Jonathan Taylor and Maria Taylor

News Feed!

2009-03-26T08:26:00.002Z

Dear All,

Just to let all readers of this blog that you can follow our recent writing news stories here:

http://jonnyandmaria.googlepages.com/news

Thanks, Jonathan and Maria
x

Ambiguity and writing

2009-02-28T12:24:00.003Z

It's a fairly obvious thing to say, but no one is ever 100% in the right, any more than anyone else is every 100% in the wrong. It's a fairly obvious thing to say - but, like many obvious things, one which most people try to ignore. In arguments, as in wars, there has never been a moment in human relationships where right has been 100% with one side. Often, individual sides manage to undermine their own legitimacy or "high ground" without any input from the other side at all. (I wonder what I'm thinking of at the moment in global politics? - answers on a postcard, addressed to Guantanamo Bay ...).

It's in most people's interests - and particularly governments' - to ignore this uncomfortable ambiguity in human relations. Most nationalisms are founded on the culpability of "the other side": Greek and Turkish nationalisms, for example, couldn't survive in their current forms without their beliefs in the absolute guilt of the other side. And closer to home, there are even more obvious examples. Similarly, most playground arguments are based on "It was his fault," "No, it was his fault," "No, he started it," "No, he started it," "He did this to me," "But he did this first," "But he did this before that," and so on and so forth. In playground microcosm, we have the history of nationalisms.

One of the jobs of the writer, I think, is to recover the ambiguity behind human relations, and show that arguments are always more complicated than 100% right vs. 100% wrong. Novels in which feature a good side versus an evil side are rare, and generally not very good. And that includes the Bible, where right and wrong are often very ambivalent (cf. King David). Writers have to be alive to moral dubiousness, to everyday compromises, to moral ambiguity, to the sheer complexity of one person relating to one other person (let alone relations on a larger scale). On a moment to moment basis, relationships change in minor and major ways. Relationships are never simple, always infinitely complex mixtures of emotions, histories, conversations, interactions, body languages, power, politics, and so on. In our society, it's in very few people's interests to recognise this - but the job of the writer is to remind everyone that this is the case.

Writers versus politicians

2009-02-08T09:53:00.002Z

'Men have lost faith in individual endeavour ... of any kind' (Thomas Carlyle, 'Signs of the Times').

Sorry we've been rather absent from this blog for a while ... life has been full of illnesses, babies, work, illnesses, babies, work, illnessnes, babies, work, and (now and then, when we fancy a change) work, babies and illnesses - so the time available for writing, let alone blogging, is approximately zero.

When one doesn't write, though, one thinks a lot about it, and what it means. What does it mean to write? What does it mean to be a writer? What is the point (for heaven's sake) of being a writer at this bizarre moment in that disaster we call human history? Well, I think I agree with Henry Miller, when he says 'the artist ... is the artist because he stands for individuality and creativeness.'

We live in a country and a historical moment ruled by so-called 'objective' and 'collective' forms of knowledge, such as statistics. Our whole lives are determined by the rule of statistics - public institutions like the N.H.S. decide whether we live or die based on statistics. The empirical basis of much modern science and medicine is, by definition, a statistical basis. Doctors talk about illnesses from an objective point of view, as a collection of symptoms, causes, effects. Newsreaders rate disasters by the numbers of dead involved. Politicians (and especially pseud0-Socialists) pretend to objectivity, spouting so-called objective truths, often in the form of statistics, about the people as a mass, as a collection of groups, cities, races, religions, economic classes, jobs.

Writers are the opposite of politicians, in this respect. Writers talk about individuality, about individuals, and about how individual human beings often differ from the groups to which they nominally belong. Politicians deal with types; writers deal with the exceptions to the types. Politicians deal with statistical generalisations; writers agree with Carlyle that "[statistical] tables are … like the sieve of the Danaides; beautifully reticulated, orderly to look upon, but which will hold no conclusion … [since] one circumstance left out may be the vital one on which all turned."

Writers, in short, reassert the importance of subjective experience in the face of a world dominated by scientific, statistical, political and so-called "objective" truths.

No doubt I think all this in part because I'm a memoirist - memoirists, by their nature, assert the importance of subjective experience. But I think this equally applies to fiction writers and poets. Fiction writers know, for example, that good characterisation is a matter of finding exceptions and contradictions and individuality within modern groups and types.

Of course, to assert that all writers "reassert the importance of subjective experience" is itself a questionable generalisation which fails to deal with individuality ....

The Mozart Effect

2008-10-31T16:31:00.003Z

We've heard a lot in recent years about the so-called "Mozart effect," whereby - supposedly - children who are played Mozart (in the classroom or womb) are suddenly transformed into geniuses, able to polish off S.A.T.S. and spelling tests like ice cream. It's always Mozart who is singled out as somehow intellectually ameliorative, no doubt because he is popularly portrayed as the echt-child-genius-who-didn't-live-long-but-achieved-oh-so-much-in-his-romantically-doomed-lifetime. It's never Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, or, heaven forbid, Tchaikovsky. Perhaps the next thing we'll hear is the "Tchaikovsky effect," whereby children are transformed into sentimental, hypersensitive wrecks.

It's typical of this kind of pseudo-scientific tosh that the focus is on "what Mozart can do for your children" in terms of exams, S.A.T.S., literacy development. It's all about pushy mothers who want their children to do better at exams than other pushy mothers' children. What a sterile, ultra-utilitarian view of this wonderful music: classical music reduced to a New Labour literacy strategy ... classical music as a revision aid ... classical music as an instrument of S.A.T.S. and keystages and G.C.S.E.s and I.Q. tests and pseudo-psychology all the other statistical trash which currently drowns out real childhood. It's typical, too, of the grey, utilitarian way in which the arts are seen by our culturally-impoverished society that music as wonderful and varied as Mozart's is nothing more than an instrument of the State - something to socialise kids and their minds. Music is there for a reason - and that reason is to make kids better at exams and ultimately (therefore) to serve the State.

But, let's be frank here. Mozart would have blown a fart in the general direction of S.A.T.S. tests and I.Q. tests - and so would Mozart's music. Mozart's music escapes the Mozart Effect and undermines it and blows raspberries at it. Mozart's music is carnivalesque, ironic, idealistic, cynical, irreverent, blasphemous, heretical, anarchic, divine, spiritual, earthy, Olympian, utopian all at once - and this very mixture can't but subvert any political, psychological or pseudo-scientific programme which tries to appropriate it.

Terms of abuse

2008-10-12T09:20:00.005+01:00

I've been lecturing this week on the basics of prose writing, and the importance of things like grammar, and so on. This has led me to think on the uses and abuses of certain words. At different times in history, words are abused in different ways, and some of these abuses (of course) get absorbed into common usage and eventually the dictionary. Some of the abuses, though, are quite pernicious - as both Orwell and, more recently, George Steiner have recognised, the lazy abuse of words and metaphors can be dangerous (politically, economically, socially, racially and so on). Flaubert also understood the casual misuse of words - see his "Dictionary of Received Ideas."

For what it's worth, here is my list of the top ten most abused words at the present time. I'd love to hear more suggestions too:

10. Globalisation - a strange, protean term which can be used by one person as a terrible criticism, by another as a term of endearment.
9. Devastated, devastation - how often do you hear a news broadcast which doesn't use one of these words?
8. Inclusion, inclusive, inclusiveness - often used by government bodies or arts organisations to describe activities, organisations or structures which exclude as many people as possible.
7. Racist - the core meaning - which is specific and powerful - has almost totally evaporated from the word, and it is now used as a catch-all pejorative by anyone looking for a catch-all pejorative (I have heard it used by far right-wingers, for goodness sake).
6. Terrorist - anyone whose opinions conflict with those in power, particularly if those in power have all the big guns.
5. Sex - again, a word which has been so over-used that no one's sure what it is any more.
4. Snob, elitist - nowadays, anyone who is more interested in art, music, literature than inclusivity for its own sake (i.e. anyone who is interested in art, music, literature which is "inclusive" because of quality rather than because of government diktat).
3. Forwards - everyone these days is always moving forwards, never sideways, in zig-zags, or complex fractals. God, it's boring.
2. Teams - always say in a job interview "I can work well as part of a team." No one's quite sure what working well as part of a team is. It can mean either something as uncommon as common courtesy, or, conversely, being willing to kill your colleagues whilst they're not looking - it all depends on your management style and definition of the word "team."
1. Evil - always no.1 abused term throughout history.

The Computer Says No

2008-09-29T20:26:00.003+01:00

Much as I have mixed feelings about "Little Britain," as with all good comedies, it has some important things to say about attitudes, behaviours and stupidities. The rather overdone sketches around "The Computer Says No" character are a case in point.

The other day, my mother told me that she went into a shop in Stoke and received "The Computer Says No" treatment. Being my mother, she immediately bristled and retorted (in excellent received pronunciation): "We're in charge of the machines, you know, not the other way around." The shop assistant looked flabbergasted, and obviously didn't agree with her: if The Computer says no, that's that.

And actually, unfortunately, I agree with the shop assistant. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately, The Computer is in charge. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately, the machines are in charge of us, not the other way round. Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the lessons of the twentieth century, we as a stupid race persist in over-trusting machines and raising them to positions of authority over us. So much of what we do is determined by machines, whether it's email telling us what to do, electronic timetables and diaries telling us where to be, electronic rulebooks telling us what is allowed, Word for Windows telling us what to write, etc. etc.

This is amazing, really, given the history of the twentieth century, which, if it taught us anything, should have taught us that machines, computers, technology are not good in themselves and should definitely not be raised above human beings in terms of power. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we as a race persist in believing that technology = progress - that technology is somehow a good in itself. We entrust the future of the world to computers; we entrust the apocalypse to machines (in the forms of bombs).

If this doesn't demonstrate the infinite stupidity of the human race, it demonstrates a couple of other things: firstly, the infinite ability we have for ignoring the lessons of history (gosh, if only we witnessed the Somme, surely we'd learn not to trust machines with our destiny); and secondly, and I think more importantly, our infinite insecurity. The human race has learned not to trust itself. We don't trust our own instincts, our own goodness, our own freewill, our own choices, and have, therefore, given our destinies over to machines. Isaiah Berlin once said that the twentieth century was the century of the inhuman; and I think that's because we've learnt not to trust the human, and put ourselves in the mechanical hands of computers, machines, technology.

In the end it's worth remembering that there is a difference between technology and human beings: however awful human beings can be, at least they can also be human once in a while. The more like machines they are (see "Little Britain"), the less human they are, the worse things turn out.

A few more photos

2008-09-21T20:09:00.004+01:00

Here are a few more photos, 4 months in:

Miranda, looking thoughtful.

Miranda and Rosalind in their new vehicle.

Rosalind relating humorous anecdotes about when she was young.

Rosalind and Miranda entertaining on the lawn.

Rosalind, Miranda and Parental Units at the Monkey Park in Stoke.

Miranda looking benevolent.

Soap cliches

2008-09-06T20:22:00.002+01:00

Gosh, still can't find much to do whilst actually feeding babies except sitting passively and listening to radio or (God forbid) watching daytime T.V. One hand to hold baby, one to hold bottle = captive T.V. audience. I can feel my brains dissolving in my head watching "Diagnosis Murder," "Neighbours," "Trash in the Attic," "Doctors," "Makeover your something-or-other" and so on and so forth.

I've been thinking, though, that someone ought to compile a catalogue of soap cliches for actors and writers. Then, using the catalogue, people could put their own soaps together with no trouble. Here are just a few obvious ones:

1. the suspicious embrace / cuddle, in which the camera focuses in on one of the cuddler's faces, because there's some hidden agenda going on.

2. the heavy dramatic irony scene, in which Character A has done something awful behind Character B's back - e.g. affair with best friend, Character C; Character B spends five minutes extolling the virtues and wonders of Character A, and even considers marriage, whilst Character C pulls lots of telling faces.

3. the half-overheard conversation, in which someone misunderstands what someone else is saying (e.g. by only overhearing a bit, and missing the "not" in the sentence, etc.) and gets hurt for at least half an episode, until the mistake is cleared up.

4. the comic sub-plot, in which someone leaves a cake on a car roof, a dog eats someone's dinner, or something of that nature, to complement the more serious doings of the main plot.

5. the hospital scene, in which someone is seriously ill in a nearby room, whilst his or her relatives and friends are waiting in the corridor for news. The doctor comes out and looks serious, and tells the relatives that it's late and they should go home and get some sleep. Relatives look concerned, and insist that they couldn't possibly go home (don't they have visiting hours in soap hospitals?).

... please add to the list ad infinitum...

Life goes on...in between feeds

2008-08-22T21:13:00.009+01:00

Fans of this blog may have realised that I, (Mrs Jonathan), have been strangely absent from this blog. There were some fairly reasonable excuses for this, such as pregnancy, illness, hospitals, twins and the like. For 3 months of my life I lived in a altogether foreign dimension. Yes I was part of the world but in a detached, distant way. But gradually things have assumed a sense of normality, my head doesn't feel as if it's a lie any more. I have got used to the strangest things such as night feeding, not much sleep and having to get everything done in between feeds. The babies need to be fed and changed every 4 hours and they sleep longer during the night. This means that life has to be lived 'in between feeds', in fact if I were to write my autobiography I think it would be called 'in between feeds' because that's when I have to do the normal stuff that usualy goes into an autobiography.

Having come out of this weird hibernation period I see not much has changed; the shops are still shops; summers still have rain and teenagers are still binge drinking etc. However, their are new things to add to 'normal' life which actually are very lovely such as babies' smiles, coos and gurgles and getting this rush of affection for the little dears. Just let me get enough sleep, ladies.

Classical music and boredom

2008-08-22T20:52:00.003+01:00

Another thing Maria and I have been talking about of late is the issue of "boringness" (for want of a better word) when it comes to music. To simplify matters, Maria, of course, is into The Smiths, whilst I listen to Mahler (the twins have yet to throw their lot in with one or the other).

Anyway, one morning (probably a 4.15am feed), we were listening to Radio 2, and I said that I found a particular song boring. It was repetitive, the lyrics were uninspired ("you" rhyming with "too" and "through", and so on), and formulaic. You knew exactly what was going to happen from the first bar.

I pointed all of this out, saying it was sending me to sleep. And Maria made an interesting point. She said that most people (who are into pop music) think that fans of classical music complain about pop because it is (a) too loud, (b) too aggressive, (c) not relaxing enough, (d) too discordant, etc. etc. In short, pop fans think that classical fans don't like pop because it's not as soothing as classical music. And, of course, a lot of classical music is marketed (on radio and on C.D.) as "relaxing," "meditative," "therapeutic," blah blah blah.

But the things that get chosen and labelled and sold as "relaxing" are often really strange: I find nothing "relaxing" (in the soothing, soporific sense of the word) for example, about the Adagio from Khachaturian's Spartacus (gosh, it's anything but relaxing), Barber's Adagio (gosh, it's harrowing), the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique (gosh, it's the Pathetique, for goodness sake, the least relaxing piece of music one can think of).

No, none of these things are conventionally relaxing, except insofar as we're told they're relaxing by marketing executives and second-rate DJs. They might be relaxing in a different sense (a cathartic sense, for example). But the point is that the popular idea of classical music as inherently relaxing ("ahh, isn't it nice?", "ahh, what wonderful music for a dinner party") is not a view shared by many of the more dedicated listeners. There is nothing relaxing in the soporific sense about Mahler, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Khachaturian, Beethoven, Mozart (how relaxing is the last movement of the Jupiter symphony, for goodness sake?), and so on.

So pop fans are often mistaken about why classical fans don't like certain kinds of pop songs. It's not that we find them too loud or too exciting for our feeble, sensitive dispositions. It's that we find them TOO "relaxing", boring, repetitive, dull, samey. There's no development, nothing unexpected, nothing beyond the well-established formulae, no key changes (apart from a crunching one towards the end), not enough dissonance or harmonic daring (as opposed to too much), no climaxes, no emotional intensity.

I'm only talking here, of course, about the lowest end of the pop spectrum - and there's plenty of boring classical music out there at the lower end of that spectrum. But I think Maria's right: the reasons why dedicated classical fans don't like certain kinds of pop are often mistaken and misrepresented.

Blog by friend

2008-08-20T12:44:00.001+01:00

Here is a newish blog by an old friend (also available through links below):

http://mitziszereto.wordpress.com

On snobbery and classical music

2008-08-17T12:25:00.005+01:00

People (like me) who mainly listen to so-called "classical music" are often - both implicitly and explicitly - accused of snobbery. The assumption that dedicated classical music listeners are somehow elitist is everywhere, and has even been internalised in the classical music world itself: so often, concert promoters, radio stations, award panels, arts councils, local councils, funding councils and so on insist on a false inclusiveness, an avowedly "low-brow" approach which amounts to a patronising attempt to broaden audiences beyond the white middle-classes. The fact that classical music listeners and practitioners have never been exclusively white or middle-class is lost and ignored for political reasons. Look at Mahler, rising from the Jewish working classes in a Bohemian backwater to being declared the "most famous man on earth"; look at Goldmark, who rose from obscurity and starvation; look at Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ....

No: it's assumed that classical music is still an elitist, snobbish and exclusive club which needs taking down a peg or two. The irony is that I've met lots of "pop musos" in my time, whose pride in their own pop knowledge, and whose derision at kinds of pop music they perceive as overly populist and commercial is at least as elitist as any classical musician. But, because they're into pop music no one ever dreams of accusing them of snobbery.

This modern belief that classical music is somehow inherently snobbish, and that it's only of interest to an exclusive middle or upper-class clique has, I think, had the effect in education of actually reducing opportunities for lower-middle-class or lower-class students in music. Because it is assumed that classical music is of interest only to an elite; because it is assumed that no one would want to study it from other backgrounds; because of a false kind of inclusiveness which reduces classical music to the status of an expensive luxury which must always be leavened with pop and other kinds of music; because of all this, classical music in education has, through no fault of its own, been partly shut off from state education.

This is also partly, I think, because music itself is perceived to be useless (an old British failing), and state education is even more utilitarian and gradgrindish than it used to be - and a Gradgrind can't see any reason for working class people to dedicate themselves to music. Classical music in particular takes a lifetime of dedication and training, and the benefits it brings don't fit in with a National Curriculum devoted to utility and immediate money-making results.

Hence, peripetetic music lessons, GCSEs and A' Levels in Music, proper classical training are the first things to be cut in schools, and particularly academies built on the New Labour Gradgrind model, which seem designed (ironically for a Labour invention) to train and keep the urban working classes in so-called "practical" jobs. In this context, classical music is in danger of being forced into the position that it's actually never been in before, in terms of education: it's in danger of being made into the exclusive province of private school education.

On realism

2008-07-30T21:34:00.003+01:00

How "realistic" should a novel be? I've been wrestling this question, because some of the reactions I've had to early sections of the novel that I've been drafting have amounted to: "Yes, but is it realistic? How can I feel that these people really exist? How can I believe in these bizarre situations that you describe?"

I find some of this surprising, simply because a lot of the novel (so far) is based on real life - or, at least, my experience of it. I've always been accused (when recounting anecdotes in pubs) of exaggeration and hyperbole, and that's fair enough. But exaggeration only exaggerates - obviously - it doesn't invent, doesn't make up things out of nowhere. Exaggeration is a distilled form of realism.

But actually, a lot of the novel-so-far isn't exaggerated, or not much: I really have met people like I describe, and I really have come across the bizarre situations I recount. People in real life really really (really really really) do the most strange things, behave in the most strange ways. That's why I've always preferred Dickens to George Eliot or Trollope - the world I inhabit is more Dickensian than Eliotian; the people I meet everywhere (and I don't exempt myself from this) are often full of oddities, tics, neuroses, cartoonish gestures, catchphrases, and so on. They don't always behave with forethought; consciousness and rationalism don't always rule their actions. Dickens - as far as I'm concerned - is much more realistic than Eliot, or Trollope.

But none of this stops people accusing Dickens of caricature (as if it's a bad thing) and of being unrealistic. And I've realised that it's something one has to watch out for when writing a "fictional" novel. You have to persuade people that what you're saying is possible in the so-called real world. In a memoir, on the contrary, because it's assumed that you're talking truth - whether or not you are - you can be as outrageous as you like. You can talk about bizarre, outlandish, weird situations and people. You can describe the most unlikely scenarios. You can be as over-the-top as you like ... and all because memoirs are assumed to be "true," however out-of-the-ordinary the experiences you describe. It's all a question of genre.

And the novel genre demands something different. Ironically, our culture demands that a fictional work be MORE, not less, realistic than a true one. In writing a novel, you're supposed to be moderate, talk about situations which are immediately recognisable to everyone - just do not be too outrageous, or you won't be believed. Tone down the characters' oddities, tone down the strange things that happen to them, take real life and add water: this often seems to be the unwritten rule of fiction writing.

But I've not yet decided whether I'm going to accept it. I'm not yet sure I want to write a novel which doesn't, or doesn't quite, reflect the surreality and grotesqueness of everyday life in modern-day U.K. I think I might just carry on regardless, trying to describe a reality which, frankly, does a great job of exaggerating itself.

New website

2008-07-22T21:45:00.003+01:00

Do have a look at our new website, which is being designed:

http://jonnyandmaria.googlepages.com

... it'll be finished soon (as far as any website is ever finished).

Historical novels

2008-07-08T20:38:00.003+01:00

I've recently finished reading an historical novel - set in the early twentieth century - by a very well-known novelist, who will remain nameless for the sake of this little blog entry. It was a good read, and the product of a quite remarkable level of research, in the best sense of that word: here was someone who clearly knew the subject from the inside. The sheer command of details, facts, names, places, dates, geography and language was virtuosic, and took my breath away (I simply don't have the patience for that kind of research). In fact, at times, the level of detail was rather overwhelming for a reader.

So, in all sorts of ways, this was a brilliant piece of historical writing, where the history and the story intertwined in complex ways.

But something bothered me about it all the way through - something niggled about the whole novel. And gradually I realised what it was: the command of history, yes, was incredible, but it rather swamped the story and the characters. And now I think this is one of the dangers of the form: in a historical novel, the novel part (the characters, story, etc.) should still predominate over the history (the facts, details, etc.). It's all too easy to write a historical novel where the history is what is important - but in a novel, it's individuals which matter, not great historical movements, economic forces or mass hysterias.

The danger of the historical novel is that the novelist has an historical thesis first, and a story with characters second. In this case, the characters become merely subservient to the historical thesis, to the historical point the author wants to make. The characters become mere examples of wider historical movements. And then it is no longer a novel, but a historical treatise with fictionalised illustrations.

Novels (I think) are about individuals, and individuals not as examples, but as themselves. The amazing and still-scandalous idea behind the novel form is that individuals matter in the grand scheme of things - that individuals aren't just examples of the masses, but may stand against the masses; that, rather than being mere examples of historical movements, individuals might swim against the tides of history, might try and break out of their particular moments, might try and change their historical moments. Of course, in most novels (especially nineteenth-century novels), the individuals fail, or succeed only partly. But the point is still made: this individual was special, this individual mattered, this individual wasn't just a personification of the wider forces around him or her.

Otherwise, why bother writing novels? Why not just write historical textbooks?

Twins Listening to Nielsen

2008-06-21T16:46:00.004+01:00

Now, the other day, the twins and I were all listening to Carl Nielsen's Symphony no.4, The Inextinguishable. Judging by the lack of howling, the twins certainly seemed to rate Nielsen above nappy changing; given the lack of contented glugs-glug-glugs, Nielsen isn't as popular with one-month-olds as bottles of milk. So, Nielsen rates somewhere between nappy-changing and milk, which is fair enough.

This afternoon, I tried Valentin Silvestrov. He rated lower on the nappy scale: Rosalind didn't seem to mind him - like one doesn't mind a fly buzzing round one's head - but Miranda seemed positively annoyed. In fact, during one of the less discordant passages, she threw up. All I can say is, as a very amateur musician myself, I'd be pleased if someone threw up to my music. At least it's a reaction, and it's better than polite indifference. Music as emetic: you don't see that very often at the Proms.

Sibelius and Brahms weren't vomit-inducing, though I noticed that Miranda had one of her "bowel-movement" expressions during the great passcaglia at the end of Brahms's Fourth. But then, maybe that says something about the nature of that great finale. Maybe Miranda's going to be a great music critic in the future.

Twins

2008-06-09T16:36:00.003+01:00

Some of these photos are a bit blurry, but, given sleep deprivation, "blurry" is how one experiences much of the world at the moment ....

Miranda Anna Taylor, looking like she's about to say something important

Jonathan's mother and Rosalind Marilla Taylor

Rosalind Marilla Taylor

Maria and Miranda Anna Taylor
Rosalind and Miranda in the intensive care unit
Jonathan and Miranda

Maria and Rosalind

Miranda
Jonathan's mum and Rosalind on the great return home (aka The Great N.H.S. Escape)

Miranda in her new home

Intensive care

2008-05-20T22:40:00.005+01:00

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.

Babies

2008-05-19T23:21:00.002+01:00

Miranda Anna Taylor (5lbs) and Rosalind Marilla Taylor (2lbs and 9ozs) born on Thursday the 15 May 2008 ....

Above: Rosalind

Rosalind again

Miranda

Rosalind shortly after birth

Miranda shortly after birth

Hospitals

2008-05-19T22:52:00.003+01:00

Welcome to the National Horror Service, here to provide you with all your horror needs, from gothic to slasher, from psychological terror to gore-fest, from Kafka to Dante, from Poe to Lovecraft, from Ring to King. Specialities include:

undead staff, zombified by lack of sleep, paperwork, jobsworthery and regulations
limbo wards, where you can effectively be buried alive on a trolley for hours, even days if you're lucky
rampant viruses and infections, better than anything on 28 Days Later or Masque of the Red Death
unnecessary Dr. Moreau-ish pain, caused (for example) by moving you from hospital to hospital the day after a big operation
mismanagement and bureaucracy to make Franz Kafka weep
Cormanesque comedy-horror, where surgeons talk about Chinese food whilst slicing you in two
starvation, when someone forgets to feed you for hours and hours and hours
drug-induced trips, when drugs are mixed up or forgotten or given unnecessarily to medicate problems which just need care, love, attention
ghosts, otherwise known as ignored, starved, patronised and abandoned old people
the feeling that no-one ever listens to you, can't even hear you screaming
haunted houses (aka hospitals) full of cobwebs, ghost-like patients, dirt, stupidity, idiocy, malaise, regulations, mismanagement, neglect ....

The National Horror Service: why rent a horror movie when you can live one?

English cuisine

2008-05-12T22:21:00.004+01:00

Chips get a bad press, I think. In fact, I think that English cuisine gets a bad press. Personally, I think we have some of the most wonderful food in the world: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips, steak and chips, Balti and chips, spam, spam, spam and chips - these dishes are rather wonderful, and, along with Edward Elgar and Charles Dickens, are among the few things that inspire a certain patriotism in my knees (the organ of patriotism is definitely the knees).

As I say, English cuisine gets a bad and unfair press; however, there's a reason for this. Fish and chips can be a transcendent experience; but it can also be unbelievably disgusting. English cuisine, like English weather, is remarkably adaptive: Sunday lunch can be a substitute for church, or a visit to the crypt. Fish and chips can be a heavenly pub lunch washed down with beer in the sun, or it can be, erm, well, hospital food.

Yesterday, Maria passed me a hospital chip. She's been having hospital chips now for over two weeks. This was the first time I tasted one. This was also the last time I tasted one. It tasted like socks. Dead socks. Dead socks left on the floor for two weeks. Dead socks left on an unhoovered floor for two weeks after a disgusting party.

Oh my goodness, it was unbelievably awful.

So, we've all been exercised by the Jamie-Oliver-save-school-dinners campaign - which is all well and good - but hospitals still serve dead socks to patients. Healthy eating is now promoted in schools, but in the places where health is meant to matter, dead socks are still acceptable. In fact, hospital patients are allowed to eat dead socks morning, noon and night. Dead socks are served in maternity wards, cancer wards, and - believe it or not - heart disease wards.

It's great that dead socks are now less popular in schools. But at least in schools you can go home. In hospitals, there's no going home - there's no getting out for much of the time. So if dead socks are on the menu morning, noon and night, you'll have to eat dead socks morning, noon and night.

Interestingly, as a postscript, we managed to get out yesterday to the hospital restaurant, which is run by the same (how do we put this without getting sued?) corporation. And there, for a few quid, you can buy chips which taste slightly better than dead socks. So it's not that the corporation is incapable of half-decent chips. It's that patients - the people who really need healthy, decent, well-balanced food - don't pay so don't matter, and can therefore put up with the bargain-basement-you-don't-pay-so-you-have-to-suffer version of English cuisine.

Of course, the fact that the patients do pay is by the by.

Local Elections and Labour

2008-05-06T23:37:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, Maria and I were chatting over a hospital meal about (of all things) Labour's disastrous local election results. The conversation was animated because there's an element of schadenfreude here: as far as I'm concerned, the authoritarian thugs who run this country deserved what they got.

But that's by the by. Specifically, what Maria and I were talking about was Labour's explanation for the results, which amounts to one word: the ECONOMY. Everything boils down to this. Every single Mouthpiece of Sauron who's spoken up after Labour's defeat on behalf of the government - every single over-paid flunky who's risen to obscurity in Gordon Brown's cabinet - comes out with the same "spinned" (spun) explanation of what has happened: people are dissatisfied with the state of the ECONOMY at the moment - i.e. at the price of petrol / bread / baked beans - and they want someone to deal with it. When, in their infinite wisdom, Labour have dealt with it, then the voters will return by the million.

This is rather brilliant as an explanation and as political spin: it informs people retrospectively why they were disgruntled, in the hope that those people will trundle away and say "Ah, yes, that was why I was disgruntled." It is a way of reducing people's disgruntlement to a manageable unit which can be gradually eliminated - which is much more containable than a generalised, diffusive disgruntlement and feeling that lots of things are wrong, but no one is quite sure what.

It's also a subtle version of what Labour do every day: tell people what they are thinking, why they are unhappy with the state of things. People don't quite know what they're thinking - so the Labour logic goes - so we need to "help" them. We know better than them what they're really thinking, so we can instruct them, guide them.

No doubt this all stems from the old left-wing ideas of false consciousness and ideology - those old notions that the people don't really know what they want, what they think, but the leaders / the state / the government / the party / Karl Marx's representatives on Earth (please delete as appropriate) do. As I get older, more and more I think this deeply damaging and deeply authoritarian ideology (and it is itself an ideology) lies at the root of all left-wing politics, from New Labour to Old Labour to radical feminism to Socialist Worker to the green lobby to Ken Livingstone to northern councils and so on and so forth.

I hasten to add here that, as everyone knows, I'm no true-blue Tory - God forbid. Thatcherism and its predecessors espoused other forms of authoritarianism (despite claims of laissez-faire capitalism and free-trade - never trust anyone whose claims include the words "free-trade"), many of them more outwardly, physically violent than the mental violence of New Labour.

But at least the Tories - in their most liberal, old-fashioned, inept incarnations - pretend to uphold individual liberty, whatever that means (the liberty to make money at someone else's expense, the liberty to starve). Labour don't even pretend. Instead, they determinedly tell us what to do, what to think, what to believe all the time. They determinedly believe that they (the party) know best, and that anyone else who disagrees is not only wrong, but morally wrong. This is a form of religious fundamentalism, of self-righteous sanctimoniousness, of ethical conviction. Anyone who disagrees needs to be forced to agree (at C.C.T.V.-point), and will go to hell if they don't.

It never strikes New Labourites (and here I mean the cabinet, not the back-benchers) that maybe one of the reasons that people voted against them in the local elections is that they are thoroughly bored with sanctimoniousness, with moralising, with being told what to do, what to think. It never strikes New Labourites that maybe, just maybe, they might be wrong on some points and the people right (erm, Iraq?). It never strikes Labourites that telling people why they voted against the party might just be adding salt into the wound. No, it never strikes them - not for a moment - that they might, for once, actually listen to people, actually ask them why they voted against the government.

Just back from hospital

2008-05-04T23:17:00.003+01:00

Hospitals are strange places - sealed worlds, in which nothing happens for hours, and then someone comes along, flicks through some notes and nonchalantly announces the Last Day of Judgement, or that there's nothing wrong with you and you can go home. "Hello," says someone who you've never met before, "oh look, you're going to go to hell today," or "Hello," says someone who you vaguely recognise from a previous "Hello," "I'm afraid yesterday's registrar got it wrong - you're not going to hell, but heaven, i.e. out of here."

It is all a bit too much like St. Peter at the gates of heaven: they flick through your paperwork, through files of test results, notes from other Recording Angels, scribbles by cross nurses - all of which you're not allowed to see - and then pronounce your Doom: hell or heaven, up or down, ward 1 or 101, bed rest or operating theatre, should I stay or should I go?

Thankfully, Final Judgement was postponed today (though it was threatened by an over-enthusiastic-locum-St. Peter), and I'm back at home now, still in Limbo and very tired. Doom is postponed - like the late trains I caught - and is probably rather annoyed. I see him (I'm sure Doom is a him) staring out of a train window into the rain, tutting furiously. For once I hope the train is very, very late. Heaven or hell - they can both wait for now.

More on "relevance"

2008-04-26T22:40:00.002+01:00

... having said all that (in the last post) about Shakespeare and relevance, I've just found this, and think it's rather funny / good:

Literary "relevance"

2008-04-26T22:00:00.003+01:00

Have got ten minutes to fill between hospital visits, so thought I'd rant about something - it's always therapeutic. What neither hospitals nor G.P.s ever tell you is that Alf Garnett was the most physically healthy character ever invented - ranting is good for your health.

Anyway, this morning, before toddling off to the "orspital," I saw on the BBC News an article about a guy who's released a book which retells Shakespeare's plays in "contemporary" language (e.g. using text-speak, street slang, etc. etc.). Now, this has been done many thousands of times before, and I've got nothing against it, per se. There's nothing new in Shakespeare studies (whatever the academics say), and no doubt Will isn't turning in his grave (innit). One possible reaction to the story is: so what?

Another reaction is the slight nagging worry about the explanation given for the new book - i.e. that it will enhance Shakespeare's "relevance." Shakespeare's olde-worlde language is a bit long in the tooth, so it needs brushing up, Ali G-ing, and selling (selling being the operative word) to a new generation.

I have two problems with this common point of view: firstly, it is patronising towards the young. It assumes that the young have less capacity to appreciate Shakespeare than previous generations. It assumes that they can only talk, understand and appreciate idioms of their own time and contexts. It assumes, in short, that they are stupider than people of previous ages.

Secondly, this point of view is patronising towards Shakespeare. It assumes that Shakespeare wrote "timeless" stories and scenarios (the one thing, in fact, that he didn't - as is well known, most of the stories are not his own); but his language is archaic, obsolete, irrelevant and out of place in the modern world.

The problem is that, without his language, Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare. Shakespeare IS his language (after all, as I've said, his stories and many of his characters are often not his own). Get rid of his language - substitute a faux-contemporary idiom - and you have precisely nothing. You certainly don't have the Shakespeare of Hamlet's soliloquies, Othello's anguish, Prospero's musings, Anthony and Cleopatra's love-makings ....

And "relevance"? Why on Earth do people bang on and on about relevance, particularly with Shakespeare (but also with Mozart, Blake, Beethoven, Shaw, Tennyson, Dickens and anyone else you care to mention who has surely proved over and over again that he or she doesn't need special pleading)? The Arts Nobbling Councils (as Douglas Adams called them), the LEAs, and the government education strategies of the world bang on and on about relevance, whilst relevance itself trundles along, taking no notice, humming a Mozartian tune.

What these people don't seem to realise is that relevance isn't about forcing Shakespeare into contemporary contortions. Relevance isn't about making Shakespeare relevant to now. I mean, who wants to be relevant to now? Now is crap. Let's try and transcend now, imagine a better now, imagine a world beyond, before, or after now. Art that's relevant to now will get precisely nowhere: it will be forgotten tomorrow, along with the thousands of anti-gun-crime, just-say-no, don't-have-unprotected-sex-or-binge-drink musicals churned out by committees and funded by government quangos.

Art shouldn't be relevant to now. Art, as William Blake realised, should try and destroy now because (frankly) it's rubbish. Art should reach out beyond relevance. In fact, the very best art, the art of geniuses like Shakespeare, turns the question of relevance inside out: rather than making Shakespeare relevant for us, we should make ourselves relevant for Shakespeare - we should try and make ourselves worthy of him. To put it another way, rather than asking what Shakespeare can do for us, we should ask what we can do for Shakespeare ....

Hospital reading

2008-04-14T16:58:00.004+01:00

What works well as hospital reading? I've yet to find anything at all.

I've been spending a lot of time recently in hospitals, both during the day and in the evening - hours upon hours, in fact. And you would have thought, given that amount of empty time, that you might find something useful to do with it. I mean, it's not as if you see the medical staff for more than one minute in every ninety; and there are absolutely no other distractions, apart from a dreary nowhere-view across Leicester, and the odd visit to the toilet. There's not even any television, because you have to pay extra for that (something I never understood about television: shouldn't they be paying you to watch that stuff?).

So, as I say, you would have thought that you would do something useful, instead of staring into nowhereness, drumming fingers, dozing, pacing, yawning, pressing buttons you shouldn't just to see what happens, more pacing, humming the complete works of Mahler, etc. etc. etc. But no: however hard you try, it's just about impossible to read, or do anything constructive, in a hospital environment. You take a book along hopefully, but you never average more than one page per five hours.

I think there are various reasons for this. The first is that, in hospitals, the nothing that happens for hours is always filled with a vague sense that something might happen any moment. You can never predict whether it will be ten hours or ten micr0-seconds till the next visit by a nurse or doctor; and you can never quite predict whether that visit will be to send one home, or to do something much less pleasant. You can never predict when the tests will be ready, when this or that procedure will start or finish, so you are absolutely in Limbo. And Limbo is not a good place to concentrate on reading a book. How can you possibly concentrate when you know that sometime in the next microsecond or hour or day someone may or may not come and do something or tell you something that may or may not be important?

Indeed, another thing that ruins concentration in hospitals on anything but the most desultory of activities is the nature of hospital time. Hospitals are strange, parallel universes in which minutes crawl by, but hours race by. You sit there, waiting and yawning, and the minute hand on the clock seems to tick backwards. Then you look again, and four hours have suddenly ticked by in one tock. Where did they go? Who said they were allowed to leave? What did you do with them? What did the doctors do with them? Are they hiding under the bed?

And: why did you only manage to read four lines of your novel in that time?

I suppose one possible explanation is that, in hospitals, novels don't seem that important any more, and it's hard to concentrate on someone else's (fictional) life when your own, or the lives of loved ones, are so much more pressing.

Another possible explanation is that I shouldn't be thinking about reading anyway.

Novels and memoirs

2008-03-30T20:38:00.003+01:00

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.

Book Launch Photos

2008-03-14T17:19:00.004Z

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).

New Labour and the Proms

2008-03-06T13:12:00.007Z

How reassuring that Margaret Hodges, so-called Minister of Culture, has come in for a huge amount of criticism following her attack on the Proms. There's a particular good letter from the cellist Steven Isserlis in The Guardian today, which about sums it up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/06/politicsandthearts.musicnews?gusrc=rss&feed=news

Amongst other things, Hodges said: “All too often our sectors are not at their best when embodying common belongings themselves. The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I’m thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease with this.”

Now, I think the Proms as a whole is a fantastic festival. As regards the Last Night, well, it's a bit of fun and (in my nostalgic old age) I don't object to Patriotism as much as I used to, as long as it doesn't slide into crude Nationalism.

But the idea that Art might be there just to be enjoyed "as a bit of fun" is anathema to New Labour. Art is there to promote New Labour thinking - a certain kind of British integration posited on authoritarian inclusiveness.

This, to my mind, demonstrates a typical New Labour attitude towards culture. Culture, for this government, is there for the following reasons:

1. to stop people stealing cars

2. to stop poor white people stealing cars

3. to stop poor minority ethnic people stealing cars.

Government policies on the Arts are all founded on these three central tenets. Music exists in order to stop people stealing cars. Literature exists to express the consequences of stealing cars. Plays should all feature someone stealing a car and facing the consequences. If said plays can also feature the consequences of gun crime and knife crime, all the better.

This is the utilitarian, gradgrindist world of New Labour Arts Strategy: the Arts are there to make people more amenable New Labour subjects, who will not steal cars, fire guns or stab people. More or less every single Arts and Culture-funding body in the country now has a form which you have to fill in to show how your music / literature / stage play will help poor, misguided people from doing wrong.

This is about as far from an Aestheticist or "Arts for Art's Sake" attitude as it is possible to get. It's also a long way from what the Arts are really about. Gosh, imagine telling all this to Richard Wagner - "Yes, Herr Wagner, 'The Ring of the Nibelung' is all very well, but at times it seems to promote knife crime (when Siegfried stabs Fafner), teenage rebellion (in Brunnhilde's misguided attitude towards her father, and Siegfried's attitude to Mime), and even stealing (in Siegfried's appropriation of the ring). Can't you write something, well, a bit more socially responsible next time? Otherwise, Herr Wagner, you're going to have your Arts Council funding cut, and be given an ASBO."

Real art, real culture can be violent, anti-social, apocalyptic, dangerous, subversive. Real art and culture might, in some contexts, promote the stealing of cars rather than the other way around. Real art and culture doesn't obey the programme of any ruling class - be that ruling class bourgeois, Conservative, New Labour, Communistic or Fascist. No signed-up, single-minded, hood-winked flunky of any political party will ever be able to accept this. Real art is anarchistic in the widest possible sense - it escapes being pinned down to one meaning, one role, one policy, and flies dangerously free of fixed political agendas - even those of the creator him or herself.

To retutn to the Last Night of the Proms and one of its famous moments, what ignorant New Labour flunkies don't and can't understand is that Elgar's famous Pomp and Circumstance March no.1 isn't just jingoistic tub-thumping - it's also other things as well. It's also aspiration towards a utopian vision of England that's never been realised; it's also a pastoral and nostalgic memory of an England that never was in the first piece; and, as many people have recognised, the dying fall at the end of the famous march rather subverts the jubilation of the words which have been imposed upon the music.

Conversations with writers

2008-02-10T18:14:00.004Z

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

A Tabloid Pravda

2008-02-09T11:54:00.000Z

Everyone is having fun at the moment "bashing the [arch]bishop" (to quote The Sun), because of his supposed advocacy of Sharia Law in the U.K. According to paranoid reports, Rowan Williams wants us to have public executions, stonings of adulterers, floggings and women chained to kitchen sinks. Newspapers have set up premium phone-lines for you to ring in if you want him sacked. Millions are ringing in voting against him - millions of people who, otherwise, have no affiliation with the Church of England. Never mind, knowing premium rate phone numbers, their votes won't be counted anyway.

Amongst all this hoo-hah, bullying, hysteria, jumping on bandwagons, New Labourish point-scoring, David Cameronish point-scoring, Biblical and tabloidical gnashing of teeth, there is a black hole in the middle of the coverage: the archbishop's actual speech. Everything we hear is second-hand slaggings-off of the archbishop's speech; everything we hear is everything but the speech, which we can only experience filtered through other people. The one thing we're not allowed to see or hear is what the archbishop actually said. That, no doubt, would muddy the issue, befuddle a good story, thinks the press, and the supposedly-more-high-brow media follow suit. Neither in The Star nor in the broadsheets nor on BBC News (more high-brow my foot - all of them are tabloids, really) are we allowed to see the actual full text of the speech the archbishop gave.

Instead, we just hear endless people lining up to gain votes / popularity / readers / viewers / free lunches by attacking what he said. Are we to believe that these people have read and digested the speech that we're not allowed to see, and have come to informed opinions based on the evidence, or (what is more likely) are we to suspect that they haven't seen or heard it either? In this respect, what we're hearing on the T.V. aren't even second-hand reports about the speech - they're third- or fourth- or twentieth-hand.

Now, without being over-the-top here, isn't this weird, twentieth-hand version of reality a form of totalitarian censorship? People can't be trusted to make up their own minds on the speech - they have to have their minds made up for them by idiot columnists and ravenous BBC carrion. People can't be allowed to have access to reality itself; reality has to be sifted, filtered and distilled for them. The reality (in this case, the archbishop's speech) is lost in the welter of stupidities, popularity contests and scandal-hunters. Again, without sounding over-the-top, isn't this all rather similar to what the media does in countries where it is state-run - i.e. filter and skew the truth so that it fits in with whatever political agenda the state needs it to fit in with? How can we go around condemning the Chinese press, looking down on the propoganda-filled papers of certain Middle Eastern states, and old Communist states, when our own press and media are themselves a form of propoganda, refusing us access to truth or reality - when all we've substituted for Pravda in the U.K. is a bargain-basement, intellectual-hating,lowest-common-denominator, scandal-mongering, near-murderous, god-forsaken, rabid, rampant, omnipotent, omnipresent tabloid Pravda which conspires against anyone who wants to be really informed about what is happening in the world?

And in the middle of this, a guy who is an intellectual making intellectual points is savaged near to death. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with him: I'm just saying I'd like us to be given the chance to know what he said before our minds are made up for us. But no, we couldn't possibly be allowed to get to grips with complexity, ambiguity, ambivalence, in our news. No ambivalence wanted here, thank you, and particularly no intellectualisms.

In this climate, I'm afraid, the only real figures who can survive in the public world are journalists, spin doctors, Blairesque politicians and lawyers - that is, people who know how to filter the truth. Anyone with integrity or intellect beware - you will be misquoted, misrepresented and eaten alive. Anyone who believes that the truth may be complex, ambiguous, worthy of debate, for goodness sake, stay in your garret and don't come out.

A paradoxical dedication

2008-01-31T19:47:00.000Z

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.

Blog by a friend

2008-01-30T18:01:00.000Z

Here is a great blog by a friend of mine who's chronicling her recent move to India:

http://www.mrspoppadum.blogspot.com

the state of the nation

2008-01-20T14:32:00.000Z

There are two things you should never do. Number one: never watch the news before you go to bed; secondly never read a paper or watch the news on a Sunday morning. Why, 'cause it will do your head in that's why. The other morning Gary Newlove's wife delievered a very eloquent speech about the murder of her husband by three evidently deranged young people who were looking for trouble. There would be very few people who wouldn't feel sympathetic to this woman and her family. But it wasn't her or her sentiments that irritated me. It was the policeman afterwards. Having just delievered a speech about the many aspects of our culture and society that could lead to such a tragedy, the recording of Mrs Newlove's speech was followed by a policeman who claimed the murder was caused exclusively by alcohol. Apparently the miracle cure was to push the age of being legally able to drink alcohol to 21 and not 18. Two of the murderers were 16 and 17 anyway so what good did that do anyway. Mrs Newlove's local MP said that 'political decisions' were not to blame. Well how comforting that must be to be told the politicians have washed their hands of your husband's murder. Obvioulsy the 'Political decisions' made about anti-social behaviour didn't help Gary Newlove very much.
This morning another very eloquent lady appeared on some token chat show. Well the BBC have to tick a few boxes and say they show some interest in issues don't they? The woman's son had been murdered by a group of young idiots. She made the case that young people don't live in real communitities anymore, they live in virtual communities. This means that rather than have a respect for the people around you they idolise people and things who don't actually feature in their lives like guns or excessive amounts of money and material goods. There's no nurturing or care in the upbringing of these children. However I was raised on a council estate in London and I didn't kill anyone, there are plenty of young people who are very sensible and the minority of thuggish, insolent people overshadow them. Was anyone listening to that woman? Will anyone lsiten to Mrs Newlove? Whenever the government say they will make 'an enquiry' this invariably means that you'll never hear about it again or just hear what other people want you to hear, e.g. ban alcohol etc, no junk food, let's have citizenship lessons at school! etc. The media, politicians and the police are using other people's miseries as a platform to put across their own agendas. Do you really believe that if we voted for another government anything would change? More ex-public school kids and jumped up councillors telling people in deprived communities how they should think, eat, live etc and 'vote for me'. Will it save people like Gary Newlove? MT

Tragi-comedies

2008-01-15T19:42:00.000Z

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.

Yusuf Juma

2008-01-09T17:15:00.000Z

I want to post this blog entry in support of Yusuf Juma, a poet from Uzbekistan, who has recently been imprisoned by the Uzbek authorities for his opinions and writings. The following articles are about the poet, and are deeply shocking:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/21/asia/AS-GEN-Uzbekistan-Dissident-Poet.php

http://freecommonwealth.blogspot.com/2007/12/courage-of-yusuf-juma.html

I would just like to express my warm support for Juma's cause, and hope the situation can be resolved and he will be released as soon as possible.

Jonathan's New Year's Resolutions

2008-01-04T17:13:00.000Z

A Hery Vappy Yew Near to everyone. Generally speaking, I don't go in for New Year's Resolutions, Revelations, Revolutions, Ridiculations, Recitations or Recantations. After all, most people's New Year's Resolutions are (a) eminently predictable, and (b) identical, year in and out, and therefore rather depressing. Resolutions are proof, if any were needed, that history is as circular as it is linear: every year we promise the same things, just as (on a very different scale) every war is meant to be the war that ends all wars, and every revolution promises the millennium and ends up delivering tyranny.

But, for what they're worth, here goes:

1. Learn to drive (same resolution as last year).
2. Drink less (same resolution as last year, though since I actually ended up drinking more last year, this should be achieveable).
3. Write more (easy, since I wrote so little last year) and better (not so easy).
4. Learn how to shave properly, after 19 years of cutting myself and not the stubble.
5. Stop shouting at the News on TV. After all, it never seems to listen, rude machine that it is.

Less of this in 2008 ....

The Ghost of Christmas Past

2007-12-23T21:35:00.000Z

Christmas has always been about routines. There are certain things you do and certain places you go at Christmas, but for the last few years these routines have disintegrated somewhat. This is due to time passing, marriage and family dynamics altering, but it was not always so. Christmas was so predictable that I could describe the events of the season in detail in the middle of August; let's start from Christmas Eve.

1. Emergency shopping visit, xmas Eve: usually dragged round shops to catch early price reductions and buy essential last minute broccoli.

2. Leaving the flat to stay at my aunty's in Kentish Town: this was a fairly comic and rdiculous affair. At soon as night began to fall my father would get tetchy and pace around organising a simple 45 minute trip as if it were a military exercise. He would pack everything into his wheeled shopping bag, this included passports, cash, a Turkey, whiskey, birth certificates, lemons, pyjamas, a plastic bag with toothbrushes and paste, a spare jumper or two, soap and a luxury tin of chocolate biscuits. I would shove a few sundries into a bag of my own.

My father's logic was that it was far safer to travel with these items on the underground, train and the streets of North London than to leave them locked away at home. My father had a running battle with invisible muggers and burglars and he had another quirky habit which he practicised in the name of security. He would ask - no demand - that me and my mother left the flat first and then 15 minutes later he would leave the building as well. This was to put potentially passing burglars off the scent; clearly they would be planning to break in if they had realised the house would be empty. Instead it must have given the impression that me and my mother had been kicked out on Christmas Eve; heading towards the local train station with our belongings and a befuddled expression on our faces. The befuddlement would come from that fact that my father had intricately described each stage of the journey to the station and we would have to follow these directions.

All this before we'd even got to the station...well I'm going to stop typing now, simply because this is getting too long winded. Well you should had tried living through it...perhaps I will share the rest in another installment.

Christmas and consumerism

2007-12-23T21:08:00.000Z

I was just wandering round Sainsbury's yesterday amidst the pre-Christmas melee. It was about as bad as you would expect: an asexual orgy of frozen turkeys, eight-feet-deep trays of sprouts, and more broccoli than you could eat in four lifetimes (especially if you don't like broccoli). The trolleys were like dodgems, and were all full of food which would probably soon be dumped - either before or after being eaten.

So, everything ship shape and as expected. The more you consume at Christmas, the better the Christmas will be - so the illogic of modern capitalism goes. In fact, as I wandered around (purposely annoying the more rabid shoppers with my laid-back pace and whistling of Aida) the supermarket, it struck me that consumerism is locked in an indirectly proportional relationship to meaning. The more we consume - and particularly the more conspicuously we consume - the less the event for which we're consuming means. The more we've consumed as a society every Christmas - in terms of booze, food, t.v. and presents - the less Christmas means in a spiritual sense. The more the cost of weddings has spiralled, the less they've come to mean in a social sense - the divorce figures prove that. The more ostentatious funerals are, the less we really think about the spiritual side of them. As I say, the more money we spend as a society on something, the less that something means.

None of this comes as a surprise. Everyone knows that the most over-the-top weddings are often the hollowest; everyone knows that no one's interested in the true pagan - let alone Christian - meaning of Christmas any more, despite everyone spending far more cash on the festive season that at any other time in history.

But what's noticeable is that the mathematical formula:

SPIRITUAL MEANING% =

100

________________

CONSUMERISM%

... brings about a certain desperation in the human race, when the variable CONSUMERISM% is in the ascendant. Hence the people dashing round the supermarket. Hence the desperate turkey-buying. Hence the desire to pig out even more than we in the West normally pig out.

Not that pigging out should be underrated. After all, if it's all we've got left - if SPIRITUAL MEANING% really is at a fairly low ebb - then we might as well give in disgracefully and join in the pigging and outing.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls ...

2007-12-19T21:48:00.000Z

.... what a beautiful but simple song. I remember this movie from when I was a kid, and the opera from when I was much older. It took me a couple of years to realise they were one in the same.

Didn't know, though, that (according to someone on the net, which is the same as saying Chinese whispers) orchestras are reluctant to play "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls." Supposedly, there's a superstition that after an orchestra has played it, one member will die within a month. I wonder where that superstition comes from?

Video nation et al

2007-12-17T18:13:00.001Z

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

Abuse of the word "revolutionary"

2007-12-15T19:24:00.000Z

I was giving a lecture the other day about Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I found myself calling it "revolutionary" as a piece of radio drama. I couldn't think of any other word - "radical," "original," "path-breaking" didn't quite encompass what I meant; but then nor did "revolutionary." The English language is sometimes an incredibly subtle musical instrument on which one can play everything from the greatest symphonies and operas to the cheapest, nastiest pop songs. But it has its blind spots, and I think the word "revolutionary" is one of them: it's a crude, catch-all word for lots of divergent meanings.

For example, you often see documentaries - normally on BBC2 or BBC4 - on which some fourth-rate celebrity or cultural critic (so-called) is seen sitting next to lots of books declaring that this programme or that film or this celebrity or that pop song was "revolutionary." The person involved generally realises that he or she is only going to have ten seconds in the sun, so he or she has to come out with a startling soundbite .... a soundbite which generally involves the word "revolutionary" in it: "Oh yes, 1970s feminism was revolutionary," "Oh, indeed, the Sex Pistols were revolutionary," "It's obvious to us now that flaired trousers were revolutionary," "Germaine Greer's / Erica Jong's / Salman Rushdie's / Delete where appropriate's first publication was revolutionary," "Anita Roddick's Body Shop was revolutionary," "The invention of the bra - now that was a truly revolutionary moment."

The one thing that's never mentioned on these kinds of shows, of course, is actual revolution. God forbid. What is revolutionary, according to these shows, is everything except revolution. Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, move over: what's really revolutionary these days is Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, or a piece of lacy underwear.

Now, I'm not saying this is definitely a bad thing. A revolution based on lingerie would, no doubt, be preferable to a revolution based on the murder of the bourgeoisie, induced mass-famine, civil war, terror. But what I am saying is that the word has gradually lost most of its meaning over the last few years, and now gets rolled out whenever anyone is talking about something that is vaguely new. The word "revolution" is no longer the preserve of the vitriolic left-winger - and that's no bad thing - but has become almost meaningless, because it has been colonised by consumerism, middle- and low-brow cultural criticism, capitalism, and daft readings of modern history in which anything vaguely new marks a radical break with the past.

Moreover, these readings of modern history always assume that history is linear and progressive: the invention of the bra, Erica Jong's novel, 1970s feminism, the Sex Pistols were all revolutionary and liberatory moments in which the world got that bit better. Thank God for Erica Jong, they seem to say. Things before her were intolerable. How on earth did the poor benighted people manage?

What these readings ignore, of course, is the real meaning of the word "revolution," which is opposed to a smoothly linear, progressive version of history where things get better bit by bit. Revolutions are violent and radical breaks with a hopelessly corrupt past in favour of a bright new future. They do not fit in with a comforting "things-getting-better-bit-by-bit" version of history, and they certainly don't fit in with a consumerist, capitalist, middle- and low-brow cultural criticism.

Personally, I'd opt for a moritorium on all uses of the word "revolutionary" for the next ten or so years. The word sounds hollow and unconvincing from radical Marxists and BBC cultural critics alike. Why can't we admit that history doesn't get better bit by bit, and nor does it ever change violently and radically for the better? The most we can hope for is that it doesn't change violently and radically for the worse, and just trundles along at the pretty appalling level it's been at for the last two million years.

The Devil's Advocate's Thoughts for the Day

2007-12-05T19:29:00.000Z

Here are some meaningless epigrams for today, which I may or may not believe in (please delete as applicable):

Consumerism is like Medieval Christianity, in that it persuades us that every day may well be the last day of the world.

The jobsworth is Dr. Faustus minus ambition. Instead of selling his or her soul to the devil, the jobsworth just sells his or her soul to an institution.

Democracy never works because it's never been tried. The same could be said for liberalism.

Democracy and liberalism are impossibilities.

The human is the individual; the anti-human is the collective, of any and all kinds.

Marxism is capitalism plus authoritarianism.

Socialism is the abdication of social responsibility.

-isms are designed for people who can't think for themselves.

Feminism is the last of the grand narratives. It's a story told by capitalism to turn the other 50% of the population into wage-slaves.

Apathy is the new radicalism.

Reality is narrative, which is the same as saying that reality is fiction.

History is full of people who believe things, and history shows that they are always the most dangerous people.

All of the worst crimes in history are perpetrated by people following orders. The people giving the orders are neither here nor there. No one had to listen to them if they didn't want to.

Reality is narrative, which means that all epigrams - which, by definition, don't have a narrative - are unreal.

Writing as catharsis

2007-12-02T21:29:00.000Z

"Storytelling is always after the fact, and is always constructed over a loss."

(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."

On not writing a great novel...

2007-12-02T20:11:00.000Z

Pictured above...Santa writing the great Laplandian novel

Tis I again, after a bit of time off. I've been meandering around the house with various sickness symptoms caused by pregnancy. How come everyone is behaving like it's Christmas? Last time I checked there were twelve days and they don't start on December 2nd. The town was full of slavish shoppers purchasing everything in sight. Look I'm not down on Christmas, quite the opposite. I love the holiday season. One of the best things is that delicious period in between Christmas and New Year when time gets suspended and you can do your own thing, and everything is pleasant and xmassy. It's just that that time is not now, it's frustrating! Plus what's the deal with Epiphany? In other words where is it in this country? Other countries mark the day, our celebrations come down on Jan the 1st, even earlier sometimes.

As the more diligent readers of this blog will be aware, we've got cable. This means that you can watch 7 episodes of 'Only Fools and Horses' in a row if you so wish. Actually I like this programme because Del Boy is rather like my dad, well my dad's a Greek Cypriot version. The resemblance is uncanny, honest.
Normally I would not dream of parking myself on a sofa and staring at the tv but it's useful for pregancy sickness. The most ridculous thing is flicking through the channels, there are technically seven or eight hundred of the buggers. Let's do a flick...Scrubs, Takeshi's Kingdom, property programmes, Hugh Fernely-Wittingstall out with his upper class pals shooting passing partridges, Whose Line Is It Anyway? So it can be a Friday night in 1989 on a Sunday tea time. Cable obliterates time, you could watch Dallas at 3am if that's your bag, Tenko at breakfast, despite the fact that these were once prime-time shows but in the cable universe time is irrelevant. So despite my better judgement I sit and stare at the top 30 christmas TV moments. Yeah, writing the great English novel ain't going to happen tonight.

2007-12-01T10:15:00.000Z

Maria tells me I should raise the tone of the blog, and particularly the tone of my metaphors and similes. I promise to do so. In the meantime, to raise the tone in a general sense, here is some Gustav Mahler.

Cable TV

2007-12-01T09:51:00.000Z

We've just got cable t.v. Never had it before, because I think it's best to limit the amount of rubbish you allow in your house. I mean, people wouldn't invite more junk mail through their letter boxes, so why would you want more crap beamed to you through the television? Five channels of trash is quite enough, thank you. Sometimes, watching t.v. is no better than watching a poo revolving on a plinth. Everyone knows this, of course; but they believe that watching poo-on-a-plinth t.v. is mesmerically relaxing after a hard day's work.

Oddly enough, it seems to me that most t.v. channels also know that they're just pedalling poo on plinths. Even on the part of the t.v. channels themselves, there's little or no pretence any more that what they do isn't anything but crap. You can see this by the utter contempt with which they treat their own programmes and films: they talk over the titles, "tempting" you with what's coming next; they have running banners on top of the programmes, again telling you what's coming next Wednesday week; they start a serial and then forget about it after a few weeks and substitute something else; they cut scenes in the middle, slicing speeches in half, with commercial breaks; they don't even bother to differentiate commercial break from programme with a title screen; and commercials go on and on and on. There's no pretence on the part of most t.v. channels that the programmes are there first priority. They are absolutely up-front that it's the adverts which matter to them: after all, they might slice film scences awkwardly in half, but they'd never do that with the adverts themselves. Oh no, we can't annoy the sponsors, can we?

None of this should surprise or even annoy us. None of this should even bother us. It's our own fault for swallowing the lie that watching the t.v. is easier than listening to music or reading books or (God forbid) going outside. And again, we don't swallow the lie unconsciously - we're all totally aware that it's a lie at the same time as swallowing it whole. So it's our own fault that we're condemned to a hell of watching crap revolving on plinths for ever and ever and ever.

The Age of Hypocrisy

2007-11-26T19:04:00.001Z

'I fear we are a stupid people' (Thomas Carlyle).

If asked (which I haven't been) to characterise our age, I think I'd say it was The Age of Hypocrisy. Every age has its besetting sin, and ours (I think) is hypocrisy. Shame it's not lust or gluttony - that'd be more interesting. In fact, we're always being told by the Puritans of the world that lust and gluttony are our main sins - all those pictures of binge drinkers on the t.v. news suggest as much. But these images are themselves mere symptoms of a deeper sin: hypocrisy. After all, are we to believe that all the politicians and media whores who preach at us about binge drinking go home at weekends to read Middlemarch and drink Horlicks? No, they've more than likely been drinking and coke-ing it before, after and during the very news broadcast on which they tell us not to.

Shameless hypocrisy is ubiquitous in the modern age: the guy who declared war on Iraq is now Peace Envoy to the Middle East; the same government that talks about 'respect' invades other countries willy-nilly; alcohol companies produce adverts promoting 'drinking sensibly' (I mean, come off it); people who weren't good at being parents themselves run parenting classes; health and safety pretends to be about health and safety rather than 'please don't sue us'; people preach to us about carbon emissions whilst building more airports; top charity workers earn per week fifty times more than one of the people they're meant to help will do in a lifetime; ecologists drive and fly around telling everyone else not to drive and fly around; everyone seems to be preaching to everyone else about what they weren't good at in the first place.

And, of course, one of the most surreal forms of hypocrisy by which we are currently best is Christmas. Christmas, Christmas, Christmas: it's everywhere at the moment, and has been since October. Every shop window pretends to wish us a merry Christmas, every advert promises us a snowy heaven. For a start, let's be honest for a moment: snowy heavens don't happen any more. It's all a lie.

But it's a lie in a much more worrying sense: these days, Christmas is over before it's begun. Christmas starts in October, and starts to grind to a halt sometime in mid-December. My mother went to some department store last year in mid-December to buy some Christmas decorations. "Oh no," she was told, "don't be silly. That's well over now. No, of course we won't be buying more in. The season's been and gone." Most shops, at the very least, start the sales in the week before Christmas, and take all the Christmas decorations down on Christmas Eve. So Christmas is a peculiarly Derridean enterprise, in that it really is over before it's begun. By Christmas day, all that's left is to hand out the presents people couldn't afford, and eat all the food no one can really manage. The 25th December doesn't really exist as such any longer, let alone the other days of Christmas. I think this is spiritually, morally and emotionally unhealthy, maybe disastrous, for people in this country: everyone looking forward to something that doesn't exist.

Back in the 1970s, when "I were a lad," people and shops and churches alike at least pretended that Christmas consisted of twelve days. We sang 'The Twelve Days of Christmas,' didn't put the decorations up till twelve days before Christmas, and the shops didn't even re-open till a few days after Christmas. The shops never took down their decorations prematurely. They never seemed quite so exploitative or voracious.

Obviously, this was a different kind of untruth, in that the shops back then were still only interested in Christmas insofar as it fattened their pockets. They were only pretending to be interested in Christmas; they were only pretending to take part in the Festive Season and the twelve days so they could make money in a different way to the Christmas-Eve-is-the-end-of-everything, boom-and-bust, take-it-and-run, end-of-the-world capitalism of today. They thought they might make money over the whole twelve days of Christmas, selling treats, cashing in on people's seasonal goodwill. So it was just a different form of hypocrisy, spread over a different time span.

But maybe some forms of hypocrisy are better than others. If we have to live in the Age of Hypocrisy, perhaps it'd be better for the shops at least to pretend that they care about Christmas itself, and the whole of the Season, rather than bare-faced exploitation, in which Christmas is blatantly a money-making enterprise, and the hypocrisy is just an open secret. Otherwise, we might just as well give up all the snow-ridden lies about Christmas - we might just as well abandon the whole idea of a Festive Season - and just have a 'Financial Transactions Season,' in which we hand over lots of our cash to the shops in return for rubbish, which self-destructs at midnight on the 24th December.

(Thomas Carlyle, not Father Christmas)

Books for enemies

2007-11-25T11:04:00.000Z

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.

Thoughts from a Car

2007-11-23T20:31:00.000Z

Most days I like driving; not the actual mechanics of it but the opportunity it gives you to switch off. Yes I know that sounds dangerous, perhaps I don't mean it like that. I suppose I mean to say that all your energy goes into looking ahead and concentrating so hard that it becomes impossible to think about much else apart from what's ahead of you. Invariably it's white vans or some crazed person behind you trying to shunt you off the road.

Living in Leicestershire means not much public transport. In London I became a whizz at buses and underground trains and connections. That's how all London children grow up, judging each location and suburb by which buses go there or the location of the closest tube line. Nowadays I rely more on the car but I still get the odd train or bus. I listen to the radio alot and in the time honoured tradition I howl along at the top of my voice when a favourite song comes on. Today they played one of those camp 'plinky-plinky' 5os pop songs, 'She's Venus in blue jeans'. Hmm what a cultural mishmash thought I, keeping my eyes fixed on the road ahead. Then I had this thought. Ever since women have been wearing men's clothes their bodies have started looking like men's bodies. Okay, not everyone just the ones you get in the films and that, but still it's the ideal. You never saw Mae West in blue jeans, but after 1941 I doubt you ever saw the lady in her own flesh.

When I was a girl you had to wear skirts in church and I mean the 1980s-90s here. That's what the God of the Greek Orthodox religion said you had to wear, otherwise you were a man or something, an anomaly in the eyes of the lord. The church became a leggy fashion parade at Easter, all these young women swanning around with nyloned knees. You might as well have held a placard saying 'Hi, I'm marriage material for your son!' All the mothers looked smug. Oh yes, you weren't allowed to cross your legs when you were sitting down either. No I have no idea why either. I just dared to do it once when I was 19 and an old black-clothed widow had a go at me. It was apparently because it gave an opportunity to look up your crotch and that made you a whore...why not wear trousers? My theory was that they didn't want you to be comfortable, because then you might start doing your own thing. However, short skirts were okay, 1 or 2 inches above the knee was quite acceptable. When sitting, your thighs and knees had to be pressed together with an extremely strong imaginary glue. Actually I never went that short, I never really did much. I was one of these teenagers with this incredibly progressive ideas that you didn't dress for church as if you were going clubing.

Well what that has to do with driving down the A6 I don't know. But hey, maybe that's why driving is okay, you can do what you like with your legs, ballet like movements; slouches or merrily whorishly apart and only your steering wheel need know.

Anti-technology

2007-11-23T17:47:00.001Z

'Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills?'

(Charles Lamb, ‘The Superannuated Man’)

I don't know why I'm keeping a blog. After all, I'm hardly what you'd call a technocrat. Deep down, I believe it is every writer's job to be - at the very least - suspicious of technology. Ever since Romantics like Charles Lamb, it has been every writer's job to resist industry, technology, so-called 'progress;' and the internet should be no exception.

It seems fairly obvious to me that all technology of whatever kind is, at base, a matter of either sex or death. I'm not being Freudian here - or not just. I'm not just saying that all technology is propelled forwards by repressed impulses from the unconscious, from the twin Gods 'Eros' and 'Thanatos.' I'm not saying that precisely because these impulses aren't repressed, or concealed when it comes to technology. They're open secrets. Everyone knows (and knows consciously) that DVD technology, for example, was introduced for the porn industry, so people could cut quickly to the (ahem) good bits; everyone knows that the internet is 95% pornography, and the other 5%, consisting as it does of social networking sites and Friends Reunited, is basically an electronic knocking shop. On the other hand, everyone knows (and knows consciously) too that technology is propelled forwards most rapidly during times of war (which is to say all times) by the armaments industry.

So everyone knows, whether they admit it or not, that technology is ruled by Eros and Thanatos. And perhaps, at base (and here I am going to sound like Freud), Eros and Thanatos are the same thing when it comes to technology. Sex and death, love and death, pornography and war - they combine in all sorts of ways (American newscasters, after all, often pedal pornography-as-war).

So there you are. That's why writing a blog is a bit of an ambivalent experience for me. And I've yet to decide whether this blog is more about sex or about death, or if it combines the two.

P.S. there's stuff about technology here too:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1865942,00.html

The joys of (pre-)motherhood...

2007-11-22T20:02:00.000Z

Today was a not-emerge-from-under-the-duvet sort of day. A man came to check our radiator in the bedroom whilst I was knocked out in bed. (My husband was around though for all you moralists.)This is not my normal sort of behaviour, but since finding out I was pregnant things have not been normal. I felt horribly gulity about not going to work but vomitting over my colleagues would probably not be very sensible. I did wonder what other women in my predicament were going through. I'm still waiting with great enthusiasm for the dream period when you are meant to be glowing, healthy, vital etc but it's not happened yet. Early preganancy has been quite hard going, it's like a daily hangover without the drink the night before. I'm getting very dubious of these shiny faced mamas in magazines who do their international jetsetting and cope ever so well with the sickness. In common parlance I feel like a wuss.

P.S.

2007-11-22T19:54:00.000Z

P.S. here are a couple of reviews of my book, Take Me Home:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2113677,00.html

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2064562.ece

... and here are some extracts from the book:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2150845,00.html

A Mendelssohn kind of day

2007-11-22T19:22:00.001Z

Today has been a Mendelssohn kind of day - lots of scampering about, but no real highs or lows. Okay, I know, that's unfair on Mendelssohn, whose music I actually think is terribly underrated. As normal, it's all Wagner's fault - most of the commonplaces people pedal about Mendelssohn come from him, despite Wagner's obvious debt to Mendelssohn. Wagner learned most of what he knew from Mendelssohn, but has since rather eclipsed his disavowed mentor .... Which is a shame, because I think we'd all be better off if our lives, our societies, our worlds were more Mendelssohnian, less Wagnerian - more Midsummer Night's Dream, less Gotterdammerung.

All of which is to say that a Mendelssohn day isn't too bad. I had far too many Wagnerian days earlier this year. But we won't talk about that.

Instead, we'll talk about diaries again. Walking home from work, I was thinking again about the connection between diaries and poos (in terms of web-logs). They have a lot in common: they're both generally things people do at the end of the day, and they're both seen as emptying, purging, cathartic acts. The diary is, in a sense, a way of excreting the day.

I can't promise to excrete this diary every day - I've managed two days in a row, which is a record since I was thirteenish. Back then, my short-lived, adolescent diaries would all have the same narrative structure: start diary when fancying a new girl; carry on diary whilst pursuing aforesaid girl; throw away diary when aforesaid girl told me she'd rather eat her own eyelids than have anything to do with me.

Given that I'm now married, that narrative structure is no longer open to me, so I'll be looking for different kinds of stories here.

So what was the story of today? Went to work, taught something or other, came home, had tea, couldn't find any beer in the fridge, excreted a blog entry, had a bath, went to bed. Not much of a narrative structure there. Rather Mendelssohnian, in fact. And that's just fine.

Photo of Maria

2007-11-22T19:15:00.001Z

Thought I'd put up a photo of Maria, since there's one of me on the blog already. Here she is:

And if you're remotely interested, here is a picture of both of us:

... not sure I like this one (my face looks vast).

Pre-sleep musing and cocoa

2007-11-21T21:35:00.000Z

Hi, it's the wife. The 'Maria' part of the 'Jonny and Maria' outfit currently gracing your screens. I've never written a blog before but I've been an avid diary writing for many years now. I first kept a diary when I was eight years old. It was only a little, tatty green book and I didn't exactly write huge amounts but it was my diary. I imagine it's currently residing in a landfill site somewhere in the west of London. This is because my father had a phobia of books and writing of most kinds unless it was the racing pages at the back of the paper. I used to illustrate my day as well. I was in hospital once so I used to draw fetching sketches of me propped up on pillows eating grapes.
One of my favourite diaries was my 1991 edition; I was 12 to 13 at the time. The focus was mainly adolescent boys, haircuts and school. Perhaps I liked it so much because it created an image of normality. I also used to draw sketches too. This became the norm when I wasn't bothered writing the words in the entries. So a reader, or me 16 years later, would have to guess what the day was about through the medium of a fat-tipped felt pen.
Every teenaged-diary writer makes a thing about the secrecy issue. The inside front cover would always feature a warning to peeping eyes that was somewhat worded like a gypsy's curse, "If you dare to read this diary you suffer!" Oh yeah, like anyone would. Firstly, I was an only child and secondly my parents couldn't read English properly, apart from racing details in tabloid newspapers, which we've already stated.
My current diary is a return to form after a few years of sporadic scribbling. I'm managing to write something every day, despite the varying quality of the entries. I wonder what the point of writing a diary is, or indeed a blog? I think it's something that you only gain some semblance of pleasure from when you are actually writing. I'll think it over and tell you another day, I'm off for my comforting hot drink before nap time.

Anti-blogging (Jonathan)

2007-11-21T20:56:00.000Z

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:

http://www.crystalclearcreators.org.uk/

.... 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

2007-11-17T14:08:00.001Z

Hello hello hello, this is just a test to see what happens. I'm sure everyone does this the first time!