The Quiet Road

When I was a boy, a disillusioned America, motivated by nostalgia, elected a faded Hollywood movie star.

Baby-boomers were a mess. Vietnam and Watergate had kicked the living crap out of them just when the 60s had got them all high and hopeful. It was one of the great cultural betrayals of this or any other era… the sheer size of the promise that was broken… but go read Burroughs or Pynchon or Thompson about that. Point is, by 1980 mainstream American culture was in crisis. After everything they’d been through, the boomers suddenly found themselves dealing with the weakness and mortality of their parents. The world wasn’t what they’d been led to believe, and the people to whom they once turned to make sense of things were themselves looking frail and terrifyingly uncertain — or worse, they were quietly abandoning them.

America wanted to be sipping soda at the diner on the way to the baseball game with their Pop while Elvis rocked the jailhouse on the jukebox in a 1957 that only existed in the grossly distorted shadow memories of their childhood. So they elected Reagan.

Freudian enough for ya?

Now, almost forty years later, the world has seen a disillusioned America elect a narcissistic Reality TV star. This time though, they were motivated by incoherent frustration, anger and a monumental amount of fuckwittery.

Golden Age of Hollywood Vs Fox & Friends. It shows.

There’s plenty of catching up to do. Plenty of “Previous posts” links to be clicking. Though browsing through my blogroll, I find that it’s been quieter than usual all round. It’s not just been me.

Larry‘s only had four posts since Chrimbo for instance. Mind you, one of those was a video of a man playing Angels We Have Heard On High on a piece of broccoli. I’ll take quality over quantity every time, and it doesn’t get much better than a man playing Angels We Have Heard On High on a piece of broccoli.

An anecdote about my life as an engineer

John B’s been over in Haiti. I came within a mildly amusing anecdote of spending a few months in Haiti in 1996 but it involves a corporate blunder that’s almost certainly still covered by confidentiality clauses, so I’ll have to be vague.

At the time I was working for an engineering consultancy that specialised in managing medium-sized projects for US corporations (food and beverage mostly, but there was bits and pieces of other stuff). The company had built its reputation on handling projects in what were euphemistically known as “hardship locations”… Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, Tanzania, the Middle East, the Philippines. Though by the time I joined they’d shifted both into working in ‘first world’ countries and also to the “new hardship locations” of the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia.

In early 1996 a multinational corporation contacted us. An almighty cock-up had been made in Haiti and our company was one of a small group who had the expertise to put it right. Because there was a certain level of political sensitivity involved, there was a kind of “name your price” air to the whole thing. I put together our quote for the job and was encouraged to “be generous” with the budget by my boss; the company owner. I’m talking about the high side of reasonable here, you understand, not silly. The project had a healthy profit margin, but still we looked certain to win the contract.

I’d begun preparing to head out there. Seven of us would go out. Myself, a director of the company, and five engineers. After a couple of weeks, the director would head home and I’d run the thing for the next twelve weeks or so. It was to be the third project I’d managed, but the first in a hardship location… and what a location! Admittedly, our project would entail spending most of our time in a secure compound well away from population centres. So it’s not as if we were going to be hanging out in downtown Port-au-Prince every evening. All the same, it was a pretty daunting prospect and I had more than a few sleepless nights freaking out about it.

The day before I was due to fly out for a preliminary visit we got word that the project was put on hold. I don’t recall ever being so relieved. A part of me was excited by the prospect of visiting the place, but it was a small part. Overshadowed significantly, I might add, by a far larger anxiety about running a site office and managing a bunch of men, many of whom were twice my age, for three months. In Haiti. In fairness to my boss, and contrary to how I may come across here, I was actually quite good at that kind of thing at the time. It’s not like he was sending some blithering academic off to fix stuff in Haiti. Even so, I was mightily relieved when I informed the office secretary to cancel my travel plans.

The company was expanding at the time. We were being asked to quote on far more work than we could possibly do and despite moving to larger premises and taking on more staff, we were actually turning down as many projects as we were taking on. So losing Haiti wasn’t all that big a deal. Within a week I was looking at the schematics for a plant in Baku.

For the next couple of months the Haiti project was on-again / off-again. It was getting on my nerves, and it was pissing off my boss. Over a liquid lunch one afternoon, he brought up the subject and vented his exasperation at trying to get anything organised in Haiti. The place was, he assured me, impossible to deal with. This from a guy who’d built factories in Angola and Northern Nigeria.

“Yeah, and that’s without the voodoo! Just wait ’til one of the lads pisses off a local voodoo priest. It’ll be The Serpent and The Rainbow all over again”. I was laughing, but my boss’s interest had been piqued. What was The Serpent and The Rainbow, he wanted to know? I told him it was a book and then a movie about Haitian voodoo and was supposedly based upon a true story. We chatted about voodoo for a while and I told him to rent the movie from the video shop if he got the chance.

He did. And clearly a bit squiffy from a few ales, he sat down to watch it that evening.

Now, I don’t know about you, but there are one or two horror movies that — for me — stand far above the rest… films that got to me. Got to me at a level that most horror films, even the very good ones, never get to. Films that crept inside me and did nasty things to my mind when I lay down in my bed at night. And it’s not about the quality of the film; it’s about the time and place you see it. Set and setting. How you’re feeling, what’s been on your mind, what you’ve eaten, drank or smoked. For me, An American Werewolf in London was one of those films.

For my boss, it turns out, The Serpent and The Rainbow was one of those films.

We’d had that drink on Friday afternoon. By Monday morning he’d read most of the book and was in something of a state. That afternoon he made a call to New York and withdrew our involvement in the Haiti project.

Now, I’m not saying that we’d still have pulled out if economic conditions had been different and there hadn’t been other work to do. And the way we’d been jerked around for so long certainly hadn’t helped. But The Serpent and The Rainbow was very much the straw that broke the camel’s back. The fact that my boss rented that movie on that particular night and it scared ten shades of shit out of him is almost certainly the reason I didn’t go to Haiti in the mid 90s.

So yeah.

There you have it. Well, I did say it was a mildly amusing anecdote. Though I must admit, it certainly went on for longer than I’d anticipated.

But look, it is almost 4am. I’m very close to nodding off. And I wanted to get something up here tonight but the thing I’m writing about nuclear power isn’t quite right yet, and the thing about police brutality and civil protest just isn’t hanging together either. At least this meandering nonsense is labelled as such.

Is that one of the best film credits ever?

And is this one of the best opening paragraphs to a blog post ever…?

The approval ratings of Austrian rapist Josef Fritzl have fallen below Gordon Brown’s according to a Daily Mirror YouGov poll published today which suggests that Brown would win a 20-seat majority at the next election if the Conservative Party were led by Fritzl.

Harry Hutton, Fritzl’s Approval Ratings Fall Below Brown’s

Certainly when you add it to the closing paragraph of Harry’s prior post, it’s clear that despite the lack of quantity, Chase Me Ladies, I’m In The Cavalry… is also still providing high quality:

I honestly believe him to be insane. And the fact that this very dangerous lunatic is still poking his nose into the Middle East shows that Blair remains one of the most serious threats to our national security, and that his arrest and execution should be matters of the highest priority.

Harry Hutton, Blair Must Hang

There have been plenty more pearls amongst the online swine during my absence. I’ll get to them in due course. I’m travelling a lot over the next couple of weeks. London. Then Serbia. But I’ll try to post as often as possible, even if only briefly. For now, I’ll leave you with Politicari + Virusi (Politicians and Viruses) from Serbian band, Disciplin A Kitschme.

Hi y’all. I was discussing politics with someone earlier and I came up with a slogan to explain my rather extreme position. Thing is, I’m not sure whether it’s original or whether I absorbed it from a song or a film or even a TV show. It’s obviously a variation on “demand the moon, to get the earth”, but if anyone knows whether there’s a more specific equivalent doing the rounds in popular culture could you let me know?

Here it is…
“Demand revolution and you might get reform. Demand reform and you just get ignored.”

Anyone heard it before? Or the same sentiment in similar language? Maybe I dreamt it?

The book-meme post got me thinking about literature (as it was bound to do) and about what makes good literature. Leastways in my eyes. Clearly I’m not the first person to tackle that question, and I suspect there’s little truly original to be said on the matter. So this won’t be a long insightful (or inciteful) essay on the subject of literary value. Instead it’ll be another bloody list, which takes far less time and effort, and won’t be out of place here in the blogosphere.

And it’ll be a list of characters. You see, I thought about literature and the myriad interacting factors that make for a good piece of fiction. There’s plot, characters, dialogue and that indefineable thing called “style”. Those would be — for me — the Big Four. Obviously there’s plenty of other factors too (political position, theme, structure, setting and so forth). And there are those who would insist that “theme” is a far more important factor than “dialogue” for instance. Or that the political message of the book is as important as anything else. It’s a subjective thing.

The best novels have them all of course; a great plot, wonderful characters with whom the reader can strike up a relationship based upon empathy rather than mere “interest”, believable dialogue all tied together with a writing style that allows the words to flow into your mind, rather than appear before your eyes. Add a political message that one agrees with, a theme that flirts with redemption but never to the point of fantasy, a story structure that doesn’t have you wondering what the hell is going on half the time (occasionally being forced to wonder what the hell is going on is a good thing; do it too often and the book becomes less interesting), a setting you can either identify with or is gloriously exotic, and so forth.

Eventually you end up with a Pynchon novel, of course. But you knew I was going to say that.

I figured the easiest of all those factors to identify would be “good characters”. Incidentally, good characters almost always need good dialogue… otherwise they cease to be good characters very quickly… but the two are indeed quite separate and I’ve read books with great characters but iffy dialogue (The Great Gatsby) as well as the converse (can’t think of one off the top of my mind, but there’s more than a few dull characters in the world of literature who are rescued by the author’s ability to write a good line of dialogue or two… in most of Woody Allen’s movies for instance, the characters rarely get truly fleshed out, but who honestly cares when they’re saying the things he writes?)

Anyways, as an antidote of sorts to the book-meme post which contained a good deal of negativity, I now present my list of the finest fictional characters ever created. Not a duff one among them. And these are “fictional” rather than “literary” characters as there are one or two from more modern media. As usual… no specific order to these… just writing them down as they come to me.

• John Constantine: My favourite fictional character by a country-mile. There’s no order to his list, but if there were, John Constantine would still be first. Originally a creation of Alan Moore in his Swamp Thing stories, John Constantine is nonetheless as much a Garth Ennis character as a Moore character. Ennis wrote many of the best Hellblazer stories (the graphic novels in which John Constantine is the anti-hero) which is really where the character sprung fully to life. Constantine is a magician. Not a stage illusionist, a real-life magick-user who consorts with demons and angels as well as all manner of low-life human nasties. He is bitter, cynical, self-obsessed and haunted by a horrific past… yet he’s also incredibly likeable. He cannot be relied upon to Do The Right Thing, though he often does so reluctantly. In fact, in probably the best of the Constantine stories (The Long Habit of Living) he knowingly and deliberately places the entire human race in serious jeopardy in order to cure his lung-cancer. He’s an utter bastard who you’d stay as far away from as possible were he real (he generally ends up being responsible for the grisly death of his close friends) but who you root for without reservation while reading the stories. Never, ever, ever, ever see the movie.
• Sherlock Holmes: Most people know all about Holmes, so I won’t go on too much about him. Like most of the literature of that era, the Sherlock Holmes stories often feel — to me — as though they’ve been caged by the culture they came from. As though there was so much more beneath the surface that had to be left unsaid because of the phoney morality of the time. All the same, Holmes somehow escapes the cage (I think Mycroft may have smuggled in a key somehow) and becomes a wonderfully 3-dimensional character as the stories progress. Most of the other characters are merely props, of course, with which to explore the methods and psychology of Sherlock himself. All the same, because he is such a wonderful character, that flaw (and the many others) don’t overshadow the stories. Personal favourites? Probably the two stories that introduce his two greatest opponents; The Adventure of the Final Problem (Professor Moriarty) and A Scandal in Bohemia (Irene Adler). Jeremy Brett is the definitive screen Holmes.
• Agent Dale Cooper: Created by David Lynch for his TV series Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper is an FBI agent with a difference. When I mentioned him before on this blog I wrote: “A latter day Sherlock Holmes (who switched the cocaine and opium for something a little more psychedelic), Cooper attacks problems with a singlemindedness that usually appears anything but, and a method that is often – quite literally – madness itself.” Mind you, there’s an obvious mistake in that description (Sherlock Holmes’ narcotic of choice was morphine rather than opium).
• Zoyd Wheeler, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates: There’s just no way I could pick a single character from Pynchon’s Vineland. Like almost all of his novels, it’s an ensemble piece, and choosing one character above another would be impossible. As it is, I’ve left out a few others who are worthy of mention (Takeshi, Prairie and — of course — DL). Yeah, I’ve heard the objection that “they’re not characters at all!” and certainly Zoyd is not merely a man, he’s also the unrealised dream of the 1960s, Frenesi isn’t just his ex, she’s also the inherent contradictions of feminist politics and Brock isn’t just a total asshole, he’s also The Law. But that’s what makes Pynchon so wonderful in my eyes. They feel like real people to me, even in those passages when they are obviously being used primarily as symbols to make a political point.
• Doctor Benway: OK, hardly a well-rounded character. Hardly more than a scary bogeyman in fact. But this Burroughs creation is nonetheless one of the all-time stand-out characters in modern literature. “Did I ever tell you ’bout the time I performed an apendectomy with a rusty sardine can… … …?” The following short scene says more about Benway than I ever could…

  … incidentally that line near the end is “some fucking drug-addict’s cut my cocaine with sani-flush!” The bizarre decision to cut the word “fucking” makes it a little difficult to make out.

• Harry Haller: The protagonist of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Harry Haller is a total outsider. Alienated from society, from almost all human contact, he sees clearly the absurdity of human existence. He is at once repelled by, and attracted to, a society he can never be part of. Haller is Nietzsche, he’s Hesse himself, he’s even — some have argued — Carl Jung (the “magic theatre” he discovers and explores being no more — or less — than his own psyche). Certainly for a period in my teens, Haller was me. Losing himself in the intoxication of alcohol and narcotics, and finally in his desire for Hermine, the beautiful dancer, he seeks salvation in oblivion. The ultimate existential hero. “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace”, writes Haller reproducing one of Nietzsche’s more famous aphorisms, “by means of it one gets through many a bad night”. Haller’s subsequent abortive suicide attempt is one of the funniest tragic scenes in fiction.

Hell, this could on forever and I’ve left out some true greats. It’s a decent start though, and I’m going to add a “Part 1” to the title of this entry in the possibility (though not the assurance) that I’ll continue it later.

Notable absences

• Leopold Bloom: despite being the central character in the finest novel ever written (actually, I have some sympathy with the view that “Dublin” is the central character of the book, but all the same) Bloom wouldn’t feature as one of the great literary characters. Which is clearly deliberate on Joyce’s part. Bloom is a passive observer (almost always). A rather limp Everyman who, even when he provokes a reaction from the world around him, is generally doing so accidentally, and as a result of being misinterpreted or misunderstood. It is only at the very end, with Molly’s wonderful “Yes!” that he finally escapes his role as voyeur and fantasist. Bloom is not a Great Character, because Ulysses is about viewing the world through impotent eyes. Eyes that have no Greatness behind them until that very last scene.
• Legolas (the elf): Tolkien was a master at creating an internal world for children (or adult fantasists) to disappear into. He wasn’t necessarily a great writer of characters. But Legolas deserves a mention, even if only in this second list, because I probably spent a good third of the time between my 9th and 11th birthdays being Legolas. Outwardly, I was a very quiet child. What was going on inside, though, was anything but.