Sons of Loki

Good morning, Mr. Ben. It’s about six-thirty, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Ah, just laying here in the bed: half awake, half asleep, thinkin’ aboutcha…

It’s about seven o’clock, Norwich, sitting here listening to Johann Johannsson’s “Part 1: IBM 1401 Processing Unit“, a hauntingly beautiful piece of classical music incorporating recordings of electronic tones generated by an old IBM 1401 mainframe, thinking about Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, or Will to Power, or will to pleasure, or at least some slightly different version. It has occurred to me that everyone is in it for themselves. Politicians want power, obviously. Hedge-fund managers want money. Nuns want everyone to respect them as paragons of virtue. Philanthropists want people to see how kind they are, or (if they donate anonymously) are donating to feel the warm fuzzy feeling of being charitable. People who sacrifice their lives for a cause are doing it because they want to achieve something after death and be remembered as heroes. And so forth: no one ever truly does anything for other people without having something in it for themselves. Depressing? Perhaps not. It’s just the way things are.

I’m sorry, that was a bit sixth-form philosophy-y.

Saw Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds last night – actually the first Tarantino film I’ve seen in the cinema, or been old enough to see in the cinema – and was genuinely (and pleasantly) surprised. I’d heard mixed reviews, about Tarantino having lost his touch and being far too up his own arse to make a good film any more, but – both those things are true, and yet Tarantino is still a wonderful director, and Basterds is as good as Kill Bill, if nothing more. Some of the post-modern trickery he loves to employ is a little hackneyed (an unseen narrator popping in, drawing notations on the screen) but they’re still entertaining, particularly the twist of a certain character and subplot which you expect to rear up later but which gets literally shot to pieces with absolutely no fanfare halfway through and isn’t referred to again. Such genius! Such talent! Etc. And there’s a particularly gorgeously-shot scene with Mélanie Laurent in a red dress leaning next to of a window, with anachronistic David Bowie playing in the background.
True, I nearly groaned at the final line: “You know, I think this might be my masterpiece” – followed by a cut to “INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS” and the credits. It’s not his masterpiece by any means – that’d still be Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction – but in an age of so much shit cinema, it seems desperately unfair to berate Tarantino for not living up to his previous work.

Kinda want to learn German or French now, still.

Before that, yesterday, we were intending to head to the park but for various reasons we ended up at Shaun’s – that’s Seb and Rob and Steve and me – and I’d brought my mandolin. Shaun got down his sister’s guitar, and Steve and I had a tiny jam. I have very rarely had the opportunity to jam with people, but it’s stupendously good fun, and makes me look forward to the time I start a chart-storming electrobluegrass band. Then we wheeled out Shaun’s keyboard and spent an hour or two playing any old crap – not very well, but having a great time nevertheless.

Yes, it’s 19:11 and I’m listening to Ennio Morricone’s “The Surrender” which Tarantino pilfered for the Inglourious soundtrack, sun setting outside, pink notebook before me, PC at Shaun’s so I got the laptop hooked up to the big monitor, thinking about Japan, where practically everyone from my course now is buying things from vending machines and looking at skyscrapers and hanging about in airports and eating sushi and doing all the awesome things I can’t do and now those 32 days seem longer than ever. But I’ll survive. I don’t even know why I can’t abide the wait. Japan isn’t that great. But it is very, very great. I just think back to a moment in Shinjuku or Shibuya or Ikebukuro, dashing through the rain-drizzled, neon-soaked streets from bar to bar at midnight with people I barely knew, where I just felt incredibly, unbelievably happy. Ah, it’ll come soon enough.

Blimey. Not to sound like a corporate shill, but this Getting Things Done idea is fantastic. I’m only halfway through, and already I feel calmer and more … productive? Okay, I’m hardly the target market, being less of a high-flying fabulously-wealthy but over-stressed executive and more of a lazy unemployed student on the summer break, but just today I remembered I should work out transport for getting to Heathrow on the 29th of September for my flight to Japan. Normally I would have written a note somewhere, forgotten about it, remembered it again, stressed, forgotten about it, and finally got around to doing it about a week before. But there I was, knowing what I had to do, with a laptop, an internet connection, and enough money in my bank account, so I just went and, you know, did it, bought those train tickets. And now I don’t have to worry.

And also I know I need to get insurance for Japan. I’ve got the form filled out, but I don’t have enough money in my Nationwide account to write a cheque, and so it’s been hanging on my mind: I need to do something about that, I need to send that form, but I can’t because I don’t have the money! But the GTD philosophy says: identify your next action, which is obviously transfer money to Nationwide account. And I can’t do that today, but I can do that when I have the money. So I just write a reminder to transfer the money at a later date, and poof, that’s another worry off my mind. It’s incredibly simple, but it’s genius.

Today I got a mysterious bank credit which I realised was my travel bursary I sent off for (ask your council for details), £312 for (part of) my flights and mandatory medicals. Essentially free money, which is nice, and tomorrow student loans hit thousands of accounts across the country. That sound you hear is the gasping of overdrafts.

Ah, Wales! Land of my fathers and all that. I’ve been to Wales twice before, many years ago: once to Prestatyn and Rhyl in’t North, which I can barely remember, and again to my brother’s graduation in Aberystwyth a few years ago. He’s lived in Wales ever since, moving to Cardiff after Aberystwyth, but this would be the first time I’d have visited him. (All my tenses are wrong there, I fear.)

Yesterday I wandered into the city centre by myself down Queen Street, which is a nice pedestrianised bit with all the usual shops, then went down to the arcades, visited the oldest record shop in the world (apparently), ate a ploughman’s in an expensive-but-nice cafe, bought an arty-farty magazine in Borders (I love the magazine section in Borders. I love magazines, actually, self-contained glossy parcels of insight into a hobby or field or way of life for a few pounds.), browsed a musty old bookshop and bought a map for my brother (who now collects maps, apparently), sat in Caffe Nero for a bit reading Getting Things Done (a book which has ironically been on my to-do list for a while but which I found, purely by accident, in the Bristol Oxfam and am currently in love with: if, like me, you find yourself ever overwhelmed with stuff to do and have awful management skills, I wholeheartedly recommend it for its sensible workflow system) and visted the National Museum of Wales. They had a good exhibit on Darwin for to celebrate his birthday, with this wonderful quote written in South America:

In August quietly wandering about Wales, in February in a different hemisphere; nothing ever in this life ought to surprise me.

There’s some good art galleries upstairs, too. I love art galleries; I always want to go and paint or draw or graphically design something, although I’m no good as visual art, so then I want to go write something instead. I felt creatively charged, like that poster what someone invented a few months ago:

which seems as good a way as any of getting through this economical melting-down.

Today we took a wander down and around Cardiff Bay, where bits of Doctor Who/Torchwood are filmed. Indeed, at once place which I am told is important in the series (haven’t seen the last one) there was a honest-to-god shrine to recently-deceased fictional character Ianto Jones with contributions from Britain and the US and Slovakia and heartfelt messages and flowers, which was … quite cool if it makes them happier?

Top left: “Jones, Ianto Jones. Forever in our hearts, dreams, and fanfiction.”

This is the church where Roald Dahl was baptised (ironically named after Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who beat Scott to the pole; Scott having sailed from… Cardiff Bay!)

The pocket-sized Welsh Assembly:

and finally, the Wales Millennium Centre / Canolfan Mileniwm Cyrmu on Roald Dahl Plass.

Creu Gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen (Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration)
In these stones horizons sing

The next day we made a trip to Bristol in the afternoon, which I must say is a very nice city. (Seeing these three cities, with their pedestrianised avenues, lovely little shops, cafes, and riverside areas has unfortunately made me realise that Leeds is a little bit pants.) Bypassed the gigantic queue at the Banksy exhibition:

visited a rather cool vintage clothing shop, ate lunch at Wagamama’s, then wandered along the river Bris (not real name):

to the ss Great Britain, Brunel’s awesome and gigantic iron ship.

It’s a great museum, a nice way to spend a few hours. (Unfortunately we arrived late and had to hurry round, but still saw everything.)

Train back to Wales, and home.

On Wednesday, commenced Great Western Adventure by hitching lift with fellow Norfolk buddy James to Bath, where (after navigating the awful traffic – Bath’s lovely but only once you’ve actually got in and got parked) we met up with Georgie, Camilla, Connie and Miles for a mini West Country Japanese/Chinese get-together. Bath is a bit touristy and a bit expensive, but actually rather nice.

Down by the abbey (which we didn’t pay to go in after we realised that it would just be like a church and we had seen churches before) these pagan wire statue thingies were awesome in a totally wrong Cthulhuesque way:

Lunch on the cheap at a Thai restaurant, then them Bath bits you seen on TV and stuff:

Miles went to see his auntie who lives in the area for the last time before he goes to Japan (a prudent reminder that we are all of us going to be gone very soon) while the rest of us sat in the park reading Proust and the Financial Times went on the swings and spun round on the spinny thing and buyed some ice cream. Then Georgie treated us (although we had to pay for it) to the world famous(?) Sally Lunn’s Bun(n)s, which we ate in a pigeon-infested park with clotted cream and jam.

The buns were indeed delicious.

Also I discovered by accident that zooming in and setting a big aperture gives instant arty DOF effects.

To another park, where a young gentlemen who tried to sell us illegal pharmaceuticals was later seen helping a number of police officers with their enquiries, and then off to Bath’s train station, whereupon I caught a train to the Welsh capital of Cardiff and met my brother for the FIRST TIME IN MANY YEARS. Went back to his and Bridget’s small-but-nice house in Splott and slept.

I hadn’t quite realised how many vegetarians and vegans I actually know, but they all seem rather pleased that I’ve joined their ranks. Indeed, not a morsel of meat has passed my lips for three days and eighteen hours (I, uh, totally forgot on the evening of my first day and ate a cheeseburger). It’s partly a spur-of-the-moment thing; partly for health; partly moral reasons, partly just because I want to test myself.

I’ve also decided to re-organise my life and catalogue all my material possessions. Since coming back from university and then back from Korea all my stuff is scattered around the house in ill-organised boxes and in cupboards and in bags and it’s all rather too much to keep track of. So for both existential reasons and for practical concerns I have decided to sit down in the kitchen over a couple of days with my laptop and carefully make a record of every t-shirt and USB cable and C7 power cord (which is the official name of those plugs with the small rubber double-barrelled end often used with laptops of which I have three, for some reason) in an Excel spreadsheet (originally I was going to record socks as well, but I realised that was probably going too far), and I’m going to catalogue my book and DVD collection with a nifty bit of software called MediaMan. And then, with everything in one place, I shall start putting everything back where it should be rather than where it was, and maybe flog some stuff for a few bob. Streamline. I have far too much stuff.

So what triggered all this? I was reading Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, a bleak little tale of a city-wide uprising in 70s China, and Khaled Kosseini’s The Kite Runner, a tale of childhood betrayal in 70s Afghanistan and the modern-day repercussions, and both are good books: solid writing, nice ideas. The sort of books which inspire me to write: I read it and think “Oh, this is good writing, I can write like this.”

And then I started reading Philip K Dick’s VALIS.

That’s when Fat began to go nuts. At the time he didn’t know it, but he had been drawn into an unspeakable psychological game. There was no way out. Gloria Knudson had wrecked him, her friend, along with her own brain. Probably she had wrecked six or seven other people, all friends who loved her, along the way, with similar phone conversations. She had undoubtedly destroyed her mother and father as well. Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void. He was not dealing with a person; he had a reflex-arc thing at the other end of the phone line.

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.

With writing like that, I just want to give up. It’s too good! I can’t match it! But then Dick was a great writer.

VALIS is bizarre, a metaphysical and philosophical tract meandering through the brain of the protaganist, Horselover Fat, a psychotic man in 70s California. And all this crap about God and different planes of existence and new agey hippie shit would normally turn me right off (why I ever bothered reading a quarter of The Illuminatus! Trilogy I’ll never know) except for the fact that it is a genuinely fascinating account of a mind slowly unravelling into insanity, the kind where God fires pink lasers into your head giving you prophetic visions and revealing your past life in 1st century Greece and all of reality is a prison spawned by the imperfect separation of two Hyperuniverses… it goes on and on. Fat worries about the death of two women he was close to and Fat’s friends worry about him and no one really seems to know how to deal with reality.

It is a book written by Fat, who is writing about himself in the third person to gain objectivity, so the writing meanders between talking about himself as “I” and talking about himself as this strange, broken human being called Horselover Fat. The narrator writes about how he wanted to help Fat, how misguided some of his delusions were, all the time talking about himself. It is quite a strange read. And it gets even weirder when you realise that “Horselover Fat” is not quite such a strange name when you consider a literal translation from the original Greek and German of … yes, Philip(pos) Dick.

VALIS, ultimately, is about the mental decline of one of the greatest science fiction writers, from his own viewpoint. And because of this, it’s a terribly sad work. And yet: I’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Blade Runner), written in 1968, and A Scanner Darkly (the inspiration for, uh, A Scanner Darkly) from 1977, and A Scanner Darkly – written after the end of his drug abuse and eventual mental decline – is by far the better book. As Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say: some people never go insane. What terribly dull lives they must lead.