September 23rd - September 29th 2002
Sunday Proselytisation
Saturday Regime change
Friday Self
Thursday Illustrated Books pt 2
Wednesday Ms Gash
Tuesday Winging it
Monday More fingers
Sunday 29th September 2002
Conversation at the office: Part Two
"NSPCC."
"Yes?"
"Somebody remind me. National Society for the.. of Children?"
"Prosecution of Cruelty to Children."
"Prevention of Cruelty."
"Promulgation."
"Proselytisation."
"Privatisation?"
"Ah, that's it."
Saturday 28th September 2002
Conversation at the office: Part One
"Regime change in Iraq.. what's supposed to replace it?"
"I thought.. Starbucks?"
"Or Virgin Atlantic. Richard Branson would look nice in a keffiah"
"John Birt's between jobs again, isn't he?"
"I think they should just give Iraq to the Palestinians."
"Or maybe.. Belgium? They'd appreciate the weather."
"Certain logistical problems.."
"You do it in easy stages. First you swap the entire population of Iraq with, say, Turkey.."
"Whilst Belgium moves to Switzerland.."
"The Iraquis then move on to Greece. Do we move the Turks back?"
"Well no, because then you'd have to put the Greeks into Iraq.."
"Point taken."
Friday 27th September 2002
A lengthy and laudable piece by Will Self in today's Independent talks, at considerable length, about what it means to be gay these days.
His piece is a considerable achievement inasmuch as it manages to describe, question and, to a certain extent, applaud current gay attitudes without in any way patronising or demeaning them: indeed I caught myself, several times, thinking "Hang on, Will Self's not gay. Is he?"
All becomes clear, or clearer, towards the end of the article, where he writes:
In my experience sexual orientation is mutable, and in working my way into the minds of my same-sex protagonists [for an adaptation of Dorian Gray] I found myself enjoying enhanced homosexual fantasies. I've also been having the deabte that I thought Aids might provoke - the debate about the redundancy of 'gay'...
The piece does not appear on-line yet (though you might find a dead-tree copy in a your newsagents on the way home if you're lucky); this is a shame, because I think it raises a lot of important points, not least in his closing argument where he counters a cry from a friend ("Well, I shouldn't like to spend my whole evening chatting somebody up, only to find out eventually that he wasn't interested at all in sleeping with me") by saying:
Were I single, I can't imagine anything more exciting than chatting someone up in a world where orientation was less elastic, less a given for most - if not all - people.
I suppose, faute de mieux, some people will feel the need to define themselves as 'heterosexual', but I for one find it merely to be something I do, rather than what I am.
I don't agree with his argument, but I can't say why.
Yet.
(Declaration of interest: I'm no big fan of Self's novels but he did feature, contingently, in a dream I once had, where I discovered him running a watch and clock repair shop in Islington's Upper Street.)
Speaking of gay identity, and indeed identity in general, and bearing in mind the matter of fantasists (as raised by The Tale of My First Boyfriend), several people I know will find themselves especially fascinated by an interview with Duncan Roy in last Saturday's Guardian. Fascinating.
Thursday 26th September 2002
Coming up with a quick and dirty graphic to illustrate Summer Reading ought to be pretty straightforward; it should be easy enough to find a stock picture of a pair of sunglasses lying on an open book, or something like that, surely?
Well possibly, but damned if I could find one. And besides, I'd somehow got the idea of book-as-tent into my head:
Knocking that up in Photoshop shouldn't have taken long - but I got pre-occupied by the curve of the pages, so it ended up taking far longer to create than the half-hour or so that I get paid for. But not as long as my next example:
The visual shorthand for poison is simple enough, but combining it with tea proved a little more complicated. In retrospect, I could have tried some montage of a tea packet with the skull and crossbones, or maybe picked something out from the perforations in a tea-bag. The tea table was a lot more fun to do though, and allowed me to get the bio-hazard sign in too.
Not so nifty, though a hell a lot quicker, was my idea about how to illustrate a review of the hundreds of books written to commemorate September 11th. (I admit that the caption is in rather bad taste - but then so were many of the books under review.)
Wednesday 25th September 2002
Collisions between British and German mind-sets have always been characterised by a degree of mutual incomprehension - hence, presumably, the description (in earlier editions, since amended) from Downing Street of last night's meeting between Blair and Schröder: "Very warm and formal".
A call to allow 16-year-olds to buy hardcore pornography was narrowly defeated at the Liberal Democrat party conference yesterday. The motion was supported by a sex shop owner who represents Sheffield Hallam, Julia Gash.
Hold that previous entry; an American correspondent writes:
In fact, Six Feet Under won six Emmys, one more than West Wing. The other awards were announced September 14th. While they weren't major, they still count. The five awards to add to the Best director award were: Guest actress in a dramatic series, Patricia Clarkson; Best casting of a dramatic series; Best makeup (prosthetic); and Best theme music. So Six Feet Under won six Emmys to West Wing's five.
(Not sure what that revised tally does to another idea I've seen floated: that a vote for West Wing was a [post-9.11] vote for Americuh...)
Tuesday 24th September 2002
Nice to see The West Wing coming up trumps in yesterday's Emmy's; less nice to see Six Feet Under only winning one gong ('Best directing, drama series' and that only for the pilot.)
West Wing's Aaron Sorkin admitted as much when he accepted his award for Best Drama Series: "To the guys from Six Feet Under: If I was half a man, I'd hand this thing right over to you, but I think we know that's not going to happen."
That said, given a choice of gift between a complete-series DVD of West Wing and Six Feet, I think I'd have to opt for the former; I admire Six Feet Under enormously (for its courage in tackling existentialist themes on prime-time tv as much as for its excessive gay-friendliness) but somehow it's never quite as entertaining as I hope for: there's something off about its pace, something gluey in the way the plot-line keeps lurching into turgid sententiousness, like a tape-recorder with faulty batteries.
Crass though it can be, West Wing orchestrates its story lines with stunning eclat, amply assisted by its commitment to excellent actors, three of whom were rewarded with Emmys: First Lady Stockard Channing, Press Secretary Allison Janney and Chief of Staff John Spencer.
I admit to a mild twinge of guilt about tossing 'post-fascist' so lightly into a description of Peregrine Worsthorne the other day, a laziness only partially excused by blog deadlines.
It was salutary, less than 24 hours later, to find no less an authority than Terry Eagleton defining terms (in an article about T S Eliot in the LRB):
In fact, Eliot was not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite.
Fascism is statist rather than royalist, revolutionary rather than traditionalist, petty-bourgeois rather than patrician, pagan rather than Christian... In its brutal cult of power and contempt for pedigree and civility, it has little in common with Eliot's benignly landowning, regionalist, Morris-dancing, church-centred social ideal.
Even so, there are affinities as well as contrasts between Fascism and conservative reaction.. Both are elitist, authoritarian creeds that sacrifice freedom to organic order; both are hostile to liberal democracy and unbridled market-place economics; both invoke myth and symbol, elevating intuition over analytical reason.
Moreover, though racism and anti-semitism are not essential components of right-wing Tory belief, as they are of most Fascist doctrine, they flourish robustly in that soil.
Monday 23rd September 2002
The highlight of my weekend? "More fingers!" (Time and place best left unspecified, I think.) Elsewhere, I gather that The Tale of My First Boyfriend was the subject of some discussion at the lunchtime tables of the literati - which is nice. Late arrivals will find it archived here.
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