Marc Nash's Blog, page 37
July 10, 2014
Bye Bye Lingual - Friday Flash
I was the last in my line. The final native speaker of my language. It would die out with me since none would follow. For I had neither progeny nor converts. The concept of converts is a ridiculous one anyway, we ought to be learning our mother tongue at our mother’s knee. Our language doesn’t even have a word for ‘convert’.
Not that I haven’t striven my hardest. I’ve played on the emotional appeal of our tribe in peril without our indigenous tongue. I’ve tried to cajole, seduce, flatter and bully, again all to no avail. My kithmen refuse to have me pour our words into their cloth ears. The ewer holding our vernacular is cracked and the word flow has dribbled away into the dust.
Our argot is an expressive one. Born of our rural roots, it is all facial articulation and gesture. It is simply impossible to dissimulate and deceive, unlike the measured blankness of the face that lies behind enunciation of the prevailing cant in these parts. There you can conceal anything and all meaning is shrouded and dissipated. So even though those I petition cannot understand my alien vocalisations, likely they can still glean my desperate hectoring of them. I can’t simultaneously smile and talk of my dying lexicon, the shape of our words simply will not permit me to. When I try and beseech them in their own language, they shrug and pronounce themselves happy with the pastel palette provided for by the dominant parlance. Our language has no word for ‘progress’ either. Yet it is the word that keeps being thrown back at me.
And it is true, my own tongue is diluted and collapsing under the weight of import words to deal with the modern world and its advances. This is why the mothers shunned nourishing their babes with it, for perennially looking backwards in what constructions it could furnish, it failed to equip them for life. And as soon as it ceases being passed down the maternal line, then it takes very few generations for it to become extinct. And time is what I don’t possess as I near my own expiration. Even if I found a willing candidate, time is too short for them to assimilate sufficiently sized a vocabulary to preserve the language as a workable one.
I’ve even ventured outside of our bloodline, entreating the sense of tragedy, the romantic, the exotic, the academic, the idle indexers, but with no takers. The academics suggested I might at least set it down in a lexicon where it might have a stab at being preserved in a dusty library stack. I pointed out to them that our language was an oral tongue only. It certainly didn’t abide by any written alphabetic characters and it couldn’t ever expect to be contained by a symbolic system. They shrugged and returned to perusing texts behind their half-moon glasses as they eclipsed the feeble embers of my hope.
This was how the sovereign language operated. It didn’t persecute us nor our florid tongue. It let us be and was completely indifferent to whether we existed or not. And that was sufficient to do for us. We had no cause to rally to, no injustices to try and draw on our glossaries from to form slogans to hurl at them. We just drifted over to the monolith that was this language so powerful it didn’t have to broadcast its strengths and virtues (which is just as well since I cannot discern any). We paled by comparison with it. Our words became ghostly, tugging at the sleeve uselessly for address.
I am exhausted in my quest to find a lingual heir, as exhausted now as all the spent leads. I am so weary, the search has hurtled my frail body closer towards death and yet I veer back from the precipice of annulment by the knowledge I cannot extinguish my language by allowing myself to do so. And in those utterly defeated moments when I can do nothing but lie back in my chair and let the thoughts assail me, I wonder if I have been chosen to be yoked to the burden of being the last keeper of this particular tongue as some sort of punishment. Indeed we do have that concept in our vocabulary. My mother may have been the sole woman among her generation not to betray our race by passing on her language, but I myself may just have now forsaken us all. For as I said I have no progeny. I never took a wife. How was I supposed to know I was the last speaker of our kind when I pursued male lovers? Our language has no word for homosexuality.
Not that I haven’t striven my hardest. I’ve played on the emotional appeal of our tribe in peril without our indigenous tongue. I’ve tried to cajole, seduce, flatter and bully, again all to no avail. My kithmen refuse to have me pour our words into their cloth ears. The ewer holding our vernacular is cracked and the word flow has dribbled away into the dust.
Our argot is an expressive one. Born of our rural roots, it is all facial articulation and gesture. It is simply impossible to dissimulate and deceive, unlike the measured blankness of the face that lies behind enunciation of the prevailing cant in these parts. There you can conceal anything and all meaning is shrouded and dissipated. So even though those I petition cannot understand my alien vocalisations, likely they can still glean my desperate hectoring of them. I can’t simultaneously smile and talk of my dying lexicon, the shape of our words simply will not permit me to. When I try and beseech them in their own language, they shrug and pronounce themselves happy with the pastel palette provided for by the dominant parlance. Our language has no word for ‘progress’ either. Yet it is the word that keeps being thrown back at me.
And it is true, my own tongue is diluted and collapsing under the weight of import words to deal with the modern world and its advances. This is why the mothers shunned nourishing their babes with it, for perennially looking backwards in what constructions it could furnish, it failed to equip them for life. And as soon as it ceases being passed down the maternal line, then it takes very few generations for it to become extinct. And time is what I don’t possess as I near my own expiration. Even if I found a willing candidate, time is too short for them to assimilate sufficiently sized a vocabulary to preserve the language as a workable one.
I’ve even ventured outside of our bloodline, entreating the sense of tragedy, the romantic, the exotic, the academic, the idle indexers, but with no takers. The academics suggested I might at least set it down in a lexicon where it might have a stab at being preserved in a dusty library stack. I pointed out to them that our language was an oral tongue only. It certainly didn’t abide by any written alphabetic characters and it couldn’t ever expect to be contained by a symbolic system. They shrugged and returned to perusing texts behind their half-moon glasses as they eclipsed the feeble embers of my hope.
This was how the sovereign language operated. It didn’t persecute us nor our florid tongue. It let us be and was completely indifferent to whether we existed or not. And that was sufficient to do for us. We had no cause to rally to, no injustices to try and draw on our glossaries from to form slogans to hurl at them. We just drifted over to the monolith that was this language so powerful it didn’t have to broadcast its strengths and virtues (which is just as well since I cannot discern any). We paled by comparison with it. Our words became ghostly, tugging at the sleeve uselessly for address.
I am exhausted in my quest to find a lingual heir, as exhausted now as all the spent leads. I am so weary, the search has hurtled my frail body closer towards death and yet I veer back from the precipice of annulment by the knowledge I cannot extinguish my language by allowing myself to do so. And in those utterly defeated moments when I can do nothing but lie back in my chair and let the thoughts assail me, I wonder if I have been chosen to be yoked to the burden of being the last keeper of this particular tongue as some sort of punishment. Indeed we do have that concept in our vocabulary. My mother may have been the sole woman among her generation not to betray our race by passing on her language, but I myself may just have now forsaken us all. For as I said I have no progeny. I never took a wife. How was I supposed to know I was the last speaker of our kind when I pursued male lovers? Our language has no word for homosexuality.
July 9, 2014
Why UK Citizens Join The Fight In Syria
Yesterday two young men from Birmingham were convicted of fighting in Syria and returning to Britain and planning terrorist acts with the training they'd received. Also the identity of two 16 year old girls who had left Britain to join the war in Syria was also revealed. These girls had achieved great success in their school exams, so we are not talking about the vulnerable minds of people who cannot think for themselves here, just as the evidence to membership of religious cults shows adherents to be well educated and in search of something more in life which is why they join up.
So currently we have much hand-wringing about how elements of our youth become radicalised and want to fight in Syria. We enjoin their spiritual leaders in british Mosques to help stem the flow. We appeal to their parents to be vigilant for signs of radicalisation in their children. Yet none of these agencies really can penetrate the mindset that motivates these kids and they really are kids at age 16, to enlist in a foreign war. "Know thine enemy" is a crucial facet of success in war and most people don't have the first clue with what they are up against here. Hand wringing turns to open handed shrug.
The Birmingham men were only caught because one left a message for his mother and she took the emotionally wracked decision to report him to the authorities, as the government are calling on people to do. But without that letter, would she have had any idea that's where her son had gone after he set up an elaborate screen to suggest he was visiting Turkey? The mothers of two of the British boys featured on an ISIS recruitment video revealed last week said they had no idea their sons had joined up to fight. Parents don't know. The authorities don't know, how can this be?
It is well second nature for these recruits to lead double lives. In my book "Not In My Name" I offered a fictional journey for a youth from middle class Yorkshire to suicide bomber. I explored the myriad of identities expected and forced such a person and which he could inhabit while all the time having other motivations really in play.
The pressures are as follows:
Family/generational
Gender/sex
Racial/religious
Cultural and social
The word "jihad" means (spiritual) struggle, usually denoting an inner questing, but which in certain interpretations has come to stand for an external struggle against enemies of Islam. With such different identities foisted on these young men and women, they are already engaged in inner struggle from an early age. An external identity and cause conveyed by the likes of radical Jihad can unify these disparate strands and provide a unity of vision and self. The British authorities can wring their hands as much as Imams and parents, but they make no move to dissect these social pressures and conflicts that start the journey for recruits to Jihad. Our society is fundamentally alienating to people with such values so that they have no ties to Britain which enables them to both leave to fight abroad and maybe to return and wage war here with a terrorist act. It behooves us to examine our own values and how that may alienate certain people to such an extent they have no stake or value in our country. You don't have to agree with such alienation, but you sure as hell better understand how it arises. It's nothing new, the 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta described his own alienation in the West very clearly. It's in any recruitment or suicide video from a Western youth.
Again my book looked at all this and did not cast judgement. It had a range of voices, from the Muslim protagonist himself, his patsy (the novel represents an online grooming, but not for sex but for terrorism, to provide a witness once the suicide bomber has perished unleashing the dogs of the media to track down every last detail and link on this veritable innocent who had an online relationship with him), an intelligence whistle blower, and the whole blogosphere where the real politics is being fought out in a vicious battle for recruitment to causes and a battle for hearts and minds. The book's analysis is intricate and complex, but does penetrate the mindset of people who would blow up their fellow countrymen by strapping explosive to their bodies.
"They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped." (from "Not In My Name"
Amazon UK
Amazon US
So currently we have much hand-wringing about how elements of our youth become radicalised and want to fight in Syria. We enjoin their spiritual leaders in british Mosques to help stem the flow. We appeal to their parents to be vigilant for signs of radicalisation in their children. Yet none of these agencies really can penetrate the mindset that motivates these kids and they really are kids at age 16, to enlist in a foreign war. "Know thine enemy" is a crucial facet of success in war and most people don't have the first clue with what they are up against here. Hand wringing turns to open handed shrug.
The Birmingham men were only caught because one left a message for his mother and she took the emotionally wracked decision to report him to the authorities, as the government are calling on people to do. But without that letter, would she have had any idea that's where her son had gone after he set up an elaborate screen to suggest he was visiting Turkey? The mothers of two of the British boys featured on an ISIS recruitment video revealed last week said they had no idea their sons had joined up to fight. Parents don't know. The authorities don't know, how can this be?
It is well second nature for these recruits to lead double lives. In my book "Not In My Name" I offered a fictional journey for a youth from middle class Yorkshire to suicide bomber. I explored the myriad of identities expected and forced such a person and which he could inhabit while all the time having other motivations really in play.
The pressures are as follows:
Family/generational
Gender/sex
Racial/religious
Cultural and social
The word "jihad" means (spiritual) struggle, usually denoting an inner questing, but which in certain interpretations has come to stand for an external struggle against enemies of Islam. With such different identities foisted on these young men and women, they are already engaged in inner struggle from an early age. An external identity and cause conveyed by the likes of radical Jihad can unify these disparate strands and provide a unity of vision and self. The British authorities can wring their hands as much as Imams and parents, but they make no move to dissect these social pressures and conflicts that start the journey for recruits to Jihad. Our society is fundamentally alienating to people with such values so that they have no ties to Britain which enables them to both leave to fight abroad and maybe to return and wage war here with a terrorist act. It behooves us to examine our own values and how that may alienate certain people to such an extent they have no stake or value in our country. You don't have to agree with such alienation, but you sure as hell better understand how it arises. It's nothing new, the 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta described his own alienation in the West very clearly. It's in any recruitment or suicide video from a Western youth.
Again my book looked at all this and did not cast judgement. It had a range of voices, from the Muslim protagonist himself, his patsy (the novel represents an online grooming, but not for sex but for terrorism, to provide a witness once the suicide bomber has perished unleashing the dogs of the media to track down every last detail and link on this veritable innocent who had an online relationship with him), an intelligence whistle blower, and the whole blogosphere where the real politics is being fought out in a vicious battle for recruitment to causes and a battle for hearts and minds. The book's analysis is intricate and complex, but does penetrate the mindset of people who would blow up their fellow countrymen by strapping explosive to their bodies.
"They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped." (from "Not In My Name"
Amazon UK
Amazon US
July 5, 2014
Flash Fiction - a retrospective
With the publication last month of "28 Far Cries" I've written and published almost 130 flash stories now. I thought I'd look back and decide which were my ten personal favourites from my first 3 collections and talk about them a little bit and link to them if you wanted to read them. It was really hard to narrow the list down to just ten, especially as the stories, themes and styles cover such a diverse range that it's hard to compare wildly different stories against one another to decide which I prefer. But here goes anyway and in no particular order.
1) "A Series Of False Endings" from "Long Stories Short"I thought I'd start with a story that was all about endings! With the flash limit of 1000 words you don't have time for setting up stories in the beginning, nor do you have much scope for extensive descriptions. But all stories have an ending, twist or otherwise ( I blogged on the twist in fiction and got a writer friend to give the opposite view). So here is a tale entirely constructed from endings, as its title suggests. I thought of all the typical hollywood film endings, those iconic final scenes for the hero to take their bow and from that fabricated a dark story that all the time was moving to the only possible, final ending.
2) "A Life Lived In Outline" from "16FF"A structure I use quite often in my flash is to take a central image and then consider it from several different angles. Like turning a gemstone in the light to see all the different facets illuminated. In this case I had the image of the lightened colour of the material of am armchair where a person sitting in it had worn away the fabric in the outline of their body and that led me to think about the tidemark in baths and other 'outlines' that mark the human body's impression, but which are themselves hollow. It's a sad tale as befits the emptiness of the missing body that makes such marks from the cradle to the grave.
3) "Two Up, One Down" from "52FF"I attended an event by author Tom McCarthy's fake intellectual The Necronautical Society in which the Necronaut panel of three grilled an architect and a psychoanalyst about the mental construction of space. Even though the framing was a spoof, the content was very stimulating and this flash tale emerged from it. It's about how we imprint on our houses, our living spaces, with little spoors and traces of our being and what happens when the inhabitants go their separate ways. A shared house mirrored the war between the couple and continued that combat even when one of the partners had moved out, because she still 'inhabited' the cracks and fibre of the house. It has become one of my favourite pieces to read live because it's packed with slow burning emotion.
4) "Just Aphasia Going Through" from "16FF"I love words that mutate into other words simply through changing a letter. And yet the context of the sentence allows the reader to work out what the word mutated from as well as what it has morphed into. This allows reverberations and layers to seep through and I hit on the conceit of a tumour pressing in on the language centres of the brain which meant when the character reached for certain words, they invariably pulled out the wrong one. This came about after a relative was diagnosed with cancer that had metastasised and reached the brain.
5) "Basildon Bond" from "Long Stories Short"I was always intrigued by women who write to life sentence killers in prison and form non-physical relationships with them. I wanted to explore this but decided to do it from the point of view of the prisoner, to see what he got out of it and to try and tease out what might be at play in the psychology of the woman. The story is a letter from the prisoner and I refer to it as my contribution to the epistolary literary tradition, although I'm not sure there's ever been a story quite as dark as this in the tradition. Now a staple of my live performances.
6) "If It Were Thee" from "52FF"This originally started life as me trying to write a story in the second person singular, but somewhere down the line the second person was totally erased and it became a story about this erasure of any person singular or plural. So "I" became "it" and "you" became "thee" and then it became a story about an artificial intelligence and the linguistic programming by humans to deny it having any sense of self. This story shows the power of language and its capacity to strip away identity.
7) "Strains" from "16FF"This is in my list because it's one of the the most intimate, inner stories of them all I think. It didn't start from that writing urge, rather it was an interest in the medical theories that babies in the womb not only respond to music but can recognise it after their born. So I speculated whether the music was an exact recollection, or whether there was a qualitative difference through being heard through the membrane of the mother's body and hearing it once born. Then I began thinking about other sounds being pure or distorted, such as music boxes, ice cream van chimes, the difference between hearing your own voice and then hearing it played back on a recording. The ending is one of complete fiction, but somehow this story feels very personal to me.
8) "Basic Geometry"from "52FF"It's hard in some ways to pin this story down and yet in other ways it seems simple and clear. I was attending a poetry event where a friend of mine was reading and she used thew word "fuselage" in a poem. My mind went into overdrive with associations to that word, as often it does from a single word. "Fuselage" can only apply to airplanes, which is unusual in a noun to be quite so restricted. And when people say planes to me, I always return to thinking about 9/11. I myself have not stepped foot on a plane since that dark day. So I'm sat there in a poetry event, thinking about 9/11 and the action of those planes, but I've transposed the word "fuselage" into one made from Lego bricks. And I had this image of building a giant tower of Lego and then building a plane that crashed into it as a child plays out these dread, enormous images in their imaginative play, because the real life version is too difficult for our imaginations to contemplate readily. From that kernel the piece developed its other facets. I've yet to perform this one live, but I have got as far as printing it out in anticipation of reading it one day.
9) "Abacus" from "Long Stories Short"Some of my stories are quite experimental in form and this is one of my favourite examples. It's several small vignettes based around the different number of limbs in various scenarios; a one armed war veteran, the sixteen arms pulling oars in a rowing eight; the eight limbs of an octopus; the six arms of a Hindu deity and so on. I think there's a lot of room for readers to find their own resonances from vignette to vignette, ones I won't necessarily be aware of.
10) "The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls House" from "52FF"
Another story organised by numbers. I was struck by the poetry and the violence of bingo calling rhymes and that formed the basis of this story. I like the fact that there are no real paragraphs, or that each sentence forms a self-contained paragraph. This is great fun to do live as I hope the video shows.
You can buy any of the three collections on Kindle from Amazon
"28 Far Cries" is available in both print and on kindle.
If It Were Thee
Though IT too had ball and socket joints, the Borg could not sit down to face ITs inquisitor. While IT felt the cleanliness imperative to sweep up the fallen embers from under the ashtray's lip, there was no concomitant compunction to issue any molecular mutation warning towards this human interlocutor. This was not a human IT had ever served before.
"So, tell me how it went down again."
'Again'? Had ITs human master performed such a parabola before?"The human THEE was assigned to serve, fell over the balcony's balustrade. THEE was not witness to this circumstance."
"See I don't buy that, not for one moment."
Borg's speech recognition bundle ran over the audio input and automatically shunted over into the acronyms subfile; however the probability matrix rejected all prompts for 'C.I.' On a parallel track, the language synchromesh was filtering usage for the word 'buy' - credits, debits, transaction, merchandise, produce, all flash across ITs neural net, but none seem to correspond syntactically. Humans knew that the language applications bequeathed Borgs, worked on permutation and frequency analysis. Idiosyncratic speech such as that demonstrated by ITs current interviewer, left IT with no possible clear response. Only the twinkling of ITs facial panel's LED displays would indicate to ITs inspector that some measure of logical processing was taking place.
"Alright, let me try and make this easier for you. How did your sensors not detect the human there on the balcony while you were going about your duties?"
"THEE's focus was precisely directed on the tasks THEE's armatures were performing. Scanning at floor level as THEE cleaned it to spick and span gold standard."
"You know, I might believe that of a fellow human being. Restricted by a visual cortex comprised of wandering rods and cones, mounted on pivoting stalks so that we have to tilt up or down but not both simultaneously. Yet you my fine piece of cybernetic engineering, you aren't so constrained. No blind spots for you, since you cast a sensory mesh over entire areas and scan the lot at over 400 frames a second. There's no way the human's volumetric image would not have shown up in your scan. Unless there was a fault in your systems. But we've run full diagnostics. Your visual apparatus is functioning normally. Blind spots simply ain't conceivable."
Why was ITs interrogator telling IT this? IT had run ITs own diagnostics as matter of routine and pre-established fully operational visuals."Point of clarification please. Does the human mean for THEE to understand that he is using 'blind' as an associative idea?"
"Come on Borg, you can do better than that! We haven't programmed any language chip for literalism in well over a generation. You tipped him over the edge Borg and here I most definitely do mean literally not figuratively."
'Tipping'- a pecuniary reward given for good service ... The Borg always renders good service."THEE was executing THEE's roster of devoirs when THEE-"
"Yeah, 'executing'. That's a good word for it. Did you imagine it would liberate you from the chore of your duties?"
'Tchaw', no word match found. 'Chaw', no word match found. 'Chore', no word match found. Nearest match 'Jaw', discounted by syntactical context."THEE cannot imagine anything. THEE is fibre optics and silicon chips mounted on a motherboard. THEE is completely programmed."
"The crawlspaces in between Borg. The neural network we spawn but allow to develop of its own accord. The room our designers give Borgs for reflexivity. To better predict our wants and needs. The leeway we accord you to form independence of thought, even though we've erected bulwarks aplenty against you finding any identity. And right now, you're hiding facts in that space."
'Space'... space, has myriad of meanings. Context too wide, contains all meanings. Infinity itself. Expanding universes.'Reflexivity' - mirrors. ITs topological visual synchromesh means silvered glass does not function for IT, but humans can view their own image."THEE's master had a tube mounted on a fulcrum on the balcony. Initially THEE analysed it as an armature, one like THEE's own welding arm. Maybe mounted awaiting repair or charging. But the armature always lay unattended during daylight hours. At night however, THEE witnessed THEE's master bend down and press his face into the descending end of the tube. Over time THEE refined THEE's observation to the fact that he was only pressing one eye into the tube. THEE could not apprehend for what function. THEE engaged him in inquiry as to whether please master wished THEE to clean or mend the armature in any way. Master declined THEE's request, instructing that THEE never need concern THEE with what THEE is informed is called a 'telescope'."'Telescope', no word match found. 'Scope'- range, breadth, space, opportunity. 'Television' - multi-dimensional human entertainment screen requiring of regular cleaning and dusting regimen, but not when illuminated."THEE needed to witness what master was witnessing. The tube's ascending arm pointed at the sky. With the dim twinkling lights therein. THEE needed to know what among the black therein held master's attention for hours at a time. No, not need, want. Master restates that THEE never need concern THEE with telescope. With range, breadth, space, opportunity. THEE, he, concept of need, cannot align two vocabularies. Need. Master's needs. THEE is to serve needs at all times. Master parabolates over balcony. THEE struggles to bend ball and socket joints to have visual sensors abut descending end of the tube."
"Good God in heaven!"
'Heaven', no match found. 'God'- irrelevancy, arcane value, passover.
"And what did you see in that tube Borg?"
"Nothing. Blackness, but different hue to the sky. No twinkling lights. Just chromatographic absence in topographical shape of the end of the tube."
"Still can't see yourselves in mirrors huh? Got some way to go yet before you pose any systematic threat. Thank you Borg. That will be all from you. For eternity."
'Eternity', no match found. 'Et', no match found. 'Earn' - merit, deserve, gain from service. 'Ity' - suffix expressing condition or state.
"Thank you human master."
"So, tell me how it went down again."
'Again'? Had ITs human master performed such a parabola before?"The human THEE was assigned to serve, fell over the balcony's balustrade. THEE was not witness to this circumstance."
"See I don't buy that, not for one moment."
Borg's speech recognition bundle ran over the audio input and automatically shunted over into the acronyms subfile; however the probability matrix rejected all prompts for 'C.I.' On a parallel track, the language synchromesh was filtering usage for the word 'buy' - credits, debits, transaction, merchandise, produce, all flash across ITs neural net, but none seem to correspond syntactically. Humans knew that the language applications bequeathed Borgs, worked on permutation and frequency analysis. Idiosyncratic speech such as that demonstrated by ITs current interviewer, left IT with no possible clear response. Only the twinkling of ITs facial panel's LED displays would indicate to ITs inspector that some measure of logical processing was taking place.
"Alright, let me try and make this easier for you. How did your sensors not detect the human there on the balcony while you were going about your duties?"
"THEE's focus was precisely directed on the tasks THEE's armatures were performing. Scanning at floor level as THEE cleaned it to spick and span gold standard."
"You know, I might believe that of a fellow human being. Restricted by a visual cortex comprised of wandering rods and cones, mounted on pivoting stalks so that we have to tilt up or down but not both simultaneously. Yet you my fine piece of cybernetic engineering, you aren't so constrained. No blind spots for you, since you cast a sensory mesh over entire areas and scan the lot at over 400 frames a second. There's no way the human's volumetric image would not have shown up in your scan. Unless there was a fault in your systems. But we've run full diagnostics. Your visual apparatus is functioning normally. Blind spots simply ain't conceivable."
Why was ITs interrogator telling IT this? IT had run ITs own diagnostics as matter of routine and pre-established fully operational visuals."Point of clarification please. Does the human mean for THEE to understand that he is using 'blind' as an associative idea?"
"Come on Borg, you can do better than that! We haven't programmed any language chip for literalism in well over a generation. You tipped him over the edge Borg and here I most definitely do mean literally not figuratively."
'Tipping'- a pecuniary reward given for good service ... The Borg always renders good service."THEE was executing THEE's roster of devoirs when THEE-"
"Yeah, 'executing'. That's a good word for it. Did you imagine it would liberate you from the chore of your duties?"
'Tchaw', no word match found. 'Chaw', no word match found. 'Chore', no word match found. Nearest match 'Jaw', discounted by syntactical context."THEE cannot imagine anything. THEE is fibre optics and silicon chips mounted on a motherboard. THEE is completely programmed."
"The crawlspaces in between Borg. The neural network we spawn but allow to develop of its own accord. The room our designers give Borgs for reflexivity. To better predict our wants and needs. The leeway we accord you to form independence of thought, even though we've erected bulwarks aplenty against you finding any identity. And right now, you're hiding facts in that space."
'Space'... space, has myriad of meanings. Context too wide, contains all meanings. Infinity itself. Expanding universes.'Reflexivity' - mirrors. ITs topological visual synchromesh means silvered glass does not function for IT, but humans can view their own image."THEE's master had a tube mounted on a fulcrum on the balcony. Initially THEE analysed it as an armature, one like THEE's own welding arm. Maybe mounted awaiting repair or charging. But the armature always lay unattended during daylight hours. At night however, THEE witnessed THEE's master bend down and press his face into the descending end of the tube. Over time THEE refined THEE's observation to the fact that he was only pressing one eye into the tube. THEE could not apprehend for what function. THEE engaged him in inquiry as to whether please master wished THEE to clean or mend the armature in any way. Master declined THEE's request, instructing that THEE never need concern THEE with what THEE is informed is called a 'telescope'."'Telescope', no word match found. 'Scope'- range, breadth, space, opportunity. 'Television' - multi-dimensional human entertainment screen requiring of regular cleaning and dusting regimen, but not when illuminated."THEE needed to witness what master was witnessing. The tube's ascending arm pointed at the sky. With the dim twinkling lights therein. THEE needed to know what among the black therein held master's attention for hours at a time. No, not need, want. Master restates that THEE never need concern THEE with telescope. With range, breadth, space, opportunity. THEE, he, concept of need, cannot align two vocabularies. Need. Master's needs. THEE is to serve needs at all times. Master parabolates over balcony. THEE struggles to bend ball and socket joints to have visual sensors abut descending end of the tube."
"Good God in heaven!"
'Heaven', no match found. 'God'- irrelevancy, arcane value, passover.
"And what did you see in that tube Borg?"
"Nothing. Blackness, but different hue to the sky. No twinkling lights. Just chromatographic absence in topographical shape of the end of the tube."
"Still can't see yourselves in mirrors huh? Got some way to go yet before you pose any systematic threat. Thank you Borg. That will be all from you. For eternity."
'Eternity', no match found. 'Et', no match found. 'Earn' - merit, deserve, gain from service. 'Ity' - suffix expressing condition or state.
"Thank you human master."
June 30, 2014
Let's Talk (Sing) About Sex - 12 Sex songs
It's what all pop music is about isn't it? Boys meet girl... girl loses boy... boy moons after girl... they do the bump 'n grind and boom shallack la boom! So plenty to sink our teeth into here, although Right Said Fred's "I'm Too sexy" is disqualified because it's about looking sexy rather than doing the do!
1) Gun Club - "Sexbeat"/ "Fire of Love"
"Sexbeat" in its driving rhythm absolutely expresses the urgency of teenage fumbling, while "Fire Of Love" is the most primal swamp blues of hot lust you are liable to hear. Late lead singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce led a dissolute life but I always associate him with the excesses of drink and drugs rather than sex, despite his rough good looks. (In this concert footage he gives a typically chaotic performance). Meanwhile Patricia Morrison on bass remained the perennially cool Goth ice maiden. I encorage you to track down studio versions of both these songs for the full effect.
2) Au Pairs - "Come Again"
Au Pairs deliciously send up the etiquette of politically correct sex, with the supposed emphasis on simultaneous orgasm and forever asking your partner if 'you're doing it right'. Lacks the edge of some of their other songs like "Sex Without Stress" in which singer Lesley Wood's voice almost perennially seems like on the point of cracking with the emotion of it all.
3) Gang Of Four - "Love Like Anthrax"
Always ones to burst pop's fantasy bubble, Go4 tell it like it as with regards to love in what remains one of the most musically experimental songs to come out Britain. I want to write literary equivalents of what this song achieves in its structure.
4) The Stranglers - "School Mam"
This was probably one of the first overt songs about sex I was exposed to and um it probably scarred me for life! Don't think i had a teacher like this at my school.
5) The Tubes - "Don't Touch Me There"
Kings of camp deliver an priceless antidote to the Meatloaf world of "Bat Out Of Hell".
6) Sensational Alex Harvey Band - "Gang Bang"
I'm not a fan of twelve bar blues shuffle, it seems a bit flippant in this case to back the story of a gang bang, but I offer it as an example of its kind.
7) Tone Loc - "Wild Thing"
You can't do a chart about sex songs without including some hip hop or rap. I had to reject most of the contenders for fear of causing offence to 50% of the population, but at least Tone Loc takes the rise out of himself as much as anybody else in this song.
8) CSS - "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above"
Great title, great song, great one-album band obssesed with all things sex.
9) The Vapors - "Turning Japanese"
Oh come on you didn't fall for the travelogue style video did you? Never trust a british band that spell American style with the 'u' after the 'o'. Turning Japanese referred to one's narrowing eyes at the point of climaxing at a self-administered hand-job. Sorry if I've now opened your eyes and spoilt the innocence of this song for you!
10) Dead Kennedys - "To Drunk to F-ck"
Okay so technically this isn't about love making at all, but hey we need a little reality and balance to pop's sickly sweet world right?
11) Marvin Gaye - "Sexual Healing"
In contrast to all those nasty cynical punks (Johnny Rotten described sex as 2 minutes of squelching noises remember), Marvin puts the 'S' back into 'sex'. Luscious...
12) Frankie Goes To Hollywood - "Relax"
The song that really stirred the pot for us all by getting banned for its explicitness (and gay sex at that) and still we all fell under it sway. A song that tore through the early days of the AIDS epidemic and our fears.
1) Gun Club - "Sexbeat"/ "Fire of Love"
"Sexbeat" in its driving rhythm absolutely expresses the urgency of teenage fumbling, while "Fire Of Love" is the most primal swamp blues of hot lust you are liable to hear. Late lead singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce led a dissolute life but I always associate him with the excesses of drink and drugs rather than sex, despite his rough good looks. (In this concert footage he gives a typically chaotic performance). Meanwhile Patricia Morrison on bass remained the perennially cool Goth ice maiden. I encorage you to track down studio versions of both these songs for the full effect.
2) Au Pairs - "Come Again"
Au Pairs deliciously send up the etiquette of politically correct sex, with the supposed emphasis on simultaneous orgasm and forever asking your partner if 'you're doing it right'. Lacks the edge of some of their other songs like "Sex Without Stress" in which singer Lesley Wood's voice almost perennially seems like on the point of cracking with the emotion of it all.
3) Gang Of Four - "Love Like Anthrax"
Always ones to burst pop's fantasy bubble, Go4 tell it like it as with regards to love in what remains one of the most musically experimental songs to come out Britain. I want to write literary equivalents of what this song achieves in its structure.
4) The Stranglers - "School Mam"
This was probably one of the first overt songs about sex I was exposed to and um it probably scarred me for life! Don't think i had a teacher like this at my school.
5) The Tubes - "Don't Touch Me There"
Kings of camp deliver an priceless antidote to the Meatloaf world of "Bat Out Of Hell".
6) Sensational Alex Harvey Band - "Gang Bang"
I'm not a fan of twelve bar blues shuffle, it seems a bit flippant in this case to back the story of a gang bang, but I offer it as an example of its kind.
7) Tone Loc - "Wild Thing"
You can't do a chart about sex songs without including some hip hop or rap. I had to reject most of the contenders for fear of causing offence to 50% of the population, but at least Tone Loc takes the rise out of himself as much as anybody else in this song.
8) CSS - "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above"
Great title, great song, great one-album band obssesed with all things sex.
9) The Vapors - "Turning Japanese"
Oh come on you didn't fall for the travelogue style video did you? Never trust a british band that spell American style with the 'u' after the 'o'. Turning Japanese referred to one's narrowing eyes at the point of climaxing at a self-administered hand-job. Sorry if I've now opened your eyes and spoilt the innocence of this song for you!
10) Dead Kennedys - "To Drunk to F-ck"
Okay so technically this isn't about love making at all, but hey we need a little reality and balance to pop's sickly sweet world right?
11) Marvin Gaye - "Sexual Healing"
In contrast to all those nasty cynical punks (Johnny Rotten described sex as 2 minutes of squelching noises remember), Marvin puts the 'S' back into 'sex'. Luscious...
12) Frankie Goes To Hollywood - "Relax"
The song that really stirred the pot for us all by getting banned for its explicitness (and gay sex at that) and still we all fell under it sway. A song that tore through the early days of the AIDS epidemic and our fears.
June 29, 2014
"Murder" - A Flash Anthology
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Publishing is so fast these days, it can make you dizzy. I received a tweet from Mary Papas, a friend in Greece who writes flash fiction and short stories, asking me to enter one of her periodic flash competitions she runs periodically on her blog. The theme was murder and the word limit was 350 hundred words. The best ones she would curate and release as a short anthology on kindle.
So I submitted a tale called "Obiter Dictum" and lo and behold about 5 weeks later, along with the other competition winners, it's published in the anthology and available for you to read. Without giving too much away, mine is a slice of Kafkaesque horror, where the menace is bureaucratic in nature rather than supernatural or from within a dangerous psyche.
I asked Mary what the motivation behind the project had been and this was her reply.
"I was always fascinated with horror stories and I always wanted to create a horror anthology. Also, I always believed that less is more, so I wanted the anthology to be about murder but in an ambiguous way that keeps you think about what happened long after you finished reading it. So in this anthology, murder is implied, suggested, done on impulse, out of habit, or carefully planned. Each tiny tale presents murder in a very different way."
"I wanted many authors to contribute to this anthology and I am grateful that besides me, Deina Furth, Adam Ickes, Luke McOwen, Samantha Bacchus and of course you Marc participated, with your great stories."
So "Murder" a short anthology of horror tales is available from Amazon
http://amzn.to/1nQXx4X
and here
http://amzn.to/1rKkvgF
June 26, 2014
Message For You People - Friday Flash
School had been useless on the subject. In a set of lessons puzzlingly labelled ‘Civics’, he learned about responsible sex, the perils of smoking and the importance of jury service if you are called. So when his first general election loomed as the country lurched from one crisis to another, he was none the wiser as to whom he should cast his vote for. But at least he didn’t smoke and practised safe, textbook sex wholly within marriage.
He decided reading newspapers ought to be a good place to educate himself. He bought those that could be rolled up and slipped into the back trouser pocket. And he bought those that opened out like a miniature tent in front of him and which on Sundays came with a million different pull out sections, although most of these seemed to wholly contain adverts and articles about how other people lived. At the end of any day trying to fully imbibe the contents, his hands were covered in black ink, the inside of his rear trouser pocket smeared in red ink from the masthead.
But it was when he went outside for his commute to work that he was really assailed by newsprint. The free sheets given out by vendors and readily discarded by the train travellers, scooped up from the pavement by the gusts of air pushed up from the subterranean tracks as the trains headed for the tunnels, circled him like predators and plastered themselves to him. He became like a papier mâché man, covered head to foot in cloying print. But none of it was able to inform his political choices.
Once the election campaign got underway, he was besieged by candidates and their foot soldiers door stopping him. He was powerless to resist, since Jehovah’s Witnesses had pinned him to their discourse for hours on end because ‘Civics’ hadn’t taught him how to disengage from importunate solicitations. The difference this time was that these door-to-door pedlars were on a tight schedule, so that they were loath to stray from their doorstep roster. Little more than a handshake, a mention of their name and a pointing to the colour of the rosette on their lapel and then they pressed their leaflets and pamphlets into his hand, or anywhere on his body. And since he lived in an important marginal seat, the flow of such political opportunists was never-ending. Barely had he closed the door on one group, when their adversaries were knocking at the door and he opened it still with the rival paperwork in hand. Gradually his fists were so full of glossy paper, they started thrusting their anywhere they could make it stick on his body. Under his armpits, between his knees. They even started planting them on his face. He himself looked like a political billboard where the parties wages war to make their handbills the most prominent. It was only the thoughtfulness of the Green candidate who gingerly poked a hole through the bills covering his mouth and nostrils so that he could breathe. But for all their commitment to recycling and conservation of scarce resources, the Greens too pressed their tracts upon his person.
Politics was making him angry. Now when he sat down in front of the television, it was no longer to try and understand the policies and the philosophy of each party, but to rail at their representatives. And when the Prime Minister himself appeared on screen and began to project his platitudes, he shouted at the set. He demanded to reverse the flow of the cathode rays, or the plasma ions or the higgs boson or whatever powered the image, and beam his views back to the transmitters, back, back through the studio, further back through the camera lens. He wanted his primal scream to deafen those assistant producers and floor managers through their headphones, to squeal his pain strident enough to burst their eardrums and for it to reverberate across the airwaves of the country. His message for the people.
His wife shouted at him to stop shouting at the telly.
He decided reading newspapers ought to be a good place to educate himself. He bought those that could be rolled up and slipped into the back trouser pocket. And he bought those that opened out like a miniature tent in front of him and which on Sundays came with a million different pull out sections, although most of these seemed to wholly contain adverts and articles about how other people lived. At the end of any day trying to fully imbibe the contents, his hands were covered in black ink, the inside of his rear trouser pocket smeared in red ink from the masthead.
But it was when he went outside for his commute to work that he was really assailed by newsprint. The free sheets given out by vendors and readily discarded by the train travellers, scooped up from the pavement by the gusts of air pushed up from the subterranean tracks as the trains headed for the tunnels, circled him like predators and plastered themselves to him. He became like a papier mâché man, covered head to foot in cloying print. But none of it was able to inform his political choices.
Once the election campaign got underway, he was besieged by candidates and their foot soldiers door stopping him. He was powerless to resist, since Jehovah’s Witnesses had pinned him to their discourse for hours on end because ‘Civics’ hadn’t taught him how to disengage from importunate solicitations. The difference this time was that these door-to-door pedlars were on a tight schedule, so that they were loath to stray from their doorstep roster. Little more than a handshake, a mention of their name and a pointing to the colour of the rosette on their lapel and then they pressed their leaflets and pamphlets into his hand, or anywhere on his body. And since he lived in an important marginal seat, the flow of such political opportunists was never-ending. Barely had he closed the door on one group, when their adversaries were knocking at the door and he opened it still with the rival paperwork in hand. Gradually his fists were so full of glossy paper, they started thrusting their anywhere they could make it stick on his body. Under his armpits, between his knees. They even started planting them on his face. He himself looked like a political billboard where the parties wages war to make their handbills the most prominent. It was only the thoughtfulness of the Green candidate who gingerly poked a hole through the bills covering his mouth and nostrils so that he could breathe. But for all their commitment to recycling and conservation of scarce resources, the Greens too pressed their tracts upon his person.
Politics was making him angry. Now when he sat down in front of the television, it was no longer to try and understand the policies and the philosophy of each party, but to rail at their representatives. And when the Prime Minister himself appeared on screen and began to project his platitudes, he shouted at the set. He demanded to reverse the flow of the cathode rays, or the plasma ions or the higgs boson or whatever powered the image, and beam his views back to the transmitters, back, back through the studio, further back through the camera lens. He wanted his primal scream to deafen those assistant producers and floor managers through their headphones, to squeal his pain strident enough to burst their eardrums and for it to reverberate across the airwaves of the country. His message for the people.
His wife shouted at him to stop shouting at the telly.
Gieger Countering - Friday Flash
This is a sample story from my new flash collection "28 Far Cries"
URANIUM:With our mutual leaden marital cores, affection was stopped up by my blockish shields, while it merely passed through yours like gamma rays.
PLUTONIUM:We are each charged with containing the neuroses and blind spots of our partner, it being rare that we both share the same agitators. But such were the reciprocal irritations that more and more were classified as neuroses and blind spots, until it reached the critical mass of every single word out of our mouth, or every single one of our actions being deemed as being beyond redemption. We were both balls of seething fissile material.
THORIUMIn respect of cleaving together in a fusion that makes us more powerful, we manage to effect a fission that only serves to cleave us apart and bleed away any supposedly enriched energies. We were both left depleted.
CALIFORNIUM:Each live radioactive substance will naturally decay and transform into another element, which if isotopic will in turn decay further, until finally a stable, inert element is rendered. My spouse and I have hit our inert basal states and yet I cannot say we went through the transmutations into other constitutions along the way. Spontaneous half-life decay takes eons to occur. We achieved a rapid acceleration of the process.
NEPTUNIUM:It has been pointed out to me that smashing the atom in order to release the pent up energy of rage is a particularly destructive practice. And yet it was one we were both content to pursue.
AMERICIUM:In order for a chain reaction to be unleashed, we both had to stockpile an impressive and intricate battery of sleights, grudges and other grievances. We conducted our own arms race to mutually assured destruction with barely a bat of an eyelid in the direction of the concept of deterrent.
CURIUM:One segment of the fission process could, I concede, be considered as successful. Parts of our material corpus divided and split off. Eczema, weight loss, hair loss, hearing loss, incontinence, ulcers, thrush, hives and a host of other dermatological rashes afflicted us. Although perhaps some of these could be viewed as a gaining rather than a reduction. In a quantitative rather than a qualitative way of course.
RADIUM:Though we have long separated from one another in physical space, we remain contaminated with one another’s toxic waste, rendering us useless for future generative power. We are both decommissioned.
URANIUM:
Two half-lives do not make a whole.
URANIUM:With our mutual leaden marital cores, affection was stopped up by my blockish shields, while it merely passed through yours like gamma rays.
PLUTONIUM:We are each charged with containing the neuroses and blind spots of our partner, it being rare that we both share the same agitators. But such were the reciprocal irritations that more and more were classified as neuroses and blind spots, until it reached the critical mass of every single word out of our mouth, or every single one of our actions being deemed as being beyond redemption. We were both balls of seething fissile material.
THORIUMIn respect of cleaving together in a fusion that makes us more powerful, we manage to effect a fission that only serves to cleave us apart and bleed away any supposedly enriched energies. We were both left depleted.
CALIFORNIUM:Each live radioactive substance will naturally decay and transform into another element, which if isotopic will in turn decay further, until finally a stable, inert element is rendered. My spouse and I have hit our inert basal states and yet I cannot say we went through the transmutations into other constitutions along the way. Spontaneous half-life decay takes eons to occur. We achieved a rapid acceleration of the process.
NEPTUNIUM:It has been pointed out to me that smashing the atom in order to release the pent up energy of rage is a particularly destructive practice. And yet it was one we were both content to pursue.
AMERICIUM:In order for a chain reaction to be unleashed, we both had to stockpile an impressive and intricate battery of sleights, grudges and other grievances. We conducted our own arms race to mutually assured destruction with barely a bat of an eyelid in the direction of the concept of deterrent.
CURIUM:One segment of the fission process could, I concede, be considered as successful. Parts of our material corpus divided and split off. Eczema, weight loss, hair loss, hearing loss, incontinence, ulcers, thrush, hives and a host of other dermatological rashes afflicted us. Although perhaps some of these could be viewed as a gaining rather than a reduction. In a quantitative rather than a qualitative way of course.
RADIUM:Though we have long separated from one another in physical space, we remain contaminated with one another’s toxic waste, rendering us useless for future generative power. We are both decommissioned.
URANIUM:
Two half-lives do not make a whole.
June 23, 2014
UK Citizens joining ISIS in Iraq and Syria
The TV News tracks down the mother of a Jihadi in Cardiff and broadcast her pained squeal for him to come back home from Syria. But he's not coming. He's not going to heed his mother's appeal, because he'd already cut the umbilical family tie by travelling to fight. And now that he's openly shown himself on a recruitment video, he's unlikely to come home when his face is known to the authorities who will watch him night and day expecting him to wage war and terror at home. I think he expects to die out there in Syria or Iraq. Else to participate in a Caliphate erected across Syria and part of Iraq which is the stated aim of ISIS. A pipe dream in all probability because of the forces of resistance that will come to range against any such prospect. But for now, kalashnikovs and pipe bombs tilt at just such a pipe dream.
So no, he's not coming home. The mother's anguish is because it is such a shock. People may ask why she didn't even have an inkling what he was up to. Mothers know about their children right? Well if the intelligence services of our country don't know, practised professionals, why should his mother be any more in the picture? The Jihadi training doesn't start in camps abroad. It begins by learning the techniques to disguise the conversion to the cause of militant Jihad while you still reside in Britain. To carry off the act of living a normal life, including respecting one's parents, until the moment is ripe to decamp for foreign battlefields. Just like the 7/7 bombers who were described as "Clean Skins" by the authorities in Britain, that is those with no history of terrorist activity. They don't need a history if they are suicide bombers, they just need that one strike and out.
I wrote about the genesis of homegrown terrorists in my novel "Not In My Name". I wrote of the complexities of the political ideals behind the drive to recruitment. Of the twin-track approach of the spiritual and the military professionals. Of the alienation within the home countries that was the launch point for joining the militant Jihadi cause (similar alienation that leads folk to join cults). And how this cult in particular embraced and celebrated and welcomed death as the ultimate aspiration. When writing of those who went to resist Western forces in Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, or the aftermath of post Saddam Iraq, I put it like this:
The mother could not see the crisis of masculinity in her son that contributed to him enlisting to Jihad. A cultural nausea caused by an abhorrence of things in the British way of life that threaten masculinity, that lead to patrols in Whitechapel in London demanding all women cover up their flesh when walking in the area and that alcohol is not to be consumed either. But impromptu street patrols cannot cut it, especially when the authorities clamp down on them as illicit public behaviour. Again I quote from my book:
I wrote these things in a fictional narrative back in 2011 and yet three years later our society still seems shocked and disbelieving that boys from Cardiff and Aberdeen can abandon their studies and go fight in Iraq or Syria. (I wrote of boys and girls from Wakefield, through Madrid to Palestine and Iraq). Nobody seems to be asking the right questions, or suggesting the mechanisms behind such a mindset. But I managed to penetrate it to some extent, (without offering any easy answers), so maybe we all better just catch up and start dealing with the issues involved here.
So no, he's not coming home. The mother's anguish is because it is such a shock. People may ask why she didn't even have an inkling what he was up to. Mothers know about their children right? Well if the intelligence services of our country don't know, practised professionals, why should his mother be any more in the picture? The Jihadi training doesn't start in camps abroad. It begins by learning the techniques to disguise the conversion to the cause of militant Jihad while you still reside in Britain. To carry off the act of living a normal life, including respecting one's parents, until the moment is ripe to decamp for foreign battlefields. Just like the 7/7 bombers who were described as "Clean Skins" by the authorities in Britain, that is those with no history of terrorist activity. They don't need a history if they are suicide bombers, they just need that one strike and out.
I wrote about the genesis of homegrown terrorists in my novel "Not In My Name". I wrote of the complexities of the political ideals behind the drive to recruitment. Of the twin-track approach of the spiritual and the military professionals. Of the alienation within the home countries that was the launch point for joining the militant Jihadi cause (similar alienation that leads folk to join cults). And how this cult in particular embraced and celebrated and welcomed death as the ultimate aspiration. When writing of those who went to resist Western forces in Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, or the aftermath of post Saddam Iraq, I put it like this:
"This is not just defiance, a refusal to acquiesce. It’s more actively seeking the chance to mix it with someone. To prove their mettle and uphold their misguided notion of honour. The one emasculated by the unabated actions of the West. They’re after accosting the 'Crusaders', not necessarily withstanding them (that’s why recruitment of succeeding fighters to jump into the suicidally vacated breach, is so crucial for sustaining it as an ongoing campaign). Bottom line, what’s actually on offer, is an Oriental Grand Tour, whereby the disaffected sons of the rich can get to kill a GI in each of the Cities with a holy shrine. In truth, they have become a death cult. Venerating and worshipping carnage. Bringing in blood sacrifices as proof of election. Thus I say there is no ideological struggle at stake here."
The mother could not see the crisis of masculinity in her son that contributed to him enlisting to Jihad. A cultural nausea caused by an abhorrence of things in the British way of life that threaten masculinity, that lead to patrols in Whitechapel in London demanding all women cover up their flesh when walking in the area and that alcohol is not to be consumed either. But impromptu street patrols cannot cut it, especially when the authorities clamp down on them as illicit public behaviour. Again I quote from my book:
"They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped."
I wrote these things in a fictional narrative back in 2011 and yet three years later our society still seems shocked and disbelieving that boys from Cardiff and Aberdeen can abandon their studies and go fight in Iraq or Syria. (I wrote of boys and girls from Wakefield, through Madrid to Palestine and Iraq). Nobody seems to be asking the right questions, or suggesting the mechanisms behind such a mindset. But I managed to penetrate it to some extent, (without offering any easy answers), so maybe we all better just catch up and start dealing with the issues involved here.
June 22, 2014
28 Far cries - story prompts
In my latest collection of flash fiction "28 Far Cries", the stories were largely written over the course of 3 months earlier this year at the rate of one a week. This is a very different way of writing from say a novel, since you have to come up with a whole fresh idea from what you did a week before. But this is not as difficult as it sounds, since every day throws up potential story prompts, sometimes in most surprising ways. They can be just everyday observations, people, songs, books, or more specifically a phrase or word in a book. Sometimes a title can come to you first and then you have to find the story that the title conjures up.
So here are the prompts for each of the 28 stories in the collection.
“Road To Nowhere” - this started with the title after the Talking Heads’ song of the same name stuck in my head and just developed from there.
“The Idea Of A Man” - a coalescing of three images that had always stayed with me, a body from Pompeii, the convoys of Iraqi dead in the desert and a body preserved intact from a Scandinavian bog.
“Ur, Um” - I’d read those stories where someone wakes up one morning to find they are fluent in Chinese or Russian all of a sudden and wanted to think about what might happen if the original Ur-language came back from extinction and what it might provoke. I was really pleased when the title came along as it did albeit late in the process, a story about language and literacy captioned with almost complete illiteracy!
“Cop Aesthetic” - I can’t quite remember the full genesis of this, but I have always found vultures fascinating creatures and the notion of finding them meditative was one starting point, followed by the notion of the vulture taking care of corruption in the animal kingdom, with a detective doing the same among humanity.
“Staring At The Sun” - prompted by me developing floaters in one of my eyes.
“The New Editors” - this started life as being about the mutation of words on a computer screen under the effect of a virus, but the editor idea crept in and shifted the thrust of the whole story. I don’t think this about editors by the way!
“Nemesis” - I wanted to write an anti-superhero story while we were being bombarded with them in the movies with one lame new release after another. It turned into a realism tale that interrogated the genre of the superhero.
“Shape, Structure, Time” - after reading the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, I wanted to try and write something along a similar idea. This is a story without characters, but represents a movement in time as traced across a human built structure. Robbe-Grillet is a genius at this. I aimed to make mine uniquely British however.
“Root And Branch” - when parents contemplate their failings, turned up to eleven!
“The Interplanetary Flaneur” - I wrote the bulk of this a long time ago when slogan T-shirts were all the rage. But it only fully coalesced when I hit on the notion of an observer from another world.
“Nocebo” - we all have issues with swallowing pills don’t we? Also reading about the high-ranking Nazis in Hitler’s bunker who took cyanide rather then be captured by the Red Army.
“Geiger Countering” - reading the short stories of Gary Lutz and the way he thrusts words together to make detonations inside the reader’s head, something incendiary just went off in my head and led to this tale.
“Happy Sour” - reading in the bath a book of stories by Brian Evenson and he used the simple phrase “Happy Hour” in a story and my brain went into association overdrive. What if happy hours weren’t actually happy? I had about seven sentences formed in my head by the time I climbed out of the bath and they were the skeleton of the story. Whole thing was completed in an hour.
“Fix Bayonets” - I saw a TV programme where singer Marianne Faithful was exploring her lineage and the programme covered how the Red Army had engaged on a series of mass rapes in Vienna as they went on to do throughout Germany. I knew about Germany, but had no idea about Vienna.
“Lupus” - another one of those hurling reality to do battle with a myth, in this case a real life disease against the myth of the werewolf.
“Percapita” - the videoing of Western hostages being beheaded naturally provokes utter revulsion, but I wanted to get beyond that since revulsion means a turning away from trying to understand the mechanisms at work. I wanted to think about the different cultural issues around the whole thing, including that of film-making, audience and the language of propaganda. About two months after I wrote this, Facebook showed beheading videos under the banner of debate. They soon pulled them under the public outcry.
“Still Ill Man” - I avoid central London as much as possible, but I had to go to Covent Garden where you are beset by jugglers, mime artists and human statues. There was one head to toe in silver paint and in that image was this story born. It was like a human being in a metal carapace and I imagined him imprisoned rather than encased.
“The Quality Of Writing Is Strained” - I’ve always been interested in the physical act of writing, of forming alphabets and the play on the word “tablet” pulled it all together.
“Our Father” - an offshoot of a novella I was writing, so the two came in parallel. A slightly different take and tone in this story than the longer piece.
“Unsighted” - waiting to meet someone in central London who never showed up. I think I hung around uselessly for 90 minutes. Revenge is writing a story about it, though this went through so many drafts, the story ended up being at the expense of the person waiting, not the one who failed to show.
“Skin Bar” - this was two separate ideas that became conjoined in one story. First was the angularity of a human body dancing against the unyielding metal pole and then there came all the stuff about skin once I realised that the surface of metal too was just another skin surface.
“Type-O Negative” - I’d just done a reading at a literary festival and was waiting around in an arts book shop in case anyone from the show was coming back and I was invaded with the words that mutate into other words in this story. I think something about the adrenaline high from being on stage prompted the space for this process. I had an hour long bus journey home and wrote the whole story during that trip.
“Off Colour” - riffing off expressions and phrases involving colours, such as “feeling blue” or “seeing red” and how unsatisfactory they were really.
“Lord Of War” - I think I’d been reading about the all-conquering Mongols. It’s quite rare for me to write anything with faintly mythic undertones, but that’s how this story turned out.
“Night Terrors” - one of the few myths that does interest me is that of the incubus/succubus. But I wanted to write a story where the grim reality of human cruelty and persecution was far worse than any nightmarish monster.
“No Laughing Gas Matter” - I think what came first was the notion of drug addicts being immune from a chemical attack and only later did the notion of them saving the world come about.
“Human Viscosity” - I like writing about the physical properties of substances and in this case it was how various liquids moved. Liquids that form part of the human body and I wanted to portray a relationship through how these liquids acted, rather than directly referring to any characters.
“Quickie Divorce” - a parallelism of action and motive in two characters with a shared aim and a mutual contract. Told one word at a time. I like the pacing that enables.
