I have a whole “splodge” of thoughts at the moment about what might constitute an interesting blog post. I’m thinking about Peter Mandelson, the trajectory of Lagash in Asimov’s novelette ‘Nightfall’, a rejoinder to French feminist theory, the principle of hope, connections between Celtic languages and others, the attitude of some Trotskyists towards Yoga, and the writing technique of A E Van Vogt. I’m also aware that threatening and frightening days may be upon us all, which relates to a couple of those possibilities, but when one writes about such things it’s important to take a tone that spurs people into effective action, makes them feel less isolated or does something similar, and there is also a place for escape. I’m a little concerned that while all this stuff is going on, I seem to be a bit away with the fairies, but I’d say that’s a response to the trauma of the outside world. The other subjects I mention will doubtless come up on here but for now, in order to stop my brain turning into an overcrowded airport with ideas circling while their fuel gradually diminishes, I do need to set pen to paper, metaphorically anyway, just to clarify things a bit. And since I’m talking about writing here, the subject may as well be writing, so here it is.
Before you assume that I’m just going to be talking about a science fiction author here, I’m going to ask you to bear with me because this is not about the genre in which the author in question was writing in but the approach taken to creation and writing style, which has a much broader application and in fact was applied more broadly outside that genre. Please don’t just stop reading because you dislike science fiction, although there’s more to be said about genre fiction here, but in the meantime I can assure you this is interesting.
I used to have a friend who was trying to write, substantially for profit. In order to achieve this, he read a number of Mills & Boon romances to analyse them and work out their structure and style. He frankly found the whole process nauseating but it was still a potentially useful exercise. My father used to have a quote from Samuel Johnson on his study wall: “No man but a blockhead wrote, except for money”. Maybe Johnson lived in a time when there were enough people buying books for this to be true, but it doesn’t seem apt for today’s environment and even when it was, I strongly suspect authors took pride in their craft and were emotionally involved in the writing. It also seems to me that Johnson’s dictionary was a labour of love. I don’t know what else he wrote.
I can think of several authors who took a somewhat similar but hybridised approach. There’s a right-wing political theorist whose name escapes me just now – I thought it was Friedrich Hayek but apparently it wasn’t him – who wrote horror stories to help fund his work. Michael Moorcock has two sets of novels, one popular and the other more intellectual, the former for his living expenses to write the latter, which he actually wanted to write and cared about. Finally, J G Ballard claimed that his first novel, ‘The Wind From Nowhere’, was just written to make money, again to fund his career as a serious author. This last case is odd though, since that novel recounts the world ending because of a mysterious destructive wind and is followed by three other apocalyptic novels, ‘The Drowned World’, ‘The Burning World’ and ‘The Crystal World’, which are all accounts of the world ending because of a natural phenomenon, and apparently, though I haven’t checked, these three have protagonists who are basically the same characters with different names placed in the circumstances of each story, meaning that the structure of his first book is similar to the next three even though he claimed the first was written purely for money, so what’s going on there? It seems that the author can only ever be themselves and therefore the idea of excluding a particular set of works from a more cerebral approach may be futile, as their distinctive character will always infuse their writing. This, I think, is evidence that even if a particular way of writing is pursued simply for money, it may end up in any case reflecting the author’s personality, and besides this, it will always tend to reflect their cultural milieu.
But I’m not focussing on these authors here, but on the Canadian author Alfred Vogt, whose name is usually styled as A E van Vogt. Born in Manitoba in 1912, van Vogt is the oldest and first author of the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction”, along with Heinlein, Asimov and several other authors who published in pulp magazines from the 1930s on. His first sale, ‘Black Destroyer’, and to a lesser extent another short story of his, is notorious for having apparently served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s 1979 cosmic horror film ‘Alien’ without his permission. Although it’s somewhat different, it is in fact quite a bit closer than a lot of film adaptations of various other stories, even excluding the ones which are in name only, and it was also demonstrated to satisfaction in court that this was so. This also means, a little strangely, that there’s an extremely famous and successful work out there which hasn’t been officially credited to him. So much for making money from writing. As well as that, he seems to have been the first SF author to come up with the idea of a starship with a large crew on a multi-year exploratory mission through the Galaxy encountering strange new life and, well, boldy going where no-one has gone before. There are plenty of other stories which show that before ‘Star Trek’, but he seems to have been the first, so basically he also invented ‘Star Trek’. I obviously acknowledge ‘Forbidden Planet’ here too.
He’s a most singular author, most unlike the other Golden Age writers but very influential on later ones, and this is what interests me about him. On the whole I don’t care for his stories in terms of characters, events or ideas but I still find his writing fascinating. He’s not big on plausibility or even world-building really, and he comes across as quite unreconstructed, but that isn’t where the interest lies. Damon Knight famously wrote about him being like a dwarf using a giant typewriter, and said that his work reads like that of a small boy trying to impress someone with big numbers and flashy imagination without much depth. That essay did a lot of damage to his reputation, and here we can loop back to the questions of whether he was just writing for money and if that makes any difference when considering his stories, but clearly he was trying to “wow” his readers and is the origin for many tropes of genre science fiction without which it’s hard to imagine the genre at all in its dominant form.
One way in which he is widely acknowledged to succeed is in creating what’s been called a “sense of wonder”. This, along with “if this goes on. . .” is the foundation of sci-fi as we know it. Sense of wonder, and here I’m paraphrasing the ‘Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’, is notable in being conveyed even in works which are generally regarded as being rather badly written, such as those of E E Smith, which brings into question what does in fact constitute bad writing: if it succeeds on that level, is it really fair to see it as bad just because it doesn’t conform to the received wisdom of what counts as good? Nonetheless both van Vogt and Smith do strike me as pretty awful and I don’t feel like I’m doing myself justice intellectually or emotionally when I read their stuff. Two of his novels at least end in sentences which, so to speak, start the ripples in the reader’s imagination. One of these does so in part by using the word “sevagram”, which occurs nowhere else in the English language, including that novel itself, leading to the reader wondering what a sevagram is, how the plot could’ve led to it and what’s going to happen after the story ends, the sevagram being unquestionably important in the universe of that novel, but then just abandoned, set adrift in the reader’s mind. Sense of wonder has been linked to the sublime, and I’m afraid I can’t follow that further due to my lack of ability in literary criticism. It has a dream-like quality, and this is where van Vogt’s technique becomes relevant because to some extent he did base his writing on dreams. He used to set an alarm to allow himself to sleep in ninety minute blocks and write down his dreams each time he awoke. This is to my mind remarkably similar to Salvador Dalí’s method of using dreams to inspire his painting, and although the painter is generally considered to be more a populist than a great artist he’s still top-rank in many assessments of his work, so if it’s a productive technique for him, why not for van Vogt?
It doesn’t end there though. A very prominent feature of his stories is that they’re written in eight hundred word blocks, each of which contains a “hook” to the next block to keep the reader engaged. This is often not apparent at first glance, which can be expected to some extent from a good writer, which he may not in fact be of course, but it does often become obvious once you know he’s done it. Two examples are found in the form of his short stories (and there’s more to say about that too) ‘Dear Pen Pal’ and ‘Far Centaurus’. The former is epistolatory, which is a particularly clear way of using this method. The latter is told by a single member of a small team of astronauts on their way to Alpha Centauri as he comes out of suspended animation every few decades and becomes aware of the events that have transpired on the ship in the meantime, until they reach their destination, at which point the story pivots into a novel direction, then does so again shortly before the end. One of the disconcerting things about this story is that the intervals are by no means regular, and that’s part of the vertiginous nature of his writing. You never know where it’ll go next, which again keeps you reading, because his plots are illogical and disjointed but he takes the reader with him, presumably through his “hook” approach.
Before the mid-twentieth century CE, many stories later to become novels were published in serialised form in magazines. This is true of his stories, but in his case he used it to the benefit of his novels in a peculiar manner. Instead of serialising a properly connected narrative, van Vogt invented the term “fix up” for a common and already-established technique of compiling several short stories together into a connected novel. His external reasons for doing this are also interesting, which I’ll come to. ‘The Voyage Of The Space Beagle’, for instance, is a compilation of four stories, some of which are somewhat altered in order to fit together, but rather than simply taking stories A, B, C and D, he sometimes intersperses the stories, taking story A, dividing it up and inserting the other stories within it, so it’s more like A1, B, A2, C, A3, D, A4. This, I’m guessing, then spurs him on to write creatively as a way of resolving the initial discrepancies between the stories.
All of these taken together – the hooks between the sections, the larger sections constituting short stories in themselves and the hooks between sentences within the sections – give the whole work a kind of fractal quality to it, being similar on a smaller scale to the entire novel. As I’ve mentioned, there was a reason within his life why he wrote fix-ups, at least in his mid-career. He worked with L. Ron Hubbard to set up the latter’s initial self-help technique referred to as Dianetics and was running a local chapter of the movement, which tied up most of his time and led to him having to repackage his former short stories as novels with connecting passages. Before concluding that his association with Dianetics, and later Scientology as it became when Hubbard turned it into a religion, makes him a dodgy piece of work, it should also be noted that he was later to part company with Hubbard when he didn’t like the direction Hubbard was taking it. Nonetheless, Dianetics are relevant to his writing too, because his heroes are often men whose thinking is based on non-Aristotelian logic. Without introducing spoilers, both ‘The Enchanted Village’ and ‘A Can Of Paint’ involve solutions to seemingly intractable problems when an entity within each realises there’s a completely different way to solve the problem at the end of the stories. His heroes are lateral thinkers. They also tend to be unexpectedly superhuman. Both of these features are integral to his writing, as they’re his way of presenting a different kind of logic to the reader. They’re not just plot twists because they’re supposed to be inspirations to apply the same kind of approach to everyday life, which is what he was trying to do too. His use of dreams and approach to fixing up come across as lateral thinking solutions to problems his life presented him with such as lack of time to write when he was working for Hubbard and the need to come up with plot ideas with terrifyingly short and inflexible deadlines through forcing himself to dream. I have to wonder whether that kind of sleep schedule was good for him in the long run. It should also be said that although I’ve described his protagonists and the flow of his stories as illogical, he doubtless saw them as following their own unconventional and more intuitive logic, superior to the conventional form. He was pioneering lateral thinking in a fairly coherently articulated form several decades before De Bono named it.
For all these reasons, van Vogt is worth studying, my main problem with that being not wanting to sit and count eight hundred words to find the breaks and paperings over in his stories where they’re not obvious. It doesn’t end there though: he’s also very influential. I’ve already mentioned ‘Alien’ and ‘Star Trek’, but there are two other major ways in which he influenced writing, and I’ll also mention the significance of his technique outside SF. One was by being a factor in inspiring New Wave SF. Although his characters, unlike those of the New Wave, are simple and flat, the fault lines apparent in his writing with the sudden twists and turns are also an important part of that sub-genre, and the dream logic he employed, often literally, is also found there. Both he and that movement focus more on the effect of the writing than on seeking a hard, science-like explanation. It made him atypical of the Golden Age already.
The other was Philip K Dick, who openly confessed that he was influenced by him. His first novel, ‘Solar Lottery’, depicts a world where the leader and their potential assassin are both selected at random through a lottery, which for the characters provides the same kind of sudden change of fortune as found in the other author’s stories (and incidentally reminds me more than a little of Asimov’s ‘Franchise’). In other works, Dick portrays similar mental disciplines of which van Vogt was a fan and tried to apply, but is clearly suspicious of them and believes they must ultimately fail. Dick builds the same kinds of worlds but peoples them with more sophisticated characters and tends to give the whole thing a bit of a side-eye compared to the other author’s enthusiasm and trust.
The mainspring of van Vogt’s writing technique is the writing course he did before his career began, although he very much made his own thing of it and developed it well beyond its initial scope. This was based on the books of the Canadian veteran John Gallishaw, ‘The Only Two Ways To Write A Story’, ‘Twenty Problems Of The Fiction Writer’ and ‘Advanced Problems Of The Fiction Writer’. These turned out to be influential on more than just van Vogt. Of all people, F Scott Fitzgerald is said to have used these techniques, also Bradbury, Heinlein and Hubbard. Sometimes his ideas are more floating in the ether or could be discovered by careful analysis of authors directly influenced by him, but outside the realm of SF these seem to include Georgette Heyer, Ellery Queen, the later Agatha Christie, and outside genre fiction entirely John Updike, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty. In some of these cases it’s probably more osmosis than conscious and deliberate study or influence, but it’s there, more strongly and obviously in genre fiction but also in mainstream literary novels.
It won’t have escaped your own attention that although this post isn’t fiction I’ve made an effort to include a couple of van Vogt’s and therefore presumably John Gallishaw’s methods in this, undoubtedly much more clumsily and perhaps inappropriately, and it’s not hard to spot them. It’d be an interesting experiment to try this out in fiction and see what happens.
Due to the focus of this blog away from gender identity, this is going to be a difficult post to write. I’m probably not going to say anything edgy or controversial, but it’s hard to know how to word it without impinging on the subject. Nonetheless. . .
I had a dream, and no it was not like the one Martin Luther King had. I’ll slightly fictionalise it, but I find memories of dreams to be very flexible, as if they’re still forming when one awakes. In this dream, I’m back at Warwick University and Christine Battersby says that in order to stay on course for an MA, we all have to write an essay on Julia Kristeva. We have an hour to do it. This is in a way very much like the dream where you find yourself back at school having to do your exams and aren’t ready, but there’s a twist. When I look at the paper I’m planning to write on, all of it has stuff printed on it and with fifteen minutes to spare, I go back to my room to get clean, plain paper. On getting outside, I’m in Bristol. I can literally write anything at all on Julia Kristeva and get through, but even that seems to be beyond me in the dream.
OK, so hearing about other people’s dreams is boring isn’t it? For most people anyway. That said, it’s worth dwelling on this one to some extent and here comes the tightrope walk. There used to be a book with a mirror cover called ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’. It was about assertiveness and I didn’t buy or read it because at the time I definitely didn’t regard myself as a woman in my own right and felt that were I to become assertive it would be at the cost of actual women. I think I was fourteen at the time. There’s a long tale here about whether being assertive or successful occupies someone else’s space which I won’t go into here, but this was the beginning of a general approach towards feminist theory which I continued to pursue well into adulthood. Whether or not it made sense, I still had that attitude when I was doing postgrad at Warwick, that feminist theory was for women to read, not men, and that for a person constructed as male to do so was transgressive, invasive and violating, as well as effectively stealing women’s intellectual work, and that I wouldn’t understand it anyway because my mind was inferior to that of a woman’s due to emotional imbalance and male-socialised fake rationality. Consequently, I had some difficulty when I started my MA because, being in continental philosophy at Warwick, there was a big overlap with the Women’s Studies department. Most of my interaction with the staff there was with Gillian Rose and Christine Battersby. Gillian very sadly died of cancer in 1995, although the view was expressed that people took her work more seriously than it deserved to be because of her illness. I can’t comment because I know nothing. I heard something from her and knew a little of her. I was aware that she wanted to promote women’s work in philosophy, so I ignored her so as not to interfere. Christine Battersby is different. She’s chiefly known for her ‘Gender And Genius’, which analyses the concept of genius in the Romantic tradition and the appropriation of emotion from a feminine to a masculine trait. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I’m guessing there.
And this is the thing: I’ve never read it, whatever “it” is, in this setting. I was aware of Kristeva and Irigaray, but clearly I’m focussed on the former in this dream, and I am kind of honouring this dream by now writing about Kristeva here, and I’ll go on to write about Irigaray: semiotic and post-structuralist thinkers in the French mode.
Both of them were followers of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although I’m no fan of his, simply because they used to be his acolytes, it doesn’t follow that they either slavishly followed his sexist assumptions or built on them, and it’s possible to salvage positive things from an unpromising start. Sometimes, also, you presumably have to make compromises to get where you aim to be in your career. Anyway, Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French polymath working in the area of critical theory, and when I say she’s a polymath I mean she applies her thought to a number of disciplines. She sees them through the same lens. Two important concepts of hers are abjection and the chora, although there are others such as the symbolic vs the semiotic and intertextuality. At this stage, all I have is a dream I experienced a few days ago and a peremptory examination of her work, but I can plonk these two in front of you. Abjection is the idea of what emerges from one which is therefore intermediate between subjective and objective. A really obvious example is excrement, but an interesting observation can be made on another form of the abject. Speaking for myself, if I had a glass of water in front of me I was about to drink and I spat in it, I’d no longer want to drink it. This is of course apparently absurd, as that saliva would have immediately mixed with the water when it was in my mouth. Likewise, what one does in the toilet is expel matter which is already in one’s body, yet most of the time this is not dwelt upon. Probably most people, when asked to reflect on this, would say it’s an instinctive response which protects one against possible danger such as infection or poisoning, but Kristeva’s view is that it’s a psychoanalytical phenomenon which is extended to others, and in fact to the Other, which has a significance beyond instinctive survival. I can get on board with this to some extent because I can see that much of the time we don’t eat to keep ourselves alive, don’t play ball games to practice hunting skills and so on: function and purpose are in different realms, so that’s okay. There’s an important principle here actually, that evolution is effectively blind and produces whatever is good enough from the resources available.
Though somewhat elaborate-seeming, the abject is similar to the disgusting and the abhorrent. Kristeva uses it, as do others, in the analysis of horror and film critics have applied this to horror films. This also blends into the “monstrous feminine”, not so far as I know a specific concept of hers but overtly developed from this concept. In ‘Alien’, for example, the alien lays eggs in humans and hatches out in the abdomen before tearing out of it. The ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The Devil In The Dark’ is about a mother alien killing human miners, and it even applies to ‘Beowulf’. The claim goes further than that to propose that all horror is in fact about the monstrous feminine. I have to say that that seems quite far-fetched but I haven’t read the arguments, which is a general problem with what I’m writing today. I haven’t read her at all.
Abjection is extended to refer to the Other, i.e. those who are “not we”, which often includes other humans whose differences, and even similarities, to oneself, are emphasised. Hence for a White able-bodied heterosexual man that could be women, non-Whites, the disabled and queers, or a combination of those. It could also work the other way but this is seldom done, or at least not enough. The situation is complex because as well as othering the people concerned, one also recognises, and possibly fears, oneself in them. This is clearly similar to the anthropological idea that things which don’t fit neatly into single categories are deemed disgusting, the classic example being a flying squirrel since in terms of the culture concerned it was neither beast nor bird – I don’t know what they thought of bats.
The other big concept is the chora, from the Greek and adopted from Plato’s idea of the inaccessible origin of creation, including the uterus as well as the primal chaos of the abyss from which the cosmos came forth. Kristeva tried to reclaim this concept from its patriarchal setting as Plato conceived it. For her, it’s a nourishing maternal space. It can also be thought of as early infancy, before the Mirror Stage, a significant event in Lacanian psychoanalysis where children first recognise themselves in mirrors. Before that point, the mother’s body is the sole mediator between the chora and the symbolic realm: she’s everything to the chora. Hence another distinction in Kristeva’s thought between the semiotic and the symbolic. The former is not to be confused with semiotics. Instead, it’s emotional and non-linguistic, involving rhythms, music and the poetic. This continues after entering the symbolic phase but is kind of hidden in crevasses. To me, that’s also fine but with both the chora and the semiotic it’s a major assumption, given the importance mothers have for their children, that they would be the sole progenitor of their children much of the time. This to me comes across as a model of development frozen in the past. This is often an issue with psychoanalysis: it feels like it’s frozen in a particular culture at a particular time in history. Even so, to some extent this is still valid and it’s certainly germane to the wider human world even today.
I can’t spend too long on Kristeva, but I will say a couple of other things about her. She was also a novelist, writing detective stories which were linked to her theory, with a journalist character representing her called Stephanie Delacour. I haven’t read them of course. The other thing was that she may have worked as a secret agent for the Bulgarian government and her early writing was published in Maoist journals. I don’t know how much evidence there is for that allegation and I’m just passing it on. It’s quite odd though because she seems quite conservative politically to me.
Now for Luce Irigaray, who wasn’t in my dream. She didn’t explicitly respond to Kristeva although some of her work is clearly a response to hers. The first thing I think of with Irigaray is that when my ex and Sarada were discussing her in a pub once, having read some of her work, they were interrupted by men who seemed to be threatened by the idea of two women talking about something intellectual. I don’t know if they’d noticed it was feminist theory. I wasn’t there, but clearly it was something important to the two of them around the time Sarada and I got together. I don’t know where my ex stands with her now, but Sarada can’t remember much. I could ask my ex I suppose.
Irigaray is a difference feminist. That is, she doesn’t believe women and men are the same and they’re both men, but that women have the potential for their own subjectivity which is inadequately explored, equal to men’s subjectivity and also different. She views Western society as inherently unethical because of the patriarchy. Regarding sexuality, I find her views are really rather strange. She says male sexual satisfaction can only be achieved via an instrument, by which I presume she means the phallus, whereas females are constantly auto-erotic because they are constantly touching themselves, by which she means that the labia are in contact with each other. This enables her to view penis in vagina sex as an interruption of this contact, so I presume that’s where she’s going with that. But the whole thing seems highly metaphorical. Clearly the human body regardless of sex is constantly in contact with itself, and this may be affirming but it doesn’t feel like much can be built on it. It seems to me that if one confines oneself to the metaphorical and poetic, as Irigaray seems to do, it changes philosophy’s role, or perhaps reveals a different role which seems unproductive, which is maybe what she was already either trying to do or already existed in continental philosophy. After all, philosophy is seen by some as literature. But to illustrate what I mean, in the analytical tradition philosophy is used to inform ethical debates, analyse politics and to design digital electronics. All these are thoroughly practical uses, although it’s easy to see the last as fairly irrelevant to social progress. If philosophy is to be replaced by a more metaphorical approach, either it has another function or it needs to proceed in a very unfamiliar way, perhaps in the way literature does, and of course I don’t know what that is but to me it may not be progress because of the peculiar phenomenon of universalism. If we have the ability to appreciate works written in Greek, Roman or Mediaeval settings, that common connection is positive but it also seems to mean it can’t touch social justice or provide a means of improving things, and I would expect a feminist philosopher to want progress.
Irigaray has notoriously been challenged by Sokal in his ‘Fashionable Nonsense’, but it’s unclear whether he simply misunderstands her or is onto something. The issue is that Irigaray states that physics has a masculine bias because it focusses on solid mechanics rather than fluids and also that E=mc² prioritises c as it’s the “fastest” constant. Irigaray also uses mathematical terminology without seeming to understand what it means. Sokal regards all of this as uninformed and unscientific, and as creating illusory profundity. Lacan is sometimes seen as having done the same with his focus on the Borromean Knot.
It has to be said that this feels like some bloke with unearned self-assurance wading into an academic field and explaining things to a woman, whether or not that’s what actually happened. It’s like Richard Dawkins’ fight with Mary Midgley. Irigaray is not trying to do science here but something like psychoanalysis or semiotics, so the question may be about whether what she’s doing is worthwhile compared to what a male scientist might be doing. It’s quite close to being an art vs. science debate. Irigaray has a practice of what’s been called “mimesis”, where she uses scientific terminology to subvert it from within. She may also be trying to show how anti-language is used, and as such it seems to have worked almost too well with Sokal. It is also true that the likes of turbulence and chaos, as reflected for example in how blood flows through the circulatory system in pathological situations and in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change, should be considered more seriously than it has been. Sokal has been accused of scientism, which is the idea that the findings of science are the only important set of views.
One of her aims was to make it clear that scientists and in fact the culture in general was unconsciously perceiving things from a masculine perspective. So for example, many scientific papers and other writing uses the “editorial we”, which is of course gender-neutral in most European languages, but in fact that “we” usually refers either to men or to women who have been induced to adopt a male-centred approach.
‘Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un’ – ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ – is among her most important works. Now this is an interesting title, bringing to mind the idea that the female body is the default from which the male form deviates, which is how things are among most mammals including humans and meaning that the female sex is not a sex but simply the standard, unmarked and straightforward human form. However, strangely, she seems to mean the opposite. It’s a collection of essays including the eponymous one. Her view, and I’d agree with this, is that the patriarchal view of sex has historically been that the male is the unmarked and the female is either denied or seen as a deviation. The essay itself is about the Freudian idea of penis envy, which it deconstructs. The vagina is literally a sheath or a hole rather than a thing in itself and the clitoris is ignored completely. It does make sense that in a male-dominated society these things are made to be so and do assume such significance although she seeks to deconstruct this too. It’s also interesting that it seems to be autoeroticism which is the contrast to heterosexual penetrative sex rather than lesbianism for her, although this does provide some kind of solitary self-sufficiency, but it omits the solidarity of women together needing each other and not needing men, which seems like a missed opportunity. She also posits the idea that heterosexual sex for a man involves a sadistic fantasy into which women can only insert themselves in a masochistic role, which seems to be an unrealistic generalisation about the male psyche, doesn’t allow for the existence of masochistic men and also for masochistic women whose masochism is deeply in accord with their desires. It seems, in other words, to be kink-shaming. This reminds me of Andrea Dworkin’s views as expressed in ‘Intercourse’, where Dworkin seems to describe a willing submissive role as in some sense morally wrong for women, presumably because of failure of solidarity with other women in this respect. Overall, I do actually find what Irigaray says as rather unsatisfactory and unfair on women, regardless of her view of men.
‘Speculum de l’autre femme’ preceded the other work, and I’ve not read it. This is also a collection of essays which as I understand it analyse male thinkers in terms of their phallocentrism. Published in 1974, this seems long overdue for the time and it could suffer from the problem hindsight imposes on some cultural phenomena of making them seem trite and tired simply because their ideas were ground-breaking and then adopted widely, so it may be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary her ideas were at the time. She asserts that female sexuality is like a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis because of its prior focus on males and their sexuality. I’m intensely curious about whether the speculum referred to is not just a metaphorical mirror but a reference to the gynecological instrument. I’m assuming it is, but as I say I haven’t read it.
There is a third prominent author of this kind whom I’ve not read and who seems to be less well-known in the Anglosphere but equally prominent in the French-speaking world, namely Hélène Cixous. Her most famous work is the 1976 ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ – ‘The Medusa’s Laugh’ – which calls for the development of écriture feminine, also referred to as writing with white ink, the metaphor being partly connected to breast milk. I know even less about her than I do the other two, but I do know that Irigaray shared the idea of using female-centred language and I’m guessing this is similar. In what I’ve written, I may have come across as quite dismissive of the ideas and writing of these thinkers. I feel that I may have missed something in knowing practically nothing about French literature, but it does seem to me that there is an attachment to words and language here which is not about communication and clarity, and therefore not about sharing wisdom and being open to the wisdom of others. There seems to be an arrogance to it which I guess is inherited from Lacan. Another aspect of this is the fairly vapid nature of psychoanalysis itself. I see it as a necessary early stage of depth psychology, i.e. the kind of stuff you talk about in counselling and psychotherapy, but in my own training in psychology and psychiatry it’s notable that other paradigms are much more evidence-based and helpful, and psychoanalytical concepts as applied to non-conforming behaviour and presumably the states of mind associated with those are simply an unnecessarily elaborate mind game.
However, all of that must be placed in context, some of which is sympathetic to feminism and some of which is more to do with intersectionality. I actively avoided reading any feminist texts other than those I was compelled to do as course requirements for two reasons. One was that I regarded those texts as for women and explicitly excluding me, and it was important for them to have their own space. The other is that due to constructing myself as a man, I felt that feminist theory would be beyond me in the same way as mainstream literature is: I lacked the ability to respond to or understand it properly. I suppose this is a little like the chora, in that I wanted there to be a nurturing space for women to find their own authenticity. Obviously I’ve abandoned all that now (and I’m edging into dodgy territory). The intersectional approach is more hostile to this theorising. One of the most peculiar experiences I’ve had with respect to gender politics is when I read ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ by Carol J Adams, where she made the startlingly false assertion that it surprises some people that so many feminists are vegetarian/vegan (“vegn”). My own experience of that was precisely the opposite. It was notable to me that so few feminists were vegn, the reason for that apparently being that they regarded linguistic construction as central to consciousness and therefore rejected the possibility of non-human consciousness. Therefore, the whole time I’m engaged in this, I’m acutely aware of the possibility that these feminist theorists are hostile or apathetic about animal liberation and may also be White supremacists. All of these people are White and European and seem to be oblivious of those facts, and that makes it hard to trust their judgement.
All that said, it probably is worthwhile reading them and I plan to do so.
We all rewrite our personal history, but due to journal-keeping I can check on early versions of events. Therefore I think I can say with some confidence that I’ve never really had heroes or role-models. The closest identifiable person was one I mentioned in a school essay when I was thirteen, a couple of years before I started writing a detailed diary in earnest and at length, and it was Kate Bush. I can still see that, to be honest. I obviously wouldn’t have a sportsperson as a hero due to my total lack of interest, but I suppose I might have a scientist or an author, or there might be someone in my everyday life such as a friend, relative or teacher, and in fact there probably are two identifiable people who fall into this category. They are one of my English teachers and Isaac Asimov.
I’ll start with my English teacher, whose name I won’t mention. Just to be clear, I had two particularly significant English teachers I have reason to refer to and I don’t want them to be confused. One was the folk singer John Jones of the Oysterband, known under the name Fiddler’s Dram for the one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. This is not the person I’m talking about and I want to emphasise that although my view of him at the time was unfairly negative for some reason I don’t understand, he’s clearly a diamond geezer and I once tried to get his band to sing at a fundraising festival for Greenpeace. Not him, not him, not him! Okay?
So, the guy I’m talking about is my favourite teacher of all, and a significant influence on me, shall as I said remain nameless. At an early stage he opened my eyes to the evils of homophobia, encouraged my creative writing, introduced me to Radio 4 and facilitated my appreciation of literature. He was my English Language and Literature teacher for three years altogether, at twelve and from fourteen to fifteen. I visited him in his home twice. Whenever I begin a sentence with a present participle, that’s his influence. He was also blind, apparently due to albinism, but refused to be registered blind because he regarded it as an unnecessary encumbrance. He had disguised his blindness at his job interview. He was also single the whole time I knew of him, and left the school as a full-time teacher shortly after I did, citing me as the reason, because he felt the school couldn’t cope with my talent and personality and nurture me properly. Yes, he specifically left my school because of me, and this isn’t just something he told me but something which appeared in the local paper when he became a post master. If you want a model of what he was like, watch ‘Dead Poets’ Society’. A minor but interesting detail which came out later was that he had also been Boris Johnson’s teacher a few years previously, at a different school, and in fact the first time I heard Boris Johnson’s name was in 1979 when he mentioned him as a star pupil in passing. I honestly never had a better secondary school teacher and he really believed in me.
I’m sure you know what’s coming because this is how all stories like this end. A few years ago, he was found guilty of serial sexual abuse of children at another school where he taught in the 1960s CE and early ’70s and sentenced to fourteen years. This had been at a previous school, the one where he taught Boris, and it had been conveniently omitted from his reference for my state school, and to me the implication is that the independent school in question decided that it was okay to have him teach at such a school because oiks don’t matter. A book has been written about this whole situation, which incidentally criticises J K Rowling for promoting boarding schools as positive institutions because the author sees them as inextricably rife with abuse and ‘Harry Potter’ as making children want to go to them where he expects them to suffer at their hands. My school friends and I talked about the situation at length shortly after it came out and we agreed that you could see the signs. One frustrating aspect of the book written about him is that the author is not allowed to report on his defence, which he predictably made himself, because it would give insight into how abusers think and operate and therefore that way of thinking went unchallenged when it was in fact entirely spurious and easily refuted, and the insidious nature of his arguments would therefore continue to persuade people otherwise.
Now I don’t know what the argument was, but I’m going to take a stab at two candidates for it. My original thought was that it was based on pederasty, and remember this isn’t just idle speculation: I had extensive contact with him over many years. Pederasty, which you probably know about already, was an openly acknowledged and positively sanctioned institution in the Greco-Roman world where a sexual relationship existed between a fully adult man and an adolescent boy as part of a mentoring situation, which might later be repeated by the boy after he reached maturity. Given his background in independent schools, which in England often emphasise Greco-Roman patrician culture, I can easily believe that this is where he was coming from.
The other candidate I can think of, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is a common line of argument in the ’60s to the ’80s that just as homosexuality and extra-marital sex became accepted, so should active paedophilia. In fact I’m almost certain that he believed this. It was really prevalent at the time. The National Council for Civil Liberties supported paedophilia, as did the German Green Party in the ’80s, and there were also adoption programmes for paedophiles in Germany at the time which encouraged known paedophiles to adopt children in orphanages so that they could abuse them. In Britain there was the Paedophile Information Exchange. It was simply seen as the logical extension of tolerance for homosexual sex at the time, for several decades. We need to acknowledge that this was so and, equally, assert calmly, without panicking, that this is not okay. Nonetheless, I think this may have been how my teacher argued, and ironically by arguing to me that homophobia was no better than active racism and sexism, he persuaded me to adopt the attitude I still have today, and it is correct. But he very probably took it further. What was absent, and I think this applies more widely, was the notion of consent and the ability to do so.
It’s very easy to say that he had a bad and a good side and that people are complex, and that’s true but I don’t think it’s that simple. For him at least, I think these things were part of an organic whole. The very qualities I perceive positively are intimately related to the vices. It isn’t that people can’t function and be, say, anti-homophobic, pro-feminist, anti-racist without also being child abusers, but in his case they were all connected and that made sense to him. So I suspect.
The other example is less personal, although he too has been an influence on me in a way, and this time it applies to many millions of other people. I’m talking, of course, about Isaac Asimov. Asimov goes back a long way for me and I’m not sure exactly how far, but I do know I got his ‘Guide To Science’ for Christmas 1975 and I was already familiar with some of his fiction then. I was also aware of his screenplay for ‘Fantastic Voyage’, although like many other people I didn’t realise he wasn’t the author. Much of his fiction, though not all, consists of men talking to each other in rooms far away from any action, which may not even be happening, and his main genres are science fiction and mystery, but from the ’60s onward he moved away from fiction towards more general writing, initially in science as he was a professor of biochemistry and then famously branching out into every century of the Dewey Decimal System except philosophy. One of his major qualities is writing extremely plain language and he’s a genius at communicating complex concepts clearly to the general reader. Even today, I sometimes go back to his explanations, for instance for the electron configurations of the transition metals and rare earths, because no-one I can recall is as good as he is at clear, explicatory writing. He’s famously responsible for the Three Laws of Robotics and like many other sci-fi authors he successfully predicted the internet and many other 21st century technologies. Going back to his sci-fi, he made a major attempt in his later years to link most of his stories together in a manner which I and many other readers found tiresome, and his second attempt at ‘Fantastic Voyage’ is probably the second most tedious novel I’ve ever read (the most boring is Aldiss’s ‘Report On Probability A’). His most celebrated story is ‘The Last Question’, but actually I don’t think it’s that good. Two of his favourite stories, and here I agree with the consensus that they are indeed brilliant, are ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ and ‘The Dead Past’. The former is about a nurse who is hired by a scientific establishment to care for a Neanderthal child whom she develops a strong caring relationship with and ultimately makes a major sacrifice forced upon her by a heartless decision by her employer. It’s good, brilliant in fact, but to my mind his best story is ‘The Dead Past’, which has a number of things going on but basically recounts a professor of ancient history who strongly suspects he accidentally started a house fire years before which killed his daughter and is attempting to prove that the Phoenicians didn’t sacrifice their children by fire by persuading a physicist to develop a Chronovisor to look into the distant past, but is being investigated by a McCarthyite, CIA-like government body which it turns out is trying to protect the privacy of the general public and is being genuinely benevolent. To my mind, ‘The Dead Past’ is one of the best stories I have ever read, regardless of genre. It should also be said that although the ‘Foundation Trilogy’ can be perceived as a textual sleeping pill, it also presents an interesting parallel to Marxist theory, invented the idea of music videos in the early 1940s, formed the basis of the setting which ‘Dune’ reacted against and ‘Star Wars’ copied and created the concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica, which in turn led to Douglas Adams’s Guide and ultimately Wikipedia. It must also be said that the Apple TV series using the same name is an adaptation in name only and that the film ‘I Robot’ is also very dissimilar to any of the robot stories.
But there’s a complication, of course. It manifests itself in his fictional writing fairly clearly. Asimov is not keen on characterisation and up until fairly late in his career, he tended to avoid portraying sex and relationships. There are some exceptions. For instance, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ is about a woman committing adultery with an android, ‘Feminine Intuition’ is about a gynoid being designed to find the nearest habitable planet because masculine thought processes are getting nowhere. Moreover, the chief robopsychologist in the robot stories is Susan Calvin and she is not in any way a stereotype, being single, child-free and asexual. However, Asimov’s behaviour in real life with women is from a 21st century deeply dodgy. He was known to be “all hands” and was nicknamed “The Octopus” at science fiction conventions. One of the women he worked with complained about his sexual harassment in something like the 1950s or 1960s and was actually listened to, so it must’ve been pretty bad. He also wrote two books, ‘The Sensuous Dirty Old Man’ and ‘Lecherous Limericks’ which celebrated sexual harassment and assault as perceived today. The former is actually an instruction manual for it, although to be fair it is also a parody of a pair of books popular at the time, ‘The Sensuous Woman’ and ‘The Sensuous Man’, so the context for this is missing. Later in his life, the slightly older SF author Alfred Bester, who was incidentally exceedingly monogamously married to a woman for forty-eight years until her death, and also seems to have been a bit of a jock as opposed to Asimov’s nebbischkayt (nerdishness) gave him a bear hug, snogged him and repeatedly pinched his bottom to teach him a lesson, and he was somewhat repentant after that but unfortunately the way he put his response made it sound more like that he was personally hurt because his advances had been constantly unwelcome. Furthermore, although parents can’t be held entirely responsible for their adult children’s actions, David Asimov was found by California police to have the largest collection of images of child sexual exploitation ever found in the area.
But as I said, it isn’t that simple. In the late ’50s or early ’60s, he was at a meeting about scientists and someone made a comment about their wives, to which he chipped in “or their husbands”, scandalising the meeting, including women, because they thought he was talking about gay men when he meant female scientists, and he went on to say that it wouldn’t matter if they were gay either. At another point at a conference about Judaism, and although he was Jewish he wasn’t observant or religious, he objected to another Jewish person saying they didn’t trust scientists or engineers because of their involvement in the Holocaust by saying that the only reason the Jews hadn’t persecuted anyone historically was that they hadn’t had the opportunity to, and that on the one occasion when they had, with the Maccabees, they’d done so, which was not anti-semitic so much as an observation that it’s a general problem with human beings that, if we can, we may well persecute others. This seems quite prophetic in view of recent events.
Okay, so the differences between Asimov and my English teacher are naturally considerable, but the advantage of considering the former is that he’s much more prominent for all sorts of reasons to the English-speaking world. My English teacher has some notoriety nationally, but it’s quite low-key, and this makes him harder to treat as an example. It isn’t enough even to use the excuse that “it was a different time” here, because even at the time Asimov’s behaviour was strongly objected to and it must’ve been quite serious. However, he was also protected by his fame. On one occasion, when he sexually assaulted someone in a lift at a conference, the woman’s partner objected and it was he, not Asimov, who was ejected from the building. I’d be surprised if this was the only time this happened. Women would avoid SF conferences because he was there and this is very likely to have impacted on their careers long term and kept them away from success.
These things tend to come to notice about public figures due to the internet. The question arises of what may have happened in the past which never became widely known about others. It’s said that one should never meet one’s heroes, but it may be even worse than that. Maybe most people’s lives don’t bear scrutiny. Thinking about my own past, I can’t think of much that I’d be unhappy if it were more widely known, but maybe that’s how it works. Maybe people usually justify things to themselves or alter their own memories in their favour. I tend to think that the only difference nowadays is that things are harder to hide.
There is also the question of changing values and attitudes. Jimmy Savile, for example, wasn’t just protected by his fame, but also by the normalisation of sexual assault, objectification and harassment at the time. It isn’t just a question of faulty record-keeping. Rolf Harris is an even harder case to conceptualise, because unlike Savile he was actually very talented and creative. Savile probably was too, but not publicly so much as being good at getting away with his abuse. Even he, though, has his defenders. Some of the people he helped on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ went on to build successful careers on the contacts they made and won’t hear a word against him. There can be a kind of sunk-cost fallacy here, in that having committed oneself to a particular set of opinions about someone, it’s hard to change one’s mind and retract them, even internally.
But why does it happen like this? Is there something about success that breeds this? Is it that success and the atrocities go hand in hand because they result from the same origins? Or, is it more that people who become well-known have their lives more closely scrutinised and that basically everyone’s a bit of a git when it comes down to it?
I’m aware that there’s a long list of men in this post. There are terrible women too, and there’s a bias I’ve seen referred to as the “women are wonderful bias”, which excuses women of more and presumes their good faith. However, it remains the case that men are more successful than women in public life and therefore have more opportunities to do wrong, so even without a gender bias they can be expected to have sinned against more. That said, there are allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley. Although she may be less well-known than the men I’ve mentioned, MZB as she’s often referred to was a sci-fi and fantasy author whose daughter Moira Greyland accused her of sexually abusing her throughout her childhood, exposing her to other people to sexually abuse her and being forced to participate in ritualised sexual abuse. Unfortunately from a queer-tolerant perspective, Greyland sees this as integral to LGBTQIA2S (you can see why I hate that initialism) identity. MZB’s husband was found guilty of multiple counts of child sexual abuse – this much is not in doubt. As far as I understand it, she also defended his behaviour publicly, and also claimed to be feminist. This is to some extent reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir, who is on record as publicly defending active paedophilia.
I don’t know, I haven’t got an answer to this. What do you think?
This is not a good blog with prospects. It’s more a verbose, waffly dumping ground for my conceptual earworms. I don’t stick to topics, I digress, I don’t pay attention to the quality of my writing and there are probably a load of other things I’m supposed to do which I just don’t. To some extent I’m not bothered about this or my readership, which raises the question of why I don’t simply write it all down in a notebook or diary. I do that too. I don’t know why I don’t do it with everything, but what you see here is a small fraction of my writing. I never make more than one draft and I rarely plan. I rarely do research. It’s also influenced by my diary-writing habit of never going back and editing anything, which leads to strange wording on occasion because I won’t do something like change “strange wording on occasion” to “occasional strange wording” or “occasionally strange wording”. I do have rules. I never blog about herbalism, gender identity or education, although I have just now and then stuck something on here which covers both or all three due to not having a single topic. The historical reason for this is that I used to have blogs on these topics, but it helps me to develop thoughts about other subjects which I might otherwise neglect, and I can also escape from “day job”-type matters. Not that I really have a day job, but anyway.
This affords me a certain level of freedom in what I do with it. Nobody reads it, so I can cock up and it doesn’t matter. I can experiment in a way which others can’t without losing readers because I have none. Obviously I don’t literally have zero readers, but there are sufficiently few that I don’t need to worry about people bailing en masse, because there is no «masse» to bail. To quote Samuel Beckett, I’m talking into a vacuum.
So: this is what I’m going to do with this. I’m going to start writing two types of post on the same blog. One will be the kind of thing I’ve been writing up until now. The other will be in Gaidhlig, and incidentally I don’t know how to type a stràc on this computer so I’ll probably use a different device, the aim being to practice writing in that language. I’ve been writing a short passage in Gaidhlig for my weekly class for about a month now, but since term’s come to an end I won’t be doing that for a bit and there are also things I want to write about which aren’t appropriate for that setting. Due to the subject matter of the bits so far, they won’t obey the usual rule of excluding herbalism, education and perhaps gender identity. I’ve already written about herbalism for example, and also seaweed, and I wouldn’t usually stick something like that on here. I mention gender identity because although I won’t be talking about the central issues, it does interest me to attempt to write gender-neutral Gaidhlig, an issue which arose because one of the students is non-binary.
So far I have the following already written:
Seaweeds
Herbalism
My grandfather
The Gaidhlig will be bad. That’s the point. I want help and I want to practice. Although this may not happen, I would greatly appreciate it if people whose grasp of the language is better than mine comment on how I can improve this. After these three, I plan to write about my six plans to move to Scotland and the history of clans McIver and Macintyre.
I’d also like to make a few comments on how I approach language-learning which may not be apparent to people whose first language isn’t the same as the language I’m attempting to acquire. This has a history to it, which also means it never applied to French. I’m fluent in Esperanto and have also been a FORTH enthusiast. FORTH is a programming language I’ve mentioned here before, characterised by the definition of more complex words in terms of simpler words, and Esperanto is largely made up of morphemes which can be chained together to modify the meanings of words. This has led me to take the same approach in languages where my vocabulary is small, so for example I’ve worded “died” as “lost (his) life” in some passages. Such an approach I plan to replace with actual words, and it can run up against idioms, either in English or the other language, but it does hopefully communicate itself well for the time being. I tend to do this on the fly.
I might end up writing things which are seldom or never written about in Gaidhlig, but it’s a living language which needs to be used for whatever purpose needed.
That’s it for now then. Watch this space in Gaidhlig, which I don’t know well enough, but I hope this will change.
I don’t know why I do this, but my diary entries are numbered in days as well as dates, starting with my first dated comment referring to an actual date when my mother suggested starting one, which was “17th July, 1975 ¶ I saw two spaceships docking”, referring to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. I choose to date it more precisely to the handshake between Thomas P. Stafford and Alexei Leonov at 2:17 pm, CDT. This was 8:17 pm BST, and I’ve rounded it off to the start of the minute. This numbering system is a little reminiscent of the Julian Date, which is the number of days elapsed since 1st January 4713 BCE, which was the last year the Indiction, Solar and Lunar years coincided. Two of those are self-evident but the first refers to a fifteen-year assessment for taxation in the Roman Empire, and I presume it’s in there because it used to be used as a proxy date. Obviously all three of these are proleptic, i.e. projected back before their real invention, because the year didn’t used to begin in January and the Roman Empire didn’t exist that far back. The point of the Julian Date is to provide a standard for the timing of astronomical events. It’s also used to calculate best before and sell by dates, batch tracking (for instance for product recalls), converting between calendars of different cultures and for dates in databases, since it’s less cumbersome than using the peculiar and fairly irregular numbers for the days of the month. However, in these situations it tends to be cut off and the date is recorded as the number of days since a more recent date, since otherwise the number would be needlessly large. The exact current Julian date is 2461006.828461, or actually it’s moved on since then. It actually begins at noon GMT, presumably because most astronomical events were recorded at night. It also, incidentally, provides decimal time, which makes things easier but is in the wrong base. My own dating system is based on days since a certain date, so in a way it is a real Julian Date. I have changed it several times. It used to be based on what was coincidentally my parents’ sixteenth wedding anniversary but I realised that prevented me from referring to dates before that, so I changed it to the first dated incident I wrote down. There is an earlier date in April 1975 but it just records the measurements of a staircase so it’s not about a temporal event and I ignore it. My sister once pointed out that I was recording historical events which were not appropriate for a personal diary, but in fact more than 99% of them are in fact personal.
It looks a bit odd to me that I’ve written out (18396) above, because I’ve almost always just used it in my diary and it feels like I’m revealing something intimate and personal by writing it out publicly. Another thing about it is that for me the day starts at 7:17 pm GMT, but I ignore that most of the time. If the Julian date had been used for computers there needn’t have been any Y2K problem. Incidentally, that wasn’t a panic about nothing, but I don’t want to get too distracted here. If it had been recorded as a 24-bit value, it wouldn’t have become an issue for tens of millennia. There are quite a few peculiar things about Y2K, not least the fact that software actually does use Julian Dates.
This has been on my mind recently for two reasons. One is that I’m writing an astronomical calendar for a client, so I should probably use Julian Dates for that for simplicity’s sake. That’s what they’re for of course. The other is that I couldn’t resist watching the current Vince Gilligan series ‘Pluribus’, which uses a similar day-based dating system for time before and since the Joining. I should point out that I have subscribed to Apple TV before, and no it isn’t ideal that I’ve had to do this again to watch it. I’m not going to try to defend that decision, but I will say that the quality of Vince Gilligan’s and his associated team’s work is so high that it’s hard to resist the temptation to do this. Just this moment, I’m wondering about whether I should introduce a spoiler warning, and I suppose I should but I’m not sure how important that is. At some point I will talk about the nature of spoilers and when they are and aren’t appropriate, but that’s for another monologue.
So here we go:
SPOILER WARNING
‘Pluribus’, styled as “PLUR1BUS”, has a title which can be analysed as “You Are 1: Be Us”, which makes me wonder if “PL” is also significant. It does constitute the first two letters of “please” I suppose. This sums up the premise of the series. The Very Large Array radio astronomy facility in New Mexico detects a signal repeating every seventy-eight seconds from the direction of the TRAPPIST-1 system around six hundred light years away, consisting of four different codes, and the scientists deduce that it’s an RNA sequence although I’m not sure why because DNA also has four bases. I should probably explain this although I think it may be common knowledge. DNA stores genetic code in most living things and RNA is the medium they use to transcribe that code into proteins. It does make sense that RNA would be used for this purpose, since it is actually being used to transmit information rather than store it. There are also some viruses which use RNA instead of DNA, and also some smaller things which I don’t fully understand which seem to be bare RNA molecules which behave like viruses which are candidates for the smallest life forms of all, assuming they are alive.
At this point it’s worth saying that conceptually the series is worth dividing into the setting and therefore science fictional stuff and the more conventional aspect of the story, which I will get to. Back to the science side then.
There are a number of whiteboards shown throughout the series so far. The first has equations on it referring to signal processing, the second is a plan for creating the virus and the third and fourth, unless I’ve missed some, are Carol’s whiteboards, one for planning her next mass-market romantic fantasy novel and the other detailing of what she’s determined about the Joined in an attempt to repeat them. I have no idea if this is significant or whether it’s just a good way to convey exposition and maybe conceal Easter Eggs. Possibly significant, I don’t know
A defence organisation in Annapolis, MD put together the genome and test it on rats. Unsurprisingly, it’s clear to neither the scientists nor the viewers at this point exactly what the RNA code does, but one interesting detail is that there is a gene in it which encodes for a receptor which responds to the scent of Convallaria majalis or lily of the valley and is also found in sperm cells and attracts them. This is possibly nothing, but it may be a reference to the lily of the valley storyline in ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s probably too obscure to be more than a passing reference. The astronomers also speculate that the dish or other antenna used to send the message must have been the size of Afrika.
One of the rats appears to have died and a scientist, suitably protected, picks them up and tries to feel for a pulse, but since she’s wearing gloves she can’t do so, takes one off and gives the rat cardiac massage, and they then wake up and bite her. Although she tries to wash it out and follow the emergency protocol, it doesn’t work and she’s infected. She then infects everyone else in the facility by kissing them, licking doughnuts on reception and pretty soon there are planes dropping the virus from the sky and infecting every human in the world. The result is that almost the whole human world becomes a single hive mind with the exception of thirteen people, including one in Paraguay who was undiscovered and appears to have avoided being infected. The other twelve are immune. Five of them speak English as a second language and one, Carol, is the focus of the series. She lives in New Mexico and her partner was killed by falling backwards when she, like almost everyone else, has a seizure on being infected.
Now there’s the larger, as it were Galactic, picture in the story and the smaller global one. The former is of course open to interpretation and on a galactic scale six hundred light years is practically next door. A fairly simple explanation for the developing scenario is that the Galaxy has a plague or a process which eliminates threats, like how the immune system eliminates cancer. At some point, civilisation becomes able to carry out genetic modification and decode messages from other star systems. When this happens, it detects a message, interprets it and out of curiosity turns it into a virus, which it is then infected by. This causes it to form a hive mind, build an enormous transmitter and send the genome signal to other star systems, and the cycle repeats. This could be a few things. It could simply be the next stage in the evolution of intelligence, a plague which is spreading through the Galaxy or a galactic defence system that renders potentially harmful species innocuous. Or, it could be pre-emptive action by another civilisation attempting to neutralise humanity, deliberately targetted at us. Scientifically, this makes more sense because the codes involved are RNA bases, suggesting that it’s designed for functioning among life on this planet unless RNA and DNA are the only basis for life.
To nitpick, it isn’t clear why adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine were chosen for which of the four bases. There are presumably four types of signal and it does make sense that humans would interpret these as bases, but how do they know which is which and why did they see one as uracil rather than thymine? There are also other bases, such as flurouracil, used in cancer chemotherapy, and the synthetic pair known as P, Z, S and B, and some viruses use unusual bases to protect themselves from host defences.
All this, though, is about the science and very probably the point of the series is not connected to the wider Universe as such. Many fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ zombie series got very focussed on the idea of a cure or an explanation for the cause when in fact the point of the show was entirely unconnected to that, so far as I know – (<=en-dash – I am a real human) — I stopped watching it after I think the fourth series. It might not matter how it happened.
Possibly, heteronormativity prevented me from realising that Helen and Carol were a romantic item all the way through the first episode. However, I tend to do that with heterosexual couples too, so maybe not, but I don’t think it was very clear. I thought Helen was Carol’s agent who had become a friend. One important aspect of Carol being queer is that she’s estranged from her parents due to them sending her to conversion torture and has no children, which is not inevitable of course but probably is more likely. This puts her in a different position with regard to intimate relationships, particularly because Helen dies in the pilot. However, she becomes one of the joint in the final moments of her life and the hive mind therefore has access to all her experience, memories and personality, to a greater extent in fact than Carol ever had. She feels violated by this and she orders them to close Helen’s memories off and never to refer to them again, though on one occasion so far she’s caved into temptation when she wanted to know what Helen thought of her writing.
More than eight hundred million people died when the Joining took place. I presume this is due to things like people operating heavy machinery, driving passenger vehicles, crossing roads, being in the middle of surgery and so on when the virus hit, but some viewers have suggested that they deliberately killed some of those infected. I don’t think this is what’s happening though. It also emerges that if Helen expresses strong negative emotions towards them, they have seizures and on the one occasion when she did this so far, eleven million people were killed, meaning that she has to tread very carefully.
The hive mind is working towards assimilating all the people who have not been so far and they don’t know how long it’ll take. Most of the other people who are immune are entirely happy with the situation and at least one of the children wants to become part of the hive mind. Some of the others, notably an Indian woman called Laxmi, haven’t accepted that people close to them have had their identities dissolved into the collective. Carol has the Joined arrange a meeting of all the willing English speakers and they travel to Bilbao where she meets with them in Airforce One, which has been commandeered by a Mauritanian immune person called Koumba Diabaté, to whom I shall return. In this meeting, she comes across as a typically American White saviour and also to some extent a Karen, and in fact she has strong Karen energy throughout. She’s the only White person there and everyone else’s English is a second language, but she has insisted on English speakers rather than allowing interpreters. It’s understandable that she might not trust them, but – okay look, this is getting too involved. Right now I have a huge blizzard of thoughts about the show and I’m just going to jot down a few points.
Event TV used to be something which united people in a particular country and in a sense, very occasionally, globally, as with the lunar landing with Apollo II, and maybe to a very limited extent the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on (1), but with the advance of the internet and the advent of access to non-live video, among other things, there has been fragmentation. ‘Pluribus’ is in a sense a unifying factor although it isn’t easily accessible or on the main streaming services, which is a shame because it would be appropriate if it were.
There’s a purple and green thing going on, which is interesting because those are the two main colours of aurora. I’m not sure what they mean, but there’s a pattern, as there was in ‘Breaking Bad’, of colour-coding. Purple was associated with Marie, whose clothing stays purple until almost the end of the series, green with Walter White more than anyone else and associated with money, greed and jealousy. Purple is the colour of the emperor, so it may be that purple in this signals those who rule, i.e. the Joined or the virus, which starts off in a purple solution. Green also symbolises growth and change. I don’t know what to do with this. Yellow also seems significant – Carol wears a yellow jacket at the start of the season.
“Soylent Green Is People”. Right now, and this is why I’m rushing this out on (18402) because the next episode, ‘HDP’, is out on (18404) (again, this feels weird), Carol has found that the Joined are constantly drinking “milk”, which is however a plasma- or serum-like yellow fluid which we are at least led to believe from the final scene is partly made from something shocking, presumably human corpses. The issue, though, is that it probably either isn’t that simple or is misleading. Maybe the yellowness is also significant, I don’t know. My current presumption is that the 800 million deaths led to a surplus of corpses which are rendered down into nutrients or possibly some kind of culture medium for the virus or source of antibodies against a simple and relatively harmless pathogen which would enable them to become individual again.
Things like serial numbers, licence plates and other sequences of characters may be significant. In ‘Breaking Bad’, these referred to colours as hex triplets. But there’s more going on than colour in this.
There’s a suggestion that Carol’s unpublished novel ‘Bitter Chrysalis’ is connected to the outcome of the series in some way, for instance that its plot prefigures the arc of the show. There was a large butterfly on the wall of the ice hotel in Norway. It could simply be that Carol has to become the butterfly through the bitterness of her experience.
Even if the viewers’ sympathy is meant to be with Carol as the product of capitalism against the Joined as communism, and of course my sympathy would be the opposite, it’s still interesting as a study of the American Way. Gilligan is in any event a genius at making us root for the bad guy.
Speaking of which, maybe this is a mirror image of ‘Breaking Bad’, which is “Mr Chips becomes Scarface”. This is an unsympathetic character whom circumstances force to be a messiah.
Speaking of which, obviously he gets us onto Team Carol, but actually there’s not a lot wrong with her. It’s more that women are rarely permitted to behave like that in popular culture. In real life it’s not quite so bad. She’s the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Connections have been suggested with a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode. I personally perceive connections with David Brin’s ‘The Giving Plague‘ and possibly even Andy Weir’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ in the sense of an interstellar plague, which links to Olaf Stapledon too. There’s an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ called ‘Third From The Sun’ with a character in it called Will Sturka, based on a 1950 Richard Matheson story. It doesn’t seem to be otherwise connected. In ‘The Giving Plague’ a sociopathic scientist has to deal with a blood-borne virus which causes people to become more altruistic and therefore more likely to give blood, and ends up faking altruism out of necessity. ‘Project Hail Mary’ has an algal plague spreading between yellow dwarf star systems which dims their suns, which is more loosely connected, and Olaf Stapledon has two instances of interstellar plagues, one of which, the “Mad Star”, infects stars and ends up seeming to wipe out the human species in the distant future, and the other of which is spread by apparently very sane, virtuous and balanced civilisations on various planets which gradually, through interaction with beings in other star systems, would conclude that it would be in the other civilisation’s interest to have its culture destroyed or even the species exterminated.
So there’s plenty more, and I realise this has broken down into disorder but I want to get this out now to beat the deadline of ‘HDP’ being released, which incidentally seems to stand for “Human Derived Protein”.
The other night I was lying in bed listening to a radio dramatisation of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ on my Walkman using earphones when Sarada came in, and as usual I couldn’t hear what she was saying properly because of them. Ironically, if it’s true, the very part I was listening to was the scene where Guy Montag enters the bedroom to see his wife Mildred lying comatose on the bed with the “seashells” in her ears “listening” to the radio. This was not only not lost on me but in fact I had wanted it to happen. The invention of wireless earbuds, which these weren’t because I can’t get Bluetooth to work properly and don’t approve of having basically disposable batteries in devices which in any case only last a couple of years, so I’ve heard, but they do nevertheless resemble Bradbury’s “seashells” and their use. However, Ray Bradbury said he was in the business of prevention rather than prediction but it seems someone stepped on a butterfly.
Having looked at ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and a few years ago ‘Brave New World’, it seemed about time I looked at a third classic dystopian science fiction novel. I don’t know if it makes sense to rank these things, but if the first two count as being number one and number two, Bradbury’s novel surely belongs somewhere in the top half-dozen. Were it not for Zamyatkin’s ‘We’ and Kazuo Ishiguro no ‘Never Let Me Go’, it might even deserve an undisputed third place, though it seems quite crass to do that to these works. Nonetheless, I’m sure it often finds itself onto high school reading lists almost as often as the others I’ve mentioned, and in fact probably more often than ‘We’ in fact, which is relatively unknown. Ray Bradbury, though, differs from the other authors in being a genre sci-fi author. Of a kind, anyway. Kazuo Ishiguro ga now has tendencies in that direction but his stories haven’t always been like that. Bradbury also wrote mainstream fiction: ‘The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl’ comes to mind, and is a wonderful study of misplaced guilt which calls Lady Macbeth to mind.
In general, I find Bradbury a slightly odd author and I can’t put my finger on why. As I understand it, he’s usually considered one of the Big Four: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Bradbury. The Big Three, however, doesn’t include him. He differs from the others in having a much more mainstream literary approach and despite his successful efforts to produce absolutely classic science fiction works such as ‘A Sound Of Thunder’, which seems to be the origin of the idea of the butterfly effect, he doesn’t really feel like a SF writer at all even when he’s writing absolutely classic stories. He characterises and uses elaborate imagery and turns of phrase, and whereas that’s admirable it also makes his prose feel foreign to the genre. To that extent, it seems inappropriate to think of his inventions as predictive or worth considering in itself. Science fiction is substantially two things: fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting and fiction where ideas play the role of characters. Bradbury’s work is less like this than most SF. New Wave clearly is not like that, but that was still several years off when he was at his peak. It’s been said that he’s more a fantasy and horror writer. He’s also respectable enough for my third year English teacher (the folk singer, not the guy serving time) to have us read his 22-story anthology ‘The Golden Apples Of The Sun’, although I’d already read most of them.
The second story in that collection, 1951’s ‘The Pedestrian’, is one of the sources from which ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is taken. Depending on who’s reading this, my introduction to it may be from one of you, who described its plot to me in about ’79, before I read it, although by then I had already seen the Truffaut film, which was apparently his only English language production. The other source is the longer story ‘The Fireman’, which I haven’t read. I can identify quite strongly with the main protagonist in ‘The Pedestrian’, who is in the habit of taking long evening walks about the city. He is stopped by an automated police car and asked to justify his actions, which he does but is assessed as mentally ill by the AI and taken to a mental hospital. This very much accords with the pedestrian-hostile nature of many US cities, many of which are apparently not walkable, and jaywalking had been made an offence from 1925 on. I myself spend a lot of time walking the streets for exercise and mental health, and just to get places, and I can’t imagine how that would go in the States. One thing this story does illustrate, though, is Bradbury’s strong attachment to nostalgia.
Now for the novel itself. Guy Montag, a fireman in a futuristic world which has banned books, has a job whose main activities are tracking down people who own books and burning them, and yes that does sometimes mean the people. He meets a teenager called Clarisse whose experience of the world is more holistic and authentic than he’s accustomed to, which opens his eyes to the possibility that books must hold much of great value in view of the fact that some readers are prepared to die rather than relinquish them. In the meantime, his wife Mildred is an avid TV watcher, televisions having now become wall screens which can even be tiled to cover the entire parlour, and drifts into taking an overdose of sleeping pills which is remedied by a couple of technicians coming over and changing her blood. After he begins questioning the book ban, he begins to surreptitiously collect books himself, notably a copy of the King James Bible, and throws a sicky to stay off work. His boss Beatty then visits him at home, explains why books have been banned and hints that he knows his secret and that other firemen always do it once but surrender the book within twenty-four hours. There’s also a robot dog which hunts down miscreants and kills them, and seems also to “know” something about Montag, either automatically or through having been programmed to suspect him. At some point, Clarisse dies in a car accident and Mildred is completely emotionally detached about it, as opposed to her interest in something on TV called ‘The Family’. Montag recalls an incident when he met someone called Faber in a park who was a retired English professor, makes contact with him and goes to see him. Faber decries his cowardice for not doing more to stop the anti-intellectual drift of society for standing up for literacy and books and reveals to Montag that he has a two-way radio system which he uses with Montag to offer him guidance. Montag returns home to find Mildred has gathered with some of her friends and he tries to have a serious conversation with them which turns out to be futile. He then shows them a book of poetry, which Mildred excuses by making up a story that it’s a ritual firemen perform once a year to show how ridiculous books are. He then goes back to the fire station with a decoy book which Beatty discards and reveals that he was once an avid reader himself. Montag is then called out to a house which turns out to be his own and is ordered to set fire to his own books with a flamethrower. Mildred has reported him, but is distressed by the destruction of the parlour screens and walks out on him. He then burns Beatty alive with the flamethrower and is pursued by the hound, which injects him but he destroys it with the aforesaid flamethrower. He flees another hound and this is publicised on TV as a major spectacle, but escapes by crossing a river so his scent can’t be followed, and escapes to St Louis where there’s a rural community of people each of whom memorise a particular book. In a culmination of the aerial manoeuvres which have been going on in the background throughout the novel, his home city is destroyed by nuclear weapons but the community survives and returns to the city to re-build society.
Right, so what do I have to say about this? Well, it is considerably dated in a somewhat peculiar way and I have the strong impression that Bradbury isn’t that articulate about what he’s trying to defend. The general idea of the novel is that social and technological change have led to a general dumbing down and flatness to society, relationships and personalities because of the inconvenience of individuality and passion, which leads to life not being worth living because people drift zombie-like through it. Mildred seems to take the overdose accidentally, but she doesn’t really value her life as such so it doesn’t matter whether she lives or dies. Instead, she’s mesmerised by her TV soap opera and radio station and nothing else is going on in her life. She’s also treated like a machine, by non-medics, when she takes the overdose. It’s like changing the oil in a car – I should point out here that I have no idea what I’m talking about because I know nothing of internal combustion engines. The technicians are impersonal, callous and accidentally brutal. Mildred is really the Everywoman of that society, and this is where I start to worry and think it shows its age.
Yes, Guy Montags wife is the Everywoman. She doesn’t seem to do any paid work and it seems that whereas men have jobs, her life is vacuous because domestic labour has been rendered obsolete, but instead of it being replaced by a role where she goes out and participates in the labour market she is left without a role. What, then, is she supposed to do? Montag, the firemen and other men have that option but apparently she hasn’t, and Bradbury criticises her for it. It’s like she’s trapped in the stereotypical place of the ’50s housewife and lacks any inherent impetus to break out of it. Then there’s Clarisse. She’s been interpreted as a manic pixie dream girl, i.e. she’s only there to allow Guy Montag’s personal growth. In more detail, the manic pixie dream girl is said to be an eccentric young woman with no internal life, often seen as wish fulfillment by a lonely male writer. The other women protagonists are less significant. I find both significant women in this book problematic and unsatisfactory, which is not surprising as it was published in 1953.
That’s one problem. Another way it dates itself is in the rationalisation for the firemen’s roles. The backstory on their development is that houses are now fireproof and there are simply no more domestic fires. Although this has led to a dystopia, this sounds initially like a positive thing. With hindsight, we are now aware that making a house completely fireproof would have trade-offs. Given that it was written in the 1950s, asbestos would almost certainly be involved. A more recent approach is to use flame-retardant chemicals, which are toxic and environmentally harmful. This is what we’ve actually done, and the consequences are that our homes are still at risk of fire, though less than previously, but are more likely to give us cancer or harm us and our surroundings in other ways. It seems characteristic of the mid-century that problems would be solved with no downside, as expressed in Donald Fagen’s ‘IGY’, a song I used to find very irritating until I got it. All that said, Bradbury does portray the disadvantage very clearly, and this again relates to gender roles.
The firemen lost the purpose of their work. This is a bit peculiar as it seems to suggest that there are no industrial or forest fires or other disasters such as rescuing people from road traffic collisions, and this is too shallow for me. But it also feels like they found a new role substantially because they were underemployed, and rather than simply dispensing with the role of the firefighter, they had to find a new function. It’s almost as if the vacuum of having no station had to be filled. I very much doubt that this is the intention, but it’s productive to read that into it. Whereas the women are left with nothing to do but fill their lives with fatuousness rather than finding other niches, the men for some reason have to be given something else to do, no matter how destructive, which they have to be paid for and which has to have meaning.
There’s also an elusive issue which arises from books themselves and Bradbury’s attitude to them. It feels like he has accepted that there’s value in them without fully understanding what that value is or allowing it to inform his writing. He defends the idea of books as good for the soul and recognises that they do things like deepen thought and improve empathy and emotional intelligence, but he himself doesn’t seem to have undertaken that journey. Even at the end of the novel, the people left behind have undergone something like rote-learning without profoundly internalising the content. The defence is symbolic. We should have a right to emotional complexity and pain even though Bradbury may not recognise all that implies. I hope I’ve captured that.
Beatty’s defence of the society’s position is very clear. His view is that books are contradictory, complex and cause pain and conflict. This is where the most difficult aspect of the entire novel comes to light. Beatty traces the history leading up to all books being banned as originating in anti-racism, and for me this makes for very uncomfortable reading. He outlines a process where the offensiveness of books to certain marginalised groups expanded until it was forbidden even to offend people such as dog-walkers, bird-lovers and cookery writers. Whereas it’s easy and valid to portray this as bigoted, it is true that one may need to be offended from time to time and that hurt is an important part of life. The problem, however, is that Bradbury doesn’t seem to have any sense of either immutable traits being in a special position or of the idea of punching up versus punching down. He seems to have a view of society as it had been as fundamentally equal or merit-based with the marginalised in essentially no worse a position as anyone else for some reason. On the other hand, this view is being expressed by someone in 2025. Perhaps I’m being confronted with something which makes me uncomfortable today but something valuable may have still been lost. However, I simply cannot get on board with the idea that active racism is okay.
Salvaging something from that, though, Beatty seems to be saying that the process got beyond the political realm and started to be about not making anyone uncomfortable, which meant never being provocative. It’s tempting to see a parallel between the trend he describes and the trend towards supposedly being “right on”. This is surely something the Right would agree with nowadays, perhaps disingenuously, and it makes me wonder if Bradbury is essentially conservative. After all, nostalgia is about yearning for things to go back to how they used to be and there’s a strong element of that in his writing. Nevertheless, it still feels like something can be salvaged from this.
Beatty makes a couple of other points. He draws a connection between population growth and the loss of tolerance because people have little choice but to invade each other’s space. The idea of overpopulation being a problem is now thoroughly dead, so whether or not this could be a factor is now moot. Yet again this is a sign of datedness.
Then there’s the question of technological change. There’s plenty of vapidity nowadays in online coverage of books and book reviews, and that’s just about the ink and paper version. The books themselves can also be very much of low quality. Books also compete with videos, web pages, audio books and e-books, whereas Bradbury had only identified radio and linear broadcast television as a problem. For example, he didn’t seem to anticipate video recording. On the other hand, he did anticipate the shortening of attention span and the rise of ever shorter summaries, a tendency I probably find just as horrifying as he.
Viewing Beatty’s exposition alongside the possibility that the firemen are engaging in malignant busywork, it begins to look highly insincere. Beatty has changed from a surreptitiously well-read younger man to a self-justifying thug. Has he maybe been brutalised by his work? I feel this takes things beyond the confines of the story.
But the book is not a lost cause by any means. It still has a lot to say about the dumbing down of culture, mob rule, shortening attention spans and the dangers of veering away from emotionally difficult and troubling themes and explorations. If the reader can look past the awkward social conservatism, it’s still possible to salvage something from this, and it is the case that with the constant use of smartphones and constant shallow entertainment, we are currently seldom left with our own thoughts uninterrupted and undistracted. Finally, in my defence I’ve been doing something like this at night since 1980 and it hasn’t fried my brain yet. And finally finally, it really ought to be 233°C, not Fahrenheit 451!
This is going to have to be a personal post rather than purporting to be a more abstract lit crit or review of said novel. I want to start more generally. A-levels seemed to be structured in an interesting way from an external perspective, that at some point they would confront the student or pupil with a particularly challenging, testing incident which almost seemed designed to force them to make a decision regarding their possible future or otherwise in that field. This may of course be paranoia, but if it is, it might still make a lot of sense to do this. For me, both English Literature and Biology seemed to do this, actually at the same time, although RE didn’t so far as I can tell, unless there’s something about my approach to such a subject, which after all has similarities with Philosophy, which meant that I breezed through whatever it was supposed to be. It may have been Biblical criticism. Alternatively, maybe it’s just that exposing oneself to a rigorous, wide-ranging and relatively advanced area of study just will tend to test one and is simply more likely to provide such hurdles. I’ve mentioned in passing that my experience at Pegwell Bay was nasty enough to persuade me that marine biology was not my future, but I won’t dwell on that because I want to focus more on what was happening at the same time and my response to it.
The Pegwell Bay experience was in fact linked to the ‘Moby Dick’ one. Since I was busy away trying to do fieldwork in a muddy patch of beach over in Thanet, I didn’t get informed of the summer reading for A-level English Literature. It wasn’t all bad by the way: there were cuttlefish eggs washed up on the beach containing fetuses which changed colour according to their background, and it may also have borne in certain facts about me to one of my biology teachers which were helpful when he became year head for writing my reference for UCCA. However, a couple of things came together, one of which was that I totally failed to read the set novel for the summer, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I also failed to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, but that was easier to remedy because it’s an anthology. ‘Homage To Catalonia’ was also involved now I come to think of it, and I managed to bluff my way through that quite effectively. The same was unfeasible for Melville’s brick of a novel. I haven’t re-read it for the purposes of this blog, but I have listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests going on about it and other things, and one comment made on it is ironically probably true of my life. The reviewer said that reading that novel was likely to completely change one’s life and attitude towards literature. Ironically, that’s entirely true of me because what it did was persuade me not to want to have anything at all to do with mainstream literature ever again, and this has been a major theme in my life ever since, with one exception in the form of considering writing my MA dissertation on the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s plays, which I didn’t follow through, and thereby hangs another unrelated tale too boring to relate here.
I first heard of ‘Moby Dick’, probably in November 1975 when David Attenborough mentioned it on ‘Fabulous Animals’ as a story where a white sperm whale is pursued by the one-legged Captain Ahab who dies holding on to the harpoon impaled in their side. It seemed to be some kind of sea story, something on which I was quite keen on at the time – Flannan Isle comes to mind, and the mysterious fate of the Waratah. There was nothing in my experience which should’ve put me off it, although I never considered reading it back then. And of course I unfortunately never considered reading it when I was supposed to either. It’s a dramatic life change to shift from being so enthusiastic and engrossed in mainstream novels to being utterly hostile and disillusioned about them. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the sheer length of ‘Moby Dick’ and the circumstances surrounding my failure to read it, but it was also observed by my O-level English teacher that whereas the earlier course did a good job of encouraging love of literature, the later one tended to kill it stone dead, such that even decades later someone exposed to it is happily using the cliché “stone dead” rather than using my imagination a bit more.
I still don’t really know what to make of the novel. It’s been observed that it has strong homoerotic overtones and that it probably isn’t post hoc eisegesis to read that into it. “Ishmael” shares a bed with Queequeg early on in the story and the man’s world described almost throughout lends itself to that too. Queequeg’s tattoos are also significant masculine adornment, and his unused coffin being decorated with them and later saving “Ishmael’s” life after the shipwreck, where he hugs the empty coffin until rescued. This seriously suggests that the references to “seamen” and “sperm” are absolutely meant as doubles entendres, and this is not a retroactive projection by bored schoolboys, but the actual “Moby Dick” title just seems to be a happy accident as the word “dick” wasn’t used that way back then. It seems strange that something so puerile-seeming could be incorporated into a popular mainstream novel of the nineteenth century without any comment, but maybe it was hidden in plain sight, as so many things are. It probably goes without saying that the whale in this is easily interpreted as a phallic symbol, and in fact just as many phalluses are unwanted and intrusive, the presence of this book in my life was also like that. It’s a massive erection, basically.
There used to be a whale fetus in a large jar in one of the biology labs. I always used to feel equally sad and fascinated about it. I expected that some unfortunate event had occurred to the mother, possibly in the Faroes, which had led to it falling into the school’s hands. The human skeletons which used to be present in state schools often also had dodgy origins and the one at mine was apparently eventually repatriated to its next of kin, which was actually two separate families as it was made up of two separate sets of human remains. I don’t know what happened to the whale, but I wonder if it might have been used by the English department in connection with the novel.
I’d long been fascinated by whales, and in fact cetaceans in general. The only ones I’d actually seen in the flesh except for the pilot whale were bottlenose dolphins, but there had been a lot of emphasis over the ’70s and ’80s that they were both magnificent and endangered, and in Britain they are of course the property of the Crown, like swans. It was what everyone used to associate with Greenpeace. Beyond that, as I’ve said before I used to be really into reading stories centred on other species such as ‘Watership Down’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ and many others. These don’t sanitise the lives of the animals concerned and there’s plenty of death and suffering in them. Anthropomorphism also varies. ‘Tarka the Otter’ probably does it the least out of these examples. I’ve talked about my “preganism” before on here. I wasn’t to go vegan for three years after reading the novel and at that point wasn’t even vegetarian although I’d considered it. However, I had already long since begun to adopt what I might call a biocentric attitude: that humans are members of the animal kingdom and not set apart in a manner which is different than the individual traits of any other species.
I read ‘Moby Dick’ with that mindset, and having that attitude makes it a really difficult read on top of the difficulty the book presents more generally. Whales are charismatic organisms associated with characteristics such as majesty, grace and beauty. Melville does attempt to acknowledge that in his writing, but when it comes down to it, ‘Moby Dick’ is basically about a group of men who go out and murder numerous beings for their livelihood. They’re basically contract killers, but their victims are also generally arbitrary, with the exception of Ahab and the White Whale. It isn’t even expedient that these individuals need to be gotten out of the way as it might be in war, espionage or organised crime. They’re not even on the level of drive-by shootings, which seem to be about demonstrating loyalty and how far a gang member is prepared to go. These murders are arbitrary and solely motivated by profit, and okay it may be a tough life and manly, dangerous work but it reflects an obliviously genocidal attitude towards the biosphere. All that said, there is some mitigation in that in a sense going out and murdering whales is more humane from a utilitarian perspective than killing buffalo, a comparison Melville doesn’t make because the big massacre didn’t happen until a couple of decades later, because a whale can have a mass of more than a hundred buffalo and only one of them dies to provide all that mass of material for food and industrial purposes. By contrast, murdering the nameless beasts exploited for their milk, or sheep and pigs requires a lot more deaths to produce the same amount of materials, so in a sense whaling is much less unethical than “livestock” farming, and this is reflected in the murder of pilot whales in the Faroes – it’s just the same as what happens in a slaughterhouse except that it takes place in the open for all to see rather than being hidden away as if we’re ashamed of it as a society. But I felt like I was being expected to empathise with characters carrying out genocide. Now that can happen of course, and I’m sure that there are plenty of works of art that attempt to force their audiences to throw their lot in emotionally with the “baddies”, as ’twere, but when this is done as far as I know this is more to give the readers pause for thought about humanising evildoers. I wouldn’t say there’s no element of this at all in the story but I still feel that Melville cannot bring himself to condemn the practice of whaling completely, and it’s hardly worth observing that this is because he’s a man of his times and culture. Likewise, I can’t step out of my life and times in considering this book, which raises the frequent question of universality.
Melville does not, however, portray whaling as a morally neutral or positive activity. In chapter 105, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?’, he does contemplate the possibility of whales becoming extinct at a remarkably early stage for that mindset. He compares the blood-soaked lower decks and crew as the corpse’s flesh is rendered to being in Hell, in Chapter 96, ‘The Try-Works’. This, however, also draws a parallel between this industrialised work and the “dark Satanic mills”, so it isn’t that the rendering toil is particularly infernal just because of what they’re essentially doing so much as it being infernal along with, say, working down a coal mine or in a steelworks. Hence industrial labour itself is a form of damnation, and certainly those who work in slaughterhouses are doing “proper” work and also the dirty work for a carnist population who seem to prefer to be oblivious, and the existence of factory ships out in the ocean carrying out the same dirty work is similar. But I don’t know whether Melville shows them in the same light.
I suspect that the White Whale is supposed to be a tabula rasa. I think it’s possible that the whiteness is supposed to be like a screen onto which diverse things can be projected. Chapter 42 is called ‘The Whiteness Of The Whale’. Without reading it, the concept of White fragility, though highly anachronistic, comes to mind, as does Han Kang’s ‘White Book’. Melville himself seems to portray whiteness as blankness and makes it horrifying, evoking the polar bear, the paleness of death and going on to connect it to cosmic indifference, and this might actually be the key to the whole book. Captain Ahab sees a rival in the White Whale, but none of the other captains or any of the crew think that way. He’s trying to make the whale personal when in fact the sheer vastness and whiteness make the true nature of the animal beyond comprehension, like the Universe. One gets the impression that “Ishmael” and Melville are both wrestling to make sense of the whale as a concept, and that the sheer length of the book is an attempt to render his narrative incomprehensible in the same way as the whale, and by extension the Universe, are. To the White Whale, Ahab is at most a tiny figure standing on a ship at the top of the world, dimensionally marginal and maybe not even that. Maybe to the White Whale, Ahab doesn’t even exist and there’s just the threat of the harpoon. The whiteness also acts as a mirror on which the characters see reflected their dominant attitude: anger, fear and awe. It’s also like the glare of the whiteness obliterates distinctions between good and evil, humanity and nature and sanity and madness.
One frustrating element of my English course’s, and in fact the more popular, approach to the novel is that the long quasi-encyclopaedic sections on “cetology”, as Melville puts it, are padding and can be skipped, because to my mind at the time, and possibly still, they’re the best bit of the novel. All the protagonists, human ones at least, emotional realism, interaction and dialogue mercifully take a back seat and finally we get to read something interesting and engaging. Even so, I think they’re there for two reasons. One is to ensure the novel is whale-sized and the other is to show a different way of attempting to encompass the cetacean and metaphorically the newly scientifically analysed natural world. This also fails. I may find it superficially comforting through systematisation, as I often do, but it’s not deep in the way Melville wishes it to be, and he acknowledges his failure as something common to us all.
Then there’s the issue of Starbuck, which nowadays is more shocking to me than it was then. Starbuck is the Pequod’s first mate and a Quaker, the first to recognise that Ahab is insane. He says of Ahab’s monomanic quest, “Vengeance on a dumb brute, [. . .] that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”. Starbuck is the voice of reason, supposedly, and the moral compass. However, considering they’re out there murdering countless whales, it seems to me that the entire enterprise is operating in a moral vacuum. I don’t understand how a Quaker can be involved in something like this. I presume it isn’t supposed to be realistic but I do believe they were involved in whaling. They also owned slaves, and while I’m aware that the past is not like the present, I would also hope that there are certain values which would persist and the fact that this actually happened is almost enough to make me give up hope for humanity. Quakers, although I’m sure they acknowledge their failings, are supposed to be examples to others and carry the torch of progress. I also seem to recall that the ship is owned by Quakers: it’s a Quaker business. That’s enough to make me want to puke to be honest. Quakers as mass murderers, and that’s probably entirely realistic for the mid-nineteenth century CE.
I have to say that in spite of all this I found the names “Pequod” and “Queequeg” tantalising because they seem to betray a pattern of sound from the same language, possibly one spoken in Nantucket, and I wanted to know what that language was. It’s quite distinct from languages spoken elsewhere on the continent, unsurprisingly, which does at least show some respect for the distinct ethnicities the White people genocided and oppressed. Queequeg represents non-Western spiritual completeness, which is a bit like the noble savage myth but you can’t really expect English language literature from getting on for two centuries ago not to be racist, so unlike the rest I can look past that. Entertaining it, there is the well-known difference between the White men killing the buffalo and removing only small parts of their bodies and the more reverent and ecologically sound approach taken by their previous killers. It might be worth mentioning that Queequeg may be from a less homophobic culture than “Ishmael”, and therefore that the homoerotic overtones in their relationship might be less repressed for him, and there’s also the contrast between their friendship and Ahab’s animosity with the whale.
One notable feature of the book is that it purports to be the Great American Novel and is not set in America but on the ocean. It begins in North America but quickly leaves it, and there may be something about the idea that America actually is the world or aims to dominate it in that approach. The ocean is also the Wild West in a sense, unbounded, vast and full of potential. Twentieth century SF author Barry M Longyear also extended the notion of Manifest Destiny, this time into the cosmos, though in a manner conscious of colonialism, and in a way this novel is a precursor to that, although that potential is still quite nebulous at this point, perhaps reflecting the tabula rasa and projections made upon the whale. It makes the US feel like an infant nation looking forward to growing up and achieving great things.
As you can see, I haven’t got a lot to say about ‘Moby Dick’ and what I have said is highly contaminated by my own views and doesn’t seem germane to the novel. To me its role is probably as a whiteboard on which to discern what went wrong with my literary appreciation. I find that I can’t read it without being overcome with a kind of moral repulsion at its acceptance of the outrage against cetaceans as a backdrop to the story. This is partly admitted by Melville, but it also says something about me. You’d fail to appreciate Shakespeare if you couldn’t look past the fact that he wrote in an early modern Western society where Christianity was dominant, patriarchy and the monarchy were unquestioned and democracy was a minor detail of ancient Greek history. I do know someone who is in fact unable to appreciate him for these exact reasons, but I do enjoy his work. I encounter two basic problems with mainstream literary novels. One is that I tend to make too many associations and am unable to give them different weights, which is similar to my inability to recognise my own strengths and weaknesses. The other, though, is illustrated by my response to ‘Moby Dick’, namely that I can’t see past my moral outrage and am dominated by my immediate impressions of a piece of writing. Maybe in the end I am myself like Ahab and I can’t see past the white whale that is mainstream literary fiction. Maybe it’s a tabula rasa to me on which I end up projecting anything arbitrarily, or maybe it mirrors myself.
Thisses title might be a bit confusing, coming as it does straight after the last one, so this might end up being even less read than usual due to people thinking it’s the same post. It isn’t. I’m also doing all of this from memory without re-reading or re-watching anything, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right.
There was a time before I read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and it was before 1984. My image of it was very different from what it delivered. I imagined it would be futuristic and somewhat like ‘Brave New World’, which I think I read first. There are ways in which it is, from Orwell’s perspective anyway, and there is advanced technology in it, though not often in the way that might be expected. I think for someone who’s read neither, at least in the 1970s CE, the two novels are conceptually smushed together and are just weird high-tech dystopias without much distinction between the two. In fact I once came up with a fan theory to convert Orwell’s world into Aldous Huxley’s, which went on to become H. G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ world of the Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not very literary tinkering of which I’m fond but probably bores most people and can’t be done without altering details of Huxley’s back story unless that’s unreliable in-universe. Once I’d read it, I had to rewrite history with authentic memories.
Winston
With the exception of ‘Coming Up For Air’ and presumably ‘Animal Farm’, which I haven’t read, Orwell’s central characters are generally similar to himself both psychologically and physically. Winston Smith is no exception. In fact, since Orwell was basically dying at the time, Winston is also not a well man. His varicose ulcer in particular gets mentioned a number of times. However, he’s also transposed down in history and some of his experiences are therefore inevitably different. He’s divorced, feels guilty about betraying his mother and sister and is living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. He’s also complicit in the regime, like all Outer Party members, his job being to rewrite history to accord with the current party line. Orwell was involved in the wartime BBC propaganda effort, working from Room 101 of course, and I presume this reflects his ambivalence about this work. However, Winston is far more heavily coerced than the author. He’s constantly surveilled, like all of the Outer Party. Incidentally, it’s notable that the proles are not surveilled to the same extent and seem to have a lot more fun than he and his colleagues have. It’s been said that fascist regimes rely very much on the middle class to succeed, so this may be it, and the low level of education among the poorest is accompanied by lack of political awareness. The working class don’t come across very positively in this novel, and unfortunately given the attitudes stereotypically associated with them in England today, the contempt for them continues. Orwell has seen their lives from the inside and it’s made him pessimistic about the idea that they can be the source of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t sit well with me even while I suspect it’s often true. However, they’re not a monolith and different people have different attitudes and values.
Novel-writing machines
Julia, Winston’s love interest, works on the novel-writing machines and is of course mainly seen from his perspective in the novel. Recently, the novel ‘Julia’ has attempted to tell the same story from her viewpoint, which also helps the reader see Winston from outside. Julia disguises herself as an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Sex League, and this among other things provokes the thought that the whole society is built on dishonesty and bad faith. Everyone is encouraged to think that everyone else loves Big Brother. The concept of the novel-writing machine is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it fits technologically. The trope arises repeatedly in science fiction and outside it – I think Roald Dahl uses it and Jonathan Swift does too – and I suppose it’s the author’s nightmare and since Orwell seems to have been trying to cram everything he hated into the world of ‘1984’, it finds its place there. At the time of writing, though, it must’ve seemed completely impossible and it seems out of place in the general grimy, low-tech atmosphere of Airstrip One. The solution to this, I think, is that the Party invents anything it needs to keep the populace in check, whether propaganda or some other kind of technology, so where there’s a will, there’s a way. It also makes me wonder if technology is potentially much more advanced than is seen in day to day life by the common people but they only get to avail themselves of it when it helps Ingsoc. This theme is also visited in ‘Brave New World’ where it’s openly admitted that technology is deliberately held back. Focussing on the very obvious thing which hasn’t been said yet, yes this is AI chatbots and they absolutely can produce stories of poor quality with lots of cliches and stereotypes in them, which is exactly what writing in ‘1984’ does. Song lyrics are also written by machine if I remember correctly. Like the real world, the fun creative thing which people actually want to do is taken away from them and they’re left with drudgery. Creativity would be subversive of course. Another aspect of this is that Newspeak is quite mechanical in nature and it might be easier to mechanise textual production in it than in English, but I’ll return to that later.
Telescreens are the most obvious bit of tech in the novel. Supplemented by microphones, they ensure that nobody outside the Inner Party can go unobserved in that manner. In a humorous note, the gym instructor can see Winston failing to do his physical jerks and criticises him through the telescreen. Anthony Burgess, incidentally, provocatively stated that “‘1984’ is essentially a comic book”, but what he seems to have intended by that, apart from being edgy which I think is probably his main motivation, is that Orwell takes the immediate post-war situation in Britain with its austerity and rationing and extrapolated it over almost four decades, leading to a caricature which might not have been meant to be taken entirely seriously. In my desire to make sense of the technological minutiae of the novel, which is never entirely absent from my mind, I’m given to wonder if telescreens use cathode ray tubes like the televisions of the time or whether they’re flatscreens which work in a handwavy way, because there are enormous public telescreens in places like the one in Victory Square which suggests to me that there must be a massive long tube behind them the size of Nelson’s Column or something.
The other notable bit of technology in the book is the machine used to torture Winston during his interrogation. Probably like you, I’m not sure I want to go there in too much detail but it seems able to read his mind and there’s a quantitative rating system which reminds me of electric shock therapy for some reason. I get the impression that the machine can fix transitory thoughts in the mind before doubts set in.
The nature of truth
My English teacher once observed that the novel is as much a philosophical treatise as a work of fiction. This was before I’d formally studied philosophy, so it was presented to me at a time before I had fully formed and thought-through ideas about that, but the main issues seem to be those of history and truth, or perhaps the relationship between language, thought and experience. There’s an incident during Winston’s interrogation where O’Brien burns a piece of paper and says he doesn’t remember it. Winston has some difficulty conceiving of how he can refer to something which he claims is not remembered. This is of course doublethink: being able to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The idea seems to be not only that one outwardly expresses contradictory propositions but that the actual mental activity involves sincerely embracing the contradiction. It isn’t even a question of some thought being required to reveal the contradiction: it’s just there, blatant, as an object of one’s attention. There’s a theme throughout the novel that the indoctrination goes all the way to the centre of the mind.
This relates to the Party’s hostility to orgasm. An orgasm is a subjective experience, often ecstatic, over which the Party has no control. It can make the outside world as drab as it likes, but because orgasm is generally seen as pure pleasure, often shared between people, it has to be eliminated. There’s no control over it. It’s also possible that the existence of orgasms in such a stark world would reveal that things could be better in other ways too because of the contrast. Beyond this though, it seems to be control for its own sake, and it’s what the Anti-Sex League is about. It’s therefore a particularly telling contrast that Julia of all people is in that organisation. She is using doublethink against Big Brother.
Then there’s history. Winston is aware of the Party rewriting history to attribute the invention of the steam engine to Big Brother. He is himself involved in this activity. O’Brien’s burning of the paper is a reference to the immediate past.
Bad Faith
Parsons is Winston’s neighbour and colleague, and is scarily conformist in a very bad faith kind of way. His wife and he, though not his daughter, have a deeply buried aversion to the regime but cover it not only with a veneer of approval but one which penetrates most of the way to the centre of their identity, though not quite all the way, though they won’t even admit it to themselves. Ingsoc has had more success with their daughter, who is no “oldthinker”. She bellyfeels Ingsoc because they have moulded her from birth, and she’s reminiscent of both the Hitler Youth and the children who were to emerge in East Germany who used to report their own parents to the government. She hardly belongs to the family and is really there as living surveillance. In a somewhat similar move to Winston’s as a boy, she betrays her father to the authorities by telling them the possibly fabricated tale that he said “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Although this may be her lie, it could also be that this is really what Parsons said because only in an unconscious state can he admit to his abhorrence of his situation. Whatever actually happened, Parsons praises his daughter for turning him in before the rot had truly set in, that is, before he had to admit the truth to himself.
‘The Place Where There Is No Darkness’
The above is my favourite quote of the entire novel. Winston has previously dreamt that his boss O’Brien is his saviour and he later appears to demonstrate this by letting him into the inner circle of the Party but also the illusory inner circle of the resistance. He imagines that this place is one of hope, but in fact it’s the Ministry Of Truth, where the lights are on all the time to prevent prisoners from sleeping, and also the light penetrates their minds to reveal their secrets, deepest wishes and worst fears. Darkness in this context is simply anything Big Brother wants to get rid of such as sexual pleasure and happiness in general. Although it’s not his intention, I feel very much that this metaphor of light as evil and darkness as good is very productive, and also reflects the fact that Oceania is an ethical photographic negative, also shown by slogans such as “Freedom Is Slavery” and “War Is Peace”.
Maintenance of hatred to distract and unify
A very familiar aspect of the novel is its emphasis on the need for an external enemy, whether Eurasia or Eastasia. Dorothy Rowe, the psychotherapist, used to concentrate very much on this idea and I once went to a talk from her on this subject where she pointed out that soon after the Cold War ended and many people expected a new era of peace, the first Gulf War ensued and we all of a sudden had a new enemy to distract us. During the real 1984, one recent manifestation of that enemy had been Argentina. Nowadays many people would say it was immigrants and asylum seekers, and here I have a question. Some people use this novel to defend what they see as the Free World against other agents and forces such as what they call communism, and then on the Left we would tend to see it as about the likes of totalitarianism and fascism in a more right wing sense. It’s interesting that it should work so well in such a double-edged way. Orwell leads us to see that Ingsoc calls itself socialist when it clearly isn’t, and that would seem to accord with the general left wing view of state capitalism as manifested in the Soviet Union and China, but it seems to work just as well the other way around. Recently we’ve had the “War Against Terror”, which is more abstract but the same thing. Big Brother also regularly retcons the constant alternating wars with Eastasia and Eurasia, more or less entailing that the other two powers constantly shift between alliance and war. Each needs the other two as enemies. This is a particularly vivid and relevant aspect of the novel today.
Newspeak
English is called “Oldspeak” in Oceania. The idea of Newspeak is twofold. One aspect of it is within the regime, to close down thought and reasoning subversive to Ingsoc, but it also serves the purpose for Orwell of being ugly and unpleasant, and also kind of mechanical, not requiring deep thought but rather doublethink. There’s a third aspect to it which I’ll come to in a bit. I’m not entirely sure about this but I have the impression that there are no capital letters. Winston doesn’t use them in his diary, which is in Oldspeak, and there are also no capital letters in Minitru memoranda. Winston observes that someone using Newspeak speaks like a block of text with no spaces between the words, or it may be an aspect of simplifying the language while losing nuance – destroying it actually. However, there are some capitals, such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” and “INGSOC”. I’m sure I don’t need to go into much detail about the language if you’ve read the book. Orwell seems to buy very much into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the world, and therefore that restricting language is restricting freedom of thought. I don’t agree with this and in fact the hypothesis is, I think, largely discredited nowadays. Interestingly, to me, Suzette Haden Elgin tried to do the opposite by creating Laadan, a constructed language specifically geared to women’s experience, but later decided that it wasn’t actually any harder to articulate that in natural languages although other women have taken and developed her conlang and disagree. It does appear to be true that we think of things differently to some extent depending on the language we’re able to use: I found it much harder to express philosophical ideas in Gaidhlig than English and I don’t think that was my lack of competence in the language.
The extra aspect of this I mentioned, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, is that the simplicity of Newspeak reflects Esperanto, which had reached its peak about fifteen years previously. In fact I have written a short story in Newspeak to explore this, set in a community where only Esperanto is spoken. I’m not aware of any other fiction written in Newspeak. In general, Esperanto was considered progressive at the time, so I have some difficulty reconciling this, but then Orwell was also like that – he engaged in doublethink himself to an extent, so maybe he was externalising a habit of mind. Zamenhoff’s popular conlang had its momentum destroyed by fascism and Nazism.
Film Adaptations
To be fair, this should be called “The Film Adaptation” because although several have been made I have the 1984 version in mind. I found it very faithful in terms of the events. It would have been difficult to reproduce Winston’s thoughts verbatim there, but at one point O’Brien bends down next to him in the torture chamber looking old and tired and the text in the book reads ‘you are thinking. . . that my face is old and tired.”. I was of course primed by having read it, but that does, I think, get very clearly communicated in the film. Mike Radford, the director, said that there was nothing in the film that wasn’t happening somewhere in the world that year, a very similar claim to Margaret Atwood’s concerning ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that nothing in that had not been done to women somewhere. Orwell seems to have anticipated that one day the technology would exist to keep tabs on people minutely, which by the time of the real 1984 had already seemed to have gone too far and since then has only gone further. In a review of the film from the time of its release, “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted” was said to be the “real” version of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. That year, the Met had set up a bank of cameras at Brent Cross which could recognise number plates of cars leaving and entering London by that route and cross-referenced them with DVLA records in Swansea. That was over forty years ago now. There were also concerns about computers keeping track of credit card transactions and cheques. Nowadays of course everything is done by card or bank transfer and those worries seem trivial, which just shows how much we’ve normalised all this. MI5 had also just bought two ICL mainframes with 20 Gb of storage, which doesn’t sound like very much now but compared to the 5 Mb which many hard drives could accommodate at the time, it was a heck of a lot and this had been done secretly – why? Another notable aspect of the film is that it shows nothing which didn’t exist in Orwell’s lifetime, so for instance IT is still based on valves. This leads to a little distortion in the story, particularly in the interrogation scenes, as they were clearly supposed to be more advanced than is shown on screen. Since Orwell’s central characters are self-inserts, John Hurt must have resembled him quite closely physically at the time, and I get the impression he must have starved himself to achieve that gaunt appearance. Apparently Orwell’s inspiration for the idea of altering back copies of ‘The Times’ originated from the editing of ‘The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia’ in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, where articles on, for example, Trotsky were deleted and photos of scenes from the Russian Revolution airbrushed. Radford points out that for all the disquiet and woe of his situation, created by the Party itself, Winston actually genuinely seems to enjoy his job. Another character, possibly Symes, says that the destruction of words is a beautiful thing, and given that O’Brien has said that the only source of pleasure the Party wants to continue is the pleasure of a jackboot stamping on a face forever, much more overtly Symes but Winston also, both enjoy that aspect of their work in different ways. Symes is part of an effort to shrink English vocabulary to a size convenient for Ingsoc’s ideology and Winston destroys words printed on paper by burning them. Other sources of pleasure are denied them. During a break in filming, Radford watched a news item showing the Queen laying a wreath on the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, who fought to liberate Kenya from the British in the ’50s. At the time he had been painted as Satan incarnate by the media, but all of a sudden he was rehabilitated and revered. Not that he should or should not have been, but the complete volteface is rather familiar. The year 1984 also saw the computerisation of much political campaigning, with for example the targetting of election leaflets on education to addresses of parents of school age children. All the stuff about our data being used to manipulate us is not new at all, although of course it’s become all-pervasive today.
A bit of an aside: there were two annoying pubic hair incidents in 1984, one connected with Nena’s armpits (okay, not pubic hair but you know what I mean) and the other Suzanna Hamilton’s, which was visible on screen. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but apparently more recent audiences have found it quite shocking and worthy of comment. To be honest this reminds me of the incident with the fillings in the mouth of the screaming woman, who had been born into the post-nuclear world where there was presumably no dentistry, at the end of ‘Threads’, in that it really seems like a distraction from the real point of the film, but if you like you can actually shoehorn it in, in that women in Airstrip One don’t want to squander their paltry wages on using razors to remove body hair but in fact I very much doubt anyone at all in Britain was doing that in 1948. A few other things: Richard Burton’s health was failing at the time and took forty-five takes to do one of the scenes because he couldn’t remember his lines, so he was in fact very old and tired at that point. He actually died two months before the film was released so I’m guessing it was his last movie. The scenes generally kept pace with the diary dates in the book, so the opening scenes, for instance, were filmed on 4th April. This meant, of course, that it couldn’t be released until late in the year. In connection with both the theme and the insistence on using technology contemporary with Orwell’s life, Radford wanted to film it in black and white but Virgin refused, so instead the footage was put through bleach bypass to give it the washed-out appearance it had in theatres. This added to the cost of production because it meant that silver couldn’t be reclaimed from the negative or positive prints.
Then there’s the peculiar issue of the music. The initial plan had been to use David Bowie because of his album ‘Diamond Dogs’, but he was too expensive, so the Eurhythmics were approached instead and there is of course an album of their music for the soundtrack. However, all of that was Richard Branson’s idea and he hadn’t told Radford, who had hired Dominic Muldowney to do it, who ended up scoring the entire movie. Branson then vetoed Radford’s choice and the result is that in the initial theatrical cut most of the music is the Eurhythmics’, although it does seem rather quiet and brief most of the time, but some of it, for instance ‘Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee’, which plays in the opening scene in the cinema after the Two Minutes’ Hate, is by Muldowney. Some versions of the film on Blu-Ray give viewers the option of choosing between soundtracks but there’s also a DVD which only uses Muldowney’s, which I guess is much sought after because it’s out of print. Personally I like the Eurhythmics soundtrack but think it reflects the kind of impression one has before one has read the book and the Muldowney version is much more in keeping with the atmosphere of the film because Orwell didn’t forsee popular music going in the direction it in fact did.
The other thing about the film is its influence on other near-contemporary works. In particular, Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ shares a very similar aesthetic, and Apple’s initial ad for the Mac is also self-consciously very similar to the first scene.
To conclude, it probably doesn’t need saying that there’s a lot that did need saying about this novel. When I tried to write an essay about it at school, I ended up just giving a detailed synopsis because I felt it said what it did so well that it was practically impossible for me to rephrase it in any way which would be helpful, which is, I think, a general problem with literary criticism of sufficiently high-quality works. There may never have been a point when ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ couldn’t’ve been taken to describe the world outside the window, but that’s equally true now and that’s a true mark of the universalism of a great work of literature.
There you go: don’t say I don’t listen to my readers! I don’t want this to seem self-indulgent, so before I start I want to point out that this is a response to a comment, that someone would like me to do something like this, so that’s what I’m doing.
Without tinkering with HTML, it seems difficult to provide links within a document in WordPress, so for now I’ll just give you a table of contents in order to prevent you being overwhelmed with the length of this post:
1. The Eternal Present
2. The Never-Ending. . .December?
3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell
4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾
5. A Collision With The Great White Whale
6. Armageddon
7. The Stereophonic Present
8. Harvest For The World
9. The Ending Story
10. Life Off The Fast Lane
11. Green Shoots
The Eternal Present
To me, the year 1984 CE is a kind of eternal present. I sometimes joke about this, saying that all the years after that one were clearly made up, and someone pointed out to me that that was highly Orwellian, but in fact it really is the case that all years are made up and we just have this arbitrary numbering scheme based on someone’s incorrect guess about the birthdate of Jesus, and yes, here I’m assuming there was an historical Jesus, which considering I’m Christian is hardly surprising.
2. The Never-Ending. . .December?
There is a fairly easy if absurd way to make it 1984 still, which is just to have a never-ending December. It’s currently Hallowe’en 2025, in which case it’s the 14945th December 1984. This wouldn’t be a completely useless dating system and I sometimes think we can conceive of time (in the waking sense: see last entry) differently according to how we choose to parcel it up. Another way of making it 1984 would be to date years from forty years later, and no that’s not a mistake as there was no year zero in the Julian or Gregorian calendars. There was one in a certain Cambodian calendar of course, from 17th April 1975, where it was inspired by the French revolutionary Year One, the idea being that history started on that date because everything that happened before that was irrelevant, being part of capitalism and imperialism I presume. My insistence that it’s always 1984 is the opposite of that, as I’m affectedly sceptical about anything happening afterwards. Coincidentally, I use a day-based dating system starting on 17th July 1975 in my diary, and I don’t actually know why I do this, but it’s only ninety-one days after the start of Year Zero (there are other things to be said about Pol Pot which would reveal the over-simplification of this apparent myth). It’s based on the first dated entry in any notebook and my mother’s suggestion that I keep a diary which I didn’t follow. It’s actually the second dated entry, as the first one is of a series of measurements of a staircase, which isn’t really about anything personal. I’ve also toyed with the idea of Earth’s orbit being a couple of metres wider, which would make the year very slightly longer but which would add up over 4.6 aeons (Earth’s age) to quite a difference, but if that were so, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions wouldn’t’ve happened which did and other ones which didn’t might’ve, so it totally changes the history of the world if you do that. If the year was a week longer, it would now be 1988 dated from the same point, but a lot of other things would also be different such as the calendar. It’s quite remarkable how finely-tuned some things are.
3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell
Although I could go on in this vein, I sense it might irritate some people, so the rest of this is going to be about my feeling of the eternal present, how 1984 actually was to me and thoughts about George Orwell. I’m just telling you this if you feel like giving up at this point.
I have habitually said that “George Orwell is better than War-Warwell” as a reference to Harold MacMillan’s paraphrase of Winston Churchill, and I wonder if Churchill is one of those figures who is always having quotes misattributed to him, like Albert Einstein. The trouble is, of course, that this is a practically meaningless phrase which I can’t do anything with, although Sarada has published a story with that title. I’ve read a lot of Orwell, although unlike most people who have that doesn’t include ‘Animal Farm’. It’s been suggested that if he’d lived longer, he would’ve gone to the Right and become a rather embarrassing figure like David Bellamy or Lord Kelvin, but of course we don’t know and I don’t know what that’s based on. He was known to be quite keen on the idea of patriotism though, so maybe it’s that.
Within the universe of his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, we don’t actually know that it is that year. It does seem to be about that time, because Winston Smith was a small boy just after the end of World War II. The Party is constantly revising history and is now claiming that Big Brother invented the steam engine, so it seems easily possible that it isn’t exactly 1984 and that either new years have been written into history or removed from it, and just maybe it’s always 1984 and has been for many years by that point. Maybe they just want to save on printing new calendars or are trying to perfect the year by repeating it over and over again, for example. Maybe ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is like ‘Groundhog Day’, and what we read is merely one iteration among many of that story. I’ve heard, although appropriately maybe this can’t be trusted, that Orwell simply came up with it by transposing the last two digits of the year he wrote it. Whereas it’s possible to play with this, the truth is probably simply that he needed to give Winston enough time to grow up and reach his forties so he could tell the story.
It interests me that there was a somewhat jocular, artsy attempt to claim that a period called the 19A0s existed between the late ’70s and early ’80s which has been edited out of history, which is similar to the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Just to cover these, I’ve written about this before, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis, so if you want you can read about it there.
A slightly puzzling aspect of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is why its title is spelt out rather than written as figures, but it seems that this was common practice at the time. It’s one thing that everyone gets wrong about the book, as it’s almost always referred to as ‘1984’. I should point out that one reason I didn’t get any further than A-level with English Literature is that I experience an impenetrable thicket of associations whenever I consider mainstream creative works which make it difficult to respond meaningfully to them. In the case of Orwell’s novel though, since it’s arguably science fiction it might be more appropriate than usual to do so, since that’s also how I respond to that genre but find it more in keeping with that kind of imagination. I’m not alone in this it seems: Orwell’s novel is analysed in such a manner by the YouTube channel ‘1984 Lore’. I myself used Newspeak to write a short story about a kibbutz-like community on another planet where everyone actually spoke Esperanto to explore whether language restricts thought, portraying it in terms of the idea that it does.
4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾
My personal experience in the year 1984 represents a peak in my life. Note that it’s just one peak, neither the biggest nor the only one. It doesn’t overshadow the year of my wedding or the births of our children, grandchildren or anything like that. ’82 and ’83 are also significant in their own ways. ’82 I thought of as the “endless summer” characterised by the nice pictures of young people in yellow T-shirts and long blond hair on the envelopes you got back from the chemists with the photos in them, and ’83 had been particularly poignant, but the year after those had been highly focussed on for a long time in various circles by many people. 1984 opened for me hiding under a table in a suburban living room in Canterbury whispering to my friend about when midnight came. I was wearing a navy blue M&S sweatshirt whose inner flock was worn on the inside of the left elbow, a blue and white striped shirt with a button-down collar which I was only wearing because she liked it, and jeans which annoyed me by not having any bum pockets, and she was wearing jeans which did have bum pockets and a white blouse with yellow check-line lines on it, but it was completely dark so neither of us could see anything. I was sixteen and had had a lot to drink considering my age, naughtily, as had she. We eventually conjectured that midnight must have passed and I rang my dad, who came to pick me up and whom I immediately told I’d had some alcohol (Martini, Cinzano and a Snowball) which my friend saw as not only typical of my impulsiveness and indiscreetness but also liable to get me in trouble but it didn’t. The street lights looked rather blurry on the way home. Thus opened my 1984. A few days later I was back in the sixth form and my friend Mark Watts, who was later to go on to found an investigative journalism agency and uncover a number of cases of child sexual abuse, informed me that it was vital that we didn’t fall for whatever spin the media were likely to put on it being the year named after that novel and that whenever he referred to George Orwell it would be under the name Lionel Wise (Eric Blair – Lionel Blair; Eric Blair – Eric Morecambe – Ernie Wise), which was quite clever if also rather adolescent, which is what we were. We were all very conscious that it was 1984 at last. Anne Nightingale played David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Van Halen’s ‘1984’ on her request show on the evening of New Year’s Day. I didn’t have a hangover, because I don’t get them. I asked my brother to record something off Anne Nightingale because I was about to go out again to see my friends, and it happened that the next track was Steve Winwood’s ‘While You See A Chance, Take It’, which I’d wanted to get on tape for years but he cut it off halfway through the first verse. The machine on which that was recorded was a rapidly failing mono Sanyo radio cassette recorder which my mum was annoyed was deteriorating so fast seeing as it was less than four years old and I’d got it for my thirteenth birthday. Incidentally, I’m writing all this without reference to diaries or any other kind of record. I just remember it, plainly, clearly, in great detail, and I don’t know how this compares to others’ memories. My memories of much of the ’80s are as clear as flashbulb memories because they occur within my reminiscence bump. There are errors, such as the exact name of the Steve Winwood record, but also a lot of clarity. Anyway, later that year on my seventeenth birthday, 30th July, I got a stereo boom box possibly from Sony which I first recorded on on 8th August, namely Tracey Ullman’s ‘Sunglasses’, followed by ‘Smalltown Boy’. In September, I got my first job, as a cashier at the new Safeway, which looked enormous to me at the time but on returning to the Waitrose which it now is seems really tiny nowadays, and lost it after eleven weeks due to being too slow on the till, not assertive enough to turn people away from the “Nine Items Or Less” (now “fewer” apparently) queue, and £2 out on the cashing up on two occasions. Apparently this was a lot stricter than other places, such as Lipton’s where my sister worked and who was much further out than I on many occasions when she first worked there. I could say more about her situation there but probably shouldn’t. Anyway, I got £1.41 an hour from Safeway which I saved up to buy the first big item I’d ever got for myself, which was a Jupiter Ace microcomputer. Which brings me to computers.
I was very into computers in the early to mid-’80s, but also deeply ambivalent about them. At the start of the year, the family had owned a ZX81 for a year and a bit. I found this annoying because it was such a low-spec machine, but restrictions fuel creativity so it was in fact not a bad thing. I was spending a lot of my time reading computer magazines and wishing I had a better computer, which I resolved late in that year, and also writing software, mainly graphically-oriented, which was difficult considering that our computer only had a resolution of 64×48, although I was later able to increase this to 192 on the Y-axis by pointing the I register on the Z80A somewhere else than the character set, so I could make bar graphs which looked quite good. I did also write a computerised version of Ramon Llull’s ‘Machine That Explains Everything’, a couple of primitive computer viruses and an adventure game. Later on, after I got the Jupiter Ace, I got it to display runes and produce screeds of nonsense words in Finnish. As I said though, I was ambivalent. I’ve never been comfortable with my interest in IT for several reasons, and for more reasons at this point. One reason was that at the time I was communist, and also kind of Stalinist, and felt that the use of IT and automation as fuelled by the microchip boom would create massive unemployment and reduce the power of the workers to withdraw their labour. However, it isn’t clear to me now why me not having a ZX81 would’ve made any difference to that. In the middle of the year, I decided that communism was over-optimistic and there was a brief period during which people were very eager for me to adopt their views, but I quickly opted for Green politics. I was not yet anarchist and believed in a Hobbesian state of nature. Besides this perspective, I was also uncomfortable about my interest in computers because it seemed nerdy, something very negative at the time, and unbalanced – obsessive and not “humanities” enough to my taste. It felt too much like my comfort zone and not challenging enough. It did, however, become apparent that I had spent so much time studying computers, with text books as well as mags and experimentation, that I could’ve easily aced the O-level, which was another example of how my formal educational focus was outside educational institutions at the time, and it was also suggested that my aforementioned friend with whom I hid under the table and was trying to learn BASIC at the technical college, would’ve welcomed me teaching her. This got to the point where I helped her with her homework. On another occasion, an acquaintance was trying to write a FORTH programming language interpreter in Z80 assembler and I had a look through it with interest. One of my other friends later went on to write parts of the major GNU text editor “religion” Emacs, already almost a decade old by ’84, which I still use today. However, I found my interest in computers made me feel embarrassed and self-conscious and I felt somewhat ashamed of it. I think I found a lot of my interests at the time to be very personal and not something I felt comfortable sharing with others.
It was also the year of my perhaps most significant cultural shift. I entered the year enthusiastic about mainstream literature and poetry. I had been warned, though, by my O-level English teacher, that A-level English Lit was likely to spoil my appreciation of reading, and this did in fact happen. Early in the year my enthusiasm continued and I came to enjoy reading poetry and literature. I planned to continue my writing on the works of Samuel Beckett as part of my A-level and the fact we were studying Joyce gave me optimism in that regard. We had a fair bit of freedom to do that kind of thing. In the summer exams, my practical criticism of a particular poem was chosen as a model answer for others to emulate and I was able, for example, to uncover themes in poetry which my teacher hadn’t noticed, which was mainly due to my insistence on maintaining a wide education. I was applying to university in the later part of the year, having researched them in the earlier part, and having opted for degrees in English and Psychology or Philosophy and Psychology, I was clearly sufficiently committed to English at the time to consider it as a first degree. However, all of that was about to go to shit.
5. A Collision With The Great White Whale
It may be worth analysing what went wrong in some depth, but the simple facts of how it happened were as follows. My A-levels were in English, RE and Biology, which I want to stress is a very popular combination. At the end of the first year, around June, there was a marine biology field trip which was in itself quite formative for me because I didn’t relish getting stuck in the stinky, sticky black tarry mud encouraged by the anaerobic respiration in Pegwell Bay, an estuary on the edge of Thanet. It was cold and wet, and the water was of course salty, and I thought I’d ruined that sweatshirt I’d mentioned earlier which I was once again wearing. My dissatisfaction was palpable. Anyway, it was assumed by the English department that those who were off on the field trip would, possibly from their friends, learn their summer reading assignments, which were to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ anthology and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I didn’t get that information, didn’t talk about the assignments with my friends because it wasn’t a priority for us and consequently was confronted with reading an absolute doorstep of a book plus much of the Joyce one, which was less problematic because being short stories it was easy to catch up with that one. I was then confronted, on reading Melville’s novel, with a load of American men murdering whales for a living. Right then, I wasn’t even vegetarian but I did, like a lot of other people, believe in saving the whale. Over my childhood, I’d read a lot of story books about animals, like ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Bambi’, ‘Watership Down’ and ‘A Skunk In The Family’. Of course there was peril in these and also horrible deaths on occasion, not to mention sad endings, but the focus was on the otter, the bovines, dogs, cats, deer, rabbit and skunk. There is no problem with depicting them being treated badly, suffering and so forth. But in ‘Moby Dick’, there is never any sympathy or focus on the experience of the whales or acknowledgement of them as victims, in a similar manner to the people who had lived in North America before White colonisers turned up. It was all about something else, and there wasn’t just an elephant in the room but a whale. I was unable to bring myself to step into Ishmael’s or anyone else’s shoes. The only bits I could tolerate were the encyclopaedic sections. I could go into more depth here. I think Melville was probably trying to make a whale-sized book, was using the whale as a metaphor for the intractable and incomprehensible nature of, well, nature and the world in general and as a tabula rasa, them being white like a piece of paper, and there’s the angle that the whale is in some way a phallic symbol. Ahab also anthropomorphises the whale, seeing them as a rival in a battle with him when in the end the whale is just the whale and doesn’t even realise the tiny figures above lobbing harpoons at them are even conscious beings. From the novel’s perspective, the whale probably isn’t even a conscious being. Hence I was confronted with what I read as a hostile, nasty and animal-hating, actually animal-indifferent story where I couldn’t work out whether any of the characters were supposed to be sympathetic and,moreover, the only chapters I could actually garner any interest in were dismissed as mere padding by my teachers. I also found, for some reason, that the same approach I’d been taking to poetry up until the summer no longer seemed to work. It probably didn’t help that one of my teachers was a frustrated Classics teacher who later left and taught that at the King’s School, although I was interested in the classics she managed to shoehorn into the lessons such as Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia and Antigone. I would say, though, that I really didn’t get on with the Oresteia because I felt very much that it lacked universalism. None of that was in the exams of course, but I wasn’t ever very oriented towards those. I was more just interested or not.
The autumn of the year was marked mainly by anxious procrastination about submitting my UCCA form, which I handed in a month later than I was supposed to due to indecision about what to put in my personal statement, which wasn’t up to much partly because of not wanting to admit what I was interested in, and partly because of not pursuing it in a public way due to the shame I felt about admitting it. I also got annoyed with universities insisting on being put first, so rather than selecting places I actually wanted to go to, although my first choice, Keele, I was very keen on due to the balanced and eclectic nature of their educational approach, I deliberately listed Nottingham, Reading and Exeter, followed by Sheffield in which I was in fact fairly interested in. I got rejected by all of them except Keele and Sheffield, Exeter apparently by return of post. Among the polys I applied for Hatfield, Oxford and NELP, and would’ve got into NELP in fact. I liked the modular nature of the course at Oxford, which appealed to me for the same reason as Keele did.
6. Armageddon
Another association which arrived in 1984 and which has been with me ever since is the idea of “proper Britain”. I may have mentioned this before, but the notorious nuclear holocaust drama ‘Threads’ was broadcast on 23rd September 1984, notable for being the first depiction of nuclear winter in the mass media, and I remember being edgelordy about it by saying to my friends that it was over-optimistic. I was ostentatiously and performatively depressive at the time. I did not in fact feel this, but my takeaway from it was probably unusual. There’s a scene at the start where Ruth and Jimmy are canoodling on Curbar Edge above Hope Valley which really struck me. It was grey, drizzly and clearly quite cold, even though I think the action begins in May. There’s also the heavily built up large city of Sheffield, where I might be going in a year or so, and it suddenly crystallised my image of what Britain was really like. Not the South with its many villages and small towns densely dotted about with relatively dry and sunny weather, which I was used to, but the larger block of large post-industrial cities with redbrick terraced houses, back-to-backs, towerblocks and brutalist municipal architecture set against a background of rain, wind and greyness. I relished that prospect, and it felt like real Britain. This is how the bulk of the British population lives, and it becomes increasingly like that the further north you get, hence my repeated attempts to move to Scotland, which in a way I feel is more British than England because of many of those features. By contrast, if you go from Kent to France it’s basically the same landscape and climate with different furniture. Maybe a strange reaction to a depiction of a nuclear war, but there you go.
I did, however, also feel very much that it would be strange and foreign to move away to an area dominated by Victorian redbrick terraced houses. I couldn’t imagine that they’d ever feel like home to me and I couldn’t envisage settling down there. I was still very much a Southerner at that time. I was also, however, fully aware of the privileged bubble I was living in and it made me feel very awkward.
Nor am I ignoring the actual content of the film. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction was very high in many people’s minds at the time and it almost seemed inevitable. This made even bothering to make plans for the future seem rather pointless and almost like busy work. We all “knew” we were going to die horribly, as was everyone around us, so doing the stuff I’ve mentioned, like applying to university, seemed more like something I did as a distraction from that worry than something with an actual aim sometimes, depending on my mood. This had a number of consequences. One is that I wonder if a lot of Gen-Xers underachieve because they missed out on pushing themselves into things in their youth, expecting the world to end at any time. Another is that as the ’80s wore on, pop music and other aspects of popular culture began to reflect that anxiety. Ultimately even Squeeze (basically) ended up producing an eerie and haunting post-nuclear song in the shape of ‘Apple Tree’. Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ particularly captures the attitude and is widely misunderstood. The reason we’d be forever young is that we’d never get a chance to grow up and live out full lives. That single was released a mere four days after ‘Threads’ was broadcast.
7. The Stereophonic Present
Speaking of music, there were something like four bands in the Sixth Form at that point, the most prominent being The Cosmic Mushroom, clearly influenced by the Canterbury Scene even in the mid-’80s. My own attitude to music was to concentrate on cassettes because I didn’t trust myself to take care of vinyl properly. The advent of proper stereo in my life was on my birthday at the end of July, and there’s something vivid and recent-sounding about all stereo music I own for that reason. This is in fact one factor in my feeling that 1984 is current rather than in the past. The present is characterised by clear, stereophonic music, the past by lo-fi mono, and that switch occurred for me in summer that year. This is actually more vivid than the earlier shift between black and white and colour TV. Incidentally, CDs were out there for sure, but only for the rich, having been first released two years previously. Like mobile ‘phones, they were a “yuppie” thing, like jug kettles. Back to music. Effectively the charts and my perception of them that year were dominated by ‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This was released in November the previous year and entered the charts in early January. This got banned as it climbed the charts, which boosted its popularity enormously and got it to number 1. It stayed in the Top 100 until April the next year. We played it at the school discos, the other standard being ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, which we all used to sing along and dance to. My personal preferences included The The, Bauhaus and The Damned at the time, although the ongoing appreciation of the likes of Kate Bush continued.
8. Harvest For The World
On 24th October, the famous Michael Buerk report on the famine in Ethiopia was broadcast. This led in the next couple of years to Live Aid and Run The World, but from that year’s perspective it only just began. There’s been a lot of justified criticism of media framing of the famine, but as a naive teenager I didn’t have much awareness of that and simply saw it as a disaster which required a response from me, which was initially in the form of a sponsored silence for the whole school in the sports hall, then later a sponsored 24- or 36-hour fast supervised by one of my biology teachers in which I also participated. Although I can’t really mention this without pointing out that the whole thing was dodgy, it did start a ball rolling which continued in much later political activism on my part and a passionate youthful idealism to make the world a better place, which I felt confident had to come soon and meant action from me. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was a further effort in that campaign, satirised by Chumbawumba as ‘Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records’ and roundly criticised by the World Development Movement, but at the time I knew nothing of this. By the way, it’s remarkable how the unpopular Chumbawumba cynicism managed to get from the political fringe into the mainstream in just a few years with the Simpsons parody ‘We’re Sending Our Love Down The Well’ only eight years later, although that was also linked to a Gulf War song it seems, which however is in that tradition, which I first became aware of, superficially, that year. In fact I can’t overestimate the importance of this sequence of events, even with its grubby and cynical connotations, and my support of it has a simplicity and innocence which I wish in a way I still had. I want the world to be one in which something like that works straightforwardly and simply. As I’ve said before, nobody is Whiter or more middle class than I am.
A rather different aspect of this is that I and someone called Louise almost got the giggles during the sponsored silence and we both spent most of our time doing it, which was I think a whole hour, trying not to laugh. A while after that the same thing happened with the two of us in an English class, though on that occasion we gave into it and there was actually nothing provoking it at all. It then spread through the whole class. Once again, in an English class shortly after that, the teacher, discussing Moby Dick of course, took out a model of a sperm whale on wheels unexpectedly and rolled it up and down the desk, which again led to uncontrollable laughter. This was Thatcher’s Britain, yes, and most of us hated her, but it wasn’t grim or joyless, at least for seventeen year olds, and I actually managed to get some pleasure out of Herman Melville’s writing!
CND was very active at the time. I, however, was not, for a couple of reasons. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral disarmament, and in fact that was the last of the standard lefty/Green causes I committed to, but I had a feeling they were right and wanted to go on the demos but never actually did. This is by contrast with the Miners’ Strike. Kent, like Northern France, was a coalmining area and the strike was very close to us because several of my friends were in coal miners’ families. I asked what I could do but nothing really came to mind. I was also aware of hunt sabbing but was unable to work out how to find out about it. Had I got involved in that, I might’ve gone vegan years earlier than I did.
9. The Ending Story
Then there was cinema. My aforementioned friend under the table rang me up one day and just said we should go and watch ‘Champion’ at the ABC. That cinema, incidentally, was managed by someone I later got to know when he and I both coincidentally moved to Leicester. I was surprised my friend just spontaneously bet on the horses when I’d never dreamt of doing that, at the time because it was gambling. The film, in case you didn’t know as it may be quite obscure, was based on a true story about a famous jockey who has cancer and survives. One impression I got from it was that he looked like Lionel Blair, which is the second time I’ve mentioned him today. At this time it was still possible to sit in the cinema for as long as you wanted while the same films, yes, films plural, played over and over again. This was actually the last year it was possible. The year after, I’d just finished watching ‘Letter To Brezhnev’ and the ushers chucked us all out. It was a real shock, and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It meant that parents could use cinemas as babysitting services, though this may have been somewhat reckless by today’s standards. They did the same with swimming pools: Kingsmead had this going on, although specifically in ’84 I didn’t exercise much apart from walking eight miles, to school and back, every day. This lazy year ended immediately with my New Years’ resolution to go running every morning from 1st January 1985.
‘Ghostbusters’ was also quite memorable. I took my younger brother to see it and I wasn’t expecting the whole audience to shout the song when it came on. It’s a good film, with a memorable scene involving a fridge and an unforgettable line which is usually cut towards the end. It also mentions selenium for no apparent reason, and has Zener cards at the start. At the time, rather surprisingly, it seemed to be generally accepted even in academia that some people were psychic. I often wonder whether it’s really good-quality research which has led to received opinion on this changing or whether it’s just a reputational thing that psi is now widely rejected by academic researchers. The other major film I remember watching was ‘Star Trek III’, which is also very good, and at the time there was no plan to bring Star Trek back. It was considered a sequel too far by one of my friends, so at the time it looked like the show was completely defunct and they were trying to revive it beyond all reason. I also saw ‘2010’, which I liked for incorporating the new findings about Europa, but it definitely lacks the appeal of the original. Incidentally, the long gap between Voyager visits to Saturn and Uranus was underway and the remaining probe wouldn’t get there for another two years. The original ‘Dune’ also came out this year, and although I wanted to see it, I don’t think it came to Canterbury. I wouldn’t’ve liked it at the time, having seen it since, and oddly I had the impression it was in a completely different directing style and that it was also a 3-D film. It may also have been the most expensive feature film ever made at the time. ‘1984’, of course, also came out then, but that deserves its own treatment. As other people I’ve since got to know of my age have commented, ‘Neverending Story’ marked the first time I perceived a film as definitely too young for me, and in a way that realisation reflected the twilight before the dawn of adulthood to me.
10. Life Off The Fast Lane
Speaking of marks of adulthood, many of my peers were learning to drive and passing their tests at this point. Although I got a provisional licence that year and my parents strongly suggested I learn, I refused to do so for environmental and anti-materialistic reasons. Although I’ve had lessons since, I’ve never in fact got there and I’ve also heard that an ADHD diagnosis can bar one from driving in any case, if it affects one’s driving ability. I’m not sure mine would but I do think my dyspraxia is a serious issue there. 1984 is in fact the only year I’ve independently driven any motorised vehicle, namely one friend’s scooter and other’s motorbike. Like the underage drinking, it’s apparent that we didn’t take certain laws particularly seriously at the time and I’m wondering if that was just us, our age or whether that’s changed since. I was dead set against learning to drive, and this was probably the first thing which marked me as not destined to live a “normal” adult life. It has on two occasions prevented me from getting paid work.
Television didn’t form a major part of my life at the time. We couldn’t get Channel 4 yet, so the groundbreaking work done there was a closed book to me. ‘Alas Smith And Jones’ started in January and incredibly continued to run for fourteen years. I’d stopped watching ‘Doctor Who’ two years previously when ‘Time Flight’ was so awful that I decided it was a kid’s show and put it away. Tommy Cooper died on stage. The second and final series of ‘The Young Ones’ broadcast. ‘Crimewatch UK’, which would eventually become compulsive but guilty viewing for Sarada and me, started. In a somewhat similar vein, ‘The Bill’ started in October, which I used to enjoy watching years later due to the handheld camera work, which made it seem very immediate and “real” somehow. NYPD Blue is like that for other reasons incidentally. ‘Casualty’ was still two years in the future and ‘Angels’ had just ended, so I was in a wilderness of no medical dramas.
11. Green Shoots
Also, of course, the Brighton hotel bombing took place, and many of my friends felt very conflicted because on the one hand there was the general sympathy and empathy for people being attacked, injured and killed, but on the other they were very much hated for what they were doing. I’m sure this was a widespread feeling, and there is of course the band Tebbit Under Rubble, which very much expresses one side of that sentiment. Greenham Common was in progress and a major eviction took place in March. Although I was later to become heavily involved in the peace movement, at the time I was still very much on the sidelines although some of the people I knew were connected, and I do remember thinking that computer and human error were major and unavoidable risks which meant that the very existence of nuclear arsenals was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
Then there was the Bishop of Durham, and since I was doing an A-level in RE at the time, his stance was highly relevant. The Sea Of Faith Movement was in full swing, which promoted a kind of secularised Christianity which was largely non-theistic or even atheist in nature, and the foundations were being laid in my mind which I’d later extend but allow the high-control group I became involved in to demolish, almost inexplicably. Over that whole period, I was expected to read a newspaper of my choice and take cuttings from it on relevant religious and moral issues to put in a scrapbook, so my long-term readership of ‘The Guardian’ began a few months before this and persisted through the year. It was either 25p or 30p at the time, and this was before colour newspapers had come to be. I had also been an avid Radio 4 listener since 1980, but unlike later I also listened to Radio 3 a bit, never really managing to appreciate classical music to the full.
This was also the year I finally decided I wanted to become an academic philosopher, and I still think I could’ve followed that through though it didn’t happen. This is the end of a kind of winnowing process probably connected to my dyspraxia, where I became increasingly aware of practical things which I simply couldn’t do, I’d been put off biology by the griminess and unpleasantness of field work and therefore philosophy was the way forward. That said, like many other people I was also very motivated to study psychology in an attempt to understand myself, and as you probably know a lot of psychology undergraduates begin their degrees by being concerned about major issues in their own personalities, so in that respect I’m not unusual. I also presented two assemblies, one on existentialism and the other on the sex life of elephants as a parable of romantic love.
I feel like this could go on and on, so I’m going to finish off this reminiscence in a similar way to how I started. My emotional world revolved around the friend I was hiding under the table with at the beginning of the year and our significance to each other was important to both of us. About halfway through it, having just visited her she became concerned that she and I were going to be found together alone in the house by her parents who were coming back unexpectedly, so I left the house by the back door and crept surreptitiously over the front garden, only to be stopped and “citizen’s arrested” by their next door neighbour. This turned out to make the situation more embarrassing for her and me than it would’ve been if I’d just left when they came back. I don’t know if anything can be made or a picture can be drawn of who she or I was at the time by putting those two incidents together.
I’m aware that I haven’t talked about Orwell’s book and its adaptations as much as I’d like, so that’s something I’ll need to come back to, and there are huge things I’ve missed out, but I hope I’ve managed to paint a portrait of my 1984 and possibly also yours. I may also have portrayed someone who peaked in high school, but I do also think tremendous things happened afterwards. 1984 is, though, the first foothill of my life, which makes it significant. It’s sometimes said that the reminiscence bump is only there because fifteen to twenty-five is the most eventful period of one’s time here, but maybe not. It’s hard to say.
NaNoWriMo is apparently dead. In case you don’t know, NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – was a thing started in 1999 CE whose participants were to write the first draft of a fifty thousand word novella during the month of November. My one successfully published physical novel, ‘Replicas’, was partly written as a result of it, and there are other examples of authors who have successfully had novels published in this way. It seemed in general to be a good idea. However, a few years ago it seems to have gone horribly wrong.
I can’t recall the exact details of the problems but what seems to have happened is, well, a couple of things. One was that there seem to have been predatory child abusers on the fora and no attempt to moderate this activity, resulting in grooming of underage participants. Another was that when people objected to using AI, the management team responded that to ban people from using it was “classist and ableist”, which would require quite a convoluted argument to justify. It’s also quite patronising. The most prolific person I knew on the local group was completely blind, for example, and never used AI. The grooming allegation involved funneling minors to something called an “ADBL fetish site” (I haven’t found out what that means because I think searching for it might lead to being put on a list or something) and the people running the fora proceeding to ban more than a hundred people who criticised it or asked for it to be investigated, one of their moderators being involved who took a long time to be banned. This, I should point out, is what I’ve heard. I’m not making any allegations which would put me in hot water legally here. It reached a peak of several hundred thousand participants a year from only two dozen or so people in ’99, then went into decline maybe around 2018.
I’ve made several attempts to write novels using it. As I’ve said, I wrote ‘Replicas’ one year and on other years I wrote ‘1934’ and ‘Unspeakable’, so I did find it motivating, but the decline and probably also the unpopularity of what they did led to fewer donations and they have recently closed down. Possibly the source of the problem was that they got young people to participate without putting any kind of protective system in place.
Besides all that, I always found them rather unsatisfactory. Part of this was the attitude taken by the participants. My father used to have a quote on the wall of his study: “Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”. Now obviously that’s not my exact philosophy but I really feel like in general people who take writing seriously and have a healthy attitude to it, unlike mine, are either doing it for therapy, e.g. journalling, or to be read by others, and being read by others often involves being published. This isn’t why I write of course, but I don’t regard myself as typical in that respect and it also doesn’t seem like a good idea. NaNoWriMo participants seemed to be just writing for the sake of it. That made me uncomfortable. They didn’t seem to take it seriously enough. It was like they were doing it just because they could be part of a group of people able to call themselves writers. Another issue I had with it was that they actually seemed to positively encourage verbosity when as you know if you read this, I am way too verbose and the last thing I need is a project which encourages me to waffle. I think in general NaNoWriMo is not particularly suitable for me anyway, and I have several times suggested that a better approach might be a month where you try to reduce your output by fifty thousand words rather than produce a fifty thousand word first draft. For instance, you could just write less or you could edit drafts to make them pithier and aim to cut fifty thousand words out. Left to myself, I usually write about five thousand words a day unless I make some effort or do something to stop myself, and even then I feel a compulsion to do so. I never get writer’s block but I also have no idea how good my writing is. I think probably writer’s block arises when someone overthinks the quality of what they’re producing, which I don’t – I just dump a load of stuff onto the page because I feel internally pressured to do so. Anyway, point being, I don’t need an annual month during which I produce fifty thousand words. That will happen anyway in three weeks or less if I let it. This is worth looking at in more depth, but before that I want to say a few more things about NaNoWriMo.
When I was involved, there was a lot of focus on something called Scrivener. I still don’t really know what it’s for. Apparently it’s supposed to help a writer organise their material methodically as a kind of labour-saving thing. It seems to me that if you need to do that, you may as well just use a lever-arch file and in any case my process doesn’t lend itself to that but is more like a massive mental tangle plonking itself in my head and needing to be carefully unknotted, rather like what grows physically out of it. I personally suspect Scrivener is busy-work, in the sense that it adds labour to what your doing and makes you feel like a “proper” writer. It’s like buying exercise gear and sitting on the sofa in it, or getting lots of fancy kitchen gadgets and living off takeaways. The actual accoutrements seem to be of limited value to me and if they’re blocking you from doing something you should just make do without them. I just cannot see the point, and I also get the impression that there are a load of other bits of flim-flam which NaNoWriMo-ers have been pushed to buy and use which are similar. Writing for me has usually involved a notebook and a bic, or a pencil. That’s it. More recently it’s involved a laptop or a PC, but even then it feels like I’ve lost some degree of control.
Ironic moment while I gather my thoughts which have not been neatly organised by Scrivener. . .
Ah yes! Another weirdness around NaNo was that writers used to talk about their characters as if they had a life of their own. They would talk about putting them in a particular situation and seeing how they’d behave. To my mind, you already know how they behave, or possibly, to you they aren’t exactly people but are kind of wired into the situations and the right lights go on or off at the right times. There was always something kind of precious and pretentious about people who talked about their protagonists that way. It was like they had a Numskull infestation or something. There are apparently things to be said about fictional characters in terms of literary theory, but since that’s way beyond me, I won’t be saying them.
The really silly thing about NaNoWriMo is that it actually didn’t need any of that to function. All it needed, after a couple of years to get it going, was for people all over the world to know that it was a tradition in November for this to happen, like Veganuary or Movember, and it would just take place of its own accord. I’m not sure there isn’t some kind of paid staff behind either of those, but you really do not need anyone to be doing loads of stuff and getting paid for it after a while – Hallowe’en and Easter come to mind. Those are going to happen anyway so why not NaNo? So all this drama about what the staff and volunteers were doing seems to me to arise from the fact that they probably had to make their own work for something which in the end wasn’t really needed at all, but in spite of that they somehow seemed to manage not to moderate things well enough to prevent child abuse from happening, which maybe if it had been organised differently wouldn’t have led to anyone being accountable other than the moderators. I have moderated groups online myself and probably wasn’t very good at it, but like most other moderators I wasn’t getting paid and the stakes weren’t anything like that high. In any case, I would imagine that NaNo will carry on anyway and that causes me to wonder why they even bothered to have all that bureaucracy as it apparently achieved nothing except for foisting imponderable software packages onto people. Nor is this a result of the changes of the past couple of decades, as more informally organised traditions have existed probably for at least as long as we have as a species.
An idea I’ve floated around from time to time had its genesis in a comedy song on the radio in about 1981 called ‘Love Is Blue’, whose last line was “Blue is an anagram of Ulbe”. A couple of years later, I filled in a page of a school exercise book with the words “BLUE ULBE” alternating in a kind of chessboard pattern, so that if you looked down the page you’d see alternating instances of “BLUE” and “ULBE”, just as you would across the page. A rather serious-minded Eng Lit A-level student once said to me as I was flicking through, “Did I just see a whole page of the word BLUE written over and over again?” to which my honest answer was “no”. It does seem rather pointless perhaps, but in fact I don’t think it is.
Some people doing NaNo used to announce that they completed on the first day, before sunrise in fact. I don’t understand how they achieved that because they appeared to be typing actual words and to type 50 000 of them in six hours, say, would require a speed of 138 wpm, which I suppose is achievable but the thing is you’re not supposed to do any actual writing, as opposed to planning, before that. However, to me at least it occurs that there’s a very simple way of doing this: type a word followed by a space. Select that text. Copypaste it. Select all. Copypaste again. Do that sixteen times et voilà! 65536 words. In fact I have tried this in some word processors and it tends to go wonky if you do it too quickly.
This is of course not really a novella. Other people involved in NaNo have found my approach annoying, but it doesn’t end there. It has the psychological advantage of getting to your target word count in a couple of minutes, so anything else you do after that is in a sense just tinkering. But you can use this first draft. When I’ve mentioned this before, I’ve drawn a parallel with the description Michelangelo had of his process when he chiselled his ‘David’, of taking a block of stone and simply removing everything which wasn’t David. Likewise, one can take this block of words and remove everything which isn’t a novel. But how?
A couple of years ago, I tried this to a limited extent but bailed on it. I started writing a story about a shop which only sold tubes of blue lube in various different shades. I didn’t get very far. Yesterday, I tried again, on a small experimental level, thus. I “read” a page of anagrams of the word “blue”, in the sense that I ran my eyes over the lines until I entered a kind of hypnotic state. I concentrated particularly on misreadings, such as “bulb”, “boule”, “umbel” and “rule”. Then I used free association and found myself imagining standing in a field of blue tulips with an open umbrella as blue ink rained from the sky all around me, filling up the cups of the flowers. This brought to mind tank bromeliads. These are, in case you didn’t know, plants in the pineapple family which also function as pitcher plants but are unusual in that the water which collects in their vessels is the abode of countless organisms who rely on that environment to survive, including apparently a particular species of frog. Terry Pratchett wrote a trilogy of novels collectively called The Bromeliad, which is a word play based on epics whose titles end in “-iad” such as the Iliad and David Eddings’ ‘Belgariad’. The Bromeliad, also called the Nome (sic) Trilogy, covers the adventures of a community of small humanoids from another star system who live in a town called Blackbury, also the setting of the Johnny Maxwell series. I mention this because it makes the story idea very unoriginal, although I do other things with it than Pratchett did with his set of stories.
Anyway, the idea, for what it’s worth, is this. There is a vast field of blue flowers which act as cups for the blue rain which often falls from the sky. Within each flower there lives a complex ecosystem of animals and other organisms. In one of these, a species has developed a technological civilisation, and at this point it becomes derivative not only of Terry Pratchett but also the Oglaroonians of ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, because one of their number is exiled from the tulip and shunned for suggesting there could be a colour other than blue – their entire environment is blue. They seek refuge in a neighbouring flower, where they discover that another civilisation native to that flower is planning to invade the home flower and exterminate all the residents so they can take it over, possibly because their own flower is too crowded. They then try to get back to their own flower to warn them, but the problem is that they are completely shunned by their own community.
It hasn’t escaped me, in case you were wondering, that the deluge of blue ink falling from the sky and being captured in organic vases in which life and drama teem, also reflects the actual writing process.
That, then, is what I got from the experiment. It isn’t quite the same thing as removing everything which isn’t the story and is more like Salvador Dalí with his paranoiac-critical method. Moreover, the actual story is highly derivative and unoriginal, but to be fair this exercise only took me about two minutes so it would be exceptional if it was actually good. Presumably it could be made good though.
There are various ways one might approach story writing. Some of them involve meticulous planning. NaNo people seem to have a complex community of interacting people living in their minds who actually remind me more than a little of dissociation as well as the Numskulls in a way which doesn’t strike me as particularly healthy, but on the whole they’re not my generation. There’s nothing special about the word “blue” either, and in fact it might not be ideal because it has few meaningful anagrams, although the very lack of sense could stimulate the imagination more. If I took this method seriously, I think it would probably turn me into a weird novel-writing machine which might not be able to relate to the outside world or do everyday tasks, but then that happens to writers anyway. It would, though, be quite costly if all that came out of that was a story about little people living in flower cups. But that state of mind, I think, quite closely reflects the experience of being a writer of the kind I am in danger of being, and I have a vision of myself, pen in hand, hunched over a notebook on a stained mattress, scribbling away 24/7 as I fill my adult nappy, waste away from lack of food, perhaps fuelled by caffeine, but also producing marketable literary secretions whereby I support myself and others financially, as being a late stage in my deterioration into a novelist. I suppose what’s coming out of the other end of my body in this scenario would also have some value, maybe as fertiliser, but it’s a toss-up as to which is more worthwhile, the writing or the other stuff. It’s quite similar, after all.
While writing ‘Malone Dies’, Samuel Beckett got so absorbed in the process that the people around him worried that he would himself die at the end. He withdrew from the world and appeared to deteriorate physically, as I possibly inaccurately recall. But the problem lies in not being able to stop doing it, if indeed that is a problem, because then you have to rely on it being readable and engaging. However, that reliance is in part the result of the nature of the world as it currently is. A better world would be able to incorporate people who can’t help but create, regardless of the quality of their creations. There is also the question of pointlessness, as in, is there anything which there is actually a point to? I think there is, but I kind of wish there wasn’t.
I recently rather sadly announced to a new acquaintance whose role seems to be to support struggling writers that I had triumphed over my writing and managed to reduce my output. Maybe I don’t have to be this person, wasting my time on this activity. An obvious metaphor exists comparing writing to alcoholism, and of course many authors have historically also been alcoholics. In that context, and this may also apply to NaNoWriMo, encouraging writing for some people is like enabling an addict, because ultimately their writing is destructive and destroys their life. I can only say this about myself, but looking at NaNo, maybe it’s just as well it’s coming to an end, in a sense, because it could be drawing people into a hobby which is in fact more like mainlining heroin cut with brick dust and bits of cotton wool fluff into their veins. But it’ll doubtless just carry on anyway.
A Box Of Chocolates 