in a process that was getting along just fine without them in order to combat this suspicion. Of course it did nothing to alleviate our doubts but it resolved their own basic fear that effectively they were superfluous to, parasitical on the real heart of the business, which was this core of essentially satisfied and highly motivated, highly productive workers.

One week, due to a particular confluence of circumstances, holiday, illness, sudden business trip, sudden need to take a few days off, the women found themselves effectively unsupervised. They now had to not only do what they always did but also take on the role of their direct manager, Kath. I liked Kath a lot, she was a very wise woman who realised her own contribution to the actual work process was minimal and that her job was fundamentally to absorb and displace the useless directives coming down from above, she was a kind of “handler” of higher level management, a buffer zone that tried to absorb their disruptive energies and allow the work to go on unimpeded by their “initiatives”.

So the group of women now had to: check the orders coming in, print them off, distribute them, pass on requests for chains and jewellery to one part of the factory and for boxes and packaging to us in the warehouse, fill the orders and then pass them on to the mail room to be distributed. There was some initial panic about this among the factory management in other areas: unsupervised workers, uneducated working class women taking on responsibility for the entirety of their section.

The women split the work up among themselves, some simply “boxed” all day and a couple of others who had worked there longer and perhaps felt a little more confident printed off and distributed/collected up completed orders, rang us for the required packaging, nipped down to the vault to request jewellery. The overall effect on productivity, of removing the managers, was zero. This went on for three or four days with no backlog of work building up, no misplaced orders, no logistical problems of any kind. Kath came back. She was a heavy smoker and had been laid-low with a chest infection. We mentioned that the place had seemed to run fine without her and she shrugged, of course, and chuckled phlegmily.

The next day the factory manager Pete returned and the whole place grew tense again, it had had for a few days, not exactly a carnival atmosphere, but something liberated about it: sure, the work had been the same but there was a lifting off of the pressure of surveillance, of the bad faith on everyone’s part of having to pretend that management was useful or necessary, the weight of an illusory set of distinctions, of hierarchy and rank settled on everyone’s shoulders again, the psychic stress of dealing with his petulance and the grotesque illogic of his demands. He stormed about, a short man in a bottle-green C and A suit, with a pair of rimless John Lennon specs and his blond hair worn slightly long at the back, sorting everything out, manufacturing problems out of thin air, making his presence as a manger felt.

Desperation clung to him, he was a figure of fear, powerful, clownish, futile. I both pitied and hated him, we all did and our forbearance of and coerced collusion in his wasteful ego-theatrics was something he no doubt told himself was “respect”.

Everybody fell back into the daily routine after this pleasant hiatus, reprised their roles, but of course for the first day the resentment, when the contrast was most noticeable, was at its most pungent, there was a slightly acrid taste to the air, a sense that heads were down a little more, sprits lower.

But still, in ways I couldn’t understand, they loved their jobs these women, partly because they loved each other.

And so the work went on, despite him.

continuing the occasional "just lovely" season....

unbelievable

deeply, almost comically cretinous.

England looks like an ugly, scary place right now. Uglier and scarier than I'd imagined it would be in fact.

Ah well, just six weeks to go and I'll be "home".

Let the suicide attempts, affairs, bulimia, isolation and paparazzi-induced nervous-breakdowns commence! By Royal Decree!

"we just felt we had so much to be thankful to them for, the least we could do was offer up our children for use in their ritualistic sex-magic practices. if we're lucky they'll pick the middle one who's not that bright and would probably just end up as cannon-fodder in an ill-advised middle-east military misadventure anyway..."

Dunno about you lads but i'd do all seven of 'em.

Honeymoon time! Let the pissing, fisting and shitfun commence! By Royal decree!

Naturally my thoughts go out to my countrymen on this difficult and depressing day. Here i am sitting comfortably in Japan and watching the disaster unfold in real time via the magic of the internet. I wish in some ways i could be there to do something about it, even if it was only to offer some comfort to those most deeply affected by these awful events.

Phil's moved on to the 90s now. Pity them!

Several years ago I had one of those experiences, which everyday life is probably full of on some microscopic, atomized, imperceptible level and which would fall into the category of the paranormal.

Now before we go any further I should confess that while I’m a life-long atheist I’m also not a sceptic in terms of the paranormal and in fact I don’t see any contradiction between these two positions. Or rather let me re-phrase that, I am a sceptic, in fact I’m deeply sceptical, but I feel that what is supposed to be scepticism these day is in fact something rather different that I’ve decided to call “neurotic materialism”: neurotic materialism is the violent assertion of rationalism in the face of any even mildly inquisitive approach to what has been deemed irrationalism, a kind of explosion of rage, often couched in terms that to me seem to parallel the discursive strategies of neo-liberalism and Capitalist Realism, that of the childishness of the believer, an absolute hostility against the refusal to be contained within the parameters of the scientific worldview or the rationality of the market system.

There has been a confluence of these two positions of course, I suspect that there’s also an overlap of capitalist realism and neurotic materialism especially among those who used to be seduced by the possibilities of an outside to both, alternate forms of social organization, areas of experience and perception outside the standard paradigms. Of course one of the foundational texts of capitalist realism is Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” and the irony here is of course that while the sceptical, scientific mind hunts down and destroys any deviation in the name of rationality the contemporary political rationality based on free markets and homo economicus rest in the fundamentally religious notion of the invisible hand. I don’t think NM is a response to the recent rise of religion or even of Islamic fundamentalism I think instead it’s mostly an off-shoot of the End Of History.

There’s a classic bit of N.M here in response to Phil’s posting a very interesting and rigorous discussion on the overlaps between the paranormal and contemporary physics. What’s certain is that the commentator hasn’t watched it but is instead simply responding in a not very detached, fundamentally emotional way to Phil’s desire to have a little bit more of an enlightened dialogue between the two fields. The response, then, in that way is a perfect demonstration of the kinds of hysterical, intolerant scepticism that always strikes me as developing out of the speakers own woundedness, a form of negative solidarity: I have had to close down my imagination, the free range of my enquiry in the name of maturity, and you must suffer along with me!

Now let’s also be clear: I have no truck with Hippies, with new-age stuff generally, with mediums and spiritualist but I think that there probably is a point at which what you might call the “hard paranormal” died off or at least was driven conclusively underground and forced to slum it with all kinds of tat-peddlers and wannabe-gurus. However, ignorant as I am, I think it would also be fair to say that if anything destroys simple, common-place conceptions of time, space and causality it’s modern physics. There’s a very interesting British writer, Andrew Crumey with whom my own life overlaps in a small way (he moved out of a house in Leeds and I moved in directly after him) whose work explores some of these complexities (Mobius Dick being an excellent example). I mean, pick up a copy of the New Scientist or Nature and it’s a head-fuck beyond the dreams of most speculative fiction.

But still, on to my own paranormal experience. It’s mild so don’t start getting anxious that it’s going to reveal hitherto hidden depths of madness and paranoia.

I woke up about six o’clock in the morning, a bright Summer Sunday as I recall, to go for a piss. As I did a voice in my head said one word to me very pointedly, it was clear and distinct cutting through the tangle of babble and scraps of memory and dream that float around and interweave, alternately thickening and weakening as you slide in and out of sleep.

The word was “interregnum”.

Interregnum. As I had a piss I puzzled over the word. I wasn’t even sure I knew what it meant: if it even was a word it was one I hadn't used, in speech, writing or even as part of my internal discourse, ever, as far as I could tell. Of course I’m interested in words, and annoyed by not knowing what one means, especially if it appears to be a word that is swimming around in there somewhere. I went back to bed. I slept for a few hours. I got up, ate breakfast, then we went into London to watch a film.

We got there a bit early and went for a walk around Soho to kill time. Inevitably I wandered into a bookshop and this being a Soho bookshop there wasn’t much in there of interest, lots of books on and of photography of course, a few pulpy novels. The person I was with started to look at something so I scanned around a little more attentively for something to read.

The only book that I could see that was of the slightest interest to me was a biography of Louis McNiece. I can’t remember the name of the book but there can’t be that many McNiece biographies out there.

I do remember however that it was on a low shelf so I squatted down to look at it. It was a thick, hardback edition and instead of opening it at the start and looking at the contents page I just opened it at random.

The first word I saw,sitting there in the middle of the page?

Interregnum.

I was of course completely stupified by this and immediately started explaining the whole incredible situation to my partner, who, while rather mystical about her own experience was suddenly drily and irritably sceptical about my own: it was simply co-incidence and if it hadn’t been a really statistically unlikely coincidence it wouldn’t have impressed itself upon me. Of course I know that argument and again, from the outside I can understand the scepticism, but for me, from the way this extremely low-frequency word had so pointedly arrived in my mind on the same day that I wandered into a bookshop, picked up the only book in there that was of interest to me, opened it at random and saw the same extremely low frequency word, well…

I’m sceptical about my own experience of course: it confirms nothing to me but still if there’s one thing I am sceptical about it’s the notion of linear time, and so I am prepared to imagine that in some ways when we sleep we enter a-temporality, that consciousness is fundamentally way of ordering what would otherwise be a kind of a-temporal miasma, so for me the idea of pre-cognition, of something from what the conscious mind delineates or fences off as time-yet-to-come but which the unconscious mind has access to as part of its base-level a-or-multi temporality being caught, trapped on the wrong side of the filter as you suddenly wake up, well that’s an idea I like to explore (especially in fiction as it happens).

So of course I’m sceptical but I’m also intrigued and exploratory and the hysteria of the neurotic materialist seems to me more childish, knee-jerk, emotive and irrational (and in many respects not very well informed) than that of the curious sceptic.

I’m sceptical about scepticism. Which is surely how it should be.

"..aunque no está en el repertorio autorizado, si mi pueblo me la pide, la voy a cantar.."

"although it's not in the authorized repertoire, if my people ask for it, i'm going to play it..."

This song, by a fat, dead Argentinian folk singer (murdered by the junta for reputedly playing this very piece at a festival when it had been proscribed)has the following lyrics, though obviously they lose a lot in translation (not mine, i hasten to add)

Zamba of my hope,
dawned like a love.
Dream, dream of the soul
that sometimes dies without blooming.

Zamba, I sing to you
Because your song spreads love.
Caress of your handkerchief
that is enveloping my heart.

Star, you who looked at me,
You who listened to my suffering.
Star, allow me to sing,
allow me to love as I know how.

Time is passing
and life will never return again.
Time is killing me
and you affections will be, will be.

Submerged in horizons,
I am (but) a cloud of dust that blows into the wind.
Zamba, do not leave me yet.
Without your song, I no longer live.

Star, you who looked at me,
you who listened to my suffering,
star, allow me to sing,
allow me to love as I know how.

that hipster dialectic in full:



thesis



meets



thesis



and produces



thesis!



Hey! Everybody having a good time?

And actually I don’t think these new post-omni artist do fundamentally resemble critics, insomuch as critics often have interesting things to say and take stands, none of these guys do, they just look like what they are: consumers.

Excellent piece over at The Mire by Tony Herrington in response to Amanda from Not Not Fun, extending some of the arguments that Reynolds took up in his original piece on them.

Herrington’s rather diplomatic, no doubt he has to be, but under the restraint I sense a desire to shout, YOU”VE GOT NOTHING TO SAY! YOU”RE A BUNCH OF BORED, SPOILED KIDS ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON GOING THROUGH THE DRESSING UP BOX ! YOUR LACK OF ANY KIND OF POLITICAL SENSIBILTY OR PROJECT VITIATES YOUR ART UTTERLY! WHERE IS YOUR SYMPATHY OR SOLIDARITY, WHERE IS THE INTERST IN AYTHING OUTSIDE YOUR OWN NARROW NETWORK OF SCENESTERS? AND NOW YOU WANT TO BE BOTH APOLITCALLY COOL AND RADICAL AT THE SAME TIME?

Of course one also has to consider the degree to which the Wire itself is part of the problem here: it’s been fashionable to disparage the Wire for years now, but largely that disparagement comes from the wrong direction, ie from the uber-hipster’s desire to find it too geeky and cliquey and not really getting what the truly clued-up (themselves) know is cool, whereas my own disinterest in it is that, with the exception of one or two writers (you’ll know who they are) it’s oppositional to nothing. The Wire is also completely happy with the continued existence of Justin Bieber as long as it can make it’s small profit sympathetically tracking numerous micro-scenes and arguing about what's in or out this year.

I suppose that’s its remit but where’s the interest there? It’s just about music then, innit? Some people might care about music in its own terms but again to me that’s dull and bloodless, I care about the gestalt of music, politics, theory and practice, in other words music in dialogue with exactly those antagonistic social forces Herrington lightly chides himself for still being interested in and I conceive of the artist as being someone who is first and foremost intent on fundamentally altering structures of thought and feeling, an attacker and underminer of complacent subjectivities especially his/her own. NNF simply want to play with the signifiers of yesterday’s radicalism, desperately hoping that by travelling at light speed between any number of them they’ll hybridize the way into something new: they can’t, they can only increasingly desperately chase their own tails, it’s a kind of cultural race to the bottom, (over here, over here! listen to my black-metal digi-dub afrobeat drones with Dada-esque phonetic poetry interludes), each stage more ludicrous and undignified than the next.

The problem with hybridization of this kind (ie affirmative hybridization: this cool thing plus this cool thing equals new cool thing) is that it misunderstands much of the original hybridizing impulse which was to “correct” the racist or sexist or regressive elements of traditional rock and its representations (say PIL or The Slits), or to foreground alternate models of culture and sociality (Two Tone), it was an act of aggression. The problem for NNF is they want to be interesting without rejection and negation, without refusal and a concomitant commitment to the horror of refusal, to it’s vertigo, to its potential desolations: this commitment to the awful empty space that a thorough-going negation opens up, this vacuum, is anathema to lives surfeited with cultural goodies, lives which have enjoyed a superficial repletion, yet it’s exactly those moments of past radicalism that still set them tingling and whose aura they want to enfold themselves in again and again to protect them from the chill wind that comes whistling up from their own depths, and which were arrived at by precisely this rejection, this set of strictures, this refusal to follow the logic and realism of the time, through painful self-interrogation.

But as we know, earnestness, self-criticism, pain, failure and commitment are all a bit of a drag, stay within your comfort zone if you must, by all means risk nothing, but don’t expect then to be found interesting, let alone have the cheek to consider yourself an artist.

I picked up a copy of Bolanos 2666 yesterday and powered through the first section. I like it. it’s good to have something, fiction, that I want to read, and to feel my reading skills, my critical reading skills, kicking in. As a consequence of our recent discussions about Foster Wallace etc I also started watching interviews with writers I admired, Barth, Gaddis etc along with some I’m not particularly into.

Now I have to admit the whole process has been basically painful. I was obsessed with some of these writers in my twenties and early thirties and I also wrote pretty obsessively. I was always working on something, from the age of twenty-two onward, short stories and then increasingly novels. I haven’t written anything at all, or really read anything for the past two and a bit years since I finished The Begging Letter, which I kind of rushed to get done anyway. Now, I can forgive myself this given that in the last three or so years I’ve separated from my now ex-wife, gone through the divorce, moved house seven times, been back and forth to Japan three times , re-married, worked full time and also wrote Classless.

The problem is that I’m now happy, happy in a way I imagined was constitutionally impossible for me, and all my writing and reading was fuelled by unhappiness. A couple of year s ago I had a breakthrough and in some ways I simply allowed myself to have what I wanted. Previously the motor for much of my investment in writing was the fantasy that one day I would publish something and that finally I would be able to have my desire. Then, instead of endlessly pushing fulfilment into the future in order to give the present some direction, my mind some traction, I decided to have it in the here and now. In this sense I’m finally living, fully and unproductively in the world, as opposed to my productive half-life of writing.

Going back to look at and think about fiction again has brought back ugly memories and sentiments, the first of which is a kind of desolation at other people’s success, that cold, depressive down-rush at the sense of all the time you’ve squandered fruitlessly while other people were using their talents more wisely. What do I have to show for that twenty years?

Now I’m really not very competitive, not envious, or so I like to think and certainly in terms of say, other Zero writers, I feel nothing but pleasure at the ways they are prospering: yes, yes, this is exactly the kind of public intellectual culture I want to have in the U.K., but all this generosity of spirit is facilitated by the fact that they don’t write fiction and I have no aspirations to being a critic. Somehow in fiction other people’s success, other peoples ability does seem to steal from me, to reduce me, to make me feel less consequential, makes me want to attack and defeat them as a way to restore my self-esteem. I remember walking through Hyde Park in Leeds 6 one summer as the relationship I was in was reaching it’s grinding nadir: there was a younger couple in front of me, walking down the path, holding hands. They might as well have had them clamped around my heart: they didn’t, couldn’t know of course what awful pain it caused me to see their simple, standard display of happiness and connection. A more generous soul than mine might have found some affirmation in it: love exists! But it simply oppressed me.

The larger question is, to what extent do I want to get back into all that, to what degree do I have any aspirations to be anything? I don’t want that to sound maudlin, and nor do I want to sound self-regardingly enlightened by saying that it’s not, but in some ways for me fiction and writing are like an old, bitterly adversarial relationship that I’m well out of. Yet, I am feeling a desire to read again, to talk about fiction again (I confess I’ve really enjoyed thinking about Wallace, for years I talked about nothing but fiction, but again these weren’t happy years) even in this blog I scarcely mention it and one of the things I’ve enjoyed about the blogosphere is that it has forced me to engage with a whole range of subjects and positions (and people) I wouldn’t otherwise have got involved with. The past two years is the longest period in twenty years that I haven’t been working on something, the only period in the last decade where that something hasn’t been novel-length. Yet in another way I have completely forgotten about this whole period, in fact I view it largely as time of error, a long, purgatorial questing after myself, and one which I’m happy to just dismiss.

So several other, more minor questions also present themselves to me: should I go back to fiction in a serious way both as a writer, reader and more exhaustingly of all as a thinker and a talker about it given how consumed by it I’ve been in the past? Can I get over the worst aspects of my associations with writing and reading,? Should I start writing seriously again given that it hasn’t been a joyful process for me and will stir up all kinds of emotions I’d hoped to leave behind? Can I forge some new kind of relationship over time with writing itself? None of this maters outside the confines of my own life, but I feel in some ways like a recovered alcoholic (which, actually, I also am, more or less). Everything I wrote was always finally about the desire to stop writing and just live: the smart answer here is that they’re not mutually exclusive, but for me they were, the consolations of writing stood in the way of me fully taking hold of my own life, indeed I often half-consciously forced myself into interpersonal unhappiness as a way of strengthening the hold fiction had on me: if I made it my salvation I would finally get good at it.

But again perhaps a new phase is a starting, a new way of assessing, addressing and overcoming old selves, affects and attachments, re-writing the self by writing again. Now I know that no-less-a-luminary than Zadie Smith said that writing shouldn’t be a form of therapy but for me it can't be otherwise. Maybe it’s time to go back, rethink, re-learn, start at the beginning again. You hear the siren song that seems to be drawing you away from your life, from your own best interests, that wants to catch up a part of you and narrow the arena of your concerns, to pull you back into yourself and keep you there for years, time ticking by, nothing concrete in terms of money, or security, or comfort to be gained, depending on the ever-depleting patience, the good graces of those closest to you.

So no, of course not, it’s foolish.

And yet, maybe.

Cheers Sam! Nice one Nina! a bit of slap-bass driven pro-Union protest folk rock always hits the spot dunnit.

Stewart Lee, Hauntologist! Now, obviously being miles away from "home" with no job, no mates, and ping out at work all day i've drifted into nocturnalism and spend my life watching stuff on youtube. not having had a tv in the uk for the past seven or eight years i have been doing some catching up (though mostly i've been, interestingly enough, not exactly watching the film's that are on there but taking satisfaction in finding out what's available. this is the internet innit, where the pleasure is in the discovery, the filing away of the for-later and the continued quest, where any actual watching of something is less important than knowing what can be watched.) two things i have watched and really enjoyed are Saxondale and Lee's stuff. yeah..... that's it. Stewart Lee, really good.

HA! Never thought I'd find myself pissed off for not being able to get hold of a copy of The Wire! Bleeding useless Japanese tropical paradise with its sunshine and fantastic food.....

Excellent post by Alex over the 90s/00s’ blog on David Foster Wallace.

To be honest the post and the comments after it don’t leave me an awful lot to say. I will say however that I’m a Wallace sceptic. I remember Infinite Jest coming out and the moderate interest and mixed reviews it garnered at the time, the follow up Brief Interviews got generally (and I think rightly) negative reviews. So circa 2003 the general feeling re Wallace was: occasionally interesting, a bit over-blown, a bit try-hard, a bit contrived, not that great.

By the time Infinite Jest came out I was burned out on very long American post-modern novels anyway, having read the entire output or John Barth, Robert Coover and William Gaddis over the previous five or six years, plus as much as I could get by John Hawkes, Barthelme, William Gas, and the newer wave of post modernists like William Vollman, T.C Boyle and numerous others whose names escape me. I was an absolute beast for fiction the 90s and went straight from Moby Dick into Sutree and on into Carpenter’s Gothic without a pause.

So when Wallace turned up I was ready to get involved but, to be honest, it felt a bit stale. I got some way into Infinite Jest, some way into The Broom of the System, liked some of the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing and almost nothing in Brief Interviews. Given that I was unenthusiastic it’s hard for me to say anything very specific except that the kind of suburban affluent melancholy of the privileged geeky yet cool clued-up pop-culture polymath seemed heavily symptomatic of the 90’s and rather over-subscribed to.

Actually it felt at the time as though several writers were jockeying for position as Great American Novelist, which inevitably, during the post Historical, a-political, Information Age largely meant obtuse/elliptical indirect free style dense with asides and references to everything from astrophysics to Bugs Bunny cartoons. This was felt to be the main aim of the novel, to bring the Information, but with a protective coating of irony and a diffuse melancholy so that the author couldn’t exactly be seen as having no real critical position on the times. James Woods memorably and rightly savaged all this in an essay in which he coined the term hysteric realism but Woods' own solution to the impasse, a non hysteric, more orthodox realism, is trying to get the genie back in the bottle to a large degree. Certain conventions of literary self-consciousness developed and took hold after the War and they can’t just be wished away now.

My expectation during the mid-Nineties was that some of the innovations of the experimental end of post war Fiction (largely The American Post modern novel, the Nouveau Roman, certain elements of the South American Boom, Calvino, Borges etc) would be redeployed and extended on in a critical or committed vein. The political ravages of the previous ten to fifteen years seemed so concrete, real and immediate to me that I simply couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a wave of angry, dissenting radical literary avant-gardists out there ready to burn the past, kill their idols and forge something new. Naturally I considered myself one of them.

Instead we got The Beach, Purple America, Infinite Jest, White Teeth, all of which felt thoroughly inconsequential. In retrospect Fight Club was probably about the best of it.

So I think there’s basically a lot more to dislike in Wallace than to like and you’ll forgive me if I don’t find This Is Water** to be very significant, it’s a set of observations that any reasonably thoughtful person knows by the time they’re in their mid teens, my feeling is it’s become a touchstone because it’s the smartest guy in the room whose saying it, so, wow, it must have depth***. It’s interesting to see the Wallace industry kicking into gear though and granting the status of savant/seer to him and doubtless glossing the general indifference toward his work at the time. Something similar has happened to Joy Divison over my lifetime too, when I was a teenager they were just a bunch of not very exciting miserabilist from Manchester, now they seem to have had some quasi-religious cult built around them, no doubt the same will apply to Wallace and I have an odd feeling that’s the last thing he would have wanted. I think he would have preferred to be rejected, spurned and surpassed, I think he would like to have been recognized as the problem, I think he would like to have been approached sceptically and critically and I say that because I certainly don’t doubt his integrity.

*Writing that I suddenly felt nostalgic for my own enthusiasm for fiction around the time, I really read continuously ( I did as a kid too, I remember actually walking and reading at the same time.) There were several reasons for this which I won’t elaborate on here, but certainly one of them was escape. There’s a passage early on in Sophie’s Choice where the narrator talks about the sheer physical thrill of encountering finely wrought prose, it practically gives him an erection. I understand that. When you’re living in poverty both financial and existential then the semi- erotic transport of the beautifully written is an addictive necessity.

**The fact that that speech is now called “This is water” is symptomatic of the arch- bereftness of so much of the work of the period, the straining after something meaningfully indirect yet not typically literary produces just this kind of smug, slightly irritable, shallow posturing.

*** Plus why on that website Alex links to is there thought to be some kind of opposition between being smart and being kind, and the notion that there shouldn’t be/isn’t is radical or surprising. I know I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, the aim of maturity is the development of a political position and a praxis, this is, if you like, the synthesis of this supposed opposition of smart/kind, politics is the lived expression of your intellectual and moral capacity, politics is what Wallace and Smith etc lacked (and hence the faintly tragic, brittle, frustrated air). I’m slighty obsessed with the notion of the “by-product” at the moment, and literature is a by-product of something else, a commitment not to literature itself but to some larger and broader idea literature wants to serve. If you aim directly at it you’ll never hit it, but you’ll never understand why. Literature has to extend out of a full life, it can't be a proxy for one.

Just lovely.....

More brilliant stuff from Oliver at the 90s blog. Now officially the 90s-to-present blog.

For Sam!

I love Disco Inferno, y'know.... but..... they do sound an awful lot like The Lightening Seeds at times...

Greyhoos ups the ante at the 70s blog on Bowie and much more beside.

Quick post by me over at the 80s' blog on work.

I haven't worked for four months now and have another two to go. This is the longest period I've gone without working since I left University except for that 9 or so months when I did a Masters.

That's twenty years of constant, full time, tax-paying work. There are some people in this world who simply don't want to work and would like to stay on the dole scrounging state benefits and living off hardworking people like myself. You might say that such people don't really exist, that they are a right-wing media fabrication but you're wrong, I know for a fact that they exist through bitter personal experience.

I'm one of them.

Do I want to work? Do I find my work enobling, essential, a matter of pride, socially useful? Not really. Would I have prefefred to spend all that time sitting around "doing nothing" as I have been for the past four months. Oh Yeah! Am I itching to get back to work. Bollocks am I.

I console myself that I have a reasonably pleasant line of work but I'd rather be on the dole, if only benefits were more generous. They could be after all, scrap Trident, increase the dole. I say that any genuinely pluralist society must recognize the legitimate desire of a sector of the population to loaf around. Surely we can come to some kind of agreement where those who want a job but can't get one can exchange places with those who have a job but don't want one, what we need is a system that would maximally redeploy and reallocate talent to where it is most needed. In this regard Government could be an indespensible aid to the working of the free market by boosting benefits so that no-one would ever have to take a job they didn't want and thereby reduce "productivity" with their general lack of enthusiasm, absenteeism/mental health issues etc.

After all, it's only realy a free market, freely enterd into, if there is the option of not working at all and no significant financial incentive to work. The problem with the current system is that it's not generous enough, forcing people like myself to take work, against their deepest inclinations and thereby skewing the workings of the invisible hand. Let those who want to work, work and let the rest of us live off their labours.

Have you been using up my tax money sitting around smoking dope and playing video games all day instead of having your soul-crushed by demaning badly-paid bullshit work? You're welcome to it! Have some more, I don't fucking blame you!

Anyone still listening to that Burial album?

Is it possible to really appreciate a record after only hearing it once or a few times?

I can’t help but feel that you should only be allowed to put together a top ten records for any given year several years after the fact, otherwise it’s a fairly shallow exercise in trend spotting, identifying what you think were the most interesting records of the year rather than those with some depth and durability, those records that somehow stay with you. Personally I would say that a good 90 percent of the records that form a part of my own personal canon have lacked immediacy. Most of them have grown on me: had something intriguing but uncertain enough to make me return to them until they started to take on shape. In fact it takes a while, a certain amount of exposure, often quite prolonged, before I can hear them properly.

There seems to be two ways in which a particular record gets to me, first of all there’s a track on an album which I like and which then leads me on to listen to the whole thing repeatedly enough for me to begin to appreciate the rest of it: you need to inhabit a record for a while. A good recent example would be Donovan’s The Hurdy Gurdy Man: I knew the title track (primarily because it was covered by the Buttholes) the rest of the album seemed a lot less interesting, but I left it on as I was writing and hey presto it’s slowly revealed itself, a kind of grafting process that has happened , in a way, while my back has been turned. I’m surprised that after a week or two of having it on almost constantly I can’t get over how good it is. Again, the same with the latest 31 Knots album. First listen had me thinking, as usual, aha, bit lumpen , not as good as the last one. Now a few weeks later it feels like I can pick up on its subtleties and variations, hear the hooks and shifts in tone, the drama and comedy, the flourishes, it has somehow emerged from the fog, taken on a particularity and a clarity. This used to be the case with Shudder to Think records. I’d buy the latest thinking, Well, I wonder how many times I’ll have to listen to this before I like it? It often seems to be those records which you have to endure to some degree that are the ones that finally do endure.

This is not, I think, just a structure of expectation or a habit of an older pre-internet generation of listeners but a necessary component of musical appreciation: sufficient repetition. It’s not a necessity in terms of “critical” skills, but it’s often the case that music gets around those critical faculties/filters anyway. I question the degree to which musical appreciation, on the deep, (im) personal level, is determined by factors that have anything to do with “taste”. Here’s something else which happens to me fairly frequently: Ping’s listening to something, or the I-tunes is running away in the background and I suddenly find myself saying “what’s this, it’s brilliant” invariably discovering that it’s something I’ve professed to hate/have no interest in a few months previously, but which suddenly, detached from its place in what I consider to be my attitude, my approach , catching me in a defenceless moment, somehow has got to me. This has now become a running joke, what do you think of this? This is rubbish for the next six months until it’s suddenly the best record I’ve ever heard.

What interests me in this is the degree to which what you like is seemingly rather arbitrary: I’m sure you have your arguments, your approach, your well reasoned rationales but my actual brain, predictably, has no interest in what I think: it has its own agenda (I should doubtless say process) and I tail along behind it slightly irritated and mystified by its attachments. This is annoying and disruptive as I want to own my own taste, assert myself, have an opinion and an attitude, I want to like what I like for coherent reasons and not simply find that it’s all a rather mysterious process that goes on at a level beyond my own conscious permission. I want to have an argument about it, a coherent, grounded position, but what I want and what it’s doing are often two very different things.

I equate this in several ways to the process of language learning. There was a point when I lived in Barcelona, and still couldn’t speak the language, at which the Spanish around me shifted from being just “noise” to something structured, the noise had differentiated somehow, become a series of units arranged in a particular ways and according to a set of underlying principles (this affects how you subsequently hear all other languages.) I still didn’t understand it, but suddenly I felt a stage closer, my brain had, through sheer force of exposure somehow begun to recognize a pattern in it, to identify it as a language and not just noise. It’s also true that for example at a relatively early stage of language learning it’s hard to understand what people are saying if you’re outside, in a pub etc as the brain has yet to sufficiently differentiate the second language from noise and will filter it out, background it, along with all the other ambient blare as non-essential, non-signifying. No amount of immediate concentration or effort will surmount this problem, it’s more a question of repetition and exposure. Ping just had a similar problem in work: she has to use headphones and is given instructions over them. In the first week she couldn’t understand much and was stressed out by it, it hasn’t been an issue since the second week.

Language learning will of course fundamentally remind you that your brain is much smarter than you are, and that by and large you should just try to keep out of its way. There’s also a distinction between learning and acquisition that’s relevant here too, I’m pretty good at “learning” Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji: I can fly through exercises on them as my short term visual memory ( plus my memorization strategies) are pretty good. If I leave it for two or three days I struggle to recall anything yet I also know my brain will be going about the longer, deeper level process of assimilating them, even if I don’t do any more work perhaps. I’m just in the gap between learning and assimilation.

The perfect example of this would be the word “hembra” in Spanish (it means “bitch” here actually, but in a non-derogatory way i.e. female dog/animal). I asked if a dog was a boy or a girl, not knowing the right term, and was told it was una hembra. About three months later I was standing on Lewisham station and the word popped, unbidden, into my mind with a little ker-ching! and disappeared again. You know that word now my brain told me. The brain does this with music too, I think. If it doesn’t follow a familiar pattern then the brain needs time to assimilate it, there’s a pleasure gap between listening and assimilation, a point when you don’t really know what you think of the record, or at least, when you haven’t had time enough to like it yet.

Just to qualify that and also drawing on the language analogy, there are also occasions ( which regrettably, but due to perfectly natural disinclination, we all avoid) when the pressure of the moment means, through panic/survival you instantly assimilate a word. I now know and will never forget the words “shiranai” “warimashtaka” and “tarimashtaka” in Japanese because they were all accompanied by moments of stress and embarrassed incomprehension that immediately drove them home and I imagine that encountering the truly radical and strange in art does this too, it opens up some faintly traumatised fight or flight response that somehow boosts your perception of immediacy, that shuts down all other mental functions and throws everything directly at the object in an effort to understand/deal with it, renders it luminous, auratic.

I wonder if on some level this isn’t the “Real” of listening, a kind of alien, mechanical pleasure process that constantly disrupts the symbolic-critical, ego and persona related field forcing it into all kinds of realignments in order to maintain its integrity. There can be very few critics, amateur or otherwise who haven’t experienced the near continuous vertigo of responding to and enjoying stuff you’re not supposed to like or used not to like: we conveniently label this guilty pleasures, or maturing tastes, but it’s probably something more interesting and less amenable to the discursive practices on which conventional criticism is founded.

Actually when I started writing this post it was supposed to be about what a fine, fine record Mordant Music’s Symptoms is. Clearly I had other things to say, though no conscious idea that I was going to say them. See what I mean!

OVERLORD X ,14 DAYS IN MAY

A Monster. They were patchy weren't they, RSW. Far as I recall this is the (first) and best thing they did but I have also got Soundclash and In Dub back in the UK (somewhere) and I remember they had a lot of hip admirers at the time. They were a very assertively London-y, British Bass Culture collective. Squat-dwelling, spliff smoking bad lads. Hmmm. I'm off to check 'em out again.

Like it!

Excellent first post from Oliver. Exactly what we need more of, stuff on gaming.