Attending theatre and browsing the shelves of bookshops I find depressing these days. All the products on offer are marketed through their capacity to hit a buzzword or an issue of the day. When I saw a production of Henry V they seemed to want to convince me that colonialism and climate were the two main themes of this play. No, colonialism and climate are two of the main themes of our day. You will only have a book read by an agent or a publisher if it hits contemporary issues right in the bull’s eye.. Everything aims to comfort you in your certainty. Of course, an important point about literature is that it reaches into the cracks between the slabs of conviction; those ill-defined places that (if this is an interesting product) even the author cannot explain any other way than her or his ambiguous, uncertain text. Fiction is a fumbling investigation; a turning over of soil, not the laying of a foundation. That is why it is a novel and not a treatise.
Author Archives: paulbilic2003
May 24: non respondants
It being spring and the weather getting better you find yourself going out a bit more to others (the French call this the other, as though all contacts were emblematic and of the same type) . In this spirit I realise that in the last couple of weeks I have sent emails to people I have not seen for many years. They were prompted by chance moments; re-reading a poem I associated with someone; seeing the job title of someone I used to know randomly somewhere. From the three emails I have winged out (modern people call this reached out, don’t they?) I have received no response. I reached out and they were non-respondants. It could be that they simply want nothing to do with me. I am a poor memory. It could be that they are unhappy with themselves. What have I become? they think when my face pops up from nowhere as a cookie in their mind. I don’t really want to parade my older self to this person from the past. Fair do’s to all concerned, I suppose. I am a notorious getter-in-toucher. I am liable to just pop up on your doorstep; stick my nose into a complicated family situation. I actively cultivate being blithely oblivious. Hats off to me.
May 21: such thing as a free lunch
Last week was a week studded with free events. On Saturday I was invited to the Chelsea v Nottingham Forest match at Samford Bridge. On Wednesday morning I was invited to see the final rehersal of the Budapest Festival Orchestra before their Mahler 9 concert in the evening and at lunch time on the same day I was invited to a meal at the soft opening of a new restaurant in Mayfair. All these outings were free. They all suit me. Football; Mahler; food. Three of my favourite activities. I ask myself whether I should think that these invites are merited in some way. Have I put myself in the way of them? Do they reflect on me or are they just random? Do you get gratuities by frequenting the right sort of people, or perhaps by coming across in the right way? In which case, I have worked for my supper. There is no such thing as a free lunch, they say. But this would imply that I have done something to deserve these events. It would be presumptious to say that I have. They are just chance. A ticket going spare; an event offered as a marketing bait; a chance neighbourly encounter. They are random felicities which have come about through no work or competence on my part. But don’t worry. There will be occasions where I will have to do painful stuff for nothing. On such occasions I will remember the Mahler and bite my lip.
May 7: some consolation
I felt I wanted to watch the Coronation of Charles III on the telly. I was interested in the music and the spectacle. I’m not sure where I stand on the monarchy. I’m kind of for it, though I shrink in horror when I’m supposed to call someone Lady Suchabody or Lord Suchaface instead of Mrs and Mr like the rest of us. If ever they gave me a knighthood or an OBE I’d probably turn it down. I don’t mind Charles though. He was caught between generations and has done his best to try and find a way. I find I resent rich kids with VIP tickets to Glastonbury more than I resent royalists queueing 12 hours to glimpse the royal carriage for two seconds. What an ordeal for Charles, balancing a crown, an orb and a sceptre, as he tries to remember the right response from 800 years ago. It felt a bit like that for me conducting A level orals last week, juggling with timing, the regulations and the responses. Still, there’s some consolation. At least, they’re not making me listen to Take That tonight. I just switched on the telly and there was poor Charlie waving a little union flag and trying to keep interested. He’ll sleep well tonight, poor lamb.
April 20: concentration skirmish
These days we live in close proximity, also often in open-plan spaces and we use machinery that makes noise. This means it is hard to have the single-focus required for difficult activities. When my partner is trying to read The Golden Bowl by Henry James (his last and most notoriously difficult novel) I am listening to 5Live with a discussion of last night’s Bayern Munich Man City match. Fair do’s, I was only getting my own back on the day before when I had been trying to concentrate on reading a 19th Century German novella in German while she was half-watching Gossip Girl on the Iplayer. What happens when I try to do this is that I get the skeleton of the text but it is pretty meatless. All this is the modern phenomenon of being stretched on the rack from one concentrational pole to another. Some things work nicely together, of course. Ironing and watching the News. Writing school reports and watching a Hammer horror film. This taxing of our concentrational capacities should be a modern Olympic sport. It is certainly true that doing just one thing at a time is a luxury we should be encouraging.
April 9: occular evidence had to be supplied
They were arguing in the cafe this Easter Sunday morning. A man with a red face was sitting along when I saw his eyes brighten up. It had to be his son or his dog. It was his son, a three year old from his estranged wife. She was maybe Korean or Chinese. He, I realised when I heard him speak, was Italian. It was soon clear the boy shuttled between the two, especially when I heard her say Why didn’t you send me the video of him playing? Clearly, the boy had been round the dad’s but the dad hadn’t sent the ex-wife the video of the playing boy. We need our proofs, our bits of documentation to look at when we are on our own. This child she spends probably all her time with except the odd weekend, she needs to have the ghostly image on her phone when he is not there too. The dad was nonplussed. Did he not realise that occular evidence had to be supplied? Did he think that occular evidence would de-intensify the experience of him alone with the child? After the terrible disputes at the break-up, now there are the terrible disputes over the scraps of video material. The child was happily running around the cafe creating havoc. Now that he was present to both of them, they ignored him.
March 25: two types of fastidiousness
There is public and private fastidiousness.
An example, I think, of my private fastidiousness is the way I arrange my objects in my jacket or coat pockets before I go out in the morning. I put my phone in my left-side pocket and my key and oyster card/debit card wallet in my right-hand pocket. I am right-handed, so I have easier access to the right side; I will need more immediate access to the travel card. I will not need immediate access to the keys (once I slam the front door) but they are necessarily away from the phone as they will clank and maybe scratch, which they cannot do with the little leather wallet, which is its necessary bed-fellow. When I have negotiated public transport I reverse the pockets, as the travel card will not be on-call during the day. This is all private fastidiousness.
An example, I think, of my lack of public fastidiousness is my unwillingness to go back and correct a text I have sent because of a spelling error or typo. Many people insist on this, as in Now Worries and then ten seconds later No as a correction. I would not bother with this unless there were true cause for confusion. If I sent See you at sex I suppose I might correct the sex to six,, but mostly I’d just let the typo hang. This may reflect badly on me if I have written here as hear or their as there and correspondants may have me down as an ignoramus, but this is one of the risks when you exhibit a non-fastidious devil-may-care life style.
March 22: speaking to people in a place where you shouldn’t speak
A man spoke to me at the gym today. He said, If that’s your water bottle, don’t leave it there. It was all right , I suppose. The If that’s your water bottle was polite enough, though the injunction don’t leave it there wasn’t. Anyway I said, It’s not my bottle. He didn’t seem to want the answer. He just walked off. At the gym, I have learnt, never speak. Once I made a shush gesture to a young man, putting my finger on my lips. He was throwing weights about with great noise. A few minutes later his mate came over and said have you been telling my bro to shut up? I said, it’s just a bit noisy. The mate said: no disrespect mate, but you’re not that young. I said, No disrespect taken. You’re right, I’m not that young. We were talking at cross purposes. He though I would be insulted, not being as young as him. Yes,communication is not the thing in a gym. Another time, a gym employee asked me, did you see who left this kit all over the place? I said I didn’t but it was typical, they must have their mummies picking up after them at home. The gym employee looked at me very puzzled. Was it a joke? Was it knowledge? Was it …? What was it? It was speaking to people in a place where you shouldn’t speak. I’ve been in that gym for about twelve years. Those are the only three times I remember speaking. Just don’t speak there.
peoplearerubbish.com
March 21: the day I appeared in the Pink
Many years ago, when I was 12 or 13, I appeared in The Pink. The Pink was a Manchester newspaper that came out on Saturday evening, remarkably at about 6.30 pm. It was a full newspaper printed in the colour pink with all the football reports and results from the matches played at 3 pm that afternoon, as well as the horseracing and all the other sports played on the Saturday afternoon. It puts modern technology to shame, where often morning mewspapers cannot even get out the result and report on a match played the evening before. Anyway, imagine my shock when I discovered my own name printed there in the schools rubric as the winning goalscorer for my school team. How they thought it necessary to put a phonecall through or get a reporter at the match me and my mates were playing in Whalley Range that Saturday is beyond me. I remembered this random fact about me starring in The Pink the other day and it occured to me that life has been on a downhill slope all the way since then. It was a case of fame and acclaim when I had never even looked for it. It must have made me think that success came to you on a plate. Since that time things have not worked out with quite the same ease. Since then, it has been a relentless striving to hit the same heights, to no avail. Don’t worry, in recent years my striving has tailed off and I have become reconciled to my life of relative obscurity, and become quite content with it. No matter. I can still look back with a fond smile at the day I appeared in The Pink.
peoplearerubbish.com
March 14: content drowning
I am looking for a term to describe the phenomenon where you may believe in or have an interest in a particular topic or subject but the weight of discourse surrounding it, the sheer mass of hype, means that you can no longer abide the actual topic anymore. It came up with my friend when the subject of David Bowie came up. She cannot abide him because of the sheer amoiunt of jabber surrounding him. I am the same with smoked salmon, I said. I don’t mind smoked salmon, you understand, but it is massively over-hyped. Sheer visceral irritation can make you renounce your usual positions. The issue of over-hype comes to my mind at the moment because of so-called Red Nose Day, a BBC initiative to raise money for children’s charities which entails, for example, the dressing-up of newsreaders as dancers and the outfitting of dancers as newsreaders. The rubbish surrounding it means that I don’t even have the time of day for the charity. It is a case of the form swamping the message. Although, fortunately, I did manage to evade the phenomenon in the case of Happy Valley, which had been massively trailed and praised and for once I managed to block my ears and just watch it. This exception apart, with information overload now predominant, the phenomenon which I shall call content drowning, will soon flood all output.
peoplearerubbish.com
peoplearerubbish 