Omnivoracious

Friday Is Someday

So I’m walking down this street in west London –   

No, of course not right now. Right now I’m sitting in my office typing this. I’m just using the present continuous for vivid narrative effect. Look: I’m walking down this street in – 

What do you mean, am I sure? Listen, I taught English as a Foreign Language for fourteen years. Of course I’m sure. Present continuous. Vivid narrative effect. I’m walking – 

No, this is not going to be about books.

I can’t help that. I promised I’d tell this story about dreamy autopilot rails and Zen states “someday”, and I didn’t really give it much thought, b-t since this is Friday and time to wrap up the blog, it turns out someday has to be today or these people won’t get to hear it. Ahem. So I’m walking –

Are you going to let me tell this f---ing story or what?

Right. Ahem.

So I’m walking down this street in west London, early Saturday morning and pretty hungover. The night before, I was at a party held by some Polish students of mine in a house they’re renting together while they study English over here. I’m young and single and trading off my cheaply-won status and stature as an EFL teacher (4 week training course, one previous job for one year at a cowboy school in Istanbul – cheap indeed) and some of these Polish girls are drop dead gorgeous and very sexy with it. No way was I going to miss that party. Unfortunately, I spent most of the night chasing the drop dead gorgeous Marlene Dietrich look-a-like who had approximately zero interest in me, while ignoring her drop dead gorgeous raven-haired green-eyed friend who kept plying me with whisky and would, I discovered a few weeks later, have dragged me into bed at the slightest hint of attraction on my part. 

Sigh.

So anyway, I wake up early next morning, dispiritingly alone, in a small spare bedroom and feeling decidedly the worse for wear. I remember I’ve agreed to meet some friends across town for lunch, so I dress hurriedly, steal some aspirin from the bathroom and crunch them down, then slip out the door without waking anyone. The latch snaps shut behind me.

At which point I also remember that I came here last night in a taxi with Marlene Dietrich and her raven-haired friend, in the dark and already a little drunk, and as a result I have not the faintest idea where exactly in west London I am. This is a quiet residential street, amidst what looks like a maze of similar quiet residential streets. I don’t know where the nearest tube station is, I don’t even know if they have tube stations in this part of town. To be honest, at this point I wouldn’t even swear that it is west London we’re in. I might have misheard that part.

And this is where the Zen thing kicks in. I set off down the street without hesitation or conscious thought, navigating, I realise much later, by the sounds of distant traffic (head towards them) and then the one or two other people I see leaving the houses I walk past (follow them!). Though I haven’t consciously realised it yet, these cues will inevitably lead me to public transport of some sort and an accompanying You Are Here-type map. Autopilot on, situation dealt with. Meanwhile, it’s a bright, slightly frosty London morning, my head doesn’t hurt too much anymore – enjoy.

Until, that is, the guy with the cornflakes. Or more correctly at this point, the guy without the cornflakes.

Looking back, I guess he picked me because I was moving slower than anyone else (London pedestrians, un-hungover, tend to scoot along at a fairly rapid rate). Or maybe it was just the general aura of minor damage and unkempt blur that I was almost certainly radiating that morning. Who can say for sure? At any event, what happens is that this slightly shifty looking guy comes shuffling up to me, and says:

“Look, mate, can you do me a favour?”

“Uhm,” I say. (There are sub-routines of hazard awareness within the hungover Zen software, it seems.) “Depends what it is.”

“Well. See that shop there, on the corner?”

“Yes, mate.”

“Well, could you go in there and get me a box of cornflakes?”

“Large or medium?”

“Oh, large, large. I mean, look, I got all the money and everything.” He does. He hands it over. “Just a large box of cornflakes.”

So I head across the road to the shop, step over the threshold and into the grocery-smelling interior where two men are chatting across the counter. The cornflakes are on a high shelf at the back. I point.

“Could I get a large box of those cornflakes, please.”

In the efficient, minimalist silence of London corner shop service, the man behind the counter steps up on a small wooden stool, hands me down the cornflakes, takes the money, makes change. We do mumbled monosyllables back and forth, the pencil sharpener shavings of polite exchange and discourse. I head back out into the wintry sunlight with the prize under my arm.

My newfound friend-in-need is still where I left him, on the other side of the street. I cross, I hand over the cornflakes.

“There you go, mate.”

He is overjoyed. “Thanks, oh thanks so much. Thank you.”

“Wait, don’t forget your change.”

He turns back. “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thanks, mate.”

“No trouble.”

And off he goes.

It takes me about another ten minutes to find the tube station. It’s the Metropolitan line, above ground at this point. I sit slumped in the carriage, lean my head against the grimy window pane beside me and gaze out at north west London in the winter sun. Eventually, the train jolts, bangs my head on the glass, jolts again and starts to move.

It’s three stations before I sit up abruptly with the first conscious question of the day in my head:

Cornflakes? What the f--k was that all about? 

Zen state, you see. I didn’t think to ask, I just dealt with it. 

B-t I still wonder, occasionally, even now, nearly twenty years later. What was that all about?

And I’ll never know.

Have a nice weekend. --Richard Morgan

Thursday Looking Up Again

Translator’s note: in due deference to the Committee for Public Morals, this column will now be sanitised by government-approved Decency Operatives; henceforth a list of words including but not confined to “f--k”, “s--t”, “c--t”, “p---k”, “a-----e”, “b------ks”, “sn----------es” and “z------p” will not be permitted to appear in their full forms. We will also be removing the word “but” wherever possible – it is short and ugly and with so many alternatives available continuing to sprinkle the text with it would surely demonstrate a limited vocabulary. Please note this is a temporary state of affairs necessitated by the War on Expletives (currently at puce alert) and will not affect other writings by this author - your co-operation is appreciated.

Yeah, about that ship. 

Completely slipped my slightly hazed mind yesterday. So, backtracking now….

Looking up round town is a curiously rewarding pastime in Glasgow (always assuming you time it carefully in relation to things like traffic and crossing the street). So much of the city’s history is above habitual eye level. So tip a glance upward, beyond the internationally homogenous ground level frontages of this high street brand and that, this coffee franchise or the other, this or that link in yet another ubiquitous restaurant or retail chain. Rising over all this, like drowned mountain ranges rearing out of some recently globally warmed ocean of consumer frenzy, you can see the dressed-stone splendour of the city Glasgow once was. 

You can see, for example, if you look up on the corner of George Square opposite Queen’s Street Station, a gilded globe set on a spire, itself topped with a fully-rigged merchantman running before the wind. Turns out that building used to belong to an association of marine insurers, and their enduring legacy is still up there for all to see. Nor is this an isolated example – all over town, you can tip your head back and see statues, bas relief figures, exquisitely sculpted ornament and of course the elegantly worked red or blond sandstone Victorian architecture of the buildings themselves. Central Station towers and crenellates (no, that’s not an obscene word, Linda C – you’re thinking of m--------es) between Hope and Union Street like some pale outcrop of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. The Mitchell Library looms in domed and regal splendour like some Austro-Hungarian imperial palace set atop the dark, corrugated concrete wall of the M8 motorway underpass where it gouges through the heart of the city to the river. And everywhere, above the broad, glass-windowed bars, restaurants and retail outlets that were once banks, Glasgow’s Victorian facades rise with assured imperial elegance, testament to a time when this was Britain’s Second City of Empire, the gathering point of unparalleled wealth traded (and, ahem, looted) from all over the world.

If, as Anne Michaels says in Skin Divers, There is No City that Does not Dream, then Glasgow has plenty to occupy its fitful hours of REMsleep. But those dreams must be a curious mix. Because this is still the murder capital of western Europe, and still home to some of the most appalling social deprivation stats in the developed world. There are as many gangs here as there are in London, a city with nearly six times Glasgow’s population. Knife crime is rife, junkies and stumbling alcoholics are on the streets in force. And somewhere out there in this city’s dark dream of Friday night, an ornate blond sandstone portico built by once-upon-a-time Tobacco Lords is giving shelter from the driving rain to a small group of bone-thin, pasty-skinned fifteen year old boys as they wait for the opportunity to stab, slash or otherwise f--k up some completely innocent passer-by. They will have no reason for this random act of violence, not even robbery – the forces driving them are as remote from their understanding or grasp as the history of the city which gave birth to them and whose rain-drenched streets they haunt. They are lost in the labyrinth, and it’s doubtful if they have ever looked up in their lives.

Now, I ask you – who could give all that up, just for unlimited Spanish sun and one of the finest and most varied culinary cultures on the planet?

Not, it appears, a foul-mouthed, noir-addicted author. Not yet at least. --Richard Morgan

Wednesday and Slightly Wasted (Guest Blogger: Richard K. Morgan)

Okay, seems we’re out of directional thematic metaphor, done up, done down, “roundabout Wednesday” sounds crap, so this’ll have to serve instead. Though Slightly Groggy is probably a fairer assessment, since neither Steve Erikson (yes, that is the fantasy, not the “literary”, writer) nor I drank heavily last night. But – I am these days so unused to regular alcohol consumption (like I said, what the fuck am I doing living in Glasgow??) that the relatively restrained quantities of Jack Daniels and Pinot Grigio I put away (no, not in the same glass) plus an early morning airport run have me a little ragged around the edges. You know – somewhere around that Zen state peripheral to actual hangover, where consciousness gets in the back seat and dozes and you just get on and function, while everything apparently trundles along just fine on some set of slightly dreamy autopilot rails. (Tell you a great story about that someday.)

About those inverted commas around “literary” back there; no disrespect to that Steve Erickson (whose first novel Days Between Stations was an enchanting meditation on distance, loss and cinematic wonder which still echoes in my memory more than twenty years after I first read it, but whose other work I’m entirely unfamiliar with) but I’m a little tired of the range wars and strung barbed wire deployed every time the “literary” critical world comes into contact with genre. It’s something Steve (the other Steve Erikson) and I bitched about last night at great length – the ingrained prejudice that lives and breathes within the mainstream critical establishment against genre fiction. 

I mean, look, let’s be clear about this: I’m not suggesting we should expect the New York Review of Books to devote column space to the latest Star Wars tie-in novel or yet another mock-medieval pot-boiler about yet another Good Hearted Farmboy growing up to be a Warrior or a Wizard and defeating yet another Evil Empire. That would be populist entertainment relativism above and beyond the call of sanity. 

But. 

But:

There has to be a reason why books like DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little or Yann Martel’s Life of Pi walk off with the Booker prize, while Geoff Ryman’s Air isn’t even short-listed (and it sure as shit ain’t about how good they are, because Ryman’s book pisses all over the other two in every meaningful measure there is of literary quality). There has to be a reason why David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood can all try their hand (rather clunkily) at visions of a genetically modified future and be reviewed at length for it in the mainstream press on three continents, while a whole host of SF genre writers (of varying but by no means uniformly poor stylistic merit) have been writing confidently and compellingly about exactly the same thing for a couple of decades now at least, and are all summarily ignored (and yes, I am including myself in there, and yes, I am sulking). There has to be a reason why Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 are by-words in the English Literary Canon and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is unheard of outside of genre circles. There has to be a reason why-

Ah, fuck it, why go on?  Sure, there’s a reason, and that reason is blind prejudice. The mainstream critical world doesn’t like (or know anything much about or want to know anything much about) SF and Fantasy fiction for exactly the same reason British people on package holidays to Spain demand access to fish and chips and Sunday roast – because they’re too ignorant and self satisfied to look beyond their own narrowly ingrained and inculcated tastes and taboos. It’s different than what they know, and they don’t like that; plus they once heard somewhere that SF is shit, and it must be true because look at all that god-awful stuff on TV (which latter is a bit like writing off all of British post-colonial literature from Salman Rushdie to Monica Ali, because you once saw a couple of Bollywood movies and didn’t rate them very highly). 

Truth is (and I’ve said this before in the second half of an article here) our only mistake within genre is to bother with these people at all – like bigots of any stripe, you can’t talk them round, you can’t argue the point, you can’t make them see the light, any more than you can persuade the Ku Klux Klan that the colour of someone’s skin is no good indicator of their worth as an individual. The stance of the mainstream with regard to genre fiction is neither critical nor analytical, it is deeply emotional – and you challenge people’s deeply held emotional beliefs at your peril.

Example – just try telling an audience of fantasy fans that Frodo should have died at Mount Doom. Steve Erikson (the fantasy Steve Erikson) tried it at a convention, he told me last night, and nearly caused a riot as a result. Oh yes, children, for if there is bigotry out there in the big bad world of mainstream literary crit, there’s as much and to spare in here, in the cosy and slightly claustrophobic confines of our genre. For every mainstream critic who wouldn’t know good science fiction or fantasy if it bit him in the ass, there is also a fistful of genre fans who think The God of Small Things must be some kind of fantasy epic about war between microscopic elves, Vineland is that Norse Saga about the Vikings discovering America, and Philip Roth is, wait a minute, oh yeah, that guy who used to sing with Van Halen, right? 

Yes, sad to say, people, this is not a one-way bigotry we’re talking about here. Intolerant, uninformed people on both sides of these barricades have some serious self-examination (and reading) to do if they’re ever to be disassembled (the barricades that is, not the intolerant, uninformed people. Though come to think of it...)

Free your mind, people. Your reading habits will follow.

Meantime, I’m off to take some aspirin. My Zen state is peeling back here. --Richard Morgan

Tuesday Looking Up (Guest Blogger: Richard K. Morgan)

Hey, the sun came out!!

Goddamn it, Scotland does this to you all the time – just when you’ve made up your mind to abandon ship and go live in the Mediterranean (well, not exactly in it, obviously), the clouds part, sunlight streams down and paints all that gently shifting foliage soft velvet green, temperatures climb to respectable summer levels and you get hit with this fleeting odour of things growing – hard to describe, but for me it’s the scent of summer holidays up here when I was a kid. When we first moved to Glasgow in 2000, we had a flat overlooking a tree fringed flowing stream and I used to cycle off to work in the mornings, at the age of thirty five, convinced at some deep atavistic level that I was still on a childhood holiday. As a colleague said at the time – man, you got to bottle that and market it.

Scotland actually does do almost exactly that, if not with its scents, then with its light. You’ll have seen that light as you pass through the duty free zones in airports all over the world. It’s wrapped around ranked bottles of single malt, it’s plastered across store section poster space and sometimes it shows up in movies about Scottish heroes starring Irishmen, Frenchmen or Australian-Americans (Yeah, I know – go figure). But actually, what you’re seeing there, that light, has been stepped on, as drug dealers like to say (at least, they did when Robert Sabbag wrote Snowblind (great book, btw – get it) back in 1976 – these days, I don’t know any drug dealers so I’m not sure if the parlance is still current). To see real Scottish light, you need to come here for yourself – and a good place to see it from is heading west out of Glasgow, on the Erskine suspension bridge. Stand there towards the end of a decent summer day, and you can get a startling view that might just make you want to stay: 

Westward, the clouds are smashed in with yolky evening light and ladders of pale filtering silver-gray.  There are mountains, scoured blunt and rounded by a billion years of geology, and the sea poured into the gaps between. It looks cold and wild and heart-catching, like all that whisky advertising footage before the safely warming tones of gold and green are shaded in to take us down from cask strength to a more palatable luxury product. You’re looking at Argyll, the toe of the Scottish Highlands, and a looming hint of what’s waiting further north.

Yes, standing up there, you can forget for a while that Glasgow is the murder capital of western Europe.  Which –

Oh shit, Linda, I’m still not talking about books, am I.  My apologies.  Ahem:

Currently reading: Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Colossal seven hundred and something page epic detailing the meeting and developing friendship of those two guys who drew the famous Mason-Dixon line – though at the stage I’ve reached, they haven’t yet reached America and are busy with astronomical duties for the Royal Society. Looking up, brooding and squabbling with each other, mostly. Doesn’t sound very interesting, I know, but trust me, this is some of Pynchon’s finest work. I mean, a book set in the eighteenth century and there’s a Bill Clinton joke on page 10! There’s also a primary narrator called the Reverend Cherrycoke, a family of mad Afrikaaners called the Vrooms (the mother soberly addressed as Vrou Vroom) and an intensely knowledgable ship’s crewmember and esteemed yarn spinner called Pat O’Brien. Catch that lot, if you can. Mason and Dixon features some of best laugh out loud tricks I’ve ever seen in modern literature, along with a poignant look at the dawn of the Age of Reason and the Independence of America. However, Linda should be warned it also features more than a few “curse” words, presumably demonstrating that Pynchon, like me, is suffering from stunted vocabulary development. If you can forgive him that, though, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Just make sure you set aside a good three weeks or so to read and digest it.

Shit, that’s the bell. I’m out of words – okay, tomorrow we’re back to Glasgow and looking up some more. At a ship, among other things. See you then. Meantime, I have to go and get drunk with Steve Erikson [Ed.: Aaagh--my mistake--I had Zeroville on the brain and assumed that Richard was referring to Steve-Erickson-with-a-c, even though he had included no "c" at all in his original post and even though I'm well aware of Steve-Erikson-with-no-c, and so linked to the wrong guy when I posted this yesterday. See Richard's Wednesday post for a further explanation. Apologies to Richard, both Steves, and the Erikson fans who commented.].

No, really. --Richard Morgan

Monday Morning Coming Down (Guest Blogger: Richard K. Morgan)

In more ways than one – first thing this morning (well, about ten thirty, which is first thing in the morning for a full time author) I take a five metre drop on the end wall at the Glasgow climbing centre.  Combination of factors, worst of which is probably the unpalatable fact I weigh twelve to fifteen kilos more than my climbing partner, a wiry French guy called Regis who’s also nearly a decade my junior (well, that’s my excuse, anyway).  Then, the fact I’d carelessly hauled a couple of metres of loose rope up preparatory to make the last clip-in on the climb, and was equally carelessly looping it when the hold under my foot gave way, spun, and dumped me onto the three fingers I was holding myself pinned to the wall with.  When you weigh in at ninety-two kilos and change, three fingers won’t hold up a drop like that.  Or at least, my fingers won’t.  The whole thing was, as the Spanish say, de pelicula – just like a movie.  I drop, I lose the finger hold instantly, pull loose, drop again.  Regis gets approximately zero warning and the rope snaps him in a couple more metres towards the wall.  That, the loose rope, the space between clipping points, my height – well, it all adds up, and during the fall I actually have time to think "shit, hope Regis is paying att-" Snap/Tug!!  Oh – he is.  Phew. 

I hang there, turning gently with the rope.  Sheepish, post-adrenalin grin.  Oops.

Something similar (minus the adrenalin) happened a couple of days ago too.  My wife and I flew back in from a visit to her family in Madrid, where the sky is a sun-blasted blue and temperatures are climbing towards their usual summer excess.  I didn’t get to check the daytime readings – some bright spark in the Madrid Ayuntamiento apparently decided that the digital time-and-temperature displays once common all over the city are a prime cause of traffic accidents (no, I think that’ll more likely be the speeding, light jumping and tail-gating Spanish drivers seem to think is a requirement of urban car ownership) – but I did notice the outside temperature reading on my brother-in-law’s car dashboard one midnight out on the town, and it read 31.  That’s centigrade, that’s the middle of the night.  I’ll leave you to work out what daytime was like.  Anyway, we flew back in from that to Glasgow, where it was cold, cloudy and raining at a malicious thirty-degree angle.  See - this is where we live.  Where, in fact (since writing novels is a profession you can do pretty much anywhere), we choose to live.

And why – I wondered, getting off the plane – the fuck do we do that?  What exactly are we doing here? 

Snap/Tug!!  Oops.  I stand there blinking cold rain out of my face.  Sheepish grin.

Why indeed?  Tune in tomorrow for some answers, some alarming statistics, maybe the odd subliminal plug for my book (BUY MY BOOK, IT’S GREAT; IT’S CALLED THIRTEEN, YOU’LL LIKE IT!!) and some more general rambling.

[Note from Ed: ahem, Richard, it’s not really subliminal, if you tell them you’re going to do it like that.]

Ah.  Right, good point there, Tom, thanks.  Uhm – can we go from the top again? --Richard Morgan