Thank You, Wikipedia

That spoof video about Newport contains the lyric, "Josie Darby's from Newport/Yes, it's strange we didn't know either/ Thankyou Wikipedia", owning up about where we all get our instant erudition from these days.  In the midst of writing we can within seconds feign feats of recall that were once only available to dons and raconteurs on their second drink.

By the way, I don't mean the Nashville band, The Raconteurs, who are known in Australia as The Saboteurs due to the coincidence of a Queensland group already using the name Raconteurs. (Thank You, Wikipedia.)

By eliminating the need for a shelf of books and a hearty library habit, perhaps at some college, and a nice study and a support system that allows you to  squander time rubbing the bridge of your nose as you look up the slim vol of poetry to get that quote right, Wikipedia has changed, probably, some very fundemental things about what a writer looks and even smells like.

Read an essay from before the time of the internet and you sense a very different beast at work, gnawing at his typewriter trying to make his word count.  This would conventionally be a genuinely erudite soul,  with a wholly different information processing system, the most important features of which are that it is large, external and complex.  So it is not the sort of support structure available to most people. It is the equivalent of the difference between shelled animals and their unshelled equivalents.  These prelasparian writers had to arrange their lives, loves, finances, feeding habits and those of their partners, children, priests, barmen, pets and so on, around the simple fact of their need for an exoskeleton that provided the important personal resource of education and information storage.

To read the work of the pre-internet writer, the 'old type fouled up guy' as Larkin described himself, (thank you, Wikipedia) is to summon an image of the dens those works are conceived in, the napless carpets, the radio with selotaped aerial,  the gin and glasses, discarded pullovers, objects and photo's of ugly friends and of course, the ceiling-high shelves laden with dust and books.

Today, we are free of the need for that placenta-like resource but are, once we have cut the cord, perhaps more naked as a result.  If someone were to question me about The Raconteurs or Philip Larkin at a function, especially a function at which not being exposed as a fraud is in some way important, I would be embarrassed by my one-dimensional knowledge. So, big question, is this a good thing or not?

One's normal response when deciding whether to back or moan about progress is to err on the side of survival.  Yes I am modern and relevant and love the internet to bits.  But in this case I guess it has to be a good thing.  Several generations of writers have been able to moan about Tennyson not having to clear his own plate away, let alone cook, wash up and clean under the rim of whatever kind of toilet bowl 19th Century poets had (Wikipedia is inconclusive).

You don't have to be a writer to envy Seigfried Sassoon's life of leisure. Sassoon did nothing unless he happened to fancy it that morning.  He normally opted for riding or writing, until war gave him something to ride around in and write about.  But modern writers will feel the pain of green-eyedness a little more acutely than some as they attempt to forget their job in Pizza Express for the purposes of finding their novelist's voice.

I went to my old friend Mark Radcliffe's book launch on Saturday.  (Gabriel's Angel - buy it why don't you?)  The event was combined with his 50th birthday party, throwing into sharp relief the fact that I knew him before his voice broke.  I know what he had to go through to get to his first novel.  I remember the prefab house he lived in, the mice droppings in the frying pan in his/our first London flat, the nursing job, the other stuff (we didn't always stay in touch).  He had as much chance of gathering about him the inkstands and photographs of tousle-haired dons on a Cumbrian walking holiday that provide a writer's support system as a pig has of flying when he's already busy with other, more pressing matters.

If it is a little easier today for people to take off before they run out of runway, it has to be good news for the variety and quality of writing available.

What's the point of being nasty to bad writers?

In Terry Eagleton's  decimation of 'Heartbreak'by Craig Raines
a writer, possibly hapless, is set upon without mercy for some very self-regarding prose indeed.  Here are a few examples of the literary coshing. 


'There is, in short, plenty of stuff to keep Pseuds’ Corner busy for a fair few months: ‘Francesca’s fanny was a glorious irrepressible Afro pompon (“to go with my Botswana bottom”)’ might do for a start', 


There is much rustling of the author’s Things I Saw Today that Look A Bit Like Other Things notebook.


''There are pregnant pronouncements such as ‘the myth of our attractiveness survives its destruction’; in the margin the reader is silently invited to inscribe a large approving tick'


'Another character speaks of ‘some … dump in fucking wind-tormented Ireland. I remember going for a walk in one of those places. Got an amazing headache in seconds from the wind parting my fucking hair in a hundred different places. Every which way. I thought I had a brain tumour. Seriously.’ Nobody actually says ‘wind-tormented’, so the poeticism has to be deflated by that ‘fucking’. The notion of the wind parting one’s hair in a hundred different places is another shamefaced piece of poetry, which must be countered by the sham colloquialism of ‘every which way’. 


I admit, that last section makes one vomit mentally, but what is the attack trying to achieve?  It is published in the LRB so sales won't be hurt, only reputation.  So is it to do down the author's prospects?  Or stop him trying.   The book sounds unreadable, yet in some of the examples given you can sense the writer trying to describe something for the first time, without fear of 'the chill wind from Cambridge'.   What would Walt Whitman have written if he'd lived amongst English LIT CRIT creeps waiting to duff him up then roll off together sniggering from the common room twirling their conkers.  No wonder English writers all try to adopt the same bovver boy manner, Amis and Barnes and Faulks and Banks all set their faces into a turdy glare of negativity to announce that theirs is approved literature.
If you think the job of criticism is to show off  how good you are at criticizing things, you're playing to the same imaginary gallery as the Craig Raine.  Art Criticism is at its most beautiful describing the technical detail of the spectacular, not 'My dog could've done that.' 


 Who put you in charge anyway?

Stop Praising David Laws.

Please.  Why is everybody praising this person as a paragon.

This is conceivably one of the most deceitful and most abusive scandals ever.

He had a secret lover, who he paid with taxpayers' money. 

He could have kept his privacy but chose to give him your money as well.  As a way to cover it up.

Sorry?  

He also gave his lover exorbitant maintenance and council tax payments according to the Telegraph.

Which records show that he reduced when rules were introduced saying that recipts were needed.

This  is proof that his intent was to make petty financial gain.

Yet he persisted.

The expenses scandal must have told him that he was breaking the rules.

His excuse is that he wanted to help his lover buy a flat. - That's not something that taxpayers need to pay a millionaire for to get themselves represented.

Yet he is universally praised.  

He is praised by the leaders of a government who are going to change our broken politics.

Whhhhat??

There has been no witch hunt.  
No one's been calling for his head.  
He went because the most disgusting deceit has been tried on, and found out. 

Oh, and how does 'we weren't even proper partners' excuse him? 

The blind man's labrador's witness

If the electorate were a Labrador, (a big if, if ever there was one) then it is a guide dog, a gentle and patient pilot to a uncertain political class, feeling its way into dark territory strewn with obstacles and quickly moving forces. The labrador represents the dumb yet not stupid electorate, that can only shove mutely and bark once every five years. The blind person however is confident of its superiority to the labrador and wants to change the result of the election in its favour. The electorate decided that there should not be an overall majority for any party, but a hung parliament, one that should regularly be called to account and have to trim its behaviour to the requirements of its neighbours.  Good doggy.But what the blind person wanted was a proper majority, a stable mandate that would mean it could ignore the concerns of others, and the consequences of the doggy's clear-sighted decision. So it changes the decision, by allocating a higher percentage of votes needed to dissolve the parliament resulting in exactly the opposite of what the doggy ordered. An untouchable majority. The trouble is that the doggy needs a shit now and then (I love metaphors. I can run and run with them.) When it does the blind man has to clear up the mess with a little poo sack, or risk standing in it. The dog will do this because it's a dog, and it poos in public. Whereas a blind man is blind, and has trouble locating and dealing with the poo. To find it he will have to bend over and sniff around, at which point he'll be mistaken for a dog with hilarious consequences, if the the guide dog happens to be on heat. And the blind man is wearing no trousers. Meanwhile, we can all watch in horror and amusement as the public repays the blind man in the wide-eyed gaze of the media. No really. Metaphors come true all the time

21st Century Politics. I'm spoofing my own ads.

We're now into the last few weeks of the campaign and I find myself writing ads for both sides. Helping out a Labour friend and candidate in a high profile seat with dispassionate advice and suggestions, while in my professional capacity, like a barrister defending a mad man, I slave over the Tories. The fact that there is so much spoof activity online is getting me into a psychological vortex. As much of my work finally sees the light of day in badly realised versions of their former selves, I find myself sitting in bed last Saturday, corrupting one of my own ads for the other side, then turning to address a hasty call from the office to churn out a crude mockery of another ad that ends up in the next day's Mail on Sunday. And with the most visible ads sometimes being the spoofs, it's now pointless distinguishing between the two. It's spoof-swirl. Luckily I have constructed a chinese wall that neatly bifurcates the professional and personal sides of my ad writing cerebellum so I'm alright for now. Nor do I spill secrets to the other side. Why not? well think about it logically. Take two possible motivations. Not to lose my job and not to act immorally. Both ends of the spectrum favour not being a double agent, therefore all points in between must do so too.