Writerly occupational hazards: Ersatz creativity (boozing)
Inebriation is a false Muse. As seductive as they may be, chemical substitutes for true creative intoxication don’t work.
Maybe there are exceptions that prove this rule. Malcolm Lowry, e.g., did much field research for his brilliant novel Under the Volcano, which included a main protagonist who was drinking himself to death. (Lowry, unfortunately, perhaps in his quest for verisimilitude, was himself to go all the way at an early age.) Emulating his own hard-boiled detective protagonists, writer Micky Spillane claimed he’d go to the office, get his feet up on his desk, crack a bottle of whiskey and dictate the next book off the top of his head to his (leggy) secretary. I can almost believe him, having read a couple of his stories way back when I was a boy. Though I suspect he asked his secretary to have a quick look at his punctuation, after she washed out his shot glass and ashtray and before sending the ms. to the publisher.
Generally, though, writing and boozing don’t mix.
James Joyce had this to say about matters:
Boozing does not necessarily have to go hand in hand with being a writer, as seems to be the concept in America. I therefore solemnly declare to all young men tyring to become writers that they do not actually have to become drunkards first.
Samuel Johnson, with his usual verbal parsimony, suggested this:
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
What the hell. I’m moved to coin an aphorism of my own:
Our fiction-writing faculties may also produce splendid daydreams. Especially when inflamed by alcohol, these in turn conduce to celebrating one’s literary awards before they’re awarded, not to mention counting one’s groupies before they’ve hatched.
Our friend Jack Shackaway says all that’s rubbish. He tells me that boozing provides him with much literary lumber for the building. In fact, here’s something he has just passed me:
“Doctor, doctor,” I say. “I am suffering from a chronic hangover.”
“Yes,” she tells me. “That is an occupational hazard of piss artistry, and there is no cure unless you find another line of work.”
“But all I know is writing.”
“Then we can only treat the symptoms. There is no cure, although I personally find that a Bloody Mary with double vodka and a megadose of vitamins B and C on the side can work wonders.”
At this point in my dream the doctor takes to looking much younger and shapelier and she starts to remove her clothes, and I’m wondering whether this is part of the treatment, when I’m awakened by a nurse.
I see my doctor riding shotgun in the background. Then she comes forward to say, “It’s confirmed. You have dengue fever.”
Dengue fever, eh? When you’ve had as many force-10 hangovers as I’ve come up with these past months, you laugh at dengue fever. Almost.
I make a grab for the nurse, but then I wake up again, and I’m at home.
And it’s really a hangover I’m looking at after all
QED, eh? (Referring to my earlier claim re. drinking and writing.)
A last perspective, this from Philip Larkin:
Get stewed.
Books are a load of crap.
That, and the other literary quotes, aside from my own, are from Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anedcotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights, by John Winokur.
The cartoon illustration is from “The Joy of Hangovers" in Bangkok Old Hand, by Collin Piprell (out of print).
Flu season in Bangkok
Jack here.
The fever’s gone. I’m still sick, though. Never mind I’m sitting here like a fool—more like a two-bit hooker, actually—editing a massive, near-sadistically impenetrable document for money, not enough of it.
But let me tell you about my blissful, antihistamine-enhanced sleep last night. A serial dream—it bridged multiple pee breaks—had me much excited at a book idea. I’d decided the combination of the world’s longest palindrome (several long paragraphs) and a brand-new concept of time I’d come up with would throw light on the whole of existence, proving a ripping good yarn to boot. The excitement had fled by the time I awoke.
Do you think the Muse might be messing with me?
Early response from Bob the Literatus:
Palindromic narratives? "T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet." Might one build out from that? It was making the rounds in DC back in the 1960s.
Let me explain
There’s a new and especially antibiotic-resistant bug on the loose, threatening to spread worldwide. As though we needed another new epidemic, not to mention all the floods and earthquakes and rising seas and so on. In fact the suspense is killing me, as I await the plagues of toads and suchlike falling from the skies (Exodus 7-12).
But the near-universal spread of the consumerist virus doesn’t get enough press. (Maybe that’s because governments around the world have every interest in promoting the pandemic, for this lies at the heart of “economic recovery” plans. So team players don’t go around describing our favorite growth engine as a plague, and forget about the most recent collapse of the global financial system.)
But I was going to talk about my new computer, and why I have it.
This cultural worm (consumerism acts like a virus but it’s also a worm) has conspired with a trojan computer to warp my judgment. My new desktop is so sophisticated it has an agenda all its own, and when enough of them get networked, like in about a week and a half, probably, it’ll be Bob’s yer uncle. Humankind superseded by an intelligence of our own creation. At the end of our long history we come to know our essential nature, revealed to ourselves by our own offspring as obsolete, unpleasantly smelly wet things that shed hair and bits of dead skin all over the place, clogging up the fan vents on our successors.
I didn’t mean to buy a new computer. Especially an iMac 27” supercomputer with a 1TB HD, a shitload of RAM and some processor I can’t even talk about for fear agents of foreign powers come and take it from me. This machine has all the latest doodahs and gimcracks. I can now handle words of any length and sentences of any complexity. I can move the words this way and then back again. I can delete commas and replace them at will. I can adopt full-screen, page-width View and then stand back at duelling range to write without the use of reading glasses. I am a god among penniless scriveners.
And I didn’t really mean to switch from PC to Mac. But Mac Users I know transfixed me with steady gazes and made pronouncements in tones of profound certainty. Mac Cultists who were complete strangers gestured hypnotically in public places. Evil designers and engineers at Apple have gone around expressing the epitome of classic elegance, the quintessence of contemporary cool. And Sara, of course, tells me I should do whatever makes me feel good, never mind my Buddhistic arguments that this is all maya, eh? Attachments to transitory things that can only bring more unhappiness down the road when one’s acquisitive lusts find new focus. Etc.
But here I sit, gazing at several acres of screen space, my old 19” Dell hooked up to one side of the 27” iMac which (have I already mentioned this?) has the actual computer built into the frame of the monitor.
Mac Cultists have been sent by the Devil.
But here are some arguments that finally swung me from PC to Mac.
- The Mac looks neat.
- And… Um.
- My old PC has gone gaga. It does odd things at unpredictable intervals, except it predictably does these things at the most inconvenient times possible.
- It’s all of three years old, of course, but it takes so long to boot that I try never to have to boot up.
- Nevertheless the machine has taken to crashing so often that I spend more time booting up than I do working or having fun or sleeping.
- Even when the computer is booted up, Outlook, my mail program and contacts organizer, takes so long to download e-mail that carrier pigeons might make a speedier option.
- My PC is ugly.
- Macs are cool.
- I’m told Macs, unlike PCs, don’t progessively slow down till they’re neck and neck with a pre-global warming glacier.
- And they’re sweet. Or did I aleady mention that?
- The text is adjustable to any size and for any light, so I’ll avoid eyestrain.
- Mac hardware and Mac software, unlike their PC counterparts, are part of a unified design, so they work better. (Or so I’m told; it’s too soon to say.)
- I need to renew my sense of personal efficacy, and I don’t want to sit downstairs with my buddies in my new cabin cruiser wearing a Tilly hat and drinking beer and talking about fishing. (See my last post, if you want to know what I'm talking about here.)
- For years I’ve been reading about a database/search program for Mac called DevonThink, for which there’s no PC equivalent, and I’m dying to try it.
- I spend much of my waking life in front of computers, and this environment should be as efficient and pleasant as I can make it.
- This iMac is just too cool for words.
So here we are. Aethestics and ease of use rool, OK! Plus a consumerist virus ate my brain.
The illustration, above, is from an article, “Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?”, about a mysterious invasion of toads in Mianzhu, China in 2008.
Blacksmiths & novelists revisited: The Scott Adams Theory of Content Value
Collin's not the only one comparing professional writers to blacksmiths, these days. Scott Adams, e.g, of “Dilbert” fame, presents his Adams Theory of Content Value: "As our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero."
The fate of the author in the age of digital gizmodery (with apologies to Scott Adams):
Among other things, Adams predicts “that the profession known as 'author' will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books - and good ones - for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won't exist.”
(Just by the way, he also makes interesting comparisons of Kindle e-books and the iPad and their respective effects on developments as the value of books drops to bugger all.)
The bright side? Adams' theory affords another reason, a good one, not to work on Free Lunch, my perennially nascent novel and source of nagging guilt that I'm not working on it, something that interferes with the business of getting on with my life as a freelancing lad about town.
Some dimensions are darker than others
There are rogues, and there are rogues. There follow reports of close encounters with two very different species of actor in the current Thai political maelstrom:
Squeakish-clean candidate for office.
Useful additions to the many perspectives on the troubles? Colorful, anyway.
Message from the future
Leary here. It seems our Jack is going native.
Appearances rool, OK! What Ellie likes to call the Cosmetic Imperative. For example, the women construction workers in Thailand who wear long-sleeved shirts buttoned up and balaclava masks under broad-brimmed bamboo hats — better all sweated up than turned “black” in the sun. Not that you’d ever find Jack working construction, with or without a mask. But it’s same-same if you’re expecting a bit of street violence. You see these things are going to go down anyway, so you’d might as well look your best for the occasion. Right? And there’s another of Ellie’s laws: “There’s no instinct more primal, in Thailand, than the urge to look good.” Not even the survival instinct, it seems.
From my POV here, about 55 years in the future, your time, I could tell you what happens with the current troubles in Thailand. But I don’t expect it would do much good. Because whatever I tell you, it won’t change a darned thing.
One trouble with popular movements. They can feel just great to these people — it’s easy to get all pumped up with solidarity when everybody’s wearing the same colors. It’s much like belonging to a football fan club. Unfortunately, that’s pretty quick to turn to bad feelings against any group sportingdifferent colors. All you need then is to tack this onto a sense of injustice and inequality. As my Ellie says, at that point you get moral outrage, righteous indignation and gosh knows what breaking out around nearly any issue you like. And almost anything can set if off. Once that happens, it escalates — it takes on a life of its own. Before you know it, it’s like the whole society has gone crazy.
Part of the problem is that the people are led to believe their problems can be fixed right up. A few political and social and economic reforms, and Bob’s your uncle. And the so-called leaders who manipulate the mobs depend on these notions.
Realistically, of course, we live our lives in a kind of tension between what is, at any given time, what should be. We always live between some times when things just seem to get worse and worse, and other times when they appear to get better. They never seem to go all the way to heck, though, and they sure never get perfect. They swing one way, and then they swing back again, and we have to get on with living our lives in the situations between. Making the best of things as best we can. So you get a new leader and another party wins an election, and it’s all, “Yo! This way to the land of hope and glory.” Then that goes to heck, and the people head out into the streets again to demand another change of government, and some other route to the Promised Land.
There are always people happy to oblige, it seems, and so it goes. Year after year, government after government, and protest after protest. And guess what? You still get injustices and inequalities and a few people ruling the roost at the expense of the many. In what’s coming up locally, some of the faces at the top may change, but from the POV of those at the bottom that may not make a whole lot of difference, when it comes down to it.
Just one word of advice from the future: Holding your breath till stability sets in is only going to add a touch of blue to all the red and yellow you’ve already got out there in Bangkok. And keep your eyes peeled for larger-scale instances of the Cosmic Imperative.
“Now, don’t go waxing oracular,” says Ellie, and I don’t believe this is anything like waxing a car, something we don’t have here in Aeolia, in any case. But while I’m at it: One big player in current events is coming to a time he’ll wish he hadn’t got what he wished for. There, the oracular’s all shiny and clean.
Heroes of the Revolution
This is Khun Kik, my hairdresser, who is a Vidal Sassoon graduate and way beyond the means of your average freelance writer, starving variety. She is also quite lovely, as is Miss Da, her assistant, on the left. These ladies are the first Heroines of This Revolution we’re teetering on the brink of here in Bangkok. But the wounds on Kik's face are not from rumbling with the Red Shirts. No, she was walking up some stairs hand in hand with her two kids, a week ago, when one of them stepped on her foot, causing her to fall on her face, break her nose and seriously loosen two front teeth.
So why are they heroes? Kik closed her salon for a week while she recovered, and now she's leaving town till after the Songkran holiday holidays. Thinking about this, she got to feeling guilty that her clients would have to go around not looking their best in the middle of a revolution. So she scheduled customers from early morning to late evening for today, and to hell with the Red Shirt crowds that had basically occupied this part of the city.
Her husband called again and again, telling her not to be silly--the street demonstrations were on the verge of boiling over into something more dangerous. (They haven't, as of this writing.) She should close up shop --as had virtually all the businesses in the neighborhood--and go home. But she and Miss Da soldiered on. And our man Jack braved Skytrain cars stuffed to bursting, red-shirted folk from upcountry asking him in disbelieving tones, "Can you eat Thai food?" and all manner of perils and pains in the butt just so he could do his bit, which includes looking as dapper as possible when society finally falls apart.
Most of her foreign customers showed up; her Thai customers, who know their onions, canceled.
A concluding note: As high as tensions are running in central Bangkok, the demonstrations still have a festive feel to them. Many locals, of course, as inconvenienced as they’ve been this past month, are becoming markedly less festive in attitude.
(For breaking news and comment, see thaivisa.com and The Nation. Bangkok Post breaking news on Twitter.)
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