So here you are… approaching your 26th birthday, standing beside a bin, tie askew, jacket missing, wild-eyed, spraying wet specks of salty potato at passers-by. Pay close attention, children: dreams do come true.

1. Do people still keep appointment diaries? Or does everyone just use their phones now? I tried that, but I end up never checking it so it’s kind of pointless. Whereas if I see an object lying around that looks like it might be some kind of configuration of words and paper (delightful!) I tend to flick through it out of sheer muscle memory.
2. I put the original outline for this post in my phone, which it turns out is an uncouth bloody yahoo and doesn’t recognise the word “concierge”. However, after foundering a bit it does leave you with “bombieri,” which sounds like a kind of roguish Italian fighter pilot. So that’s all right.

All of which is to say: what a gig. I saw em a couple of years ago at Oxegen and they were so-so, which I now reckon was more down to the crowd than anything else (plus and also, I was pretty sober… textbook error). The crowd in the Point²  ranged from hugely enthusiastic to not-quite-as-enthusiastic-but-willing-to-stand-aside, which is a-ok in my book. Age-wise, about half the people there were thirty-year-olds pretending they were 16 (as my brother put it). The rest were wans and young f’llas who assumably listen to Rage on account of they’re a cool band from back in the day, much as my generation listen to Iron Maiden. I’m somewhere in the middle, but it pleases me that I’m on course to becoming a middle-aged rocker.

One thing, however… whenever a mosh pit formed near us, not only did the bouncers not stop it, they actively helped people who lost their footing. I’ll reiterate: the bouncers contributed to the crowd having a good time. Is this a thing that happens now? Concert security have always been, and are supposed to be, the worst people in the world. If you pull that out from under kids’ feet, what the hell are they supposed to believe in? The goodness of humankind? No fucking thank you. These people’d want to sort themselves out reet smart before we all start getting notions.

1. Or, as I said in an IM conversation, “Tonight I’m going to Rage Against the Machine”. The ambiguity of that makes me want to start a band called Bang a Donkey.
2. IT IS CALLED THE POINT

Seems drawing badass celestial bodies is a thing I do when I’m drinking. I see two problems here: one, my knowledge of astronomy is fairly limited and thus already running almost dry; two, I can’t guarantee Drunk Colm won’t eventually think rubbish puns about white dwarves are the way forward. So over to you: suggest something else I can doodle. Something that gets a bad press and needs an image overhaul. Something that will benefit from a good ol’ bitta tipsy PR. And please note that you will be paying for the necessary Art Juice. I’ll be right over here.

(Context for the upper half: a bar in Berlin, an ill-thought-out game of Guess Who¹. Bonus points: German tries to correct my spelling, realises I was right in the first place. WhuPOW.)

1. First two questions: “Are they German?” “Can’t remember.” “Do they have a beard?” “Not sure. ” It went uphill after that though, I promise.

2. To appease Viewing Public, Producers commit to set timetable for resolution of show, up pace.

3. In order to facilitate (2) above, Producers start resolving the most thematically important subplots, more or less abandon the rest.

4. Show ends. Viewing Public complains about subplots not being resolved.

***

Years later, the Dessert-Eating Public becomes enraged at their inability to both have and eat cake. A global spate of bakery-directed arson ensues. Cuse and Lindelof appear to call for sanity. JJ Abrams appears to fling the idea for Super Clovereightfield II at someone and collect a fat paycheck. Colm eats a Mr Freeze, maintains that it is both “delicious” and “refreshing”. Paul Daniels is pronounced World President, resolves to crack down on pastry vandalism. Everyone is confused. It was all a dream. Or was it? No. But you could be forgiven for thinking so.

I am tired of “new writing” and of “powerful new novelists.” I am tired of today’s new people; I am tired of their lives, of their tastes, their reading, their language, their singing, their sedatives and their psychiatrists, their houses, their furniture, and their faces.

(via Bookslut)

That’s magnificent. It’s from Margaret Anderson, who I’d never heard of until this morning because I’m rubbish. She founded and ran an influential avant-garde literary magazine, which at one point was at one point the subject of a good ol’-fashioned book-burnin’ after they published the first few chapters of Ulysses. Another time, Anderson published a completely blank issue of the magazine, on the basis that nobody was writing anything worth a damn. What a champion.

… so but anyway, now you may fearlessly shout at passers-by about how tiresome and annoying their faces are, safe in the knowledge that you come from a fine pedigree. And isn’t that all we ever really wanted.

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

“Look on the bright side, you get your hole, you have 2 great kids, and you gt to pass of the door-knocking sales-scum to CL. Win-win, really.”

“Christ, could you refrain from referring to CL as a fucking hole? I know you think it’s jokey and cute, but it isn’t. It’s just a way to insult women.”

I.

“Getting your hole” is an idiom meaning “having sexual intercourse on a regular basis”. The hole in question could be a vagina or an anus–here, in context, it’s pretty clear that it’s a vagina. To a woman you might say “getting the length” or “getting your fill”¹. So the direct meaning of the phrase, let’s say, is “having more or less unrestricted access to a vagina, subject to the ongoing approval of the person of whose body said vagina is a part”.

II.

So “hole” in this case refers specifically and solely to the vagina–i.e. to the organ, not the person. But now, look at the switcheroo happening between the two quoted comments: the second takes it as read that “hole” is referring to the person. In other words, the second commenter is speaking as if the vagina constitutes the entirety of the person’s being. Which, if I may offer a humble opinion here, is treading some pretty dodgy ontological ground, enlightened-outlook-wise.

1. Though the latter is maybe a bit redolent of that musty old nonsense about passivity/receptivity and the psychosexual/social implications thereof, which let’s side-step that whole barrel of worms for now.