The Occasional Papers

Since deciding to move flat over this stupid sofa business, we’ve found a few really great flats which should actually save us a bit of cash in the long run and are far more practical in a number of ways to what we have now. The only things I’m really bummed out about are losing the coal fire which I have only recently figured out how to use and also having to call it a day on the front of my great big composting project (I have one of these).

Even if the new place has a garden comparable to the one we currently have access to, I don’t really feel like shoveling that huge pile of kitchen waste and fallen leaves into binbags and then relocated it. Ew. Besides, it’s been lovingly layered into levels of ‘greens’ and ‘browns’ which I wouldn’t be able to reconstruct so I’ll probably just leave it behind. Maybe in nine months or so I’ll come back and jump the fence so that I might see my baby in its truest compost form like one of those women who agree to have babies for someone else but become emotionally attached and wind up with a restraining order.

The BBC aired a Steven Spielberg special of The Culture Show a couple of nights ago. I like some of Spielberg’s stuff but I had a Flintstones poster on my bedroom wall as a kid and it read “Steven Speilrock Presents… The Flintstones”. He’ll always be Steven Spielrock to me.

Among other clips in this career retrospective, there were some from last year’s War of the Worlds remake. The bit where a Martian tripod emerges from the water and upsets a boat reminded me of the fact that I actually saw that movie in the cinema. I’d totally forgotten about it and if you’d have asked me prior to my seeing that clip if I’d enjoyed War of the Worlds, I’d have told you that it was a movie that passed me by.

Such is often the case in this popcorny zeitgeist of ours. Children of Men on the other hand, though I saw it at least three weeks ago, is still playing on my mind. Surely that’s a hallmark of a good movie: one that repeats on you like a bacon sandwich.

The story itself is a fairly humdrum sci-fi commodity – humans mysteriously stop reproducing – and I am not particularly tempted to read the P. D. James novel on which it is based. But there are certain visual reminders of current politics which makes the way in which the film’s government deals with the problem eerie and a little too close to the current state of world affairs for comfort. There are scenes of armed combat reminiscent of what the media feed back from the Middle East. There are civilians being hooded by military men Abu-Ghraib style. There are illegal immigrants locked in cages while London commuters walk guiltily by. There are mass refugee movements akin to what we’re warned will happen in the event of not turning back the clock on global warming. Most literally of all, the audience is treated to a scrapbook collection of news clippings compiled (if memory serves) by Michael Caine’s character with images of Bush and Blair as precursors to the real apocalyptic stuff. Above all there’s this sense of helplessness inspired by corrupt and clumsy governments.

It makes one wonder if indeed we are on the cusp of dystopia or if indeed we are already there. I saw a banner add on the Internet today placed by the BBC’s TV Licensing people. “We know you intend on paying your TV License,” it read, “We just hope our Enforcement Officers don’t get to you first”.

Enforcement Officers? Since when are governmental bodies in this country permitted to threaten civilians in such a fashion? Presumably they get away with it because they are talking to the “small minority” of license-shirkers who “spoil it for the rest of us” but I don’t think the poor should be drilled just so that Catherine Tate can make more offensive drivel and even though the principles remain, threats of visitations from the BBC’s SS Men are uncomfortable to endure.

See also the benefit fraud announcements in which the government represent themselves as Mysteron-like rings of light seeking out and bringing to justice those who cheat their generous benefit schemes.

I recently spent far too much time in Heathrow airport. We queued at the security gates for an hour or so, all the while subjected to looped audio announcements:

“No cigarettes or cigarette lighters”
“Only one bag is allowed. Please note that a lady’s handbag counts as one item”
“No liquids or gels”
“No sharp objects”
“No electric devices”
“No pre-prepared food or drinks”
“No touching the walls!”

Red scrolling text accompanied the audio track and uniformed men circulated, barking the same orders and offering out transparent plastic bags so that we might deposit anything not permitted through the gates.

We were eventually frisked and asked to remove our shoes for examination. My friend received a DNA swab. Keep in mind that this was a purely domestic flight from London to Glasgow. I found the taking off of shoes particularly uncomfortable as I wear a small orthopedic lift in my left shoe and didn’t particularly want to be questioned about it. I thought about other circumstances in which people might be asked to remove their shoes: Mosques? Bouncy Castles?

And Auschwitz, of course: as soon as the Jews and Political Prisoners checked in, they were asked to remove their shoes as the first step in a dehumanising process allowing the SS Men to treat them as non-human vermin. I realise that the security guys are working for our protection but whenever one makes divisions and one group is given more power than the other, it ends only with repression and mistreatment. See the Stanford Prison experiment. See Das Experiment. See Abu Ghraib.

Yesterday I mastered fire. Dear Diary! No longer will the superior abilites of Neanderthal man mock me so fervently.

Since acquiring this skill, I’ve watched far less television: the fire demands constant attention and is far more interesting to watch than Torchwood anyway. It seems as though the conveniences of central heating and gas fires developed in order for people to have more time to lay on their fat arses and watch the disgusting rubbish that the babble machine churns out. The Glass Teat undoubtedly distracts us from more natural and amazing things. Don’t watch that, watch this! I’m tempted more and more each day to move forward with my Walden IV plans, though I imagine that when things such as fire-lighting and the growing of vegetables are matters of survival that they become far less novel and wonderous.

“Soon my pet; Soon I will feed you the world!”

Our landlord is a big fat spacker. A couple of weeks ago, we heard via our letting agent that he is liquidising one of his other Glasgow properties. By this I do not mean he’s blending it up with some fruit and icecubes with the intent of drinking it in a fashion akin to that bloke who wanted to eat a Boeing 747. I don’t think this guy is capable of loving anything fullstop let alone an inanimate object to the point of wanting to ingest it. Rather I mean that he’s getting rid of his other property and as a result we’re inheriting some of his better items of furniture. At first we thought this would be fantastic as some of the furniture in our little loft conversion has certainly seen better days. We’ve always enjoyed the Bohemian charm of our shabby tables and chairs but we agreed that it would certainly be of practical and aesthetic advantage to replace some of it with any better stuff that might be going.

So we said that a new kettle and toaster would be nice (we previously had no toaster and the electric kettle was somewhat inefficient) and that we’d take a replacement sofa if the letting agents didn’t mind arranging for a van to collect and deliver. The landlord and the letting agents seemed to be happy with our requests and so things fell into motion.

A couple of days after making the initial requests and arrangements, we received a call from the agents telling us that the landlord had two sofas which were undoubtedly of a better quality to what was currently in place in our loft and that he would like us to have them both.

But there’s no room, of course. It’s a tiny flat and the positioning of furniture is dictated by where the walls slope in (with the shape of the roof), where window nooks exist and where the various wall-mounted heaters are positioned. Two sofas would be impossible to get in.

But the landlord insists that we take them. It’s his property we’re renting and it’s his sofas we’re talking about, you see.

It is at this point in the story I would like to mention that the landlord lives in New Zealand. Yes, he’s on the other side of the planet with no idea how strapped for space we are and no idea as to the condition of his sofas. He’s insane.

The condition of the sofas is the other problem. They’re fairly filthy and even after a day spent laundering the covers, it seems that I am allergic to the sodding things. I strongly suspect that the previous renter of the sofas was a dog owner. So all night I wheeze away, struggling to sleep and all day I continue to wheeze, unable to get any work done.

We spend a further day moving furniture around in order to try to accomodate the two massive sofas. We’ve now got them to almost fit but it still looks rubbish. It is difficult to get into the kitchen and one sofa is uncomfortably close to the aforementioned coal fire meaning that (a) it’s a fire hazard and (b) the sofas are white and will surely become covered in soot. I should also mention the clause in the contract which forbids us to move furniture around or else risk losing a portion of our deposit. And yet we had to move almost everything in order to accomodate these fucking things.

Yesterday we had a guy over from the letting agents (the owner no less) to see the current state of things and to whom we would explain our various concerns. I explained about my allergies, the kitchen being blocked, the fire hazard, the soot, the aesthetic and ergonomic crapness of it all, the fact that this was not what we’d signed up to and the fact that we’ve lost two days accommodating this nonsense. The guy didn’t really accept my arguments, instead commenting upon what a lovely flat this is and how nice we’d got it. A real charmer, he was.

So we’re looking for a new home. Which sucks, as we were both extremely happy with out little loft before this fucking sofa came along. Our first viewing of another flat is tomorrow afternoon.

Should there be an etiquette for travelling in lifts with other people? Wikipedia currently defines an elevator as “a transport device used to move goods or people vertically”. A transport device! So when sharing a lift with another person, you’re effectively going on a journey with them, albeit a short one. I’m always worried about what to say, if anything, to a person I’m sharing a lift with. I’d usually say ‘hey’ or at least smile when I or they board for the first time. It only seems polite to acknowledge their existence at the start of the journey. But when they or you leave the lift, it’s particularly difficult to know what to say. “Goodbye” seems a bit much but I feel obliged to say something in order to provide closure to our fleeting relationship initially instigated by a smile, nod or ‘hey’. When parting, smiles or nods do not usually suffice in that the other person is seldom looking at you but is rather studying the metal doors or digital number readout. So you have to say something. In the past, I have said “Cheers”. “Cheers” seems to be a common expression here in Scotland when parting company with someone but to me it means “Thank You”. What am I thanking this person for? S/he’s not a lift attendant driving the ‘vehicle’ on my behalf nor am I thanking them for their amazing good company on our emotionally-charged ascent up the building.

There are of course confounding variables. If a lift is very busy – filled with other vertical commuters – there is no obligation to say anything to anyone. Social situations usually become paradoxically less personal when there are a greater number of people involved. Conversely, if it’s an extra-long journey from basement to roof, there is a greater demand for smalltalk. In the event of you’re going to and/or from the same locations as your elevator chum, there is also extra demand for pleasantries: you have something in common – probably many things if you’re going to the same floor of, say, a library or a cinema.

I wish there was some sort of elevator etiquette known to all. Well, there sortof is: don’t say anything to anyone and keep eyes fixed on the inanimate metal wall and/or the progress of the numbers. But that’s horrible and disturbingly akin to gents’ urinal etiquette.

Maybe we should tell jokes to other updown passengers. Next time I board a lift with someone else already in it, I’m going to say “What did one snowman say to the other snowman”. And then when one of us alights, I’ll say “Can you smell carrots?”. It’s like a good version of Subway Stanzas. Since giving up my ‘career path’ in standup comedy due to disillusion with the permissible sandbox nature of comedy clubs, I’ve been looking for an escape valve for comedic energy. I think lifts are the ideal venue. I shall reinvent myself posthaste as the elevator jester.

I think you’ll find my idea quite uplifting. Haha. I don’t often make jokes. Except for when I’m in elevators. From now on.

Is it ever possible to action the perfect ‘good deed’. The idea of course is that no good deed goes unrewarded and so by accepting this notion, the deed becomes bilateral and not in essence a ‘good’ one.

Upon writing the above sentence, I realise that this paradox is the focus of an episode of Friends in which one of the characters becomes fixated upon actioning this perfect good deed. How trite of me to raise this point again. But never mind.

At work last night, a colleague and I were given a task to share between us. I’d go away and do half of it and then he would do his half upon my return. Not finding it too strenuous a task, I decided to do 3/4 of the work rather than half so that my chum wouldn’t have so much to do. What a good deed. But I found myself thinking that I shouldn’t draw attention to the extra work done lest the deed no longer qualify as ‘good’.

In truth, this was the reason I only did 3/4 of the job and not the whole lot. If I did all of the work, everyone would know and give me an embarrassing course of back-pattery.

Presumably, the ultimate good deed would be one committed in a vacuum – entirely in sworn secret with no one else ever knowing of it.

But left after this is a sense of self satisfaction at having completed a good deed. And so again the deed becomes bilateral again – the deeder has acquired something (self satisfaction) in exchange for the good action and the maxim of no good deed going unrewarded is proven true once again and so the paradox remains fulfilled.

With respect to other projects and in an attempt at warming myself up before writing other stuff, I’m going to make a more determined effort to write something in these pages as frequently as is comfortably possible from now on – perhaps even every day. When I first started blogging back in 2003, I wrote that I amazed myself by how little wordage I produced during daylight hours and that merely writing about annoying events from the previous day would be at least something. As Dickon Edwards once wrote, “Where to start? Where to stop? Just write it down, that’s all that matters.” So for a while at least, The Occasional Papers is going to take a more diary-like approach to blogging in which I will simply – as Roy Walker would approve of – say what I see. Or at least that’s the plan. Presumably this will result in some boring rubbish rather than the incredible ideas and insightful analyses you’re used to in these pages (ahem) but, as ever, you don’t have to read it.

Last night, we invited some friends over to our flat. The evening began with the regular customs of drinking alcohol, talking, listening to music and eating snacks but somehow we wound up engineering an army of vegetable gargoyles. The things you do when you’re young.

As much as I love rising late, watching cartoons all day and working four-hour evening shifts at the university library, I’m forced to admit that such a bovine way of life is not entirely sustainable. The dream has to end sooner or later. In anticipation of this, I’ve been attending job interviews over the past week or so for jobs markedly similar to the one I currently hold but with a greater number of working hours and/or better career prospects. So far the interviews have gone very smoothly though no one has yet seen fit to hire me.

Today’s interview was for a job in the very same library in which I’m currently employed so the interview panel consisted of people I knew. For some reason, this really spooked me and so the interview went a lot less smoothly and a few with stuttered, dry-mouthed answers. I was also aware that they’d he heard my standard interview routine (read lies, jokes and bullshit) before and so I’d have to think on my feet a lot. A few curb-balls from the main interviewer resulted in a few raised eyebrows suggesting I was out on a limb with my improvisations. Bah. On the positive side, there is a twisted logic in favour of being successful this time around: since the smooth interviews resulted in no job, this clunky one which felt like cycling a penny-farthing down a cobbled street will surely result in the high-paid and idle job of my dreams, possibly involving my own office and daily mandatory naps.

Coming out of the interview, I bumped into my friend Keir, whom I decided to join for a quick coffee in the student union. Not actually being a student, I always feel as though I’m cheating the system when I take advantage of the union’s cheap, quasi-palatable coffee. The alternatives are to hoof it down to the cafe-packed Byers Road which takes up valuable coffee-break time or to use the academic staff lounge where the machine-pumped coffee is so utterly revolting it makes the student union look like Starbucks.

Keir told me that he’d read in the newspaper of someone tracking down one of Hitler’s decedents with the goal of asking him if he’d like to be given seventy-odd years’ worth of royalties for the Führer’s best-selling title, Mein Kamf. Understandably, the guy has refused the money in order to distance himself from his unpopular ancestor. The guy in question is some sort of distant nephew or cousin or something, because, as Keir pointed out, “Hitler didn’t have any kids. He only had one ball”.

“Does one testicle mean you can’t have any kids?” I questioned, “Maybe you could have half a kid.”

The absurd idea of Hitler’s freakish secret halfchild had me laughing uproariously – a welcome thing indeed after the tense interview. “I love him”, I said in an hilarious Hitler voice, “I shall call him Harvey”.

With clever, topical, good-taste jokes such as that one, you can see why I have so many friends.

The rest of the coffee break was spent musing over whether Hitler’s hemi-child would be a top half, bottom half or a left or right half. The further thought occurred that the poor child might be given the opportunity of a ‘half transplant’ at some point in his life but that the new half might have come from a Jewish donor. The shame of it! Would Hitler have to execute his halfchild? Would he merely have to half-exectute him, essentially undoing the work of the pervert doctors responsible for the transplant? Of course, it’s entirely possible that the two halves, much like many Siamese twins, would have become inseparable and he’d have to die entirely. That’s certainly the outcome I find most likely. Either that or he survived and became the world’s most literal case of a self-hating Jew.

“I’d better go now,” said my coffeeshop chum, now rising from his seat, “not because I’m late for getting back but because I don’t want to hear more of this horrible rubbish”.

Some people just don’t have the stomach for stories of Nazi halfbabies and their inevitable botched operations.

In other news, we’ve been suffering a wasp nest on the outside of our converted loft for about three months. The council pest-control guys aren’t too keen to do anything about it since we’re so high up. Every now and again (okay, twenty times a day) a wasp makes his way into our living space. I wish they wouldn’t do this. After all, I’m never invited over to their place. Despite their persistance, I’ve only been stung on one occasion: the little bugger must’ve crawled into my jeans in the night, resulting in his death and a sting behind my left knee. Anyway, yesterday saw major victory in the battle against the wasps: a low humming, which I assumed at first to be a rogue bee, drew my attention to a wasp the size of my thumb. It could only have been a queen. Rather than land a newspaper upon it, which would have resulted in a mess of ludicrous proportions, I sprayed it to death with a can of supa-hold hairspray. That’s an entire nest nipped in the bud right there, wasp-haters. The result of such a peculiar execution is one very hard, perfectly preserved queen wasp. I might skewer it with a cocktail stick and show it to occasional house guests, though I think I should probably (a) donate it to science or (b) sell it to an art gallery. Any further suggestions should be made via the usual channels.

Minty-fresh arts/culture magazine, The Mind’s Construction Quarterly has at last folded. A sad day for hip young intellectuals across the nation.

I had lunch yesterday with the mag’s editor, who is moving on to bigger and better things in web design and simply won’t have time to edit a quarterly magazine anymore.

The good news, however, is that it’s entire backlog of material (and there’s rather a lot of it) can now be read for free at the mag’s website.

Among this stuff is my own tMCQ backlog. Almost all of it is comedy related and a Stewart Lee interview is probably the highlight though I’m quietly proud of The New Satire. I’ve linked to it all below for anyone who is interested in such things.

On Wanting to Stay Alive: Robert Wringham meets Stewart Lee (An interview)

Why Not Sadowitz? (Review of Glasgow Comedy Festival 2006)

The New Satire (Post-9/11 Comedy)

Manifesto for a new United Kingdom! (Glastonbury Festival 2005)

In Truth No Beauty? (Nude Modelling)

I’ve also taken up writing book reviews for The Skinny. Dunno how frequently I’ll do this but at present there are two in the bag. The first is a review of Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium.

For some reason I’m not in the latest edition of The Idler, which is a bit of a disappointment as it was supposed to contain the first of a series of columns about libraries. Not to worry. We’ll see what the next edition brings.

Meanwhile, work on my own magazine, The Escapologist progresses slowly but surely and I’m sending proposals off left right and centre for books (!). More news about these half-assed projects some time in the distant future.

Returned from a vacation in Prague. It’s a beautiful city with one helluva history. Dvořák! Kafka! Communism! Jews! Riots! Fires! The word ‘robot’ was coined here. How cool is that?

There are many anecdotes and ideas I’d like to share with you via the medium of these electronic pages, dear reader, but they’ll have to wait a little while until I’ve become reaccustomed to being back in Old Blighty. In the meantime, here are a few photographs from the trip. (Do check them out, faithful reader – I just invested in a one-year Flikr membership, for goodness sake).

Last year, I had the pleasure of attending Edinburgh’s Beltane festival. Somehow, amid the drums and the fire and the nudity, I managed to catch a slight reflection of my white, unshaved self: an aparition I found oddly sobering. The mere glimpse of the same old face I inspect each morning in the bathroom mirror caused me to remember that there was an outside world to worry about and to ultimately go back to. A similar thing happened a few times in Prague: I’d suddenly hear a snatch of English accent amid the rumble of Czeck and find myself reminded of the elastic rope connecting me to Britain, always allowing for infrequent departure but never failing to demand a speedy return trip. Usually, the English tourists were engaged in utterly benall conversation. One guy was saying to another “So she fucking glanced at you – big deal” and a middleaged woman was saying to her husband “I don’t know how to get there, Benjamin, stop asking me”. Bleh. This trip has far from quenched by thirst for travel and if anything has made me hungry for a greater number of prolongued soujournes. I facny next time, a location “off the beaten track” will be enjoyed so that the English lingo and the Suvaneer shops might be avoided. In the British Airways inflight magazine, John Simpson recomends Sudan! Also: Messner Mountain Museum looks wowie.

A man sits alone in a sterile white room with no memory of who he might be or how he wound up there. Referred to as Mr. Blank, the protagonist explores the room’s sparse furnishings and his fractured memories by way of discovering who or what he is: institutionalised madman; incarcerated lawbreaker; or psychological experiment? A deeper mystery for the reader lies in what kind of book Travels in the Scriptorium is actually supposed to be: in one respect it’s a report of events seen through the hidden cameras in Mr. Blank’s room but it also succeeds in describing his inner feelings and thought processes in the way only a novel can do. How confusing.

Great writers have been known to vanish for years only to re-emerge with a stunning comeback novel. While Paul Auster never actually disappeared, his recent novels (including the Quixote-inspired ‘Timbuktu’ and the meta-fictional biography, ‘The Book of Illusions’) were far from being the postmodern manifestos expected since The New York Trilogy. This, however, is undoubtedly a return to what Auster does best. Straight away we are swamped in typically Austerian themes: linguistics, semiotics, nominality, self-reference, a sense of space without time and time without space. Scriptorium is a cacophony of ascetic oddness and thought-provoking postmodernism.

To Saint Mungo’s Museum to witness Les Stone‘s new exhibition of photojournalism.

The subject: Vodou!*

*I’m assured by my expert flatmate that ‘Vodou’ (as opposed to ‘voodoo’) is the correct spelling.

Presented are photographs of Mambos, Houngans and other practitioners of Vodou engaged in their ecstatic practices and rituals. I think my favourite one was a picture of a guy apparently experiencing the spirits by immersing himself in mud with only his face and a cigarette above the surface. It reminded me of Glastonbury.

More than anything though, Stone’s exhibition functions as a thematic and contrasting sequel to James Edward Bates’ Ku Klux Klan exhibition which showed here last season and which I wrote a little bit about here.

A little word association for each exhibit:

So many differences yet a few similarities. I’ve declared that both each of these subcultures involve an anti-intellectual element yet both do so in a dramatically different fashion. The guys in the Klan are idiots: their actions are the result of a congealing and senseless ideology passed down through the ages, from illiterate generation to illiterate generation. The Vudou guys, on the other hand, give up their intellectual selves deliberately in order to find release from it. They become ecstatic and allow themselves to become possessed by the rhythm of drums, the ecstasy of dance and, most importantly, the essence of the loas (ancestral spirits).

The beliefs of both groups have become intertwined with Christianity: the Klan’s as a way of justifying their beliefs (“God tells us to be this way; God tells us we’re righteous”); the Vodou practitioners’ as a way of allowing for its survival. According to Wikipedia: “A common saying is that Haiti is 80% Roman Catholic, 20% Protestant, and 100% Vodou”. Many of the Vodou Loas have Catholic counterparts. I’m told that my favourite loa, the cigar-smoking Papa Legba, is a Haitian counterpart of Saint Peter.

Go and take a look, Glasgow. On the other hand, check out a selection of the photographs here.

Rather than commending people upon the stuff they’ve done, perhaps we should start giving out awards for those individuals who’ve not done stuff – those who have resisted the temptation of ‘selling out’ or losing integrity in favour of… something else. After all, John and Yoko didn’t “stay in bed” or “grow their hair”, as their lyrics suggest: they just didn’t get up and didn’t get haircuts. The bed-in was about inaction rather than action.

In today’s paper, I read about Kiran Desai: daughter of Anita Desai and winner of this year’s Man-Booker Prize for fiction. Ms. Desai’s work is importantly Indian: “rediscovering her Indian-ness,” writes the paper, “was vital to her success”.

Then why would she accept a Man-Booker Prize: an award which even this article remarks has “Colonialist Connotations?”

“Someone said to me, ‘Will you turn down the Booker prize because it is a commonwealth prize?’ And I said ‘I’m not crazy!’ It’s also a hedge fund, so you have big-business qualms about that. There’s all kinds of reasons to turn it down.”

Yet she still accepted it. This doesn’t make me want to buy or read her book. This just smacks of a lack of integrity. I remember thinking the same when Sanjeev Bhaskar accepted an OBE last year. If these dudes had any respect for their own work, they’d do a Benjamin Zephaniah and tell ’em where to stick their awards.

Yet I sit here wracking my brains for examples of commendible things that people have not done.

I’ve personally managed to resist the networking opportunity of adopting a MySpace page. You should all love and respect me for that. MySpace is owned by the News Corporation, the managing director of which is media shitbag, Rupert Murdoch. That’s all the reason I need not to have a MySpace page.

Kiran Desai, when asked why she didn’t refuse the Man-Booker, says:

“Because you can drag that ethical dilemma into every single aspect of your life – and that is very much what my book is about. You are unable to make any kind of rule, really, without it being messy and mixed up with the rest of the world, and mixed up with sad and difficult things. Would I buy this sweater? Where is it made? It’s by someone poor in China and someone horrible is making money out of it. Am I going to eat this bit of fruit picked by whom? It infects every single thing. But I stand by the book’s ethical sense, and it’s a book that certainly says the opposite of many things that flags stand for.””

Wow. It’s as though the slow movement never happened. Such egocentric thinking is what messes stuff up for so many people. You don’t have to do a bunch of stuff in order to save the world. It’s what you don’t do that counts. Just resist the high-fat crap that floats temptingly through the media, get back to basics and if in doubt – don’t get up and don’t cut your hair.

Manged to catch a bit of The Sky at Night last night. It’s great innit? A real TV institution. I just discovered that you can watch old episodes on the Internet as well, so that solves the problem of constantly missing the show due to its infrequency.

The subject of last night’s episode was lunar craters. After the initial nostalgia-shock of watching Mr. Moore interview other grey-haired scientists (one of whom last night illustrated the crater-making process by firing buckshot into a pudding) and the shots of outer space which would have been unimaginable only twenty years ago, I realised that the topic of lunar craters is so utterly boring and pointless that surely anyone with an interest in the final frontier – about the unknown and unexplored riches and reaches of the universe – would find such locally-focused minutiae a complete waste of astronomical airtime.

When I think of astronomy, the first things that come to mind are the freezing childhood winters during which I would camp out in the back garden with my dad in the hope of seeing Jupiter or a meteorite through our crappy telescope. And then I think of the great, mesmerising cosmic entities of which we know very little: quasars, black holes, distant solar systems. Surely moon craters might be of interest to a geologist or a geographer – but to an astronomer? It strikes me that there are far more interesting and worthy secrets out there to wonder about. It’s infinity dammit! Why spend so much time gawping at the pock-marks on our own grey satellite?

It’s weird that the discipline of astronomy can encompass anything that is vaguely extraterrestrial. Wikipedia defines it as:

“the science of celestial objects (e.g., stars, planets, comets, and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earth’s atmosphere (e.g., auroras and cosmic background radiation). It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the formation and development of the universe.”

It’s difficult to see how something as theoretical as “the formation of the universe” and something as elemental as asteroid-spotting can be seen as the same subject. I think Earth scientists should turn their attentions skyward so that the craters of the moon can be looked after by geologists and topographers while the cosmologists can concentrate on finding God’s Andromeda holiday home.

I’m suddenly reminded of the ominous Dewey Decimal Classification Number 999: “Extraterrestrial Worlds”. The study of everything outside of our tiny blue planet is lumped into Dewey 999. Utterly Pre-Copernican.

(A slight exaggeration perhaps. The science of astronomy has a section of its own – 999 focuses upon the geography of extraterrestrial worlds).

But after a brief meditation on the idea of lunar craters, it becomes slightly romantic. The moon is a stopping place for so many bits of space debris – a graveyard of stories. These rocks and bits of astronomical shrapnel have travelled eternities to wind up there. The old “if these walls could speak” maxim comes into play and one wonders about the journeys these bits of rock had before coming to their lunar resting place.

Final thought: when you see those craters on the moon and out in the Mojave Desert, where the hell are the meteorites that made them?

Sorry for this unsolicited intrusion upon your friends pages, but would anyone recommend a good online email provider?

I recently escaped from Postmaster after two or three years of pretty decent service, which has sadly degraded over the past six months or so. I took up an account with Google Mail. In spite of great reviews from most of my pals, I’m having massive problems with it – outgoing messages never reaching their destinations and replies never making it back to me. Hotmail and Yahoo!, incidentally, are both services that I abandoned many years ago.

A free email provider would be best but I’m prepared to fork out a few quid for a good service that works. Any suggestions, livejournalers?

In anticipation of your help, dear reader, please enjoy the Futurama bureaucrat song:

Unfortunate though it was, I caught a few minutes of Channel Five’s, The Wright Stuff this morning. For those not in the know, The Wright Stuff a sort-of panel discussion show on which snaggletoothed tabloid journo Matthew Wright mulls over topical issues with an apathetic studio audience and a panel of three Z-List celebrities. Today’s show predictably focussed upon Gordon Brown’s suitability for the Prime Minister vacancy but they also managed to talk about ‘Open Relationships’ and ‘People who can’t throw things away’. Tabloid Television at its finest.

Loath as I am to admit it, Matthew Wright raised an interesting point about the nature of collecting. When someone suggested that there might be a difference between hoarding and collecting, he shouted, “No there’s not! Collecting is just organised Hoarding!”

Was he right? As a librarian, collecting is an issue close to my heart. As a minimalist, hoarding is something I avoid. It strikes me that collecting is far more systematic a process than hoarding so Matthew’s proposal is in some way correct but after more careful consideration, once can see that it’s a little half-baked. A Hoarder will refuse to throw away the daily flotsam and debris that gravitates into his orbit. A collector deliberately acquires items of a particular type or persuasion. Hoarding is passive. Collecting is active.

By coincidence, I helped a friend today to empty his “toy cupboard” at his parental home in Beith. His childhood toys had long been discarded, perhaps in the last clearout, but he had a huge ‘collection’ of other artifacts: candle holders, Eiffel Tower statues and literally thousands of books. I think he was a collector once upon a time, acquiring souvenirs of his travels and a systematic collector of books but his system had long been abandoned in favour of nostalgic hoarding.

As a kid, I collected everything: badges, ticket stubs, postcards, butterflies and (most oddly) ceramic owls. Today, all of that stuff is gone (unless my mother has romantically hoarded some of it) but I still collect certain things, mainly books, records, videos and those pamphlets that religious people give you in the street (mentioned late in this entry). I’m pretty sure that all of this is the result of educational inquiry and appreciation of beautiful things rather than an irrational fear of throwing stuff out.

In his recent item, The Curse of Storage, quotes Japanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake: “A Japanese room is determined by information, whereas a Western room relies on objects.” Perhaps this also helps us to define a difference between the hoarder and the collector. The collector sees things in the Eastern sense of curating information in one form or another, be it as books, records, videos, dynamic materials or specific types of objects. When Darwin curated birds and insects as evidence for his theory of evolution, he was a collector of information. As A. C. Grayling notes, collecting is the first stage of scientific inquiry. Librarians and Museum curators are, again, collectors. A man with an obsession for Kellogg’s cornflakes packets and an archive of such items is also a collector. However, the person who simply cannot throw out their tatty old clothes or birthday cards or childhood toys is a hoarder.

A collection is beautiful. The contents of a hoarder’s nest is not so.

I hope this clears things up.

This week I’ve been reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Predictably, it’s quite brilliant and I’m finding it welcomely fibrous after a stint of reading purely for leisure in the wake of completing my Masters dissertation.

I’m surprised that the book has survived as such an iconic American text though: while it’s filled with discourse about freedom, frontierism, individualism, autonomy and liberty, it speaks against consumerism and industry and instead promotes simplicity and the rejection of modern luxury. Does anyone know whether it’s on school reading lists in the States?

Walden keys very much into my current lines of thinking about sustainability and whether the modern world allows for alternative ways of living comparable with those sought and mastered by Thoreau in the 1850s. There have been occasional successes in Waldon-esque living in recent years including Jeremy Till’s brilliant House of Straw and the Downland Gridshell (brought to my attention by ). But there have also been many tales of bureaucratic woe. I’m beginning to think that the realistic modern equivalent to simple living is ‘Practical Idling’ (see the so-named feature in #36 of The Idler): working part-time in order to sustain a simplistic but civilised lifestyle. But this doesn’t quite cut the cheese for me in that rented accommodation in cities is seldom conductive to ‘extracurricular’ environmental efforts such as the employment of solar panels or windmills.

Anyhoo. Before we get ahead of ourselves, here are a few nice quotes I pulled out of the first half of Walden:

* “Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

* “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of others?”

* “[cottage industries are] good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter”.

* “There is greater anxiety commonly [in towns] to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience”.

* “Our houses are such unweildly properties that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them”.

* “Shall we always study to obtain more … things, and not sometimes be content with less?”

* “Where is this division of labour to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself”.

And so on. There are many of these. Excellently, the copy of Waldon I have here is an old library edition and so most of the inspirational stuff had already been underlined by students of yore. If I’d have done the American thing and purchased my very own copy, I’d have had to have extracted these from scratch. How representative of Thoreau’s thinking!

Perhaps the most interesting nugget of wisdom I picked up, however, actually goes toward talking me out of wanting to live in any such fashion: “The best works of art are the expression of a man’s struggle to free himself from this [entrapped] condition”. I’m reminded of an old item by Momus in which he argues that an artist must always remain ‘foreign’ to his environment rather than travelling the world so that she might find where she most clearly fits in. Then again, I think of Lord Whimsy’s maxim voiced in his book that the artist’s canvas might be his own self and his own life and that surrounding oneself with beautiful importance is the stuff of life. How conflicting! Thoreau does however add that “the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that the higher state [of freedom] may be forgotten. I’m sure that all this might be relevent to my magazine project in some way.

But there are “Other Waldens” in the world and as purifying as the manual labour and hard study prescribed by Thoreau may be, the Downland Gridshell or the House of Straw or the Hermit’s Corner or the lifestyle of the Practical Idler may be better answers.

At university, we learned about Walden Two: a utopian piece of speculative fiction by behaviourist shitbag, B. F. Skinner. A wikipedia search for ‘Walden’ also points me in the direction of Walden Three: an organisation promoting universal peace, love and sustainability. According to their website:

“Anything that saves labor and resources makes us richer as a whole. Our engineering model is apolitical. It is just a labor and resource saving device. It frees them for whatever the political-economic body wants. Our model allows political systems to maximize their available labor and resources. Thus the underlying basis of economics: conservation. There is no need to “take” from the rich to solve our economic problems. This is a common economic fallacy. In fact, the rich will profit and benefit greatly from what we propose here”.

By coincidence, I read in The Guardian’s ‘Good Lives’ column on Saturday about Tom Beeson’s Farm W5: a “food market [that] supplies fresh, seasonal, locally sourced food, produced properly and ethically”. I can’t help but wonder whether the ‘W’ in ‘W5’ stands for Walden.

With no Walden Four, of course, there is clearly a gap in the market.

includes a picture of me on a website dedicated to “the stuff of nightmares”. I’m assured, however, that the photo’s object of fear is the ice cream monster I’m standing next to rather than your humble narrator himself.

“Delinquency is a sign of life. I am against crime because it feeds straight into the government system: for every crime committed, there is a tenfold attack on personal liberties. One bomb leads to a thousand new laws. Therefore, the real anarchist should avoid criminal acts at all costs”.

“Boredom was invented in 1760 … We have delegated the relief of boredom. We hand over our creativity to the professional musician or film-maker. We bore ourselves in order to earn the money that we will later spend trying to de-bore ourselves. That absurd modern trend called extreme sports springs to mind – in order to feel alive, because most of the year we feel dead, we hurl ourselves from a bridge every few months”.

Read a bit of Tom H’s How to be free in today’s paper.

Read it while drinking tea. Perhaps an 11 O’Clock tea. It’ll do you the world of good.

Hello, clever people of blogland.

Does anyone have a single clever word for “war criminal”? Perhaps a Japanese/Russian/German loanword? I need it for a book review in which I want to look like a smartarse.

Thants in advants, ants.

Ants.

We must have learned a lesson or two from the three-hectare health-based caveats that come affixed to cigarette packets by now.

The obvious lesson is that smoking makes you dead. The other is that government health warnings can be applied to a product as economically lucrative and politically powerful as tobacco, signaling a small triumph of the moral over the profitable.

My friends David and Siglinde came over last night for dinner and with them they brought a trendy brand of cigarette called American Spirit, the packet of which promotes the fact that they are chemical-free and made from ‘all-natural tobacco’. If it weren’t for the “Smoking will harm your unborn baby” sticker, you’d think that these cigarettes were positively good for you!

But it got me thinking. Why is it only tobacco products get these warnings? Why don’t McDonalds food products come with warnings that declare, “This product is composed of the lowest-grade meat imaginable and your purchasing of it will be instrumental in the decline of Brazilian rainforests and the continuing economic rape of several third-world countries”?

But no. In the food world, it is far easier to put stickers on products that are actually half-ethical. “This product is fair trade” my coffee boasts. Well, it should be shouldn’t it? I don’t go around declaring the fact that I’ve never killed anyone. It’s as given.

What a fucked up world we live in.

Of all products that warrant health warnings, I reckon cars warrant them most of all. Here are a few suggested health warnings that I think should be displayed in the windows of showrooms:

* “Cars cause lung cancer, asthma and heart disease”.

* “Car accidents cause 1.2 million deaths worldwide each year” *

* “Car accidents injure 50 million people worldwide each year and will increase to over 65% over the next twenty years”. *

* Cars promote the notion that individualism must be attained at the expense of others” *

* “Infrastructure associated with cars damage the water cycle”.

* “Communities with greater number of cars experience greater degrees of personal alienation”. *

* “Cars depend upon oil. Oil is a primary motivator for war”.

* “Cars are unsightly, noisy, dangerous machines developed in the name of convenience, marketed in the name of the autonomous self, instrumental in war and conductive to the ongoing collapse of our environment”.

Wow. What a preachy post. Cars suck is all I’m saying. If you don’t believe me, just remind yourself of this pile of crap.

The houses in my street are all old-fashioned Glaswegian manor houses. In light of the city’s shift from heavy industry and tobacco lording to the production of pop stars, novellists, comedians and badge makers, pretty much all of these manor houses have been broken up into apartments to cater for the influx in time-wasting, tofu-munching English bobos such as myself.

The house across the street from me has somehow managed to avoid this “apartmentising” process and still exists as a single home. However, the old lady who lives there only seems to operate in two tiny rooms, the rest of them being filled with lumber, old furniture and garbage.

When I first moved in here, the letting agent mentioned that the old lady lives alone on one level of the house and periodically refuses offers from his company and others to buy the house for a million quid, probably making her house the most expensive rubbish dump on the entire planet.

From my attic apartment, I can see down into her living room window at night and enjoy watching her eccentric old-lady behaviour. As I’m much higher up than she is, I don’t think she can see me. If she can see me, she’s certainly not letting on about it.

The catalogue of eccentric old lady behaviour includes eating a pork chop in an astonishingly feral fashion and spending almost forty minutes spraying water on a single pot plant. Her roof is covered with randomly positioned, long-abandoned ladders. Days can pass without a single light going on, suggesting that she either stays with friends periodically or else just sits there alone in the darkness (probably in order to get some privacy from her nosy neighbours). She’s great.

The past three nights however, have seen a change in regular patters of activity. Lights stay on for long stretches into the night and instead of the old lady, I see as many as three younger people going through drawers and sitting on the couch making phone calls.

Do we think she’s dead, dear readers? Any other theories would be vastly appreciated.

I hope she’s not dead. She’s become a sort of eccentric, elderly, female version of that ‘ugly naked guy’ on Friends to me.

Whenever a long term resident dies on this street, a memorial bench is added by the residents’ association to the communal garden. I’ll keep watching out for new benches and for any further activity from the intact manor house so that I might let you know which of my neighbours are dead and which of them who aren’t.

Dearest reader, you should really check out the livejournal blog of Rob Rabiee over at . It’s funny and clever and better than yours.

That is all.

x

Received my first ever rejection letter from an academic journal this week.

This is not to say that I’ve ever had a piece accepted by an academic journal but rather that I’d never submitted to anything like one before. In hindsight, I suppose I was aiming somewhat above my station but I had a few ideas and I wanted to send them somewhere.

It was an Art History journal called Konsthistorik Todskrift and my article was a short hypothesis concerning Augustus Egg’s painting, The Travelling Companions (above). It’s a pre-Rapahelite thing housed in the Birmingham City Art Gallery – the best gallery of its type that was once local to me (of course, now living in Glasgow I have far more choice).

Hardly anything has been written about the painting and it is often described as being ’cryptic’. To me, however (after much research into fictional doppelgängers for a book) its meaning was plain to see:

”Doppelgänger motifs and other representations of the multi-faceted (or at least dualistic) model of the self are quite frequently explored in modern and postmodern visual art. Douglas Gordon’s video installation pieces, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995) and Through a Looking Glass (1999), for example, examine the Apollonian / Dionysian divide that some believe exist in human nature.” Augustus Egg’s The Travelling Companions: a literary interpretation.

By Robert Wringham

Doppelgänger motifs and other representations of the multi-faceted (or at least dualistic) model of the self are quite frequently explored in modern and postmodern visual art. Douglas Gordon’s video installation pieces, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995) and Through a Looking Glass (1999), for example, examine the Apollonian / Dionysian divide that some believe exist in human nature. It is the Freudian battle of id versus superego: logic’s war with primitive animalism. As with many aspects of postmodern works, the central concept of human duality is something of a found piece, it having roots as far back as the Ancient East. The postmodern understanding of dualism draws from ancient Eastern trickster or morality fables; the literary work of German pre-romantics such as Jean-Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffman and that of later British writers such as Oscar Wilde, James Hogg, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stephenson. Indeed, Douglas Gordon’s pieces, as their titles suggest, are intrinsically connected to literature. The doppelgänger today has been cast mostly into the realms of cliché but thankfully not before the production of such artistic feature films as The Student of Prague (1913) and John S. Robertson’s memorable version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1920).

Predating much of this, however, is The Travelling Companions by Augustus Leopold Egg. There is a woeful dearth of literature concerning Egg’s painting, which seems strange given the significance of this piece in the artist’s career (it lead to his fascination with non-anecdotal art) and the subtleties involved in the image’s discourse. While other doppelgänger-themed paintings, such as How they met themselves by Dante Gabrielle Rosetti (1854) have been celebrated quite widely, Egg’s illustration of human duality – as decency and vulgarity being two sides of the same illustrious coin – seems to have gone unrecognised as such.

Painted in 1862, The Travelling Companions depicts two young women as passengers in the carriage of a train. The first thing that strikes the viewer, perhaps, is the painting’s symmetry. Not only do the women, facing each other, appear to be identical but each substantial object (the hat; the fruit and flowers; the women’s clothes) seems to have a counterpart or alter-ego mapped onto the opposite side. The basket of fruit in the universe of the first girl is represented as a floral bouquet in that of the second. Egg has mastered here the art of visual alliteration.

Though the women are aesthetically identical, it is clear that one is not an exact mirror image or screen-printed copy of the other (as in Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis of 1964) for one of them is sleeping while the other is awake. Moreover, the panorama visible from out of the carriage window (it is of Mentone in the South of France) unites the travelling companions within the same image: whatever duplicating event may be occurring in the painting is most certainly contained within the carriage itself and not without in the world at large.

Is it as simple as this? Is one of Egg’s girls the ontological copy of the other? Meditating on The Travelling Companions and remembering the folkloric idea of a doppelgänger being the harbinger of impending doom, one might imagine that the waking woman in the train carriage is the ghostly double of the other one; slouched not in sleep but in death.

Our interpretation is strengthened when we remember that Augustus Egg was constantly inspired by literature. On good terms with Charles Dickens (they together formed The Guild of Literature and Art, a philanthropic organisation in support of starving artists), Egg would often render images of Dickens’ work, most notably a triptych painting called Past and Present (1858). He also created a number of pieces based upon the plays of Shakespeare including The Taming of the Shrew (1860) and The Winter’s Tale (1845) and a piece based upon Thakeray’s Esmond1 in 1848. With this in mind, it would not be unreasonable to theorise that Egg might have come across the work of Hoffman or Richter and been inspired by doppelgänger allegory or imagery. Indeed, Shakespeare’s work, with which we know Egg was familiar, featured hints of the doppelgänger in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Comedy of Errors.

A curious coincidence concerning Augustus Egg and the fathers of Western doppelgänger literature is that he suffered in his youth from a respiratory disease not unlike the one suffered by Robert Louis Stephenson, whose symptoms and medication was said to inspire the nightmare which lead him to write the most famous doppelgänger story of them all: [The] Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde2. (Occultist, Dion Fortune later popularised the notion that respiratory-related diseases are connected with the supernatural).

Of the panorama visible from the carriage window, we can see the beautiful twilight setting of Mentone. But there is more than that. Half of the view is land while half is water: perhaps symbolic of the liminality in the doppelgänger dimension and the difference in corporeality between the two siblings.

A further idea follows. Given that one of the women is sleeping while the other is awake, perhaps the waking woman is the product of the sleeping one: that she is the dreamed projection of the other. Such duplication qualifies as a doppelgänger motif in itself but extra poignancy is brought to the equation when you consider that the girl is both the dreamer and the dream. Edgar Allan Poe (also a celebrated writer of doppelgänger fiction with William Wilson and Fall of the House of Usher) expresses this concept in poetic form: “is all that we see or seem / but a dream within a dream?”3 Indeed, the work of Poe could very well have served as inspiration in the formulating of The Travelling Companions. Moreover, Lewis Carroll wrote occasionally of a state of consciousness he referred to as ‘the Eerie state’4: a level of consciousness between sleep and wake in which one was both aware of reality but also ‘aware of fairies’.

On the other hand, perhaps the sleeping woman is the product of the waking woman’s imagination: we don’t after all know what she is reading in that book (which itself may be an indication of Egg’s literary inspirations). It may not be a case of the dreamer and the dream but rather the reader and the read. Such ambiguity in explanation is truly the stuff that doppelgänger fantasies are made of.

Anyway, I managed to convince a secretary to send me the feedback report. The editor makes it clear that my article is not suitable for the journal but is largely very kind:

“The article is interesting and put forward some possible interpretations of a motive by the painter Augustus Egg. The presentation of the painting and the painter is a bit short as well as the discussion. But this may be the intention; the article has character of an essay. This comment is not necessary meant as a critique.”

Konsthistorisk Tidskrift
Referee report

Manuscript title: August Leopold Egg’s The Travelling Companions: a literary interpretation
Manuscript number: 435/2006/01

Referee’s comments:

The article is interesting and put forward some possible interpretations of a motive by the painter Augustus Egg. The presentation of the painting and the painter is a bit short as well as the discussion. But this may be the intention; the article has character of an essay. This comment is not necessary meant as a critique.

The material presented is the painting and the literary references but no theoretical literature is referred to. The interpretation is more of a hypothetic discussion than of a scientific one. But it has its points.

I find the parentheses a symptom of the author’s want to comprise a lot and not to write too much. It is definitely better to bring the argument or the information into its full extension and exclude the parentheses.

One of my many golden rules for blogging is that the blogger should never open an entry by apologising for a recent absence of entries. A blogger doesn’t owe his reader anything of the sort and starting in such a fashion is akin to posting a moronic meme or a recounting of a boring but apparently “random” nightmare involving toothfall. Besides, a readership probably doesn’t even notice a blogger’s non-presence given that there are so bloody many other things on the net to be getting on with. Besides, I’d like to get away from the ephemeral ‘rolling now’ nature of blogging, which brings me on to another golden rule: write not just for the watchers of the rolling now but also for readers of the archive. After all, I get almost as many comments and emails about my electronic writings from people who’ve chanced across old entries through Google than from actual registered and recognised livejournalers.

So no apologies for my two-week absence, fuckers. How’d you like them apples?

The reason, however, for my absence concerns a shifted interest: a retroactive paradigm shift to the non-digital world. I love digital with all my heart of course and there seems to be something lacking in life without the constant flow of information running two-way through my laptop. Nonetheless, I’ve been enjoying the analogue world of late and I’d like to tell you all about it!

It all started when my friend David and I took a trip to Pollock Park on the south side of Glasgow. He’d brought his non-digital SLR camera along and was courteous enough to let me play around with it. Lemme tellyas, dudes: some of the photographs I came out with on that sunny afternoon were some of the best I’ve come out with in years! The reason? Permanence. Once the shutter has done its business, you can’t alter the image. Every shot has to count. With digital you can take the shot again and again until it’s perfect. With analogue, you gotta get it right first time unless you want an entire spool of twenty-four exact-same pictures only with altering degrees of blur and perspective.

Since then I’ve been on a bit of an analogue trip. I bought a mechanical typewriter on which to chunk out a few experimental words. It’s terrific fun. Thinking that if every letter typed had to matter – if deletion or modification would cause more aggravation and mess than correctitude – then the final piece would be more thoughtful, more ideas-filled, more reasoned.

I’ve also been looking at art work for The Escapologist – the magazine I am enjoying editing. It’s all real art work from the textural universe of pens and paper rather than the textual universe of pixels and paintshop. Canadian artist, Anna Oster can do great things with typefaces.

The newly reopened Kelvingrove museum and art gallery in Glasgow is also sucking up quite a bit of my leisure time of late, as did the Edinburgh [comedy and book] Festivals. I’ve had a ball at each of these things and I don’t think there’s anything particularly digital about either of them.

A slight lie. I noticed at Edinburgh an influx of shows dedicated in some way to blogging. I planned to blog about this fact and offer a few interpretations of it but, alas, my non-digital binge was somewhat distracting.

Don’t worry though, dear reader. I’m not going to abandon the blog in favour of some dusty diary stashed between bedsheets. I’m far to vane and audience-seeking for that sort of malarkey. Besides, I love my blog and my self-imposed form of blogging rather spectacularly. I’ve also landed a rather peculiar job reviewing bars and restaurants for 5pm.co.uk, which will require the passing around of information online for the next few weeks and I surely will not be able to resist the super-procrasto temptation of writing plenty in these pages instead.

What do you look for in a piece of fiction, dear reader? I’m asking partly out of interest and partly as a half-hearted piece of market research in preparation for writing some of my own.

It was while reading Patrick Süskind’s celebrated and entirely disappointing 1985 novel, Perfume this week that I finally realised exactly what I personally look for.

Ideas.

I think that novels (and short stories, novellas etc) should have a strong conceptual element and that anything else – plot, character development, use of language – are all elements of artistry, which, while vital, should really just be part of the machinery and second to this conceptual element.

Would you rather read a vital and original work by a clumsy genius with Asperger’s Syndrome or a soulless and linear trek through convention by a completely articulate wordsmith?

The obvious and most middleground answer is probably the former written by the latter (though as a fan of Beefheart and Vonnegut, I’d probably still be tempted to go for the raw mania of a monkey pumped full of dopamine).

A novel should build up an environment complete with characters in which an idea or ideas can be played out. This was where Perfume failed for me. It’s just a story which goes and-then-and-then-and-then-and-then-and-then: a linear chronology in which Act Three barely relates to Act One other than that it succeeds it.

I think this is why I like 1950s science fiction so much. Writers like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon are conceptual machine guns firing out amazing ideas in rapid succession: ideas that, if not potentially and entirely life-changing, are just fascinatingly new and peculiar. Yet this stuff can’t really be looked at as “literature” in that it was such a mass-produced medium only brought about due to the marketing of personal type writers. Ellison alone wrote something like two-hundred thousand short stories: none of which have much merit in terms of literary poise but which serve as flabbergasting philosophical experiments – the “what ifs?” and the “why nots?”.

Perfume is almost completely conceptually dead. Süskind does stupid things like painting scenes and then having them collapse into the river to make way for the next chapter without any kind of event being staged in them. He also hops from point of view to point of view too often: how am I supposed to give a shit about Granuille (the anti-protagonist) if I’m spending so much time in the head of characters that don’t matter (A perfumer called Baldini who dies in the first act and a paranoid villager called Richis in the last act who is likeable but pointless)?

Characters should exist as embodiments of ideas. The guy in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, for example, is a representation of passivity, naivety, ‘new man’-ness and the modern condition. The characters in Perfume however, are merely characters: pieces being moved around on a board completely convincingly but without any reason to do so.

So, reader, what do you look for?

Every now and again I go through a period of thinking I might have finally found the chutzpa to go into performing proper standup comedy. Sometimes I even go through with actually doing a bit but find that I’m so nervous on stage that the rewards are hardly worth the sweat, shaking, the stress-induced eczema or the number of runny poos.

More often than not, however, I put together the material and then something so horrendously confidence-shattering takes place or I become so disillusioned with what I am (or comedy in general is) trying to achieve, that I can’t take it any further.

I went through to Edinburgh yesterday to meet my old friend Adele who’d come up from London to do festival things. Naturally we took in a couple of shows: the OK Wilson Dixon at the Babybelly and the ever-charming Boothby Graffoe at The Stand. That both gigs took place in the early evening and in small, intimate venues meant that the audiences were small, middle-class, quite forgiving and had not yet been given the opportunity to get very drunk.

So I found myself thinking “Yeah, I could deal with an audience like this. This would be okay”. I also noticed that Boothby Graffoe, when doing his act, appeared very nervous – was literally trembling – in spite of his decade or so doing stand-up. When I see other nervous but industrious comics like this (Simon Munnery sometimes sweats like a piece of toast and is easily thrown by heckles. Similarly, Richard Herring recently wrote about having to do as many as five poos before going on stage) I can only conclude that my nerves are normal and I should just get on with it.

But the real clincher in yesterday’s initiation of my latest ‘chuztpa period’ was that the best joke of the evening with the biggest laugh came not from either of the acts but from your humble narrator:

We were waiting outside the doors of The Stand, with a fairly long queue trailing behind us when a frail old lady with a walking stick painfully made her way down the stairs. Everyone waiting in the stairwell noticed how astonishingly frail she was, resulting in an odd hush. When she got to the bottom she (as many people do) said “Ooh, my goodness. Is this a queue?”

“Yeah, but you have to buy your tickets here first,” I explained.

“I already have my ticket,” she said.

Suddenly possessed by the the ghost of Peter Cook I sternly said: “Well get to the back then”.

Everyone around us laughed and I even got a clap from one bloke. The very idea that anyone could be so cruel and principal-driven to ask this sweet old lady to climb the stairs to go to the back of the queue was simply hilarious.

Thankfully the old lady realised I was joking. I think.

Of course, that joke would never work in a routine because you’d have to set up the scene, which in itself isn’t funny. It was the combined facts that it had been a real-life situation and that I’d heartlessly referred to everyone else’s preoccupation with her astonishing frailty. The thing about it that makes me think about doing stand-up again is that it was a good example of thinking on one’s feet, which you have to do in order to deal spontaneously with hecklers and other things happening in the room.

On this subject, I saw Simon Munnery the other night in Glasgow. His hat set on fire while it was laying on a table too close to a candle. It resulted in about ten minutes of improv about the audience being kind enough to tell him about it and about how it might have been a double bluff. A lesser comedian would probably have just been annoyed at the interruption.

It’s a bit of a shit Fringe this year to be honest and there’s very little I feel passionate about. Go see Munnery, Zaltzman, Graffoe, Kevin McAleer and the Book Club though. They’re all good. Failing that, just look out for me and I’ll subject you to some amazing off-the-cuff granny-bashing.

You are sentenced to travel backwards in time to the year 1900 with no possible hope of return. Bizarrely, you are permitted to take along one modern object or device. What do you opt to take?