Obooki's Obloquy

Posted By obooki on March 4, 2010

Not wishing in any way to turn this blog towards the direction of politics (Obooki has been very careful not to allow his own political opinions to intrude at all, though he’s had great fun implying his political beliefs wherever he can since there’s nothing a reader likes more than to make assumptions about the writer he’s reading, even though we all know you can’t derive anything about a writer from his work(or vice versa)), and not that I really believe I’m saying anything political (but it has been pointed out to me that that might be just a matter of opinion) – but just to bring up again a short point made in a previous post, Mark Thwaite (or at least his mysterious alter-ego Rowan Wilson) interviews writer Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism) who says, a propos of why do you think capitalism has such a grip on our consciousness:

I’m not sure that it has a grip on our consciousness so much as on our unconscious. It shapes the limits of what we can imagine. It does so because it has enjoyed 20 years of unchallenged domination, blitzing our nervous systems with its intoxicants, paralysing thought. Put at its simplest, capitalist realism is the widespread idea that capitalism is the only “realistic” political economic system. The response to the financial crisis only reinforced this belief – it was (on every level) unthinkable that the banks could be allowed to crash. The problem is imagining an alternative that anyone believes could be actually attained. Which isn’t to say that an alternative can’t ever come about; in fact, after the financial crisis, we’re in the bizarre situation at the moment where everything – very much including the continuation of the status quo – looks impossible.  But this is already an improvement from how things seemed only two years ago. The financial crisis forced capitalist realism to change its form. The old neoliberal story was no longer viable. But Capital has not yet cobbled together much of a new narrative, or come up with any economic solution to the problems that led to the crash in the first place. It’s as if capitalism has suffered its own version of shock therapy.

As I say, this man has written and published a book which from its title (Capitalist Realism) one would believe contained something in its pages about economics – something I find difficult to understand in relation to the above quote, which seems to indicate no particular knowledge of or acquaintance with economics; – not of course, that I find it at all difficult to understand in relation to this quote, since it was clear to Obooki even before reading the interview that the work called Capitalist Realism was just that sort of bourgeois work which reveals the inherent bourgeois prejudices not merely of its writer but also of its readers precisely in its utter opposition to everything bourgeois – a writer and whose readers who are precisely of that kind who mock the complacency of the vast majority of humankind whilst reading and approving only those works whose opinions they knew they agreed with beforehand.

Not wishing to bog myself down in mockery, I’d just like to make one remark on the following one sentence (slightly rearranged):

The response to the financial crisis only reinforced [the] belief [that] … capitalism is the only “realistic” political economic system… – it was (on every level) unthinkable that the banks could be allowed to crash.

As we mentioned the other day, in 1929, the US administration – faced by a similar financial crisis – allowed the banks to go into liquidation. What we didn’t perhaps mention, but were thinking of, is the reason why the US administration had such little interest in saving the banks. What was there justification? – Well, they did so because they believed the market was right; they believed that if the market had caused the banks to fail, then who was the president of the United States to interfere in the matter. That is to say, they let the banks fail because they believed in capitalism.

This forms a nice argument, I’m sure you’ll agree: capitalism used both as justification for rescuing the banks and for allowing them to fail. I think we should easily be able to extend this to capitalism being used both to justify or not justify anything.

Of course, our writer goes on to mention in the next paragraph that “postmoderism” is characterised in part by “a destruction of the sense of history”. Hence presumably why we get views like Fisher’s that this particular financial “crisis” is in any way peculiar from any other financial crisis which has happened in the last, say, 150 years and demands some sort of “new narrative” or solution.

There’s insightful rubbish all through the article. Later on, for instance, he says:

it’s true that almost no-one working in public services is likely to be sacked if they get a poor performance review (they will just be subject to endless retraining); but they might well be sacked if they start questioning the performance review system itself or refusing to co-operate with it.

One wonders if he’s ever been in the public sector. For a start, everybody I’ve ever met in the public sector endlessly questions the performance review system, laughs at it, refuses to co-operate with it; secondly, training tends to be more a theoretical thing: people almost never get around to going on any training since there isn’t any money to send them on it. (A little story about training: my manager told me, after a performance review, that I should look into going on some time management training, since I couldn’t seem to manage my workload. At the following performance review he asked me why I hadn’t organised any time management training and I pointed out to him that I didn’t have the time management skills necessary to get around to organising it. The matter was subsequently dropped.)

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Tags: Capitalist Realism

Posted By obooki on March 2, 2010

We’ve always enjoyed Ekow Eshun’s performances as the absurdly enthusiastic but completely ignorant commentator Ekow Eshun on that marvellous satire of the contemporary arts scene that is Newsnight Review. So it’s come as a grave shock to us recently that his tenure as Director of the ICA should be inspiring so little confidence in its employees. This, after one worker there was reported recently to have said during a staff meeting, he “didn’t want to hear the word ‘vision’ coming from Ekow Eshun again – he had heard it at every staff meeting this year and it meant nothing to him”.

Classic stuff!

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Actually, there’s a much more in-depth article about the state of the ICA here at Mute Magazine. They look at the accounts, which are available here (2009 accounts soon to be available, and might make interesting reading – for those who find accounts interesting).

Take Mute’s interpretation of the accounts with a pinch of salt though. They claim, for instance, that “The number of staff paid more than £50,000 rose from 3 to 10″ between 2005 and 2008. Actually, it increased from 1 to 5 (a higher percentage increase – and all those 5 were being paid more than the 1). – Other things of note:

1. Their bank overdrafts (which are their only substantial liabilities) have increased from £94k to £282k in the period. (Though not claimed as long-term liability, it probably is in reality – and puts their debt gearing up from 7% to 17%). Interest payments are obviously also going up.
2. Debtors (i.e. money owed to the ICA by others) have increased from £489k to £1.1M between 2007 and 2008. That’s a lot, and one might be inclined to ask why it hasn’t been paid, and whether it will be. It’s affecting their liquidity naturally.
3. Their fixed assets (buildings, fixtures and fittings, furniture) have decreased in value from £560k to £292k from 2005 to 2008. – This doesn’t mean their selling things; it just means that, in good economic times, they haven’t really been investing in their buildings.
4. Their trading income (i.e. from selling books, from the cinema, from the bar & restaurant) in 2008 was £502k, but their expenses were £523k, giving a loss on the trading account of £21k.  Compare to 2005, trading income was £1.1M, expenses £829k – profit of £270k.
5. Yeah, and all that sponsorship money. What if it should dry up, eh?

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Tags: Ekow Eshun, ICA

Posted By obooki on March 2, 2010

I thought I’d review films this year, as well as books. I’ve not watched much cinema in the last few years, having lost my taste for it – but suddenly it seems to be coming back.

I guess my taste in films has a lot of similarities with my taste in books. For a start, a lot of foreign-language ones. – If we compare though what we might call the “literary” with what we might call the “arthouse”, then I’d say my opinion was much the same: some arthouse films are very good; whilst others are absolute rubbish, dullness passing itself off as profundity.

It’s on the other side of films – the more, how shall we say, “Hollywood” end that my taste is probably different. If I can’t read “popular” novels because they are just too dreadfully written, this isn’t so with Hollywood cinema, which can be very well made indeed. I’m not sure what this says about the respective industries, or about people in general.

If you want some specifics: the Guardian did a list of the top 100 films of the 2000s round the turn of the year: – neither of the films I enjoyed most was in it. Not merely that, one was only mentioned in the comments by two people; and the other wasn’t mentioned by anyone at all. They were, respectively: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, and Tran Anh Hung’s At the Height of Summer. – On the negative side, I feel great difficulty in expressing my utter contempt for the entire oeuvre of Lars von Trier (or at least as much of it as I’ve ever been able to bring myself to watch).

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Posted By obooki on March 2, 2010

About halfway through March February, I was forecasting, in my hopeful way, that I’d read eighteen books. As it is, I read seven. – On the other hand, I did give my first 10-rating. (I was hoping, of course, it would be someone more obscure and esoteric). Next month promises to be a bumper month: both in quantity and quality.

Reviews here.

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Posted By obooki on March 2, 2010

The Guardian has polled writers for their ten rules of writing, as a “homage” to that wonderful stylist Elmore Leonard. – It’s quite interesting actually, reading Leonard’s own rules, how he keeps saying: do such and such, unless you’re actually a good writer, in which case you can get away with it. It’s as if Leonard started writing these rules based on his own narrow and desperate practice, only to suddenly realise that they were a lot of writers out there who were a helluva lot better than him.

Like all rules for writing, these lists make me feel strangely violent. – The thing is, it seems to me, with writing, doing certain things creates certain effects; it all depends what you’re aiming at; what you want your novel to sound like. Prescribing that certain things – like using adverbs; like having thick paragraphs of words (all the classics can fuck off then!!!!); like using any other words but said to introduce dialogue – are wrong seems to overlook the possibilities of the written form and to show an extraordinary ignorance of the manipulation of language which is at the heart of the craft. But of course, this is typical of almost all writers, who believe as a matter of course that the only way to write is the way they write.

Still, I thought it would be fun to go through the list, very slowly, and have a look at all this sage advice.

Elmore Leonard

The only rule I can bring myself to roughly agree with is the one about exclamation marks. This is only a personal preference though: I almost never use exclamation marks in my writing; – but I can see having lots of exclamation marks would create a certain effect, and if this is what you’re aiming at, then by all means use them.

The whole business of “said” I could write a 200-page monograph on, but – you’ll be pleased to hear – I shan’t. I vaguely thought I had a tendency towards “said” myself, but looking through some of my writing the other day I found myself using all kinds of words (”replied”, “asked”, “argued”, “suggested”) which will no doubt break the reader’s train of thought as he has to look them up in the dictionary.

A lot of Leonard’s rules seem to be based around the idea that dialogue should be used to create character. – Maybe he should become a playwright then!!! – On the other hand, these rules aren’t much use if you don’t have much dialogue in your novel.

Diana Athill

“No inessential words” – for that simple, poetic prose which is the hallmark of every dreary novel you’re likely to read.

Anne Enright

“Only bad writers think that their work is really good.”

Hmm. So, presumably, only those writers who think their work is bad are actually any good. This doesn’t say a lot about their literary judgement. One wonders how they ever get anywhere.

Jonathan Franzen

Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

That sounds like the kind of thing David Foster Wallace would say. – It had never really occurred to me before; for which reason I think it’s probably nonsense. (Technically, of course, and doesn’t imply a sequence and is being misused – so maybe DFW would be against it).

Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.

Again, I think we are exploring Frantzen’s own uncertainties and weaknesses.

The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The [sic] Meta­morphosis”.

This is one of those things that sounds good until you start examining it. (It’s called rhetoric – use it when necessary!!!).

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

See above.

Esther Freud

Cut out the metaphors and similes.

I can’t employ them; therefore you shouldn’t.

Don’t wait for inspiration.

All the best works were written without it.

(And so on. – But you get the drift: conform to the same simple relentless dull style of every other worthless novelist. Don’t try anything with language that people might find pleasing; – words and sentences that give pleasure in themselves are somehow suspicious and we shouldn’t have anything to do with them.)

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Posted By obooki on February 28, 2010

No posts in a while, mostly because my Internet Service Provider was not fulfilling the function you’d take for granted in its name.

Not that this has stopped the litblogging world, which is all up in arms about a work entitled Reality Hunger – a work which seems (from what I’ve read) to consist entirely of quotes from other books.

Mitchelmore, with his usual insight and profundity, right at the beginning of his review seems to question the very physical nature of the work, wondering: “but in what way is it a book?” – I don’t know. At a guess: it consists of a series of pages stuck together with glue and bound at one side with some printed text on the pages. (Am I right?). Though, knowing Mitchelmore never says anything without acuity, it did leave me wondering if it came packaged as an aeroplane or a potted plant.

But it’s Mark Thwaite who – as so often – provides the most fascinating commentary, falling as so often in the simplest of post-modernist contradictions. (Oh, he’s been reading some Continental philosophy!). He claims, of Reality Hunger:

One of the very many obtuse things about David Shields’ obtuse “manifesto” Reality Hunger — an obtuse book which contains many wonderful quotes about literature and life and which could have been simply a very fine commonplace book — is its obtuse and strident assertion that the line between the real and the fictive was in any way ever absolute and that the commingling of these two supposedly separate realms will save literature from redundancy.

This last point is further elucidated:

Shields [...] seems to think that reality is a given rather than a perpetually socially constructed fiction which we half-wittingly recreate each and every day of our lives.

OK, let’s ride with that idea.

The next paragraph runs:

If the recent banking crisis showed us anything it was that the make-believe is at the heart of what we tell ourselves is real — and that fiction becomes fact when we have faith enough, or fear, in the (empty) lies that keep us in our places…

At which point, we might want to say: hey, wait a minute! Just now you said that “reality is … a perpetually socially constructed fiction”; so what’s this you’re meaning now when you’re talking about a point where “fiction becomes fact”; – you’ve just established that there isn’t any fact; that everything’s fiction.

He goes on:

Those who rule our world kill to maintain the presence of this absence every single day. Every day thousands starve or go cold, kids are bombarded in Iraq whilst neoliberal bloggers cheer, countless bore themselves stupid in offices — all so that bankers in Saville Row suits are maintained and preserved, and maintain the fiction that thinking beyond a system predicated on their maintainance and preservation is an impossibility.

Which makes us wonder why the author uses “fiction” here in a highly pejorative sense, and implies that the beliefs stated are somehow wrong, when – as has already been established – “reality” (any view of reality, whether someone else’s evil one or whether your “correct” one) “is … a perpetually socially constructed fiction”. On what possible basis can you claim that one fiction is preferable to anyone? – Certainly not by assessing it in relation to any facts, since there are no facts to relate it to. – You talk about “every day thousands starve or go cold, kids are bombarded in Iraq whilst neoliberal bloggers cheer”? – but there are no “thousands” starving or going cold and there are no “kids” being bombarded in Iraq, nor “neoliberal bloggers” cheering it on – this is all a socially constructed fiction, like the “bankers in Savil[l]e Row suits” and the people not thinking beyond their “mainta[i]nence and preservation”.

But, of course, what this really suggest to me, is that the writer doesn’t really believe that “reality is a … perpetually socially constructed fiction” at all, since he so quickly slips out of the notion when it doesn’t suit him. [ed. His common-sense takes over, eh?]

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Here’s the Wall-Street investor Philip A. Fisher explaining why we bailed out the banks (he’s writing in 1958):

Prior to 1932 there would have been serious question from the responsible leadership of either party [this is the US we're talking about here] as to whether there was any moral justification or even political wisdom in deliberately running a huge deficit in order to buttress ailing segments of business. Fighting unemployment by methods far more costly than the opening of bread lines and soup kitchens would not have been given serious consideration, regardless of which party might have been in office.

Since 1932 all that is reversed. … The responsible… leadership has said again and again that if business should really turn down they would not hesitate to lower taxes or make whatever other deficit-producing moves were necessary to restore prosperity and eliminate unemployment. This is a far cry from the doctines that prevailed prior to the big depression.

He then goes on to mention other significant factors: the increasing importance of income tax for central government revenue; the immense extension of benefits (notably unemployment benefits) – which would also encourage government to bail out the banks (i.e. so that the economy wouldn’t collapse, unemployment increase massively, and a much much larger deficit be created by a fall in GDP combined with an enormous increase in benefit payments).

What’s the main difference between 1929 and 2009? – In 1929, they didn’t bail out the banks, the US economy collapsed, the world economy collapsed and we entered into a wholesale slaughter of one another the scale of which had never been seen before.

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Posted By obooki on February 15, 2010

Or yes, and as quoted in the same Parks piece and approvingly remarked on elsewhere, I must heartily agree with Borges’ comment:

most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

If, like the good philosophers we are, we test this sentiment by generalising it and taking out “the works they read” and replacing it with “stuff”….

I often find myself staring at a sunset thinking: if only I knew what the majority consensus was, or if this sunset considered itself right-wing…

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For those who cannot bear anyone to suspect that Borges wasn’t the great intellectual that’s sometimes made out – that he was in fact something of a faker (well, he wrote “ficcion” didn’t he?) – here’s what your opinions sound like. – Bolaño should show the master more respect.

.

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Posted By obooki on February 15, 2010

Tim Parks writes an article in the NYRblog about the ultimate dull conformity of all world novels, as commented on here and here, and postulates a future in which each individual language’s idiomatic charm will be lost. – Like all such speculatives trends, Obooki imagines it is nothing; but that is not why the article interests us. – No, why we find it interesting is Parks’ first line:

Not all writers share the same sense of whom they are writing for.

Grammatically correct, or not?

Now I know what you’re thinking. This line should clearly be re-written as:

Not all writers share the same sense of for whom they are writing.

But leaving apart such simple Latinate solutions, it brings up a question which had been nagging on Obooki’s mind since our last painful excursion into correct English usage, although as it happens not quite in its classical Obookian form.

Here is the question: does “whom” in this sentence depend on the preposition “of” or does it depend on the preposition “for”? – Now, ok: as it happens (and this is why we don’t find it classical), it doesn’t really much matter, since both “of” and “for” take the accusative (i.e. “whom”). (Which doesn’t explain why the sentence sounds so dreadful, but…).

Parks, one sentence further on, provides his own answer to this question, for he says:

there are clearly periods of history when … authors’ perceptions of who their readers are change

There we go: “whom”, in the first sentence, must have been dependent on “for”, since now that we have the same construction which finds “who” in the nominative in the relative clause (is in apposition to “their readers”), suddenly the relative clause dominates and “who” becomes nominative.

I have a suspicion this is true. My thought is actually this: that “of” doesn’t as it were govern “who” at all, but governs the entire relative clause, as one might once (or Obooki, with his strange attempts at punctuation, might even yet now) have written perhaps:

Not all writers share the same sense of, whom they are writing for.

(Yes, “blocks of language” are Obooki’s thing).

The fact that the first sentence sounds dreadful (at least, to my ear) and any writer of distinction – any master of his own language’s idiom – should have circumvented it (the easiest way in English, it seems to me, is either a) restructure the sentence so that it never arises, or b) replace “who” with an apposite noun (e.g. “the audience”) where case suddenly isn’t an issue) is perhaps just a reflection of the gentle obliteration of “whom” from our language (it shall not be missed!), and also a nagging doubt that we can’t in this context substitute the usual genitive “whose” for “of whom”.

Anyway, I didn’t think it was a good way to start a newspaper article.

(I see he also goes for “1960’s”.)

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Tags: Tim Parks

Posted By obooki on February 11, 2010

Julian Gough, quondam writer of a short story, has been having a go at the Irish literary establishment (picked up here by The Guardian, which tries to provoke the Irish literary establishment into having a go at quondam writer of a short story, Julian Gough).

Since we violently disagree with Julian Gough in everything he says, it comes as a great pity he has the gall to use so many Obookian arguments to justify himself, viz.

I do read the odd new, young writer, and it’s usually intensely disappointing. Mostly it’s grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting.

or

I don’t believe in trends, movements, schools, and the whole German classification mania. That’s all made up after the fact, to help university libraries with their filing.

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Posted By obooki on February 8, 2010

On QI this week, they claimed that Stalin never laughed. I can’t honestly believe this: every piece of anecdotal evidence I’ve ever read indicates he had a particularly dark and macabre sense of humour.

Every day in Pravda, for instance, starting in the mid-1930s, Stalin used to have a spot the difference competition. Here’s one below. See if you can, Spot the Difference.

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