Some advice for writers, from Satan

Photograph by Alistair Gentry

From Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), about a failed writer who makes a deal with the devil in fin de siècle London. It’s actually a terrible, repetitive and badly structured book. Nor has Corelli’s prose style aged well. She was very popular at the time, but like many popular writers then and now she hardly bothered writing anything but complete shit once she’d found her audience, with more concern for quantity than quality. She also wrote a (likewise popular at the time) book inspired by Jack the Ripper but the only thing she succeeds at in The Lodger is making the Whitechapel murders seem like a total bore as well. Her not very fictionalised, undigested chunks of rant about the publishing industry are enjoyable, though, perhaps precisely because she was so looked down upon as a writer and took the opportunity to vent her spleen.

The only other slightly interesting thing about this novel is that Corelli invented the name “Mavis” for one of the book’s characters. Thanks to Corelli, “Mavis” was popular for a while before becoming indelibly associated with the kind of frumpy, prematurely aged, parochial, suburban English housewives who were mocked mercilessly by Monty Python and other satirists in the 1960s and 70s, and then by drag queens in the 80s.

“Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah. Nobody wants him,—everybody despises him. His efforts are derided, his manuscripts are flung back to him unread, and he is less cared for than the condemned murderer in gaol. The murderer is at least fed and clothed,—a worthy clergyman visits him, and his gaoler will occasionally condescend to play cards with him. But a man gifted with original thoughts and the power of expressing them, appears to be regarded by everyone in authority as much worse than the worst criminal.”

“I had also tried, unsuccessfully, to dispose of a manuscript of my own,—a work of fiction which I knew had some merit, but which all the ‘readers’ in the publishing offices appeared to find exceptionally worthless. These ‘readers’, I learned, were most of them novelists themselves, who read other people’s productions in their spare moments and passed judgment on them. I have always failed to see the justice of this arrangement; to me it seems merely the way to foster mediocrities and suppress originality. Common sense points out the fact that the novelist ‘reader’ who has a place to maintain for himself in literature would naturally rather encourage work that is likely to prove ephemeral, than that which might possibly take a higher footing than his own.”

“Revenge is sweet!” he quoted sententiously—” I should recommend your starting a high-class half-crown magazine.” “Why?” “Can you ask? Just think of the ferocious satisfaction it would give you to receive the manuscripts of your literary enemies, and reject them! To throw their letters into the waste-paper basket, and send back their poems, stories, political articles and what not, with ‘Returned with thanks’ or ‘Not up to our mark’ type-written on the backs thereof! To dig knives into your rivals through the medium of anonymous criticism! The howling joy of a savage with twenty scalps at his belt would be tame in comparison to it! I was an editor once myself, and I know !” I laughed at his whimsical earnestness. “I daresay you are right”—I said—” I can grasp the vengeful position thoroughly! But the management of a magazine would be too much trouble to me,—too much of a tie.” “Don’t manage it! Follow the example of all the big editors, and live out of the business altogether,—but take the profits! You never see the real editor of a leading daily newspaper you know,—you can only interview the sub. The real man is, according to the seasons of the year, at Ascot, in Scotland, at Newmarket, or wintering in Egypt,—he is supposed to be responsible for everything in his journal, but he is generally the last person who knows anything about it. He relies on his ‘staff—a very bad crutch at times,—and when his ‘staff are in a difficulty, they get out of it by saying they are unable to decide without the editor. Meanwhile the editor is miles away, comfortably free from worry. You could bamboozle the public in that way if you liked.”

Hello Cat-headed Person from Suburbs of London

Over the past few days many bloggers and even newspapers have gushed that Hello Kitty is apparently a “girl” and not a cat, although for no adequately explained reason she has a cat head. Maybe I’m sheltered, but I don’t know any girls who love to bake and have cat heads. She’s officially and canonically got no mouth, so why or perhaps more cogently how is she so enthusiastic about baked goods anyway?

What none of them have done is behave like a real journalist and really look into Hello Kitty’s background. And while we’re on the subject, newspapers and so-called professional journalists, WTF? This blog here is explicitly dedicated to silly stuff, and I don’t get paid for doing it. Hello Kitty possibly not being a cat isn’t current affairs or headline news by any stretch of the most overcaffeinated imagination. Nor is the Great British Bake Off. Stop looking at Facebook and do some proper journalism. There’s an army of raving barbarians who hate everybody that isn’t them, better funded and organised than some official armies, squatting on large parts of the Middle East and almost within spitting distance of Turkey. I mean the country called Turkey, although they’d probably also spit on your turkey dinner. A new Cold War or even a mini WWIII is bubbling under in Eastern Europe with Russia vigorously stirring the pot. We’ve probably already reached the point where it’s too late to do anything about global environmental collapse, for fuck’s sake. Leave the Hello Kitty stuff to the non-professionals.

(Digression over.)

1

The character’s corporate Sanrio biography page mind-bendingly mentions that she has a pet cat called Charmmy Kitty. Given that Kitty’s parents are George and Mary Kitty, how is Charmmy Kitty (who looks exactly like Hello Kitty except with a cat body) not related to them? Is she some kind of throwback relative, cruelly debased and treated like a pet? Call the RSPCA and child protection services, I think they’ll both be required. There is some precedent for this in the warped relationship between Goofy and Pluto. Both are apparently canines, but the latter behaves like a domestic dog and is treated as a pet (i.e. as a kind of property) while Goofy autonomously wears clothes, attends work, drives cars, and so forth. How did this situation come about, and why do all the other characters refuse to discuss or even acknowledge the issue?

2

Furthermore, “Hello” is evidently the first name of Miss Kitty rather than “Hello Kitty” being a grammatically questionable greeting.

3

Sanrio informs us that Hello Kitty is from “the suburbs of London, England.” Candidates include a few posh places like Richmond or Kingston Upon Thames, which is probably what they were thinking of, but also such delightfully kawaii locales as Barking, Dagenham and Ealing. In my own personal Hello Kitty mythos, though, I’m going to imagine Hello living in the suburban concrete shit bucket and leading democratically appointed crap town of Croyden. She regularly shops at Lidl. “THE FIRST CAPITAL CONNECT SERVICE TO. LONDON VICTORIA. IS. CANCELLED. DUE TO… DELAYS CAUSED BY AN EARLIER DELAYED TRAIN. WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE CAUSED.” Hello waits over an hour for the next train, drinking shit coffee. Even though she doesn’t have a mouth.

Hello Croyden.

4

From the Sanrio site I also discovered that you can quite easily become the proud owner of an @hellokitty.com email address if you’re very, very sick. Terrify AROUSE dates when you reply to their flattering messages– they can’t wait to see all the stuffed animals and dolls on top of your bed either! Impress the potential employer when you apply for that dream job! Prove it’s quite normal for a grown man or woman to have their email end with @hellokitty.com! Oh, the possibilities.

America…

BAISE OUAIS!

I’ve been reading Postmodernist patriarch Jean Baudrillard’s book about the USA, called America (Verso 1988, new edition 2010). Although it’s occasionally mired in the kind of obscurantist, elliptical wittering that he’s rightly condemned for by some people– the gobbledygook blindly imitated to devastatingly stupid effect by many academics, critics and artists since the 1990s– it also has some incredibly sharp observations about a country and a populace that at heart he obviously enjoys a great deal. He often unfavourably compares his native France to the USA, although this is not as funny as his bullseye hits on US culture; these are not very far from what (postmodernist) native writers like Chuck Palahniuk and David Foster Wallace would be doing ten years or so later.

Writing in the mid 1980s, Baudrillard also makes some incredibly prescient and accurate observations about where Reaganism, Thatcherism and the whole greed-is-good yuppie privatisation era would lead politics, morality and society. You’ll need to read the book for those predictions, though, because they’re too long for a blog post.

Here’s some of his funnier, pithier aphorisms and observations about America instead:

Examples of the mania for asepsis

“The Getty museum where old paintings look new, bleached and gleaming, cleansed of all patina and craquelure, with an artificial lustre that echoes the fake Pompeian decor all around them.

In Philadelphia, a radical sect named ‘MOVE’, with a bizarre set of rules, including one forbidding both the practise of autopsy and the removal of rubbish, is cleared out by the police, who kill eleven people by fire and burn down thirty adjacent houses, including those (the irony of it!) of all the neighbours who had called for the sect to be removed.

… they certainly do smile at you here, though neither from courtesy, nor from an effort to charm. This smile signifies only the need to smile. It is a bit like the Cheshire Cat’s grin: it continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared… It is part of the general cryogenization of emotions. It is, indeed, the smile the dead man will wear at his funeral home, as he clings to hope of making contact even in the next world. The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’… Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact that you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile. Give your emptiness and indifference to others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile… Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

 

What to do if it happens

Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack. Ninepence!

Scans from a nuclear war information booklet issued by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1963. People of Britain, gather your Vaseline, paper handkerchiefs, teaspoons and aspirin so we can get on with a proper British apocalypse. I’m more into the mod design than the details of people being killed instantly. “HEAT”, “BLAST” and “FALL-OUT” each have exciting logos. Which is nice.

“There still remains some risk of nuclear attack”

“Seek safer and more comfortable surroundings before the fall-out comes down.”

I haven’t scanned them, but some of the other pages mention living in a hole in your back garden with a dustbin lid as a hatch, or building a “fall-out room” made of doors and sandbags inside your house. It’s grim. The booklet’s main achievement is making it seem lucky if you’re one of the people vapourised or incinerated during the initial blast. Most of the advice for survivors comes down to staying indoors with your family and waiting for help that may never come. It’s like an even more depressing and futile than usual episode of Eastenders. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office does allow that there may be an interruption of water supplies and electricity; many people in British cities had experienced this during WWII, so it wasn’t too scary to admit the possibility. As for absurdities like putting out your rubbish to be collected after an H-bomb has dropped nearby or using Sellotape and a raincoat against radioactive fallout, I’m not sure if the government really thought that after a nuclear exchange everyone would be resuming their normal lives within a few days or weeks, or if this was just the impression the authorities hoped to give people.

There’s a method* in his madness

* J. Karwowski’s Method of Preserving the Dead

Found on an old hard drive. In 1903 a gentleman named Joseph Karwowski (“a subject of the Czar of Russia, residing at Herkimer”, New York) took out a patent on “certain new and useful Improvements in Methods of Preserving the Dead”, to wit encasing them in cubes of glass. He claimed that excluding the air would preserve them “for an indefinite period in a perfect and life-like condition.” The process would involve encasing the body in a layer of sodium silicate which was dry heated to solidify it, then further surrounded by a cube or cylinder of molten glass. Evidently a man of thrifty instincts, he also allowed for the cheaper and less labour-intensive possibility of preserving just the head “if preferred”, Futurama style.

Not that I or anybody else in their right mind is considering actually carrying out this operation, but I can see a number of potential snags here. I’m going to leave aside the notion that the chap illustrated above looks as if he was in the middle of objecting to being encased in sodium silicate when he was rudely cut off in his prime.

Firstly, you’re “dry heating” a corpse in glass, then surrounding it with more, even hotter glass? Surely this means you’re cooking dear mad old uncle Joe sous-vide? Secondly, an eight foot tall cuboid of solid glass plus a dead body will be impractically heavy. What would you do with it? Leave it out in a cemetery, or put it in your living room? In the latter case, anybody who lived above the ground floor would be wise to go for the head only option, although even that would be rather hefty.

Last but most disgusting, bodies don’t go moldy like bread, because spores land on them. They rot primarily from the inside, as autolysis causes the tissues to die and liquefy, while microbes that have lived harmlessly inside the body are let loose, unchecked by the living body’s defences. Some of these microbes are anaerobic, meaning that lack of contact with the air is not a problem. If you feel up to it, check out some of the Bronze Age people sacrificed and thrown into anaerobic, acidic bogs in Northern Europe. Or the bodies of dead Everest mountaineers and people in the Andes who were similarly mummified by cold, dry air. I warn you that searching for information or images on this subject can be quite upsetting, so the more squeamish reader should just take it from me that these people are quite well-preserved, but they’re not “life-like”. Nobody would be at all impressed if you had them in your house. This is probably an understatement. You should expect a Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs kind of reaction if you’re keeping dead people in glass cubes. I imagine the people at the patents office were relieved that they received “no specimens” of Karwowski’s method.

It’s sad, though, that when Mr. Karwowski died he was probably buried or cremated like everybody else instead of being magnificently, vitreously entombed. For all eternity, the world’s heaviest paperweight.

Scarlett Johansson’s murder van

… and how she was punished for it.

It’s been out a while, but I only just got around to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, the enigmatic, glacial barely-horror film in which an alien (Scarlett Johansson) drives around in a white Transit van and preys upon lone men in Scotland. I’ve not read the novel by Michel Faber, upon which the film was based, so this discussion is purely about the latter. There’ll be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film and you’re one of those big babies there’s plenty of other things to read on this blog.

You know some bad news is coming, because I’ll start with the good. The film captures the bleak beauty and grey light of Scotland perfectly. It looks like the most grimly lush Radiohead video ever, if Radiohead singles were ever nearly two hours long. The score by Mica Levi puts many a mainstream horror soundtrack to shame with its angular, insectoid weirdness. Over the past year or so I’d say that only Cristabal Tapia De Veer’s peculiar score for Channel 4’s Utopia was better, more inventive or more crucial to the production’s atmosphere. Johansson seems to pick her acting roles at random out of a hat, and in the wrong film she can be stiff as a board and half as interesting. Given the chance, though, she can do great work. Making one of Sofia Coppola’s dreary chorus line of autobiographical Poor Little Rich Girl non-characters sympathetic (Lost in Translation) is quite an achievement, even when Bill Murray brings his full chemistry set. In Her, Spike Jonze and Joaquin Phoenix trowel on the protagonist’s lonely, nerdy life as a sadsack spod so thickly that we don’t doubt he’d take up all manner of hikikomori activities. It’s Johansson, however, whose voice performance really sells the concept of an incorporeal artificial intelligence product that loves and is lovable while at the same time never really anybody’s at all.

Conversely in Under the Skin, Johansson barely speaks through the whole film, but watch the extraordinary and chilling way her amoral, calculating character performs feminine charm and accommodation then a split second later looks like a dead cod lying on a bed of ice at the fishmonger’s. The only character comparison that immediately comes to mind is Daryl Hannah as Pris and Joanna Cassidy as Zhora in Blade Runner, inhuman humans who know exactly which male buttons to press but would snuff any man, woman or child without blinking. Hannah and Cassidy never got as much to do in Blade Runner as Johansson does here.

Doomed

“Why worry so much about the future of a doomed world?”

A delightfully nihilistic quote attributed to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the main architects of the Manhattan Project and of the first atomic weapons, although it’s probably apocryphal. It seems to originate in French from Michel Houllebecq’s book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. The English translation of Houllebecq actually mentions in a footnote that the quote is untraceable.

Houllebecq is, shall we say, a not uncontroversial writer who may conceivably be projecting his own profound misanthropy and negativity onto Oppenheimer; Lovecraft’s, too. Even so, it’s in character for a man who made it possible for the human race to render itself and most other life on the planet totally extinct within a matter of minutes.

It’s also in character for Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

Computers are boring

The TRS 80 home computer, USA, 1978. In these thrilling advertisements, a man does the household budget (on paper, while looking at the numbers on the screen) and some kind of prepubescent Oedipal classroom psychodrama is played out through the medium of multiplication tables.

Basically it’s a jumped-up pocket calculator, only much less convenient.

Don’t worry, puritans of America, you can’t do anything fun or interesting with these computers!

How to survive an atomic bomb

Don’t stand too near it when it goes off is what I’m mainly taking away from the diagram. Also put your coat over your head, preferably while you’re dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and don’t panic. You’ll be fine.

“The harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”

I’ve mentioned before that I absolutely love Werner Herzog. Not so much his films, especially not his dramatic ones. What I love is his Nietszchean, über-miserablist persona as demonstrated in his documentaries and also shown beautifully in the video below about the making of his film/descent into madness/love-hate platonic affair with Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo. I just find Herzog hilarious, especially having heard him talk about yoga or celebrities with the same carefully sculpted loathing as he expresses here for nature: “The trees here are in misery, the birds here are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.”