The Bastard Love-Child of Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses

Just a quick question for the literate public - why haven’t you read The Third Policeman yet? If you have, then congratulations, you get to stand with me and harass everyone else. As for the rest of you, what’s taking you so long?

I’ll give you the benefit of ignorance and assume that it has simply passed you by. I suppose that’s understandable. Brian O’Nolan, AKA Myles NaGopaleen, AKA Flann O’Brien is the shrinking violet of Irish literature. If he were a film, he’d be Falling Down, that Michael Douglas film which nobody remembers even though it was awesome. Although he is often overlooked, no one can deny that Flann O’Brien belongs around the top of the list, not far from Joyce himself.

His writing style is playful and drunken. He was a man who, with his associates, the likes of Kavanagh and Behan, defined the stereotype of the drunken Irish writer. Whatever sense his books lack is compensated tenfold by a natural humour that allows you to suspend your disbelief just long enough to get to the next volley of lunacy.

Published posthumously in 1967, The Third Policeman centres around the unnamed narrator whose life takes a dramatic turn for the weird when he goes to retrieve Mathers’ box. He finds himself in a strange little plot of nowhere in which he comes across a ‘completely false and unconvincing’ police station. Here we meet two of the three policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Sergeant McCruiskeen, two men of the law more than happy to solve any crime as long as it is related to bicycles.

The story then meanders disconnectedly along a ludicrous journey that can only be compared to the bastard love-child of Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses. We find a spear so sharp that it can cut you before it even touches you and a carved wooden chest with an infinite number of smaller wooden chests resting inside each other and some strange element called ‘omnium’.

Just when things look irreconcilably daft, Flann delivers a delicious little twist which, although a tad predictable by today’s standards, still offers enough satisfaction to pay off the preceding debt of confusion.

Just to be even more mental, the main text is periodically interrupted by footnotes regarding the work of DeSelby, a fictional mad scientist. Some of these footnotes are so long as to spill into two or three pages, thereby overshadowing the main story. Scholars often question the significance of this practice - I think Brian O’Nolan just got a kick out of making people squint for longer than necessary.

The main talent in the Third Policeman is it’s humour. The author was a prodigy of the pun and if you like to laugh, this is the book for you, but be warned - this laughter isn’t free. The price for a chuckle is a chill. Funny though this book is, it’s undeniably creepy. Every scene is edged with the blur of uncertainty like a dream that explains the meaning of everything for a split second before you wake up.

If it were adapted for the screen, there would be no end to the difficulties that would arise in portraying something that is intrinsically impossible.

And there are plenty of those.

You want an example?

How about Sergeant Pluck’s Atomic Theory of the Bicycle?

It goes like this - there’s a great danger to be had with the riding of bicycles. On a bumpy road, the seat of the bike makes an untold number of collisions with the person riding it. Over time, bicycle-atoms are transferred into the person and human-atoms are likewise transferred into the bike. This results in some very bicycline humans (who have trouble standing still without falling over) and some very human bicycles (who are prone to raiding the scullery).

Of course, Flann O’Brien says it better than me.

Another Shining Gem of Outstanding Brilliance

Research. There’s a good word and one no writer should be without. For any writer, the greatest excuse for procrastination has to be that it was all in the name of research. I’ll redirect your memories back to the first season of Spaced in which Daisy Steiner passes off her inactivity as research into the psyche of the unemployed - vital research for an article which she had planned to write. Writers have as many great ideas as they have means of wasting time.

So, in order to justify watching episode after episode of Doctor Who, I’ll impose a retrospective mission upon my past self. I wasn’t just wasting time - not me! I was actually trying to discover, for YOU, dear reader, which episode was the best one.

And I found it, by God!

If you’ve never watched Doctor Who, I’ll bet that it was for one or all of the following reasons:

- It’s childish.
- It’s silly.
- It’s low-budget, poorly-plotted, two-dimensional pap.
- It’s another excuse to sell more lunch boxes and pencil cases.
- It’s hard to get emotionally involved when you know that any potentially fatal situation can be escaped by adjusting the settings on the Sonic Screwdriver.
- The TARDIS’ capacity for all-encompassing salvation is equally unbelievable.

Let’s face it, with all of his toys, the Doctor is pretty much invincible. Even if he does happen to die, he just morphs into somebody else and carries on like nothing happened, thereby making the franchise itself endless.

Remember Doom? Remember how much of the appeal was lost once God Mode was activated?

Without the possibility of death, life has no meaning.

That said, I’ve been told that a Time Lord can undergo a maximum of 13 regenerations.

Is that true?

Anyone?

I’m straying from the point, however.

My point is that the best episode of Doctor Who, since it’s revival in 2005, has to be ‘Blink’, the tenth episode of the third series and the only one in the series written by Steve Moffat, winning him a Hugo and a couple of BAFTAs.

It’s my firmly-held belief that even the greatest critic of the show would find this episode compelling, frightening and very, very clever.

To my limited knowledge, no other episode has used the possibilities of time travel to their full potential in the way that Blink does.

The story revolves around Sally Sparrow who must defeat four statues. It doesn’t sound that difficult, but these statues are actually the Weeping Angels, a race of quantum-locked humanoids who cease to exist when they are being observed.

According to the Doctor (in this case, played by David Tennant, the best Doctor so far, in my ignorant opinion) they kill in the most humane way possible - by transporting their victim back in time where they are allowed to live to death. Meanwhile, the Weeping Angels feed off of the potential energy in the years that would have otherwise been lived.

You’re safe enough as long as you are looking at them but as soon as you avert your gaze, they’ll be on top of you faster than …well… the blink of an eye. Next thing you know, you’ve landed in 1920, with no hope of return.

That’s beside the point though.

The real genius of this episode is the way in which timelines are manipulated. The first victim is Kathy Nightingale, Sally’s friend, who disappears at the exact moment that the doorbell rings. When Sally answers the door, she finds Kathy’s grandson bearing a letter, written by her decades previously, explaining what had just happened.

To say much more about the story would be to spoil the experience but that is just a taste of how messed up this episode eventually becomes before, inevitably, making perfect sense…in a messed up kind of way. If you’re not already convinced, it’s only because I’m not explaining it properly. I urge all of you Doctorsceptics out there to give it a shot, if you only watch one episode in your lives. If you really hate the Doctor that much, you’ll be glad to hear that he’s virtually absent for the whole 45 minutes.

So, there you have it. Your intrepid researcher has trawled the depths of the TV mire to bring you yet another shining gem of outstanding brilliance.

Don’t thank me.

I’m just doing my duty.

It Ain’t Real Pain Unless You Want to Kill Someone

As if things weren’t bad enough, I’ve been listening to a hell of a lot of country music lately. Since I tackled the vocation of ‘writer‘ yesterday, I think it only right to continue my handy series of articles with my guide to becoming a country music star.

It suffices to say that city-folk are at an immediate disadvantage. It helps, when you decide to become the next Hank Williams, if you actually come from the country.

If you can’t change the past, then the least you can do is work on your accent and scale your world-view down a notch. You’ll never hear a country music song borrowing lines from Camus or comparing heartache to a broken iPhone so, in order to succeed, you must forget about these things in favour of more earthy similes.

Assimilate meaningless drivel like ‘honky-tonk’, ‘hoochie-coochie’ or ’achy-breaky’ into your vocabulary and refer liberally to your pick-up truck, the juke box and Jesus.

Get your wardrobe right. This might seem like an obvious point but to overlook it is to doom yourself to weep outside the doors of Carnegie Hall. Three chords and a heart made out of hay and cow-shite won’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t have your boots, your blue jeans and your Stetson. And if they ain’t made in America, you might as well wear an Osama Bin-Laden costume (use the word ‘ain’t’ a lot too, that’s very important).

The next important point to observe is that real country music is about pain. Now, we’re not talking about a paper-cut or banging your funny-bone against the handle of a door, we’re talking about the real thing. This is the kind of pain you feel when your hoochie-coochie woman takes her love to town leaving you at home, in the trailer, to drink moonshine and think of all of the ways that you could put her in the ground.

City-folk know nothing of pain - it ain’t real pain unless you want to kill someone.

Think about marriage too. Think about everything you know about this institution and then forget it completely. If you’re a country music star, the only reason to get married is so that you can get a divorce and spend the next two or three albums whinging about that no-good devil-woman.

I’ll take the time now to acknowledge the existence of female country singers. Not all country music stars are misogynist hicks - some of them are sassy country gals whose reaction to pain is a whole lot different. You’ll notice that as soon as her man leaves her, the subject of the song will cry and cry and cry and cry and cry and cry… until they die.

If she survives the crying process, she’ll more than likely go off on a hedonistic binge in an attempt to find a man as good as the one she just lost (Honky-Tonk Merry-Go-Round).

But whether you’re a cowboy or a cowgirl, it is crucial that you are unlucky in love, possibly an alcoholic and preferably a gun-wielding psychopath.

However, even if your chosen subject is heartache, you’re bound to run out of material eventually. Worry not, because you are free to sing about agricultural processes(Amarillo Sky), regional topography (Black Hills of Dakota) or even the acceptance of a questionable stereotype (It’s Alright To Be a Redneck). Use your imagination, by all means, but not too much - you don’t want to look like a faggot.

…Metablogging at it’s Finest

Okay, how about this for an experiment. I’ve got one hour in which to write whatever the hell I like, be it good, bad or completely nonsensical. This is a fairly simple experiment and I’ve had the good will to let you see the results.

Just to set the scene, I’m sitting at my desk, with a pose-able lamp shining down on the keyboard, adding a very noir atmosphere to the proceedings. I feel I should be smoking a cigarette and slugging from a fifth of bourbon. But I’m not, because I only have an hour and it’s not for me to waste time.

I’ve done enough of that already.

It’s been one of those weeks in which nothing happened. That’s completely my own fault so I can’t really complain, but consider it a stated point. Since nothing has happened, or rather, I haven’t done anything, I find myself at something of a loss when it comes to writing some content for this god-forsaken blog.

I could tell you about the two and a half seasons of Doctor Who that I shamelessly watched, but I know you don’t care and if you did care, you have probably already watched them yourself, so no need for a synopsis.

I could tell you about the….the, um…oh my God, all I’ve done is watch Doctor Who and go to work for a week. I’d be really depressed if I thought it was a complete waste of time but I rather like Doctor Who, and even if I’d seen the majority of the episodes before, they were just as entertaining the second time ’round.

But this is a new week, a fresh start and from here on in, anything can happen. That’s either optimism or extreme paranoia, I haven’t decided yet.

…10 minutes gone…

…12 minutes gone…

That’s what they call a fugue state. It’s a period of time in which the subject loses all awareness of their surroundings and either allows another personality to run the show for said time, or stares blankly at a point in space, returning to reality only when they feel spit trickling from the sides of their mouths. I fall into the latter category.

Come on, man, think, you’re losing them.

Okay…

…17 minutes gone…

God this experiment isn’t going too well.

If I just keep on typing, something is bound to happen, that’s how it works, right? Well, maybe not, I’m sure that a real writer would have a topic chosen before sitting down to write anything. Not only that, but they would have done countless hours of research to make sure that they have their facts right and don’t have to prattle on for, say, an hour, without accomplishing anything.

Okay, problem number one has been defined.

This is progress.

So what I need is a subject.

The subject of today’s entry is, in fact, today’s entry. It’s metablogging at it’s finest. In today’s entry, I have decided to write about writing the entry that I intend to publish today. So far, it has been an enlightening experience. I started out full of juice and with very good intentions but, as you have seen, it didn’t take long for me to realise that I was severely unprepared, having neither cigarette, nor bourbon.

Problem number two, defined.

Writers smoke and drink. Fact. If I want to be a writer, I must act like a writer. Now, contrary to popular opinion, a real writer spends hardly any time writing. Instead, they linger in dark rooms waiting for someone to come along and photograph them holding a cigarette somewhere near their face.

Observe.

 

Now, if  they’d been writing at the time, they wouldn’t have been able to hold the cigarette and thus, would cease to be writers.

I hope you’re all taking notes, because this is important.

So, you have your topic ready, your glass of whiskey sitting beside your ashtray, what now? You need a pen, right?

WRONG!

You need a gun. Because nobody will take you seriously if they don’t think that there’s a possibility of you blowing your brains out at any time. People like a writer who isn’t afraid to die. If they get the slightest whiff of impending suicide, they’ll rush to the nearest shop to buy your first edition hardback with the intention of forging an autograph inside and flogging it on eBay before your gun stops smoking.

What?

Proof?

Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway…

I was going to use Yukio Mishima as an example too but he didn’t shoot himself -  he decided to go traditional and performed emergency surgery on his stomach without ever planning to stitch it back up.

Well, here we are at the end of the hour. Hope it was as fun for you as it was cringingly awful for me. I welcome any suggestions for a topic that I can hack to death over the course of an hour for the next fun-filled entry.

Enrich Your Life #001

What if all of my strawberries rot in Farmville?

Today was a beautiful day, complete with sunny sun and happy little birds sharing bird jokes we’ll never understand. Somewhere, a kid was flying a kite. Somewhere else, a group of happy metrosexuals were drinking cold, rattling glasses of Magners and exchanging epic anecdotes about their respective gap years.

I’m not bitter - just jealous.

I’m jealous because I have missed the whole glorious glory of the day having been stuck indoors, a slave to my own inertia. It hasn’t been a complete waste of time because I’ve discovered something very important - I have got to stop playing video games. It’s taking over my life.

Although I should accept that all of those hours are now lost, I can’t help thinking about what I should have done. I should have gone to the park with a book and a bag of cans. Hell, I could have sat on the sofa and watched re-runs of Come Dine With Me, even that would have had a greater sense of involvement than watching the seconds tick by until I had enough energy to Steal a Tanker Truck in Mafia Wars.

God, it’s sick - I actually feel sick right now, like I could puke for days on end in a multicoloured orgy of self-loathing and the worst thing about it is that I’m still thinking about Mafia Wars - oh, I wonder how many energy points I have now? I probably have loads, it’s been, what, a whole hour and a half since I last checked - that’s a lifetime in Mafia Wars. I could probably make it to level 19, get my energy bar completely refilled and master the Soldier tier in New York.

Disgusting.

Count yourself lucky if that means nothing to you.

What I should do is ban myself from playing video games full-stop. Even now, I’m wondering what I could have done with my life were it not for all of those hours (and there must be at least a couple of years when you add them up) keeping my thumbs exercised. I’d be a really successful accountant by now I’m sure, but no fun at parties. Not that I ever go to parties because I’m too busy earning fucking achievements.

Just for the Hell of it, I’ll try it for a week - no video games week. Here’s a list of reasons not to, just so you can see how utterly pathetic it is -

1 - If I don’t use my energy points, who will?
2 - What if I don’t bank all of my money and it gets stolen?
3 - What if all of my strawberries rot in Farmville?
4 - What if I leave Final Fantasy VII for so long that I forget what’s going on and have to start all over again?
5 - What if someone beats my high score in Crazy Cabbie?

And so on, and so on. Meanwhile, I’ll grow old and useless and drop off the face of humanity like a leper’s nose into a bowl of gruel.

The bottom line here is that Mafia Wars is a purely diabolic creation. I don’t care how much of the proceeds go to Haitian disasters, it’s some sick bastard’s way of making money by exploiting the boredom of millions of technoholics.

The real evil genius of the thing is that in order for the players to succeed, they must invite more people to join their virtual mob. So, you look through your contact list for the people whose lives are just as meaningless as your own and, bingo, you now have enough witless zombies in your entourage to take on fifteen other lost souls in a battle with no ultimate conclusion - everyone lives to fight again and the only thing lost is a piddling amount of money that you never had in the first place.

Your list of Mafia Wars accolades isn’t likely to help you find a better job, or improve your sex life or bring you closer to discovering who you really are, so why waste your time with it?

‘It’s fun’, say the level 300 über-mafiosi who can’t understand reality unless it’s framed in a monitor. The painful truth is that it’s not actually fun at all, only addictive. This is what Mafia Wars sounds like -

Click...

Click...

Click...

Click...

Ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

It involves no skill, no thought, so, by definition, it’s not even a game. It’s just a mindless process of clicking and waiting and clicking some more until the next aimless set of mouse-related tasks is unlocked.

And therein lies the appeal and the great sin of game developers nowadays. So many games on the market today, aren’t even played for fun. The fun disappears after the first 12 or 14 hours. The only reason people continue is to unlock this achievement or that achievement or to find the secret area or the hidden item.

The creators know the mind of the gamer. They know that unless every little thing has been accomplished to 100% completion, this lonely soul will feel a great sense of emptiness.

With Mafia Wars, all of the fun has been erased leaving only the compulsion to unlock things, earn achievements and thus, eliminate emptiness.

Basically, it’s a really sick joke.

But if nobody played the ‘game’, it wouldn’t exist. Millions of people keep it alive and keep the creators swimming through pools of naked women drenched in Dom Perignon, laughing at the hapless fools who awarded them such a fortune.

Laughing at me.

How I’d love to wipe the smiles from their faces. The tragedy is that I’m too lazy to get up off of my ass and kill them for ruining my day. Why can’t I kill them? Because there isn’t a fucking button to click that will do that.

Fair play to them.

Clever guys.

So there you go - my day amounts to me digging a hole in which to get stuck, and then shouting at the spade.

I wish Red Forman was around.

I could sure use a foot in my ass.