The Museum of Vestigial Office Technology

Paul Haines on humour in writing:
"Humour makes you laugh, and coating it black also makes you shudder and hopefully think a little more about what it is you shouldn't be laughing at. And the beauty of prose is you can't hear the voice or see the face of the person telling the joke, so you just don't know if you should be laughing, you just don't know..."
~ from an interview with Ben Peek in 2010

Paul Haines on the shock factor:
"The intent to shock and inner darkness? I know that people do say I like to shock in my work, but I’m not trying to shock readers. I’m usually trying to make them laugh, or go ‘eww’, or think that guy is weird, real weird, but I never consciously think that I’m trying to shock."
~ from an interview with Gillian Polack in 2010

One thing that's quite clear from re-reading his work is that while, yes, it is shocking and terribly, inappropriately funny, these are effects he used, rather than ends in themselves. He had a bigger agenda than that as a writer. He sought to expose the emptiness and double-standards at play in the human heart; and in the schizophrenic breakdown of reality and personality in his metafiction, he found a true expression of the chaos and confusion of human experience in contemporary culture.

it's christmas eve. i found a lost dog and gave my hat to a stray person who was a long way from home on a hot day. it started when i said g'day to a bloke as i walked past him in the street near my house, and i asked him how he was doing. it turned out he wasn't doing so well. he'd been hit by a car, he said, and had been in hospital. now the banks are closed and he had no way to get money until wednesday. his name was nathan. he pulled up his shirt to show me his bruises and the dressing which covered the wound on his back. his bare feet were painted red with mercurochrome. i gave him what i had. it wasnt much, but he was almost beside himself with gratitude. he kept asking what could he do for me. i said nothing, it's nothing, don't worry about it. as we were talking, a dog ran up to us, gave us a sniff and walked on. i saw she wasn't wearing a collar so i called her back, a beautiful black staffy, not much more than a pup. she was friendly. i patted her and said, 'look, she's got dirt and cobwebs on her. she's escaped from someone's yard.' nathan brightened, 'i know what i'm meant to do. i'm going to find her owner. that's what i can do to pay you back.' he picked her up and carried her like baby jesus and we turned down the alley. it was hot. i put my hat on his head. i am nearly home anyway. we see someone come out of a gate, and nathan calls out, 'hey, do you know where this dog lives?' the gate-leaver sizes us up and decides he doesn't want anything to do with us. shakes his head, and moves on. but from across the alley another gate opens up, they've heard us talking, and nathan is already saying, 'hey have you lost a dog?' sure enough they have and the friendly staffy is back in her yard. the dog's owner is saying thanks, thanks. nathan says don't thank me, thank this guy, it's his karma. and it would be nice to think that karma works like that but of course it doesnt.

My band did some recording last year. We went to Fabian's farm and rehearsed the material in an old shearing shed, watching the fog roll off the tops of the hills. We came back tight and well-prepared. Then we spent two days in a portable studio set up in a dingy Brunswick squat house scheduled for demolition. The first day was utterly demoralising. My amp failed. The intonation on my guitar was out and it wouldn't stay in tune. The vibe in the 'studio' was awful. The walls were covered in graffiti. The place was a swamp of stagnant energy. I've been inside some dodgy habitations in my time and usually I'm pretty immune to it, but after 10 or so hours of not getting any usable takes I came home exhausted and depressed. The contrast with the time on the farm was absolute. It felt like failure. But I fixed my guitar and did some practice. I borrowed an amp. And the next day I showed up again and we stuck at it till we'd gotten takes we felt we could live with. Our expectations were low. This is one of the tracks we made. You can barely hear the squalor.

More to come.

http://thetelevisionsky.bandcamp.com

I wrote some more thoughts about the Ditmar controversy, but decided not to post them. I'm an old man, and out of touch.

Instead, here's some perspective from Seth Godin:

What's the point of popular?

Worth considering is the value in losing elections and other popularity contests. Losing reminds you that the opinion of unaffiliated strangers is worthless. They don't know you, they're not interested in what you have to offer and you can discover that their rejection actually means nothing. It will empower you to even bigger things in the future...

Which is not to say I think the Ditmar winners embody any of the negative traits Godin associates with being popular; rather, that the detractors are focusing on the wrong thing.

The 'don't walk' sign has just started flashing as I run to cross the road, and I wave a friendly thank-you to the car turning left.

The horn blares once, twice, and I turn to say sarcastically, 'Thanks for your patience,' to the driver, who I now see is an elderly nun in a habit complete with wimple, abusing me through the open car window. On the car door is the insignia of the Daughters of Charity.

I swear I couldn't make this shit up.

I figure some of you might get a kick out of hearing Haines say cunt a lot in front of a literary crowd and narrate the castration scene from his award-winning 'Wives' novella, published in X6 by coeur de lion.

(The acoustics in the large enclosed space at Fed Square don't really lend themselves to a reading, and the sound engineer didn't ditch the popping lectern mic in favour of a hand-held till after Paul had read, but well, you get the idea)

I read Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms during the week, mostly because I picked up the latter at the library and realised it was a sequel to the former so I found a cheap secondhand copy of Less than Zero and churned through both of them in a few hours. Gotta say, I was disappointed.

I think American Psycho is an important book. Because of its misogyny and violence, because of its ridiculous schlock and cheap sensationalism, not to mention its shoddy copy-editing (see Teresa Nielsen Hayden's review in Making book) and the obvious point about its catty and often hilarious social satire, it is an intriguing and bizarrely paradoxical cultural artifact. It is a testament to the logic of late capitalism: deeply flawed and deeply pleasurable and deeply horrifying all at the same time, forcing the reader into the uncomfortable space of simultaneous recognition and disavowal.

Lunar Park which I read a couple of years ago when it was released doesn't occupy quite the same terrain, but it is damn fine fiction, bending autobiography and ghosts and downright creepy medicated weirdness into a satisfying horror narrative.

Imperial Bedrooms seems to be shooting for the same mark but it doesn't quite get there and I don't really know why. Maybe because it is a self-conscious sequel, and it lacks the element of pastiche that Lunar exploited so well. I gobbled it up anyway, but it seemed like the formula failed with this one and all I could see was an awful superficial book about awful selfish people doing nasty awful things to each other and it held none of the fascination that Lunar and Psycho had for me. The awfulness is entirely the point of the book, of course, so it seems unfair to criticise it on those grounds. I think the problem is it's just not a very good story.

It does stand alone, but I read Zero anyway, to see how they fitted together. The blurb on the back hails it as "Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation", but like bad plastic surgery, time hasn't been kind to it. The writing has a lot of energy, enough to pull me through the book and keep me reading; certainly it's a strong piece of work for a nineteen-year-old writer. It tries to be scandalous and shocking but it isn't and in a way maybe it created the cultural conditions for its own ultimate failure to hold up: things that were scandalous 25 years ago are now everyday fare in the discourse of celebrity culture.

eight months sober and living above a bottleshop. the coopers ales sign illuminates my room at night. with the blinds open, i sit bathed in the blue glow. there's a butcher on one side of the bottleshop and a bookstore on the other. i stopped eating meat in january and i haven't finished reading a book since march, although a dozen lie on the table next to my bed. occasionally i rifle the stack and flip some pages. i have a record player and a bunch of records and a potted plant and i feel calm and centred and purposeful.

infograph by rob corr from here

yesterday I saw
a news headline
about Lachlan and Sarah
Murdoch having a baby

just a glimpse was
all it took for those
signs to somehow pique
my unconscious and

last night I had a
long dream where I
spent time with them
and their children at

a holiday home
somewhere tropical
they were gracious and
hospitable and later

Lachlan flew us to
a different location
in his Lear jet
we took off from

a rutted and overgrown
runway it was
exhilarating