on smoking

I smoke. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your fuckin' mouth. (Bill Hicks)

i'm not gonna get in to the whole smoking issue here, Bill more or less said it all in the lines above (and elsewhere, in far greater detail)

i just wanna talk about one little part of it

i read a report a few weeks ago that said the government are considering banning ten-packs as part of their anti-smoking measures

the idea is that kids won't be able to afford twenty-packs and therefore won't start

oh, and adults will be deterred too

right

let's make one thing clear from the outset

the State makes a hell of a lot of money from smokers, and despite the stark warnings they've plastered all over the packs, the exchequer would take a serious hit if smokers hadn't stopped reading these messages after about three days

that bugs me

SMOKING IS SO BAD FOR YOU AND OTHERS AROUND YOU, AND WE'RE SO INCREDIBLY CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR HEALTH, WELL SON, WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO tax it

fuck that

and it's not a case of the State recognising the fact that we should be free to make our own decisions as rational, autonomous beings either

if that was the case we could buy dope and smack in Tescos

most of the planet rolled over and banned dope because the Americans realised a long time ago that the oil-based world economy would go in to convulsions if a clean, renewable, multi-purpose resource called "hemp" was made available to all those nations that they quite literally had over a barrel

but that's a whole other post, long overdue

cigarettes are quite different though

no risk to the old economic order

no messy social questions

no need to educate

no stigma

(apart from the one they're obliged to fuel, just enough to make it seem like they're anti-smoking, but not so much that it works and people actually quit - an ingenious balancing act that deserves credit)

okay, as a smoker, i suggest the following

if you're that worried, ban them

bring in prohibition laws, send smokers scurrying to speakeasy-style rooms on the fringes of the city (at least we could smoke indoors) and whatever you do, stop making money off my habit at the same time you're telling me i'm wrong

it's just too fucking hypocritical

stop making all these limp-wristed attempts at cutting down on smoke-related deaths

banning ten packs?

come on, if you were serious you'd make us buy them by the thousand, that'd be a real fucking deterrent

oh, and you could try making us smoke them all at once too - isn't that what parents are supposed to do when they catch an errant child?

but the money being made from smokers is the key issue here and if they wanted to stop us smoking i sincerely believe they could

banning cigarettes from the work environment, increasing taxes, splashing diseased lungs on our screens, they're all just attempts at making it seem like there's a pro-active anti-smoking campaign in full swing at the highest levels of Irish political life

i'm not saying smoking isn't a bad thing - i've read the reports and felt the damage

but the fraudulent approach of this and other states is sickening

if you're gonna tax cigarettes "as a deterrent" or health initiative or whatever you want to call it, plough every last cent you make on an addiction that you allow to pervade our society back in to the health services

if you're that worried about me, tax me back to health

shit, if i thought that this would happen i'd smoke twice as much in the hope that when i'm old and sick there might actually be a decent health infrastructure to look after me

i've a huge problem with duplicity, be it from the State or people i come across on a daily basis, and no amount of exposure to it will ever make me swallow

i choose to spit

on larry's request

we've all been asked to comment on Gwen Halley's recent attack on Vincent Browne in the Sindo

i'm not gonna, for a few reasons

firstly, as a piece of writing it's beyond shite, and doesn't deserve whatever vague credibility an MAJ class discussion will lend it.

secondly, and more importantly, this is a blog, which by definition is an expression of personal opinion. it therefore seems counterintuitive to take direction on what the blog content should be. under ordinary circumstances i would have no opinion on Gwen Halley because i wouldn't read the Sindo if i was stranded on Mars with a choice between Life and a high callibre bullet.

i've soiled my brain but only acceded to do so under orders. therefore, to comment any further on the matter in this domain would not be an accurate reflection of self, which everything i've written so far in room1004 has aimed to be.

on parenting (the joys of)

that's it, i'm never having kids

they just grow up, buy filghts to India, someone calls a stripper and then everyone cries

on the wizard

"this monkey's gone to heaven" (The Pixies)

just heard the sad news that george best has died

i met him two years ago when i was working at a racecourse in Brighton

he still had it

the room was electirified when he walked in

he was the centre of gravity for about 600 people that day

in my short career as a waiter i never neglected more tables to look after (and just be around) one man

i'm a romantic, so heroes have always appealed to me, especially flawed ones

i'm sickened by elements in the media (and general public) that take the moral high ground on his life - the smug, judgemental fucks

yes, he self-destructed

yes, he blew his second chance

yes, things could have been different

no, that doesn't make his demise any less tragic

personally, i'll remember grainy old barely colour footage

and stories, lots of memories and stories

and one day in brighton

god bless

Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann.

on drink-driving ads (the Ludovico method)

"What exactly is it, sir, that you're going to do?"
"Oh," said Dr. Branom, his cold stetho going all down my back, "it's quite simple really. We just show you some films."
"Films?" I said. I could hardly believe my ookos, brothers, as you may well understand. "You mean," I said, "it will be just like going to the pictures?"
"They'll be special films," said Dr. Branom. "Very special films. You'll be having the first session this afternoon."

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, pg.73.

well... yes, and here we go again... (HST)

christmas creeps close and the government orders another round of anti-drink-driving advertisements for the Irish public, on them, bless their oily souls.

and every year they get a little more horrific...

scene one - people mangled in a car, don't drink and drive

scene two - pretty young thing in pieces on the road, don't drink and drive

scene three - pretty young thing turns around and shows that the other side of her face ain't pretty no more, don't drink and drive

scene four - paralysed kid, don't drink and drive

scene five - screams, pain, rehabilitation sucks, don't drink and drive

scene six - guy considers having a drink, remembers that ad he saw on tv and decides not to risk it. pretty young thing at the bar finds this sexy and lustily moves closer. wahay, i've pulled, definitely don't drink and drive

(scene seven, in which they're both sober, realise they've nothing in common and leave seperately but safely in their cars having had a really shit night, was apparently edited from the final version but will be available as a special feature on the easter bank holiday dvd release)

deaths caused by drink driving are tragic and avoidable - no argument there - but the government's method of deterring drink driving is hugely questionable

rather than dealing with cause, the government shoves effect down our throats on an annual basis

last night's launch of the new drink-driving campaign unsettled me, not because of the gross imagery involved, but rather because of something it slowly but surely brought to mind

a clockwork orange

...or more specifically, the Ludovico method...

Burgess presents us with a world in which adolescent violence has become such a heaving social problem that the government eventually resorts to an extreme kind of Pavlovian response treatment

anyone that's read the novel, or seen the film that did a very poor job of interpreting it, will know what this entailed

prison, drugs, and forced to watch reel after reel of violent and sexually explicit movies, run to a blasting Beethoven soundtrack

the drugs take hold and Alex, the protagonist, becomes violently ill when viewing the imagery

over time, even without the drugs, Alex is repulsed by the films or even the thought of violence

or even the classical music he has grown to associate with the treatment

association brings nausea

he goes from violence ("all the vesches i had done"), to programmed and reflective passivity ("very quiet and like yearny")

it works, but it's clearly wrong

wrong in an intuitive sense

wrong in a human sense

wrong

this Ludovico method (a play on Beethoven's first name) removes a key part of what it is to be human

...choice...

you don't do it, but not because you think it through and decide it's morally wrong, you don't do it because the thought of doing it causes a spasmic reflex that floods your mind, a reflex void of logic but overwhelming in effect

it's what Burgess termed "negative reinforcement"

a key passage from the novel reads:

"Choice," rumbled a rich deep gloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. "He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."

"These are subtleties," like smiled Dr Brodsky. "We are not concerned with motive, with higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime-" (pg.94)

and so are our government

commendable as their wish to stop road deaths may be, the government should stop trying to shock us in to breaking our bad habits

"DRINK DRIVE AND YOU'LL KILL A KID JUST LIKE THIS ONE YOU FUCK. STOP IT NOW. COULD YOU LIVE WITH THE SHAME? DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE, DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE, DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE, YOU'RE A BAD PERSON, YOU'RE GOING TO HELL, LOOK AT THIS, BLOOD, GUTS, FUCK YOU, STOP THINKING, YOU'RE WRONG"

or, we could, let's say, morally educate people from a young age instead of teaching them calculus

if people had more of a social conscience, a part of our development completely neglected in the education system, we wouldn't have nearly so many problems

...shame, guilt, prison...

this is the unholy trinity that's supposed to keep our society in check

and let's face it, if consequence was a deterrent from the act, our prisons would be empty

and hands wouldn't still be lopped off with a frightening frequency in Saudi Arabia

educate, educate, educate

for once in our fucking collective existence as a putatively evolved society, let's address the bigger picture, rather than the spilled milk

what sort of society would you prefer to live in? one in which we're shocked in to not doing something? or one in which we don't do it because we have respect for those we share this rock with? because we're good, educated, moral people? because we care more about others than we care about the shame of being caught?

so, i'll close with the words that open a clockwork orange:

"What's it gonna be then, eh?"

on garry glitter

bleed that cunt to death. and all of his ilk. no excuses, no second chances, no sympathy.

on cocaine

again, never again

another blurred morning filled with regret

and guilt

another night twisting and turning when you finally get the head down

fractured sleep

disturbed dreams

and guilt

always guilt

always never again

sleep in, what masquerades as sleep now, miss the first half of your day

slide to the floor, shower and black coffee, hope it'll get you through the afternoon

hands shaking so don't bother to shave

no breakfast

food's still not an option after last night

your appetite is the first to go and last to come back

you have to start looking after yourself

GUILT

you need to stop abusing your brain

there's only so much it can take

some day it might just burn out

so you make yourself a promise, again

never again will you... watch another fucking docu-drama made by Sky One.

last night's Coked-Up Britain, which has been hyped for the last week and a half as a cutting-edge hard-assed exposé of cocaine culture in the UK, was one of the finest examples of the garbage currently being produced by one of the most widely watched channels in these isles

it was crass, sensationalist, off-balance, one-sided...

they took three cocaine abusers, interviewed them, and then dramatised events that covered a period of very hazy length

case 1 - a 30 something woman, working as a secretary, becomes an addict/pregnant/unemployed neglectful mother in turn. child is taken by social services, goes through rehab, gets child back

case 2 - a 40 something man, hyper successful, hyper cocaine/alcohol abuser. just hyper. loses job, loses family, flies to America for rehab, gets family and job back.

case 3 - a 30 something male disaster, 30 grand in death, posts himself part of his cocaine stash every day so that he doesn't take it all in one go. loses everything, including his mind. takes up poker.

this tripe pretends to be journalism

at risk of sounding flippant, these are not your average cocaine users/abusers. granted they exist, but making a docu-drama exclusively on these lines only serves to further cloud the minds of middle-class, drug-ignorant viewers by painting a selective and extremely negative picture of contemporary drug culture.

it's not all broken families and premature babies in withdrawal

these are terrible things, but as long as mainstream media insist on pushing just one side of a story, society will never reach a full understanding of the real issues involved

demonise something for long enough and it'll retreat and stay underground, which is where it festers and becomes a real problem

bring it out in the open and have the balls to point out that drugs aren't something that Lucifer slipped on to Earth on the 7th day when God was resting, and maybe we'll start making progress

there are positives

there are times and reasons and ways of doing things that don't automatically equate a life derailed

if we're ever going to "solve" the drug "problem", an honest, mature education needs to be provided

at the moment, such an education is completely lacking in most Western societies

Coked-out Britain made me feel all those things that I opened this post with. although the tone was tongue-in-cheek, that kind of duplicity in the media makes me feel worse than any hangover from any substance that i've ever experienced.

it's an abuse of position, an abuse of the journalistic profession and most sickeningly of all, it's yet another abuse of the minds of the viewing public

who said tv wasn't a drug?

(by the by, look up cocaine on the Google Image search with Safe Search turned off and you'll find a picture of Woodie Allen on page 4. you see... positives...)

http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2005/072805.asp

on jfk's anniversary

Where were you when JFK was shot? Me, I was somewhere in the cosmos waiting to be born, patiently counting down the eighteen years, six months, and twenty-four days till I breached the physical and began my innings as transcendental ego housed in flesh.

Sorry.

I know it’s not the best JFK story, but it’s all I’ve got.

Kurt Cobain, Diana, 9/11. Why do we persistently ask these “Where were you when” questions? And why are the subjects of these questions invariably the death and destruction of Celebrity? No one asks “Where were you when JFK was inaugurated?” No one cares. But almost every American that was alive at the time of Kennedy’s assassination seems able to provide an anecdote of exactly what they were doing when they heard the news of his death.

Kennedy assassination has had a curious and enduring fascination that goes far beyond the immediate political shockwaves it caused. Like the deaths of many public figures, (or the simultaneous deaths of vast amounts of unknown individuals, such as the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks), Kennedy’s assassination has become a strange and macabre cultural event, and this forms at least part of the impulse to ask “Where were you when.”

Furthermore, Western Celebrity-fetish has a nasty propensity to immerse itself in the spilled blood of its idols. Our senses are assaulted daily with images of Celebrity, and we eventually develop a sense of emotional attachment to these images. This in turn creates a voyeuristic phenomenon in our minds, whereby we feel we have a right of access to details of their deaths.

Luckily, celebrities have a certain habit of leaving the planet in a dramatic, tabloid-friendly fashion. Countless celebrity suicides or deaths-by-misadventure, the odd car crash and a sprinkling of murders – especially when the event itself or the immediate aftermath is captured on celluloid – go a long way to satiating both our appetite for celebrity palaver, and also that strange human impulse that is best summed up in the old maxim that we can’t help looking at the wreckage of a car crash as we slink past in the resultant traffic jam.

Sometimes though, our fascination with events like the Kennedy assassination goes beyond the callous fetish outlined above. Sometimes an event is so shocking that we can only start to deal with and comprehend it by giving it some resonance, some meaningful place in our own, unrelated and perhaps ultimately unaffected lives.

When Kennedy was murdered, America (and most of the world) was instantly convulsed in a state of absolute Horror. The psychological effect and scale of what had happened went beyond any frame of reference that anyone to date had a grasp of. Everything that had previously seemed untouchable about American (and Western) idealism was now up for grabs, suddenly seeming just as vulnerable as a president in an open-topped limousine.

When the shit rains down like that you have two options: you can either stand there and watch it gather around your ankles and think, “Jesus, that’s a lotta shit”; or, you can react and stamp your mark on that first shit deposit. By creating a personal association with the event you can hardwire an apocalyptic public signifier to a more manageable, personal signified in the brain.

And so, for many Americans, the “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?” question was a way of dealing with the appalling vista on a personal level. Everyone that has a Kennedy story has etched his or her own mark on a social/cultural milestone. More importantly though, between the lines of these stories there is often a subconscious attempt at summing up or grasping the whole situation; crystallising a memory or an act or a moment that represents the shattering of “the great myth of American decency.”

When Hunter S. Thompson heard the news that J.F.K. was dead he was alone on his ranch in Woody Creek, Colorado. Feeling distraught, overwhelmed and powerless, he reacted in the only way that seemed available, which was to write a letter to William J. Kennedy, an old friend and editor from the San Juan Star and subsequently the author of several highly acclaimed novels:

I am tired enough to sleep here in this chair, but I have to be in town at 8.30 when Western Union opens, so what the hell. Besides, I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything, much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.

The letter that the above lines are taken from is perhaps the most perfect reaction to the Kennedy assassination I have ever read. It captures the shock, anger and fear of the moment. It is mundanely personal (the Western Union reference), and yet it contains the first known use of one of the most famous (albeit borrowed) trademark phrases of the twentieth century, “fear and loathing”. It is sublimely unaware of itself as a piece of writing, and yet over forty years later it manages to communicate more of the essence of that dark day than any number of books or movies combined.

So there you have it. Moment absorbed, cultural milestone etched, a world-changing event hard-wired to a personal memory, all culminating in a stroke of literary genius.

In short, striking gold in a polluted sea of shit.

on rape (and the 21st century justification of)

...it's their own fault, apparently...

...especially if they're wearing revealing clothes...

...and are "flirty"...

Amnesty International recently commissioned a report on attitudes in the UK towards rape victims

"sympathy", surely, is a word that should spring to mind

but no, one in three blame the (female) victims

you see, apparently if you're flirty and wearing revealing clothes, you're asking to be violated

oh, and if you're "known to have had a lot of sexual partners", you're partly responsible too

that's what 15% said

8% said this made you "totally responsible"

if you're drunk, 5% of women feel it's completely your own fault

3% of men do

maybe this is why an estimated 85% of rapes in england go unreported every year

that comes to around 70,000 women

because if you've had a lot of sexual partners, you're flirtatious, you dress provocatively and enjoy a few drinks on a friday night... well, what do you expect?

sympathy?

on the rape of the english language

c1600 – To be, or not to be; that is the question:

2005 – 2b?Ntb?=?

Fuck this.

The Guardian yesterday reported that “the most complicated and wordy works of English literature” are being compressed in to text messages, “to help students [in England] choose classics and master their revision”.

The service is being launched by the student mobile company, dot mobile. The idea is to send directly to student mobiles “everything” they need to know about a given novel or play…

...in the form of a text…

...which accommodates 160 characters…

And so, Paradise Lost, Bleak House, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice… they’re all being defiled, slashed and bastardised to the length of around two sentences.

An entire book… a timeless work of art… in a text...

Again, I have two words to offer on the subject...

FUCK THIS.

But perhaps I’m being small minded… anachronistic even…

After all, the scheme has received the backing of Professor John Sutherland, an English literature professor at University College London and chair of the panel of this year’s Man Booker prize.

Defending the compression of a text like Bleak House in to a text message, Sutherland quipped that “The ‘Great Inimitable’ himself began working life as a shorthand writer. He would, I suspect, have approved of the brevity if nothing else.”

I beg to differ…

Bleak House, depending on your edition, comes in at between 800 and 1,000 pages of vivid characters, intersecting plot and scathing social commentary on the injustices of the Mid-Victorian period.

If Dickens was after brevity, I don’t think he would have opted to publish his novel in nineteen monthly instalments. He might, say, have left out the social commentary part…

But we in the early days of the 21st century know better it seems, and so we see fit to rewrite Bleak House in a way that Dickens probably would have done if he’d just given it a little more thought… or had access to a mobile phone:

EstherBecumsWardOfJarndyceWhosInCortCase.OvaWards
Rich&Ada(L8aACuple).Tulkinghorn-nosyLawyer-WorksOutLadyDedlock=E’sMum.CaseEnds w/no1gtn money.E marrysSexyDoc-Liv 2gevaInBleakHse.Rich&L.DedlockDie.

This is the sort of bile that will be sent to students… to help with their “English Studies”…

Not only does it completely Miss The Fucking Point, these texts also add momentum to the further degradation of the English language, by giving a certain credence to textspeak – “Ova”, “L8a”, “2geva”, “gtn”…

Or for people who speak English, “other”, “later”, “together”, “getting”…

Presenting Dickens in the CHAV language of Lady Sovereign seems just a little disingenuous. Why are we so willing to devolve our arts and language, just to appease people with the attention span of a dope-smoking goldfish?

It reminds me of a Bill Hicks sketch from the early 90s:

“They actually have a Bible out called The New Living Bible. It’s a Bible in updated and modern English… I guess to make it more palatable for people to read. But it’s kinda strange listening to ‘And Jesus walked on water, and Peter said “Awesome”.’ Suddenly we got Jesus hangin’ ten across the Sea of Galilee, Christ’s Bogus Adventure…”

I’m strongly beginning to suspect that Professor Sutherland is a habitual abuser of LSD. How else can you explain a professor of English supporting the rape of his heritage? He seems rather jolly about the whole thing, whereas most uncompromised minds would surely recoil at a description of the male protagonists of Pride and Prejudice as “Fit&Loadd”. (Oh, and for anyone that hasn’t read the book or needs help revising, you’ll be glad to know that although “LizH8sDCosHsProud…TrnsOutHesActulyARlyNysGuy&RlyFancysLiz.SheDecyds
SheLyksHim.Every1GtsMaryd.”)

But we can at least be happy that these kids will still be learning quotes from the heavyweights of English literature… for example, Gatsby is now warned:

“MembaDatAlDaPplInDaWrldHvntHdDaVantgsUvAd”

Two words people, two little words…

Here’s a thought. If you want students to study the classics, don’t hack them till they fit in a text in the vain hope that this will make studying more attractive. Just teach the damn things properly. Instead of force-feeding a book chapter by chapter, try to inspire an interest that will make reading the book an enjoyable experience. Give some social and historical perspective. Try to instil a sense of the joys of literature and take the focus off learning quotes and recognising themes and motifs. Try to make reading equate to something more than passing an exam, and exams equate to something more than knowing a handful of quotes. Fire every embittered middle-aged teacher that on a daily basis takes out the frustrations of their mundane lives on his or her students. Replace all that dead wood with college graduates who still have a passion for what they do and aren’t burnt out by years in a stale system. They might just make the students give a shit. And hey, let’s go hog-wild and take teaching out of the classroom every once in a while. How can you expect a kid to appreciate Wordsworth when he’s reading all these poems about the sublime beauty of nature in a dreary classroom, sitting beside some sweaty fat kid that’s just waiting for the next free period so he can pound on him some more? Ever think that maybe we’re coming at this whole education thing a little half-assed? Ever wonder why so many kids either drop out or leave school with little or no appreciation of their artistic heritage?

Oh yea, and next on the dot mobile’s “To Do” list is a “complete, shrunken works of Shakespeare”.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…

Professor Sutherland, dressed in hoodie and distractedly eating a bowl of pineapple, was quoted as saying that texting, which isn’t even a real word, is an underused but promising educational resource. So here goes…

IfIdABllt4EvPrsnInvlvdNDisStupdFckngSkemIdBAHapyrMan

on why I’m doomed to fail as a journalist

Today’s post was supposed to be about finishing off the one I canned last night. It was supposed to be a fresh attempt at writing all those clever things I’d noticed at Tuesday’s book launch… a touching portrait of a poet with one leg nervously reading his poetry before a crowd of his peers… his boyish embarrassment at the compliments received… the fragility of the artist… the fact that his mum was the only one in the room that read along with him, silently… that she was the only one that really understood the references to his childhood, and therefore smiled when no one else did.

There was even going to be pathos…

But something worrying happened, so you’ll have to fill in the gaps yourself…

Within five minutes of abandoning “on going to a(nother) book launch” and leaving room1004, I came across a blaze. The laundrette facing The Swan was in the process of self-destructing, the apparent result of tins of paint being stored above an extraction or heating vent.

As I walked past, three fire brigades, an ambulance and a number of gardai arrived. The apartments above the laundrette were being quickly evacuated. Traffic ground to a halt and a crowd began to gather.

I joined them.

Having abandoned my resolution to not smoke, I lit a cigarette and stood there idly watching… The amount of smoke created when a room full of clothes takes light soon made it clear that this was an ill-considered decision…

I persevered…

What I didn’t do though, was act like a journalist. I didn’t ask any questions, I didn’t take notes, I didn’t even hang around to see if there were injuries.

I went in to The Swan and ordered a pint.

A journalist would have returned to room1004, fired off three or four hundred words and had it e-mailed to The Metro and Herald AM before the DFB had re-rolled their hoses.

So what’s wrong with me? There’s certainly an element of shyness here… and the firemen did seem busy…

But more significantly, I think I’ve realised that I’d rather work in a laundrette than file a story about one burning down.

It’s just not the kind of thing that gets me going.

I could have written it, easily, and maybe it would have been printed. I could have asked the woman beside me taking photos on her digital camera to e-mail them to me that night, just to add punch to whatever I ended up writing.

At the very least it would have been a learning experience…

But instead I acted like everyone else on that street, and merely looked on with fading interest every time I went out for another cigarette.

Sometimes I feel there are a lot of articles being printed that don’t really add up to anything more than the words on the page. “Laundrette on Aungier Street burns to ground – paint storage blamed”… and yet the world still turns…

I don’t think that’s the kind of article I had in mind when I signed up for this. I also didn’t expect to be told that if I learn to write a clever headline and keep my sentences short and simple, I’ll be operating more or less at the top of my field.

Journalism, surely, is more vital than that.

Writing is a skill, and it shouldn’t be squandered compressing the trivialities of daily life in to something that can be read, digested and forgotten in the course of a bus journey.

So maybe – despite all my reservations in the last post – what I’d really like to be when I grow up is the guy behind the desk signing copies of his new novel or collection of poetry, all the while being slapped on the back by sycophantic bullshitters whose last novel I just loved.

Or maybe I’ll work in a laundrette.

on going to a(nother) book launch

To be honest, I don't think I really believe a word of what follows in this post - not in the first half anyway. If I read it somewhere, I'd probably disagree. I might even write a strongly worded letter, if I had nothing better to do. The argument I make is narrow at best, with very little (if any) supporting evidence. I've presented stereotypes I find laughable. I generalise to the point of farce... If I were you, I wouldn't read it.

I find book launches weird at the best of times, especially when they're held in bookstores. Not that book stores are particularly weird... but sometimes it seems strange that this one, new and unproven little book should be celebrated so, especially when the literal backdrop is centuries worth of unique, flawed and beautiful literary art.

That said, we've a tendancy to celebrate a child's birth too.

Beyond location though, there's the people that attend book launches and the atmosphere they create. (I count myself out of this group and their atmosphere because I'm invariably at book launches in a working role...)

Book people are a whole different species, and never is this more clearly displayed than at a book launch.They look different, act different, talk about different things. (Negative stereotyping be damned.) They huddle together in groups, inhaling free wine and looking tentatively around the room to see if anyone is noticing how discreet they're being. (This is a behavioural trait they share with another odd species, actors.)

They all absolutely love each other's books. This goes without saying, of course, but if every last novel by every obscure minor novelist I've been introduced to at a book launch was as good as the other obscure novelist that introduced us said it was... well jeez, why aren't you guys famous?

(I don't mean to sound like I'm sneering, but I've a very low tolerance for sycophantic bullshit, especially in the arts.)

Last night, I accepted an invitation to Philip Casey's new collection of poetry, "Dialogue in Fading Light." Poetry launches are particularly uneasy experiences for me, mainly because they involve poets. (Is everyone still on board?)

Poets are like a neurotic subspecies within the writing breed. Compared to other writers, they always seem, I dunno.. vulnerable.

Novelists have great big books to hide behind, and the fictional classification of their work affords many of them a kind of artistic bunker to shelter in. They're respected (the good ones anyways) as artists inspired to take on and illuminate for us the heaving mass of humanity. Or even just a very tiny bit of it, that's okay too.Because, they're cool.

Playwrights are frequently a little eccentric, but unless we're talking about Marina Carr, they're generally in touch with the realities of life. Again, their work is about all humanity, which we like, but we grant them a distance between their work and who they are. You know what, I'm just gonna skip all this posturing and get to talking about last night.

I've know Philip since I was a kid and I know he's had a hard life. Watching him signing copies of his new collection was really satisfying, despite my cynicism with regard to how well-meant the back-slapping was...

But this post wasn't supposed to be about cynicism or stereotyping writers - it was supposed to be about something way more... or way less... something a bit more fundamental.

A very good friend of mine, who oddly enough wants to be a poet, once told me, "Until now I always thought of writers as people that sit in darkened rooms all day and wank."

He said this after we met (and he interviewed) D.B.C. Pierre, which was in the weeks after he won the 2003 Booker Prize...

You know what, I'm tired and this isn't working and I don't wanna smoke so I'm goin home. Sometimes ideas just misfire.

on breaking up

...three days ago my best friend broke up with his girlfriend and we're all still hungover from the experience... he still likes her, she still likes him, we all liked eachother...

...it was just one of those...

...things...

...or so we keep telling him...

...you'll be fine (hopefully true), it wasn't all your fault (a reflex response), time heals (and so does electro-convulsive therapy)...

...so here's a list of things he currently doesn't care about...

...man admits murder of an eighteen-year-old boy with an axe... more than 50 birds from Taiwan died at a UK bird flu centre... car bomb kills three in Karachi... Israeli and Palestinain officials have agreed a border crossing deal... Chirac admits riots reveal French malaise... Ben Bernanke says inflation is too high... Davis's only hopes now lie in the hustings... Bush begins his Asian tour... we still don't know if that guy in England really beat HIV...

...you get the picture...

don't you?

In his shirt pocket blinks the small red light of a tape
recorder taking down every word.
As the Earl asks, "Who's the biggest fool?"
The reporter who refuses to invent a meaning for life?
Or the reader who wants it?
And stands ready to accept this meaning presented in
the words of a stranger?

(Chuck Palahniuk, "Haunted")