Day 281: According to

Pooped tonight. Bushed. Beat. Tuckered all the way out. Gonna crawl into bed with my book and get enough sleep to be refreshed for the open tomorrow.

I’m reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. I’ve been reading Underworld by Don DeLillo for about three years now. I started it what feels like an aeon ago, fell away from it, picked it back up last month, and am currently struggling through the verbiage, a sluggish paragraph at a time.

I sort of love it. But it sort of leaves me entirely cold. I can tell he’s an exemplary writer, and there’s so much nuance and exploration of subtle truths in there. But maybe I don’t think he’s a good writer at all - this is the second book of his that I’ve appreciated from afar, or maybe felt I should appreciate, without any of it connecting with me on an emotional level.

Not that his prose isn’t suffused with beauty:

“The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car.”

And his dialogue is taut, sizzling, low-key exhilarating. But I’m not really following what’s going on, or why it’s important. There’s someone who works for a waste-disposal agency, and a lot of musing about how waste, trash, excrement, points to something profound and corporeal and hidden in plain view about us all and our place in the world. There’s a baseball that was hit to win the World Series in 1951 that is followed through the novel, a kid grabbing it during the game, his father taking it off him, a collector searching for it in the 90s, something in the 70s - and lots of subtext about sports and achievement and collecting and owning and wanting and What it Means to Be American, which American writers are always trying to answer, which is far less interesting when you’re not yourself American and don’t see why they always have to bang on about themselves so much. There are about fifty more characters who I’ve been introduced to in vignettes so far unattached to anything else, and subsequently forgotten. And there’s someone cruising down freeways murdering people in his car.

That actually all sounds like the kind of novel I would adore. But something about it is so theoretical, so distanced. It’s long, and it requires effort to read - every passage begins in medias res, with characters you can’t remember, pursuing needs that aren’t at all obvious, and after a ponderous few pages you cut away again, unsure of what to make of what you’ve read.

I mean, it all makes sense on the page, and sounds meaningful and powerful and strong. But I’m struggling to transfer any of that from the book into my experience of real life. It’s like it’s encoded with wisdom, but wisdom for an alien lifeform that processes information differently to myself.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough. But I think I get most of it, that’s not the problem - I feel the depths that he’s mining. They’re just cerebral depths, always discrete and unrelated to the heart.

I’ll carry on reading, regardless. Many important works of art only fully connect with me once they’re done, once I’ve experienced them and taken in their whole and felt my own whole being shift to accommodate what they express.

I was just looking for, but couldn’t find, a quote about viewing art. Can’t remember who said it. The gist is that we don’t see art, we see according to art. It changes our viewpoint, changes us, in a very real sense, as we consume it. So far seeing according to Underworld is a lonely, removed way of seeing. But perhaps there will be immense worth in that, once I’m through.

Anyway, that’s enough of my evening spent tapping away. Now it’s time for bed and book.

...... 

Music: Barracuda, by John Cale.

Day 258: Storms of tarantulas

I've finished reading the Welcome to Night Vale novel that Mike bought me for Christmas. It was bags of fun. The same dark humour as the podcast, the same twisted flights of imagination, the same rich world.

It did have one essential problem however, which was that the strength of the podcast is in sketching individual vignettes that don't have to maintain much consistency between one episode and the next, whereas a novel is all about consistency.

Night Vale the podcast is about moments of X-Files/Twin Peaks/Lovecraftian parody - evil cults within the town's boy scouts divisions, shimmering sentient forests out in the desert, portals to netherworlds opening in the air above the all-night diner - and each moment is pushed to a horrific conclusion, and then the status quo reset in time for the next episode. As such, listeners can dip in and out with ease, with the added explanation that "time works strangely in Night Vale", which papers over any number of cracks in overarching narrative.

But a novel set in such a world does not have this luxury. It must lash all the vignettes, all the disparate and oftentimes contradictory ghost stories together into one coherent whole, and tell a story from the point of view of protagonists living in this place.

That is inherently tricky. The novel succeeds, just about, but it's hard to identify with characters for whom daily life is so disjointed and hallucinatory. Storms of tarantulas one morning, predatory packs of rabid librarians the next (run!).

Or, rather, in order to make you identify with the characters, which does happen, the authors end up shrinking their wild world, making it more consistent, yet also somehow smaller, less amusing, than how it exists in episodic form.

It all reminds me of this videogame based on The Simpsons my friend used to have on his PlayStation. The whole of Springfield was explorable in the game, you could go anywhere, see anything. But Springfield isn't a real place. It is elastic, its streets and locales stretch and shrink based on the requirements of each storyline, each joke. Docklands, shopping malls, zoos, waterparks, hydroelectric dams - they come and go as they're needed.

To map out, to tie down, actual street plans, to turn off from the end of the Simpsons' road, to go to Moe's Tavern, and then Bart and Lisa's school, and then Comic Book Guy's shop, it all starts to feel squashed, uninspired, wrong.

Springfield isn't a real town, it's a possibility space, a canvas blank enough for many disparate strokes of paint to be splashed upon it.

Night Vale is the same. The novel was fun, and the writers' skills at presenting existentially repulsive yet utterly hilarious tableaux comes through often. But the inherent strengths of the novel as a medium - character and consistency - are not the ideal fit for the Night Vale project.

But still, it was very readable, very funny, and at times quite touching. If you're a fan of the podcast, it takes a little away from the show, but gives much back as well. And if you're not a fan, then get listening!

......

Music: Jerusalem, by Dan Bern. Some classic "weather" from an early episode of Night Vale. Nasally, rasping, wry acoustic fare. Good stuff.

Day 192: Brand

I’ve been reading more lately. Back when I was drinking too much, and staying out all night, and running from my depression, I never had the time or energy to read, but it’s something I’ve been trying to get back into. I still have little time or energy - in some ways even less than before - and it’s still easier after work and writing and cooking tea to scroll down social media or boot up my Switch or PlayStation than it is to pick up a book - but, hey, I’m trying.

I’ve been reading No Logo by Naomi Klein recently, inching forwards with it a few pages on the bus one day, a couple of paragraphs in bed a day or two later. No Logo is one of those books that was always on my radar, that I almost felt I didn’t need to read because it’d be preaching so obviously to the choir. I could say “Oh, like No Logo by Naomi Klein?” in a conversation with another member of the liberal intelligentsia, and they’d nod and I’d nod, and we’d both know how erudite and sophisticated we both were. And really, what’s the point of books if not to deploy their titles as reference points proving that you’re better than other people?

But I finally did pick up the book, and boy am I glad. It is a thoroughly dispiriting and depressing affair, making me burn with indignation about three times a paragraph, and this is of course the other point of reading - to become so sickened by the state of the world that you barely have the energy to finish your cup of espresso and turn on your PlayStation that day.

Here’s the thrust of the book, as I understand it, thus far:

Since the 80s companies have been far less concerned with the actual manufacture of goods, which is a dour, mucky, low-class affair, and far more concerned with branding, which involves creating a mythos around your organisation and tying the owning of your goods to a spiritual, aspirational state of being, which is something that essentially soulless CEOs and marketing executives like the idea of an awful lot.

Thus, Nike don’t sell trainers, but the very concept of human perfection achieved through sporting excellence. Apple don’t make iPhones with very fast CPUs and lots of RAM, they turn the use of computer equipment into an act of religious enlightenment. Starbucks don’t brew the best coffees, but engender environments that provide modern versions of the Greek agora or Roman forum for today’s hip youth.

This shift in conceptual focus for companies is borne out in their spending budgets. Branding, in which you foster the notion that people lead better lives because they use your, for example, garbage Lynx bodyspray, accounts for far more of companies’ marketing spend than traditional advertising, wherein you might say, Hey, buy our garbage Lynx bodyspray because it smells the best, and it’s really good value.

Maybe you pay YouTubers, who should be independent cultural critics, to be spies for you, to find our what your young key demographic are into. They say that kids are all playing this videogame called Fortnite, which includes a dance known as “flossing”. Therefore you put someone flossing in your next advert, and your audience see it and believe your brand to be part of their world, despite the fact the game, and the dance, have not a single thing to do with the product you actually sell.

Further, marketing in general accounts for far more of these companies’ overall budgets, so they have far less to spend on making the things they sell. So they close all their factories in their own countries, sack all the workers, and contract out manufacture to people in Bangladesh or China or the Philippines, who promise to fulfil orders on the cheap by erecting makeshift factories in zones to all intents outside of local jurisdictions, in which impoverished workers labour in the most horrendous conditions for paltry wages, and the big companies can say, Hey, it’s nothing to do with us, we just ask for x number of trainers to be made, for y price, and someone goes away and does it. That x trainers can only feasibly be made for y price by using essentially slave labour is something the companies don’t feel like considering.

And these trainers, made by young girls miles from their families and home villages, are utterly generic, the same as all other trainers, until that special white Swoosh gets stitched onto them, and they get put in the Nike box, and sold at the Nike megastore.

And at this end of the process, the sale of the goods, the companies all also want to spend less, so they have more left over for brainstorming cultural resonance sessions or what the fuck ever. So they cultivate the idea that retail jobs, working in Starbucks, Gap, the Apple Store, aren’t really jobs. They’re for students, for young people about to go travelling, for kids looking for some extra spending money. And as such they can pay minimum wage, offer no benefits, no job security, zero-hour contracts, forcibly discourage unionisation, treat their workers like complete pieces of shit, because none of it is that serious. 

Except by the 90s, when No Logo was written, retail work had risen to account for 75% of all employment in the United States. The factories have all been closed down! There’s nowhere else for huge numbers of the population to work than in shops. The average age of service sector workers has risen, the length of time they’re spending in job roles has risen - and public sector professions are being axed all over the place, education is more expensive than ever, the cost of living is enormous, property prices are insane...

Yet, still, the big brands pretend their McJobs are more about life experience than a career, and they wash their hands of all responsibility.

They’ve fucked the developing world at the manufacturing end, they’ve fucked their own world at the retail end, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they say, because they need the money for branding exercises, for basically working really hard to create the illusion, the lie - let's call it what it is - that wearing Nike shoes makes your life any different to wearing any other black sneakers. That Lush soap is any different to any other surfactant that emulsifies oils so they can be washed away with water.

You want to know why the world is fucked? And this, admittedly is me extrapolating out my own conclusions. But the world is fucked because greedy organisations use slaves in the developing world to make tat that they trick us into buying at marked up prices, sold by members of our own society who aren’t paid nearly enough, under the pretence that the brand will make us happier, which it doesn’t. All the factories are closed. The shops pay nothing. The goods are too expensive. Everyone is struggling.

And then some loud demagogue comes along, some Trump or Farage or Bolsonaro, and yells that everyone is struggling, and it’s the fault of… the immigrants. Or the EU. Or the liberals. Or the Millenials. Or the lecturers. Or the scientists. Just as they said it was the fault of the Jews and the gypsies and the cripples in the 30s.

It never was then, and it isn’t now. It’s the fault of the private companies, the executives, the bankers. The Bullingdon Club politicians with their filthy hands down the pants of big business. It’s the fucking fault of the people with all the money! They’ve taken it! They’ve stolen it out from under us, and now they desperately need someone weak to blame.

Don't fucking buy their shit. Don't buy their lies, don't buy their brands, don't buy any of it. Reclaim your mind, your life, your world. Fight back.

It's going to get really important, really soon. Be on the right side of this.