Trouserpress

I can occasionally do something right with a camera.

Gotta love those spammers. They are getting more desperate or brazen. Today, among the usual deluge of offers of all kinds of porn, chemicals, credit I received under the grab line

I am really excited. Very useful. All the best!

adverts to buy compact refrigerators. Yes! Fridges! Well, I guess I need somewhere to keep all those pills I am buying, some place to cool off after ogling all that porn and a place to hide when the bailiffs come after me over the matter of unpaid loans — not to mention a place to keep my Spam.

If the compact fridge is not big enough for all that I can use it in conjunction with another product offered in the same gush of spam:

buy kitchen cabinets

buy kitchen cabinets

Yet another message offered me, and I quote:

bpro xzojbglfq rnzalspe vnko qmegckjyb ygkq zfptkdnho

An offer I can’t refuse.

I believe that the only thing not offered in spam is Spam itself. But then with spelling like the last example, how would I know?

Some people spend a lot of time and money looking for the inner child. I’m looking for the inner adult. I wonder what he/she/it/they is/are like, and will he/she/it/them get on with me and treat me nicely?

You may have heard me harping and/or carping on about this topic before. Tune out now.

I have proposed (see previous posts and innumerable pub conversations) that publishers and writers’ agents are perhaps motivated by bottom lines rather than neat lines, by profits not profundity, by talents and shekels rather than just plain literary talent; by monetary value rather than literary value and are anyway often unable to tell a best seller when it bites them on the nuts.

And in my discourse I have been quick to deny that I am personally influenced in my conclusions by the reluctance of the same publishers and agents to handle my novel Weed. Oh no, not a bit of it.

Well, now vindication, because even the Guardian, that bastion of the literary establishment has noticed. The article is called How fiction lost the plot — silly title since it is the market makers that have lost the plot, not the people who make the fiction, but why let accuracy stand in the way of an eye catching headline? The article has a similar thesis to mine, but the writer Mark Lawson has done some actual research to back up his claims. You can read it here, if you are still with me.

In my own posts I have described this bread head trend as a relatively recent phenomenon and I think I said that the success of JK Rowling (all the best to Ms Rowling, by the way) really entrenched the modern publishing culture. Perhaps it has. However, having a good read of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday while passing through Coincidence City a few days ago, I came across the following observation: “… now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on a first novel is good money down a rat hole.” You can find the passage on p2 in my edition. In the chapter called Self-Interview he expands upon this theme in a more satisfying manner and at greater length than I can quote here. The rat hole remark was apparently written in 1980 or thereabouts and Self-Interview was published in 1977, so I don’t know where I got the idea this a new phenomenon. Vonnegut himself claims it was the rise of TV after WWII that killed the market for the printed story. TV has a lot to answer for.

Well, that’s me done on this topic. Honest. No more.

Time to get on with some bloody writing.

I was in a café in Kyoto yesterday, getting lunch when a trivial incident revealed the profound ramifications of the smallest of our actions, and caused me a minor loss of life.

I ordered my sandwiches and my iced tea at the register, and waited in line at the counter for the young man working there to make my food.

There was a woman ahead of me in the line, very respectable looking in a boring sort of way, and somewhat dour in a dour sort of way.

Her sandwich when it was served turned out to be a huge sausage in lettuce on a bun. Oh, good, I thought, my food will be next. I was against the clock and very hungry, both.

However, my sandwiches — a prosciutto  with parmesan cheese and a spicy chicken — were not next.

The woman was squinting at the lettuce in her sandwich.

Suddenly, she was pointing out to the staff a blemish on the lettuce leaf that rose rather majestic and sail-like from her sausage sandwich. She had to point  out the blemish very carefully because it was so slight as to be almost invisible. It was a slightly brownish hue, possibly a bit of a bruise, and about the size of a finger print. This, as I say, on a large, fresh and crunchy looking leaf.

Instead of calling the lady a daft hag, and telling her not to be such a fuss pot, the lad behind the counter apologised and bowed abjectly for attempting to poison her with a semi-invisible stain and discreetly tossed the sandwich in the bin. In between fixing drinks for other customers he began making her a new sandwich from scratch.

The line was growing behind me. I was still against the clock. I was still hungry.

The lady shamelessly folded her arms and stared defiantly at the sandwich lad, unaware or uncaring of the havoc she was wreaking on the universe.

You see, there was a lot going on now. A little dimple, a minor black hole had appeared locally in the fabric of space.

First into this black hole was this needless waste of human life. The sandwich maker was spending time, valuable life time that he can never recover making a sandwich he had made perfectly well once already. How long did this take? He was very fast, but with interruptions, lets call it 3 minutes. That’s also three minutes of the fussy lady’s time as she waits to be served a sandwich that has already been served her. That’s three minutes of my life and of the lives of the four people waiting behind me. That’s 21 minutes of human life time spent to no useful purpose by a woman who has an aversion to merely nearly pristine lettuce.

Next into the black hole was the death of the pig. Yes, a pig died to make that sausage — not only that sausage, I grant you, but a living, breathing animal was slaughtered to make sausages and chops and bacon and prosciutto for us. I’ll bet you the pig did not want to be slaughtered, and died very much protesting and struggling to stay alive. I eat meat, but I never forget where it comes from. If a living creature has its life taken to make food for us, we should treat  that food with respect. Throwing away that sausage was great disrespect to the pig.  The selfish act of discarding the sausage  devalued the life and sacrifice of that intelligent beast.

The clock was ticking. I had to get two sandwiches down me and get myself back to work so that I could my duty of earning the money to feed my three children and keep the company president in cigarettes and golf clubs. This was causing me stress, which is also a known killer. How many future heartbeats was this prima donna of lettuce costing me? What about the people in the line behind me? What plans and commitments were falling apart for them? What biological depredations were they suffering?

And we have only so far discussed the waste of life. What about the impact this act had on the environment? That food was transported from one place to another in big smoky lorries, it was processed on machines that guzzled energy and gave out more fumes, thus contributing to global warming and resource wars. People were dying around the world over the price of oil or scratching the earth with sticks to find water that has been diverted by agricultural combos. All that too was being sucked into this dimple in the fabric of the universe.

I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. Call me mad and impulsive, but I waited mutely in line with everyone else. I regarded the woman impassively, but no amount of impassiveness brought about any apology, acknowledgement or sudden epiphany. She just puffed herself up and crossed her arms and adopted a pre-emptively defiant mien.

I wanted to hand her a spread sheet, an audit of the situation; the time, the money the natural resources. But I didn’t. I waited and I silently cursed her further for the time I knew I would have to spend writing this blog post.

[This actually happened in July 2006, but I was distracted before I could finish it and post it. I came across it recently while rummaging in my files.]

I have been neglecting Trouserpress lately, mostly because I have been extremely drunk and missing drugs (just my way of getting through Xmas). This evening I thought I would drop in for a bit of maintenance and found that there were 300 comments waiting for moderation. Of course, when we say comments, what we really mean is spam. This weight of spam has rendered the moderation page unworkable. There should be a button at the bottom of the page that will eliminate all the unwanted comments/spam in one go, but there is so much, the page will not render properly and the casualty is the zap button. This means I have to go through eliminating them one at a time and waiting for the page to re-build itself with each single deletion. This means that spammers, apart from being complete toerags, are murderers, because this is life time, a part of my life I will not get back.

The spam is for erection drugs (just use a pencil, dammit) and porn sites (if you can’t get a woody, what do you need the porn for?). The title of this post came from one bit of spam, the original spelling preserved intact. Why fuk in hospitals? I don’t get it. Is it because of all the beds there? But why do you need so many beds? How many beds can one couple fuk in? I have never in my life needed more than one bed at a time and in fact I have found sofas, floors, cars and even the great outdoors to be perfectly adequate substitutes when a bed was not available.

Another ad read ‘after amateur sex’ and carried a link to some kind of porn site. I thought, what after amateur sex? A good cuddle and ten minutes of contented chat before dozing off? It didn’t immediately dawn on me that they meant after as in seeking, and the absence of a question mark threw me. Really, these people have serious issues with spelling and grammar.

And what is it with this amateur sex thing? People having normal sex, presumably, perhaps in frowsy flannel night clothes with the light of? I thought the whole point of the sex business was exactly that it was professional, that people pay large amounts of money to do ridiculous things to each other and no obligation to make small talk. Wow! Look at that! Did you see they way they didn’t pay each other. Pass the tissues!

I am not sure what I hate more about this spam stuff, the waste of time or the logical and syntactical idiocies it imposes on me. Well, got to get back to fixing the moderation page thing so that you can comment on this post.

I have been invited back to read once more at Four Stories Osaka. This means I have to get terribly nervous again.
I read for the first time in March and that went better than I expected (see past post).

This time I shall be trying out a bit of text I haven’t yet inflicted on anyone at a reading, an extract of my novel Weed, so that will be a new reason to get anxious.

I from now until the event I shall be having horrible dreams about wearing my underpants on my head in public. After the event I may actually be wearing my underpants on my head in public.

The event is, as ever, at Portugalia, and this time will be on December 16.

http://www.fourstories.org/

Custard pies. They don’t actually exist. Not a lot of people know that.

We have covered the best novels since 1945, but one bloggy topic I have never seen is worst books in the history of the universe.

This is an important topic partly because I take the written word very seriously and partly because I am still galled and appalled that no publisher took up the chance to handle my own novel Weed (name check). Too late now: Weed is being published under my own Psipook Press imprint. Publishers, begin eating your livers now.

It seems to me that the criteria applied by publishing houses have pretty much nothing to do with the quality of literature. Publishing choices sometimes seem quite inept, even from a commercial point of view.

JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected by five (5) publishers before Bloomsbury took it on, and then it was a close call, with the boss’s niece’s enthusiasm for the sample that made them think twice about rejecting it.

On the other hand, Jeffrey Archer wrote and published his risible first novel Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less with the sole purpose of getting himself out of debt, which makes writing and publishing sound as complicated as deciding to have a cup of tea. I wrote Weed to make a difference to the world, to create something tangible, because I enjoy mucking around with words and ideas, because I wanted to write something that people might enjoy reading. Silly bloody me. If I had written it because I had Nick Spiv polishing his razor on my jugular cos I owed him a monkey, then perhaps Pete Wylie ‘Coyote’ would have picked it up.

When I wrote Weed, I was under the naive impression that publishers would put out books regardless of commercial worth if they had literary value or a meaningful message. (Belly laughs all round.)

Having dealt with numerous agents and publishers, I have come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t know either commercial or literary value if it came attached to klaxons and flashing lights.

I always submitted my Weed sample in a smart plastic cover. The sample always came back without the cover. Perhaps these agents and publishers have a second business dealing used plastic document jackets. Perhaps publishing is just a front for a massive and sinister cartel that steals and re-sells clear plastic bindings.

It also seems important to these binder baggers that their handwriting and grammar is bordering on illiterate. Weed came back from one very well known London agent with an address near Buck Palace — sans cover, of course — with a comment scrawled in biro on the top sheet: “It’s not boring but I suppose you have placed it by now.”

Well, no, I hadn’t placed it, but I was not going to write back to these people to say so, not after that stellar display of professionalism.

Weed is a satire in the vein of Hasek or Heller or Vonnegut but one agent wrote back a testy little note exclaiming that he didn’t handle fantasy. Did they even look at the manuscript?

I am reminded of David Lassman who submitted the opening chapters of some of Jane Austen’s most famous stories to publishers and agents as if they were original works. Very few noticed they were being pranked and rejected the submissions. You can read that story here.

I would like to exclude from these remarks the publishers Flame Books and Serpent’s Tail, both of whom wrote me cogent and legible notes saying how much they liked the story, had thought about it, but for their own good reasons were not into handling Weed. I do not mind in the least having my work rejected by people like that.

So, back to the naming and shaming.

The books I am going to mention here are ones that I have read or attempted to read. These are not books I hear are bad, to earn a mention on this page, I have read or attempted to read the guilty tome. Therefore, Dean Koontz, Maeve Binchy, Jackie Collins and Brian Horrick are not featured because I have so far escaped them. Nor do I mention books I have read that were simply not my taste. I have, for example, a great problem reading Gunther Grass, which is odd given my tastes, but when I read his stuff my mind wanders and I crave some drying paint to stare at. This is no reflection on Grass, just on my tastes. The books listed below are not mere antipathies based on preferences, they are all in some way, because of the prose or the story or or the characterisation, or the underlying ideologies, crap; objectively shit. George Orwell’s rules of style end with the advice, break all the rules of good writing rather than say anything barbaric. Well, we’ve got the barbarians here too.

Beserker (Something), Fred Saberhagen
I have Wiki-ed this and found there is no single book of the title Beserker by Saberhagen but I definitely read it, whatever it was. There is a whole Beserker series, each titled Beserker something, so I am not sure which I read. Beserker Wars, perhaps. I Wiki-ed the title because I was wondering whether there was some excuse for this book. Perhaps it was an underground cult classic steeped in irony, a cunning allegory, a masked satire. No. It really seems to be what I thought it was: dire and futile SF, and published by Penguin of all people. I hesitate to list this Beserker book in my worst books in the history of the universe list because Saberhagen is not evil. He is clearly a well meaning and humane person who enjoys writing SF, but this thing was awful. I could see no excuse for it at all. The cat could do better by falling asleep on the computer’s keyboard. Beserker Whatever is a space war epic about robotic ships called, er, beserkers that are intent on destroying all sentient life in the universe for no better reason than that’s what they do. The book has the span of an epic, covering hundreds of years and most of the galaxy and all crammed into just 200 pages or so. The effect is of a rough doodle for a much larger idea. Characters come and go by the chapter so you have no idea whose story you are following or why, and the characters have no character — they are all insubstantial blurs that sit at starship consoles and posture in earnest, mock heroic tones. Worse, the book attempts humour when the beserkers mistakenly create giant custard pies to hurl at Earth’s battleships. Why did I read it and finish it? I was unemployed in London many years ago and it was either read this hand-me-down or eat the mould growing on the skirting board. Tough choice, and in the end the wrong one. I no longer speak to the man who loaned me Beserker.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, and one other whose title I forget, Jeffrey Archer
I would rather be on a strict diet of Saberhagen than read another story in the vein of any of the following. These Archers I picked these up cheap at a Kinokuniya sale about 15 years ago. I was pondering at the time writing parodies of best selling fiction, but reading these I realised that Archer had already done it. These stories were not so much bad as utterly backward. The stories involve money or rich people. That’s it. In the whole world of human experience, the Tory makes fiction out of the acquisitive urge. If you are Jonathan Swift and you are taking the piss, then fair enough, but here’s a guy who can think of nothing else. Characters have dialogues (I can’t say his style resembles normal speech) at Wimbledon while the writer recreates the blow by blow and the score line of actual matches, which in the minds of the people who read this probably constitutes historical authenticity. Archer refers in the first novel to women as ‘creatures’ and in the second begins with a woman giving birth on a river bank and she screamed and screamed and screamed until she stopped, which is what I did trying to read it.

Avenger, Frederick Forsyth
Writing book reviews for a magazine is a mixed blessing. You are effectively paid for curling up with a glass of wine and having a read. Unfortunately, you don’t get much choice in the reading matter. I have read some super things that I would not have thought to pick up and I have read some stuff that you would normally only pick up with a poop scoop. Avenger is one of the latter. Forsyth is the literary equivalent of a prosthetic chest, an inflatable one. This is the man who puts the pomp in pomposity. Or perhaps he just puts the omp in the word. As with Archer, he laces his books with faux history as a substitute for authenticity or interest. He also evinces a deep desire to insert his tongue in the bottom of the President of United States of America. This could be because he is a Yankophile and a conservative. It could be because he likes the taste of poo. It could be because he knows the US market is very big compared to the UK market. Whatever, we learn from the big F’s revisionist fantasies that the during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the US watched while the whole of Europe and its institutions failed to deal with this conflict and eventually, for no other reason than exasperation, stepped in and solved all our problems for us. Bowel movements are a matter of military consideration too. We are told that as our elderly but superhuman hero is about to go out and kill lots of people (it’s just something he does) he eats up the last of his special survivalist rations (nuts and raisins but no beer) and the big F points out that he does this despite the fact that it will render him pooing small droppings. Well, I’m just glad FF has given us a fictional hero that will defend our lives and liberty even at the cost of pooping like a rabbit. An inspiration to all the troops in Iraq, I’ll bet.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Sydney Sheldon
I think I suggested obliquely in my KS review that this novel was a golden turd. It is just a turd.

Dead Funny, Tom Holt/Laptop of the Gods, Peter Chippindale
When growing up, we all receive advice for a happy and safe life from our parents: don’t accept sweets from strangers; keep your legs crossed; don’t fart in public; change your underpants and wash your teeth; don’t chase cars; be polite and say thank you; always carry a bucket; don’t make jokes if you are not funny. This last piece of advice was apparently not imparted to either Tom Holt or Peter Chippindale. Both are talented only in nicking ideas from better writers (mostly Douglas Adams) and in straining for effect. It says much about publishing and the world we live in that the utter banality of these two guys passes for rib-tickling humour. Holt used to be a solicitor and has an obsession with accountants that suggests he has learned the word ‘accountant’ is funny and should be used in comedy as often as possible, but secretly would quite like to be one.

Almost everything by Martin Amis
Objectively, Amis’s output is not in the worst in the history of the universe. Money and London Fields are among my favourite reads and I have done both twice. Moreover, I have read almost all the novels Amis has published. My problem with the fellow is that clearly he lost the plot about 15 years ago. Imagine Woody Allen on a strict diet of stupid pills, ego elixir, and nasty juice. That’s Amis now. Koba the Dread is the longest non sequitur in British literature and his style has turned into pure affectation (porno sun, porno clouds, porno iced tea, porno prose).

Intellectually he has thrown a rod. Terry Eagleton famously commented on Amis’s recent anti-Muslim statements that this view is “[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, […] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world,” who has learnt more from his father, “a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals”, than “how to turn a shapely phrase”.

Here’s something I am copying from Wikipedia: In 2003, Yellow Dog, Amis’s first novel in six years, was denounced by Tibor Fischer, whose comments were widely reported in the media: “Yellow Dog isn’t bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder . . . It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”.

So how about you? What are your nominations for worst novels in the history of the universe?

Mood: unfathomable. Music: too good.

Turning 45 and having my birthday fun whisked away by the wife, I was ignoring my birthday, as I have most years since I went 30.

However, a very recent realisation has compelled me to reinstate it.

I found out this week that my birthday, September 21, is the International Day of Peace or Peace Day as decided by UN resolution.

Apparently, beginning in 1982, the UN decreed that the third Tuesday in September would be Peace Day. In 2002, they decided to fix this to September 21.

Presumably, this was done in recognition of my famously non-violent, pro-cat views.

I now think that that September 21st is a darn cool day to have a birthday and couldn’t be much more appropriate for me if they had declared it International Wine day or World Forgetting to Shave Day.

A former girlfriend has September 11 as her birthday. Ouch.

The idea of Peace Day is an annual one-day ceasefire, where all warring parties everywhere stop what they are doing and have a drink to celebrate my birthday and reflect on the utter arrogant stupidity of violence.

So tomorrow (September 21) you are not allowed to shoot anyone, let off any RPGs, drop any cluster or thermobaric bombs or even argue with your sibling.

I am once again proud of my birthday. I won’t just be 45 tomorrow, I will be a non-violent, anti-war 45 and I now wish I had arranged a proper surprise birthday party for myself.