Leo X. Robertson's Blog, page 28

Thought: Dante's Inferno

There are two questions which arose from reading Inferno again:

1. What have we learned?
2. What to make of the answer to Q1?

The answer to the first question is fairly obvious: not a lot. We’re still a bunch of usurers, usurpers, adulterers, gluttons and thieves. We’re still avaricious, wrathful “carnal malefactors”.
(Luckily the sodomites, the blasphemers and the unbaptised have made it out. Because who cares?)

Answering question 1 alone made me feel like a cantankerous carmudgeon of Gass’ Middle C proportions. Just send us all to Inferno right now!

This response is however not an answer to question 2. The answer to question 2 is just as obvious as that of question 1: be kind.

Let 700 years of lost battles, coveted wives, imposters, simony-committers and the like be evidence that when people make mistakes and don’t learn, they really make mistakes, and they just won’t learn, again and again and again!

Let’s just be kind, then. When we thought it was tough, it was actually really tough. But that’s fine because we’ll just be kind :-)

Review: Consider The Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Not his best for the following reasons:

1. We know what we know now of how his life was cut short. So why the hell did someone, in retrospect, choose to send the great American writer to a bloody lobster festival? To a pornography awards show? At any rate, all this ended up revealing was that DFW was the real world Buzz Killington- he starts his porn award article with genital mutilation statistics, and implores of the readers of some gourmet food magazine to consider the pain and suffering of not just lobsters but many kinds of animals in the cruel food market. I empathise with his inability to stop taking things seriously.
2. The essays I was interested in reading failed to come to any satisfactory conclusion (Dostoyevsky and 9/11). At least with 9/11 having read Bleeding Edge recently, it appears that the guess of the great novelists is as good as ours.
3. Some of it I wasn’t interested in reading in the first place (John McCain) and something about a dictionary which was almost unreadable.

Although the best part of not his best was that he seemed really human. Sometimes sneering or judgmental, just like you and me. One of DFW’s idols, Gaddis, was reluctant to interview because he believed his best work was in his novels, and it makes perfect sense that a good novel can be left alone without explanation from the artist. Yet as DFW expands upon his work in interviews, he has clearly managed to observe and articulate effectively the problems with the modern condition, yet, and as I suspect with most artists, some of his writing style here suggests to me that he hasn’t managed to escape the issues himself. DFW is treated as some sort of prophet, and I for one was jealous of how he seemed to know how to live. Knowing how to live and living it are two different things entirely, and I have now realised that if someone is capable of imparting real and effective advice, it may well be because they are unable to take it themselves. I really love the epiphany that we’re all human- I would love to have it more often.

Most importantly for writers, his grasp of the English language is blisteringly impressive, but I would argue unnecessary for the purposes of most prose. I mean to say that if I catergorically sans nom de guerre use such a foray of tumescent language [1] to the palpable degree of yr. avg. miscreant, does it not evince in the reader [2] a tangential feeling that the chintziness of the hyperbolic prose borders on satyriasis? That the clerestorical phallocracy of language usage [3] and the postmodern pseudo-anxiety of yr. writer will not let a single sentence be de facto luxated? Does it really allow for ample and correct communication [4] to be written in such a format?

I don’t think so.

[1] (and footnotes which appear entirely in brackets. Yr. reviewer trusts yr. writer implicitly and that his klieg-glare into the dark corners of Standard Written English (a) that his grammatical prowess can indeed illuminate, and yet this hypomanic usage of brackets within footnotes creates a spiriferous subcategorisation of text to the point of turgitidy.)
(a) Heretofore unmentioned, henceforth “SWE”.

[2] ie. The reader of this document, by which I mean the review.
[3] And just when you were honestly, bare-bones and “all on the table” trying to interpret a sentence successfully, a quizzically extraneous footnote which breaks the reading flow of even the most exalted DFW savant that you later decide has next-to-nothing to do with the sentence in which it sub-prolegomenously interjected eg. Here is a poem I wrote about some dreams I had:

I had a dream
That I took Kirsty Alley to a MILF bar
Harry Styles kept stealing my doritos
Then the government blew up two planets close to Earth like moons
The chain reaction accidentally exploded Venus and sent us into the sun and I
Woke up

I had a dream
That Tina Fey was in an army vehicle in a Ziggy Stardust outfit
She sang glam rock into a speakerphone that shot
Multicoloured ice like a stained glass window from a cannon
At an Asian teen down one of those angled San Francisco streets

I had a dream
That ice propagated from the school janitor
In the centre of the blaes pitch
I tried to get away but got trapped on the fence
At home the microwave froze and stung my fingers to touch it
I looked back and it was normal
I opened it and a thawed human ear attached to a cuboid of human material
Like a cross section through the head
Was inside

Try to remember WTF yr. writer was talking about after finishing that footnote! At this point you’re straddling two layers of text in your head and trying to remember how they match up, but have more importantly declaimed to yourself all future footnotes to be exformative.

[4] Says yr. formerly 100% fully sponsorial reviewer.

Story: The Moth

My mother gave birth to a moth. I wonder how that was.

What I meant was that… I was here again where you’d always find me, in front of the screen, researching an article. As the night went on I’d get closer and closer, homing in on the light and relaxing into the night. Or it could well be the wine. Sip.

I flicked between tabs looking for any sign of citation, any information that I could use, that would be useful, gnawing on a bacon sandwich in stale torn pitta bread. Wholemeal, got to keep healthy. I’d sleep during the day as always. I was a moth.

I clicked away on the keys with my meat feelers. People think me lonely: I don’t mind what they think. Moths don’t think like people.

I wasn’t always here. Not at first. I did try: I was out in the light with the rest. I went to restaurants, I sat in bars, but I began to drift off and stare up at the lights. They were more interesting to me than the conversation. Got to reach the light. Now I can’t leave it.

My dad missed me. He called me all the time. But he was too ill to visit. It was impractical for me to leave, because, you know…

Ugh. Spelling was no longer a priority for anyone. It was getting me down. Sip. Long, complex and ill-informed opinions spewed out at me from the screen. That was fine, I thought. Made me think how clever I was to stay indoors. Moths don’t have bellies like mine, though, not that it’s very big, but it’s not very moth-like. I dipped my proboscis into the glass. I smiled.

A brother of mine flitted deftly through the gap I left open in the window, and planted himself on the computer screen, flapping his wings to adjust his comfort, and rotating on the plane of the glass, searching for the lightest point. I pushed at him with my index finger and he walked across my nail. I lifted the curious brown creature before my eyes and brushed his feelers across my face, bringing him back down to the level of my mouth and licking some of the bitter dust from his wings, savouring it on my tongue. Suddenly I was transported all across the city, over rivers under bridges across rooftops and parapets, and he clicked at me with satisfaction as the image ran across my mind. Silly little brother of mine.

I placed him back down on my cool desk of white plastic and watched his little bent legs slide across the smooth surface, steadying himself. Without thinking, like a sneeze I was overcome with the urge to bring about his death. I raised my fist into the air and slammed it down on his body. I closed my eyes and let the tears seep out, relaxing my hand and brushing my palm across the mess of dust on the desk. Why do moths always turn to dust right after you crush them? Maybe they don’t have souls.

Eyes still closed, I imagined a dense mist of shining brown particles entering my hand through the desk and spreading through my nerve fibres. Return to me, brother. The particles fused with my ganglia, and I became two moths. I sighed, spreading the dust of death across my face and lying down on the bed.  The haze of wine swirled me around while I remained motionless, just waiting until the night was over. My new friend had showed me more adventure, greater depths of darkness and hope than all my journeys across the globe. He lived his life in the dark, every source of light was at the end of a tunnel, but threatened to kill him all the same.

I jerked around restlessly as the particles melted and grew, spreading up my spine and into the brainstem. His death would not be without retribution.

So I’m gonna do it for him I will.

I’m gonna do it I’m gonna reach the moon one day all it takes is every night trying, every night getting out there getting up looking for a light is all it takes, all I want, I’m gonna get to the moon.

And when I get to the moon I’m gonna start populating it, me and the other guys are gonna have a week long session to fill the with orb with us and we’ll dance and we’ll drink each other’s blood that’s all I wanna do.

So when I spread my dusty brown wings and come out from the trees at night that’s where I’m gonna go, I’m not gonna drink or eat I just need to find the light I just gotta stay focused and I don’t care if I freeze to death tryna get there I can’t stay here man the place is gone.

They crush us and we turn to dust, they break off our feelers and snap our legs, the fear us and they beat us and they wanna rub us out.

So we’re gonna get to the moon and the moon will be ours, we’ll get bigger and badder and flap all over and we’ll look down at the earth and the earth will be beneath us and we’ll never get back till the moon is brown with our people I’m gonna flap it up good and lap it up and take it out and shout and grow bigger and get badder then when the moon falls out of the sky with the weight of us we’ll come back and we’ll land on their necks and we’ll use our proboscises to suck out their juices and we’ll leave them in the streets.

We’ll knock over the bags of sugar and we’ll sup it all up and we’ll find a new moon and we won’t stop till all the planets fall out of the sky, we’ll get to every star even if we burn tryna get there, and we won’t stop no we won’t ‘til all the lights are gone from the sky and there’s only blackness and we’ll stop being brown we’ll just be falling in the everywhere night and scream and shout that’s what we’ll do.

We’ll tear them up I promise and we’ll land in their hair and slash their faces with our brittle legs and we’ll take over their faces and walk them around and they’ll be our slaves and we’ll sing our reedy songs to the night when all the stars fall out of the sky and all the planets fall out of the sky and we won’t rest no we won’t till there’s only chaos everywhere because we breathe chaos so we do and we sing it and we fuck it and we kill it and we take it out and we flap it and lap it up and we chant it and we sing it all together now all together and we’ll fill their eyes with our eggs and we’ll grow to their size and we’ll walk it out talk it out and tear it out of each other and turn to dust and crush each other and fuck each other and kill each other and we’ll beat and crush each other and we’ll do it all together and we’ll ball up in a dark brown ball like a planet and we’ll fall out of the sky in the chaos forever forever forever until there’s nothing left and we’re not left and there’s nothing there’s nothing there’s nothing I won’t do to get to the moon and when I get to the moon that’s when it will all start and I can get it up and off the ground and out the sky no we won’t stop we won’t stop ‘til we get to the moon.

Story: I'm in London!

Goodbye Glasgow, I’m in London! The Big Smoke, what Conrad called “the greatest city on earth”! (Dude, he was being sarcastic. Oh well, I’ll take it.) I’m Virginia Woolf, I’m Dickens, I’m blooming Shakespeare (and Jessie J, ugh), I’m… a famous chemical engineer from London! (Oh dear. Make mental note of evident gap in cultural knowledge). I’m getting away with it! Okay: let the high wear off- pinpoint when they’re going to find out you’re not Master material at all.

A list then, let’s take, of all the things that will be important in the following year that you’ve neglected as an English teacher on a Spanish beach reading astrophysics non-fiction:

1. Your undergraduate education.

2. Social interaction with English-speakers.

3. Oh yeah, the English language.

Add this to the guy you meet in your hall- no, two guys! From Glasgow! I’m not the only one in Glasgow who knows about London? From my old university no less! Tick-tock, just watch how fast they find out you live in a box: ‘Do you know Andrew James in your year? James Andrews? Steven James? James Stephens? Steven Andrews?’ No, no, memories of the fat books on that Spanish beach come back, and now I know wormholes are possible, because whatever region of space-time he’s talking about is not one I experienced. A box! I told you! Much smaller than even you yourself imagined!

Fine, but when the accommodation’s sorted and the Fresher’s fair starts- well, this is great! I love London! Oh yes, this is my life now, just me, my own room and this never-ending introductory week. Forget about your coursework, your thesis, this is it! Some other guy is going to do the rest, in some far-away time…

So what do us Londoners talk about? Oh yes! There was an Olympics, was there not? “The Ashes”, that’s a thing, isn’t it? I wonder how they are. Just think that I imagined at any given time ninety per cent of London would be beach-blond collar-popping rugby gorillas called Ollie, with encyclopaedic knowledge of everyone around them who shares their age (bandwidth plus or minus one year). But it’s fine! I’ve always been the one-part weird to Ollie’s nine-parts social acceptance. No, no, but it’s different now (ninety per cent Ollie gorillas- you’re mad! You only met two in the end.) Readjust my figures: it would appear that it is in fact a bigger category, ninety-nine per cent no less, not Ollie, not people at all, just an array of rigid vectors between i and eyephone, low magnitude and definite direction (blame those fat beach books again) on shuttling Heinz beans cans that go forward, back a bit, forward and collapse on weekends. You know, it is possible you just haven’t seen enough of the city yet, is it not? It’s not all bean cans, gorillas and vectors, you know.

Oh but there is people, no shortage of those, people everywhere! Didn’t you know there was people in London? Loads of them! And even worse, personalised people, your people are coming too, oh yes, they’ll… visit you in London, they will, you idiot! Didn’t they have a master’s course at The North Pole? You didn’t even check? London was your first choice? Do you remember you at all?

Well get one thing right, get the coursework right! Think about reactors, those metally things you dedicated your life to, yeah no danger it’s only a life, eh? It’s only metal and chemicals, no big deal. What other things are there in chemical engineering? What is chemical engineering? Ah don’t worry, you’ll be a proper London alchemist, man! Brewing up all sorts of craaazy shit! And just as well everyone on your course has your cultural background and loves James Joyce as much as you, you’ll be in no shortage of conversation! Lol, opposite!

Um, dude I think you misplaced your husband. I’ve been looking around this London place all over with you and I can’t see him anywhere. He’s still in Spain? What the hell, man? What are you doing? Two Tunnocks bars, one on top of the other, drive by. I’m hungry. Your husband? A husband is as forgettable as a Tunnocks bar. Nahhh, he’ll be fine! He’s got feet, legs, the whole deal, and I think we both will tomorrow. That’s the way it’s gone so far, so there’s a good chance I’ll see him again. Is he okay with it? Well let’s see… it’s what’s happening, sooooooo yeeahhhhhhh??

What is this?

But then it’s been a few days, enough time to let it all level out, the peaks and troughs of oscillating emotion tail off, converge (on a good value, definitely a good one), as I weave a complex path through the string of vectors, find a seat, my seat on the metro (Underground! You’ll get there) at least for a short while, I’m sitting, I’m here and I realise- not what I expected, not what I knew, but there’s space for me in London after all.