On Messages

What with all the novels and poetry I pour into my face, I only have time for one newspaper a week, and that newspaper is the Saturday Guardian, which I read in the bath on a Saturday night. At this point it's customary to say something like, 'the fun never stops round my way' or 'that's about as exciting as my life gets', as if to imply that reading a newspaper in a bath is somehow an unacceptable thing to do on a Saturday night and that you need to get ironically defensive about it.

Now, the letters page has always been pretty annoying, sometimes rubber-ducky-kickingly annoying. In fact, my favourite thing in the last few years was the epically sarcastic column that answered the letter writers' rhetorical questions with withering precision. It was retired after a few weeks, presumably because the letter writers didn't like it. (Everyone else - i.e. 96% of the readership - did, but we had the good grace not to write in about it, more fools us, I guess). But I can't stop reading them. If anything just to make myself feel better: I may be kind of a dickhead, but at least I don't write in to newspapers with my opinions about stuff. It still leaves me feeling kind of gross, but I read it in the same way I eat popcorn: ravenously. I once accidentally picked up and bit my wife's hand because it was in a bowl of popcorn.

To make matters worse, The Guardian have now started printing online comments as if they were letters. Say what you will about letter writers, at least they have to go to the bother of finding a stamp and trudging to the post-office (or opening their email account, looking up the paper's email address and... snore....) an exercise during which the decent human mind settles like an unplugged lava lamp and thinks, You know what? Forget it. If those five words were available in pill form, internet discourse would be a whole lot readable-r.

But the commenter has no such time to take stock. I've never met anyone in real life who comments on articles. Most people I encounter seem pretty happy with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, that kind of thing. A forum where you can share your sometimes awesome, sometimes crappy, sometimes insightful, sometimes petty, sometimes generously outward looking, sometimes pathologically self-absorbed views in a manner which isn't as annoying as a complete stranger appearing from under your newspaper and saying, 'They had it coming, you know,' after you've just read an article about some sad murders which has made you feel sad. And if you think I'm taking the lowest form of commenter as a straw-man here, let's say that the highest form of commenter is someone trying to prove that they're more reasonable and intelligent than that straw commenter. Which, if that isn't self-evident enough that you don't feel the need to point it out to millions of members of the public, is just palpably untrue. You're just as much of a dick. It's easy enough to avoid this online - just don't scroll down below articles. But I can't stop reading the letters page. I'm too weak.

Anyway, I was anticipating some classic bilious rabidity after last week's article about young "over-achievers" and was vindicated to find this, from rah90, about someone or other who had overachieved in some field and put it down to working hard. I don't know the young achiever in question or what he's like, but what had gotten rah90's dander up was over-familiar. "Tristram Hunt," they averred, "says his success is down to hard work, then goes on to describe his upbringing."

"It's the typical delusional contradictions of the privileged middle class. What's opportunity, stability, love, support, healthy role models and a sense of entitlement got to do with it?" - rah90

As I've explored elsewhere, I have a posher accent than I am posh, and this puts me in a unique position of getting frequently accosted by strangers in pubs who take great amusement in making me swear and use contemporary vernacular like "innit" and so forth. This has been going on since primary school, so I'm able to take it with the grace only available to people who were picked on at school. Furthermore, after 8 years of being the posh-voiced kid at school, I encountered people at university who found it kind of funny that they let people who'd been to state school into university at all. (NB: I also met just as many privately educated people who laboured under no such idiocy, which I guess taught me that you should judge people, if at all, based on what they're actually like and the things they think and do, which is more or less what every moral tale tells us).

My point is I've been conditioned to bristle at unexamined class bullshit whichever way it breaks, and this manages to break both ways. Why exactly I'm so upset about this, why it's taken on a kind of metonymic weight for me, is maybe 1. I'm a narcissist and 2. maybe something to do with starting a family and pre-emptively striking against comments like, "Ooh, look at that middle class dad, raising his child so middle-classly with his posh accent and his precisely nothing that I know about his life and his background apart from that." (Unfortunately the moral tale I never listened to was that Aesop's fable where we're taught not to care about others' opinions lest we drop our donkeys in the sea).

Now, I can get behind being pissed off at a sense of entitlement and opportunity, sure. The arts are positively dynastic with them. There are opportunities if you can afford to live rent-free in London for a year, and significantly fewer if you can't. I get it; that sucks, and if you benefit from it the dignified thing to do is to acknowledge that rather than pretend you've gotten where you are through hard graft.

But LOVE? Seriously?! LOVE is middle class now? Ooh, look at that middle class person treating his fellow human beings with LOVE. Feh! Makes you sick, doesn't it? Can you imagine how privileged his upbringing must have been in order to condition him to treat people with kindness and respect? What an irredeemable cunt.

Tell you what, why don't you fuck off, rah90, IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME, WHICH IT DEMONSTRABLY ISN'T. Fuck off and start a family and raise them without love just to prove a point. Criminy. And I'll be like, Ooh, there goes good ol' Rah90, treating his kids and everyone he meets like dirt. How VERY AUTHENTIC OF HIM.

Happy Christmas, all.

Lxx

Ambassador Thumb 1

Ambassador Thumb 2

Ambassador Thumb 3

Ambassador Thumb 4

Ambassador Thumb 5

Cheap and Vulgar and Sort of Childish - EXCLUSIVE

Every year I think I'm going to do one of those virtual advent calendars where I post something new and delightful every day from the 1st to 24th of December. Had I managed to do so this year, the thing behind the first door would have been this. It is a short piece called 'Ambassador Thumb' which I wrote in between The Harbour Beyond the Movie and The Migraine Hotel. I read it at readings a few times and then submitted it to Succour, a magazine for which I was regional editor and was therefore confident, if not certain, of publication. I also talked it over with my most useful and critical friends and they felt it was a bit "trad absurdist", clearly derivative of Gogol ('The Nose'), which is true, and that I wasn't really doing much to make the style my own, an opinion with which I was inclined to agree. And seeing as I'd also brought along a radio play (derivative of Beckett), a full-length novel (derivative of Beckett) and a sinister one-act monologue (derivative of Fraggle Rock) to show-and-tell that week, I didn't have any time to make a case for it.

But a year or so later when I gave a friend a copy of Migraine Hotel, he wrote to me a week later saying, 'Where's Ambassador Thumb?' I told him it didn't really fit with the rest of the pieces in MH and he wrote back to say, "You fucking idiot."

The only surviving version of 'Ambassador Thumb' is in Issue Six of Succour (subtitled 'The Future') and the only copy I have is one that I read from at a school in the South West. Thankfully, just before I went on stage (or "on library" as it so often actually is), I overheard one of the teachers talking about the headmaster (who was to be present) and his attitude to swearing. Apparently he had thrown a writer out by his lapels (licking him squarely in the face with his good, clean tongue all the while) for using the word "bloody" only a couple of months ago. I had a pen with me and made some hasty edits to 'Ambassador Thumb', so I present to you the expurgated version with the following notes as sometimes the crossing out is pretty thorough:

1. For "How very magnanimous of you" read "How fucking magnanimous of you"

2. For "I murmured disconsolately" read "'Fuck you,' I told him"

3. For "Git" read "Bastard" (Not really sure about this one - I think "Git" had recently been used in one of the Harry Potter films, so I figured it was okay).

4. For "Even the soap operas" read "Even the Adult Channel"

5. For "people's backs" read "flesh against a background of groaning and saxophone music"

A narrow escape, I think you'll agree. I might post something about swearing too much in my writing if I can fit it in with my therapist next week. The manuscript I'm working on at the moment is just lousy with cussing and it sometimes makes me kind of sad. It seems cheap and vulgar and sort of childish. For most poets this is a question that never comes up. They write about soulful, meaningful lovely things, and occasionally, when they're really cross, they maybe drop in the odd light swear, and we're all like, oh boy, he/she must really mean this! But if you spend all your time playing in the gutter with little obscene plasticine figures you made, the whole swearing issue is completely different and nobody understands. For instance, my wife just came in to ask how the marking was going and has found me trying to photograph my own thumb. That would make a good title. I guess all I'm really trying to say is Happy Christmas! And I hope you enjoy!

Donnie Lighto

I haven't written anything on here for so long that I've developed Blog Fear. It's like when someone buys you a Moleskine notebook and it's so expensive and pretty, all you can think to write in it is Hemingway looked at the Chatwin. It was a damn good Chatwin. The last couple of sentences alone have taken me hours. Anyway, Donnie Darko being on after Film 2011 last night has motivated me to write a new post. I stayed up to watch the first 10 minutes as I wanted to check something that's bugged me for years. See, when I saw Donnie Darko in the cinema as a student, it began with Echo and the Bunnymen's only good song, 'Killing Moon' and I really, really liked that it did that. I think I even leant over to my ex-girlfriend and whispered, 'That's really clever because there's, like, A GIANT BUNNY MAN in the film!' And it's also a bit about killing.'

Let's back up a bit here. In the early 2000s, in what turned out to be the death throes of big department store media outlets, a lot of such shops started offering crazy deals on DVDs, like 8 for a tenner, etc. Maybe they still do, but I've never met anyone who's been into one of the (cockroach-tenacious) branches of HMV (which are mysteriously still occupying giant buildings with floorspace like car showrooms in all of our highstreets) in the last five years, and frankly I wouldn't trust anyone who had. So my household would take it in turns to take advantage of such offers, because it was actually cheaper than renting movies and if you didn't like them you could just take them to a charity shop the next day.

One phenomenon of which I am absolutely certain (although I am yet to find anyone who agrees, or who had a sufficiently advanced DVD habit in the early 2000s to say for sure) is that completely regardless of such special offers, any film which featured either Jake or Maggie Gyllenhaal retailed at £2.99. The price never went up or down from this - the price of a not especially lavish special coffee. You must have noticed, right, that everyone you know who still has a stack of DVDs in their living room ALL, whatever their taste, their age, and whatever else they like, ALL have a copy of Secretary and Donnie Darko in their collection. It's not just me who's noticed that, right? Even my gran had these movies. And the reason is that by some sinister decree, films starring Gyllenhals were to undercut the market by a minimum of a fiver. We would all go wandering through Virgin Megastore, past all of the Coldplay CDs and think, '£2.99?! Well, I didn't exactly love the film, but c'mon! It was good enough for £2.99! Even the fucking box is worth £2.99. £2.99 is cheaper than renting a movie.'

So anyway, I bought Donnie Darko, like every single other person who exists and was alive around then, some years after enjoying it in the cinema, made some microwave popcorn, put it on and was crestfallen (like, if you can imagine a crest falling off a wall) to discover that the film started with some other 80s song I didn't recognise. I was born in 81, so I'm at that awkward age where I still don't get most of the cultural referents the people 10 years older than me who actually make films and TV use. Ooh, I can't wait to do the same to people 10 years younger than me when I'm there. Sitcoms will be all Pogs and something else that happened in the 90s but I was too busy playing Pogs to notice.

So yes, back to being crestfallen: Had I just made up the whole 'Killing Moon' thing? Had I imagined it? I assumed, until last night, that I must have done. But after Film 2011 last night, after the dawn scene where Donnie Darko picks up his bike and rides back into his suburb, what should I hear but the ringing, jangly chords of Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Killing Moon'? Exactly that, is what I should and, indeed, did hear. I danced a jig with glee. Then I checked my DVD, which I hadn't prised out of the DVD holder for years and found 'DIRECTOR'S CUT' written in small, blue on slightly-darker-blue lettering under the title.

Which brings me to my point: what the fuck is with you, director of Donnie Darko? Are you some kind of film-ruining idiot? Why don't you just go to screenings of your own films and have loud mobile phone conversations over the top of them, instead of actually, genuinely ruining them for everyone forever?

inconceivable art

Once every six months I stop using every drawer in my room for stuffing things in because none of them will open. Today, while re-arranging the third drawer down, I discovered an old notebook which contained a press clipping from 2010. I'd cut it out of a Sunday supplement article about the computer game Heavy Rain which was just about to come out. You may remember HR was being pitched as a new dawn: the first example of a once inconceivable art form in which you, as creator-audience, are given complete control over the narrative; pretty much the event horizon after which computer games take over from film, cereal packet comic strips and the novel. As proof of this, the journalist cites the following:

"The smallest action alters the narrative. Do you talk to the junkie or shoot him?"

You hear that? THE SMALLEST ACTION.

Bodle

For the last three summers I've set myself a single, achievable project which, given minimal discipline, ought to be finished before the academic year trundles into gear again. Then I take on a side-project, usually by invitation, something shorter and sufficiently different from project A that it will not only not distract me from project A but provide a valuable contrast. Things not going so well on the novel? Maybe work on the new pamphlet-length sequence for a couple of hours!

The process by which this branch and sub-branch of a project multiplies over the course of the summer is insidious and is entirely the fault of Bodle: the longest serving and jolliest evil spirit inhabiting my soul.

Bodle will say, 'That new pamphlet-length sequence you're working on: don't you think that needs a pamphlet-length-sequence within a pamphlet-length sequence, in case people think you're getting too unself-referential?'

'Well sure, Bodle,' I'll say, closing and saving my document.

'Maybe it should be in the form of song, then you could have a live show with your friend on piano! You can rent a General's uniform! This can be project B(ii)!'

'By Jove, Bodle, I think you're onto something,' I'll say, spending the rest of the day trying to write a jazz standard which rhymes "Rasputin" with "stick the boot in".

'And by the way,' Bodle will say, sensing I'm already weak, 'I just had a vision of the future in which you are a celebrated playwright.'

'Get out!' I say. 'Not as in, the power of Christ compels you, you understand, Bodle. I mean "get out!" as in "get out of town!" - a chirpy Americanism which expresses surprise by feigning incredulity through the threat of exile. And am I also a radio playwright?'

'What a horrendously laboured gag!' exclaims Bodle, knowing damn well that this makes me an ideal candidate for radio. 'That's actually what makes your reputation before you turn to the stage.'

'So that's project C and C(ii),' I say, opening two further documents. 'But what about a sub-project for A?'

'The French anti-novel isn't getting any staler,' says Bodle. 'Why not get in contact with an enterprising small press and sign a contract for a 50,000 word experimental piece narrated by a holographic dolphin sticker in a Japanese girl's schoolbook?'

'Why, I can see the cover already!' I cry.

'And what could make for better relief from writing a novel than an anti-novel?'

'You speak the truth, Bodle,' I say, opening the novel again, and opening another document which I save as "ANTI NOVEL".

'And while we're on the subject,' says Bodle, 'Children's picture book. And grown up book in the style of a children's picture book.'

'Check; check,' I say, getting out some sheets of A3.

'And weren't you planning on revitalising traditional form even though countless half-baked "movements" have already disintegrated in a puff of reader apathy trying to do just that?'

'I already have a deadline.'

'And I'd just like to drop into the mix: science fiction.'

'Yeah!'

'Remember how much you love science fiction?'

'Do I?'

'Isn't it really your ultimate dream to write a great science fiction novel?'

'It's a fair cop, Bodle.'

'And what about your blog? You haven't posted anything on there for two months if you don't count a bitchy riposte to an Amazon review which you had second thoughts about and took down.'

'If there's one thing that matters in this world,' I tell Bodle, 'it's being seen to be able to take criticism.'

'Also screenplays,' says Bodle. 'Screenplays are very important.'

'That all starts tonight,' I say, heading to the shops to buy a new notebook. Halfway through doing up one of my shoes, I freeze. 'But Bodle,' I say, 'what if all of these projects become totally overwhelming and maroon me in a sea of indecision. What if, in reality, these "ideas" are just excuses not to get on with the project I know I have to finish?'

'Remind me,' says Bodle. 'Was that C or F(iii)?'

'As you know very well, Bodle,' I tell him, 'It is B(ii).'

'The only solution,' begins Bodle, after a pause, 'as I see it, is to start a website where writers share 5,000 word essays about distraction as an integral part of the creative process. How do you remain focused on one creative project? How do you keep your creative profligacy in check?'

'This sounds promising.'

'Let's talk logos,' says Bodle.