Biology of the Worst Kind

Every Little Hurts

Obviously I had no intention of going, but The Poet set off and I cheered him on from my sofa in the solitarium.  It was the Stop Tesco Opening in Mill Road March, yesterday.  Mill Road, I learned, is called 'the most multi-cultural street in Britain' by The Telegraph - in what tone I can't say.  And I live directly off it.  It is a very fine road, full of shops selling ingredients for, or the food of every cuisine under the sun, well, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, American, New Zealand; and bicycles, old fashioned hardware, electrical bits and pieces, organic this and that, as well as booze, printer ink, computers, electronic music stuff, toys.  There's a mosque, a couple of chapels, and a new age bookshop.  And Tesco has just discovered a triple fronted vacant shop to begin the ruin of it.

But my foot doesn't walk half a mile without pain, I've got a streaming cold that's refused to go away for a week, and as well as being entirely idle, I've got an aversion to crowds, actually an aversion to more than three people on the street at the same time.  I've avoided demonstrations, though mostly they have my whole-hearted blessing, since that march on Grosvenor Square in 1968 (was it?) when they got the horses and backed us up against the trees in the square and I was anyway speeding and it was all a bit much quite honestly.

But the drums and whistles of the Mill Road march could be heard all the way up in my solitarium.  Really great drumming, and I'm a sucker for anything with a powerful beat.  After about half an hour, I couldn't bear it, and headed off down the road, just like one of the rats in Hamelin, inveigled by the Pied Piper towards the river Weiser deep and wide.  And there I was on my first march for 40 years or so (OK there were a couple since). 

Actually, the march had just reached the top of my street when I got to it, and the proposed Tesco site is about 100 yards away from it, so to say that I marched would be stretching it.  I found The Poet, who waved me towards him in the crowd of a good few hundred.  I got there in time to hear the man from Al Amin, grocer and post office, make his speech and to  cheer, though I declined the placard The Poet offered me, even though it said  'Every Little Hurts'.  We reminisced with a couple of friends about the old days of throwing ball-bearings under the horses' feet to unseat the police, but decided that animal welfare considerations over rode such behaviour.  Anyway there weren't any horses, there were community police officers who for the most part were taking photos on their phones - not for the records, like they used to - but to take home to show their mums.  And then the crowd gradually dispersed to do their Saturday afternoon shopping in the deli, Al Amin and the co-op, or have a coffee in the Black Cat Cafe; the dreadlocked, the pink-haired, the grey haired and the bald went their amiable ways.  And, unless Tesco have not been cowed and continue their vile plan to ruin our excellent street, I have had my quota of exercise and activism for another forty years. 

PS Toolbar Manhaters

PS:  It's worth taking a look at Wayne's comment in the previous post, for another take on my MetaFilter dissatisfaction.

Toolbelt Manhaters - A MetaFilter Mystery

Sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel because it turns out it never got invented in the first place.  An object lesson over on these two MetaTalk  threads of MetaFilter, about which I wrote an LRB article  recently.  The subject is whether or not men dominate the space and how they do it.  I got involved reading a conversation started by a post about a flasher.  Women were talking about their experiences.  Very rare to see so many women involved in the comments.  Suddenly the thread wasn't there any more.  The moderators had deemed it a bad post, which always overrides a good discussion.  So I was told when I set up another post on the same topic which was deleted because it was 'making a point' and that isn't what MetaFilter was about either.

My mistake.  I didn't remember that you have to accept the rules of a place when it isn't collectively run.  But the complaint threads developed, and women began to say how uncomfortable they felt with the 'boyzone' talk, and some of the men fought back with talk of zealots, how women always make victims of themselves instead of getting on the right wavelength...oh god, all that stuff, decades and decades gone by, and there it all is.  Someone suggested I was having a fit of the vapours (and the thread is headlined 'Hysterics') and when I objected was told that it was a joke, ironic, dontcha get it. 

There are a handful of men who are agreeing that the ethos is bad, and fighting their corner, insisting that women claiming they find it hard to participate ought to be listened to.  It's a proper discussion, dismal in places, but as clear a description of how not very much has changed since the Seventies as can be got.  The discussion that eventually is being had is the upside of MetaFilter, just as, it seems to me, the privileging of 'best of the web' posts over debate is the downside.

Worth looking, if you're feeling strong.  But I think I've done with the site.  I'm 60 years old, and it's too tiring (actually shocking) still to be told that a discussion by women about their experiences of being flashed is 

like manna from Heaven for the toolbelt manhaters that roam Metafilter with a fried chicken leg in one hand and Camila Paglia's panties in the other. More succinctly, it massages their prejudices.

Playtime

The truth is I'm besotted by technology.  Actually, the truth is I love toys.  I like diminutive objects that do clever things.  Computer software has all the nooks and crevices of a dolls' house, tiny drawers that slide in and out and have minute working models of kitchen implements inside.  I only liked toy cars that had doors that opened and steering wheels that turned.  I adored a doll that pee'ed into a nappy after being given a bottle, not for any innate maternal pleasure it gave me, not so I could nurture my faux baby, but because of the one thing one thing following another, and the fact that I could set it in motion.  It worked like a real life object, but wasn't.  It was a trick.  A delight.

So I finished the novel and celebrated by giving up on the horrors of Windows Vista and migrated to an Mac.  A thing of beauty, and best of all it's toytown, though a bit dinky, even for me.  I hate the dock and its little bouncing icons - but I've discovered Quicksilver and my fingers are beginning to flick my applications into life.  What it means is that I've had to spend days learning a completely new system and discover all kinds of new software.  My happiness/craziness quotient runneth over.   I've got no knowhow, you understand, everything about software is just beyond my comprehension, except that bit by bit I begin to see what it does, and  just glimpse slightly how it works, how it's organised and what I can make it do. 

Databases thrill me, but are so fathomless I feel like I've been shipwrecked in a wilderness.  The fantasy is that I can put all information into my machine and it will link together to surprise me with the oddest connections.  That's a toy brain, really.  I can't get my head around the multiplicity of Tinderbox , though I think it's probably just what I want.  DevonThink  is remote and massive.  VoodooPad is wonderful and magically wiki and Journler looks to me almost just right, like the baby bear's porridge, though I have to make the magical connections myself. 

I want a word processor that pulls together notes, research, lets me play around with text and makes patterns.  Scrivener does all that with knobs on, and opens two different windows at the same time.  But Jer's Novel Writer (call it like it is) lets you make marginal notes, though you can't have a notecard view.  So much to play with.  Though the truth is that I know Word so inside and out it's virtually invisible and exactly what's required to writing.  But I want something new, that does things that make me go 'Oh' and 'Ah'.

I don't seem to get bored with looking at software.  I haven't done a stroke of work, just buried myself in methods and organisation on the optimistic assumption that I will actually get round again to doing some writing with these tools.  In fact, it's like my mobile phone, I'm not really interested in getting phone calls, I want to set it up and play with the options.

Does this mean I should have been a software designer?  Maybe.  I could just sit around and doodle patterns that make things happen, or seem to happen.  But I haven't got the math, or the logic, to put it very mildly.  Yet there's a hankering for investigating structure, for playing with things that appear to perform a clear task when really it's all done with smoke and mirrors.  Actually, that's quite like human beings and all that overt social and mental  existence which turns out to be the result of an underlying system of proteins.  It's also quite like being a writer.  Or a writer like me, at any rate.  I've never been terribly interested in telling stories or inventing what they call rounded characters.  For me, writing is much more about making shapes, fitting disparate things together, finding out about the workings of seemingly inevitable behaviours.  Or perhaps, I just should have been a geek.

It also means that I've got two redundant Window's Vista laptops.  I could flog them on ebay to defray all this expenditure on new software, but I'm rubbish at packing parcels.  Any suggestions?

Down Among the Handbags

There's a new review by me in the LRB.

• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre by Dana Thomas

There’s a science-fiction short story, I can’t remember by whom, which has a New York journalist on a hiking tour, lost in the Appalachians. He comes across a ramshackle house lived in by a family of hillbillies and they give him a bed for the night. In the morning at breakfast he notices that one of the girls has her headscarf tied in a manner he’s never seen before – it’s strange but very elegant. One by one he discovers that all the other members of the family are wearing an article of clothing in an unknown way, or have run up a frock or made a sweater or decorated their dungarees to look startlingly different. When he asks about it, they each tell him they just sort of thought they would, no big deal, gotta milk the cow, chop some wood, see ya. He stays a while and it emerges that he has discovered in this one family the actual source of fashion, the single place from which all new trends spring and stream out to couturiers, glossy magazines and eventually the city streets. No one, not even the family themselves, had any idea that was how it worked....

The rest is here if you are a subscriber.

 

What a Cunt, I Adumbrate

Adumbrate or Advocate?   Martin Amis writes an open letter to Yasmin Alibhai Brown for her suggestion that after reading everyone's favourite last-living Marxist Terry Eagleton's comments  on this, Amis is 'with the beasts' on Muslim-hating. He may have been adumbrating not advocating, but is there another way to describe patronising and smug? Known for his writing, he was, in his day.  Bright, some people thought him.  This contributuion to thought and debate doesn't confirm either of those beliefs. But that's not my problem.

I've eschewed the word 'sexist' for many years now: I've never even been tempted to use it, but really 'patronising and smug' won't do it.  They don't get into the crevices of my reading of Amis's letter.  Sexism, as a word, is a crude and instant response to what was usually a crude and instant attitude to women. I'm after some other word that conveys what it is when in 2007 someone publicly responds to a woman making a point by hoping 'Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow!', suggesting 'you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps' to Eagleton, and repeatedly using her first name.  Oh, Martin, Martin, what's the word I'm looking for?  A friend suggested 'cunt' - as in 'What a cunt', and in truth that would do it for me.  But I'm trying for a more writerly way of describing this middle-aged man's laboured tone.  There's something of the travelling salesman trying to keep his end up.  What's the word for that?  Pathetic?  Yes, pathetic.  I think that will do.   

Metafilter's Talking Cure

Here's a new piece of mine in the LRB on Metafilter:

The word ‘resources’ sets my spine tingling. My old hippy-but-curmudgeonly soul had high hopes of the World Wide Web. The future, in some respects, was living up to expectations, providing videotapes of movies you didn’t have to leave home to see again, music remastered to a complexity not heard even in the concert hall let alone your own bath; and now here was a space that couldn’t be pictured, and didn’t require going out to be in, where minds from anywhere on the planet, full of knowledge and knowhow, wit and wondering, could chatter together, collaborate, pass information and the time of day. The internet would be a planetary depository, freely available, a dream library of everything. Borges and Brautigan thought of it but never fully imagined the weird airiness of its actuality.

So it has turned out: Project Gutenberg puts great texts freely online, Google plans to digitise the universe (which makes some people’s spines tingle for quite different reasons), Wikipedia has users collating and collaborating to explain everything, and everywhere bloggers are witnessing the world, one hundred million of them. But in no time at all, abundance became too much. The noise is deafening. The best of the planet did not exclude the worst of the planet. The internet filled up with garbage, and the good stuff sank to the bottom. I gave up, being of a giving-up nature....the rest is here

Life in the Very Slow Lane

Lassitude, indolence, extreme laziness, idleness beyond belief - I don't know how to convey the degree of my incapacity for activity.  People don't believe me.  You don't believe me.  You think I exaggerate.  No, I don't.  You won't believe that either.  You think it an affectation.  So yesterday I went out.  I did a reading with the estimable Francis Spufford at the Small Wonders Festival at Charleston.  There was nothing unpleasant about it (apart from the Bloomsburyness of Charleston.  Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Virginia visiting.  God I hate that drippy painting and twee tastefulness). 

My publisher sent me in a chauffeur driven car from Cambridge to Sussex, causing much hilarity to The Poet who pointed out that I'd have my very own chauffeur on Yom Kippur.  (The academic term might be starting again but even that doesn't stem the flow of punnery from the turmoil, no, maelstrom, in The Poet's mind.)

'Thank God,I'm back,' I wailed as I walked through the door and collapsed into The Poet's arms at eleven o'clock last night.  'I've done it.  It's over now.  I've don't have to go out for the next ten days.'

I'd been out since 2.30 that afternoon.  All I'd done was sit for two and a half hours in the back of a Jaguar ('Would you mind not wearing your cap?' I asked the driver nervously), spent three hours talking and reading to people, signed a few books, and sat for another two and a half hours in the back of the Jag.   If you live what they call A Life, my abjection and exhaustion might strike you as extreme.  What can I say?  I think my blood runs slower than your average three-toed sloth, and that I got born without the gregarious gene that made the human race the monstrous social success it is today.

Actually, I'm about to find out exactly what my problem is, why I'm such a sliver of a soul.  My friend S. send me a card the other day.  We were best mates in the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in 1968.  Difficult, annoying, angry young women in the bin.  It turns out, astonishingly, that they've still got the medical records from back then, and that the Data Protection Act means I have the right to get copies.  S. got hers.  Every session with the shrinks is noted, all their diagnoses and comments still there.  'Are you sure you're up to it,' S. said.  'What with being madder than I am...'  It's a debate that's been going on between us since 1968.  In fact, she is madder than me, but she just refuses to see it.  So I've filled in the form and I'm awaiting a shoebox full of my deviant past.  Just nobody mention Pandora.  But perhaps it will explain my epic idleness.  Or idyllness, as I prefer to  think of it.

Very excitingly, just by the by, I got paid for doing the reading in scarves.  Instead of real money (hey, writers don't need money, do they, it's not like they need to earn a living?) F. Spufford and I got a voucher each to spend at the Charleston gift shop.  So now I'll be spending the winter with my neck swathed in bloomsbury-hued silk and satin.  I looked on the shelves for elegantly rounded stones to keep in one's pockets in the event of a sudden river in one's vicinity, but they must have run out.  So I shall have to content myself with wearing my Vanessa-and-Virginia scarves sitting in the room of my own in which I plan to stay for as long as I possibly can.

I Am Bad

OK, I've been outed as a noise nut and it's true.  I am crazed by noise.  I have to put my fingers in my ears when I'm on the street and a lorry passes, my whole insides turn liquid when the recycling bin men come by and tip boxes of glass into more glass.  I can't bear it.  I hyperventilate when the dog two doors down barks for twenty minutes.  Noise, like pain, makes me want to leave the planet, but before that to kill someone. 

I spend lunatic hours on Google checking out earplug sites.  None of them (of course) make silence happen.  I organised a visit from a technician to make moulds of my ears for custom ear plugs.  He didn't come.  Hope curled up and sulked.  Earplugs in any case are problematical.  Talking to the daughter who had a temporary problem with roadworks, she said she can't use earplugs because they stop her from thinking.  Which is weirdly right.  I seem (as she does) to need ambient air to think in.  Closing myself off makes my own internal sounds scream, or perhaps it's a kind of claustrophobia.  I've tried white and pink noise cds but they sound like noise to me.  Best thing I've found is Brian Eno's Music for Airports and Neroli.  Which makes the daughter threaten to disown me for naffness.  Anyway, I am a nutcase, I don't have much of a problem owning to that.

But it's actually worse than that.  Much, much worse.  Loud or sudden noise is painful but passes.  What I really hate is the noise of other people.  And that's dissembling, too.  What I really hate is the noise other people make that reminds me that other people exist.  There.  Children screaming and shrieking in the neighbouring gardens (it's hot in my glass study, I have to have the door open) sends me into a spiral of fretting and whimpering.  Do they really need to bellow in order to grow up well-balanced human beings?  Other people's hi fis, their drums, for god's sake.  I know about people's right to have rights, but if my inclination is for silence, it gets trumped by theirs.   I want to  sit in my room and not be reminded ('Do you HAVE to have that conversation in the street under my window?') that I am surrounded by other souls.  Something about the community-minded Sixties just didn't take with me.  I have fantasies about living in the middle of a field (preferably in a house) but the Poet points out that there's nowhere noisier than the countryside.  All those machines, and the birdsong., my dears.  I've spent time on retreat in convents and monasteries of silent orders, and it was wonderful, but there's the god problem (and the food is inedible).  It's like stealing silence.  I want it by right.

All this might sound like typical old lady complaint.  And it is of course.  Christ, the young!  Why don't they grow up...?  But actually apart from my new sense that my time is running out and can I please have things the way I need them while I still can, my vileness and non-fitness for purpose as a human being has always been like this.  I didn't want to hear the sound of the neighbours even when I was a kid.   I am ashamed, and then again, I'm not.   What can I tell you?  I'm bad, through and through.

lazylibrary

Busy, busy...I give you Lazylibrary , for all of you who have better things to do than read just because you want to read.

Ever read a book that was a few hundred pages longer than it needed to be? Yeah, so have we. Fortunately, there are authors out there that would rather have a concise and effective book than a lengthy and diluted tome, and that's where we come in.

Welcome to the lazylibrary, where you can find books on any topic without having to worry about high page counts. If it's over 200 pages, you won't even see it. Read all about anything, in less time, for (usually) less money.

This goes a step beyond cut versions of books.  Use this website and you are promised you won't even be troubled by having to acknowledge the existence of a book longer than 200 pages.

Of course, the assumption is that books have a point, a practical purpose.  Concise and effective is not how you might describe Portrait Of A Lady but then it doesn't have a purpose, it's a novel.  Put Henry James into the search facility and you get The Heiress, the movie script version of Washington Square, Harold Bloom on James's Short Stories (111 pages) and - actual  prose fiction - various James Bond books (Fleming's no fool, 128 pages).

So forget the made-up stuff.  But you don't want to waste time finding out about the topic of your choice, either.  The quick version of everything will do.   Look up 'death' on search and you'll find Dog Heaven (40 pages) and Tear Soup (56 pages) towards the top of the list.  Masterpieces for all I know. 'Love' gets you Individual Power: Reclaiming Your Core, Your Truth, Your Life (a weighty 192 pages) as well as I Love You Stinky Face (a more manageable 30 pages).  No need to linger over anything.  Try 'Quantum Physics' and you won't be troubled with anything over 192 pages. You can bone up on the 'Cold War' in 196 pages, and get Elizabeth Bishop, strangely. It's a biography, however, not her poetry (in fact a search on Elizabeth Bishop only brings up biogs and studies - short ones, of course.  No actual poetry at all). 

I suppose it's perfectly reasonable in a world where fast information is paramount and rough information will do.  Perfectly reasonable if you're in a terrible hurry.  Lifehacker.com who flagged lazylibrary describes it as a way for those who want 'to get back in the habit of reading but need a light point of entry'.  It supposes that 'diehard literati' (that's likely me and you) will yell travesty.  What the hell, they imply, any reading is better than none.  I wonder if that's true?  I really don't know.  It seems a much more moralistic and pointless position than my moaning about cut and short books.  If you don't want to read, then don't.  A little reading is not necessarily better than none.  I'm up for the pleasure of reading, not as little as it's possible to get away with because it's such a dull thing to do. If you don't enjoy it, don't bother, check out Wikipedia. 

Sod it, let's make long, complex, intricate books really hard to find, available only to those who know the secret password, or who can recite Finnegan's Wake backwards.  If you want to read anything longer than 200 pages or more taxing than The Thorn Birds you're going to have to beg.