I have set up a new site, www.andrewblackman.net, and will be blogging there from now on.
Pages
-
Recent Posts
Archives
Category Archives: Uncategorized
My favourite cafe in Crouch End, the cafe where I wrote most of my novel On the Holloway Road, has just put up a notice saying it has fallen victim to the credit crunch and closed down. It was a shock to me. The place was perfect for writing. It had friendly staff, American-diner-style bottomless coffee, good food, big windows to stare out of, convenient plugs for a laptop, and Fawlty Towers tapes playing in the bathrooms. And it was just around the corner.
Also, on reflection, a reason I liked it was that it wasn’t too crowded during the day – perhaps not a good sign. Anyway, I will miss the place.
The betting shop next door seems to have closed too, along with the old furniture shop Myers – and of course our local Woolworth’s has closed, along with all the other branches. The place just up the road selling glass and picture frames has halved in size. Also, worryingly for me, shops that closed a year or even two years ago are still empty. But according to the council, there is nothing to worry about:
Councillor Kaushika Amin, cabinet member for regeneration and enterprise, said last week there was “no discernable increase in the closure of shops” and vowed to monitor progress.
Later on in the same local newspaper article, Councillor Amin says there is nothing much the government can do anyway. Of course not. The free market must run its course. Small businesses must be allowed to fail, towns to lose their character, people to lose their jobs. Government money must be reserved only for truly deserving recipients, like investment bankers.
Anyway, of all the businesses in Crouch End that could have gone bust, I’m sorry it had to be Pick More Daisies. It was a good place. I hope the staff find jobs elsewhere, and that the owner didn’t lose too much. Here, as a kind of epitaph, is the Pick More Daisies philosophy that used to be up on the wall in a big mural:
My short story Safety was recently published in Carillon Magazine. A woman tries to keep herself safe from life by never leaving her flat in her gated community. But eventually, of course, she has to leave…
The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. When the projected light is switched off all that remains is a blank screen. That which has been projected by light was a series of ’stills’. Such also is what is being projected by ‘life’. The more you consider the analogy the more perfect it seems to be: it could help us to understand. – Wei Wu Wei
Worth staying up for. He used the example of a 106-year-old voter to go through a century of US history, touching on key moments like women getting the vote, then world war two, civil rights, Martin Luther King, etc., putting everything in context. Hope his presidency lives up to it. This is not the best bit, but is all I could find right now. I’m going to bed – it’s 6am.
Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video” mce_href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>
God help him.
I really need to read more. Apparently David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last month after years battling depression, was the “most brilliant American writer of his generation.” I have not read any of his books – in fact, I hadn’t even heard of him until I saw the mention on the Guardian site and a reprint of a speech he gave recently. I can certainly relate to a lot of his frustrations with daily life and his struggles to remember the bigger picture. I also liked his comments about the writing process in this old interview in Salon. I have added his “Infinite Jest” to my reading list, but apparently it is something like 1700 pages so I will have to set aside quite a bit of time….
“Re-examine all you have been told – dismiss what insults your soul.”
- Walt Whitman
Thanks to http://www.whywork.org/about/welcome.html.
I read “Crash” a while back. Everything that happened in the book from beginning to end was completely unbelievable, but still I quite liked it. It was somehow compelling, like the car crashes it described. The characters were unreal, human emotions and motivations were absent, the plot meandered through more and more ridiculous territory, and yet, still, I quite liked it. The vision of the world was so stunningly weird and recognisable at the same time.
Rushing to Paradise is similar to Crash in that nothing in it is remotely believable. But, unlike Crash, it is not remotely compelling. Perhaps it is simply the premise that I disagree with. The dystopic vision of a soul-dead society obsessed with sex and cars and death was something I could buy into. The snide vision of environmentalists and feminists as naive and/or psychotic man-hating lunatics is not so appealing.
There’s also the familiar and, to me, endlessly annoying “Lord of the Flies” assumption – take people out of a rule-based environment for a few months and they’ll become mad, murderous, paint-wearing, totem-worshipping savages. It’s a highly retrogressive (very un-Ballardian) view, which naturally leads us to the conclusion that we need a good strong government to save us from ourselves. I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. Maybe I’m naive myself, but I honestly believe that if you put a random group of people on a desert island, they’ll come up with a reasonably sensible way of surviving as a group until they get rescued. It’s what humans have done very successfully for thousands of years. Most of the savagery, as I see it, has come from governments.
So maybe that’s why I didn’t like this book. My own political prejudices clouding my judgement. The environmentalists, for example, are endlessly counterproductive, from the moment their boat becomes beached on a coral reef and emits a “huge oil slick” to the time when they start eating the endangered animals they’ve come to the island to protect. Halfway through, evidently feeling he has skewered the greens effectively, Ballard veers abruptly towards feminists. All the men start mysteriously dying, the women shave their heads, and the only man left on the island is kept alive purely to impregnate the women. Shaven-headed women taking over and reducing men to the role of sperm-producing entities to be discarded when no longer useful – it’s the ultimate male fear. And it’s utterly absurd.
I’m sure, though, that it’s not just politics that made me hate this. The writing in this book was definitely more pedestrian than in Crash. Crash felt hallucinatory, somehow; this was dull. Here, Ballard seems more aware of the absurdity of the concept, and tries to paper over it with over-long psychological explanations of the character’s motives (why does Neil, a non-environmentalist, nuclear-obsessed “youth”, go on the environmentalist expedition? Oh yeah, we are reminded endlessly, it’s because Dr Barbara, the leader who becomes a psychotic man-killing lunatic, is a replacement parent figure, etc. etc.). No real redeeming features on this one – just didn’t work for me.
