Notwithstanding what I say about hospital horrors below, notwithstanding the institutionalised neglect I talk about in Take Me Home, and notwithstanding the frequent systemic stupidity of the institutions themselves, it's quite remarkable to me what casual, everyday heroics happen within these grim prison-houses. Take the neo-natal unit, where babies receive intensive care. I'm in speechless awe of the people who work here: day in, day out, they are saving tiny lives, changing parents' lives. Doctors appear within seconds if there's a problem; everything is explained clearly to parents; care is almost one-to-one .... If only the whole N.H.S. were like this.
The people who work in these environments are the real heroes of our society. As a society, we celebrate overpaid adolescents who kick pigs' bladders around fields, wives of overpaid adolescents who kick pigs' bladders around fields, stick insects who strut up and down catwalks wearing clothes (don't we all wear clothes?), stick insects who used to strut up and down catwalks wearing clothes but now spend all their time taking coke, has-been and never-been pop singers who didn't write their own songs in the first place ... and so on and so forth.
All of these people get paid up to one hundred times what the casual heroes of baby intensive care earn. As I read somewhere once, what kind of society is it where so-called actors who spend their lives playing doctors and nurses and midwives (on Casualty, E.R., Holby City, etc.) are paid over ten times more than real doctors, nurses, midwives? It's a society which values pretence over reality, fakeness over genuineness, illusion over truth, and more than anything pretend heroism over real heroism - the real, casual heroism of the everyday, of people who go into work in the morning (or night) knowing that two babies' lives depend on what they do that day.
Showing posts with label take me home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label take me home. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Sunday, 30 March 2008
Novels and memoirs
I've been spending quite a lot of time recently writing. Not to give the game away (I'm not superstitious about these things, but I don't want to hex what I'm doing), I'm currently in the middle of a first draft of a novel. I've been writing it since September, having been thinking about it for years.
What's surprised me about the process of novel writing is how different it is from writing a memoir. It's a much more structured process, in some ways. This may sound rather basic, but suddenly I've noticed that PLOT seems to matter. I've never thought much about PLOT before - a lot of my short stories are so short that the PLOT amounts to one small thing happening to one small character in one small place. The thing with a novel is that - in order for it to last 70,000 words - you need more than one thing to happen. You need a string of things to happen, one after the other. This is a new experience for me, writing events in order, cause, effect, cause, effect, etc.
In terms of the memoir, the structure was very different - things didn't happen in such a linear way. I had to find different ways to structure the memoir, threading together little quantums of story - little anecdotes - into complete, homogenous chapters. The "story" here was closer to essay-writing - each chapter was a kind of essay, in a very loose sense. So it was possible to connect together events which were distant in time; it was possible to jump from present to past to distant past to near-past, all within a few pages. Flow was, of course, of crucial importance, but the flow wasn't that of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened." The flow was in the writing, in the connecting up and threading together of distant events and anecdotes in terms of themes and shared images.
A novel, it turns out, is very different. You talk to and read all of these critics who say that PLOT is passe, that nineteenth-century novelists packed too much PLOT in their Wuthering-Middlemarch-Bleak-Eyres, but now novelists "know better" and PLOT isn't that much of a concern. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers are interested in something else.
Quite what that something else consists of is beyond me. With the possible exception of Wuthering Heights, I've never really understood the criticism of nineteenth-century novels as having "too much PLOT." It always sounds a bit like a jealous person criticising someone else for having "too much money." And, on trying to write my own novel, I'm now finding quite how crucial PLOT is. Things have to happen in a novel, and they have to matter to the people they happen to. And then other things have to happen after those first things. And then more things have to happen, and so on. There's no way round it, no way of avoiding it - or at least, no way I can see.
Even when novels pretend to be experimental and "non-linear," this normally just translates as "they've got some flashbacks in them" or "you know how it ends from the start" or something like that. None of this actually subverts the centrality of PLOT to the novel - and none of it really undermines the basic linearity of the novel form. A novel consists of a linear plot, by and large, even where that linearity is slightly confused or complicated by the narrative jumping backwards and forwards in time. "Backwards and forwards" - those very words imply a kind of linearity.
So, to my surprise, writing a novel is a linear process in which I have to learn to think in a linear way - which is a very different way of thinking and writing to the memoir. I am, for once, writing forwards rather than sideways, diagonally, or in complex hexagonal shapes.
What's surprised me about the process of novel writing is how different it is from writing a memoir. It's a much more structured process, in some ways. This may sound rather basic, but suddenly I've noticed that PLOT seems to matter. I've never thought much about PLOT before - a lot of my short stories are so short that the PLOT amounts to one small thing happening to one small character in one small place. The thing with a novel is that - in order for it to last 70,000 words - you need more than one thing to happen. You need a string of things to happen, one after the other. This is a new experience for me, writing events in order, cause, effect, cause, effect, etc.
In terms of the memoir, the structure was very different - things didn't happen in such a linear way. I had to find different ways to structure the memoir, threading together little quantums of story - little anecdotes - into complete, homogenous chapters. The "story" here was closer to essay-writing - each chapter was a kind of essay, in a very loose sense. So it was possible to connect together events which were distant in time; it was possible to jump from present to past to distant past to near-past, all within a few pages. Flow was, of course, of crucial importance, but the flow wasn't that of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened." The flow was in the writing, in the connecting up and threading together of distant events and anecdotes in terms of themes and shared images.
A novel, it turns out, is very different. You talk to and read all of these critics who say that PLOT is passe, that nineteenth-century novelists packed too much PLOT in their Wuthering-Middlemarch-Bleak-Eyres, but now novelists "know better" and PLOT isn't that much of a concern. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers are interested in something else.
Quite what that something else consists of is beyond me. With the possible exception of Wuthering Heights, I've never really understood the criticism of nineteenth-century novels as having "too much PLOT." It always sounds a bit like a jealous person criticising someone else for having "too much money." And, on trying to write my own novel, I'm now finding quite how crucial PLOT is. Things have to happen in a novel, and they have to matter to the people they happen to. And then other things have to happen after those first things. And then more things have to happen, and so on. There's no way round it, no way of avoiding it - or at least, no way I can see.
Even when novels pretend to be experimental and "non-linear," this normally just translates as "they've got some flashbacks in them" or "you know how it ends from the start" or something like that. None of this actually subverts the centrality of PLOT to the novel - and none of it really undermines the basic linearity of the novel form. A novel consists of a linear plot, by and large, even where that linearity is slightly confused or complicated by the narrative jumping backwards and forwards in time. "Backwards and forwards" - those very words imply a kind of linearity.
So, to my surprise, writing a novel is a linear process in which I have to learn to think in a linear way - which is a very different way of thinking and writing to the memoir. I am, for once, writing forwards rather than sideways, diagonally, or in complex hexagonal shapes.
Friday, 14 March 2008
Book Launch Photos
Here are some photos my sister (Helen) has just sent me of the book launch for "Take Me Home", which took place in Loughborough Town Hall on 23rd July 2007.
My family: Ben (Helen's fiance), my sister Helen, my sister Karen, Bruce (my elder sister's fiance), me, Maria, my mother, my brother Robin.
Me and Maria.
Me and Maria again.
Maria.
Sue Mackrell, Maria and David McCormack (after a few drinkies).
My family: Ben (Helen's fiance), my sister Helen, my sister Karen, Bruce (my elder sister's fiance), me, Maria, my mother, my brother Robin.
Me and Maria.
Me and Maria again.
Maria.
Sue Mackrell, Maria and David McCormack (after a few drinkies).Sunday, 10 February 2008
Conversations with writers
Here is a two-part interview I recently did with Ambrose Musiyiwa, who runs a fascinating website called "Conversations with writers":
Part 1:
http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.com/2008/02/interview-part-1-of-2-jonathan-taylor.html
Part 2:
http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.com/2008/02/interview-part-2-of-2-jonathan-taylor.html
... the same interviews are also available here:
Part 1: "I Wanted to Write a Book to Help"
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=368816&rel_no=35
Part 2: "Turning Experience into Narrative"
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=433439&no=368816&rel_no=36
Part 1:
http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.com/2008/02/interview-part-1-of-2-jonathan-taylor.html
Part 2:
http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.com/2008/02/interview-part-2-of-2-jonathan-taylor.html
... the same interviews are also available here:
Part 1: "I Wanted to Write a Book to Help"
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=368816&rel_no=35
Part 2: "Turning Experience into Narrative"
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=433439&no=368816&rel_no=36
Thursday, 31 January 2008
A paradoxical dedication
Last week, I was teaching on the M.A. in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, which was fun, if a little strange, in that one never meets the students but chats to them via the keyboard: a disembodied experience which was strangely more intense than a real-life seminar ... in a good way.
Anyway, the subject of discussion was memoirs, and I was asked about the dubious ethical status of memoirs, and writing about other people. These questions always come up when it comes to memoirs for good reason: they are the central questions posed by the genre. If you're not tortured, or at least exercised, by the moral questions posed by the genre, then you shouldn't be writing memoirs, as far as I'm concerned.
In my book, the dedication reads: "This book is dedicated to my father, John Taylor (1928?-2001), who would probably have hated it." Obviously, this dedication itself poses all sorts of ethical and moral problems. Should I have written a book about my father if he would have hated it?
When my brother first read the book, he said to me: "Well, yes, dad would have hated the book when he was ill, given the paranoia and paranoiac fear of being talked about in the local papers or elsewhere. But, if he'd been well, he would have liked the book, because when he was well, he loved writing and reading." My father was, after all, a very cultured man.
So this makes the book a deeply paradoxical enterprise.
Put it this way: when he was ill, in the early 1990s, my father used to come into the dining room (where I was typing fantasy-science-fiction), shouting: "HE'S WRITING ABOUT US, YOU KNOW! HE'S GOING TO EXPOSE US IN HIS WRITING!" ... and he was proved right retrospectively by the future, but not at the time, when the thought of writing about my own family hadn't even crossed my mind (Tolkienesque fantasy seeming more relevant to my life back then).
But, as my brother says, before he was ill and paranoid, perhaps he would have loved the book ... the problem being that then the book would not have been possible or conceivable. After all, the book is partly about his illness, dementia, Parkinson's, paranoia. My father would have loved the book when he was well, but the book is posited on the fact of his latter-day illness. So the book is a strangely impossible paradox in ethical terms. My father would have loved a book which is partly about an illness which would have made him hate it, if you see what I mean. Or, in other words (and there are so many ways of putting this), he would have loved a book which is about a later self who would have hated it. Or my father would have loved a book if he could have gone forwards in time as he was before the illness, read it, and then gone back to experience the horrendous illness so it could have been written at all.
These are the kind of ethical ambiguities and time-travelling paradoxes and questions that memoir-writers have to confront. I don't think there're any simple answers, and I don't have any to offer.
Anyway, the subject of discussion was memoirs, and I was asked about the dubious ethical status of memoirs, and writing about other people. These questions always come up when it comes to memoirs for good reason: they are the central questions posed by the genre. If you're not tortured, or at least exercised, by the moral questions posed by the genre, then you shouldn't be writing memoirs, as far as I'm concerned.
In my book, the dedication reads: "This book is dedicated to my father, John Taylor (1928?-2001), who would probably have hated it." Obviously, this dedication itself poses all sorts of ethical and moral problems. Should I have written a book about my father if he would have hated it?
When my brother first read the book, he said to me: "Well, yes, dad would have hated the book when he was ill, given the paranoia and paranoiac fear of being talked about in the local papers or elsewhere. But, if he'd been well, he would have liked the book, because when he was well, he loved writing and reading." My father was, after all, a very cultured man.
So this makes the book a deeply paradoxical enterprise.
Put it this way: when he was ill, in the early 1990s, my father used to come into the dining room (where I was typing fantasy-science-fiction), shouting: "HE'S WRITING ABOUT US, YOU KNOW! HE'S GOING TO EXPOSE US IN HIS WRITING!" ... and he was proved right retrospectively by the future, but not at the time, when the thought of writing about my own family hadn't even crossed my mind (Tolkienesque fantasy seeming more relevant to my life back then).
But, as my brother says, before he was ill and paranoid, perhaps he would have loved the book ... the problem being that then the book would not have been possible or conceivable. After all, the book is partly about his illness, dementia, Parkinson's, paranoia. My father would have loved the book when he was well, but the book is posited on the fact of his latter-day illness. So the book is a strangely impossible paradox in ethical terms. My father would have loved a book which is partly about an illness which would have made him hate it, if you see what I mean. Or, in other words (and there are so many ways of putting this), he would have loved a book which is about a later self who would have hated it. Or my father would have loved a book if he could have gone forwards in time as he was before the illness, read it, and then gone back to experience the horrendous illness so it could have been written at all.
These are the kind of ethical ambiguities and time-travelling paradoxes and questions that memoir-writers have to confront. I don't think there're any simple answers, and I don't have any to offer.
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
Tragi-comedies
Aye, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
(Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’)
The strange thing is that, whenever I give a public reading from my book, audiences always react very differently. There's no predicting the reactions my book will elicit. A while back, at a Derbyshire Readers' event, I gave two readings on the same day. The morning audience's reaction was different to the afternoon's. And every time I give a reading - however similarly I perform the same piece - people react differently. Generally, these reactions can be classified into three categories: audience who experience the work as a tragedy (to use the term loosely), audiences who hear the work as a comedy, and audiences who understand it as a tragi-comedy. Some people laugh at the "jokes," some people look stern, distressed, even shocked, some people do both at different times.
I can't help but wonder what causes these different reactions. Given that the reactions are so different to the same words, they're not (in a simple way) caused by the words themselves. And given that I perform those words in a similarish way each time, they're not caused by my performance. So they must be caused by something in the audiences themselves. There must be something about certain audiences which hear Take Me Home as comedy, and something about other audiences which experience it as tragedy.
Someone a while back made a suggestion as to why this might be. She said that the different reactions are caused by different life experiences on the part of the audiences. People who've had similar or analogous experiences to my own would understand the humour; people who hadn't would just see the horror and sadness. If you haven't experienced something like family illness, disease, death, or care first-hand, you can't understand how it might be funny as well as tragic. I think this point of view has something going for it, though I don't think it explains away all of the different reactions I've had to the book.
I think people are sometimes worried, even shocked, when they're confronted with the truth that horrendous things can also give rise to laughter. They forget that laughter and comedy are often very serious matters, caused by cruelty, power, sadism, horror, violence (you only have to look at all the good sitcoms and comic films to see this - and I mean the good ones, not the rubbish that's made in the name of comedy post-1990). They also forget that every human experience is a mixture of emotions - pessimism and optimism, horror and laughter, death and life, indignity and dignity, stupidity and cleverness, bathos and pathos, comedy and tragedy. In the most horrendous things that have happened to the human race, there has always been comedy. Shakespeare realised this - look at the comedy in "Hamlet" and the clown in "King Lear."
In fact, that comedy is essential. If we weren't able to see the comic idiocy of Nazism, we might end up seeing Nazism as a serious tragedy, which would be to elevate the Nazis onto the Wagnerian plane they themselves felt they occupied. Certain cheap t.v. dramas and novels threaten to do this. "The Great Dictator" and "'Allo 'Allo," though, redress the balance, and make us realise how ludicrous the Reich was.
So it's of the utmost importance to see things as tragi-comedies, not simple tragedies. And that's what I tried to show in the book.
.... Tennyson's reading of "Charge of the Light Brigade" - not much to do with this entry, but brilliant all the same.
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
(Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’)
The strange thing is that, whenever I give a public reading from my book, audiences always react very differently. There's no predicting the reactions my book will elicit. A while back, at a Derbyshire Readers' event, I gave two readings on the same day. The morning audience's reaction was different to the afternoon's. And every time I give a reading - however similarly I perform the same piece - people react differently. Generally, these reactions can be classified into three categories: audience who experience the work as a tragedy (to use the term loosely), audiences who hear the work as a comedy, and audiences who understand it as a tragi-comedy. Some people laugh at the "jokes," some people look stern, distressed, even shocked, some people do both at different times.
I can't help but wonder what causes these different reactions. Given that the reactions are so different to the same words, they're not (in a simple way) caused by the words themselves. And given that I perform those words in a similarish way each time, they're not caused by my performance. So they must be caused by something in the audiences themselves. There must be something about certain audiences which hear Take Me Home as comedy, and something about other audiences which experience it as tragedy.
Someone a while back made a suggestion as to why this might be. She said that the different reactions are caused by different life experiences on the part of the audiences. People who've had similar or analogous experiences to my own would understand the humour; people who hadn't would just see the horror and sadness. If you haven't experienced something like family illness, disease, death, or care first-hand, you can't understand how it might be funny as well as tragic. I think this point of view has something going for it, though I don't think it explains away all of the different reactions I've had to the book.
I think people are sometimes worried, even shocked, when they're confronted with the truth that horrendous things can also give rise to laughter. They forget that laughter and comedy are often very serious matters, caused by cruelty, power, sadism, horror, violence (you only have to look at all the good sitcoms and comic films to see this - and I mean the good ones, not the rubbish that's made in the name of comedy post-1990). They also forget that every human experience is a mixture of emotions - pessimism and optimism, horror and laughter, death and life, indignity and dignity, stupidity and cleverness, bathos and pathos, comedy and tragedy. In the most horrendous things that have happened to the human race, there has always been comedy. Shakespeare realised this - look at the comedy in "Hamlet" and the clown in "King Lear."
In fact, that comedy is essential. If we weren't able to see the comic idiocy of Nazism, we might end up seeing Nazism as a serious tragedy, which would be to elevate the Nazis onto the Wagnerian plane they themselves felt they occupied. Certain cheap t.v. dramas and novels threaten to do this. "The Great Dictator" and "'Allo 'Allo," though, redress the balance, and make us realise how ludicrous the Reich was.
So it's of the utmost importance to see things as tragi-comedies, not simple tragedies. And that's what I tried to show in the book.
.... Tennyson's reading of "Charge of the Light Brigade" - not much to do with this entry, but brilliant all the same.
Monday, 17 December 2007
Video nation et al
Here's a tiny video I did for BBC Leicester:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/articles/2007/09/28/vn_carersmemories_video_feature.shtml
... and here's a blurb about the book from Leicestershire's reading groups:
http://www.leicestershire.gov.uk/index/community/libraries/reading_writing/reading_groups/reading_circles_booklist_introduction/reading_circkle_booklist_four.htm
... and here's a mention of Take Me Home on David Morley's blog for Warwick Writers:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickwritingnews/
... and here's a blurb for an interview I did with BBC Wales:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/jamieowen/updates/20070806.shtml
... and here's a review that appeared in the Irish Times:
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/weekend/2007/0630/1183047373579.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/articles/2007/09/28/vn_carersmemories_video_feature.shtml
... and here's a blurb about the book from Leicestershire's reading groups:
http://www.leicestershire.gov.uk/index/community/libraries/reading_writing/reading_groups/reading_circles_booklist_introduction/reading_circkle_booklist_four.htm
... and here's a mention of Take Me Home on David Morley's blog for Warwick Writers:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickwritingnews/
... and here's a blurb for an interview I did with BBC Wales:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/jamieowen/updates/20070806.shtml
... and here's a review that appeared in the Irish Times:
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/weekend/2007/0630/1183047373579.html
Sunday, 2 December 2007
Writing as catharsis
"Storytelling is always after the fact, and is always constructed over a loss."
Every time I do a reading or an interview about my memoir, Take Me Home, people ask: "Was it therapeutic writing the book?" Given the subject-matter - my father's Parkinson's disease, dementia and my (part-time) experience of caring for him - the question is an obvious one, and one which I often asked myself whilst I was writing it: "Is this making me feel any better?"
To be honest, I have no idea what the answer is. Probably, it was cathartic writing the book, insofar as I often burst into tears whilst doing it - although that made me want to give up. Suddenly, it'd dawn on me the magnitude of what I was doing, and all the old, nagging ethical questions would raise their gorgon heads and stare my writing self to stone. Even when I was three-quarters of the way through the first draft, I almost gave the whole thing up, because there was a bit too much "catharsis" so-called.
But that's obviously not the same as making me feel better. I think it'd be rather selfish, rather egocentric if all I was doing in writing the book was making myself feel better about my father's illness. Now, if writing could have made my father better, that would be a different matter. Then writing the memoir would be properly "therapeutic," and writing itself a more crucial enterprise.
But no, writing can't do that. It can only pretend to bring someone back to life, make things better. And it does that by reconstructing a past, reimagining it, turning it into a story, a narrative, with a form and direction, beginning, middle and end. It's in that sense that writing is "therapeutic": it reshapes the past and imbues it with sense, logic, meaning, narrative. Whilst the present is always chaotic and stupid and confused and there and gone, the past can be reshaped into something meaningful - and that's what writing does. Of course, it means that writing is at heart nothing but a pack of lies or, at best, half-truths. But they're the only half-truths available in a world where the present is ungraspable, been and gone before you can say "Parkinson's disease."
(J. Hillis Miller)
Every time I do a reading or an interview about my memoir, Take Me Home, people ask: "Was it therapeutic writing the book?" Given the subject-matter - my father's Parkinson's disease, dementia and my (part-time) experience of caring for him - the question is an obvious one, and one which I often asked myself whilst I was writing it: "Is this making me feel any better?"
To be honest, I have no idea what the answer is. Probably, it was cathartic writing the book, insofar as I often burst into tears whilst doing it - although that made me want to give up. Suddenly, it'd dawn on me the magnitude of what I was doing, and all the old, nagging ethical questions would raise their gorgon heads and stare my writing self to stone. Even when I was three-quarters of the way through the first draft, I almost gave the whole thing up, because there was a bit too much "catharsis" so-called.
But that's obviously not the same as making me feel better. I think it'd be rather selfish, rather egocentric if all I was doing in writing the book was making myself feel better about my father's illness. Now, if writing could have made my father better, that would be a different matter. Then writing the memoir would be properly "therapeutic," and writing itself a more crucial enterprise.
But no, writing can't do that. It can only pretend to bring someone back to life, make things better. And it does that by reconstructing a past, reimagining it, turning it into a story, a narrative, with a form and direction, beginning, middle and end. It's in that sense that writing is "therapeutic": it reshapes the past and imbues it with sense, logic, meaning, narrative. Whilst the present is always chaotic and stupid and confused and there and gone, the past can be reshaped into something meaningful - and that's what writing does. Of course, it means that writing is at heart nothing but a pack of lies or, at best, half-truths. But they're the only half-truths available in a world where the present is ungraspable, been and gone before you can say "Parkinson's disease."
Sunday, 25 November 2007
Books for enemies
Yesterday (Saturday) I was involved in a "Readers' Day" organised by Derbyshire Library Services. I gave two readings from Take Me Home, and (in the middle of the day) was involved in a panel discussion - a bit like BBC's Question Time, but with writers and readers instead of politicians, questions about thrillers instead of questions about Weapons of Mass Destruction. And it was all the better for that.
One of the questions on the agenda (which actually wasn't asked in the end) was "What book would you buy your worst enemy for Christmas?" Gosh, I thought, that's a difficult one. For a start, it'd be difficult to answer the question without being a bit too person-specific. One wouldn't want to be accused of (ahem) defamation. Also, I thought: why on earth would I want to waste a book on someone I don't like? Generally speaking, people I don't like don't like books, so it'd be a bit pointless. And, as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a bit a traditionalist about these things), if you don't like books, that's punishment in itself. It must be a pretty terrible existence, living amongst books (as we all do) and not liking them.
Sometimes, I think it's best just to ignore people one doesn't like. It was always my mother's advice about bullies at school. There's no point giving books, for example, to enemies, whether to "make them a better person" or to annoy them. If someone has irrevocably made a decision about you, what's the point? Best just to keep out of the way - however tempting it is to give them a copy of a H. P. Lovecraft novel ("I saw this and thought of you").
Actually, the ignoring (not ignorance) of contemptible people (or people you find contemptible) is one of the most powerful weapons in the world. It's a Weapon of Mass Destruction that politicians and especially left-wingers don't understand at all. This morning, I was watching one on of those Sunday-morning-type, castrato versions of Question Time, and the politicians on it were all bemoaning "student apathy." The conversation went something like this:
"What a shame," said one of these also-rans, a half-forgotten, ex-Home Secretary who was an also-ran before he even started politics, "What a shame that students don't have the kinds of marches we had when we were young. Students were so radical then, so political. Now they're all so apathetic." "Yes," said another also-ran non-entity from so-called New Labour, "and it reflects on the rest of the society, on voter apathy." I hear this kind of thing all the time at university, when academics bewail the lack of political engagement on the part of modern students.
Of course, when politicians and academics bemoan "voter apathy" or "student apathy," they conveniently forget the notable lack of apathy around the start of the Iraq war. Two million people marching in London doesn't sound like apathy to me. But both politicians and academics have a very narrow view of what political engagement might consist of. For academics, it's often that students aren't neo-Marxist enough, don't flog copies of Socialist Worker on street corners, like they did when they were young. For politicians, political engagement doesn't consist of anything but voting for their particular party.
People like this can't see that there are lots of different kinds of politics, lots of different ways of expressing political inclinations. And one of the most powerful ways is to ignore mainstream politicians - treat them with the contempt they so often deserve, just as one might ignore playground bullies. Apathy is the new radicalism. It might gradually undermine (I hope) the two-party - no, sorry, one-party - politics we've got in this country. To ignore these robots in charge of our country (and their mirror images in the other party) is the one thing that politicians can't stand. I mean, if you look at some of them, most of them went into politics because they couldn't get attention any other way when they were young. Politicians are generally people who couldn't get laid when young. And if people continued to ignore them, they'd eventually spin out of control and blow a fuse.
One of the questions on the agenda (which actually wasn't asked in the end) was "What book would you buy your worst enemy for Christmas?" Gosh, I thought, that's a difficult one. For a start, it'd be difficult to answer the question without being a bit too person-specific. One wouldn't want to be accused of (ahem) defamation. Also, I thought: why on earth would I want to waste a book on someone I don't like? Generally speaking, people I don't like don't like books, so it'd be a bit pointless. And, as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a bit a traditionalist about these things), if you don't like books, that's punishment in itself. It must be a pretty terrible existence, living amongst books (as we all do) and not liking them.
Sometimes, I think it's best just to ignore people one doesn't like. It was always my mother's advice about bullies at school. There's no point giving books, for example, to enemies, whether to "make them a better person" or to annoy them. If someone has irrevocably made a decision about you, what's the point? Best just to keep out of the way - however tempting it is to give them a copy of a H. P. Lovecraft novel ("I saw this and thought of you").
Actually, the ignoring (not ignorance) of contemptible people (or people you find contemptible) is one of the most powerful weapons in the world. It's a Weapon of Mass Destruction that politicians and especially left-wingers don't understand at all. This morning, I was watching one on of those Sunday-morning-type, castrato versions of Question Time, and the politicians on it were all bemoaning "student apathy." The conversation went something like this:
"What a shame," said one of these also-rans, a half-forgotten, ex-Home Secretary who was an also-ran before he even started politics, "What a shame that students don't have the kinds of marches we had when we were young. Students were so radical then, so political. Now they're all so apathetic." "Yes," said another also-ran non-entity from so-called New Labour, "and it reflects on the rest of the society, on voter apathy." I hear this kind of thing all the time at university, when academics bewail the lack of political engagement on the part of modern students.
Of course, when politicians and academics bemoan "voter apathy" or "student apathy," they conveniently forget the notable lack of apathy around the start of the Iraq war. Two million people marching in London doesn't sound like apathy to me. But both politicians and academics have a very narrow view of what political engagement might consist of. For academics, it's often that students aren't neo-Marxist enough, don't flog copies of Socialist Worker on street corners, like they did when they were young. For politicians, political engagement doesn't consist of anything but voting for their particular party.
People like this can't see that there are lots of different kinds of politics, lots of different ways of expressing political inclinations. And one of the most powerful ways is to ignore mainstream politicians - treat them with the contempt they so often deserve, just as one might ignore playground bullies. Apathy is the new radicalism. It might gradually undermine (I hope) the two-party - no, sorry, one-party - politics we've got in this country. To ignore these robots in charge of our country (and their mirror images in the other party) is the one thing that politicians can't stand. I mean, if you look at some of them, most of them went into politics because they couldn't get attention any other way when they were young. Politicians are generally people who couldn't get laid when young. And if people continued to ignore them, they'd eventually spin out of control and blow a fuse.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Anti-blogging (Jonathan)
Well, here I am, writing the first main entry in our "blog." What ghastly words: "blog" or "web-log" - they sound like an electronic poo, a log you do on the net. Nice. Bet that comment's been made a million times before, though: anything you say on the net has been said a million times before. The internet is a salutary and continual reminder that there is no such thing as originality. Anything you can possibly think of - and an infinite number of dark, grotesque, horrendous, bizarre, fascinating, sublime things you can't - have already been done a million million times on the net. So no point trying to be original in this blog.
Not really sure what the point of this blog is full-stop. I've never been much of a diarist. I'm with Philip Larkin, who once said (mournfully, no doubt): "I don't like going about pretending to be myself." I suppose that's odd for someone who's recently written a memoir, but maybe it's not so odd: I like looking back on happenings and turning them into stories, narratives or pub anecdotes, but don't feel I have much insight about my day-to-day life. When you're living day to day, there's not much to say. It's just a while later that you can start pretending it all fits into a pattern or story.
So what is the story going to be in this blog? No idea - will only know that when we've finished it, years on. I don't even know what the start of the story should, except that perhaps I should introduce myself to my "diary." I am Jonathan Taylor, and this blog is about me and my wife, Maria Taylor. I suggested to start with that I should write about her and her day, and she should write about mine. But then we decided that might prove a little divisive - my interpretation of her day might not be the same as her version, and vice versa. Such things are rows made on. So I'll just introduce myself.
I am the author of Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself, which was published by Granta this year: http://www.granta.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=3398
I am a lecturer in Creative Writing here: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/english/jonathan_taylor.jsp
And I am co-director here:
.... Funny term, though, isn't it, "I am." We use it all the time without thinking about it. "I am" all of these things and none of them - especially this evening. Now all I am is tired. Technology has that effect on me. Good night.
Jonathan
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