No Deal

This is genius.  Noel Edmonds goes on one about refusing to pay his TV Licence, becomes a darling of the right once more, and then it turns out he does have one after all.  I wonder if he said he'd leave the country in 1997 if Labour got into power like all the other loud talking right wingers, who are still here, still talking, loudly.

That a very wealthy man like Noel Edmonds would even contemplate not paying his Licence fee is beyond me anyway, although, that there are people out there who think he's a hero for doing so (or not) is more incomprehensile - "Hey, the rich aren't paying their taxes, aren't they great!"

Insoluble Flux

"It's interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing" [From "Good Old Neon"]

Been rereading some of David Foster Wallace's stuff, to remind myself of how good he could be. Sometimes his stuff didn't work. Sometimes his stuff was amazing. I think this is what I liked about reading him, the sense that you didn't really know what to expect. I mean it wasn't like reading someone else, someone else you know is good, but who'll never surprise you or inspire you (like Martin Amis maybe, back in the day when Martin Amis was actually worth reading). It was different. I went through a phase, soon after having read everything David Foster Wallace wrote, of looking for someone similar - reading "Young American Novelists", "postmodern writers" looking for something of the same thrill that I found with him - but I never found anything as satisfying and gave up the search.
What perhaps struck me most in that search was (and I'll get to the other stuff I think made DFW great) the actual quality of the writing, a certain sharpness, a clarity of expression even in the midst of those long rolling sentences. Some of these other writers I looked at, well, maybe they had ideas (tho generally...), but the writing always seemed so dull compared to DFW. In a way perhaps this is the true genius of DFW: that while he wrote so much on the impossibilty of expressing feelings in writing, in language, his own writing was so good. Perhaps he felt that in some way if he could just write better and better (stylistically) he would eventually come upon the secret of some impossible expression...
And that is of course the other thing that I really loved about DFW, that there was always this belief in something else. It never (or hardly ever) had the feeling of writing for writings sake, pointless stylistic experiments, hiding behind irony - he was always willing to say something, to believe in something, to want to say something even if it seemed impossible to truly express anything at all.
I'll finish up these brief thoughts with a quote from the end of "Octet", in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, I found so many things I could have quoted, and this quote is overlong, but I think it expresses everything very well:

It may well be that all it'll do is make you look like a self-consciously inbent schmuck who's trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself. Even under the most charitable interpretation, it's going to look desperate. Possibly pathetic. At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do... more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.
So decide.

David Foster Wallace

So I get up and over breakfast read that David Foster Wallace has committed suicide.  I'm speechless.  Not even sure why I'm here posting on it.  I've nothing to say.
Emptiness.
Maybe I'll post something later when I've worked out a feeling.

Blackness

How to approach a deeply personal subject in the context of this impersonal blog? The names have been changed to protect the innocent? No, no names shall be named, no names, just a feeling, a feeling of truth. I wouldn't write on this at all but it does involve Avril Lavigne, and in a way I never expected.
To begin - a personal disappointment, a disappointment I am having great difficulty dealing with, a disappointment which appears as just another in a consistent series but which hurts like hell all the same (To return to names, her name always occurred to me, could always be substituted, with the name of one of those others, while I was happy, while love lasted, but now it's over, now she takes her place amongst the pantheon, set in stone, no longer to be mistaken, replaced, she is one of them now, which is to say that now she has gone her identity becomes a stable thing, whereas before she always had the potential to -to what? - disappoint. So obvious now...). As ever with such disappointment I try and throw myself into abstract thought, the work of thought, to take my mind off it, to try and achieve something abstract when the personal fails. And so it was I returned to Avril.
And yet I didn't see what I expected to see - the incessant return to the honesty of the artwork - what I saw was different, somehow personal, still an incessant return to honesty but of a more personal nature. Maybe it says more about me than about Avril Lavigne that I only see this now. Maybe I always underplayed the personal to concentrate on aesthetics, looking too deep, reading something into nothing (something someone else was fond of criticising me for...).
And yet, on the other hand, isn't this precisely the point - that I expect from the artwork the same honesty that I would expect from someone else, and, perhaps more importantly, from myself. The two are inseparable. The artwork and the personal. Which isn't a call for confessional bullshit from artists. One of the main points of my reading of Avril is that this type of confessional is in itself dishonest, or, at the very least, too easily sold, too easily solidified into an advert. It is in the wavering that truth comes about. Wavering between aesthetics and the personal in itself being a form of this. It should also be added that in this context The Best Damn Thing is the least satisfying of the albums, so fixed in its mould: it is not about a return to "Innocence", it is about facing things, heeding the truth (the theme of innocence perhaps explains the regression to the childlike on The Best Damn Thing, including the suspiciously naughty swear words scattered throughout), having the full information and yet still persisting, for instance, on the first two albums, the persistence of honesty, despite all the evidence that it is an impossible honesty, not an honesty borne of innocence.
This throwing myself into abstract thought returned me therefore to the personal but in a way that made me feel better. Previously I had chosen two paths to deal; one way - to put on angry stuff, Envy and such like (I listened to Envy for two days solid, and I have my headphones in all day at work, so it was solid); the other way - putting on happy music, upbeat music. And neither way really worked, once the headphones came out everything seemed the same as when they went in, nothing had changed, the emptiness persisted. Listening to Avril Lavigne helped me confront the truth, and I was kind of surprised to learn that the truth didn't hurt as I expected
I at least had been true(to everyone and myself), had been honest (to everyone and myself) and what else could I have done?

"I can't keep it cool, so I keep it True"

"I can't keep it cool, so I keep it true"

Loving this new Kanye