Nutshell

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-11-15T03:35:00

2009-11-15T03:31:35Z

Caught up in the general milieu of studying and working at the moment I didn't end up at the party last night, and actually got in quite early to obtain a good night's sleep. However, I wasn't particularly surprised when I was woke up at 7am, a good two hours before I needed to be up to get ready for work, by the rest of my housemates, complete with a bustling coterie of assorted friends, coming back here to carry on the drug-induced Bacchanalian ravings (well, I say 'ravings'; when I went down for breakfast at 9.30am they were all slumped in front of 'Life'. This is the twenty-first century: David Attenborough is our Dionysus. I digress). Given that I'm generally one of the culprits waking up other people up in this manner I was loathe to immediately cast a downpour over their vaguely incoherent fun and decided to just grin and bear it, until I heard, quite clearly through the general miasma of abject frolicking, one of my housemates saying 'Do you reckon Paddy's got AIDS yet?'

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. Hurt, offended and upset you could throw into the mix as well. I feel - or felt - that generally we all gel together as a group of people, we have our run-ins occasionally but no doubt so will any group of young people sharing a big house together, and I would definitely call us all good friends. And now with this housemate in particular suddenly it seems that all this trust and friendship is wrapped up in a huge shining blade sticking out my back; 'et tu brute', indeed. I try to be relatively Marxist in my friendship, I'm not exactly St Francis of fucking Assisi, but I judge everybody upon their own merits, and if I like them I get to know them; I don't let other peoples' views colour my vision. But that friendship is given on the understanding of a mutual trust and respect, judge me on my merits as well, do not devalue me to the base level of my sexuality alone.

So what did I do? Well, straight after I heard it, I got up and shouted at them to go downstairs (they were in the bedroom next door to mine). The housemate in particular had his back to me and didn't turn around, either because he was too fucked, or because he'd realised, with a crushing certainty, that I must have heard what he'd said. To give his brains some credit, I'd imagine it's the latter.

It's the gross inevitability of the phrasing that particularly strikes; twists the serrated knife a little deeper into my spine. Yet? Yet?! What the fuck is that supposed to mean? That I'm a homosexual means that my predestined fate is to end up on a hospital bed wasting away due to Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome? None of them really know of my year-long nightmarish struggle with the possibility of being HIV+, at least not in anything like the detail I recorded it on here - in fact, it's enough to say that I told various people I'd had an HIV test and it'd come out negative and you expect them to react with the same euphoric rush of ecstastic relief that you did, but in fact that whole year of grappling with demons, terror and fear, shifting, shooting pains of the mind, terrible mightly echelons of whirling anxiety, all can be condensed down into a dismissive 'oh, cool. Do you wanna watch a DVD?' - but that doesn't in anyway excuse making a joke at my expense, ostensibly behind my back, about my contracting a virus that would kill me in the most agonising and humiliating way.

It's homophobia, not of the menacing, violent kind, but of the unprecedently ignorant kind, which provides the environment for the thuggery and beatings to develop. This guy has built a slightly 'wacky' reputation on saying outrageous things for the sake of humour, but I can't personally see the humour here, and his entire tact is that he says these outrageous things in front of the people they rib thereby negating the outrageousness, because he is, indirectly, saying it to their faces. That he said this behind my back, and for someone who considers themselves an intelligent liberal, speaks of the sordid, dirty and unsavoury.

Maybe I'm painting myself as a martyr a little, but I don't expect this. Not from my friends.

I, by necessity, need to keep this brief.

2009-11-10T00:39:05Z

How useful are the concepts 'Modernsim' and 'Postmodernism' to a writer?

I've been trying for some weeks - no, more than a month now in fact probably - to reconcile this question with a close reading of Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' and Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours'. Yet here I am, two weeks before the essay's due in (as opposed to rushing it out the night before, which is something I suppose), still struggling to define what strands I want to weave, what arguments I am going to make.

So I thought it might be helpful to quickly brainstorm how useful I myself find the concepts Modernism and Postmodernism, in my capacity as a writer. Perhaps this will give me some of the raw material for an introduction to the essay in question and then hopefully shape some paths for the route of thought to take.

What may be obvious from my last entry about my exploration of Mrs Dalloway in particular is that what I find 'useful' in a way, is the idea of interiority of characters displayed here against the omniscience of the Victorian author. We can see both the character and inside their heads, in their very thoughts themselves as they interact with the world. And not just one character either, because otherwise one could argue that any novel written from the first-person perspective allows the reader into the protagonist's thoughts - 'Robinson Crusoe' or even 'Pamela' possibly, both written almost two hundred years before Mrs Dalloway's publication. The insight lifts and drifts from one person to another, a technical feat achieved by impercibility of focus change and pronouns not seemingly directly attuned to one or the other character. By doing this Woolf hints at the interconnectedness of consciousness and, indeed, the subconscious, given the echos of war that return to haunt poor, mad Septimus Warren Smith.

Perhaps items of these specific details can be singled out and identified in literature before; you can't really herald Virgina Woolf, talented as she might have been, with inventing the entire human consciousness. Consciousness has always been with us, she simply brings a certain awareness to its workings, the cogs and mechanisms whirring away that sometimes can go haywire. To build upon this metaphor in a different manner, she opens up the clock face and goes sifting about in time itself rather than simply the material objects she finds there. She strengthens and illuminates the crucial difference between our own private interactions with ourselves and our affected interactions with other human beings on a social level.

Remember the question; don't get distracted. How do I find this useful as a writer? The exploration and deepening of character, the relation of one protagonist to their world, the hollowing out of a beautiful cave behind them so that one can achieve 'humanity, humour, depth.' Perhaps a means of attempting to access a higher level of truth through language and the text. Style is foregrounded and played with to help Woolf in her textual aims. All of this will be in the texts before it for as one of the critics bridging the gap between Modernism and Postmodernsim says, 'the writer does not originate his discourse but mixes already extant discourses.'

Another critic says of Modernism that the 'dominant' relates to the epistemological and that that of Postmodernism relates to the ontological (on the broadest possible terms of hypothetical philosophical polarities, as the epistemological and the ontological are by no means unrelated). The epistemological is related to 'thinking, knowing, conceptualizing', the ontological to states of being. Therefore could one say that as a writer it is useful to be able to look back and see the Modernists seek to know a higher truth in their works than what had gone before, relating their themes firmly to the modern day they found themselves in and the changes inherent in that, but the Postmodernists dismantled this by the simple argument that the very tool they used was ultimately ineffectual and flawed: language. By this, they mean the sign or word can never truly meet nor describe the signified or object. The word 'table' written upon the page is not and never will be the same truth as an actual literal table in front of you. It is essentially a metaphor, and by that definition untrustworthy.

How is this useful to me as a writer? Perhaps as a reactionary method. (Certain) Postmodernist thought is set upon making me aware of my own words' failure to ever be the same as the actual experience I am describing, but yet if the words themselves create a projected world within which the reader inhabits (and each reader's projected world will be different, thereby partially explaining the concept of the 'active reader' creating this world with the writer) then surely that world exists outside of language and the real world itself, it becomes something special to experience for the reader themselves, a place only they can access where no Postmodernists can follow them. It is tied to the words on the page like a hot air balloon is roped to the ground before it takes off, once the reader begins the activity of reading they are in the basket with the world floating vast and opaque above them, as they fire bursts of cortical flame into it to keep it airborne. And this projected world of course exists via the medium of consciousness whose party Miss Woolf has extended an invitation to in the first place.

(Postmodernist attacks on language and its reliability are fundamentally self-effacing thoughts themselves for they are delivered in the very language they propose to undermine.)

So Michael Cunningham in 'The Hours' extends a projected world within our own real world both in which the novel 'Mrs Dalloway' exists, but then the concept of the novel 'Mrs Dalloway' extends invitations to other worlds within the novel 'The Hours', existing as it does in three different states; as a published book for Mrs Brown whom we travel with into the projected world of Mrs Dalloway again through snippets of her reading; as an unwritten novel stirring in the consciousness of Virgina Woolf; and again as an updated version of itself in New York with a slightly altered main character.

Perhaps what is most interesting to a writer here is how the epistemological themes of the original novel are drawn out through the use of the ontological in the latterday novel. What both books do is define elements of either concept, and I feel this is what I should be concentrating on rather than attempting to define how the as-yet-undefined concept of Modernism was useful to Virginia Woolf when writing Mrs Dalloway.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, it's a vast and complex mountain of information to slide down. I've gone on far longer than I intended and generally set up more questions than I've answered (if any at that) but it does help to write it down. Clarifies matters a little.

Maybe I'll write five different introductions and see which one is best. Or just include them all. Now that'd be Postmodern.

So you're wishing that you never did / All the embarrassing things you've done...

2009-10-23T01:18:13Z

Oh things. Such things that there are, out there, the leaves of the yellowing trees that blow fitfully along this quiet residential street, the kids styled like death, hoods up, asking you to buy them fags from the shop down the road and - suddenly, you're put on a spot; as an ostensibly 'responsible' adult do you say 'no' and save their young lungs, or do you think back to when you were their age and wanted a similar request and do you indulge their whim because, after all, it is all part of that large, esoteric and hypostazised feeling of growing up?

But actually, really, when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, you say 'no' for quite a different reason. Because you can't be bothered.

I went home with a guy again on Monday, the first time in at least six or seven months, and it made me feel violently, virulently sick; mutilating waves of nausea descending in droves over my ribs-thin frame, glittering Ferrari car crashes piling up spectacularly in the M25 of my dazzled brain, a thick layer of vile mucus forming over the pink shaft of my muscular tongue. Working in a gay environment kinda briefly re-opened that idea of everyone else indulging in some wonderful sex party which I wasn't privy to, but getting drunk in a club and going back to some ridiculous Trekkie's house in Zone 4 who still lives with his mother is hardly a gold-gilded invitation.

I felt so ridiculously bad for the past two days, in terms of self-esteem especially, until I was reading an academic article upon 'Mrs Dalloway' today and suddenly I realised that there's no rush. Yes, I'm twenty-two, and I still have some wonders of youth left about myself, but love, when it does flight wishfully down from an abrupt heavens, will not take consideration of age into account. And I do have that exquisite wonder, described in Mrs Dalloway, of a fleeting encounter in the past, but still here in the present, overruling all over sensations, suddenly encountered when eighteen, in a hot shower of ecstatic vision, a beautiful girl passed out in a bed in the next room, tracing lunacy over an inner thigh.

There's no rush. That's the point.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-10-15T23:31:00

2009-10-15T23:42:13Z

Summer's gone and Autumn's here. I ain't noticed much red, gold or brown yet on the trees, but I have experienced a bit of magic. Last week I was walking home and everything felt this little bit cold and crisp and there was the scent of bonfire smoke drifting through the trees, and suddenly I had this sense again that anything was possible; you know, like when you were small, and it seemed like nothing was unattainable when you were finally grown-up? Suddenly it felt like that and it was cold and crisp and bonfire smoke invaded my nostrils and the buildings around me breathed heat and the trees rustled in the wind and suddenly, fleetingly I felt good.

But good is almost a palpable quality to me these days; palpable as in something that can almost be touched, caught and drawn out of the liquid streams of sky surrounding you and I. Things, as in those pieces of the universe and the soul, those bits and pieces that grab us and wake us, are good. Everything seems a little bit, oddly, good.

I've started a new job, as I managed to half-prophesise, in a gay bar in Soho. It's at the Ku Bar on Frith Street, in the heart of Soho itself. In a way, what I've been most lucky in in my back history is the ability to just walk into jobs whenever I need them. And yet I don't attribute this to any especially good quality of bar work upon my part; it's simply because of my looks.

No, don't get angry, this isn't just another secretly self-serving piece about how good-looking I am but actually a relatively searching exploration of how, whilst it's obviously great to get stuff because of any of your attributes, it would be nice to eventually be recognized for what I have behind my eyes rather than just those eyes themselves.

Ah! That's exactly what I would say isn't it? Given the back-catalogue of this livejournal, I would use that 'complaint' as a perfect excuse to start claiming that I'm simply too good-looking to get a job because of my brains. The one abiding instinct that academic work has given me is to see the counter-argument in someone's statement, and here I try to search it out and then kill it by its own statement in this text. If I acknowledge it, then it goes some way towards abrogating it.

But this new work is five thousand times more enoyable than The Wolseley. Even though I've obviously taken a vast paycut to end up here, I have ended up in the middle of Soho, and I manage to meet a ridiculous amount of people. Though the most bandied about comment I get, directly opposed to The Wolseley, is 'are you Gay?'

And I put the 'Gay' in captilalised 'G', because that is the Gay ethos. I am not Gay. I am gay, in that I am a man who is attracted to men. But I am not Gay, in the acceptance of an eternally effeminate ethos, in the constant adoration of certain 'strong' female singers, in the need to be known as one of my own.

I like everyone I work with currently, I like all those I find coming though those doors (even though some of them scare me), but, as I've said before, I am never going to sacrifice my masculinity for the sake of my sexuality.

Someone, who I trust and love a great deal, once said to me, 'but, don't you understand, it is nothing but a choice?' And he indeed thought he was gay once, and has now, ostensibly, 'cured' himself of everything: he goes out with girls all the time and makes them fall all head over heels in love with him. Obviously the one issue about 'sexuality being a fluid thing' at least for boys, is that of the erection; you get an erection for what you're turned on by, not by what you will. Perhaps, if I was put in a scientific atrium just with beautiful naked ladies I would, after time, have a lot of sex with them.

In that sense, sexuality would be fluid.

But, I don't think I'd ever fall in love with any of them. Boys would always have the lunacy edged upon my mind.

And I think I want them to have my mind, now.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-09-16T19:37:00

2009-09-16T18:35:46Z

It's been some time yet again, and as I'm currently waiting for my flatmates to return from a club night which a bus didn't stop to take me to after work, I've got a little time to devote to livejournal.

I didn't get the job at the FCO, they e-mailed last week in a surprisingly harsh manner. I say 'surprisingly harsh' because you expect to get the standard platitude-filled e-mails from these sort of jobs, you know; 'well done for getting this far but unfortunately we cannot offer you a place right now, do apply again soon.' But instead they cut straight to the chase using a short but sharp couple of sentences ending in 'you did not meet the required benchmark'. The Foreign Office: thems peops don't beat about no bush, y'all.

I'm not particularly bothered though. That sounds exactly like someone would say in my position doesn't it? Trying to be blase and apathetic, going 'yeah man, I'm totally not bothered, didn't want it anyway' but then I was always ambivalent to whether I would get it or not as I've stated on here before a large part of the reward from gaining it would have been my parents' pride. I can't pinpoint exactly where this sudden familial piety of Aeneas has inflicted me, but I've realised from being away from them that I love my parents intensely and I want to give them back as much as they've done for me in the past.

How can one say that I've 'realised I love my parents'? Isn't that a ridiculous statement to make given that it should be something that comes as naturally as green shoots on birch trees in Spring, as blinding sheets of hail in January's bitter days? Yes, yes, it should. But those horrific, nightmarish evocations of hell's hot fires that sporadically blistered into blazing maelstroms in those teen years, when I could never begin to explain to them what was really consuming my young soul, and they simply didn't understand my horrid actions borne of callous resentment for that little world which had indelibly stamped its tattoo of despair upon my shining foreheard, then there grew a schism which drove us almost irretreivably apart. Words were exchanged in the furor of thoughtless fury that should never be exchanged between a child and their makers, on both sides of the increasingly cracked china plate holding us together. Some of those statements I'll never forget, but I'm sure that there as just as many ill-advised bursts of terror from an impetulant and beliggerent fog of unease that are imprinted into their memories from those frightening years.

Sometimes I think, and I'm sure this is an enduring fantasy of most people given its apparent enduring appeal in the national consciousness, that I'd like to go back to being sixteen or seventeen again knowing what I know now. But then, one realises through the looking-glass, you wouldn't be sixteen or seventeen, you'd simply be a twenty-two year-old in a sixteen-year old body. Everyone has their year of a specific age, unless a venal death claims them too soon (I still think of him, oh yes, an awful lot, even more so now we've aged. I have that black-and-white photographic smile of his staring at me everyday, staying stubbornly forever more not quite seventeen.), and you do with it what you will.

So with my parents, by the time I left for university at that tender age of eighteen, I barely considered them in my dealings with life itself. They were so far removed from my idea of what I wanted for myself that their own tenuous inklings of what they'd like me to do with my life barely inflicted upon my arrogant zeal. More than anything in the world I wanted love and passion, emotions which I still fitfully wait for -

I'm going to go off on a deliberate tangent here because otherwise I may forget to talk about it later and I really quite want to record this down on these pages. It's to do with love and passion. I've spoken briefly about my own relationships, and 'abortive courtships', and compared to most people I've had a bizarrely small amount of real lasting, meaningful attachments when juxtaposed against most of my friends. But I think the most important word in that last sentence is 'meaningful'. Meaningful for me must be love, and love only, an indescribable passion that makes every hair on your body tingle when that person leans in slightly too close to you, when they lean in too close and the heat emanating from their body spectacularly takes over every neurone in your brain until it becomes impossible to even imagine thinking about anything else but them. I don't believe in God, I don't believe in faith, and I don't care that old Richard Dawkins tries to explain love away as 'a bypass in the brain's circuitry', this is the one thing that keeps me going through this dragon heart of a world, the one concept that offers me an ever flaming hope. And I won't settle for second best.

I think a lot of people do settle for that second best. They find someone they get on with well, they're variably funny and interesting, they find them kind of sexy and they think, well this is it, what more can I ask for?

Well there is something more you can ask for, which is, simply, everything. Everything one person could ever give you. It gets very lonely and even sometimes nihilistic waiting for that 'One', but, in my mind, you've got to and never give up. I feel sometimes I've stymied myself slightly by surrounding myself with straight friends so I can't go out to gay bars as often as I'd like and potentially meet those boys who might be out there but I do love my friends with all my heart and I would never want to go without them. And, to be fair, we do go out to gay bars increasingly often because of my dogged insistence but there just seems to be a prevalent profusion of camp caricatures mincing about with ubiquitous vodka and cokes in hand, or sinister old predatory types lurking in dark corners.

And this is precisely why these pages are so full of vague terror about aging. It's not specifically about getting older as such, but that I feel I should be experiencing this cosmic love at this age, when I'm still young and full of wonder. There is a ditchwater fear in the back of my mind that one day I myself will end up one of those 'sinister older types lurking in dark corners' in the gay bars I now visit. How horrific a future to envisage.

Maybe I just need to throw myself into the weird world of Soho completely. I'm giving up The Wolseley, but I'm staying in London because my life is now here. I went through a brief period of considering moving back to live with my parents, to save on paying rent and save for paying my Oxford fees, but after a year in London, I can never satisfyingly live in Bristol, nay even Nailsea.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-08-01T12:43:00

2009-08-01T13:37:12Z

So I finally ballsed the fuck up and took an HIV test.

I don't know where I contracted this latent streak of hypochondria from in the past year - I found myself taking a testicular cancer scan last Autumn - but the long hours and relentless monotony of shifts at The Wolseley are the perfect environment for little, niggling anxieties to get blown up, like a multiplying virus, into nigh-on-hysterical, terrifying squalls of dark, ominous neuroses spreading its miasmic taint over all of your mind at large. Everytime I would be considering plans for my future it would rear its ugly head above my thoughts, in my own typically all-or-nothing way: 'there's no point. You'll be dead within the decade.'

The really terrifying thing though was that it was a plausible reality which could come to pass. I've been very stupid in the past, reckless and promiscuous, rarely using condoms, imagining that youth's innate immortality would sheath me forever more. I literally gave no thought to the possible dangers I was risking; I was sleeping with mostly young, good-looking people, HIV was something that affected older, dirtier men. It was foreign and alien, a non-immediate plague that existed mainly in America, in New York's underground sleaze clubs. Not in Bristol's closeted schoolboys, not in Shoreditch's 'polysexual' student nights.

But seed by seed the gamut of reality flowers into the light; a newspaper article here stating one in ten gay men in London are HIV +, a lover asking if you've had the test, a dimly remembered novel of depleting T-Cells and casual despair. Bang.

So what was the tipping point from barely acknowledged cortical cadences to an actual raw, horrifying illness?

When on the annual staff holiday to the Hellhole Commonly Known as Newquay (the bar asked me to go again this year, as an honourary member; I declined upon the basis that five holidays in Newquay are quite enough for anybody's lifetime. Also I only get a limited amount of holiday now I'm a working man, I should probably be at least examined for certifiablity if I used this to go to Newquay) I noticed some tiny, itchy red pinpricks emerging on my lower left arm. I gave them little credence at first until a couple of days after my return from said Hellhole Commonly Known as Newquay they had progressed into angry red sores, blisters sporadically spreading across both arms and up onto my shoulders. They weren't exactly proliferate, there was about a ten to twenty cm circumference between each of them, but enough to be at first a nuisance, and later worrying.

I guess it was the Proust-reading Frenchman, who had insisted blanketly on playing everything safe, who was mildly worried that he might be infected himself (he also read Herve Guibert) even though his lifestyle had been remarkedly chaste compared to my own, who first installed the wheedling idea not that I was infected but that I should at least get a test. The possibity that I could have HIV lurked somewhere in my sub-conscious, all it required was physical symptoms such as these spots to spark the roaring anxiety, like a blue boiler flame given excess gas, massively blowing its ridicuous little plastic window off.

It turned out that the spots were impetigo, a fairly common, harmless and intensely contagious disease passed by skin contact or towel sharing that affected about a quarter of the people who went on that holiday. However by the time I found out this the neuroses had shifted into gear, the Fear had gained a firm holding, I had investigated to the best of my ability the various symptoms and evidence for HIV infection. I had gone to the effort of sifting through these very pages of livejournal to work out where I was very sick with flu-like symptoms two years ago (the only initial sign of primary infection before AIDS develops) and how long it was after I'd last slept with someone at that period. The time period was seven weeks, one website had said two to six weeks, another two months.

The impetigo returned, a seemingly different form and worse than before. I looked like I'd contracted that weird flesh-eating disease in the film 'Cabin Fever' underneath my left armpit. The Doctor said if it came back again she'd have to do tests for viral infections. Luckily the impetigo went for good this time but if it hadn't I still wouldn't have gone back for viral tests. It's ludicrous and unsightly how cowardly and blinkered the anticipation of facing your own mortality makes you, especially when you've only got yourself to blame.

Although, as I didn't concretely know I had it it didn't affect me all the time. I could easily forget about it when free to do something else, reading or even watching TV. It was when stuck in long, endless shifts at work, with only your thoughts for diverting company that it really cracked deafeningly like a heavy nimbus overhead. Use all that analytical academic education to construct intricate arguments for the various arguments For or Against, from the available evidence you've loosely assembled in your mind.

Yet you get out and those looming clouds fitter away, like gossamer threads into a strong, unerring seabreeze. You're too busy socialising, seeing the sights and sounds, you're young, free and laughing. Occasionally the contemplation will make a stab at your attention but you can effectively brush it away.

Until I read 'The Farewell Symphony' though. The Farewell Symphony was that dimly remembered novel I have already talked about. I checked it out of Bristol Central Library when fourteen or fifteen in the hope of titillating passages, and - I was about to say something like 'and access to a world where the gay psyche could be explored and not condemned' but no, that's just my current self projecting onto my fourteen year-old predecessor. Let's be honest, I checked it out solely for the hope of titillating passages, none of which I found. Although the novel has fairly frequent and graphic gay sex scenes it is credit to Edmund White's mastery of writing that one is desensitized to them, like the explicit depictions of violence in Brett Easton Ellis' 'American Psycho', so that they become exceedingly non-erotic. Partly I imagine because one of the strands of the novel is to subtly deplore that constant soulless sex which he used to engage in.

I don't use 'constant' lightly; I describe myself as having been promisicuous but from the autobiographical nature of The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White was ostensibly having sex with a different man every night for twenty years. Of course it's explored in the novel, the reasons behind this latent need for endless and varied physical contact (you know, other than someone just going 'slaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag') but I didn't really concentrate on this when I was in my mid-teens, and it gave me the enduring idea which by no means completely shaped but certainly added some weight to my later teens; that there was some huge sex party going on somewhere that I wasn't being invited to. Dangerous thoughts for a horny, impressionable teenager.

But it's called 'The Farewell Symphony' for a reason. Named after Haydn's musical masterpiece where one violin-player after another leaves the stage blowing out their candle as they go until there's just one player left on the wide stage, vastly alone, you can imagine what this parallels within the novel. Though White holds off throughout the whole novel, building up characters and lovers and friends and editors and grand tragic figures of the late 70s gay liberation world accelerating in love and sex until the very last chapter when he slams the brakes on fast.

'He died' becomes the constant motif. Every character in the novel is revisited. 'He's now dead'. A brief bit on what they did since White knew them, then perhaps a sentence on how thin they were when they died. I'm not doing it justice here and I don't have much time to do so, I'll come back to it. But the essential point is that after reading the very last word I felt I couldn't put it off anymore, I had to take that test.

Negative, in case you were wondering. Negative, but a little bit wiser too.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-07-04T23:45:00

2009-07-04T23:11:38Z

My trip to Paris was soundtracked entirely by Michael Jackson. I caught the first train from St Pancras at 5.25 in the morning last Thursday and there was a whiff of adventure and romance about it - fleeing London in the early hours of the morning; 'onwards, driver! To the white cliffs of Dover, to Calais, and beyond, wherever you may take me! - but I should have guessed from the expensive minicab I had to hastily arrange to St Pancras, once I'd overslept my dutifully set alarm, the radio of which was blaring out 'non-stop Michael Jackson hits, back to back' that something was up.

Paris itself was glorious: sunny and symmetrically beautifully, and strangely clean compared to the dank streets of Londinium. But every other car was blaring out one or another, or all, of Michael Jackson's extensive back catalogue. I didn't even know he was dead until the Proust-reading Frenchman informed me of it.

At first I thought he was lying. Then I accepted it. I wasn't particularly upset. In fact I couldn't have really cared less. Michael Jackson? Well, he was kinda dead anyway. No one will be able to see him at the O2? Oh, sob, sob. It's hardly likely he would have been any good. In fact, the only allure out of those lurid concerts he had planned would have been the chance to see him collapse on stage. Madonna is the same age as him but she does seventeen hours of some weird yoga move a day to keep on doing what she does; Michael Jackson had a penchant for plastic surgery and a pet chimp. The odds never really added up in his favour.

Yes he was a tragic figure and all that... yawn. Admittedly, he's made some of the greatest pop music the globe has ever known; him and Quincy Jones of course, who must be credited as probably the creative genius behind most of it. But before he died he was mostly a laughing stock.

That will sound ridiculously and horribly harsh in the wake of his, ahem, 'departure', but I very much doubt any of those weekly newspapers that instantly published 'FIVE-PAGE SPECIALS ON MICHEAL JACKSON'S GENIUS' had not written similar 'specials' in previous years, albeit not quite as hysterical, in some form, of his 'freakiness' and 'lack of reality'.

I felt sorry for him. I still have respect for his memory now that he's died. However, I'm not going to turn around and pretend he was some kind of constant golden aura benefiting the whole planet simply because he's gone. He was an inherently flawed human being. I'm not saying that this was his own fault, but a lot of these sudden ubiquitous obituaries seem to be omitting this fact.

Maybe one of the best tributes to the King of Pop, that the gent himself might have appreciated, was at the Parisian Gay Pride. The Proust-reading Frenchman and myself made an appearance at this event, and were intrigued to find that the third float on the carnivalesque parade was a white lorry entirely covered with black balloons, blaring out various hits from Michael Jackson's back catalogue. Given that they'd only had about a day to sort this out, I felt that the Gay Community of Paris had done quite well in their impromptu requiem tribute to MJ.

The rest of the Pride was intensely fun: believe it or not it was the first one I had ever attended, anywhere in the world, and I felt privileged to witness Liza Minelli make a complete arse of her speech at the beginning, fucked off her head on drugs as she quite clearly was. 'Aujourd'hui...' she began, then trailed off and went 'fuck it: TODAY...'

I was regaled by calls of 'En Francais!' around me as she proceeded with her largely unintelligible speech, which she majestically ignored, smiling all the while, pepped up, no doubt, by a large amount of lithium.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-06-22T01:07:00

2009-06-22T00:36:27Z

Some memories inadvertantly stick with you forever don't they? I'm not talking about those spectacular moments of taut emotion that scream loudly and fantastically through your buzzering system, I'm referring to certain little, un-anticipated screenshots that you view only fleetingly but then still have flickering blazingly in your mind's eye years later.

For me, one of those is being in Yates' 'Goddamned Infernal' Wine Bar (the 'wine bar' part is inherently dubious) in Bristol, simply because the drinks were cheap and we were strapped for cash, stumbling through the hideous faux-floral carpets to the peeling toilets, and finding, plastered in unwieldly felt-tip writing at eye-level height at that very spot where I was pissing, 'FUCK OFF HOME POLES LEAVE OUR JOBS ALONE'.

This point has been made in many left-wing articles and informed, liberal-leaning magazines hundreds and thousands of times before but when you're closer to it, when its on your very doorstep each day, it clubs a harder beat than scanning it over in a supplement and solemnly thinking 'very true', then moving on to more direct, important things and freely letting it drift away into its own immaterial sunset.

I'd like to see that guy who wrote that comment on the Yates' Wine Bar's toilet walls do a nine, ten, even twelve, even sometimes fifteen, hour shift, doing nothing but constantly polishing wine glasses for the entire time. Nothing else. Well actually, there is something else and that involves moving the trays of clean glasses out of the industrial glasswashers, replacing them with the endless trays of dirty glasses and then getting on with polishing the wine glasses yet again.

Or go and work in the room entirely reserved for The Wolseley's mountains upon mountains upon avalanches of daily rubbish. A room that stinks so vehemently it's hard to walk past it without holding your breath for fear of gagging. Some of those kids (and some of them are most definitely kids: eighteen, nineteen, wasting their glorious youth away endlessly polishing glasses and standing amongst rotting detritus) have to walk in there and sort out the various differing bags of rubbish for an hour or so at a time.

Perhaps we do have an excess of immigrants coming to Britain enivisaging a better and brighter future for themselves. But most of them are taking the futures none of the rest of us want.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-06-16T13:36:00

2009-06-16T13:50:49Z

What I think I find most denigrating about Placebo's new album to their once hallowed name is the lyrics. Were they always this strange, uninspiring and hollow? No, I don't hold to that. It's not just a case of me growing up and tiring of their gushing tirade, I still admire many of the lyrics on 'Without You I'm Nothing', although I was thrown slightly when I discovered that all that raw emotional intensity and searing honesty stemmed entirely from Molko imagining his past lovers' perceptions of him.

(Having said that, the whole scenario doesn't sound entirely dissimilar from something I might do in a couple of years time when the Narcissus complex has spread its blackening coils more firmly about my ribcage.)

And there in lies the heart of the problem with the songwriting in 'Battle for the Sun'; most of the lyrics have no emotional truth behind them. This lack was definitely present in 'Meds' ('You got As in your algebra test, I failed and they kept behind', sings Molko with no apparent irony on 'Drag'. Yes, perhaps this is an example of truth based on experience, but one of your early-learning mathematics failures doesn't exactly fit in seamlessly on a 21st-century rock album) but here it's reached a sort of anti-climax where almost none of the songs have those moments of redeeming insight which occasionally burst forth from the gutter in the preceding album. Placebo have become bigger and bigger over the years, in Europe at least, and it seems as they headline more festivals, sell more records and gain more fans possibly their attachment with reality, keeping their feet on the ground, weakens, and that once so keen ability to translate experience into moving and affecting lines suffers. The lyrics here are simply words chosen for their effect and strung carelessly together into cliched arrangements, very little sparkles or ensnares. The tunes are still there, more or less, the 'grinding guitars and blistering riffs' are present, though the lack of real emphatic cores doesn't make for much of lasting power.

I'm listening to it as I write this and 'my killer, my lover', which is currently being repeated over and over again by Molko in the chorus of the title song, just doesn't mean anything. It's a vast cliche, used by the dunces and poetasters of the past in the history of bad literature attempting to be deep, and here it finds its way inevitably into Placebo's new album on the eponymous song. 'Don't let them have their way, you're beautiful and so blase, don't fall back into the decay', he mutters ominously on another track. Who on earth uses 'blase' in their lyrics?

Again and again, lyrics are chosen seemingly because they rhyme and seem 'a bit enigmatic' and so are thrown into the pot sloshed about with disinterest and then regurgitated as some hollow verse chock-a-block with empty images. Take this little selection:

The atom will implode
The fragile kingdom fold
The tremor becomes a quake
And there's a body in the lake
And as the two of us rebel
And damn you all to hell
I wonder, is this all there is?

What? What exactly, Brian, do you 'wonder is this all there is'? Is it the body in the lake, the imploding atom or the fragile kindom folding? No, no, it's not all that there is because THERE'S NOTHING THERE. That song, by the way, is named 'The Never-Ending Why'.

'Hey Stefan, I've come up with great idea for naming the song'
'Wow Brian, what's that?'
[Pause for dramatic effort]
'... The Never-Ending Why!'
'OOOOOOh, is that to expound your existential listings, no doubt wholly informed by your recent in-depth readings of Nietzsche and Sartre, as to man's eternal dilemna and the eternal nihilism the human race is on a constant brink of as to ascertaining why we are really here, which has plagued the most brilliant minds and most revered philosophers in mankind's history?'
'No, I just thought it sounded cool. Another line of coke?'

It's almost as if they've brought a PC programme entitled 'Microsoft Lyrics Generator', fed into it snippets of what they want ('sex, drugs and love, please. Oh, and a bit of darkness. And blood. And semen. Perfect! Another line of coke anyone?') and then sat around for half an hour - doing coke - until the machine printed out reams of verbal mutton dressed as lamb, which they read and instantly revered, given that they are now rock gods and don't have to bother about anything down there on the streets with the great unwashed.

'What does it say?'
'"Sick of the slaughter, coming up for air... start breathing"'
'Wow, that's deep man.'
'What about this one?'
'"You don't know how you're coming across, you don't know who you're cumming across"'
[Stefan faints clean away at this genius]
'Best £49.99 I ever spent. Another line of - Oh there's only me. One for Brian, don't mind if I do.'

In these scenarios I'm only putting Stefan (the gay, bizarrely tall Swedish bassist) and Brian because they've recently changed the drummer to a young and dumb (and, presumably, full of cum, to quote the Modern Review. Although admittedly they never used 'presumably') tattooed blonde boy, and I doubt he had much creative input in the making of this album. However, I could be entirely wrong and he's the sole reason for their downfall.

You could say they wrote it with the aid of a bottle of whiskey, although I for one (quite clearly) firmly believe in alcohol as a creative impulse and I've written better livejournal entries at four o'clock in the morning tanked up on a mixture of drugs and drink than the entirity of this album.

Speaking of whiskey, the spirit is even referenced to bad effect on the best song on the album, the last one, entitled 'Kings of Medicine'. It's a real departure from most Placebo, they use trumpets and horns creating a kind of golden epic sound, apart from Brian has to namecheck his favourite whiskeys: 'now that old buzzer Johnny Walker has gone and ruined all our plans'; 'they were drowned in Southern Comfort and left to dry out in the sun'. It just doesn't fit, it sounds anomalous and aberrant in the context of the song. Some artists do the Jamie T and Lily Allen thing of namechecking brands and famous places to create their lyrical impressions of the world. Placebo make poetic visions that lace the listener into their world, carelessly throwing in Johnny Walker Black Label and Southern Comfort jolts and throws them out of that world.

This isn't exactly a new thing, of a band getting big and disappointing their fans creatively. You just hope that it won't happen to your favourites, don'cha?

And, you know, here at the end I'll do the full turnaround and say maybe it has something to do with growing up as well. I'm looking for a bit more than 'a trail of blood, sweat and semen' these days.

My god-damned Damaris.

2009-06-10T04:01:27Z

This post is mostly about music. Although I don't use 'mostly' lightly, one can expect similar deranged tangents on all other kinds of subject matters, from wine to pornography, the usual mythological gamut.

I've been lamenting to myself recently the lack of new music on my iPod, you know there comes a time when a certain amount of gigabytes just isn't enough: you need MORE stuff that's NEW. New sublime highs, rushes of realease, livid living colours gyrating brilliantly through the membrane. They say that music has similar effects on your brain as drugs do, and personally if I like a record I will listen to it over and over again, for weeks sometimes (depending on how much I like it), until the silver begins to tarnish, the starred kisses start to implode, and you need another green tinted brush of lips against your ear -

Look at this ridiculously pretentious writing. 'Is he drunk again?' Yep, I'm on the Rosé. It was only supposed to be one drink post-work (this is the equalivalent for me of going to the pub for a relaxing pint with colleagues after finishing my 9-5, only I get back at two o'clock in the morning) but since then I have been inspired to update livejournal and I gained a strangely prophetic, 'Sybil in Book VI' feeling that the whole bottle will no longer exist by the time I've finished the post. Well, the bottle will still exist, I ain't a miracle-maker people, but the wine shall be merrily coarsing about my bloodstream with wild veritas abandon. Do you spell 'bloodstream' all in one word or is it blood-stream with a hyphen, or even blood stream as in two separate entitites of letter compilations? I know not, but I use hyphens, like semi-colons, willy-nilly and I think I should start to pay attention where they're necessary and not.

- so the sounds begin to dull from their initial bouts of feverish ecstasy and you need something new and as yet unimagined to rudely steal your breath away once more. Some songs have immense powers to last (such as Arcade Fire's 'No Cars Go' or Patrick Wolf's 'Bluebells', both of which I still listen to regularly despite them both having been played literally hundreds of times before), and maybe there is a divine symmetry for producing music, like 'the divine angle' in photography, where the colours align so miraculously that you obtain a melodic narcotic (that's a good name for a pub, isn't it? 'The Melodic Narcotic'? ...hmm, perhaps a pub in Shoreditch) that you can almost never, ever get bored of. The high never comes down, the lacquer is permanently polished, the silver beyond tarnishing; it's an idea but I have yet to hear this one, ultimate revered trophy of fantastical notes and exquisite semi-quavers that has exactly the same effect on you the hundredth time of hearing it as the very first.

In fact if I'm on this topic strain, then often some of my personal favourite songs will not boom bombastically into my brain upon the first listen, but in fact will slide in stealthily over a few listens until I appreciate their specific, strangely alien beauty more fully. As if they have a peak, a zenith, an apex of the icy maelstrom, that they work up to slowly, and only then after that point, which they may stay at for many listens, will they slide into inevitable, if still much loved, ignominy. Ignominy isn't quite the right word I'm looking for, but hey, fuck it, I'm such a rebel I'm gonna play with the goddamned English language itself.

I talk about colour a lot in relation to my musical ramblings which is precisely because I hear music as colours. I realised this a long time before I even read anything about Synesthesia, and it's a lot more subtle and insidious than simply a bunch of different shades flaming up in your brain when you hear a song - like the ever-rotating shape, ever-changing colour of the 'screensaver' on Windows Media Player doing impressive acrobatics for your mind's eye only - and it's not a simple game. You can't just listen to something and say 'it's this colour'.

This is very hard to explain.

Everything musical comes through as colours but different types of music have different types of colour and some are harder to pinpoint than others. I also like music of specific colours, mostly blue and green, but my favourite albums will be ones which show a plethora of different colours through their listening. Take Placebo's 'Without You I'm Nothing' which blew me away with all the different colours in it when I first heard it and was instrumental (!) in leading to my enduring adulation of them.

Pure Morning - Green
Brick Shithouse - Dark Red
You Don't Care About Us - Light Red/Yellow
Ask for Answers - Straw yellow
Without You I'm Nothing - A deeper yellow, almost, but not quite, orange.
Allergic (to Thoughts of Mother Earth) - Red, with bits of purple and other colours.
The Crawl - Brown.
Every Me Every You - A brilliant, cerulean sky-blue.
My Sweet Prince - Darker, deeper blue.
Summer's Gone - N/A
Scared of Girls - Darker, wierder green.
Burger Queen - Yellow.

The 'N/A' doesn't refer to non-applicable, I just can't pinpoint and identify the colour for this song. It is undoubtedly there - ah! How on earth do you say 'this is how I hear music, like colours' and then find oneself forced into telling people that one song is simply beyond your spectrum of comprehension at that point. Basically, it's a bit like reaching through a grate for an object just at the edge of your finger tips; if you brush it lightly, ever so lightly with the edges of your fingertips, eventually, after much patience and arduous effort, it will come to your grasp. However, if you strain with all your might for it, you will hit it square on and consequently make it slide teasingly away from you. The colours (object) are undoubtedly there, it's simply a question of brushing them until your digits can latch on, and some objects are far nearer than others.

Most albums are quite easy to identify as having a particular colour; Amy Winehouse's 'Back to Black' is all oranges and yellows, Broken Records' 'Until the Earth Begins to Part' is full of blue and green, and some brown. You may say with the latter 'ah, it says earth' and he mentioned blue, green and brown, the colours you view the Earth from on those pictures taken from Space, yet it doesn't just stem from sub-conscious association of facts. For this, you can only take my word. It's like I tried to explain this whole concept to a girl when I was sixteen and she simply rebuked me with the line 'you're just thinking of the album covers'. I don't mention it to many people because most people simply refuse to understand or choose to ridicule you in the pub, yet I can't help secretly thinking that this entire idea applies to everyone and simply because of the ridiculously hard nature of realising that music does appear as colours most people never get around to discovering these wonders.

If I was going to be scientifically analytic I would say that the music's position on my brain's Dulux colour chart depends on the tempo of the piece and which instruments are used. Although things such as guitar riffs in particular can have wildly varied results. It also applies to letters and numbers, on a similar sliding scale of immediacy. And of course, it can't just be music, it must cover all sounds, it's simply that it's far more obvious with the more complex sonic creations of music.

Anyway, I could spend a whole post analysing this bizarre phenonmenon, but it's getting determinedly late, and I only begun this to talk about two recent albums that have been released in the past few weeks.

So I was getting bored with the music I was listening to, and then, lo and behold, but two of my favourite artists of all time, both of which are aforementioned on this page, release new albums within one week of each other.

First off was the inimitable Monsieur Patrick Wolf himself. I think Patrick Wolf is one of the artists to have suffered the most from the effects of the digital music age we find ourselves in. If his popularity amongst our age group nationally is in relation to the people I know then he must be in quite a few of the 18-24 year-old age bracket's 'favourite music' tabs of Facebook. Yet this bracket is born of the twenty-first century age; who buys CDs anymore?! I've had people literally sneer at me for buying CDs before and even demand, DEMAND, that I download the albums off the internet before they're released. As I've said before I'll download a song or two off Lime/Frostwire if I don't know the artist and want to check them out, but if I do like them I will always buy the album. Why? Because I like having the material possession in my hand, and in my collection, as something I can go back to and lend someone else if they purport to have similar tastes in music as me, rather than e-mailing it to them. And, more crucially, because if I like that artist, and want to hear more of their music, then they deserve my support, they need my support, and I would more than willingly spend £10 on an album of theirs if it means they will be able to make more of that beautiful music I adore in the future.

So to Patrick Wolf, who is ridiculously popular everywhere amongst the peers I encounter, but singularly unsuccessful with the pop charts. I read an article saying Universal severed its contract with Wolf after 'The Magic Position' simply because it only reached number #41 on the album charts at its highest. He then declared to everyone at Glastonbury that he was giving up music for good.

He declared it to his fans, and he must have wanted to hurt them in a way. Patrick Wolf fans are ridiculously obsessed it seems, but not enough to actually buy his albums, and so it must have really cut him to have been given this huge break by a vast record label to indulge his creative energies and then seemingly snubbed by his fanbase when they universally made the decision to download his album rather than go down the shop and buy it.

Which is what they've done to 'The Bachelor' also. I assumed that it might actually trouble the Top 40 this time around but after a brief analysis of this week's album chart online (I can't listen to it anymore - Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates: if I were to find out that they both died tomorrow I would probably be mildly shocked but by no means particularly saddened) there's no appearance for our Wolfy once more. 'The Bachelor' is very, very good. Hear it.

Ah, I was going to talk more about Wolf, as well as about Placebo's new album as well, but I've got to the end of the Rosé and I've gotsa go to work tomorrow. And I didn't even get round to the pornography; next time, I promise.

Count of Casualty

2009-06-05T03:53:17Z

It's been a while, innit. And during this time, I haven't exactly been reconciled to my fate as a constant drone for The Wolseley's endless hospitality business-plan, but I have come to accept what I am doing more and more, as I develop a plan for myself in my head.

Asides from wanting to become a writer, which I think will take a long time and a lot more perseverance to eventually happen, I have now started to apply to actual jobs which might provide me with something of an envisaged, if hesitant, career-plan. Unfortunately, because of my ridiculous need for something that is not just run-of-the-mill, the jobs I have applied for amount to, basically and brutally, one.

This is a job for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. If I get it I am hereby committing the next two years of my life to inane, mundane and incredibly dull office work. However, after completing this purgatory of administration, I shall be moved anywhere in the world. This could be anywhere from Berlin to Afghanistan.

So I could find a job which would please my parents and simultaneously find an avenue for travelling, whilst getting paid for it.

Though, it ain't really travelling, is it kids? We all know that. I'll be living somewhere else, but it won't be somewhere else I've chosen to live. It's not at all likely I'll speak the language, or even have been provided with adequate training in learning the language, and I'll have to work my ass off day in, day out. Is this really the best avenue to choose?

Well, it is, in terms of a career. It slaps my seventeen-year self in the face so much, that free, incredibly bolshee, unattached soul that grabbed anything and did everything not caring about the consequences, but now, I feel a strange need to please my parents. If I get a job in the Foreign and Commenwealth Office that will make them both feel prouder than they ever have in their lives. They're done something incredibly right. They're achieved something.

You see, they're both very intelligent, or I like to think so,

- No, I don't like to think so. They are very intelligent. But neither of them ever did what they could have done. My father dropped out of his engineering degree at Galway during his second year, my mother did a degree in Languages at Rome University which, although impressive enough, doesn't count for much over here. I'm supposed to be the effigy of everything they never achieved, I guess. They wanted to to go to Oxford, but at the time I could have applied I had such a strong will and idea of what I wanted to do I adamantly refused to apply to either of the best universities the United Kingdom has to offer, because I didn't feel I needed to be there. I had other things on my mind at that time; I thought I'd discovered the key to life itself, I'd felt like no one else had ever felt, and displaying my academic skills was second to a lot in my life. Nowadays, I think maybe I should have taken that chance and applied when I could, but fuck it, it's done now, and I've graduated from university with a good degree, which is more than one of my parents ever did.

Despite gaining that good degree from a good institution I do find myself in a job of pure, hard physical graft. This job does pay well; I shall have paid off the whole of my £2000 overdraft by the end of this month, and this is with being able to afford, in materialistic terms, whatever I want in the meantime: iPod, printer, clothes, CD player, new laptop etc. I live very comfortably right now, but I need something else apart from this. I can't turn around and find that I'm thirty and still working behind the bar at The Wolseley.

So, what does anyone do if they find themselves in a job that isn't as rewarding as it could be, in the middle of London in 2009?

Why, move to Paris, of course.

So, if I don't get this job in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (which I shall be taking a pay-cut to have), I'm going to France. I shall more than certainly have to take a job akin to The Wolseley in a bar or a hotel (I'm assuming hotels will want English-speakers) to pay my way, but at least during my time there I will be becoming fluent in another language which shall provide me with something more rewarding than just making the drinks in The Wolseley. Obviously though, until I go there, I have to brush up on my French.

To acheive this I am currently working my way through a GCSE French Revision Booklet, whilst simltaneously attempting to translate my mother's French edition of 'L'Etranger' by Camus. I have bought 'The Outsider' in English, and so now I try and translate a page a night of Camus utilising a French dictionary and a grammar book and I then compare to the English translation. It's not going that bad at the moment, but I need to get on it much more.

In a bit, kiddos.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-05-20T04:18:00

2009-05-20T03:29:19Z

Have you ever listened to a song's lyrics and thought they're really good, and they might apply to yourself, but they don't exactly sum up your feelings at the time? Then you go back to that song and find that it's ridiculously true to your situation at that moment? Well, that's what I've found with this song:

'I'm careful not to fall
I have to climb your wall
'Cause you're the one
Who makes me feel much taller than you are

I'm just a peeping tom
On my own for far too long
Problems with the booze
Nothing left to lose

I'm weightless... I'm bare
I'm faithless... I'm scared

The face that fills the hole
That stole my broken soul
The one that makes me seem to feel much taller than you are

I'm just a peeping tom
On my own for far too long
Troubles with the gear
Nothing left to fear

I'm weightless... I'm bare
I'm faithless... I'm scared

With every bet I lost
And every trick I tossed
You're still the one who makes me feel much taller than you are

I'm just a peeping tom
On my own for far too long
Problems with the booze
Nothing left to lose

I'm weightless... I'm bare
I'm faithless... I'm scared

I'm scared

I'm scared'

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-05-08T03:47:00

2009-05-08T03:35:21Z

By jove, it was chaos in The Wolseley yesterday, boys and girls! To seduce the rich and the mighty and the famous who churn through the restaurant's almost permanently open doors (seven am to midnight. The building itself is actually never free of staff, day in, day out, a great personal robbery protection policy) the champagne glasses we use are very delicate and made with about 50% crystal. Unfortunately, these beautiful and aesthetically pleasing glasses, whilst admired muchly by the wrinkled but well-off customers, aren't exactly designed to withstand the pressures of a high-temperature glasswasher and then immediate freezing. [We freeze the glasses so that the champagne when presented is as cold as can be, and will stay as cold for as long as possible.]

And, lo and behold, they almost universally prove to be unable to withstand these pressures we ruthlessly subject them to by splitting apart willy-nilly in our hands. Often they separate smoothly, glass from base, at other times they will inadvertantly shatter all over the place leaving you with nothing held in your hand except the penumbra of a champagne flute that once touched the hallowed lips of Paris Hilton, and then again, very rarely, they will disperse of themselves in a daringly jagged, piercingly sharp manner then will dig indiscriminately into the nearest flesh it can find. Which is, most of the time, your own hand, having just picked it out of the glasswasher.

And this time it was me that suffered this abrupt alert into pain and blood. Raising my chosen glass to its intended plinth smugly overlookly the bar it rewarded my abject devotion to the hospitality industry by snapping effortlessly in two along the base then proceeding to drive, pincer-like, into the palm of my hand and slide viciously through my tender pink flesh for a quite unnecessary amount of time.

Presented with this uncaring mutlilation by way of glass of my dearest right hand, my initial reaction ran something along the classic lines of:

'Oh, shit.'

Then, my manager, upon witnessing my profusely bleeding appendage ran up to me, like someone in a the slow-motion part of a Hollywood action film shouting 'noooooooooooooooooo', grabbed the afflicted body part and shoved it under warm water where I stood for a while, not quite knowing what to do, until he returned with one of those eternally helpful green first-aid baskets.

Taking my wound from under the forgiving, amrbrosiaic tap of health-giving filtereted London water (we give out filtered tap water in The Wolseley; a healthily economic point if any of you ever come to dine there: always ask for a jug of London's finest to accompany your meal and wine), I suddenly had a sharp twinge of pain once more, not helped by the accumulation of waiters who, given that the time was 6pm and not very busy, had nothing much better to do than congregate about my exciting wound. Epic strings could be heard in the background as my manager attempted to bandage my mutilated wound, and I just cried, with classic altrusim, 'no, Ryan! Just go on by yourself! I'll only hold you back!

And he said, 'no Pat, I can't leave you to be consumed by the monster known as The Wolsley Dinner Service!'

And I, still in epic heroic mode, shouted: 'Go on! Save yourself, save Jason! I'll carry on by myself! Don't look back! Run! Run!'

[Jason, for the record, is an entirely nice young man who has just joined and is quite clearly a lot better at the work than me, but which doesn't perturb me in the least because it's also quite clear he actually wants to devote the rest of his life to barwork. He also, unfortunately, looks disarmingly like an English version of Cyrano de Bergerac.]

And he, with tears streaming down his cheeks, said: 'No, I can't -

Anyway, on with the show, it did demand its fair share of spectactors, including one of the Wolseley general managers who proceeded to make Scottish jokes about 'breaking his champagne glasses' which I at the time (I think, in retrospect, I must have been a little bit in shock) couldn't make any reply to except smile inanely as I magically turned my bandage from white to red. I complain about The Wolseley seeming the same day in, day out for me specifically, but actually it applies to anyone who works there, from manager to food-runner, and the moment something as exciting as someone making themselves bleed happens EVERYONE wonders over to ogle on the action that provides a vital difference from one day to the next. Therefore people will be able to remind each other about that day by 'the day that the young barman had to go to hospital' rather than having to try and ascertain what happened each day from a lot of brain power and analysying of days and dates.

So I found myself being flung through the streets of London in a black cab, paid for by The Wolseley, clutching a bottle of coca-cola for the sugar, given to me by The Wolseley (yes, aren't they remarkably nice? But has anyone seen daytime TV recently? 'Accident in the workplace? No win, no fee' says June Whitfield as an actor who possibly doesn't have the most glittering career behind them pretends to fall off a step-ladder. Oh, the Wolseley's been subjecting its champagne flutes to excessive thermal shock and then their youngest bartender gains a HORRIFIC MUTILATION? Yes, you'd pay for a cab and give someone a bottle of coke if you were in that situation wouldn't you.) until I was let off outside the A&E department and whisked straight into surgery.

If only.

I stumbled into the waiting room, half-full of morons convinced they had swine flu, and presented my bandaged wound triumphantly to the overweight, bespectacled receptionist who took one look at it and then said to me, in a voice full of tender love and altruistic concern:

'CAN YOU GO AND GET A TICKET PLEASE?!'

'But -'

'I CAN'T TALK TO YOU WITHOUT A TICKET.'

'I'm wounded -'

'YOU MUST GET A TICKET TO BE WOUNDED.'

'But -'

'PLEASE GET A TICKET.'

So I got myself a ticket, like one they use in Somerfields when you're queueing up for the fresh meat counter, whilst the chorus of swine fluers sniggered at my uninitiated waiting room ways behind their copies of The Daily Mail, and I found myself with number 186. It was currently on number 167.

This bit wasn't so bad, in fact, it only took about 45 minutes till I got to see my omnipotent oracle of NHS administration. I decided to start 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' to idle away the minutes, and eventually I was seen, weighed and measured and placed in another part of the waiting room.

For four hours.

Now I like Victor Hugo and 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' was a damned fine book but nigh on five hours straight in a hospital waiting room full of moans and groans and viciously whispered arguments with no dinner isn't exactly my idea of a leisurely read.

Now, the NHS

Wolves.

2009-05-06T04:38:03Z

Oh my, that was an emotional post last night wasn't it? As you may have been able to tell from the time of posting I was horrendously inebriated. The actual entry took a collossal amount of time to formulate, not because of the writing or length, but because I spent most of it squinting blearily at the laptop screen to make out what I was typing and was literally using single fingers to jab at different letters, like an old woman who's decided to finally join the twenty-first century and get her 'e's, because my normal rate of semi-touchtyping was completely out of the question. Reading it back I was quite impressed by my stubbornly drunken tenacity in correcting typographical errors, nothing is actually spelt wrong as far as I can see, it's just the actual progression of the entry from thought to thought doesn't exactly play out in a strealined linear narrative, try as I might.

Luckily, any of you who might have read it only got a slightly bizarre and self-pitying collection of letters (as in vowels and consonants, not things written on paper and sent through the Royal Mail, formerly Consignia) to wade through, a lot of other friends woke up to find nauseous messages of adulating love in their Facebook inboxes today, sent at any time between 2 and 4 in the morning. Still if it gave them a bit of a ray of sunshine to their day then that makes it a task worthwhile. I very rarely send specific messages to people - usually these pages gain the brunt of my drunken literary spewing - and so maybe it will mean something, if I was someone sending 'I love you!!!11111!!!' every time I got drunk to people then obviously it would be a nice enough platitude but get quite tiresome after a while. Also, after Shameless and my beers had finished I plucked up the courage to actually read some of them and they weren't quite as bad as I thought. There was a lot of the generic 'love you forever' used but I also picked up on peoples' specific qualities here and there which hopefully will make it a bit more personally weighty.

Don't feel bad or neglected if you didn't get a message; it was generally people who appeared upon my Facebook newsfeed.

I'm posting at about the same time tonight, but I've only had a couple of beers. I wasn't going to drink anything, I felt so bad today, but then I watched Shameless on 4od and Shameless is nigh on impossible to watch without a beer and a cigarette because that's mostly what all the characters are doing when they're not directing witty and slightly implausible dialogue at each other. Shameless holds a very high rank in my televisional burning coal heart but do you think that if you actually went onto a council estate in Manchester you would find a group of eccentrics with rigidly strict moral codes underneath their ostensibly debaucherous facades? Whether rich or poor some people are just plain nasty and it becomes more apparent if they don't hold the trappings of materiality about them to lessen life's sporadic stomach blows.

But then there are those wonderful, inspiring people who occasionally turn up on programmes like 'The Secret Millionaire' (a slightly ludicrous and hugely condescending premise for a programme but which, in spite of yourself, can come across as vastly touching on occasions) who don't have those trappings of materiality for themselves either but do hold those moral codes and devote a large part of their hours in helping others. I hope this doesn't sound patronising stemming from a middle-class, university-educated white kid writing about council estates he has no direct experience of but I'm just trying to make a comment about the difference between reality and televisual depictions. I've just finished reading 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' also which strikes you with a brutal punch of no-hopers in 1950s Brooklyn and coming to Shameless with its sugarcoated and love-laced kaleidoscope of working-class Britain is a bit of a fairytale otherness.

Though it does what it does with a great panache, and it's popular precisely because of its humour and lack of real, downhill grittiness. Maybe I just worry that some people in their semi-detached suburban homes will sit back and watch it and take it as literal fact and say to one another over their steaming cups of PJ Tips: 'oh, look at them with their japes and their spunky attitudes to life, it's not that bad at all really amongst the Great Unwashed, is it?'

Anyway, as for analysing last night's post: I think I said some things that were vastly untrue about my relationship with Lucifer, particularly the deliciously self-commiserating couple of lines where I electronically accused him of staring out the window at a tree whilst I was trying to talk to him. He's never done that, for the record, but I guess I do feel sometimes that he doesn't quite see when I'm being funny and when I'm not. But then I can't blame him for that, it's my own fault; if you never generally step out of character then how is someone else, however close, supposed to realise when you've cautiously let the mask slip for once? Lucifer provides me with a rock of stability in a life of whirlwind lighthearted abandon and I feel unutterably privileged to have that boon from someone so loyal and understanding.

But it is true that I do hate my job. I would like to follow that up with the immortal 'with a fiery passion' but there is very little to do with passion in this feeling. It's a dull, malevolent throb spreading cancerously further and further through my core every hour I lose there. There is nothing to provide me with mental stimulus, not even a meagre challenge to my cerebral faculties, and I literally clock-in to an autopilot whilst retreating further and further into the depths of my imagination. This autopilot is so strong and such an inexplicable feature of my working persona that from time to time I will finally surface from my fantastical immersion to find I have read a docket (the ticket that comes through the machine telling you which drinks need to be made in the restauant) and poured three vodka and tonics without having any conscious acknowledgement of what I was doing. Instead I was analysing the film adaptations of Hubert Selby Jr's novels, planning out bits and pieces of a short story I'm trying to write, or hypothetically planning out this journal entry in my head.

If someone speaks to me in this catatonic bar zombie state then I find it very hard to pull myself out of the weed-strewn depths and provide them with a cogent reply. Most of my immediate colleages think that I am inordinately quiet, if not more than a little weird.

Unless I'm working with Tommy Tank of course, who is my new Lithuanian best friend. Unfortunately our rapidly burgeoning brotherhood is based entirely on an elaborate subterfuge regarding my essential being upon my part, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Which might be sooner rather than later given that we've started meeting up for drinks and chats outside of the working environment. He is around my age and has a brain, he's currently doing a degree in London, and suddenly I found someone to talk to about all kinds of subjects and explore different avenues of thought and culture, and gain stimulating replies to whatever I blathered on about. Occasionally, due to his foreign heritage, I have to explain some aspect of British idiosyncracies to him (have you ever tried explaining 'Sod's Law' to someone not brought up with the English mothertongue? It's quite hard) but the fact that he's willing to listen and take in what I'm saying makes it a perenially rewarding task to enagage in.

He's also extremely pretty, in a fey, big-eyed, Eastern European sort of way, but unfortunately apparently straight. I guess he could also be gay pretending to be straight due to the chauvinistic environment he finds himself embroiled in, but the likelihood of two people engaging in this explicit artifice in the same establishment is quite minimal (though a rather wonderful premise for a unique romcom or even a sitcom: two gay boys both pretending to be straight and unconvincingly eschewing the attributes of hot girls going by when actually they're secretly attracted to one another...) But I try not to think of him in that way, because number one once someone is a friend it should be in a platonic manner and number two, judging from past experience, I am extremely wary of allowing myself to find straight boys attractive.

The 'artifice' and 'subterfuge' I am consistently enagaged in in the workplace doesn't get me down like it used to in my teenage years, when I had no one to talk to, because in my friendship group(s - three and counting now if you include Brizzle, The Blasted Heath and UCL) everyone knows who I am and don't care. However, it is becoming more and more complex as the time goes on. It's kind of become my own promenade-style play I am conducting nowadays, not only am I playing my own central part, but occasionally players from longstanding friendships will be invited to enter stage for cameo roles. I took Kate to The Wolseley the night before my birthday and since then she has become my fictitious girlfriend, who I don't see enough because she lives in Brighton and we have an open relationship that pleases neither of us due to the distance, and yesterday Jennifer Yellow-Hat, on a rare visit to the Big Smoke from her lair in deepest darkest Cornwall, entered the fray as my 'bit on the side'.

I took her to St Alban, the sister restaurant of The Wolseley, but nevertheless there were more than enough figures from The Wolseley heirachy to witness our illicit affair unfolding over a dinner of chicken 'basquaise' and gigglingly sipped Inzolia wine. We even fed each other at one point a la Lady and the Tramp which will get pulses racing in The Wolseley's gossip grapevine no end.

As I've said before, I'm not particularly proud to be living a network of lies at work, but it's become quite entertaining in a way and when I find an opportunity that I really want in the career stakes I won't engage in this ridiculous behaviour again. I was going to write about promising opportunities coming up and so on, and some other things, but this entry has become quite Goliath-esque already and maybe I should go to bed. It's 5.30 now, but don't you worry, I'm simply a nocturnal animal these days; I sleep until 1 or 2 o'clock, get to work to start at 4 then get back here at 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning and stay up with some beers on t'internet for quite some hours.

When I get my new job, things will change. Let's hope so anyway.

The glass is half-full.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-05-05T03:56:00

2009-05-05T04:08:56Z

You know there was once that thing that made me burn. Made me live with such a searing intensity that everything I touched glowed with a Midas cigarette burn of utter and complete topaz.

Now I seek my cathedral's sanctuary in alcohol. I drink and I drink and I drink again, because that makes up for the loss of the hairs tingling at the back of my neck, the inescapable heat shovellng and muzzling at my cheek, the understanding that dearly held fraternity is there next to me always, crying at my simmering soul.

I sit here with my drink and I listen to music and I sometimes escape.

Music warms me and makes me feel a little, slightly, finally different when I creep through the everyday slog of the unredwarding and ridiculous job I slip into day in and day out. I listen to things I've never listened to before and find the most beautiful, cafefully crafted diamonds ever created yet to caress my implanted ideas. Right now the Patrick Wolf remix of 'So You Say' by Siobhan Donaghy (once a sugababe, y'all), resides majestically upon my Spotify.

I'm feeling quite bad at the moment. I wish I had someone to talk to without nuance or idea, someone I could just sit down and chat out all these mercurial subjects constantly sifting about my sore head. I live with Lucifer, and, for me at least, he will always be my closest friend in the world, but I've come to realise that often he just can't see through my eternal tongue-in-cheek method of approaching the rose and the runaway.

This is the worst thing. Everything I say, everything I do, is perenially sugarcoated in an ironic cynicism, and whilst I don't care that others don't 'get it', I would love Lucifer to just understand it and realise that I'm not always joking all the time. When I'm pretending to be my most humourous, I'm actually at my most serious, and all I really want is for him to spend that hysterically precious time to listen to me.

But he doesn't, and I retreat further and further into myself. I'm by no means physically attracted to Lucifer - I think he has grown into his looks very well, but personally he has never been 'my type', as it were - but I adore him in the concept that he has always been there for me, there has always been someone to chat to about my blue triumphs and my unwieldy mistakes.

That's wrong.

I adore him because I adore him. He is my best friend in the whole world, the one person who has been there for me through everything and will (most probably) be there for me through everything to come. I love him with all my heart.

Though sometimes he doesn't listen to me. There's something more interesting out there, yeah Lukey? Yeah, that view out the window is far more stimulating than what I've done today. Yeah, your studies in the library will always eclipse what I might have to say.

Fuck, that's ridiculous. So petty and stupid, and, dare I say it, sounding like a housewife ignored by her husband. But sometimes I feel a little like that - maybe it is ridiculous and petty and stupid - but I want Lucifer to talk to me and acknowledge what I've done that day, and be interested in what I'm doing in general.

Why?

Because I'm not the sum of my parts. I am not bar work. I hate it, I detest it.

But it's not that. Lucifer always asks me how work was.

He always asks how work was and I always reply with the same generalisation: 'It was fine, but boring.'

That's the thing about barwork; it's physically demanding but completely lacking in any real mental stimulus. There's nothing to challenge my cerebral faculties. I slog my guts out every day for my wage and I end up with a pay-packet that is enabling me to live comfortably and pay off my overdraft, but stuck in a job that is sucking the soul out of me day by day.

I hate it.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-04-27T04:12:00

2009-04-27T03:20:59Z

'My Own Private Idaho' is so horrible, so bizarre, so relentlessly shoving a sword into one's guard and twisting that I can never really call it a film that I enjoyed. However, I always rate films that have emotionally moved me, for the better or for the worse, and I just wanted to be there so much for Mike and let him know it'd be ok. Which it wasn't, the final scene was like a choppy sea of involuntary nausea plunged upon your person, as you watch him being lifted into yet another car. No more cars, no more drivers, 'please?', you beg silently and yet there it is with Gus Van Sant almost seeming to delight in the utter abyss he's managed to create to a soundtrack of sunny 1950s records.

It also cemented in my head that River Pheonix is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors we ever lost.

The trouble with your brother; he's always sleeping with your mother...

2009-04-17T02:30:31Z

I never tell people 'I want to become a writer'. I am terrified of how pretentious that sounds, and what an abject reaching for higher levels it implies. In Fitzgerald's 'The Beautiful and Damned' which I finished recently, there is a writer character named Dick (oh yes, autobiogrophical connotations abound to 'Tender is the Night' for those of us who wallowed through that for sixth form english literature) who is presented as slightly idiotic, punching above his weight, attempting to achieve a certain literary aesthetic that belies his own ideas.

I don't want to become a writer. I do write. I try to write when I have the time available to me, when I have the impetus to sit down and charge out the words upon the page. I find it easiest to write initially in public places, with an old biro and some scrap paper in some dingy cafe or pub with a large coffee or slowly sipped pint to aid my concentration/inspiration, then to write it up from these scribbled drafts on the faithful old Dell laptop. I find this a lot easier than sitting in front of the callously blank visage of Microsoft Word with the cursor blinking impudently at me, and I don't have the various plethora of distractions available on t'internet available to me there either. When finished with this 'writing up' I will print off whatever I have achieved then retire once more to said rundown cafe or pub to manically adjust and revise with that red finelined pen I had the good fortune to pick up in the university computer centre one dark, lonely night.

However, I still find it hard to show my work to others. There is a sentence in David Mitchell's 'Black Swan Green' which runs something like 'show somebody something you've written and you're basically handing them a stick and saying 'hit me anywhere''. I have faith in myself - I'd assume I wouldn't be writing anything if I didn't - but anything one writes, however far removed from immediate experience, is an invitation into their innermost recesses. And I think, though I find it extremely difficult to psychoanalyse myself despite how often and flippantly I do it to other people, that I've created an aura of myself, full of faux bravado and strangled humour, that might just be quite far removed from where I really lie.

There was also a moment on the bus a couple of months ago when I was inadvertantly afforded the opportunity to eavesdrop upon a conversation between two middle-aged-elderly people in front of me. Perhaps they had just met, I wasn't quite clear of the context, but she asked him what he did, to which he replied that he was a novelist. She, quite naturally, asked him what of his novels he had had published, to which he replied none, thought he still had hope. He must have been about fifty to sixty.

I felt inordinately sorry for him, but also slightly terrified in highlight of my own ambitions. At what point does that faith in yourself become an all too humiliating delusion? At what point should you give up?

Maybe never. Maybe he will finally become published when he's eighty and live to see his works become admired and revered all over the globe. But then he did also mention to the intended beau (I'm imagining; it seemed quite an intimate conversation), that he starts Proust's 'Recherche a la Temps Perdu' every year and has yet to complete it, which, if not exactly making me feel better, gave me a supportive point of comparison in our respective mentalities. There are very, very few books I've ever started and stopped reading, and those only when I was far younger than I am now. I'd like to think if I started Remembrance of Things Past I'd read it through to the end, although I've got more than enough other tomes to get through at the moment.

Since I've left university I've devoted as much time as possible to reading. Not to any particular plan, but just to indulge in my most rewarding past time without having to over-analyse it, make notes, or harbour the faint guilt that there should be something completely different, and possibly less interesting, I should be reading instead. I built up a large number of novels at university which languished upon my shelves for a year or more; indeed 'The Beautiful and Damned' sat there for nigh on four years, dating back to sixth form when I bought it on impulse from a friend in a charity shop in Clifton Village. It would be one of those acts of gross self-advertisement I quite abhor in other voices to list all of them here ('oh! Wow! Look at how many CLASSICS I've read') but it's highly pleasurable to be able to spend the time in such a way. I find myself in a job which pays the rent and affords me to live a highly comfortable lifestyle on top of this, but ultimately is physically demanding with no challenge to my cerebral faculties, and therefore immersing myself in a good book in my spare time is both an enjoyable activity and a way of keeping my brain stimulated. I guess a lot of my colleagues thought I was quite anti-social in the first three months or so - and, if we're honest, probably still do - because we get one half-hour break each shift and I spend all of it doggedly nose-deep in print.

But I don't read to make a statement, as I've already stated, I do it because I enjoy it. I don't want people to see me reading some famous author and then go something like 'ooooooooh, get him'. I mention this because amongst the managerial staff it really seems to irk them - do you remember that bit in The Office when one of the staff mentions 'Crime and Punishment' then David Brent goes and wikipedias it and comes out with all the facts? It's absolutely cringeworthy, yeah? Well, almost all of the managers ask me what I'm reading, and one of them at the start of my tenure at The Wolseley would say to almost all of the novels I showed to him upon request, 'oh yeah, I tried it, saw what he was trying to do, but you know...' and then walk off. Leaving the 'you know...' hanging enigmatically, clearly. The latest guy, who is almost the highest you can get in the echelons of the managerial heirachy, asked me what I was reading the other day and it happened to be 'The Beautiful and Damned', which just says, in large letters, 'F. Scott Fitzgerald' on the front cover. The other day he came up to me and demanded, a little aggressively, what my favourite book was. Put on the spot, I stammered that I couldn't really pinpoint it off the top of my head.

'Have you read Flaubert?' (pronounced in an absurd French accent)

'No.'

'Madame Bovary?'

[Well, quite obviously] 'No, no, I haven't.'

'Well, you should. Brilliant read.'

At which point he stalks off into the distance of customer service as well. You know there's some kinda comment to be made here about the concept of being 'well-read' eclipsing the simple lure of reading itself, but I guess I don't need to go into it further. The comment's made itself.

The heart beats in its cage,

2009-03-08T12:58:57Z

Like all good predominately Irish Catholic ghettos, ninety percent of Archway closes down on a Sunday, apart from the pubs, betting shops and Sainsbury's.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-02-20T03:23:00

2009-02-20T04:36:40Z

What I don't understand about other people sometimes is how they refer to themselves as stupid. They slate their own abilities, play down their capacity to impress others, and often refer to their person as below par in terms of cerebral faculties, often in a self-knowingly 'amusing' tone, like they were designed to be ever so slightly less than those seraphim who might dare to read books or watch 'arty' films in subtitles, because those opaque habits are no doubt the sole occupations of the eternally high-brow.

This really, really annoys me. You have a brain that is quite clearly just as capable as anyone else's as taking in and dealing with any information that is available to you in the known world, which is a hell of a fucking lot. Why sit there, and say to yourself, 'oh I couldn't possibly begin to understand that, I didn't "get" that idea in school, therefore it is forever incomprehensible to me.'

I have never met anyone I actively consider to be more intelligent than myself -

That doesn't sound quite right does it? It's a bit of a mammoth declaration even for these pages. If intelligence measures as a specific combination of ability, wisdom and knowledge then perhaps I can only take the first aforementioned attribute to fit this sentence. Therefore 'I have never met anyone I active consider to be more cerebrally able than myself'. Yes, that sounds better.

- I have met many people who hold a vastly superior knowledge to my own, I have encountered those individual souls who have a seemingly inexpicable ability to calculate ridiculous sums within seconds in their heads, I have brushed shoulders with those who have developed exceptional talents in areas other than my own interests. But never have I thought, 'oh you are so obviously clever, therefore in comparison I must be woefully ignorant'. If life throws something particularly horried at me I never deal with it by thinking, 'it is beyond me', or 'I cannot understand this.'

And this isn't just some self-serving exploration of my own assumed abilities; apart from those born with natural difficulties of the brain, I don't think that I've met anyone without the initial capacity to do whatever I do. The only stymie to that achievement is how they have happened to have grown up. I've spoken before about that concept of being 'Good' at spelling or sums in your first couple of years at primary school, and then, expanding upon from what I have said, gaining confidence through that assessment to know that you can achieve what is required of yourself. Suddenly you have the confidence to know that you are a, much maligned American phrase, 'Can-Do' person.

But what if, in those early, crucially formative years, you find yourself to be initially bad at those tests, or simply mediocore? Then gain an inherent supersitition that maybe you can't achieve what those other 'high'flyers' seem to gain so effortlessly ingrains itself upon your person and you start to feel that, actually, you can't do it. Or maybe you can do it, but not as well as They can.

Okay, this is probably a ridiculously simplified and uninformed view of what psychologists, far more qualified than I, have said in the past. But I haven't read their works, and I know that I've met so many people of searing intelligence who fail academically because of the expectations and unnecessary requirements placed upon them due to our education system, based around its dormant volcano of exams and assessments. Make this grade and you shall be a person of worth; pass that test and you shall be a worthwhile investment.

No. Not at all. Never. It should never work like this; if I look back to my earliest memories I was far better at sums than I ever was at spelling because my old Irish Da - who dropped out of his engineering degree at Galway University in his second year - took the time to go through simple arithmetic with me before I started school. But simply because I was top of my class in that respect and had that love of reading inferred upon me by both my parents, I thrived within the classroom and found space to plant roots which I confidently knew would grow. Forgive the horribly cringe-worthy analogy, but there were those who never had space to plant any roots.

I fervently hold to the idea that the majority of people are capable of whatever anyone else does. But, and it's that pertinenet 'but' that's always there at the start of all of my sentecnes, you must have that confidence to know you can do it in the start which, for the most part, originates from the very most determining years. Although, Jamie O'Neill, my favourite novelist, only started to read books properly when he read 'Idanhoe', entirely of his own accord, when he was in his early twenties. Please, none of you, ever tell anyone that you think you are 'stupider' than they are are. You undoubtedly are not.

You just need to realise what you are capable of. Which is absolutely everything.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-02-16T02:46:00

2009-02-16T02:48:12Z

'Novelists became fascinated by other things than telling stories, and in the process, the feeling seemed to grow that there was something wrong about telling a story from a single, central directing consciousness, because that act involved a narrative voice, and narrators were now notoriously unreliable. So more and more literary fiction became tentative, diffident, uncertain, openly self-contradictory, uncommitted, shifting, relative … and story, which is both events and the voice that tells us about them, was banished.'

- Philip Pullman, Isis Speech, 1st April 2003

Literature now.

2009-02-15T05:45:18Z

So that was my musings upon literature a year ago, which I offered to a student newspaper as an article. It was never printed.

Ah! This is where some of you may say why I have referred to student journalism before as ‘wishy-washy claptrap’ and ‘pretentious drivel’, because of an internal embitterment that they wouldn’t print my work. Well, given what I have read, I still very much adhere to those views and the editor who e-mailed me back declaimed the piece as being ‘too long’, which did nothing to improve my stance upon the student journalism of Royal Holloway.

But my views upon literature have, if not changed, updated slightly since that article. Originally, very ignorantly, I spoke of novels I had not yet read. I wrote that Salman Rushdie’s works must be viewed as the zenith of literature for posterity’s sake, and having now read and been thoroughly engrossed by Midnight’s Children I mostly agree with that statement, which was firstly written in a wreath of spurious sarcasm. I also said that James Joyce’s Ulysses was only slightly more interesting than reading a telephone directory which I must refute until I read (read as in ‘bead’, not read as in ‘bed’) the masterpiece in question (it is on my list of books to read, only very far down).

Most pertinently referring to Underworld and The Waves as ‘style over stubstance’ was a grossly sybaritic view, given that they both entail a titanic amount of substance and most disappointingly lack style, if only the sort that I am searching for.

However, I do still fervently adhere to the idea that there is a burgeoning market for the story emerging back into the ever-evolving sphere of the written word. Philip Pullman’s pertinent speech upon this concept still resonates more soundly than my words could endeavour to achieve at this moment in time, dealing as it does with literature as it is studied in schools: ‘Those who design this sort of thing [the curriculum] seem to have completely forgotten the true purpose of literature, the everyday, humble, generous intention that lies behind every book, every story, every poem: to delight or to console, to help us enjoy life or endure it. That's the true reason we should be giving books to children. The false reason is to make them analyse, review, comment and so on.’

I fundamentally agree with this view. I knew a couple of people who did a course named ‘Media Arts’ at university, extremely similar to ‘Film Studies’ at other institutions, and I remember them saying to me it was hard to watch films as others do anymore because they saw the technicalities behind the filming. It is akin to the study of literature; when you are dissecting a novel every day, just reading one for the sake of it may result in searching for the themes and relations upon the age the author is attempting to weave into his writing.

For a student of English Literature this can be extremely interesting, but it should never be the only thing that is interesting about a book. I doubt that Woolf or DeLillo solely wrote their works aforementioned in the hope they would solely be read by English undergraduated. Yet, this is the only way they can be appreciated in a beneficial light, because as sources designed ‘to delight or to console, to help us enjoy life or endure it’ they fall woefully below the benchmark. Underworld is rightly described as a tour de force literary portrait of American society as it stood at the time upon its publication, but as a novel upon its own, face-value right it is a montage of loosely connected scenes that build up no story whatsoever to enthrall the reader within its imaginative snare. Bits and pieces of it still slosh about in the broth of my memory – I particularly remember the graffiti images of the girl that died, suddenly and supernaturally appearing upon buildings about the rundown area she died within – but it is no where near the same as a powerful novel that captivated me from the opening paragraph.

Reading is seen, annoyingly but truly, as an obsolete recreation by many of the young. And perhaps Modernism, that straying away from the story to the abstraction of the experiment, was a reaction to the emerging form of the cinema which told stories with a greater immediate panache and far lesser cause for concentration than prose. Poetry has been an extreme casualty of this shift. Yet, books such as The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter have been unprecedented successes in recent times. I rate the latter far more than the former but they both achieve what they set out to do: tell a story and enthral the reader by that very premise. I know for one that, even though I detested so much about The Da Vinci Code, I read it to the end.

Unless you develop an affinity for reading from an early age it is within education where your first virginal experiences with literature occur, and it is here that the most should be done to grasp potential readers by the most intimate parts of the mind and never let go. Especially within adolescence, when the brain is still developing at is apex books should be an outlet for all the traumas associated with that age. I loved Lord of the Flies, but what if that class of twenty to thirty fifteen-year olds had had something that spoke something directly to them?

And yes, I know, Lord of the Flies should speak something directly to them, but it simply doesn’t to the majority, however wonderful the teacher (and we had some pretty wonderful teachers). Maybe I will never become a published author, but I would like to attempt a novel upon the furies of youth in this day and age before I finally give up.

Literature then.

2009-02-15T04:40:24Z

Would it be controversial to state that a lot of prose or poetry classed as ‘high literature’ is intensely dull? As an opinion from the man on the street maybe not, no; maybe it is the accepted – even expected – response. But for a student of English literature itself, it remains true that one must attest to thinking Don Dellilo’s Underworld is an absolute page-turner and Virginia Woolf’s initially impenetrable The Waves is undoubtedly a brilliant read. This phenomenon extends beyond the realms of mere students of literature though; if one wants to appear ‘intellectual’ in certain circles it would be highly unacceptable to say certain ‘classic’ novels were only slightly more interesting than reading a telephone directory. The advent of Modernism in literature and the theatre is traditionally hailed as a breakthrough for twentieth-century culture by critics, but does transcending the rules established for writing, as these writers did, actually benefit the whole compass of writing in any way?

Perhaps the earliest examples of literature from Western civilisation that have survived intact to the present day are Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Dating from about the 7th or 8th century BC, they are long epic poems concerning the battle of Troy and Ulysses’ ensuing journeys, each laced through with a myriad of mythical allusions and amazing feats of great magnitude. They are spectacles of the imagination, enthralling readers with the illustrious images presented within the text. And, crucially, they exist and came into being in order to tell a story, passed as they were originally from mouth to mouth. Telling a story is something that seems to be secondary to the Joyces and Woolfs out there, both choosing instead to exercise grand designs in style over substance, and then, inexplicably, basking in almost uniform praise for their choosing to do so.

One could argue that Woolf’s aforementioned The Waves is a seminal exploration of identity, intertwining fresh post-Freudian musings upon the self into her poetically rich prose. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, published just three years later in 1934, tackles some of these same themes, netting Freud throughout his equally as well written work, whilst also being eminently readable on the surface level, as a tightly plotted novel. I do not deliberately slate Woolf for the sake of it – she is a technically exceptional writer – but her beautiful, multifaceted use of language can sometimes be so much that the reader fails to see the character for the words. What draws one into a novel in the first place, where the love of reading first stems from, in my experience, comes from the appeal of the characters, the journeys one follows with them, their hopes, dilemmas and What Happens Next.

And this love of reading is hopelessly absent in some. Perhaps not so much in university students, but in the wider national gamut, people either entirely ignore the ‘Favourite Books’ section on Facebook or put something expressing suitably razor-sharp wit such as ‘LMFAO!!!11!11 AS IF ID READ A BOOK!!!!!!!’. It is a shame because when you do happen across a wonderful book it can surpass any film, programme or play as an entertainment form. People, specifically young people, are turned off from reading because they see it as ‘boring’. One could attribute this spreading consensus to the age we live in, roll out those old clichés that we are saturated in aesthetic images and instant gratification, reading just takes too much time and effort. But rather, I think, adolescents are put off reading because they are forced to study books that from an academic view are truly fascinating as experiments in writing, character psychology and utilising language, but on a primary level are unfortunately just not very interesting.

But there is a third way, a method of marrying the intellectually stimulating to the effortlessly popular without sacrificing grandeur or artistic integrity. To name but a choice few in recent years: David Mitchell has been praised rightly again and again for his roving through the imagination in Cloud Atlas (2004), Michael Cunningham deftly weaved Woolf’s own life and work into The Hours (1998) to create a poignant and touching novel, whereas established writers such as Martin Amis and Alan Hollinghurst – although by no means pleasing all – never fail to excite conjecture upon their stimulating work. And elsewhere the art of story-telling is still given emphasis: it is written of Philip Ridley, the multi-award winning writer, artist, photographer and performance artist, renowned for his ‘magical but menacing’ works, that ‘despite the vast range of his talents… Ridley has always described himself as a story-teller’. However, if we are looking for a really famous name, one that will be recognized by equally as many, if not more, as the names of Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner, then inevitably we find ourselves face to face – touching toes with The Chronicles of Narnia on the way – with Philip Pullman’s seminal trilogy, His Dark Materials.

Despite being vastly admired all over the world – being made into films, winning a multitude of mainstream awards, named Number Three in the BBC’s Big Read Poll of 2003 – these works show great veins of intellectual curiosity coursing through their entirety, inviting as much scholarly criticism and heated debate as the works of the Modernist authors. Some might say here that I am referencing a ‘kid’s book’, but most critics are united in agreement that it would be grossly ignorant to confine something as shape-shifting and mercurial as Pullman’s work to the bracket of ‘children’s literature’. The subverting themes of a corrupt Christian Heaven gradually destroying itself, the recurrent echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost, speculation upon parallel worlds and the nature of atomic position, and innumerable other strands of imaginative/theological/
scientific flight, all conspire to elevate this book above a simple children’s book. But the fact that it is ostensibly a piece for children means that on its surface level it reads as a riveting, exhilarating and moving story – one that has captured the imaginations of people, both young and old, the globe over. The question of story-telling and its loss, particularly in education and schools, is addressed by Pullman himself in his ‘Isis Speech’, given at the University of East Anglia on the 1st April, 2003.

Here, he cites the current Key Stage 2 (age eleven) requirements for examination of reading: selecting, retrieving, deducing, inferring, interpreting, identifying and commenting on the structure and organisation of texts. Pullman points out, with some passion, that this is all reading is reduced to, this is all we are asking of our next generations in relation to imaginative stimulus. Something that is potentially magnificent and animate within a child’s mind, is reduced to an etherized patient upon the table, devoid of a soul, to be dissected in a cold, detached manner. Later on in the same speech, he writes, ‘the rejection of the central directing consciousness, of the omniscient narrator, is exactly what happened to literary fiction in the twentieth century, to its eventual impoverishment. Novelists became fascinated by other things than telling stories… more and more literary fiction became tentative, diffident, uncertain, openly self-contradictory, uncommitted, shifting, relative … and story, which is both events and the voice that tells us about them, was banished.’

The ‘phenomenon’ of a distinctive return to the arts of story-telling and opening up the imagination is occurring elsewhere, outside the world of the written, concrete text, but closely associated with it. This is the medium of the theatre. Challenged with the multi-million visually stunning Hollywood movies, and the endless recycling of fun but generic musicals in the West End, true theatre has had to adapt to survive, it can no longer afford to be seen as mainly boring but didactically right, and one of the more successful fringe forms to emerge into the mainstreams in the second half of the twentieth century is that of physical theatre. Steven Berkoff, bursting onto the theatrical scene in 1968 with his adaptation of Kakfa’s In the Penal Colony, declared, in a typically subtle way, that he rejected the dominant theatre form of the time ‘because it’s very, very boring. You come to the theatre and people are bored out of their fucking minds’. Perhaps best known of all those companies practicing this form at the moment is the world renowned Theatre de Complicite, who consistently stress the importance of story-telling and approaching the world through a child’s eyes in their swirling visionary productions.

So, here are just some of those who are unafraid to challenge the given, to say that something is dull or boring if it is. This isn’t to dismiss certain famous authors’ life works flippantly, discarding their novels after having read the first sentence; it is having read those books, weighed them and found them lacking. Lacking in heart, soul, imagination, vision: those vital aspects of a novel that makes it an exciting, enveloping journey for the reader. And there will be those who regard these works as the pinnacles of literature, who would defend them to the death, and yes, it is true that they have made their inimitable mark on the literary world, but let us finally come to our senses and stop revering them above all else . The Iliad was first and foremost comprised to tell a story – one of epic, mind bending proportions, but a story nonetheless – maybe we would all do well to remember that. If we return to the world of the imagination, what excites us, and are not ashamed to admit this, maybe we will all be able to enjoy reading more.

Where have all the flowers gone?

2009-02-10T09:29:09Z

Despite the time of posting I am neither on drink nor drugs, merely temporarily incurably awake with only my thoughts and an internet connection to idle the time away.

Primarily amongst my thoughts is a certain tendancy almost approaching awkwardness in initial social situations. I hate meeting people and being regaled with stories of what they did at the Henley Regatta in 2003 when they were sick off the side of a yacht, so I take it to the point where I volunteer nothing except the most basic information for fear of falling into that trap of boring someone with a variety of dull anecdotes about getting drunk. Everybody has got drunk with their own friends before and they're not in need of someone else's anodyne version of events to supplement their back catalogue. I could tell a story about overdosing on ketamine after prize-giving or snorting cocaine off various girls' bare breasts, but that often doesn't create the best first impression.

(Though it depends who you're talking to, of course.)

Of course I'm not that sank into some uneasily intoxicated oblivion to imagine that upon meeting a new person the only topics of conversation we would be able to find for one another would concern alcohol or drugs, but it is a useful example, especially at parties:

'Oh, is that Captain Morgans? That ALWAYS reminds me of this HILARIOUS time when...'

The next five minutes are spent nodding along whilst contemplating the sounds of wind in Angola. So, not wanting to bore people like this, unless we have things in common that come across straight away I stay pretty quiet apart from questioning them on their lives.

Yes, and in this lies a Catch-22, for by questioning them upon their lives I can subject myself to the most absolutely, totally, utterly, mind-bogglingly, life-threateningly, sunshine-destroyingly tedious and dreary takes upon the very concept of dullness one can imagine. Some people have this remarkable ability to drone on for hours upon nothing except themselves, rarely pausing for breath or considering that they are talking to another entity capable of speech. I might as well be a kitchen cupboard, or an ironing board. But questioning rather than offering is a useful tool for working out who you want to talk to and what you have to talk about, and who you might want to avoid at all costs. It also, crucially, entails that one can adjust themselves subtly to the flows and curves of the other's personality, should they wish to do so.

Adjusting a personality isn't as sinister as it sounds, and more involves basics such as not immediately declaring that you detest something before you have established their own opinions on the subject, and then attempting to fathom how they hold such a view e.g. some people like Jimmy Carr. Areas where I don't really care one way or the other and they hate with some such fiery passion I might just agree with for the sake of it, and very little, bar white-water kayaking and other 'adrenaline sports', bonds you so much to someone as a bit of communal bitching.

Posturing and building of personas like so can be seen as the zenith of artifice if taken at face value. Short-term consequences can result in being thought 'shy' or 'coy' by others, but long-term benefits can be realised as one who doesn't bother with worthless titbits and the eventual ability to slip your real personality and opinions in to their orbit over time, rather than suffusing someone, like the smell of raw saffron, from the start.

It is also how I learn to make people laugh. I can make people laugh, but I must know what makes them tick beforehand; I do not often possess the Wildean aptitude of coming to a party of unknowns and being thought the new darling of Camden Town. Dare I say it, but I think my method creates a more genuine laughter.

Recent excursions into parties full of people who already know each other intimately have informed and shaped all of this post of course, because, as any social guerilla will be able to tell you, it is only one tactic to use in the warfare of modern intercourse. From the shimmering fields of the UCL social scene I have made ten or twelve very good friends and a large smattering of genteel acquaintances, meaning I get many invitations either through these good souls or the everlasting medium of Facebook. If it were at a party where the majority of people didn't know each other already I imagine that my natural abilites to talk to people and reserves of confidence would come to the fore quite easily, without any worry in the wide world about seeming boring or below par. But at parties where all the cross connections are quite blindingly apparent, people are taking special effort out of their time with their friends to get to know you, and there's a pressure on you not to disappoint them with several shades of beige chitter-chatter. If I'm at a party with a vast group of my friends then I know I'd much rather be laughing and talking with them then being bored by some tosser telling me how much vodka they once drank in a night ('I'm telling you, it was mental, mate!' - there's the sounds of wind in Angola, again).

Unless they were extremely cute, of course, for which attribute I'd shamelessly pretend every word they said was fascinating whilst filling up their drink.

No... once upon a time, not now. I hope. Finding oneself on the receiving end of this hopelessly devoted attention from a girl at a party is even more awkward, because all the time I'm talking to her I'm inwardly groaning 'she doesn't know' and can't tell if she's really interested in anything I'm saying. I usually excuse myself pretty quickly, to save the blushful embarrassment for both of us as the actual situation is explained. Occasionally she'll pop up again a couple of hours later far drunker, and far more determined.

So I've been utilising this method a lot recently both at parties and, to a lesser extent, in the workplace, it's been preying on my mind because, kind of like those films and books where the protagonist finds they can make themselves invisible but if they do it too often they fade away forever, I find myself disappearing ever so slightly at these parties. Maybe next time, I'll bring along a textbook of steadfast opinions from which I shall not differ all night. Maybe.

blackmarketmuse @ 2009-01-21T03:46:00

2009-01-21T03:49:53Z

'So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as bright'

Out of all poetry, nothing moves me more than these few lines. Even more so than Eliot.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof.

2008-12-19T04:03:14Z

Yeah, hallelujah.

I don't like the fact that the X-Factor winner has released a version of 'Hallelujah'. Haveyou heard it? She's got a pretty voice, but there's no soul behind that version.

Honestly, there's nothing.

But I do find it annoying in a way that a load of empty-headed trendies, considering themselves 'with it', are supporting Jeff Buckley's version for number one.

Jeff Buckley's version will always be the version that speaks to me, but let's not forget it's Leornad Cohen who wrote it in the first place.

And so all those self-righteous souls demanding that the 'original' should take 'its rightful place' might wanna think twice.

Although, hearing it again, there is very little more beautiful than Jeff Buckley's 'Hallelujah'.