Melting in a metal tube on a global warming enhanced summer’s day, I’ve been conjuring some non-insights. Mass market popular fiction has always been an easy target of bile, but at least it once was interesting. In every fog of automatic prose, on the back of the shelf one could find a ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky’ like Jim Thompson (who I never tire of advocating) – banging out genre tales at a speed more akin to typing than writing, but somehow managing to fuse in thematic and stylistic innovation along with psychological and societal insights. In a lurid style and on cheap paper.
Looking around, it seems that today the unstoppable zombie world of anti-feminist ‘chick lit’ remains in the ascendancy like a fart from the bottom of a bubble bath. Hitting every possible demographic with the icy precision of really, really good direct marketing. On the other side of the gender stereotype divide, its testosterone Parsons/Hornby doppelganger spews across Sunday supplements and into Smiths with unending energy. Looking over shoulders at the odd snippet, these things really could, and someday in the name of speed will be, written by software packages. Umberto Eco once wondered at the intricacies of Ian Fleming’s innovative nonsense and discovered that it was, in fact, an escape machine for an embittered, emasculated male bourgeoisie.
Yet in a time of smartphone and cheap flight plenty, what could there be to escape from but the endless march of convenience and pleasure? Well, some are more blessed with choice and capital than others but the last revenge of the departed proletariat is this: The horrible imbalance between work and leisure, the individual being the space between labour and its product, is not markedly different from that described by Orwell with horror in the Road to Wigan Pier when illustrating the plight of the industrial classes of the 30s. So little pieces of inky bubblegum are needed to speed the journey of the many – its just sad that the conditions of production today are more favourable to the vapid giltposh shit in his shuttered chateau than the likes of poor Jim.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Dispatched: An odorous delivery
I have long loved Dispatches. It’s one of the last pieces of mainstream terrestrial television I always look forward to. It informs and intrigues on important and esoteric issues.
When I saw that the programme would be making the old Quixotic investigative case for higher quality food than is made available by the UK’s supermarket cartel (expensive limp salads, chickens raised on feathers, dung and concrete, etc etc) I was mildly intrigued. This has been done before, well, by the likes of Panorama, countless authors, worthies and TV chefs looking for a good bit of PR, to little effect. I try to rebel where I can, but shopping hours and availability are a bit of a sad block.
Looked at the listing and it admitted ‘Jane Moore’ was the presenter. My brain was puzzled but blocked the idea in the same sanity prevention reflex that means if I coughed up a small herd of New Zealand sheep I would just turn away and forget it forever, a shameful secret. Surely, certainly it was someone I had not heard of. Some erudite, intrepid woman of letters must share the same unhappy moniker as that slaggy scribbler I occasionally avoid when examining a bog-based Red Top on a Wednesday. No way that even in an era of Dumb that a programme long on the forefront of excellence would commission such a beast. It would be like Sadie Fucking Frost presenting Newsnight – a surreal interjection from a cruel and humorous alternative dimension. Only a co-incidence to share the name of the perpetrator of tomes such as ‘Dot.Homme’ and newsprint Big Brother breast analysis.
No. The phosphors lit up and there it was. A true joke with a fat cheque for a punchline. Aged and decidedly orange (the image helpers airbrush amusingly neglected all flesh below the chin) it began to squawk about the stress of being a ‘working’ mother with three loud fuckfruits and massive house – not to mention a personal shopper. This of course means sympathy for all of us time and cash poor proles out there, and she can really relate. The lady of the house left the room in incomprehending disgust after a couple of minutes. I soldiered on for another few – hypnotised, like a man seeing a dog’s egg put in blender with some rocks as she had the absurd cruelties of factory farming that a well read ten year old would assume amazingly revealed. Yet her expensive snot smears of copy often nestle next to adverts for two for one frozen colon burgers and chicken fat/intestine/skin based Fun Shapes. Not that her moist and knuckle dragging fan base could spell hypocrisy. I would have preferred to have the programme hijacked by laddish nightmare Jamie Oliver, his VW van filled with hooting idiocy and a gang of second rank Sanisbury’s purchasing managers. Fuck it.
No matter. There may or may not have been better times.
When I saw that the programme would be making the old Quixotic investigative case for higher quality food than is made available by the UK’s supermarket cartel (expensive limp salads, chickens raised on feathers, dung and concrete, etc etc) I was mildly intrigued. This has been done before, well, by the likes of Panorama, countless authors, worthies and TV chefs looking for a good bit of PR, to little effect. I try to rebel where I can, but shopping hours and availability are a bit of a sad block.
Looked at the listing and it admitted ‘Jane Moore’ was the presenter. My brain was puzzled but blocked the idea in the same sanity prevention reflex that means if I coughed up a small herd of New Zealand sheep I would just turn away and forget it forever, a shameful secret. Surely, certainly it was someone I had not heard of. Some erudite, intrepid woman of letters must share the same unhappy moniker as that slaggy scribbler I occasionally avoid when examining a bog-based Red Top on a Wednesday. No way that even in an era of Dumb that a programme long on the forefront of excellence would commission such a beast. It would be like Sadie Fucking Frost presenting Newsnight – a surreal interjection from a cruel and humorous alternative dimension. Only a co-incidence to share the name of the perpetrator of tomes such as ‘Dot.Homme’ and newsprint Big Brother breast analysis.
No. The phosphors lit up and there it was. A true joke with a fat cheque for a punchline. Aged and decidedly orange (the image helpers airbrush amusingly neglected all flesh below the chin) it began to squawk about the stress of being a ‘working’ mother with three loud fuckfruits and massive house – not to mention a personal shopper. This of course means sympathy for all of us time and cash poor proles out there, and she can really relate. The lady of the house left the room in incomprehending disgust after a couple of minutes. I soldiered on for another few – hypnotised, like a man seeing a dog’s egg put in blender with some rocks as she had the absurd cruelties of factory farming that a well read ten year old would assume amazingly revealed. Yet her expensive snot smears of copy often nestle next to adverts for two for one frozen colon burgers and chicken fat/intestine/skin based Fun Shapes. Not that her moist and knuckle dragging fan base could spell hypocrisy. I would have preferred to have the programme hijacked by laddish nightmare Jamie Oliver, his VW van filled with hooting idiocy and a gang of second rank Sanisbury’s purchasing managers. Fuck it.
No matter. There may or may not have been better times.
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