So, the last three weeks have been busy.

This is an understatement. Continue reading “A postcard from Chelsea”

When I was at college back in 1992, there was a guy in my tutor group who played trumpet and was bang into his classic funk – James Brown, Parliament, Funkadelic, all that stuff. I remember him explaining one of the core structural components of the genre, which applies to a lot of other musical forms as well, most notably anything dance-orientated: it is called, simply enough, “The One”.

The One is that moment where a whole bunch of repeating riffs and figures of different lengths – a one-bar bass hook, a four-bar drum pattern, an eight-bar bridge, a sixteen-bar solo – all reach their loop point at the same moment within the tune. The One is the sound of something cohering, of an emergent higher order. It’s the point in the tune where everything comes together, that single first-beat-of-a-bar where everything strikes together, the moment when even the most grooveless of listeners feel the urge to to move.

I think I just hit The One in my life.

Most of you already know that I’ve just started my Masters degree in Creative Writing; my first seminar is this evening, in fact. In the last year I’ve sold pieces of writing to magazines that I’ve been reading since before I even considered writing as a career choice; I’ve just started writing a proper column at LitReactor, and other commissions are fluttering around in my in-tray. But not only that: today also sees me starting a new job with a title so cool you’ll think I’m making it up. As of this morning, I’m a telecommuting employee of the University of Sheffield’s Civil Engineering department — a Research Assistant in the Future of Infrastructure.

I’ve put a post over at Futurismic that goes into a little more detail about the job and what it means to me. Here, I’m just going to remark on the weird way my life has suddenly cohered into something strange and exciting and new, like I finally found a path I never realised I was looking for. These moments of synchronicity aren’t without their negative threads, of course; my uncle died the weekend before last after a few years of declining into dementia, and thanks to the timing of my first seminar this evening, I’m missing the funeral. I don’t feel great about that; the guilt is compounded by the knowledge that funerals are horrible things to have to attend at the best of times*, and that this one occurs at the same place we buried my old man back in 2002. I wish I was going, but I’m also quite glad I’m not, while simultaneously resentful of that spark of personal relief. Such are the contradictions of the heart that keep us awake at night, I suppose.

One of the great novelistic fallacies of the human condition is born of our instinctive need to stitch a narrative out of the cloth of experience and chance. We often speak of fate, or simply feeling that something was meant to be, even though we know that nothing is determined, and that even history shifts its meaning depending on where you stand to look back at it. Caught in the fragmentary slice of silence before the bass bounces back to the root note and the horn section stabs out a fat major chord, I find myself glancing back and wondering how I got here from there. In some respects it seems almost beyond belief, a daft tall story that a teenaged me would have scoffed at; in other ways it seems like a fortunate yet inevitable confluence of all the things I’ve been doing for the last decade, if not my entire life. Both stories are equally valid; neither of them are strictly true. The truth is in the telling, maybe. Or in the reading, or the ending.

Either which way, the page turns; one chapter ends, another begins, and a new act begins to play out. In the orchestra pit, feet and fingers twitch in an anticipation of rhythm; the audience, small as it may be, waits patiently for events to unfold.

Let the beat drop; bring on The One.

[ * I've come to the conclusion that funerals are a little like placebos, in that an understanding of their true function lessens said function's effect. Funerals are for the living, not the dead; I don't need to be there to make peace with my own mortality, but I wish I could be there to support the rest of my family. And so it goes. ]

Attention, writery types – allow me to draw your attention to LitReactor, which is a new project from the people who run ChuckPalahniuk.net. LitReactor is gonna be part online writer’s workshop, part book-geek community, part webzine. It launches at the turn of the month, but if you sign up now for the mailing list you’ll get an introductory e-compendium of writing tips from an assortment of luminaries including Neil Gaiman,  Brett Easton Ellis and (of course) your main man Chuck. Go take a look.

Oh yeah, and they’ve hired some limey called Paul to write their tech column.

2011 continues its rollercoaster procession of highs and lows; this morning I heard that Colin Harvey passed away after suffering a massive stroke on Monday morning. He was fifty years old, and was just hitting his stride on a promising career as a novelist. Colin was a client of mine, and while I wouldn’t say I’d spent enough time with him in meatspace to really qualify as a friend, I hung out with him at a few convention dinners and other such shindigs; he was a wry and funny guy, always giving other writers a hand up, always paying it forwards. He’ll be much missed by a lot of people.

Rest easy, Colin. As a tattoo’d millionaire airline pilot once sung: only the good die young.

Public service announcement time, folks. Turns out that for various reasons my house will no longer have broadband connectivity as of tomorrow, and I currently have no idea how soon we’ll be getting it back.

No, I’m not very happy about this at all. In the name of diplomacy, however, I’m going to do the wise thing and not explain exactly why I’m so unhappy about it. This is just one of the costs of sharing a living space; sometimes decisions that affect you are beyond your control. Sometimes, you may feel that those decisions have been made foolishly, or for reasons which you would respond to very differently. At those times, one must simply suck it up and deal.

So, yeah; not like the posting schedule here is going to be affected much (what with there being no posting schedule to speak of), but other things may be backburnered by necessity, and this strikes me as the logical place to make a central announcement of such for non-business purposes. (Affected clients will be contacted directly, if any of you are reading.)

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Looks like the downtime may be limited to just a few days in a week or so’s time, which is a great relief. Thanks for all the offers of help; may still need to take a few of them up at some point.

As always, Alan Moore provides plenty of value for money in this interview at New Statesman. I’m pulling out this particular chunk primarily because it’s a nice way to remind myself I’m not the only person who thinks like this… though I’m sure there are plenty of folk who’d happily tell me that sharing my politics with a perpetually stoned post-modern pseudo-occultist and writer of comics isn’t anything to be proud of.

But you know what? Fuck those people. Take it away, Mister Moore:

I take this seriously, I don’t like to vote because I don’t believe in the democratic process, and I don’t believe that it is democracy. Democracy as I understand it is demos – the people shall rule. It doesn’t say anything about the elective representatives shall rule. I think in Dodgem Logic there was an option that got put forward that I would find preferable, which was the Athenian way.

Yes, you get summoned -

Yes, it’s by lottery, if there is a decision of national importance to be made, a jury or a parliament will be decided by lottery. They will hear both sides of the argument, they will vote, the jury will be dissolved. So there’s no way you can vote for extra privileges for MPs because you won’t be one. It’s more in your interests to vote for what is in the general interest of the broad population that you will be returning to.

So, I’m not saying that it’s a flawless idea but its maybe one of the ideas that we should start thinking about, because I really think that this is pretence of democracy at best.

Yeah, and a handful of marginal constituencies get to hold the balance of power.

Yeah, that’s it, also back when I was working with the Green Party in local politics back in the 80s, there was the idea of proportional representation, which would have meant that if the Green Party had got one per cent of the vote they’d would have had one per cent of the MPs.

And yes, if the British National Party, or the National Front as it was then, would have got one per cent of the vote you might have ended up with a National Front MP, but I could’ve gone along with that. That sounded like it would at least been fairer

But this AV thing is nothing to do with proportional representation [we spoke before the referendum]. It’s another way of organising the deck chairs on the Titanic. We do need something a lot more drastic than that. Yes, we need some alternative to our current system, that wasn’t it.

So, no, I don’t vote, I believe in direct political action. I mean, some friends of mine from Wales, where I bought a ruined farm about 15 years ago, one of them had gone over to Romania and seen the volunteer orphanage that was trying to help out people that they’d rescued from the state orphanages, which were horrifying, stuff that you wouldn’t want in your head.

And this guy who was an ex-Welsh rugby player with a face like someone had tried to put a fire out on it with a shovel, everything that you’d expect of a great, big former rugby hero. He was over there on business, he saw this going on, and he couldn’t live with not doing anything.

So he came home and got a bunch of liver-damaged, unemployable drunks from Wales to go out there with a couple of lorries and materials that he’d guilt-tripped business colleagues into donating, and they built an orphanage and a hospice within two weeks with electricity and water.

What I’m saying here is, if you look at the world and there’s something that you can’t live with or there’s something that you don’t agree with, don’t vote for someone who tells you that they’re going to put that right, because they’re not. They are trying to get you to vote for them, they will tell you anything in order to get you to vote for them.

The underlined passage is my own emphasis, and the main reason I wanted to reblog this here. Whenever I get into a discussion of anarchist models for democracy (and no, that’s not an oxymoron, as Moore demonstrates above), it’s always the most staunch defenders of democracy-as-she-is-played who tell me that the danger of letting everyone and anyone play the game is that you might get people with really dodgy views – views contrary to democracy itself, in fact – having a say in the political process.

To which I often say “yeah, so what?”

It’s not a response that wins me many new friends, thanks to the spurious logic trail that goes “Person X believes people with fascist viewpoints have as much right to have their voice heard as anyone else, therefore Person X tacitly supports fascism”. I do not support or even condone fascism, but I’m aware of the dichotomy in leftist politics that enshrines freedom of speech at the same time as trying to exclude opposing ideologies from the conversation. The intent is pure, but I think it’s actually counterproductive.

“But Paul, if you let the fascists speak, they’ll bamboozle stupid people into believing their poisonous lies!” Possibly so, yeah, but by silencing them you’re not just acting counter to your own espoused ideologies, but also giving them the additional persuasion-ammo of suppression (“come hear the truth that They don’t want you to hear!”).

Certainly in the contemporary UK political scene, fascist rhetoric is almost entirely based on this sense of exclusion-from-process, and it feeds on that vague sense of one’s privilege being eroded that gets stoked by tabloid media playing to the peanut gallery (“OMG so many brown people on benefits OMG the white working class male is a victim of reverse racism OMG!”). When it comes to fascism, I’m a strong believer in the old adage about “giving ‘em enough rope”; give a fascist the publicity he so craves, and he very quickly makes it plain that he’s in favour of things that the vast majority of people are actively repulsed by. Drive them underground, however, and they can manage their in-clique channels with greater fidelity. All politicians lie, but fascism requires the greatest level of deceit applied to the greatest percentage of the population; if you force them to communicate off the public radar, you forego the chance to publicly scrutinise – and critique – those communications.

Few things corrode untruth as quickly as wide exposure; I suspect a BNP MP in Westminster would be the worst possible advert for the party. Currently, for the vast majority of floating voter types, the BNP are a vague threat that lurks in Northern towns and the London boroughs that you don’t go shopping in, and as such are of little concern in anything other than the abstract – you know, “it could never happen here!”. Well, it could – and if it does, how will you recognise it when you see it? Indeed, if you’ve not been exposed to the sort of rhetoric used by fascist ideologues, you might find yourself falling for it while piously believing yourself to be a modern and progressive type of person. (UKIP, anyone?)

I think my problem with the counterargument is that it’s enshrined in a passionate commitment to protecting representative democracy, but it demonstrates a lack of faith in representative democracy’s ability to produce a fair government that actually represents the people in the way to which it pays perpetual lip service. Or, to put it another way: if you can’t trust representative democracy to improve people’s lives to such a degree that the majority of them will vote in ways that expand and advance that central conceptual remit, then there’s a pretty serious flaw in the system, and you’re admitting such by saying that not every voter can be trusted to vote correctly. “You’re free to elect the people who you feel best represent your views… um, but you mustn’t listen to those people.” See what I mean?

At this point someone usually points out that Hitler was legitimately elected in Germany, which is very true. It’s also a massive simplification of a very complex and turbulent period in German politics – not to mention the politics of the rest of the world – and conveniently overlooks the fact that the democratic process in Germany at the time had become fatally discredited in the eyes of much of its electorate. And yes, that’s exactly the same reason the duplicity of people like the BNP gets traction in the UK at the moment; as such, the rational response is not to pillory the fascists and fuel their persecution complexes, but to make the system more open, more accountable, more transparent. Fascism – and right-wing politics in general, if we’re going to talk in terms of that old binary – thrives on secrecy, on whispered reports of unverifiable injustices and shadowy conspiracies. Make it obvious that the lies are lies, and the lies lose their power. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and so on.

This is also why I have a very ambivalent relationship to legislating against hate speech, because that legislation is a tacit admission of hate speech’s power, amplifying its effect among those who already feel disenfranchised; the best solution to hate speech is true speech. And if anything, as much as the constant battle to [x]-101 people about issues that should really be canonical in an enlightened society is exhausting and tedious in the extreme, I think the anyone-can-say-anything scrum of the internet shows us that it works, albeit very slowly. Outsourcing that advocacy to representatives is tempting for exactly that reason – there are countless nicer things to be doing, after all – but by concentrating that power of advocacy in a limited number of hands, you’re assembling the scaffold of hierarchy along which authoritarianism will creep and grow.

If we’re too lazy to work for a better world, we have no one to blame but ourselves as that better world slips out of sight.

Which is why I am an anarchist.

Hey, Dad; long time.

Nearly a whole decade, in fact, and each successive slice of it slips by faster than the last, as both you and Mum always warned me it would. Time’s a river, so start paddling if you want to make it through the rapids, right?

Well, it took me a while to suss the truth of that; I’ve never been good at taking anyone’s word at face value without testing the hypothesis myself, have I? The irony here is that you taught me that methodology of life at the same time you tried to teach me that the rules are there for a reason. I think perhaps you blamed yourself for the latter never sticking, but – as rum a ride as it’s been, and promises still to be – I think you actually inculcated the more useful program into me after all. I wish I’d had a chance to apologise for making it so difficult an experience for both of us, though; you last saw me at my lowest ebb. That was maybe partly because you were at yours as well, but hey, we can’t go back and change it. Make your bed, then lay in it… and that’s another one of your favourites that’s stuck with me.

And you were right, the path I chose was a difficult one; it always will be, if you choose to cut your own way through the forest. But you couldn’t see that the paths on the old maps were getting rutted, haunted by brigands and hard-to-see predators; you passed that way a long time befoire I had the choice, and the landscape was very different by that point. At the time I was furious at you for giving me an obsolete map, and I realise now that I should have been more grateful for the fact you left me one at all. Your old man walked out on you before you were even born; perhaps that’s what enabled you to stick to your fatherly guns, a stubborn determination to be better than the example you’d had set for you. And while I still have no wish to become a parent myself (another disappointment, I know), I think maybe it was a matching level of stubbornness that had us lock horns over so much petty crap. Mum says I look more like you every year; I guess it’ll turn out that we’re more like each other than either of us ever wanted to think… which, as ironies go, could be much worse.

I miss you, y’know, though I don’t like to admit it – emotion is a private matter, right? Well, maybe not; I’ve been questioning that one a lot recently, and it’s not holding up well under interrogation. So here’s me admitting it, and saying sorry, and saying I love you.

Rest easy, you old bastard.

Your son, Paul.

In response to viewer and listener feedback received during the recently-finished football season, the BBC has decided that pundits and newscasters on all BBC media properties will be forbidden from mentioning specific details of league matches until it has been determined that everyone interested in watching or listening to the live commentary has had a chance to do so.

Barraged by complaints from viewers stuck at work or with family while crucial matches were broadcast, the Director General felt obliged to respond and address the issue. “Obviously, it’s been unfair of us to discuss major events and turnarounds in football matches – final score, goalscorers, red cards and the like – when there are still loyal fans who’ve yet to watch or listen to the game via timeshifted media. Why should they be denied the chance to enjoy our football-related programming just because there’s a chance the element of surprise might be removed from their enjoyment of their home team’s performance?”

Asked how the BBC intended to deal with the possibility of other media outlets leaking the same details while some fans remained unfulfilled, the Director General replied: “We’re planning to set up a dialogue with other venues to establish a sort of universal code of practice. It is to be hoped that rogue venues will not breach the code and race to broadcast the full detail of a match in their discussion of it; it would be very callous of them not to consider the possibility of a fan accidentally clicking through to a discussion of a game they had yet to watch. After all, it’s not the fan’s responsibility to avoid every venue where discussion might occur; that onus lies clearly on the media and the punditry, and it’s to the shame of this industry that we’ve let this run unchecked for so long.”

Faced with the suggestion that such a code of conduct would be unpolicable and tantamount to a form of censorship, the Director General asserted that it is clearly the duty of the media to forestall discussion until a point where everyone can participate in it equally. “It’s just the right thing to do, isn’t it? After all, if we told them they’d be better off avoiding football-related media until they’ve had a chance to catch up, we’d be being monstrously unfair to that minority of people. They should be able to read, listen to or watch whatever they want without fear of finding out something they’d rather not know yet, and we have to consider that desire – born as it is of a form of deferred gratification – to be more important than the inconsiderate lust for discussion of everyone else. That lust has led to pundits taking an almost sadistic glee in discussing the particulars of certain matches, especially the most important or contentious ones, and – to be frank – the sooner we quash this unpleasant thread of elitism, the better off everyone will be.”

When pressed, the DG suggested that the same protocols will eventually be rolled out into all sports programming, and finally all news content in general. But wouldn’t this mean that eventually the BBC would be completely unable to discuss anything that had happened at all, ever? “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, I suppose,” responded the Director General. “But I’m positive that those to whom we extend the privilege of forestalling the discussion will be grateful for not having to think about what they read or watch, and that is reward enough for everyone, I’d have thought.”

For more background on this story, click here. Unless you’re worried that clicking there might reveal an important component of the events in question that will spoil your enjoyment of the discussion as a whole, of course; after all, you shouldn’t have to make that judgement call yourself.

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. And with the exception of a very few people, nor was anyone else.

To be honest, I suspected Osama bin Laden was already either dead or decommissioned some time ago; given the increasing irrelevance of al Qaida anywhere other than the headline-generation meetings of right-wing Western media houses and political parties, it was an easy mistake to make. Whether we’ll find ourselves wishing he’d just faded away into obscurity with the passage of time remains to be seen… but we can say with certainty that he’s now achieved a sort of immortality, albeit not the one promised to mujahadiin who lose their lives in the course of a holy war.

Whosoever decided that burying the guy at sea without releasing some sort of concrete proof to the media that they got the right guy deserves a hearty slapping, however, for handing conspiracy theorists the world over a shiny new toy to play with. To clarify: I’m pretty positive that the Yanks have bagged the real bear (because claiming falsely to have done so would have been so easily disproved by a YouTube video starring one bearded nutbag and a copy of that morning’s newspaper that even Dubya wouldn’t have attempted it, though I bet he’d have liked to), and I know how Occam’s Razor works. But so does any politician or high-level covert ops planning team, I’d wager, and they also know that Josephine Average is a sucker for projecting patterns into the spaces between data-points. A few stills or seconds of video would have gone a long way to quelling some of the kneejerk questioning that’s currently ricocheting around the internetosphere; as ghoulish as it was, the “leaked” footage of an addled and burned-out looking Saddam Hussein left little doubt that they’d strung up the real McCoy. (The question of whether hanging Saddam or shooting bin Laden is the morally right thing to do is a debate for another time, but suffice to say I’m not sure it is. Democracy and the rule of law must be universally applied, no matter how repugnant or obviously guilty the accused may be, or the very concept of democracy is undermined. There’s been a lot of that in the past ten years, too.)

Repetition for the easily excited: I’m as convinced as I can be that they got their man, but I’m not surprised a lot of folk are demanding more substantive proofs of such. (Postmodernism isn’t a creed or philosophy, it’s a ubiquitous and unavoidable cultural condition; we are all hostile to metanarratives that make us feel uncomfortable and/or confused, and the notion that “[any] government [other than {my preferred government}] can be trusted” was an early casualty in all but the most easily swayed.)

It’s no mark of particular intelligence or insight on my part to say that bin Laden’s death has in no way “made the world a safer place” (in the short term, quite the opposite), ended the threat of Islamic terrorism (or any other sort), secured world peace, prevented cruelty to kittens or located Elvis. Much as the methodology jars with my own pacifism, I’m not sad to hear bin Laden is dead; he was without a doubt a very nasty shit indeed, guilty of orchestrating terrible atrocities, and I recognise the need for closure in the US; the psychic wound of 9/11 has festered for a long time, after all, and little less than a trophy head was going to stand a chance of resolving that lesion. But looking at footage of folk around the White House chanting and celebrating what – based on the effort, expense, timescale and collateral damage involved – is a deeply Pyrrhic victory, I’m put in mind of the revulsion we all felt when we saw bin Laden’s supporters doing exactly that on a certain September 12th, nearly ten years ago. As is often the case (in my universe at least), old Friedrich has wise words for the Zeitgeist:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

Probably worth mentioning that “an eye for an eye” is a tenet of Islamic law, also. The United States in particular – but by no means exclusively – has had a decade of gazing into the abyss. It’s time to step back from that ledge.

So, here I am, back in the bosom of Velcro City. The physical act of moving house went pretty well, all told, though I’ve been paying for it in aches and bruises, most of which have faded to the level of background noise by this point. Mark’s van just about managed to inhale all my worldly goods (except the sofabed, which went to the astonishingly convenient charity shop two doors down, and the better portion of my book collection, which is currently glowering from the corner of a spare room at my mother’s place in deepest darkest East Yorkshire), but there was nary a cubic inch to spare, and the poor old thing managed a peak speed of around 65mph on the journey back… downhill, with a tailwind and a certain amount of luck. Those old Transits have proper workhorse engines, though, and Mark made the very best of an extremely fortunate run of road conditions – we rolled out of central Stockport at half eleven and were pulling up in Southsea by 5pm. Kudos and many many thanks to Mark, without whom I’d have been in a much stickier situation; you’re a brother, and – once again – I owe you big-time.

Princess Katie-Jane maintained her uncanny calmness when travelling, too; apart from a half-hour of plaintive miaows at the start, she pretty much just lay sleeping in her kitty-carrier the whole way, and is now cheerfully claiming ownership of the majority of the house in which I’m crashing until something more permanent can be sorted out. Frankly, I think she’s adapted more swiftly than I have to the change of geography… but then she doesn’t have a business that depends on a stable internet connection! The good news there is that, as should be obvious, I’ve managed to kludge my way to a tentatively online state by way of the hideously-priced dial-up-paced bandwidth available from BT FON/Openworld; it’s not all that and a bag of chips, but it’ll see me through until the nice people from Virgin come next week to run some optical fibre into this household. Just in time for the R*yal W*dding, in fact, which I shall probably celebrate by going and doing something staunchly atheistic and republican, like going and seeing some loud bands murder old Sex Pistols songs. When in Rome, and all that…

For them as is wondering, yes, it feels absolutely brilliant to be back – like slipping into an old and well-worn pair of shoes and wondering why you ever replaced them. And a person couldn’t ask for more perfect weather to return to a South coast seaside town gone somewhat to seed; the last week has felt more like mid-June than late April, with hardly a cloud in the clear blue skies. Perfect weather for rolling around the backstreets on a silly bicycle, and for catching up with friends one hasn’t seen for a long time… both of which have been big features of the last five days, as I’ve eased my way back into my new old town. Summer employment is looking settled, and the long-range prospects of my life are looking better than they’ve looked in a long time; just get me a permanent address, and I can take on the world! (Well, a reasonable percentage of the world at any one given time; the whole thing would take something of a run-up, I suspect.)

So, next on the agenda is one last jag back up to Stockport to do all the final closure bits on my tenancy, which will take up tomorrow and Friday. Then it’s a weekend of vicarious digital convention snooping (would really love to be at Eastercon, but sadly not a practical option given the circumstances), vicarious holidaying in famous nuclear disaster areas (my friends do some odd stuff, which may explain why we’re friends), a first shift at the summer job… and who knows what else? The town is my seafood-intolerant oyster alternative!

Right, my stomach’s saying we’re getting near supper time, so that’s enough wordwaffle. Stay funky, folks.