"Do we hate men ? We hate their bodies that do all their calculating for them. Their powerful, triangulating bodies. The Africa of the brain, the Babylon of the eye and the Zion of the holy of holies. The corporeal theodolite that makes all the rest of us mensurable. There’s no way of getting past that. The whole world is erected upon this one fact. Male scale.
From the first moment man rose up from his thorax and ceased crawling across the humus. Foregoing that frottage with mother earth, which had kept him grounded within a certain sense of his middling status. Initially he stayed close to his roots. Plated breast pressed snug into the bosom of the soil. Little did she realise, it was the first fumblings towards a survey of all her appendagable riches.
He imprinted hands, palms and cubits across her unsuspecting breasts. Spanned her with his itchy fingers. Employed instruments to increase his province over her; twigs, stakes and staves. Peered down at his natural spirit level and felt emboldened to confer upon it, the imperious charter names of Rod, Pole and Perch. Marked out his own front yard. Yet he longed to strive further. To range beyond the merely tangible. To match his burgeoning scope. To defy the limits of his two-dimensionality, (since to this day man has failed to fathom the concept of depth) and in doing so flatten the rest of us in the animal kingdom to wretched dots. Smeared on the underside of his leather sandal. His sole mates. He picked up his feet and stepped, strode and paced all over our domain. A mile as a thousand paces. That should do it. For the time being.
Yet, what could be more haphazard than a handspan or a footstep as a means of calibration? It served only to demarcate a man from his neighbour. But that was precisely the point wasn’t it ? To enable each man to erect his fences. Plant his standard and sink his ‘No Trespassing’ boundary pillars. As he enclosed all property beyond his mean embrace. To partition the land. With inbuilt space for dispute and conflict. And the king/ khan/ tsar/ kaiser/ was the alpha-male, the one with the biggest forearm, or longest reach, or greatest stride. He who could win the arm-wrestle/ toss the caber/ best the two-handed battleaxe/ piss highest up the wall/ owner of the biggest schlong. In order to become master of all he surveyed and more ? To become our master (with some complicity on our part, since he was the alpha-male after all ...) A genetic vote of divine election. And we the rank, find ourselves hemmed in by chains. Our furrowed brows unaware as to their own branding. Like all other chattel, this side of the furlong (long furrow) skirting posts.
But his immutable, shifting restlessness would not cease its jerk. Man could not measure above his head. Distantly referred to as the heights, dizzying or otherwise. In the clouds, or mountain high. Imprecise. Bluffing it. Scaled upwards to make man feel towered over, even if borne aloft on another man’s shoulders. Either upland or barrow, he was thus reacquainted with his own lowly mortality. Then there was high water or flood tide, further threatening to reinstate him in his vulnerability before nature. He envied the birds. Until ... Un-til. I looked it up. ‘Til’, from the Old German, meaning a goal or an aim; to hasten towards. ‘Und’, meaning as far as. Man’s incessant kineticism, his primary evolutionary adaptive tool, down to a low boredom threshold. So he added it all up and obtained the summit. Scaled the zenith. The apex. The maximum. Once again, he did so by collapsing scale so as to conform with his own. Of crown, peak and brow. He looked it straight in the eye. Browbeat and headbutted. Before mooring another rippling banner. So that conquered nature’s strongholds amounted to nothing. Swept away in the male-strom.
And then the gaze yonder. Always yonder. One more crest to be cut down to size. Foreshortening all the time. Til he can rein in the horizon. For the grass is always greener. Yet all the while paying no attention to detail. To what he already possesses, cupped in the palm of his hand. Crushed by his restraining fingers crimped back over. Regard any image of a king with his orb and sceptre. Digits cusped around the orb, cradling our plucked ovum. Palpating blinker for our eye, sucking the sphere of the sun into eclipse. Absorbing its orbit completely, until rendered mere satellite. Gripped in the other hand, the retractable snake staff. Both ruler and telescope, conferring his secreted authority. King cobra engorges his hood and we are all paralysed with fear. The venomous magic wand that disappears all nooks and crannies which will not submit their unnavigated occultism. The master stroke that permits yin finally to burst its borders and devour yang.
My husband finally gave notice that I was going to get a pummelling and I don’t mean he was treating me to a full body massage for our anniversary. Threatened to pulp me to within an inch of my life. Imagine that ? The sheer bloody presumption ! How could he know anything about my life, when he elicited no awareness of it outside of any intersection with his own realm of needs ? Were he in full possession of the seams, strands and flyaways, then I well believe that he could have pinpointedly measured the cut of his violence to make his point. Always supposing his calculations weren’t suddenly deluged by a surge of pug-ugly passionate fury. Actually no, that wouldn’t have happened. Not through passion anyways. Rather his staking of me might have got out of hand and triggered a more primitive bloodlust.
But the fact was, he never had full vacant possession of me. So how could he cinch an inch ? Which inch was he proposing to leave me with anyway ? Which tidbit of my soul would remain beyond his bruising north and south paws ? Surely in his mind, that would have remained a festering sore, one day requiring to be lanced as he stooped to conquer fully. And then shucks, I would be dead and not worth possessing any longer. Possession may well constitute nine-tenths of the law, but that last zero-point-one fraction sure exerts some traction. A siren calling him to sink me for the last time, wholly and irrevocably. Forcing him to lash himself to the masthead so as not to succumb to a single, final one of my charms. My last request. Taunting him, it will be murder and not assisted suicide. He will not put me out of my misery, as I will not deliver him from his. Of course, the fiendish move on his part would have been to leave me with just the inch I have always craved to shave off my waistline. But that assessment was way beyond him.
So I beat it. Beat his feruled rap. Beat off the beat off. Left him to flog his own flesh. I quit on his quirt, as he brandished his ratty rattan, and I scoffed at his scourge. Catcalling before his mangey cat o’nine tails, I wondered how many of our shared lives we had mutually destroyed. I abandoned him to do the maths. Me, I had some other numbers to crunch. And that was how I entered the world of counter-espionage.
So yes, in a way, maybe it makes sense that the bug-eyed telephoto lenses and cauliflower-eared listening devices, are zeroing in on me. They’re just a bit late that’s all. Séancing into the wrong incarnation of me. Knock twice if you’re there. For Jane Bond has passed over. She is not with us any longer. But what a time we had with her. When my body was still lissom, my mind still lithe. OHM’s. On Her Majesty’s Service. Lavishing it up at the finest casinos and night clubs of the world. The places where the global dirty dealers liked to unwind. Me, the glamorous escort perched (yes, we’ll palm one of HIS terms then double-deal it), on the arms of dashing playboys. Bringing them luck and me information. The marking of cards. Sharping. A double identity. Life as a fluttering, a throw of the dice. Blow for luck. On dead men’s bones, in the craps shoot of judas kiss intimacy. Deep-veined thromboses lying in wait just beneath my thimble-rigged smile. My locket-borne powders.
One high roller with a line of cocktails laid out, tossed me a gold sovereign with which to lace each. Another bobbed each pair of dice in my stirrup cups before tossing. Neither were sufficiently unfettered by my charms, to notice how the subtle outcomes shook out. Gold should not react chemically, nor should the same face of the die keep surfacing. Two loaded men just got a soupçon more encumbered. Enough to tip them over the edge into oblivion.
And then on to the dancefloor. Me, scintillating in my spangled, silver mirror dress. Shimmering like a miraged desert oasis. While thirsty men’s tongues lolled uselessly from their mouths. Chained-male. Each sequin scattering the disco lights into a hundred thousand coruscations. The excitation trail of my magnetic forcefield. I was that colossus glitterball astride the gyrating throng. Radiating colour therapy. Laser-healing the engrained retinal prejudice. So that everyone fell in love with me.
Actually, Jane Bond was really only the daydreams of a bespectacled, bruised wallflower. Sat around in Minneapolis branch libraries accumulating the data I sought. Well, it was 1959, in pre-internet days after all. When you had to work a bit harder for your fantasies. Tripping the light fantastic, meant more than just tripping a digital switch. Once I had culled the requisite information, then I could truly act like Jane Bond. Though I’d have to sow my own sequins on.
And when it came to bibliothecal intelligence gathering, without being colonial about it, I can honestly say that “Encylopedia Britannica” knocked “Webster’s” into a cocked hat. Maybe it had something to do with sourcing from the same continent as the pertinent information I was seeking. But there again, my ex-fellow countryfolk still exhibit a twitching vegetative resistance to metrification. An inbuilt parochialism I myself shared and that ultimately contributed to my downfall as a would-be global subersive.
For I was after the holy grail. The numerical Rosetta Stone. The definition of all definition. The measurement of all measurement. That slab of metal which represented ineradicable, incorruptible, unimpeachable scale. Lying in state somewhere in the bowels of France. Clumpy and cardinally unique, I was going to steal it and dissolve the solid state. Vapourise all surety. Render mutable all fixity. Distance the world from over-reliance on magnitudes. They couldn’t rule without rule. Wouldn’t be able to quantify without amplitude. Would necessarily fail to co-ordinate without bearings. Nothing could possibly count for anything anymore. Tabula rasa in place of tabulation. Gulping for oxygen, they’d surface too abruptly and contract a bad case of the bends. I couldn’t deliver one inch of myself or anything, but I knew where I could get my hands on a metre. I was about to seize the standard and mankind would no longer be able to cut his cloth to size.
The encylopedias soon led me back to the reliquary of materialism. The shitty brick, the cardinal corrosive, resided in Sèvres, just outside Paris. A lump of lumped-together alloy, ten percent irridium and ninety percent platinum (not exactly lumpen then). With two lines scratched on, the distance between denoting the length of one metre. Since the alloy was resistant to corrosion and maintained at a constant temperature, so it would neither contract nor expand, this prototypical metre ought remain constant. Such a standard had been established back in 1889 by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. Replacing the somewhat franco-centric previous definition of one metre, as one ten millionth of the quadrant of the Earth’s circumference running from the North Pole to the Equator, via Paris. Well, we had shanghaid both longitude and time from the rest of the world and stationed them in Greenwich, so why not ? In those pioneering days of numbers racketeering and extortion, there were only two press gangs in town. The Dutch were too busy slavering over oil painted fat bird pornography and the Iberians, they were too busy pursuing fools gold and pumping their god brand, to secure their own competitive advantage.
Only, the French had got their sums wrong, the silly bleeders ! (Damn near sufficient to get mankind into Space though). What purported to be a metre, a couple of stirations on a block, was wide of the mark. Didn’t come up to scratch. They changed their minds. There was me, all balaclava’d up in my imagination, hoisting the thing above my head before dashing it down like Moses did with his first lot of stone cold restraining orders. Now I’m frozen in the spotlight holding it up, but I’ve to proclaim it more bogus than the Turin Shroud. And then I got to thinking, just like the Shroud, the bar is a post-facto proof. The metre wasn’t derived from the bar, but the other way round. It hadn’t imprinted its ghostly dimensions on any mineral blotter. Just as the Son of God didn’t organically spoor some Semitic schmutter. They’d always had a measure, they’d just needed some tangible way to get the measure of it. The French stick was nothing but a palimpsest. I’d traced it back and cuffed it to within 0.0254 of a metre of it’s miserable counterfeited life. I was on a roll now.
The same metal alloy also defined one kilogram. And one second was relative to the radioactive decay of a caesium 133 isotopic atom - was there somewhere in a lead-lined glass case a caesium rod, with or without markings ? How typical that a fixity of measurement, should be defined against an algorithim of decay and deterioration. To consign us all, into a half-life race against time unto death. I envisioned the atomic clock, as an egg timer with isotopic sand. I was on to something here.
The whole miserable SI units of measurement, the unified, decimalised, seven numerical one-ders of the world, with which the French had devised to rule over the more haplessly homespun Imperial System, was now ripe for disfiguration. All it would take was a series of guerilla raids on each of these holy cow relics, to debase everything they stood for. The kelvin and ampere of course have no artefacts to demean. Yet since they were named after real men, I could maybe steal their headstones and reduce them to footnotes in history. Meantime, I further degrade their memories by publicly effacing some symbolic analogue measuring stick. Pull the hands off a giant coulometer. Or castrate a thermometer into unresponsiveness. And all the while, as these beacons to oppression are snuffed out one by one, the light at my theatrical showpiece grows progressively dimmer. For which the audience will not require some huge analogue pointer to flash diminishing candelas of luminescence.
But what about the seventh and final unit ? What arse de résistance for that humble mole of molecular valency ? Undoubtedly a figment of idealised imagination. A square peg in round hole shorthand. But therefore short of both artefact and real-life titular sponsor. I could certainly stage a representative scything of a skin blemish from some seized male’s exposed posterior. And then the lights go out as the world collapses into precision-free entropy. But I was forever pricked by the doubt, that this last one needed more thought. Too much stretching the point. An over-playing on words. Besides, it’s too small scale for a finalé. Arggh goddamnit ! I’ve lurched into their perfidious idiom. You see how pernicious it is ? There isn’t a (metaphorical) second to lose. Even if I haven’t sewn up all the details, nor the sequins on my dress."
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Sunday, 3 May 2009
What I love about the internet is ... its desultory predictability
"Scores to settle. Paying back for any wrongs done to me. Debits and credits. Double entry, the Damon approved method of account keeping. I am extended a whole heap of head butts for lavishing my asperity upon. George. Lawrence. The Fuzz. Whichever spotty herberts passed on their STDs. Another unknown, whose credit card I pilfered, which itself turned out to have been hooky. Oh yes, plenteous and condign, but can any disperse my rage ? A rage against myself. For I dwell without any hope of ever leaving this archipelago. I endure the prospect of forever having no love. Forced to subsist without lust even. So to fill in the yawning time on Death Row here, I have to wrest some modicum of control back for myself. Seemingly, that only comes from revenge, so enervated am I. My body is scarcely alive to me, until it is profaned. So is it any surprise I oblige my one carnal passion, that of vengeance ? The one that still sparks my sentience, the one that antiphons any endocrinal despatches. The goal that gets me out of a strange bed in the morning. Reprisal is next to reprise in the dictionary.
You know what I love about the internet ? No, indulge me a little. It’s worth staying with this one I promise. Good. Well, would you not agree that it’s a free-for-all tabula rasa that wraps itself around the circumference of the earth ? Anyone can create and contribute and etch their initials on to it. But not like some sad old patchwork quilt of remembrance. This has all the vigour of grafitti artists spooring their signature. Ooh, get you, their ‘tags’ ! Though for self-preservation purposes, I can’t leave any obvious brume of self, still it’s finally possible for me to flame on undimmed. I am alive and kicking. Although at several removes, so that I do not invite disclosure and death. The Net amplifies me sufficiently, to cast off the shackles from my mind, even if my body remains earthbound. It respires me some breath. I can partake once again of civilisation. In the great debate.
You want learned knowledge on arcana, you can, albeit unreliably and often unattributed, study it on the Web. It’s a bit hit or miss, but hey as I discovered back in college, further reinforced by Corfu’s infuriatingly patchwork library, that’s how modern epistemology shakes out. Though to be honest with you, I still favour the solidity of the bound tome for the purposes of culling knowledge. There is no such thing as an achingly beautiful website. Just the arterial red and blue of venous hypertext. But really I’m well beyond being forged in a crucible of knowledge. I only now require to be informed, rather than instructed. Intelligence not as a faculty, but as data. I seek after a full quiver of missiles. So to that end, I relish the delights of blogs and message boards. Where I can eavesdrop undetected, on what taxes the mind of my countryfolk and keep in touch with my hearth. The Net as my home from home if you will. Yet what is even more familiar and reassuring to me, are people’s personal homepages. It feels like visiting neighbours and friends, only without the burden of reciprocation. I often feel like I’m Santa plopping down through their chimneys, helping myself to the milk and digestives left out for me, without compunction to leave them any gifts in return. All of this should facilitate me remission. Of being with the grown ups for the brief, glorious interim of my sojourn. Yet lamentably, I discern the increasing infantilizing of all my race back home. These charter ticketed kids are apt emissaries for their elders. With full undiplomatic immunity from consequence.
Forgive me, all that might betoken an antagonism on my part towards the virtual beast. Far from it, what I most cherish is that this autonomous space for our minds to be writ large, this great collective consciousness, has evidenced a return to form. A reversion to type. A newly conquered universe now awash with our detritus and refuse. To wit, for all our contortions of higher aspirations, we soon corkscrew and gravitate around the twin pillars of commerce and sex. These remain our obsession. The largest ever, ongoing worldwide poll demonstrates it to be so. A secondary control test poll, that of the camera phone backs this up. So stick two fleshy digits up to the Classical Greeks and their paeans to the higher human spirit.
In regard of sex, all our experiences and feelings, such as they persist, are as if mediated for us by a silicon membrane anyway. We are all wraiths wondering spectrally through some sort of ectoplasmic dreamscape. Copulation, despite it supposedly being the most involved, physically-centred activity, is now vaporous and insensate. Nothing is present in actuality, on which to hang one’s emotions on to. Relationship is a mere bump, a pedestrian road rage not even meriting the term ‘impact’. More just a diffusing wake. If we danced, if we oscillated, so as to light up our beings with excited sparks or vapour trails, I might settle for that. But we don’t. We are inert. This is how we approach each other. This is what we have reduced ourselves to. This is why the internet is so right. The unsustainable economy of sex in real life, now pays off in spades in the virtual. A realigned love triune, of camera, fingered keyboard and fibre optics. We are each sat alone in front of our mousepads, but at least my isolation is elevated by having the sun beating down on me, quaffing cocktails poolside. How is your dreary fantasy backgrounded ?
Same thing commerce too. Convenience shopping from the convenience of your own home. Hunting down rapacious desires like big game, serves to indulge the predatory in people. And getting involved in on-line auctions renders them combatants in a virtual joust. Or a poker game of who blinks first. For we are all traffickers, recycling our superfluous lives on e-Bay. Piqued by absurd jealousy if they are outbid by an anonymous stranger. See, that’s what I also love about the internet. It tilts the market balance. Right off its unhinged axis ! Now any buyer can just search online for exactly what it is they’re after. No matter how intricate or particular their tastes. My husband and his ilk always supplied anything and everything you could want, in that they knew where to lay their big, hot hands on it. But their customers were limited, cos their purlieu was beyond most people’s taste radar. But now everyone has satellite navigation at their fingertips. Every wanton attachment, which has always been procurable, if not exactly on tap, can be tracked down for ready purchase by the consumer. No more is there such a thing as an illict pleasure. Only one that may not yet have an online community, dedicated to discussing its zesty delights. Plus the chances are, it’s not even being touted by a professional criminal, but by some devotee in his attic or bedroom. My husband’s losing market share. Caveat vendor. Emptorially empty-handed. Not only are people locating merchandise themselves, but they’re also becoming producers too. Again circumventing my husband’s wares. Observe the kids out here with their camera phones and videos. Downloading and sending back their own material online. Don’t tell me they’re charging their mates for their shared kicks ? Home-made pornography. On location out here. Coarsened violence on ‘YouTube’. Happy slap rather than slapstick. Thus the depravity has become so mundanely accessible, it loses its risk factor that makes it cost inelastic. The behemoth has reared up and swished its long, spiky tail across the knuckles of Damon’s talons and swiped the whip hand from him. Though uncentred, this particular exchange maven also knows which end to hold a crop by.
As for me, I celebrate the fact that I can partake of a little of my own revenge online. Not ordered off the peg. Rather one I can fashion for myself. I’m finally back in the Forum. Shopping around in order to manufacture and distribute my own brand of retribution. I may have previously vouched for revenge being up close and personal, in best order to dish it up cold. But the marvel of modern connectivity has caused me to revise my opinion. It no longer requires my thumbprint. What could be colder than not even appending your name, your colophon to the deed ? This way I can run amok on the whole tiny-minded world ! Like everything else, it’s acquisitive and venal and therefore fundamentally a numbers game. For once in my life I have full access. Now I am imbued in my own right, with the meddling powers of the immortals. All thanks to t’internet (as one of my Northern conquests insisted on calling it)."
You know what I love about the internet ? No, indulge me a little. It’s worth staying with this one I promise. Good. Well, would you not agree that it’s a free-for-all tabula rasa that wraps itself around the circumference of the earth ? Anyone can create and contribute and etch their initials on to it. But not like some sad old patchwork quilt of remembrance. This has all the vigour of grafitti artists spooring their signature. Ooh, get you, their ‘tags’ ! Though for self-preservation purposes, I can’t leave any obvious brume of self, still it’s finally possible for me to flame on undimmed. I am alive and kicking. Although at several removes, so that I do not invite disclosure and death. The Net amplifies me sufficiently, to cast off the shackles from my mind, even if my body remains earthbound. It respires me some breath. I can partake once again of civilisation. In the great debate.
You want learned knowledge on arcana, you can, albeit unreliably and often unattributed, study it on the Web. It’s a bit hit or miss, but hey as I discovered back in college, further reinforced by Corfu’s infuriatingly patchwork library, that’s how modern epistemology shakes out. Though to be honest with you, I still favour the solidity of the bound tome for the purposes of culling knowledge. There is no such thing as an achingly beautiful website. Just the arterial red and blue of venous hypertext. But really I’m well beyond being forged in a crucible of knowledge. I only now require to be informed, rather than instructed. Intelligence not as a faculty, but as data. I seek after a full quiver of missiles. So to that end, I relish the delights of blogs and message boards. Where I can eavesdrop undetected, on what taxes the mind of my countryfolk and keep in touch with my hearth. The Net as my home from home if you will. Yet what is even more familiar and reassuring to me, are people’s personal homepages. It feels like visiting neighbours and friends, only without the burden of reciprocation. I often feel like I’m Santa plopping down through their chimneys, helping myself to the milk and digestives left out for me, without compunction to leave them any gifts in return. All of this should facilitate me remission. Of being with the grown ups for the brief, glorious interim of my sojourn. Yet lamentably, I discern the increasing infantilizing of all my race back home. These charter ticketed kids are apt emissaries for their elders. With full undiplomatic immunity from consequence.
Forgive me, all that might betoken an antagonism on my part towards the virtual beast. Far from it, what I most cherish is that this autonomous space for our minds to be writ large, this great collective consciousness, has evidenced a return to form. A reversion to type. A newly conquered universe now awash with our detritus and refuse. To wit, for all our contortions of higher aspirations, we soon corkscrew and gravitate around the twin pillars of commerce and sex. These remain our obsession. The largest ever, ongoing worldwide poll demonstrates it to be so. A secondary control test poll, that of the camera phone backs this up. So stick two fleshy digits up to the Classical Greeks and their paeans to the higher human spirit.
In regard of sex, all our experiences and feelings, such as they persist, are as if mediated for us by a silicon membrane anyway. We are all wraiths wondering spectrally through some sort of ectoplasmic dreamscape. Copulation, despite it supposedly being the most involved, physically-centred activity, is now vaporous and insensate. Nothing is present in actuality, on which to hang one’s emotions on to. Relationship is a mere bump, a pedestrian road rage not even meriting the term ‘impact’. More just a diffusing wake. If we danced, if we oscillated, so as to light up our beings with excited sparks or vapour trails, I might settle for that. But we don’t. We are inert. This is how we approach each other. This is what we have reduced ourselves to. This is why the internet is so right. The unsustainable economy of sex in real life, now pays off in spades in the virtual. A realigned love triune, of camera, fingered keyboard and fibre optics. We are each sat alone in front of our mousepads, but at least my isolation is elevated by having the sun beating down on me, quaffing cocktails poolside. How is your dreary fantasy backgrounded ?
Same thing commerce too. Convenience shopping from the convenience of your own home. Hunting down rapacious desires like big game, serves to indulge the predatory in people. And getting involved in on-line auctions renders them combatants in a virtual joust. Or a poker game of who blinks first. For we are all traffickers, recycling our superfluous lives on e-Bay. Piqued by absurd jealousy if they are outbid by an anonymous stranger. See, that’s what I also love about the internet. It tilts the market balance. Right off its unhinged axis ! Now any buyer can just search online for exactly what it is they’re after. No matter how intricate or particular their tastes. My husband and his ilk always supplied anything and everything you could want, in that they knew where to lay their big, hot hands on it. But their customers were limited, cos their purlieu was beyond most people’s taste radar. But now everyone has satellite navigation at their fingertips. Every wanton attachment, which has always been procurable, if not exactly on tap, can be tracked down for ready purchase by the consumer. No more is there such a thing as an illict pleasure. Only one that may not yet have an online community, dedicated to discussing its zesty delights. Plus the chances are, it’s not even being touted by a professional criminal, but by some devotee in his attic or bedroom. My husband’s losing market share. Caveat vendor. Emptorially empty-handed. Not only are people locating merchandise themselves, but they’re also becoming producers too. Again circumventing my husband’s wares. Observe the kids out here with their camera phones and videos. Downloading and sending back their own material online. Don’t tell me they’re charging their mates for their shared kicks ? Home-made pornography. On location out here. Coarsened violence on ‘YouTube’. Happy slap rather than slapstick. Thus the depravity has become so mundanely accessible, it loses its risk factor that makes it cost inelastic. The behemoth has reared up and swished its long, spiky tail across the knuckles of Damon’s talons and swiped the whip hand from him. Though uncentred, this particular exchange maven also knows which end to hold a crop by.
As for me, I celebrate the fact that I can partake of a little of my own revenge online. Not ordered off the peg. Rather one I can fashion for myself. I’m finally back in the Forum. Shopping around in order to manufacture and distribute my own brand of retribution. I may have previously vouched for revenge being up close and personal, in best order to dish it up cold. But the marvel of modern connectivity has caused me to revise my opinion. It no longer requires my thumbprint. What could be colder than not even appending your name, your colophon to the deed ? This way I can run amok on the whole tiny-minded world ! Like everything else, it’s acquisitive and venal and therefore fundamentally a numbers game. For once in my life I have full access. Now I am imbued in my own right, with the meddling powers of the immortals. All thanks to t’internet (as one of my Northern conquests insisted on calling it)."
Friday, 1 May 2009
Linearity Breeds Contempt
"Why he had appointed it iterative enough to bookmark, was beyond me. Maybe for some light relief between all the hyper-spaced, hyper-texted, hyperantipathy. Not that a site offering refuge for battered women is a cause for relief to anyone, other than those who find sanctuary behind its actual walls. Maybe he was being ironic, though I think that will always remain beyond him. I know I could be a bit of a cow at times, but I don’t think his treatment at my hand could ever be said to diminish him, to a level where he felt it worthwhile to check out the equality of opportunity for spousal asylum. More like he was identifying with the bad guys, getting off on the abuse recollections of the victims. Not that I could really find any first hand, fist, or blunt object reports. I was in the process of perusing the founder’s mission statement, when the words started to deliquesce and welter in front of my eyes. Oh well, that was that. Some glitch in the programming or so I thought. Salvador Dali might have twizzled his moustache approvingly at the visual liquefaction I was being presented with. Think I was up a blind alley anyway. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink nature of our computer setup, cadged invariably after some software had fallen very hard from the backs of lorries, on to elastic pre-stressed concrete, meant that even if I credited him with the nerd nous to wipe his tracks clean, the computer configuration simply was not up to it.
As I listlessly watched the digital decomposition in front of me, I could not determine whether the letter sewage was being flushed out into the blue reservoir at the foot of the screen, or if the cobalt tide was actually advancing so as to wash over the alphabet shingle. The frame speed and resolution quality of the pixels was so low as to jounce, er rather, to slink one back to the happy daze of Space Invaders. The ziggurat of stunted motion was enough to make you travel sick.
I was about to disembark from my excursion into the yonder, when the blue swathe was suddenly (relatively speaking) stopped in its hobbled tracks. And after a tension-laden incipience, in which I wondered whether the whole gestation had done for the computer’s circuits, the aquamarine draggled wearily back into recession. Good, there was life in the old mongrel yet. More than that, something now seemed to be roiling the grizzled blank scarp of the screen. Indeterminate squiggles and strands, protruded their wormlike nodules from beyond the opaque bilge and began to flex their animation. I wasn’t certain that it was them incarnate, rather than their liquid crystal trails across the screen, that I was following. But gradually, due to my unprimed perception rather than software sag this time, I realised that they were ever so slowly shaking off their saturation and coagulating into new anatomies. Eat your heart out David Attenborough ! They were reforming into letters. The dismembered characters were reconvening themselves. Hooray for her! She’s back on the airwaves and refuses to be silenced! The mission’s back on track. Her oeuvre will out.
I tried to pick up the thread of where I’d been cut off from her impassioned appeal, but could not quite relocate myself. The text had changed ever so slightly. She must be live and on line here and now! With her fingers airily caressing the keyboard, she had planted her feet in the blue nowhere and turned back the tide. Cocking a snook at King Canute and all other bloated male egos!
As the frisson of profane delight started its vertiginous roll down the cresta run of my vetebrae, the screen shuddered and trepanned my pleasure, leaving me unhinged. While I slumped, each letter was turning tail on its axis, as if scalded. Here and there, one might sheer off into the soothing cold plunge of the void. The arrayed red-coated monograms around them buckling a little, as if to suture the breech of missing vowel or dipthong. Now detachments of surds were silently giving up the ghost and scuttling off into oblivion. Next a syllable topples, denting the lineament like a gap-tooth, before it was gradually excised into full root canal surgery as whole phalanxes of words cave in. It was swingeing and all-pervasive. Seems like she had been successfully gagged after all.
Or overwritten. Since clearly, even hyperspace abhors a vacuum. For filtering down the screen on fibre optic grappling irons and gossamer rope ladders, column after column of letters marched in. Leapfrogging over one another in their glee, as if racing to be first to occupy the vacated matrix. Was this a service provider reclaiming a squatted URL address? If so to what end, other than a point to point of proto-colic principle? For these new characters spelt out nothing but nonsense. The dead letter drivel of programming speak. Cold and metallic grey, unlike the spectacular livery of her florid prose. I had a virtual tear in my eye.
I prepared to bring down the curtain on the whole non-affair. Partly to dismiss the long engaged streetlamp, rubbernecking directly through my window, into my rubber stamped and silicon verified state of idle loneliness. But foremost in my mind, I was determined to pull the plug for good on this dissolute bazaar. Despite what I always steeled myself with in reference to the girls, clearly there was such a thing as too much information. Too much access. Too much disclosure. What used to remain in his cups down at the pub, he had been able to carry out home with him. A marketplace to trade spite, into more far reaching corners than mere spit and sawdust could reach. A whole brewery of hate in the still of this bedroom. Time to ditch the Red Hand veined Feng Shui.
It wasn’t through him spending so much time wedded to the net, that made me feel neglected. It’s more like when he got off it and sat in our non-chat room downstairs, quietly smouldering, that alarm bells clanged. My internal fume detector was tripped. Whether his nightly hate-in ratcheted up his animosity towards me; or that he already bore such pent up malice that he disgorged it into virtual violence, in order to head off the real thing, I wasn’t certain. But I wasn’t going to hang around to sift forensically through the ashes of a conflagration. That’s when I asked him to leave. I might well be constantly infuriated with life, but I couldn’t risk being around someone who was positively incendiary about it. After all, there were the the girls to think about too.
So now we’re under new management. And it’s time for a ritual incineration of a different sort -
But - she was back! Her lexical dragoons effortlessly retaking the high ground of the screen. Sliding down and sideswiping the incumbents. Rattling over letter for letter, like a train destination board flittering a new imminence. I almost applauded. The show was back on the road. A differing version yet of what had gone before. It had the thinness commensurate with being re-keyed in real time, but some of the constructions were also reedier, suggesting an earlier, less honed draft. Maybe we were going backwards in time. Why not, this is virtual reality after all?
Now some more personal stuff was drilling across my screen. Material I hadn’t seen before. She certainly came across as one wild, old bird. I’d first hand evidence, twice removed, as to her tenacity that’s for sure. And then once more, without warning, the countercharge. Her words started to wither. But I knew I only had to abide an intermission. She’d return unsullied and unabashed. For I realised that this was smart bombs and virus protection; firewalls, backdoors and catflaps. Digitised interdiction. With both parties probably absent. Off having a well-earned cup of tea while they waited to see the effects of their latest thrust or parry. I brewed myself a sustaining coffee and toasted our imagined triune in this spellbinding war of censorship. All texts should be written like this. Then the reader could be truly interactive. Our up- or down- turned thumb would really bear critical import. Authors would truly earn their corn. The payload of their words directly transmittable, delivered through the reader’s white-knuckled bombardiering.
The night proceeded to unfold in this fashion. Sometimes the purge and reinstatement would be in monotype, others by linotype, as the varying strategies were employed. But each occasion afforded me more and more detail about her past life. I was hooked. I felt I was privy to an immune system repulsing an invading bug. Found myself rooting for a benign diagnosis. Some of the things I found positively upsetting; she’d obviously had an awfully blighted life and was determined to publish it. They couldn’t break her.
By the break of day it dawned on me that this war was somewhat internecine and wholly nasty. Each occasion that they managed to score away another layer of her fabric, she’d exhibit further pentimento upon pentimento. Each palimpsest they impressed, she managed to copperplate her monograph over the top. It was as if they were trying to eradicate every last vestige of her existence, through to that egg in her mother’s womb, back to her very conception. (Freud would have had an orgasm!) This would go to the bitter end. Or some viscious eternal loop. I sent an e-mail to her website expressing my support. I didn’t expect her to have the time to open it.
Since I was filled with the presentiment that this was somebody else’s life flashing before my eyes, it occurred to me, that perhaps I should do something to preserve it as a record. However, on each occasion that I managed to squirt some paper between the rollers of the printer, the text had decomposed its legibility and the printer peeled off what appeared to be a laboured test run. Even when prepared, with paper in place, waiting for the next manifest, the resultant synchronised print-off was still garbled gibberish. Had the forces of darkness secured the printer outpost ? Or was the printer garrison still holding out, desperately broadcasting its coded warning as to the original errata ? Or had it gone native and veered off into its own hallucinatory discourse ? The period for her words to re-establish their cursive flow, was now becoming longer and longer. I decided to write some of them down. Contracted wrist giving way to longhand, as I reflexively moved for the weight of my journal. Albeit according her a fresh page at the back.
As I launched into amanuensis mode, I would be holed each time by the gobbledegook guillotine. Shredding meaning. Splintering intelligibility. I made myself memorise more for the record. Then dictate to myself from the afterglow imprinted upon my side of the retinal wall, once the image had faded from in front of me. Thus I knew my transcription would not be a pure one. More of a cross-hybridization. So be it. Amy’s plaintive greet-the-day mewl brought a natural end to my assignment. I rose to confront the day chock-full with purpose, stale from having spent a night under the tiles and pressed against the eaves. This time the monitor screen was wiped clear at my hand, rather than that of any second or third party.
I returned to my journal that night. Re-read my latest (borrowed) entry, anticipating it to be an annotation of the rest of the entire preceding contents. A foreword or afterword. A dedication. An acknowledgement of something or other. An imprimatur. But it failed to read that well or interestingly even. More akin to some dream you noted down before returning to sleep, only to read it through stupefied the next morning. It was no dream though and I’ll have the phone bill to prove it right enough. I guess you had to have been there. Which neither of us ever were really I suppose. The e-mail bounced back to me as undeliverable.
I didn’t return to the website. I don’t know if her digital Cheshire cat smirk managed to prevail. I unplugged the computer, faithful to my vow to reverse previous vows. I tried ripping out her page from my journal, but she put up her customary catfight. Eventually she was gone from my life, but she took with her half the folio’s anchoring twine. My journal now hung frail and played out. I told you she was a tenacious old bird. In union we’d not grafted. Only in divorce. Still, that was an advance on my ex-husband. He had barely ever merited an entry, let alone a dedicated page."
As I listlessly watched the digital decomposition in front of me, I could not determine whether the letter sewage was being flushed out into the blue reservoir at the foot of the screen, or if the cobalt tide was actually advancing so as to wash over the alphabet shingle. The frame speed and resolution quality of the pixels was so low as to jounce, er rather, to slink one back to the happy daze of Space Invaders. The ziggurat of stunted motion was enough to make you travel sick.
I was about to disembark from my excursion into the yonder, when the blue swathe was suddenly (relatively speaking) stopped in its hobbled tracks. And after a tension-laden incipience, in which I wondered whether the whole gestation had done for the computer’s circuits, the aquamarine draggled wearily back into recession. Good, there was life in the old mongrel yet. More than that, something now seemed to be roiling the grizzled blank scarp of the screen. Indeterminate squiggles and strands, protruded their wormlike nodules from beyond the opaque bilge and began to flex their animation. I wasn’t certain that it was them incarnate, rather than their liquid crystal trails across the screen, that I was following. But gradually, due to my unprimed perception rather than software sag this time, I realised that they were ever so slowly shaking off their saturation and coagulating into new anatomies. Eat your heart out David Attenborough ! They were reforming into letters. The dismembered characters were reconvening themselves. Hooray for her! She’s back on the airwaves and refuses to be silenced! The mission’s back on track. Her oeuvre will out.
I tried to pick up the thread of where I’d been cut off from her impassioned appeal, but could not quite relocate myself. The text had changed ever so slightly. She must be live and on line here and now! With her fingers airily caressing the keyboard, she had planted her feet in the blue nowhere and turned back the tide. Cocking a snook at King Canute and all other bloated male egos!
As the frisson of profane delight started its vertiginous roll down the cresta run of my vetebrae, the screen shuddered and trepanned my pleasure, leaving me unhinged. While I slumped, each letter was turning tail on its axis, as if scalded. Here and there, one might sheer off into the soothing cold plunge of the void. The arrayed red-coated monograms around them buckling a little, as if to suture the breech of missing vowel or dipthong. Now detachments of surds were silently giving up the ghost and scuttling off into oblivion. Next a syllable topples, denting the lineament like a gap-tooth, before it was gradually excised into full root canal surgery as whole phalanxes of words cave in. It was swingeing and all-pervasive. Seems like she had been successfully gagged after all.
Or overwritten. Since clearly, even hyperspace abhors a vacuum. For filtering down the screen on fibre optic grappling irons and gossamer rope ladders, column after column of letters marched in. Leapfrogging over one another in their glee, as if racing to be first to occupy the vacated matrix. Was this a service provider reclaiming a squatted URL address? If so to what end, other than a point to point of proto-colic principle? For these new characters spelt out nothing but nonsense. The dead letter drivel of programming speak. Cold and metallic grey, unlike the spectacular livery of her florid prose. I had a virtual tear in my eye.
I prepared to bring down the curtain on the whole non-affair. Partly to dismiss the long engaged streetlamp, rubbernecking directly through my window, into my rubber stamped and silicon verified state of idle loneliness. But foremost in my mind, I was determined to pull the plug for good on this dissolute bazaar. Despite what I always steeled myself with in reference to the girls, clearly there was such a thing as too much information. Too much access. Too much disclosure. What used to remain in his cups down at the pub, he had been able to carry out home with him. A marketplace to trade spite, into more far reaching corners than mere spit and sawdust could reach. A whole brewery of hate in the still of this bedroom. Time to ditch the Red Hand veined Feng Shui.
It wasn’t through him spending so much time wedded to the net, that made me feel neglected. It’s more like when he got off it and sat in our non-chat room downstairs, quietly smouldering, that alarm bells clanged. My internal fume detector was tripped. Whether his nightly hate-in ratcheted up his animosity towards me; or that he already bore such pent up malice that he disgorged it into virtual violence, in order to head off the real thing, I wasn’t certain. But I wasn’t going to hang around to sift forensically through the ashes of a conflagration. That’s when I asked him to leave. I might well be constantly infuriated with life, but I couldn’t risk being around someone who was positively incendiary about it. After all, there were the the girls to think about too.
So now we’re under new management. And it’s time for a ritual incineration of a different sort -
But - she was back! Her lexical dragoons effortlessly retaking the high ground of the screen. Sliding down and sideswiping the incumbents. Rattling over letter for letter, like a train destination board flittering a new imminence. I almost applauded. The show was back on the road. A differing version yet of what had gone before. It had the thinness commensurate with being re-keyed in real time, but some of the constructions were also reedier, suggesting an earlier, less honed draft. Maybe we were going backwards in time. Why not, this is virtual reality after all?
Now some more personal stuff was drilling across my screen. Material I hadn’t seen before. She certainly came across as one wild, old bird. I’d first hand evidence, twice removed, as to her tenacity that’s for sure. And then once more, without warning, the countercharge. Her words started to wither. But I knew I only had to abide an intermission. She’d return unsullied and unabashed. For I realised that this was smart bombs and virus protection; firewalls, backdoors and catflaps. Digitised interdiction. With both parties probably absent. Off having a well-earned cup of tea while they waited to see the effects of their latest thrust or parry. I brewed myself a sustaining coffee and toasted our imagined triune in this spellbinding war of censorship. All texts should be written like this. Then the reader could be truly interactive. Our up- or down- turned thumb would really bear critical import. Authors would truly earn their corn. The payload of their words directly transmittable, delivered through the reader’s white-knuckled bombardiering.
The night proceeded to unfold in this fashion. Sometimes the purge and reinstatement would be in monotype, others by linotype, as the varying strategies were employed. But each occasion afforded me more and more detail about her past life. I was hooked. I felt I was privy to an immune system repulsing an invading bug. Found myself rooting for a benign diagnosis. Some of the things I found positively upsetting; she’d obviously had an awfully blighted life and was determined to publish it. They couldn’t break her.
By the break of day it dawned on me that this war was somewhat internecine and wholly nasty. Each occasion that they managed to score away another layer of her fabric, she’d exhibit further pentimento upon pentimento. Each palimpsest they impressed, she managed to copperplate her monograph over the top. It was as if they were trying to eradicate every last vestige of her existence, through to that egg in her mother’s womb, back to her very conception. (Freud would have had an orgasm!) This would go to the bitter end. Or some viscious eternal loop. I sent an e-mail to her website expressing my support. I didn’t expect her to have the time to open it.
Since I was filled with the presentiment that this was somebody else’s life flashing before my eyes, it occurred to me, that perhaps I should do something to preserve it as a record. However, on each occasion that I managed to squirt some paper between the rollers of the printer, the text had decomposed its legibility and the printer peeled off what appeared to be a laboured test run. Even when prepared, with paper in place, waiting for the next manifest, the resultant synchronised print-off was still garbled gibberish. Had the forces of darkness secured the printer outpost ? Or was the printer garrison still holding out, desperately broadcasting its coded warning as to the original errata ? Or had it gone native and veered off into its own hallucinatory discourse ? The period for her words to re-establish their cursive flow, was now becoming longer and longer. I decided to write some of them down. Contracted wrist giving way to longhand, as I reflexively moved for the weight of my journal. Albeit according her a fresh page at the back.
As I launched into amanuensis mode, I would be holed each time by the gobbledegook guillotine. Shredding meaning. Splintering intelligibility. I made myself memorise more for the record. Then dictate to myself from the afterglow imprinted upon my side of the retinal wall, once the image had faded from in front of me. Thus I knew my transcription would not be a pure one. More of a cross-hybridization. So be it. Amy’s plaintive greet-the-day mewl brought a natural end to my assignment. I rose to confront the day chock-full with purpose, stale from having spent a night under the tiles and pressed against the eaves. This time the monitor screen was wiped clear at my hand, rather than that of any second or third party.
I returned to my journal that night. Re-read my latest (borrowed) entry, anticipating it to be an annotation of the rest of the entire preceding contents. A foreword or afterword. A dedication. An acknowledgement of something or other. An imprimatur. But it failed to read that well or interestingly even. More akin to some dream you noted down before returning to sleep, only to read it through stupefied the next morning. It was no dream though and I’ll have the phone bill to prove it right enough. I guess you had to have been there. Which neither of us ever were really I suppose. The e-mail bounced back to me as undeliverable.
I didn’t return to the website. I don’t know if her digital Cheshire cat smirk managed to prevail. I unplugged the computer, faithful to my vow to reverse previous vows. I tried ripping out her page from my journal, but she put up her customary catfight. Eventually she was gone from my life, but she took with her half the folio’s anchoring twine. My journal now hung frail and played out. I told you she was a tenacious old bird. In union we’d not grafted. Only in divorce. Still, that was an advance on my ex-husband. He had barely ever merited an entry, let alone a dedicated page."
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Learning To Write
It all starts with a signature. The first thing they’re taught to write is their own name. A reasonable enough gesture. A waxy-crayon seal, braiding their affirmatory identity. The first cheque issued on the overdraft of self. Seminal scratchings of disclosure on the tree bark of life. But soon it’s time to get serious and dead-head the flowery script, with that same old dead hand of regulation. School’s habituation and practice. As it should be, yet, the method by which they’re taught letter formation prompts more questions than poses solutions. As I survey a string of tracings, joining the dots, finger writing in the air, the wipe cleans, those that keep their word, and those which don’t and just blot. All of which I am supposed to support at home. I curly cue the trails and flicks of her spidery undulations. I try and brace the straight-backs of her tall letters against the top of the scaffold. I’m supportive alright. I can see the economy of starting ‘o’s’ at ten past, inducing seamless transitions into ‘d’s’ and ‘g’s’. I honour those ‘h’s’ for planting the seed for joined up calligraphy. But I do consider those ‘f’s’ unnecessarily elaborate and baroque.
Certainly not how I go about it. I am forced to check my own conventions. Uncramping my hand from the fountain pen, I realise that my application is always on its nib, rather than the words it ladles on to the leaves of my journal. It’s as if it were an inky dowsing rod, that must forever contend against me running dry. Inked gush must flow, whatever verbal precipitate settles from it. Why would anyone even presume to maintain a journal ? But for now, I’m only taking a dip into the signature me. More graph- ology than -ic. As I uncover our deviations from the standard arrangement, I wonder whether she will, in time, adapt this received stroke to her own personality. Will she be able to sit down and assert herself with her own idiosyncratic flourishes ? Or will she slip into tramline, baldly submitting to featureless pre-formation ? What hope any animated revelation there ? Or worse, what if her handwriting mutates into a simulacrum of my own ? Her script matching mine, a confluence as incontestable, as the superimposition of our two stained bands of DNA analysis might show. Would my ghostly imprint underwrite everything of hers ? Would she be bound and shackled by the very same lexical building blocks that wall me up in mute rage ? There can be such a thing as too much support. Suzanne, you’re on your own with this assignment. At least you’d better hope you are girl.
Certainly not how I go about it. I am forced to check my own conventions. Uncramping my hand from the fountain pen, I realise that my application is always on its nib, rather than the words it ladles on to the leaves of my journal. It’s as if it were an inky dowsing rod, that must forever contend against me running dry. Inked gush must flow, whatever verbal precipitate settles from it. Why would anyone even presume to maintain a journal ? But for now, I’m only taking a dip into the signature me. More graph- ology than -ic. As I uncover our deviations from the standard arrangement, I wonder whether she will, in time, adapt this received stroke to her own personality. Will she be able to sit down and assert herself with her own idiosyncratic flourishes ? Or will she slip into tramline, baldly submitting to featureless pre-formation ? What hope any animated revelation there ? Or worse, what if her handwriting mutates into a simulacrum of my own ? Her script matching mine, a confluence as incontestable, as the superimposition of our two stained bands of DNA analysis might show. Would my ghostly imprint underwrite everything of hers ? Would she be bound and shackled by the very same lexical building blocks that wall me up in mute rage ? There can be such a thing as too much support. Suzanne, you’re on your own with this assignment. At least you’d better hope you are girl.
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
Good Housekeeping
They say everybody has at least one book inside them.
And mine is gestating. Continously. As we speak. Ongoing, but not outgoing. For it is my personal journal.
When I was Confirmed, a wizened aunt gave me a beautiful calfskin covered notebook. I was in the dark as to her predetermination; whether I was supposed to relive and relish my secular sins, or solemnly to contemplate and renounce them like an account-keeping Protestant (ie, we don’t service wash our dirty laundry like the taigs). Which was it to be, God and ink, or nod and a wink, for squirreling away girlish secrets ? She had given me no guidance, just this richly aromatic leather-bound book, between wax-paper protective covers. In a world of wood-chip, formica and crimplene, this indubitably was an object of pulchritude. Not one I could gaze upon and be enchanted in any ornamental way, but one I could appreciate for its exquisite elegance all the same. So I never dared remove it from its waxy sheath. Its fresh, otherworldly waft, never stopped calling me every time I opened the drawer in which it was cradled. But it was far too sublime to stain with any of my inky swell. Until I fell pregnant.
Not that I conceived of it as a personal record of joy, either for me or for my issue to come. There is precious little to savour in here. (Good gracious no, neither she nor I must ever be allowed to read back on it). For any such brooding sentimentalists, there are baby books which require far less exertion. Though after a while, even this was ultimately too much for my husband, for all the alacrity he evinced on being bequeathed one from his mother. A trip to the Town Hall to register Suzanne’s name, left him too emotionally played out to lovingly duplicate the details on Page One of our own private muster. All that marks her entry in the world of the book, into the World, is her pointillist attribution through Ultrasound. Like an unfinished jotting. A sketch. That would be about right then, where he is (un-) concerned
Who am I to talk ? For I’ve just owned that my journal is hardly intimately shipshape, nor fondly Bristol fashion either. Due, in the main, to it arising out of a poser of post-natal, deep-impression. The mound of flesh that was me, sinking submerged into every reclining chair fabric we were possessed of. Mushily up hard, against the low mental activity that was silting up my champing mind, during the vacant-stared chores of nursing. There were only so many nano-seconds available in the day. Pelvic floor exercises, or turning my hand to re-engage the cogs of the gray matter ? A no-brainer in the parlance. Yes, why not ? Let’s properly record this new ordering of the cosmos. Of my corner of it at least. And so I finally took up the hallowed journal. An inhalation of the leather deep into my lungs. She still smelled divine. (Banish the faint ichorous fume, still attending to each recall of inaugural contact with my firstborn). A fresh start for all of us, anointed in the blood of slaughtered infant innocent (er of the donor calf that is, not my daughter).
But what to write ? Write wrongs, gibberish, write anything. Any manipulation would serve as physiotherapy for a debilitated mind. Any verbiage can be sown in the hope of bringing forth life in a desert, should life-affirming waters chance percolate and yield them nourishment. But I needed more than chance. I needed to assert sureity. I may not presently have much sense of myself, nor an outline of my pneumatic form, but if it has palpable solidity, there in my journal, I must bear some tangible existence. I needed to begin with some brass rubbing over the crypt in which my gist had been consigned. I’d start with shadings. Sketches. Impressions. Steer clear of fully-formed words at this stage. Just something to get my fingers cupping a pen. To get some feeling back.
* * *
And right at this moment, it might actually come in rather handy. I do not hold it up in competition with all those published manuals I mentally shredded. But as I flick through its leaves, it might refresh my memory as to certain timings. Like a baby cook book.
Not that I am particularly concerned, as to whether Amy is early or late with regard to some key developmental stage. Not being one of those mothers who marked each of Suzanne’s achievements, by dashing to the phone to elicit intelligence, as to the present disposition of her nearest rivals. Due, in the main, to neither Suzanne, nor myself, having any peers with whom we rubbed up against socially. Suzanne, is in my eyes and will forever be, peerless. (Just so long as it is only I, who remains friendless).
No, this is with reference more, as to how long I have to endure the current, particularly doleful cycle. Teething (grit I, through unflossed and nightly ground gnashers). This one is for me. As I lie back in a warm bath. My first protracted soak since being wreathed in sweat with Amy’s birth. I’ve brokered a watching brief from the troubles (small ‘t’), primed to respond to any baby monitor incursions (murphy’s law they’ll both sleep through blissfully this evening). Actually, the negotiations were instigated by him, having remarked that I was beginning to reek. In an environmentally-redolent sort of way, rather than his nose being helplessly led by some favourably sour hormonal hook. How did things get to such a pass ? Now would be a good time to review. I don’t intend to leave this tub, until the immersion tank can no longer revive the water that bestows on me it’s sheen of mock sultriness. By the cold light of day, I want to have been rebaptised into life.
So here I am, casting back for jottings with which I might divine the immediate future. But my testimonial falls way short. What was I so busy doing when I had Suzanne ? What was I thinking ? I can hardly upbraid all the textbooks now, if I couldn’t even keep my own record up to scratch. I place the journal on the lip of the sink. So now I’m thrown back on trusting my own sense impressions, an altogether different reading proficiency. For Amy’s composition is unmediated and rudimentary.
Close my - well yes, why not begin with her eyes ? That’s pretty elementary. For the eyes have it. Well, we’ve already forded the blank milky blue mists therein. And now, as the recondite cones and rods gradually cohere, I can see the pixilated pixie of myself captured in her iris. (And presumably in return, my eyeballs are tattooed with her indelible image). For this is how we must both entreat the world for the foreseeable future. Through the eyes of one another. Myself, staring back at me. Shrunken and minute. Now I feel wholly contained. Like a matrioshka, the eye of the pinprick doll reflected before me, itself accomodates another pair of yet smaller likenesses. These in turn yield further refraction upon refraction. And so on until infinity and negation. I contain her until she releases me from within her inner core. When I am left glassy eyed. Spare the rod and spoil the child indeed.
And smell. So primary a sense, even that of the troubles (small ‘t’) persists in full working order. Apparently. Amy issued into the world almost totally inodorous. Yet the world’s scents have already begun to permeate her. Absorbing my maternal infusions, her internal still regurgitates them as ubiquitous baby smells, such as milk and sick. Neither her hair nor her pee have much of a discernable whiff. She, no doubt, would be able to sniff my milch cow out in a dark room, but I’m not sure I could reciprocate and locate her uniquely as my heifer. But soon she will be responsible for imprinting her own olefactory wake. She will go airborne and assail the world, parachuting in her spoors of being, existence and occupation. Later yet, a blended admixture personal to her. The scented carbolics with which she unblocks her pores and which, in turn, quarry their seal on her. Her brand musk of choice. Perhaps the insinuation of cigarettes, a tincture of hair lacquer, a sprinkling of fried food, or any of the plethora of human bouquets with which she will choose to shower herself. And the ones she’s not in control of, yet is inevitably responsible to; the spray of pheremones, Nature’s genetic spaying if you’re not careful. And I should know. Hmm, this soothe-saying’s going terribly well don’t you think ?
Touching. Whenever she’s cupped in my arm, Amy sports her feelings on my sleeve. Tears or vomit leave their frank impress. If teething she gnaws. If blissful, she wrinkles. The crook of my arm contains the whole of her heartfelt range of expression. Forever questing after moulding herself into me, as if seeking perfect fleshy union. Yet her emotions remain untrammelled. Sheathing her like an exoskeleton.
Nevertheless, from the canon of Suzanne, I know what lies ahead. The die is cast and stamped. Stuttering remouldings, a succession of anchored push-offs, before shucking me like a peach stone as she derives a new level of emotional assertiveness. But the autonomy has shaky legs and so the process of puckering up to Mum, necessarily starts all over again. I am drafted in to drape copiously around her bruisable self, while from within she confronts the world with its brickbats and burrs. She reclaims my pliant carapace of love, as maternal obligation prohibits me from armouring myself. Yet I can feel the pressure building up inwardly. Since I know full well, as each occasion arises, she will wrench away this intimacy. As she effortlessly moults me, my bones are left broken, bloody and dessicated. A push-me, pull-you continuum, until she can fully unfurl her wings and fly the nest. By then, her emotions would have calcified into the hermetic, impenetrable crannies and crevices of her inner skeleton, while mine will simply have been scooped out, leaving me a fleshless husk. A dusty fossil. For that’s what maternal love can do to you.
Suzanne is four years old. I’ve known her all my life.
I pull the plug out, but still recline. The lukewarm water gently slaps and slurps around my flesh archipelago as it forges on towards the gurgling vortex, without so much as an excuse me. Where it squeezes past, where it sucks me down into the enamel, I welcome the meagre embrace. But the contact soon drains away and I am left shored against an unforgiving coldness.
I have forbidden myself exactly this kind of speculation in my journal. I am just to let them grow and merely monitor the process. Why ? Do I strive to preserve their childhood, to pickle it in aspic, so enabling me to let them roam free in real life? Then why am I left beached here so high and dry ? What started as an exercise, now leaves me aerobically in debt. Who will sanction me to be free ? How the hell have I permitted all this to happen ?
I rose from the empty bath and wrapped myself in my towelling robe. It smelt slightly of mildew. I pulled the belt tight around my midriff, so that the flab spilled over it as the breath was pressed from my abdomen. I knew now why my husband collected minature ships in their airless bottles. Those were the dimensions of his window out to the world. Mine occupied the surface area of a closed book and the aperture of an open teat. Though I am not enchained to respond to my taskmaster on a daily basis, my overseer mocks me with the quotidian nature of my life therein. I cannot escape the consuetude, that which my journal returns me to constantly. The entire scope of my life tapering, as witnessed by my own testimony. Ostensibly, the journal is a riddle of my life, with no nuggets of self left behind, once the child-scourings have been sieved through. I should have drowned my journal at birth. Or at least let the ink run irreparably free, when there was still water in this bath. I used the sleeve of my robe to dab at the wet imprints of my fingers on the soft leather. (The wax protective sheets having long since been forsaken). But they appeared to be set permanent, now woven as part of the very grain. Like livid throttle marks. I escorted it out the bathroom with me. Could always resort to blubbering for smudging the ink. I’ve enough tears to blot each page.
And mine is gestating. Continously. As we speak. Ongoing, but not outgoing. For it is my personal journal.
When I was Confirmed, a wizened aunt gave me a beautiful calfskin covered notebook. I was in the dark as to her predetermination; whether I was supposed to relive and relish my secular sins, or solemnly to contemplate and renounce them like an account-keeping Protestant (ie, we don’t service wash our dirty laundry like the taigs). Which was it to be, God and ink, or nod and a wink, for squirreling away girlish secrets ? She had given me no guidance, just this richly aromatic leather-bound book, between wax-paper protective covers. In a world of wood-chip, formica and crimplene, this indubitably was an object of pulchritude. Not one I could gaze upon and be enchanted in any ornamental way, but one I could appreciate for its exquisite elegance all the same. So I never dared remove it from its waxy sheath. Its fresh, otherworldly waft, never stopped calling me every time I opened the drawer in which it was cradled. But it was far too sublime to stain with any of my inky swell. Until I fell pregnant.
Not that I conceived of it as a personal record of joy, either for me or for my issue to come. There is precious little to savour in here. (Good gracious no, neither she nor I must ever be allowed to read back on it). For any such brooding sentimentalists, there are baby books which require far less exertion. Though after a while, even this was ultimately too much for my husband, for all the alacrity he evinced on being bequeathed one from his mother. A trip to the Town Hall to register Suzanne’s name, left him too emotionally played out to lovingly duplicate the details on Page One of our own private muster. All that marks her entry in the world of the book, into the World, is her pointillist attribution through Ultrasound. Like an unfinished jotting. A sketch. That would be about right then, where he is (un-) concerned
Who am I to talk ? For I’ve just owned that my journal is hardly intimately shipshape, nor fondly Bristol fashion either. Due, in the main, to it arising out of a poser of post-natal, deep-impression. The mound of flesh that was me, sinking submerged into every reclining chair fabric we were possessed of. Mushily up hard, against the low mental activity that was silting up my champing mind, during the vacant-stared chores of nursing. There were only so many nano-seconds available in the day. Pelvic floor exercises, or turning my hand to re-engage the cogs of the gray matter ? A no-brainer in the parlance. Yes, why not ? Let’s properly record this new ordering of the cosmos. Of my corner of it at least. And so I finally took up the hallowed journal. An inhalation of the leather deep into my lungs. She still smelled divine. (Banish the faint ichorous fume, still attending to each recall of inaugural contact with my firstborn). A fresh start for all of us, anointed in the blood of slaughtered infant innocent (er of the donor calf that is, not my daughter).
But what to write ? Write wrongs, gibberish, write anything. Any manipulation would serve as physiotherapy for a debilitated mind. Any verbiage can be sown in the hope of bringing forth life in a desert, should life-affirming waters chance percolate and yield them nourishment. But I needed more than chance. I needed to assert sureity. I may not presently have much sense of myself, nor an outline of my pneumatic form, but if it has palpable solidity, there in my journal, I must bear some tangible existence. I needed to begin with some brass rubbing over the crypt in which my gist had been consigned. I’d start with shadings. Sketches. Impressions. Steer clear of fully-formed words at this stage. Just something to get my fingers cupping a pen. To get some feeling back.
* * *
And right at this moment, it might actually come in rather handy. I do not hold it up in competition with all those published manuals I mentally shredded. But as I flick through its leaves, it might refresh my memory as to certain timings. Like a baby cook book.
Not that I am particularly concerned, as to whether Amy is early or late with regard to some key developmental stage. Not being one of those mothers who marked each of Suzanne’s achievements, by dashing to the phone to elicit intelligence, as to the present disposition of her nearest rivals. Due, in the main, to neither Suzanne, nor myself, having any peers with whom we rubbed up against socially. Suzanne, is in my eyes and will forever be, peerless. (Just so long as it is only I, who remains friendless).
No, this is with reference more, as to how long I have to endure the current, particularly doleful cycle. Teething (grit I, through unflossed and nightly ground gnashers). This one is for me. As I lie back in a warm bath. My first protracted soak since being wreathed in sweat with Amy’s birth. I’ve brokered a watching brief from the troubles (small ‘t’), primed to respond to any baby monitor incursions (murphy’s law they’ll both sleep through blissfully this evening). Actually, the negotiations were instigated by him, having remarked that I was beginning to reek. In an environmentally-redolent sort of way, rather than his nose being helplessly led by some favourably sour hormonal hook. How did things get to such a pass ? Now would be a good time to review. I don’t intend to leave this tub, until the immersion tank can no longer revive the water that bestows on me it’s sheen of mock sultriness. By the cold light of day, I want to have been rebaptised into life.
So here I am, casting back for jottings with which I might divine the immediate future. But my testimonial falls way short. What was I so busy doing when I had Suzanne ? What was I thinking ? I can hardly upbraid all the textbooks now, if I couldn’t even keep my own record up to scratch. I place the journal on the lip of the sink. So now I’m thrown back on trusting my own sense impressions, an altogether different reading proficiency. For Amy’s composition is unmediated and rudimentary.
Close my - well yes, why not begin with her eyes ? That’s pretty elementary. For the eyes have it. Well, we’ve already forded the blank milky blue mists therein. And now, as the recondite cones and rods gradually cohere, I can see the pixilated pixie of myself captured in her iris. (And presumably in return, my eyeballs are tattooed with her indelible image). For this is how we must both entreat the world for the foreseeable future. Through the eyes of one another. Myself, staring back at me. Shrunken and minute. Now I feel wholly contained. Like a matrioshka, the eye of the pinprick doll reflected before me, itself accomodates another pair of yet smaller likenesses. These in turn yield further refraction upon refraction. And so on until infinity and negation. I contain her until she releases me from within her inner core. When I am left glassy eyed. Spare the rod and spoil the child indeed.
And smell. So primary a sense, even that of the troubles (small ‘t’) persists in full working order. Apparently. Amy issued into the world almost totally inodorous. Yet the world’s scents have already begun to permeate her. Absorbing my maternal infusions, her internal still regurgitates them as ubiquitous baby smells, such as milk and sick. Neither her hair nor her pee have much of a discernable whiff. She, no doubt, would be able to sniff my milch cow out in a dark room, but I’m not sure I could reciprocate and locate her uniquely as my heifer. But soon she will be responsible for imprinting her own olefactory wake. She will go airborne and assail the world, parachuting in her spoors of being, existence and occupation. Later yet, a blended admixture personal to her. The scented carbolics with which she unblocks her pores and which, in turn, quarry their seal on her. Her brand musk of choice. Perhaps the insinuation of cigarettes, a tincture of hair lacquer, a sprinkling of fried food, or any of the plethora of human bouquets with which she will choose to shower herself. And the ones she’s not in control of, yet is inevitably responsible to; the spray of pheremones, Nature’s genetic spaying if you’re not careful. And I should know. Hmm, this soothe-saying’s going terribly well don’t you think ?
Touching. Whenever she’s cupped in my arm, Amy sports her feelings on my sleeve. Tears or vomit leave their frank impress. If teething she gnaws. If blissful, she wrinkles. The crook of my arm contains the whole of her heartfelt range of expression. Forever questing after moulding herself into me, as if seeking perfect fleshy union. Yet her emotions remain untrammelled. Sheathing her like an exoskeleton.
Nevertheless, from the canon of Suzanne, I know what lies ahead. The die is cast and stamped. Stuttering remouldings, a succession of anchored push-offs, before shucking me like a peach stone as she derives a new level of emotional assertiveness. But the autonomy has shaky legs and so the process of puckering up to Mum, necessarily starts all over again. I am drafted in to drape copiously around her bruisable self, while from within she confronts the world with its brickbats and burrs. She reclaims my pliant carapace of love, as maternal obligation prohibits me from armouring myself. Yet I can feel the pressure building up inwardly. Since I know full well, as each occasion arises, she will wrench away this intimacy. As she effortlessly moults me, my bones are left broken, bloody and dessicated. A push-me, pull-you continuum, until she can fully unfurl her wings and fly the nest. By then, her emotions would have calcified into the hermetic, impenetrable crannies and crevices of her inner skeleton, while mine will simply have been scooped out, leaving me a fleshless husk. A dusty fossil. For that’s what maternal love can do to you.
Suzanne is four years old. I’ve known her all my life.
I pull the plug out, but still recline. The lukewarm water gently slaps and slurps around my flesh archipelago as it forges on towards the gurgling vortex, without so much as an excuse me. Where it squeezes past, where it sucks me down into the enamel, I welcome the meagre embrace. But the contact soon drains away and I am left shored against an unforgiving coldness.
I have forbidden myself exactly this kind of speculation in my journal. I am just to let them grow and merely monitor the process. Why ? Do I strive to preserve their childhood, to pickle it in aspic, so enabling me to let them roam free in real life? Then why am I left beached here so high and dry ? What started as an exercise, now leaves me aerobically in debt. Who will sanction me to be free ? How the hell have I permitted all this to happen ?
I rose from the empty bath and wrapped myself in my towelling robe. It smelt slightly of mildew. I pulled the belt tight around my midriff, so that the flab spilled over it as the breath was pressed from my abdomen. I knew now why my husband collected minature ships in their airless bottles. Those were the dimensions of his window out to the world. Mine occupied the surface area of a closed book and the aperture of an open teat. Though I am not enchained to respond to my taskmaster on a daily basis, my overseer mocks me with the quotidian nature of my life therein. I cannot escape the consuetude, that which my journal returns me to constantly. The entire scope of my life tapering, as witnessed by my own testimony. Ostensibly, the journal is a riddle of my life, with no nuggets of self left behind, once the child-scourings have been sieved through. I should have drowned my journal at birth. Or at least let the ink run irreparably free, when there was still water in this bath. I used the sleeve of my robe to dab at the wet imprints of my fingers on the soft leather. (The wax protective sheets having long since been forsaken). But they appeared to be set permanent, now woven as part of the very grain. Like livid throttle marks. I escorted it out the bathroom with me. Could always resort to blubbering for smudging the ink. I’ve enough tears to blot each page.
Monday, 20 April 2009
Pot Bellied
Had a blazed row with your child ? Worried they might be aheading down a kush-ty path of life ? I reefer you to the following parental guide for how to get your offspring unloaded.
It's from a novella, but we couldn't use it due to er artistic reasons ... Please advise on any amendments to the txt spk, as it's not my first language.
"Look, I know you won't stand for any of my lectures hectoring you. I'm sure you have no respect for me or a single word I have to say. Given the damning evidence of that text you mistakenly sent to me a while back. Being somewhat less than decorous about my ‘man tits’ and pot belly.
Let me see if I can reconstruct your vernacular precisely, oh yes, ‘splln out ovr hs towl lk stffn v knckrd sofa. spts n mols ll ovr lk polish pntrs ovrlls’ – your mother would thrill to your use of simile there, even if recoiling at recognition of the image conjured up (we’ll pass over spelling/grammar and chalk that one up to the new dumbing orthodoxy).
Then the coup de grace, your supplementary claim that you’ve suffered the stress of seeing – which apparently is more than I am capable of - my wedding tackle, the old jolly todger. When said belly couldn’t be contained any longer and shivered the towel down round my ankles. It’s feasible that I might be prepared to overlook all of that, (I mean after all it’s a self-loathing you’ll come to in time, especially as you’re loath to perform any physical activity to stem the genetic tide), were it not for your matchless choice of final metaphor.
An incriminating confluence, of the ensemble of my pubes and so called shrivelled snail, framed against the pallid flesh of my legs, resembling a ‘smll lumpa hsh std i baccy, b4 derizzlas bn rlld up’.
I can only trust that said visual association puts you off smoking, as the textual one has put an end to my custom of wandering around the house, wrapped only in a bath towel."
It's from a novella, but we couldn't use it due to er artistic reasons ... Please advise on any amendments to the txt spk, as it's not my first language.
"Look, I know you won't stand for any of my lectures hectoring you. I'm sure you have no respect for me or a single word I have to say. Given the damning evidence of that text you mistakenly sent to me a while back. Being somewhat less than decorous about my ‘man tits’ and pot belly.
Let me see if I can reconstruct your vernacular precisely, oh yes, ‘splln out ovr hs towl lk stffn v knckrd sofa. spts n mols ll ovr lk polish pntrs ovrlls’ – your mother would thrill to your use of simile there, even if recoiling at recognition of the image conjured up (we’ll pass over spelling/grammar and chalk that one up to the new dumbing orthodoxy).
Then the coup de grace, your supplementary claim that you’ve suffered the stress of seeing – which apparently is more than I am capable of - my wedding tackle, the old jolly todger. When said belly couldn’t be contained any longer and shivered the towel down round my ankles. It’s feasible that I might be prepared to overlook all of that, (I mean after all it’s a self-loathing you’ll come to in time, especially as you’re loath to perform any physical activity to stem the genetic tide), were it not for your matchless choice of final metaphor.
An incriminating confluence, of the ensemble of my pubes and so called shrivelled snail, framed against the pallid flesh of my legs, resembling a ‘smll lumpa hsh std i baccy, b4 derizzlas bn rlld up’.
I can only trust that said visual association puts you off smoking, as the textual one has put an end to my custom of wandering around the house, wrapped only in a bath towel."
Saturday, 18 April 2009
Writing Communities Are -
A contradiction in terms.
I am not talking about pure peer review sites. I am talking about any which offer the honeypot at the end of the rainbow. Usually the lure of being read by publishers/agents. Then, for all the bolstering hugs and reviews through smilingly gritted teeth, it becomes a bun fight of the highest (lowest) order. Community ethics in which virtually every player is out for themselves. Did somebody say 'like the real world' ?
I have just served a 50 day stretch on Authonomy. I was there during the flame wars when a gamer outplayed the existing players. Good luck to the geezer; suggests a) he has a ready-made market b) he can self-promote.
But I wish to state that I do not blame publishing house HarperCollins who set Authonomy up, for the monster subsequently unleashed. I would rather consider the culpability of many of the writers on that site, for turning it into an economy of monstrous need.
Why should HC be expected to manage the need they simply gave a conduit for ? Should they have had on-line counselling for anguished and hurt writerly egos at the click of a button ? (Next to the 'report abuse' button presumably). There were challenges aplenty to the rationale of the site and writers pleading with Harper Collins to redesign the workings of the site in line with the individual writer's suggestions. Writers seemed to view HC as an absent God who would not reveal itself through great pronouncements from on high. When what HC actually represents is an absentee landlord, collecting the tithes of website traffic for their shareholders, until they decide what they want to do commercially with the site. THEIR site, however the self-congratulatory teatime insurgents on the site, conceive they have wrested control of Authonomy to their own direction.
For those of you unfamiliar with Authonomy, Harper Collins openly admit to all submissions on the site forming their slushpile and that the members of the site effectively help them trim it down from 2000 manuscripts to 5 a month which they then guarantee to read and critique. Note, they do not offer to publish anything. An algorithm is embedded that calculates a ranking for each book and at the end of the month the top 5 get culled and read, resetting the table for 5 more the following month. It is a popularity contest which relies part on personality/friendships/alliances as well as literary merit and self-promotion. The gamer crashed into the top 5 on points 1 and 3. I can't comment on point 2 in relation to him as I never read his book. Despite him bringing 1500 new potential readers to Authonomy, a handful of whom stayed to read other people's books, his approach was considered indecent. To wit, it threatened vested interests already established.
So you have the prospect of 2000 books being whittled down to just 60 chosen ones in a calendar year. 1,900 or so, therefore ain't gonna get much of a look in. Yet the hysteria of so many writers if their rank dropped a few points was incredible. The self-promotion became increasingly desperate and shrill. Sledgehammers and walnuts and all that palaver. Nobody seemed terribly willing to do a bit of basic maths. Instead people speculated on other agents and publishers stalking the site for talent. Believe me, if any professional has a space on their roster, they ain't trawling through a 2000 book slushpile to fill it. Even one that has creamed off 5 top titles as a shortcut. To date the site has yielded one direct book deal. And not one from the top 5 interestingly.
More disturbing was the amount of writers on the site who came out in public with some mental disorder or other such as depression, bi-polarity and schizophrenia. Instantly we were both asked to take it into consideration when reviewing their books, but also we were rendered co-dependents by having to tread on eggshells around their presence on the site. Of course some folk had no such scruple and flayed them alive on the fora. The common or garden hunger of writers writ large by a factor of fifty when you open yourself up like that. Monstrous need indeed.
Then we have the genre wars. HC ask you to mark which genre(s) your book falls into. This is common practice in the industry, think how bookshops are organised. I loathe the practice as I think it diminishes the work, but I am a realist, this is how it is. Firstly there were the skirmishes over people who ticked virtually every genre. Let these people hole themselves, as no professional is going to take their offering seriously if it thinks it represents every single genre possible.
It's all just fiction right ? (Unless it isn't, then it's non-fiction). But the severity with which each fiction genre fought its corner under perceived attack. Paranoia centre. A distinct lack of community in evidence here. I was as guilty as anyone, of which more below.
The most oft posted review of a book started with "Though not my normal choice of reading...", before tactical voting being the better part of valour kicks in. My take was, if you don't like SciFi/Fantasy/Romance/Historical/or Literary, then don't read it. Then maybe you'll get other SciFi writer/buffs reading your SciFi novel, rather than a Literary Fiction type looking down their nose at it, or a Romance writer complaining about the unattractiveness of the beast with 3 backs and tentacles ...
Again, it is not Authonomy's fault that the obsession with rankings leads most authors to read just 2 chapters of a book and comment, in the hope of a reciprocal read of their own book and a possible vote to move it up. Just now a movement is starting up offline between writers to commit to read whole MS. Like thanks guys, where were you when...? Unless I really couldn't get beyond Chapter 2 because of the writing (which only happened twice in my brief sojourn), I DID read everything an author had uploaded of their book. To me it was just one writer honouring the sweat and toil of another. You know, like a Community of like minded souls ...
Okay, mea culpa time. Genre wars. Though I eschew the category as being of any validity, my work would fall into Literary Fiction. Since it delights in language, isn't plot heavy and has voice rather than character at its heart. Some of it is political, most is social satire. To give you an idea of the themes/subject matter, Binge Culture, Suicide Bombers, Teenage knife violence, you know like stuff you see in the news. I was brought up short time and again, by the distinct lack of interest in my fellow writers interrogating their chosen art form, ie language and literature. But I was more shocked by the propensity for writers to own up to wanting books for escapism. There seems no appetite for engaging with things in the world about us, only to flee it. Congratulations Thatcher/Blair, your work here is done.
Of course there is a place for escapist literature in the market, but to the exclusion of all else ? To judge by the writers plying their would be trade on Authonomy, yes. I can only propose that this represents self-censorship stemming from a perceived reading of what the market will and won't sustain.
I initiated a forum discussion about how Rowling is brilliant for children to seduce them into reading, but couldn't fathom why so many adults read her of their own volition. If it's as some sort of access course to re-enter the world of books, then that is a good thing. But do they then ascend to fantasy penned by adults ? I admitted I didn't know, cos I don't read fantasy. I stated that I felt such books infantilised adults or rather they let themselves be thus infantilised. Additionally, in their regression they might even pass their children moving in the opposite direction, as they are telescoped into premature adulthood by the information bombardment hurled at them in the modern world. I got lambasted for denying the inner child within me and told not to worry so much. Oh well, that's my teenage knife crime book invalidated then ...
To my parochial mind, the majority of would-be authors as witnessed by Authonomy, are happy to churn out competent versions of one twentieth century novel or another. No one seems inclined to have a stab at taking the novel into the twenty-first century, despite all the technological advances that permit experiments with the physical form if nothing else. Some Authonomites actually owned that they were happy to 'live the dream' of being a writer, simply by having their book up in virtual print and having 'readers' (for which read, 'fellow writers') peruse their work. All 2 chapters of it. So on the one hand we have an unquenchable hunger and yet, not one whit of the professionalism that it's going to take to ever stand a chance of being published.
The two reasons why I ducked out of Authonomy today.
I am not talking about pure peer review sites. I am talking about any which offer the honeypot at the end of the rainbow. Usually the lure of being read by publishers/agents. Then, for all the bolstering hugs and reviews through smilingly gritted teeth, it becomes a bun fight of the highest (lowest) order. Community ethics in which virtually every player is out for themselves. Did somebody say 'like the real world' ?
I have just served a 50 day stretch on Authonomy. I was there during the flame wars when a gamer outplayed the existing players. Good luck to the geezer; suggests a) he has a ready-made market b) he can self-promote.
But I wish to state that I do not blame publishing house HarperCollins who set Authonomy up, for the monster subsequently unleashed. I would rather consider the culpability of many of the writers on that site, for turning it into an economy of monstrous need.
Why should HC be expected to manage the need they simply gave a conduit for ? Should they have had on-line counselling for anguished and hurt writerly egos at the click of a button ? (Next to the 'report abuse' button presumably). There were challenges aplenty to the rationale of the site and writers pleading with Harper Collins to redesign the workings of the site in line with the individual writer's suggestions. Writers seemed to view HC as an absent God who would not reveal itself through great pronouncements from on high. When what HC actually represents is an absentee landlord, collecting the tithes of website traffic for their shareholders, until they decide what they want to do commercially with the site. THEIR site, however the self-congratulatory teatime insurgents on the site, conceive they have wrested control of Authonomy to their own direction.
For those of you unfamiliar with Authonomy, Harper Collins openly admit to all submissions on the site forming their slushpile and that the members of the site effectively help them trim it down from 2000 manuscripts to 5 a month which they then guarantee to read and critique. Note, they do not offer to publish anything. An algorithm is embedded that calculates a ranking for each book and at the end of the month the top 5 get culled and read, resetting the table for 5 more the following month. It is a popularity contest which relies part on personality/friendships/alliances as well as literary merit and self-promotion. The gamer crashed into the top 5 on points 1 and 3. I can't comment on point 2 in relation to him as I never read his book. Despite him bringing 1500 new potential readers to Authonomy, a handful of whom stayed to read other people's books, his approach was considered indecent. To wit, it threatened vested interests already established.
So you have the prospect of 2000 books being whittled down to just 60 chosen ones in a calendar year. 1,900 or so, therefore ain't gonna get much of a look in. Yet the hysteria of so many writers if their rank dropped a few points was incredible. The self-promotion became increasingly desperate and shrill. Sledgehammers and walnuts and all that palaver. Nobody seemed terribly willing to do a bit of basic maths. Instead people speculated on other agents and publishers stalking the site for talent. Believe me, if any professional has a space on their roster, they ain't trawling through a 2000 book slushpile to fill it. Even one that has creamed off 5 top titles as a shortcut. To date the site has yielded one direct book deal. And not one from the top 5 interestingly.
More disturbing was the amount of writers on the site who came out in public with some mental disorder or other such as depression, bi-polarity and schizophrenia. Instantly we were both asked to take it into consideration when reviewing their books, but also we were rendered co-dependents by having to tread on eggshells around their presence on the site. Of course some folk had no such scruple and flayed them alive on the fora. The common or garden hunger of writers writ large by a factor of fifty when you open yourself up like that. Monstrous need indeed.
Then we have the genre wars. HC ask you to mark which genre(s) your book falls into. This is common practice in the industry, think how bookshops are organised. I loathe the practice as I think it diminishes the work, but I am a realist, this is how it is. Firstly there were the skirmishes over people who ticked virtually every genre. Let these people hole themselves, as no professional is going to take their offering seriously if it thinks it represents every single genre possible.
It's all just fiction right ? (Unless it isn't, then it's non-fiction). But the severity with which each fiction genre fought its corner under perceived attack. Paranoia centre. A distinct lack of community in evidence here. I was as guilty as anyone, of which more below.
The most oft posted review of a book started with "Though not my normal choice of reading...", before tactical voting being the better part of valour kicks in. My take was, if you don't like SciFi/Fantasy/Romance/Historical/or Literary, then don't read it. Then maybe you'll get other SciFi writer/buffs reading your SciFi novel, rather than a Literary Fiction type looking down their nose at it, or a Romance writer complaining about the unattractiveness of the beast with 3 backs and tentacles ...
Again, it is not Authonomy's fault that the obsession with rankings leads most authors to read just 2 chapters of a book and comment, in the hope of a reciprocal read of their own book and a possible vote to move it up. Just now a movement is starting up offline between writers to commit to read whole MS. Like thanks guys, where were you when...? Unless I really couldn't get beyond Chapter 2 because of the writing (which only happened twice in my brief sojourn), I DID read everything an author had uploaded of their book. To me it was just one writer honouring the sweat and toil of another. You know, like a Community of like minded souls ...
Okay, mea culpa time. Genre wars. Though I eschew the category as being of any validity, my work would fall into Literary Fiction. Since it delights in language, isn't plot heavy and has voice rather than character at its heart. Some of it is political, most is social satire. To give you an idea of the themes/subject matter, Binge Culture, Suicide Bombers, Teenage knife violence, you know like stuff you see in the news. I was brought up short time and again, by the distinct lack of interest in my fellow writers interrogating their chosen art form, ie language and literature. But I was more shocked by the propensity for writers to own up to wanting books for escapism. There seems no appetite for engaging with things in the world about us, only to flee it. Congratulations Thatcher/Blair, your work here is done.
Of course there is a place for escapist literature in the market, but to the exclusion of all else ? To judge by the writers plying their would be trade on Authonomy, yes. I can only propose that this represents self-censorship stemming from a perceived reading of what the market will and won't sustain.
I initiated a forum discussion about how Rowling is brilliant for children to seduce them into reading, but couldn't fathom why so many adults read her of their own volition. If it's as some sort of access course to re-enter the world of books, then that is a good thing. But do they then ascend to fantasy penned by adults ? I admitted I didn't know, cos I don't read fantasy. I stated that I felt such books infantilised adults or rather they let themselves be thus infantilised. Additionally, in their regression they might even pass their children moving in the opposite direction, as they are telescoped into premature adulthood by the information bombardment hurled at them in the modern world. I got lambasted for denying the inner child within me and told not to worry so much. Oh well, that's my teenage knife crime book invalidated then ...
To my parochial mind, the majority of would-be authors as witnessed by Authonomy, are happy to churn out competent versions of one twentieth century novel or another. No one seems inclined to have a stab at taking the novel into the twenty-first century, despite all the technological advances that permit experiments with the physical form if nothing else. Some Authonomites actually owned that they were happy to 'live the dream' of being a writer, simply by having their book up in virtual print and having 'readers' (for which read, 'fellow writers') peruse their work. All 2 chapters of it. So on the one hand we have an unquenchable hunger and yet, not one whit of the professionalism that it's going to take to ever stand a chance of being published.
The two reasons why I ducked out of Authonomy today.
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