are old people getting stupider, or is it just me? it appears that a whole plethora of previously culturally-pertinent old people are cultivating these strange personas of bumbling idiocy, Clarkson (Jeremy), Johnson (Boris), Elton (Ben), obviously not having the same backgrounds, but they all seem to be looking at everything in this terminally un-hooked-up way, one that doesn't show interest in the subjects they interminably waffle on about, it's more of a limpid "just loogathis!" that produces patently obvious pointless arm-flailing and article-buffoonery (Clarkson's a vs. an being a particularly egregious example - yes, that kind of article, not the one he wrote about Markle (Meghan), oh no) which doesn't look like satire or anything meaningful, and is instead just the cultural equivalent of watching a mentally challenged man slumber about in circles on a main road, dodging cars through sheer blind luck. It's like all of their cultural observations came from looking distantly at culture through a telescope, and now that the culture being observed has moved, they have not thought to readjust their metaphorial telescopes and are instead whining impotently about not being able to see anything or make any new insights.
I've been reading Identity Crisis today, and I have to say that on some levels I've really enjoyed the very colourful style of writing. Elton's style really feels like a continuation of the older-white-man with a near-continuous stream of odd but endearing cultural references. Sometimes, the references to the real world seem to be placed there solely for some tone-inappropriate levity in an otherwise bleak-ish environment. In terms of subject matter, it is about as heavy-handed as you can get without travelling to the "Conservative Fiction" section in a bookstore. It is so blunt I could use it to steamroll tarmac. It is so painfully obvious that I had to put it down every few minutes so my retinas did not have the glaring imprint of the political messages he is so desperate to convey.
He feels nervous, tense, but also bland and uninspired, an extremely Punch & Judy-esque take on modern life with the book being as full of caricatures as the artists in Leicester Square. It feels like something I would have written in Year 9 with my dad's supervision being the origin for all of the slightly off-kilter synonyms. Every time he uses a # it feels like a gut punch, a reminder that he is old and a bit out of it despite the utterly incredible performance he gave when we saw him live. He fails to connect with anything on a level beyond that of your average distant middle-class-hysteria Daily Telegraph reader. The plot and characters are just not that interesting or detailed. It feels like it was written in three weeks to meet the last book in a 10-book deal with his publisher. I will finish it, but with great difficulty.
I hate overzealous identity politics as much as the next sane human being, but this doesn't feel like a criticism of anything so much as watching some confused guy standing in the middle of Oxford Circus as the cars rush by him and he's just standing there, not really saying or doing anything. Nothing feels like it can be taken at any level deeper than literal impotent blubbering - the style, the veneer is all there is with this book, and it's not a bad style, but you can just see it's like a poster covering a chain-link fence. Hell, even the little metaphor I just wrote back there about the guy standing in the middle of Oxford Circus feels like it has more meat to it than about 99% of this book.
But I still have hope for Mr. Elton's work in the future. He doesn't need to stoop to this painfully floor-licking level in order to make one salient point about modern life.
I've been working on a new project called (...) recently, and I've found it to be quite fun. Whereas writing Eight Hours often allowed me to siral down into the pits of my own psyche, this one is much more representative of broader issues and allows me to, well, at least externally project my thoughts and fears onto the cavalcade of characters that I have invented for the book. It follows the story of Kemmill Roleford (a 60-odd year-old philosophy professor) and his family as they navigate retirement and growing up and all the inbetweens. But for Kemmill, things are a little bit more difficult, as his linguistic philosophy work is suddenly hampered by the fact that he loses the ability to distinguish between objects. Eventually, his work and vocabulary are whittled down to something much less than what he had to work with before. Most of the other characters have to deal with this, but some benefit from the added value that he finds in life. Eventually, it is hard to determine what Kemmill actually is, as he is unable to distinguish between a lot of things and spends his days in a haze of wonder. Life's a lot better when you're seeing things for what they are. At the end, he sees the world for what it is, unfiltered by external factors, guided purely by some unknowable thing which still resides within him. True wisdom, eschewing all forms of conventional expression.
Of course, he can't communicate any of this information. It breaks the spell. There's always a problem with getting across this need to use less words to other people, because you often need to sink to their level and use their complicated terminology in order to convince them of anything. Discourse spirals out into increasingly complex terminology as everyone is convinced they need to carve out their own niche, and words proliferate, whereas words that describe 'nebulous' concepts like a soul only remain nebulous because our words for them are nebulous. That's sort of the point that the book is trying to get across, I feel. The idea is intended to come across in various other ways, too, like Kemmill's grand-niece that is going through a period of self-discovery, or his young grand-nephew that is unable to communicate using traditional means, and instead draws pictures of thougths, feelings and desires. It should be quite good.
Recently, I re-read parts of Ducc and La Vita Eterna, and I really think that they're practically the same in terms of quality of writing, the peaks of Ducc and LVE are roughly the same, and the fact that LVE is based heavily on experiences that I've had is rather telling. Funnily enough, I did write about New Orleans in LVE before I actually went, and proceeded to not use any of my new-found knowledge about the city in order to improve the accuracy of where they lived and worked. [Upcoming spoiler, not that you care...] I feel this is because of the fact that the story is invented within the book, the man is not actually immortal and has not lived these lives. [spoiler alert over, I guess] It appears that I might feel this way because Eight Hours was supposed to be the 'turning point' for me in terms of quality of writing, there are some very good bits within Eight Hours, but they're just too shrouded, they're too bundled up within layers and layers of reference, meta-, irony, and just general tricksterishness that doesn't sit right with your average reader. But I don't know how well it would sell. Maybe it would be heralded as a new genre, the metafictional text, it feels like nothing I've really read before, self-referential bodies of nothing pointed squarely at the self-analysis of oneself. I think I read a passage in Infinite Jest where the characters use a search function to find how many times the word 'self' comes up in some teacher's piece of work that they are trying to submit, and laugh at the exceedingly high count. 93 times, it appears in Eight Hours, 53 of those being self- prependices rather than the word in and of itself. The fragment 'self' (including itself, selfish, yourself) appears an incredible 345 times, with 67 'myself', 61 'itself' and 71 'yourself'. Oh yeah, and three mentions of the appendix '-self', all used in in memory-self. That's quite a disease. There's less commas per word in Eight Hours, though, than any other large work that I've completed. However, I think that it will feel like it has more commas, mainly because the commas are used to create great big run-on sentences rather than to punctuate dialogue, which never feels as comma-y as what I'm doing right now, making long run-on sentences for no reason.
The title of this thing is something that I have promised I will discuss for a while, that is... lust! Well, not lust, but unfathomable attraction. I think if I had to actually write an essay on why I'd fallen in love with someone, my mind would go off on all of these little tangents that go nowhere, like the sparks from an exploding firework. They might be bright, and, in the moment, quite illuminating, but overall pointless and merely flashy. I think it's best left for another day. Until then...
I've been thinking about what the overal themes of the things that I've worked on over the last couple of years are. Are they self-discovery? Well, yes, honestly. They're more like my way of thinking about things rather than things which explicitly try and tell any kind of story. Even Ducc, which is about as abstract as it gets, is still a representation of myself and my perspective within a private education. Even as far back as Dreamscape, Vol. 1, it's all about representations of myself.
But where is it all going? Is it the Grand Unification Project? Why am I like this, having the things that I make be extremely obvious extensions of myself rather than things in and of themselves? It just makes talking about the things that I've made a little weird. I had a talk with someone about this last night and I am interested to see how the conversation develops as I see them more often.
I think that, essentially, I'm just trying to find myself and tell stories in the best ways I can muster, not through songwriting or scripts, but prose. Perhaps there's something in all three of those things. Prose appears to be the best thing to write in. But I feel the real thing that I'm going to work on will be my next thing. The long thing. The gargantuan undertaking of Good Time Other People / Great O In The Sky. I think that I'm going to write Great O as a collection of short stories broken up by theme rather than by actual story, kind of like how The Pale King is structured, and Good Time Other People is going to be a standard narrative with intricate explanations of the decisions that people make during the plot.
I think that it might be quite good. Perhaps I could subsume Standing On The Sidelines into it, too. Although that might be a little much.
It's been unnervingly close to a year here, we're getting towards 11 months now. The medium of the blog post is an interesting one, especially when on a blog as little-surfed as this one. Is it external, is it out to an audience, or does it function more as a private diary with the added bonus of being easily referenced and categorised, of being sent to other people. It's a grey area. But the whole point of the idea of writing is a grey area, it's pervasive throughout so many aspects of life and, linguistically, has so many pitfalls and shortcomings (that I discuss in this essay here) but it's kind of all we have. It's good in that sense. It's nice, it allows for many things to be said and left unsaid, the word is more of a tool than other mediums.
The other night, I spoke to my boyfriend about the various qualities of certain types of media, and their drawbacks. Before things eventually spiralled into the 3am whirlpool of untrustworthy thoughts about one's own life, I thought I made a few decent points about various different kinds of media that are prevalent in society.
FILM: Film, as I have mentioned before in Eight Hours, is an inherently authoritarian medium. It demands your full attention, your more sailent senses, your sight and hearing. A lot of information is transmitted through those, and it just so happens to be the two easiest types of media to transfer over an audiovisual format - it's in the name, right? Film demands your full field of view, your peripheral vision is psychologically blocked out in your mind when you are focusing on a film, you don't think about what is happening around the screen, you are taken, your senses replaced by the single-camera view. It's only a few films that actually take advantage of the ability to be non-single camera'd, but I feel a lot of these films end up re-emphasising the importance of single-perspective existence. Films replace reality, they do not supplant it. They are not augmnentors of thought, they are replacers. And if they're not doing that, they're not doing their job properly. A film that fails to get you to suspend your disbelief towards its actions has somewhat failed. As soon as you're thinking 'colud this really happen?' you're outside of the boundaries of the film, and the illusion is shattered. As a medium, it is inherently flawed. It makes you think what it wants you to think - even if it doesn't necessarily make you think anything. The constraints of the medium force anything that is outside of the convention of film to be defined by what it isn't. Nothing can lack meaning in a film, the idea of some art-film that forces you to dig deep for its meaning relies upon the fact that if your senses are replaced with something, even if it is an indeciperable mess of signals and symbols, the fact that it replaces you means you have to find meaning in it. It cannot ever be truly meaningless. There is an order put upon it. Of course, if one were to step outside of the realm of the boundaries of objects, one might be able to see these films at a more pared-back level. But I'm getting on a bit.
MUSIC: This is less a point levied against music so much as a point against music discussion and criticism. Many people, over the years, have discussed music as a topic. This is because there is much to talk about, much to discover and learn, no one man can hear all the music that there ever has been. Some of it is temporary, live performances are fleeting, sometimes captured, but often not. But some people wish to capture the feelings that music makes them feel and necessarily attribute them to certain chords, theories, all the analysis that tends to go into music. But what are we aiming for in music? Melodic complexity? 'Nice'ness? No one (bar Jacob Collier) truly aims for either of these things. If something is aimed at when making music, then it lacks a key element. When something is aimed at when talking about music, then the criticism lacks an understanding of what makes the music meaningful. Music is meaningful because it induces feelings in people, broadly transcending language in order to provide us with some insightful pieces. Music is better than film because it allows other things to happen, and not in a modern "I must watch TV while listening to eight podcasts otherwise my brain will explode" hyper-bolic/-kinetic kind of way, but in a way that allows the mind to percieve other things. Like how a book's qualities may make you imagine worlds that are far beyond capturing and bottling.
GAMES: This was the main topic of conversation, because it covered the most ground. When I'm talking about games, I mean everything with the suffix 'Games'. Sports, Esports, anything. But what was of interest to me is simplicity. Of trying to pare things back to basics. This is because I believe that a good game is one with few mechanics, but those mechanics interplay and generate depth, rather than just stat-bloat breadth. I think that games like Pokemon are a good example of stat-bloat. There is not a lot of skill involved, it is just learning. There are certain well-defined paramaters which are externally determined, which determine how the game flows. People who I have spoken to who play this at anything above a casual level seem to see it as a number-crunching competition with a sort of 'rock-paper-scissors' style meta in which nothing can really happen inventively, every match is almost predetermined, everyone is just waiting for their opponent to slip up.
But then there are other games that can have a depth with minimal input. Take football, for example, a very simple game that does a lot with a simple set of rules. Most of the rules that are imposed are to impose an external sense of 'fair play' and 'justice' to the game, and also because the pitch needs defining or there wouldn't be anywhere to put the stands. But these rules are made to be bent and broken. Not through bit flips or exploits, but the messy nature of actual reality. A lot more games should be like this. Games which rely on the messy, interpersonal nature of the world, rather than attempting to make sure that a Potion gives +2 Charisma or what the fuck ever. Reality isn't like that, and games shouldn't be either. Control, definition, they're all silly little vouches for power over an inherently uncategorisable world. Some developers don't get that, they get caught up in it all, they see worlds in the interactions of numbers and equations. Just how like some people have attempted to find solace between the atoms of the primordial soup of the big bang, sleeping safe in the knowledge that they know where they have come from.
Well, no more metricisation. Do something else. Have a sense of 'fair play'. Encourage people to go out and not determine themselves through external things. Like how that conversation eventually turned into a self-realisation that I do that for some more serious things, that I determine myself by what other people think, that I determine the way I act, living between the cracks of other people sometimes. It's late now, too, and I think I'm getting into the same territory that I was in the other night, I'm in the dangerous part of the evening where nothing is allowed to roam but my mind, creating ever more horrendous and hallucination-like visions of manglings, etc. It's not a schizophrenia thing, I promise, it's something I need to work on, wracked with stillness and guilt, feeling brave for even mentioning the existence of a 'boyfriend' in the beginning of this entry. Do people I know read this and check up on this? I'd think that this is a pretty silent spot. This is a quiet place for me to mutter my mumblings out without containing and corraling them into numbers and named days. I mean, I name the posts.
I suppose you could say I love significance, I love titles, I enjoy all of the names that we give things, but I can't get into any of them unambiguously unless I have some stake in their creation. Everything from Spex (a game that I invented with my friends in our local pub that involves moving glasses from coloured hexagons to other coloured hexagons) right the way back to Egg Smasher. I have loved titles, I have given things that don't exist titles that are far stronger (not better in any way, though) than things that people I know have been working on for ages. It's like there is some kind of theme that predetermines the title and thus the rest of the work. It's like I take fragments of past real experiences and craft multitudinous worlds from them. The title "Good Time Other People" is taken from part of a text I wrote while on acid in December '21, which eventually found its way into Eight Hours, like every good thing eventually did. Do I like Eight Hours? Massively. It feels adult, it feels to me like something with a bit of weight to it that would have certainly been against the views, wishes and whims of thirteen year old me, who the book was eventually dedicated to.
Everything, given time, feels significant. Distant, maybe, hard to glean insight from, yes, but significant. I have screenshotted parts of my own work (as utterly narcissistic as it sounds) and used them as sort of motivational little bits, mainly for myself, but when I am feeling especially bold, for others. I do not initally want to say where the texts come from. I think I have a style of writing that appears sort of distinctive to a degree, or at least a lexical set that I use - an idiosyncratic blend of poorly-learnt long words combined with an overuse of commas, with a pinch of poorly-gleaned philosophy and garnished with whatever terms I have been using for my external (ie. non-personal) writings. I think that eventually, even this blog post will be some kind of marking-post from which to measure myself against. I rise from the depths of my mind into the sky and then crash back down again ungracefully like some myth somewhere sometime.
iA[?-Av]
& [i&o]A[?-A^]
O?
iMAt & iCAt
& =x iA[?-A^]
O?
O>[O]=?
i=xi > iA[?-]
iA[>+Ax]
translation
notes
I just wrote the year as 22 instead of 23. I suppose I haven't really had anything come at me yet to put the new year in perspective. Even the actual new year celebration was largely overridden by the fact that I was having quite a lot of fun and not really thinking about the literal number that made the year up. When I was a lot younger, I supposed I cared a lot more about the actual numbers that seemed to 'define' things - time, age, year, date, etc., but now, it's a lot more abstract. The years feel different. I am somehow capable of forgetting all of these sorts of things. Perhaps it comes from an unwillingness to grow up, to try and literally forget what time it is.
Anyway, that's probably overthinking it. I'm not really about to forget what time of day it is just because I've recently tunred twenty. It is true, it does feel a little odd when someone asks me how old I am and I have to say something that doesn't end in '-teen' because it feels like I have spent my entire life giving that answer. Oh, I should probably mention, I think Eight Hours's true meaning has finally sort of come through. It's a book about being a teenager and growing up. I think that there's a lot more to be done in making the entire thing feel more cohesive as a narrative, but to be honest, I like the fact that it's quite scattershot. Of course, there's going to be huge sections of essay that are taken out and replaced with something a little more story-like, just because I think those sections read better. There's going to be a lot more on Eddie, I suppose, considering the finale, and how the 'suicide on top of a building with loads of speakers' idea is prevalent in a lot of the most critical points. There's going to be a lot more cohesiveness, I think, but also a lot more that's just made up. Perhaps I should talk about the fact that some of the things within the book that are purported to be real are actually somewhat fake.
But I want this to be a book that essentially says "Look how far you've come, look how far you still have to go." A book that I could have given myself at the age of thirteen and it would have changed my life. If I had known I would feel this way now, I mean, what would I have done? What would I do if I was given a book of similar scope now? How would I act? To be honest, I can say that if I went back to when I was 13, right now, I would live my life differently, I would know that a lot of the things that I got hung up on were largely unimportant and meaningless, and I would probably make sure to live my life to the fullest, but to be honest, it's daunting to see oneself in that sort of position at any moment - as in, you are this sort of naive little idiot to someone seven years down the line. I care about things that don't really matter, and I'm terrible in my own right. I wonder what sort of advice I would be given. I mean, of course, the obvious one would be to go out and do more things, because even the worst thing is better than the best nothing.
Hey, that's not that bad. Anyway, yeah I think I'd literally get stumped at this point. Because right now, for me, all the self-awareness about not doing things and being a lazy bastard is right there, but yet, I don't seem to do anything about it. I haven't contancted a lot of people, but to be honest, I don't think that contacting old people is always the best way to go about things. I think there's actually a lot more to be had in meeting new people a lot of the time. But where? It always seems so daunting. Also, I think I remember talking to Johnny about this a while ago, but the thought has sort of kept going in my own head - I'm not looking for a Skins-type group (kind of like the one Nathan has) where everything is still a teenage fantasy and they're all wrapped up in the drama of it all [1]. I just don't think that that kind of thing would be good for me, because it's quite painful to be around, even if it does net some really cool experiences. Plus, I think that the opposite, which is overly adult and serious friends, could lead to the wrong thing, too. I just don't know how to find the perfect balance between going out and thinking about things. I said the word 'fractal' in conversation and was accused of over-philosophising. [2]
It feels like there's two options, people who take themselves too seriously and use this as licence to have nothing but hedonistic fun and bitch about each other when the music stops, and people who take themselves too seriously and as a result are literally incapable of having fun. It turns out, being unaware of oneself is the major stepping-stone for a lot of these people. Saying things that betray themselves just because of some missattribution of authority to their own statements. I think the people that I know and live with actually have a really good balance of these kind of things, it's just that we need to go out and do more things, otherwise we just sit indoors and drink all the time. I think that we do some interesting things. But maybe we just need to loosen up a little, go out, watch films, do some more things as a group. I think this stems from the fact that I have friends outside of the group in London, but the pthers who live with me either do not or do not show them to other people. Ralph's work friends are a little too work-heavy for him to want to show them to anyone else, Ben's work friends are... actually, we've met them a few time and they seem solid, and I've occasionally brought people back to the house but it never feels like it goes anywhere.
Anyway, the rule is simple, go out, do more things, write more, do more, whatever, just do more of it. Just go out and have those experiences rather than just sitting at home. Honestly, how many blog posts saying the exact same thing do you need before you actually go out and do any of the damn things you say you're gonna do. It's honestly quite sad.