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By Grill, on November 7th, 2010
 Joyce, 1918 James Joyce’s Ulysses is an acclaimed masterpiece, one of the key works of the 20th century. Joyce himself was a peripatetic piratical genius, wandering the world dispensing wisdom and blarney in his white suit and eye-patch. Or so my English teacher told me. I think he was both dull and a bit of a git, but I guess when your face is against the window, there’s no room for reflection.
Why did that critical 1920s generation say Ulysses was so good? Well, it was the longest of his books – always a good sign for a magnum opus. He invented an awful lot of new literary techniques – the stream of consciousness, – and reused older ones, like heavy references to older works. So it professed to be about the odyssey, even though Joyce didn’t know that much about it, and nicked his chapter titles from a French author (hence the misspellings of several Greek names).
It mixed all these high-end literary techniques, with grubby writing in Irish dialect, so was perfect for playing to the sympathies of the modern English teacher, who was himself often a product of the grubby reading rooms of some rural town, rather than the Victorian teachers who were normally younger daughters of posh families. Finally, it was prosecuted for obscenity, because of the scenes where Molly Bloom fantasises about her lovers and Leopold’s masturbation – and writers love to big something up that’s under attack (see the equally turgid Lady Chatterley’s Lover.) What Ulysses wasn’t notably praised for, in my opinion, was for being any cop as a novel. Story, characters, description, even the puns, all are second-rate , even compared to Joyce’s more readable soap opera that is The Dubliners.
 Mr Flann O'Brien Contrast this with the works of Flann O’Brien (born Brian O’Nolan). A contemporary, and protege, of Joyce’s he was in fact a civil servant all his life, and only wrote, under many pseudonyms, as a sideline. His books use the stream of consciousness – but turn it into a comprehensible, first-person perspective, as seen most notably in his hilarious, Gothic masterpiece ‘The Third Policeman’. He uses the trick of nesting, making Matrioshkas of his stories, raising the reality levels the nearer you get to the ‘real’ storyteller, but never letting you know of the authenticity of the experience. He also plays with these levels, crossing the characters over, except where he wants to maintain authenticity – so in his experimental novel ‘At Swim Two Birds’, the heroes and villains of his deepest stories sneak into the level next to them, causing chaos, but never up to the ostensible sub-author, a semi-autobiographical student of literature. He drops references into his books – but they’re either absurd nonsense, parodying Joyce and Eliot, or ones that the majority of his readers could be expected to know. And though, he uses scientific and philosophical thought experiments, anticipating much, more turgid modern fiction, they’re saturated with humour instead of text. He’s a much more commercial writer – because, unlike Joyce, he wasn’t writing for fame (he had to be anonymous, after all), or to develop new techniques, but to entertain.
You get this sense most easily from his columns that he wrote, every week for years and years, under one of his many pseudonyms, Myles na gCopaleen. These are witty, local, perfect examples of what a newspaper column should be; from his presumed Mexican grave they conjure up the spirit of Ambrose Bierce, with their perfect acts of creation, their running jokes, the interspersion of created characters who live and die with the whims of the columnist and his correspondents.
I’d argue that it’s rare that perfection occurs in the first instance of an art; often, it takes someone who’s grown up in that art to polish and more it to the next step. O’Brien took Joyce’s metafiction, his flirting with academia and new literary techniques and punched the po right out of its face. Writing like Joyce’s is just a matter of rigorously applied labour – but writing like O’Brien is craft and genius.
By Grill, on October 22nd, 2010
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Words convey ideas that we associate, from experience of general use, with those words. So we know the word table and call a table a table because we’ve associated it through long experience with other people using the word table to refer to that table thing. (Thanks for attending linguistics 101.)
Some things aren’t that clear. Games journalism isn’t that clear. Some people don’t think it’s journalism, and they think that using the word ‘journalism’ in combination with games is bad for communication, as it weakens the acuity of the language, and especially bad for journalism, as it associates journalism with something distasteful. It’s something I’ve heard repeatedly over the years, but I heard it most recently in reference to Pat Garratt’s polemic on the games news business.
 Post-man Pat Transforming Gaming News Here’s the definition of journalist given by the Devil’s Dictionary (X), started by Ambrose Bierce, vanished Ur-father of modern columnists:
1. a writer who writes about sensational occurrences long after they happen and even longer after they are interesting.
2. a writer who uses marketing in lieu of judgement, appetite in place of taste, and style as proxy for skill.
3. an anti-romantic; a naturalist with a day job.
Not so useful, but quite funny. Here’s the dictionary definition:
Journalism
1. the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business.
…
4.
writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing
So it’s not scholarly – well that’s for sure. It seems to mostly fit the first definition – but is there an implication of anything honest or creative in journalism? Well, the word news is key; strictly speaking it means “information about important or interesting recent events”. Does that information have to be accurate? Well, inaccurate information isn’t really information – it’s noise. So, yes. there’s an implication of truth – journalists attempt to convey information that they have a justified belief to be true. Not fact-checking when you could, fabricating facts, or deliberately putting out information that can be mis-interpreted – all these seriously undermine an individual’s claim to be a journalist.
Pat et al *do* occasionally take quotes out of context, and report rumours (labelled as such), but they’re careful to apologise if they screw up and they mostly report accurately – even with those rumours. I’m less pleased with tabloid headlines, especially when they’re misleading, which all the news sites regularly indulge in – the red in tooth and claw nature of internet news is an explanation, but it can’t serve as a justification, especially not for established sites like C&VG or VG247. Moreover, as most of these sites share in the general games industry plea to the outside world to ” treat gamers like grown-ups”, one might think they had a moral responsibility to behave like adults.
However, most of the time, news sites are reporting the stuff that the PRs want them to – what they’ve been fed, the assets and information that’s timed to be released now, and so on. Is this journalism? Well, yes. Even if it isn’t creative, it’s still putting the interesting news out there, still acting as a filter for the audience of the messaging coming from companies (I’m betting a suprising amount is filtered out by these sites) and mingling it with the information coming from the world at large, still editorialising the message. Who judges what’s interesting? Well, the journalist tries and, if he succeeds, he gets the readers. They both judge in other words, and good journalists get to keep working.
So I’m going to say that. Journalism doesn’t have to be good writing; it doesn’t have to be creative writing; it just has to be accurate and not misleading. Games reportage fills that remit, so why not call it journalism? Just because it’s mostly fed by PRs, just because it’s often things that snootier people would want to call pettifogging rubbish, not fit to be called news, doesn’t mean it’s not information that someone out there wants to read – and the games journalist does his job by conveying it.
By Grill, on October 20th, 2010
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It was my eleventy-first birthday on Monday. Here’s what I did.
Timestamp: 12.30 a.m.
OH, what a night! A quiet drink with several friends ended with me dropping my switch card somewhere and Quintin dunking my phone in his Gulden Draak. The phone didn’t die immediately – but as the heady liquor permeated its innards it gradually flickered out of life before passing away sometime during the night – which meant my alarm didn’t go off, and hence I was late for my dental appointment, so there wasn’t time for a filling, so I have to book again, except I can’t access my diary on the dead iphone or access the address of my doctor. Amazing how totally dependant one can become on a single piece of technology; that’s something Ian Banks never addressed in his discussion of terminals in the Culture novels, the helplessness of those born into a technology. .
Timestamp: 4.30 p.m.
Now, I’m sitting on the roof of the Royal Opera House, at the poshest event I’ve ever attended. It’s a wine-tasting, filled to the gunnels with Hooray Henrys and the idle rich; the aristocrats who get employed in these things are genuinely born into it – without tasting Chateau Y’quem and a fine Margaux every day for ten years, you’re simply not going to have the experience to taste properly. It’s held by L’Union Des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, in a giant glass palace in the Royal Opera House, overlooking Covent Garden. As far as I remember, the Royal Opera House receives regular government and lottery grants to support its function and pay for its more expensive productions; but with the clientele here, paying what they must for this tasting, I can’t believe that it needs that money.
There’s more French being spoken here than English and everyone seems to assume that you have spent your entire life drinking the finest wines known to mankind, and are able to separate them into their component parts. I refrained from drinking too many of the red Bordeauxs (though I tried a lot of Margauxs), but focussed on the desert wines; here’s my recommendation: Chateau La Tour Blanche – my drink of the day. I don’t have the wine-drinkers’ vocabulary, that allows you to associate particular scents with given words, so I’ll simply say it’s complex without resorting to the straightforward sweetness of the Coutet or Giraud.
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I then left the Opera House, so I could sit in a cafe in Covent Garden and have a massive nosebleed that left blood all over my bag, mock-leather jacket, and both defunct phones.
Timestamp 11.30p.m.
Then I went off to Portcullis House in Parliament, to watch a panel of ex-Magdalen College luminaries, including Baron Kenneth Baker, Siôn Simon, John Redwood, Dominic Grieve, Matthew D’Ancona, Julia Hartley-Brewer, John Hemming and Stewart Wood answer questions from other Magdalen graduates from outside of politics. (Also a precocious and friendly 21-year old called Jamie Susskind who’d really done his research and sparred nicely with Redwood but unnecessarily dodged a question on the level of his student debt. I’m saying Labour Cabinet Minister for him, eventually.)
Once we got past the heavily-armed guards and through the Byzantine security, good discussions were had, but it’s under Chatham House rules, so I’ve got to refrain from attribution; I’ll just state majority opinions.
- The panel was oddly unfriendly to all-women shortlists for political elections, even down to one expressing his support in principle, though distaste in practice. One female attendee was extremely critical of the quality of female politicians selected through shortlists, relative to women elected purely on their own merits; there’s a touch of chicken and egg there, though, and surely something that’s reflective of problems with Britain’s ongoing gender imbalances.
- The majority of the panel agreed that faith schools must be retained because of their results, though the left of the panel said they led to segregation and intolerance. The balance between good results and community integration was a hard one to strike, and all of the panel deplored the failure of Lord Baker’s attempt to make new faith schools take a minimum proportion of non-faith students. More importantly, I think, is to focus on diversity of background in all schools – certain comprehensives and private schools act as faith schools due to their selection criteria and catchment area; likewise, other comprehensives act as grammar schools if established in upper-middle class areas.
Also, as a lone panellist pointed out, everyone was talking about this as if everyone had faith – and there was no provision for atheists in the faith school system, nor any restriction on market-saturation in given areas. This panellist was unable to find a non-faith primary school in the relevant catchment area, all of which required membership of certain local religious institutions, so the child was not allowed to attend any local school. In my opinion, close all the faith schools and those teachers would surely teach elsewhere; in that sense the faith element of a faith school is a red herring; if people want a religious education for their children, Sunday schools are available.
- They think MPs are underpaid on £60,000 + expenses a year, which I think is madness.
- They seemed to agree that an intervention in Iran over its nuclear programme is unfeasible, for Britain at least, but that Something Must Be Done, else Israel will get involved, violently. (I actually spoke to someone high-up in Non-Profileration for the Foreign Office earlier in the evening; his views coincided with the panel’s to some degree, though he seemed less certain of Iran’s ability to enrich enough Uranium to generate a bomb quickly; he was oddly quiet during the whole discussion).
- The best thinker, speaker and rationalist of the lot of them was, surprisingly, Kenneth Baker, followed by the ever-impressive and curiously funny John Redwood. Siôn Simon gave the impression of being a bruiser and party animal, and his language occasionally stumbled, but he made some good, original points.
And that was my birthday. Strange, bloody, boozy and pensive in turns.
By Grill, on September 30th, 2010 To the tune of: Vivian Stanshall – Sir Henry At Rawlinson End
The story so far.
The hapless and unusual Hubert, having unhappily chanced upon Sir Henry reliving the bombing of Dresden, has received a terrific thrashing and a crippling kick in the fork. He is now in disgrace condemned to his room.
The body of Doris Hazard’s pekinese, unwittingly asphyxiated under her husband’s bottom, after a ritual two weeks in the Rawlinson refrigerator, has been given over to Old Scrotum for indecent burial under a giant marrow. This marrow is Sir Henry’s pride and on his instructions the vegetable is daily drip fed with a powerful laxative so that “if some rascal runs off with it and eats the blessed thing it’ll give ‘em the runs for weeks”.
Long before his death in a flaming house-boat, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band Vivian Stanshell’s errant star was waning, as the spirit of the era that sustained him also waned; he was both product and producer of that re-renaissance that accompanied the hedonistic liberation of the sixties and seventies, but he also drew on a traditional aristocratic demeanour that lovingly informed his work. He had the variety of aberrant behaviours that we tend to call quintessentially English and that made him stand aside from his era, in the way that Noel Coward stood away from his; by ‘quintessentially English’ we mean posh, strange, post-colonial men who spoke in long rambling light sentences where one has to hack away the lush verbiage to stand a chance of finding often-absent meaning.
 Viv and some mice. ‘Sir Henry At Rawlinson End’ is the masterpiece of this , a louche cocktail of Ripping Yarns, The Archers and some monstrous bastard of Brideshead Revanant. It could be portrayed as a one man show, with Stanshall’s character at the heart of it, playing every part, singing every song, and linking the narrative. Except Stanshall is dead, so a brave Mike Livesley stepped into that void. Where stanshall was Elfin, he is Dwarfish; where Stanshall was pale, he is ruddy; where Stanshall was effete, he is boorish.
Despite all these deficiencies in his appearance, he carries the piece (performed here at The Unity theatre in Liverpool and worth the journey) forward single-handedly, glorying in the filth and rancour that undermine the colonial warrior unreflectively drinking himself, his family and retainers out of existence. In some senses, it is a companion piece to Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm; where that satire impinged modernity on the bucolic stereotype of Thomas Hardy and his timeworn kin, this looks at the opposite end of society, the Wodehouse world of maiden aunts, wrinkled retainers (in this case called “Old Scrotum”) and idiot kith, and escorts them down through the po-faced forelock-tugging of pre-WWI Britain before depositing them in his own brand of ingenious post-60s squalidity that rejected all the majors and their decrepid societal structure that was dying with the empire. Alone again Florrie’s eyes focused on the copper gleam of the coal scuttle, clouded, and in seconds had surrendered to Erewhon. Peacefully on tip-toe through the grey spheres where shade had substance, whispers walked, and Maya reigned. Wistful and lovely are walls with wisteria, clematis clambers on time pocked walls white. Stranger than larkspur or lupin, hydrangea many headed bright nosegay tongue-tied, fancy flight.
There was a face jumping competition at the Fool and Bladder. This ancient amusement involved leaping on to volunteer’s heads, lightly touching, and then springing off. To draw blood or squash a nose meant instant disqualification, and this was the skill of it. The normally phlegmatic Seth Onetooth was unquestioned champion of this unusual sport and he stood huge dark and work stained outside the old pub explaining the rules and recalling past triumphs to Reg Smeeton, the village newsagent and self-styled human encyclopaedia.
A large red faced farm worker, stripped to the waist, paced out an enormous run-up before turning to thunder down on his grinning partner lying on the grass. “Eeh, he’s got no chance” said Seth smugly, “silly buggers wearing spiked running shoes”.
Sir Henry is a beast of man, the classic abusive familial head, raves monstrously and constantly. We start In Media Res, with the narrator (who also plays all roles, almost as reportage) bringing us up to speed with the world of Rawlinson and book-ending it. There is little story; a dinner party is in there, but it’s difficult to ascertain what, if anything, actually happens. It is best characterised as a poisonous vignette into the long-passed world of our parents’ generation, where everyone is damaged to the point of total alienation, moral collapse and physical failure, and perfectly capable of expressing this by occasional bursts of song.
“Aar, waste of good drinkin’ time. I had to go up again and see if the old girl had finished her bloomin’ breakfast” huffed Scrotum crossly.
The old girl was Sir Henry’s mother, once a great beauty but now, unknown to Florrie, bedridden in a remote chamber at Rawlinson End.
“Well er, ‘ad she then, finished it like?” asked Seth.
“Course not. Nice bit of smoked haddock been there by the side of the bed getting cold for the last three years” said Scrotum taking a large slurp.
“By heck, three years. Does she do owt?” said Seth.
“Course not, she’m just lying there never saying nothing wi’ er gob wide open, catching flies and playing with the rats. Sir Henry says she’m not getting no more grub ‘til she’s eaten the last lot”.
Reg Smeeton, smelling strongly of newsprint, patted down the back of his wig.
“Did you know there is no proper name for the back of the knees”.
So there you have it; a single actor stood in a set with minimal cobweb-clad adornments (in which I include the band) satirising stereotypes beyond living human memory with the crudeness of Viz and the eloquence of Noel Coward. My dad, who was a devo of the Bonzos in their hey-day, complained that Livesley was not Viv; even with his eyes closed, the man was sub-Stanshall. I, with less preconceptions and no nostalgia for the hero of a lost youth, found his rotundity a perfect raconteur, dancing like a dainty-toed blimp, providing character portraits that roved the octaves, and conjuring up a world I’ve only known through out-of-copyright books.
Next time Mrs E the housekeeper has one of her nasty turns and believes herself to be a chicken, but Henry refuses to have her treated saying
“Well, it’s always good to have a supply of fresh eggs”.
Listen to the album; the play is off the stage and may not return. If it does, and Sir Henry establishes himself near you… pay the old chap a visit.
By Grill, on September 15th, 2010 To the tune of: The Magnetic Fields – Always Already Gone (suggestion from Tony Ellis).
I’ve been reading my dad’s old copy of McEachran’s A Cauldron Of Spells – it’s snippets of poetry that feel good read out loud. I think it’s helping. I’ve picked my favourites out and interspersed them below.
She was a child and I was a child
In this kingdom by the sea
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee,
With a love that the wingéd seraphs of heaven
Coveted Her and me.
Edgar Allen Poe, Annabel Lee
I really didn’t expect breaking up to hurt this much – I am so tired of crying. Everything starts it; yesterday, I saw a peanut and sesame snack bar in a shop, a perfect mingling of our two allergies, that set me off when I was trying to buy lunch. I came home through all her packed bags; I saw her fluffy slippers, and wailed out loud and startled my landlord who was coming downstairs. I broke down when I realised she’d taken all the tacky fridge magnets. Et cetera. Yet, I know this is just a passing phase, something I have to work through, and I’m not the only one hurting here, and that you’ve all been through it before. I’m bewildered that I haven’t.
She looked a little wistfully
Then went her sunshine way;
The sea’s eye had a mist on it
And the leaves fell from the day
She went her unremembering way,
She and left in me
The pangs of all the partings gone
And partings yet to be
Francis Thompson, Daisy
I felt obliged to tell someone I respect about this, and he opened up in turn. He told me about something horrible that’s happened in his family, to his nearest relative, and the daily horror he’s going through having to help this person he loves; this is a thing his beloved is suffering that is both horrible, grotesquely humilating and lethal, and he’s coping quietly every day. It made me ashamed, though I know my sorrow is no less valid; misery doesn’t work like Top Trumps.
He that loveth love beyond reward and retribution
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Wish I’d been heartbroken younger to be honest – it sucks to be this old and cynical and weeping. I just want to sleep all the time and forget about it. But then, for some reason, you’re obliged to wake up again.
Die Jahre kommen und gehen
Geschlechter steigen ins GRab;
Doch nimmer vergeht die Liebe
Die ich im Herzen hab!
Heinrich Heine, Die Heimkehr
It’s worse than mourning, in that the object of mourning cannot be recovered – it is beyond your grasp, and that’s the horror. This, the object is present, close, could be reached, touched and tasted as it was before; the difference is in the head alone, not even in the heart. We made a painful decision, mutually and it takes all our willpower to keep hurting ourselves because we’re convinced that’s the right thing to do, for both our happiness.
Rock meeting rock can know love better
Than eyes that stare or lips that touch
All we know in love is bitter
And it is not much.
Conrad Aitken, While the blue sky above us arches
I miss Maria as much as I miss original Old Peculiar, before they fucked up the flavour.
I miss her as much as Michael Bay missed the point when he made Pearl Harbour.
I miss my little one as much as a misanthrope misses anthropes.
I miss her less than I miss my forlorn hopes.
(Me, just now. Yeah, you know it’s getting bad when you start writing doggerel yourself.)
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