I’m leaving the country when the Pope arrives
I could pretend that I deliberately chose to based on his state visit - that I conspired to escape as soon as Pope Joseph Ratzinger touched down in the country - but it isn’t. Not really. I could say that I was informed by divine instinct, but that’s bullshit. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I’m going to be out of the country when Ratzinger touches down on September 18th. True, I’m going to be en route to America, a country that hasn’t quite eradicated the uglier parts of “Christian values”, but that’s beside the point.
To those who aren’t familiar with the Pope’s visit, the key to all the well-deserved furore is that it’s being treated as a state visit (as opposed to a pastoral visit, which would be funded entirely by the Catholic church), meaning that UK taxpayers are footing at least part of the bill, which reaches into the millions. There are a series of good reasons why this shouldn’t happen here, but here’s a few:
- As leader of the Catholic church, he has killed innocent people by actively opposing the distribution of condoms in countries stricken by AIDS. The Catholic church’s response to this accusation is that condoms actually help spread AIDS. The Catholic church is stupid.
- He promotes segregated education - not necessarily on standards of race, but on religion. Our education system’s already bent in favour of religion; we don’t need someone broaching the idea of religious apartheid in schools.
- He believes that vulnerable rape victims and women unable to support children shouldn’t be allowed to terminate their unwanted pregnancies, and openly says so.
- With regards to the LGBT community, he’s a colossal cunt.
- He actively rehabilitates bishops and priests who have abused kids, overseen the abuse of kids, neglected to do anything despite knowledge of the abuse of kids, and denied the Holocaust. If religious people weren’t impressionable enough, ensuring that a bunch of kiddie-fuckers can be in charge is just taking the piss.
I’ve given up on Infinite Jest
It hurts, writing a title like that.
I started reading Infinite Jest at the beginning of the summer, following the schedule set down by endurance reading group Infinite Summer. I was meant to read about 10 pages a day, plus footnotes (a lot of them). Put like that, it doesn’t sound too hard, but Infinite Jest is an incredibly dense work, with tiny typography and a plot that you fail to realise exists, until something comes out at you that makes you go “OH…”, only to disappear again for a frustratingly long time. There’s also the fact that it’s easy to get left behind, and once you reach a 100-page deficit it takes a lot of self-will to catch up.
But I’ve given up. For this summer, at least. Not because it’s a bad book - it isn’t, not really - but because it’s requiring a lot of effort, and while I’d be quite happy to “trust Wallace” in an environment where it was the only thing I’d have to read, I have a lot to read.
peterwknox
Good questions. (Better than the one that followed it - “what’s your favourite colour” - which while endearing, is hard to answer in my usual long-winded style.
Why I wrote Tales From The End
Initially, it was a test of endurance - my idea was to write 365 pieces of flash fiction, none of which would be more than 2 pages long, and publish it in a mammoth collection. Plus, it was going to be a collaboration with a close friend.
Time passed, my friend got increasingly apathetic, and I started to realise that it was a ridiculous goal. I pared it down to around 20 stories - some of which were a little longer than what I initially had in mind, and one of which was around 20-30 pages long - and that became Tales From The End. So, as it happened, it was less a case of me sitting down and knowing what the final product was going to be, and more a case of starting out with a vague plan and scribbling things down, then abandoning the plan and continuing to see where my writing took me, then realising that every story could feasibly be linked to the idea of apocalypse, or a world turned on its head and framing it with that idea. That’s a massive sentence, but you get the idea.
Towards the end, it became a bit of an exorcism; I’m not saying for a moment that I’m not proud of what’s in there (I am), but I’d had the idea for a novel building up inside me and I wanted to get started. But I also had a book-length collection of stories that needed work, but also couldn’t justifiably go to waste. Those last couple of months were torturous.
My writing routine
I didn’t have one. One of the joys of short stories is that you can push them into heavy revision and not spend years on them. The best stories in this book were fully rewritten, start to finish, around 3-4 times. You can’t do that with a novel, unless you want to have a nervous breakdown.
I started writing Tales From The End - or at least the stories that would eventually make it in - around July last year, shortly after the publication of my other book, The Chewy Cerebrum and Other Stories. I continued writing them until the end of the summer, then gave it a break, then started again a couple of months later. Then I abandoned it until around April, and wrote a bunch more, and extensively revised the ones I’d written the previous year. I also wrote the longer short story around then, after having the ideas for it - as well as a completely different handwritten draft version - knocking around in my head for about a year.
With the novel that I’m working on now, it’s completely different. I’ve resolved not to try and write it until at least next summer. This gives me the chance to go over ideas that might not necessarily work, refine characters, work out petty logistical issues and ensure that I’m in love with every aspect of the story. It’s a completely different approach, but it’s interesting.
How was the self-publication process?
Easy and expensive. That’s on the one hand; on the other, I’ve made most of the set-up costs back (and it’s Print on Demand, so I don’t pay for inventory) only a month or so after it’s come out.
I’d say self-publishing isn’t for everyone, but it gets a bad rap. While I’m sure there are a lot of writers who resort to self-publishing because their material’s not actually good enough to publish, there’s a whole market of interesting, occasionally transgressive material that major publishers would probably be scared to distribute. (My two favourite books, which did find publishing deals, are now out of print in America.) I figured that no-one would want to publish a collection of doomsday short fiction by a completely unknown writer (when was the last time you saw a well-known book of short stories by an author making their debut?) so went down the only route left.
You need friends and (I’m shuddering saying this) a decent social media strategy if you want to sell books on your own steam. Thanks to the wonderful environment this blogging platform cultivates, I have around 200 people subscribing via RSS and about a thousand following me; these together don’t account for the hits I get. If you contrast that with when I released The Chewy Cerebrum (which didn’t do nearly as well, and only sold about 10 copies), I spent a long time floundering, lucky to get 10 visits a week. Even out of my current visitor count, it’s obvious that not everyone you know is going to buy a copy, so it’s best to try and be as active online as possible. Or just throw a launch party.
Hope this answers your questions. Feel free to pick up a copy.
Tales From The End - Now On Amazon
My book, recently the recipient of a glowing review, is now available on Amazon for £5.45 with free delivery ($11.50 in the USA). Also, if you’re not a fan of buying books online, you can now step into any branch of Barnes and Noble and order it from there (plus, they’re currently offering a 10% discount online, which brings it down to $10.35). I don’t think this book could get any cheaper if it tried.
Brief thoughts on the Afghan War Diary
- After being a long-standing supporter of Wikileaks (I even donated once, though it was some pitiful amount like £3), I’m now raising my eyebrows a little. To the uninformed, the so-called “Afghan War Diary” - a collection of around 70,000 pages of information that included (amongst other stuff) names of Afghan civilian informants - is being used by the Taliban to hunt down “traitors”. I’m all for being open and honest, but this is morally murky territory.
- More problematic than that, though, is how stupid the American government is with regards to the internet. You can’t ask for already-published documents on the internet to be “returned”. It’s the equivalent of me sending you a picture of a spider via email, then asking for it back.
- Julian Assange did a TED talk a while back. It was surprisingly funny. He’s like a (generally) responsible version of Christopher Poole, except… not.
Yeasayer - Madder Red
The new video from psychedelic-freakshow band Yeasayer is up, and it’s about as mindblowingly terrifying as it can get. Here’s why you should watch it:
- You will never think about domestic animals the same way again.
- Kristen Bell, star of Heroes, Sarah Marshall in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the only good thing about the otherwise-shitty film Fanboys, is in it.
- It’s probably the second-most accessible Yeasayer song (after Ambling Alp), and it features a lot of “ooh”ing.
The World Freakin’ Melts Down: a review of the book Tales From the End.
My first review. It’s glowing. You should buy the book that the review’s about.
Remnants
“We were talking about you the other day.” Christ.
It’s strange, considering that your nostalgia is present reality for other people. When I was in my mid-teens, there was this constant paranoia I had, that people were talking about me behind my back, making awful comments, hating me openly between themselves only to sit there, smiling once I turned around again. And there were others - a select group who I had the misfortune of calling friends - who helped bolster this paranoia by constantly making reference to it all. “I’m not sure you really know so-and-so,” and so on.
Internet, I am not used to this love mail
Really, my current perspective - that I’m an arrogant 19-year-old blogger type, keeping a sort-of online journal, whose experiment in self-promotion got out of hand - needs to be taken into account, along with the fact that I am, by my own standards, worth very little, when I say this: I am utterly freaked out when strangers compliment me online.
I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s a good kind of freaked-out - a sort of combination of “d’aww, that’s nice” and “WHO ARE YOU, WHO DO YOU WORK FOR, AAAH”. Bear in mind that I’m being quite unusual in that I’m baring my soul, here. Sure, I could eradicate myself from the Obvious Web within a matter of a couple of months, but for now I’m ChrisJFraser. I’m not hiding behind some ambiguous username that doesn’t let you know who I am. That’s probably a little risky. At the same time, it’s quite fun. Anyway: a brief selection of the kind of thing I’m talking about (I’ve hidden them under the cut to avoid accusations of self-love):
Inner Dialogue - Return
- (It's a while since I've done one of these. For the unacquainted, the C represents my Conscious and the S represents my Subconscious. And before I get called out for being inaccurate by psychology undergrads, shut up, it's just a bit of fun.)
- C: So....
- S: Mhm.
- C: We weren't expecting it to be so....
- S: So dull? Is that what you're hinting at here, with these ellipses?
- C: Yeah, I guess. Though... I don't know. It's not quite that.
- S: Maybe not for you.
- C: What's that supposed to mean?
- S: Look, you know how it works. You're the one that's easily entertained, who picks up on anything and openly enjoys it. Yes?
- C: Yes. Are you saying that because you don't feel the same, we're faking?
- S: No, retard. I'm saying that you enjoy yourself, but I don't necessarily. I'm -
- C: - picky?
- S: I was going to say selective.
- C: Well, it's not my fault if so little stimulates you.
- S: It probably is, actually - you just don't realise it.
- C: We're back home now, anyway. We can do anything. What do you want to do?
- S: ... what answer do you want?
- C: Something printable.
- S: Christ.
- C: What?
- S: Nothing - it's just that ticks a lot off. There's stuff over on my side that should never be aired in public.
- C: Like wha - oh. Jesus. Yeah - leave that one.
- S: You know the other day, when it was bucketing it down with rain, and you and Joe ran screaming like maniacs out of his house and got soaked in seconds?
- C: Uhuh.
- S: And you nearly got run over because you didn't look before crossing the road, and the combination of the fear, the exhilaration and the fucking brilliant weather made you burst out laughing without relief for a good five minutes?
- C: Mmm.
- S: Something like that. But extended.
- C: ... you're so fucking difficult.
Perceptard Mixtape, August 2010: Today Is No Sunday
This month’s mix comes from the delightful Delfina Utomo, and it might be our best yet. She writes:
According to Wikipedia, August is National Goat Cheese Month. I don’t know if this is true. It is also Get Ready for Kindergarten Month. These crazy events… Nonetheless, we have surpassed the half-year mark and sailing nicely towards the year end. The tracks in this mixtape are predominantly on my train playlist. Armed with my ear candy, train rides cease to be a daily routine. Everyday there is always something new to see, something new calling to be noticed. My commute is made pleasant and anxiety-free and I wish that for everyone in the month of August.
As always, the download’s over here and the commentary’s below the cut. Enjoy.
Some brief follow-up points
In anticipation of the backlash of the post previous to this one, I should probably point out that I’m not the idiot in the room that thinks all Muslims are bigots. That’s stupid.
You can be a Muslim in the sense that my father is a Christian - it forms some sort of baseline for your worldview, but it’s vague, and it’s rarely considered, and it doesn’t really interfere with your life until the carol services (or Ramadan, or Eid, or whatever) roll around. Or you can directly disobey what the Qu’ran tells you to do - that you should always favour recency over decency - and be incredibly pious with regards to the more sensible passages.
Ground Zero Mosque
I’ve been watching the debate (not really a debate, as it’s already been approved, but - you know) emerge over the “Ground Zero Mosque”, and it’s fascinating, to say the least. What’s been interesting to me is the way that liberals (a category I would unequivocally place myself in) have rallied behind the Muslim community in defending their right to have it built. There was even considerable controversy when a series of ads stating the obvious - that maybe a mosque near one of the worst Islam-inspired atrocities in history might be a little disgusting - were approved by the MTA to appear on the sides of New York buses. After all, this is America, and in America suppressing someone’s freedom of religion is tantamount to torture.
While I get that outright banning the mosque is probably also a bad idea, this is one issue where I’m not going to side with the left, because, well - you haven’t really done your homework.
Insane Generation (Cartoons)
We were watching cartoons at Joe’s house. After a couple of hours, I couldn’t help but notice something.
Without going for the “it was so much better in my day” schtick, cartoons have changed. Excepting Avatar (which I didn’t get thanks to it being the finale, but there was an obvious plot thread and at least a bit of thought for the plot), cartoons these days are insane. Plot doesn’t really matter anymore.
Mark Twain was a pretty badass atheist
From his finally-published autobiography:
“Do you banish all books that are likely to defile young morals, or do you stop with Huck?”
“We do not discriminate; we banish all that are hurtful to young morals.”
I picked up a book, and said—
“I see several copies of this book lying around. Are the young forbidden to read it?”
“The Bible? Of course not.”
“Why not?”
Click through - it gets better. A clear sign of the bizarre way literary censorship tends to work. I wish I’d used this argument before….
