I wrote this 20 years ago.

They're selling postcards of the hanging....

Killing is easy. Third and fourth fingers on your palm, first and second sticking out, point at your victim and say peow. Or peow-peow. Only little kids say 'bang'. Real guns have strips of caps which make a satisfying 'pop' when you squeeze the trigger, but they don't actually kill anyone. Two fingers and peow-peow is the rule. Killing is fun. People recover from being killed quite quickly. Some people are immune to being killed. This seems like cheating. Captain Scarlet is indestructible. One day in infants Miss Ward read to us 'The Magic Tinder Box' which ends with the soldier sentenced to be hung and every few minutes the gaoler came into his cell to remind him that tomorrow was the day he was going to he hung. They also did the story on children's TV, one of those programmes where the people spoke in French but a man's voice told you what they were saying, so far as I could tell the soldier was expected to put a rope round his own neck and jump off by himself when he was ready. All his friends turned up to watch. I can't remember what the story is about: I assume he gets off? It was clear, even in that dull French space between Wacky Races and Crackerjack, that being hung was very different from being killed. People who were hung didn't get up again afterwards. It was probably like being sent to Mr Mariot to be smacked, only worse. But it only happened in the olden days, when there were pirates and Hitler and putting people in the stocks. It was extremely horrible and unbelievable and therefore very fascinating. There was an old fashioned English book with a blue cover that pointed out that verbs could have different past tenses depending on context. 'Hang the picture; the picture was hung. Hang the murderer; the murderer was hanged.' I could never quite believe that something so nasty was being used as a grammatical example. Guy Fawkes was a hero because he didn't cry or tell on his mates when they took him to be hanged, that's why we let off fireworks to remember him. Henry the Eighth chopped off the heads of at least several of his wives. Actually, pretty much everyone in history seemed to have been executed at some time in their lives: Mary Queen of Scots; Walter Raleigh; Marie Antoinette; Thomas Moore; Joan of Arc; Anne Frank; Jesus. I assume that the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds was originally just effigies of infamous criminals, but by the time I went it was pretty much a museum of capital punishment, wax convicts having ropes put round their necks by wax hangmen in worryingly modern looking suits and short haired wax works being strapped into distressingly modern looking chairs. There were slot machines where you could watch dolls being executed on Brighton pier. These days the London Dungeon has franchised out the torture trade, and Terry Deary has built a career on history books where you don't need to use the index to find the gory bits. When we were asked to improvise a play on an historical subject, we made one up about a beheading. God knows what the teacher thought. Little boys can be morbid. We got over it.

How did we get this far? I'm currently doing a course at Bristol College, and therefore coming into contact with what I believe are called 'teenagers': the kinds of people who think that 'blogging' is a little bit retro, understand the point of Myspace and think that 'gay' is a term of abuse. I have overheard them in the computer room, looking at pop videos and Jackass stunts on Youtube and then saying 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein yet?' There are apparently edited versions of the footage, with the killing set to music for comical or ironic effect.

The creepiest thing about the Tony Party is the way they get together beforehand and decide not only what they are going to think but the exact words in which they are going to think it. It's been put about that when Prescott said that just possibly televised public hangings weren't a particularly good idea he was breaking ranks, speaking what we might loosely call his mind. In fact, he had clearly agreed a form of words with Tony in advance, ventriloquizing what last night's focus group had decided was the most expedient lie. 'I think the manner was quite deplorable really. I don't think one can endorse in any way that, whatever your views about capital punishment.' Not, as you or I might have said 'The way in which it was done'; the manner. This was the same phrase used by Blair's spokesman ('he does believe that the manner of execution was completely wrong') and, when the focus group decided he should break cover, by Blair himself ('the manner of the execution was completely wrong.') Members of the hivemind cannot criticize the killing itself, only the manner in which it was done. Our problem is that it was an undignified ritual strangulation; that they weren't very courteous to the man whose neck they were going to break; that they took photographs while his pants were filling up with shit. There was a way of doing it which we would not have deplored; a manner that we would have approved of; a kind of human sacrifice which would not have been completely wrong.

As the fellow said: the word you were looking for was 'obscene'. 'Deplorable' is when you fuck your secretary.

I remember when the worst we could say about Blair was that he had wasted a lot of money on putting up a big building to celebrate the fact that there was going to be a date with a lot of zeros on the end and only noticed on December 28th that he didn't have anything to put in it. I remember when we used to wonder if he should cuddle up quite so closely to Bill Clinton, whose left-wing credentials were not impeccable. We used to worry about the fact that his friend Bill had signed death warrants; including one for a mentally handicapped man who would not have been executed in a civilized country i.e one that doesn't execute mentally handicapped people. Straining at gnats.

How did we let it get this far? How did it happen that, in his eagerness to position his product alongside the Twin Towers brand, Blair nailed his colours so deeply into the backside of the unelected thanatos-worshiping simpleton who succeeded Clinton that the most he can bring himself to say is that he wishes we could have had a more polite hanging? Bush has never made any great secret out of the fact that he used the terrorist atrocity as a pretext to attack a short-list of despots who had been fleas in his father's ear. I've seen The Godfather: that's how gangsters behave. Blair, as we have seen, has that particular God complex which says that whatever comes into his head at a particular moment must be right; and that even to stop for a moment and think about the reasons is to betray of the idea of leadership. In 2003 God (i.e Tony Blair) decided that the answer was 'the invasion of Iraq' and he's been trying ever since to work out what the question was. To find non-existent nuclear weapons. To bring peace and stability to Iraq. To make a Iraq a beacon of democracy and liberal values for the whole region. To pull down a statue. I am not going to apologize for removing Saddam. I made the decision to remove Saddam. I think that the world is better off without Saddam. His prayer-partner yo-Bush is notorious for his hang-em-high mentality. ('I do not believe we've put a guilty - I mean innocent - person to death in the state of Texas.' ) How could Tony have been in any doubt that what he had got us all involved in was the War of Saddam's Neck?

Clinton told the Labour Party conference that Mr Blair was the only person who could act as a restraining influence on Mr Bush. That is, if not for Tony, Mad President George would be even more insane. A journalist once asked Auberon Waugh how he could be such a nasty person and also a Catholic. Waugh replied 'If I wasn't a Catholic, think how much worse I'd be.' Couldn't Tony have persuaded George to hand Saddam over to a properly constituted international court which gave people proper trials and didn't practice ritual asphyxiation? Did he try?

Did you ever think it would get this bad? Did you ever think we would reach a point where members of the Tony Party were using phrases like 'whether or not you agree with capital punishment' as if it were a matter of legitimate difference of opinion, a subject for debate? You ritually slaughter criminals, we don't; but then you wear body armour to play rugby, and we don't; aren't these quaint little cultural differences fascinating? Where have the last 40 years gone? Are the 1960s still in the future?

Regular readers will remember that, as Shadow Home Secretary, Blair expressed the view that watching a (comparatively mild) 'video nasty' was likely to turn innocent children into murderers. How appropriate that his last year in office should be ushered in by a nation of cretinous ghouls drooling, like morbid eight year olds, over the nastiest video of all time.

I wrote this two years ago. 




1: Because it is wrong 

2: Because it does no good.

3: Because all murderers are "definitely guilty". (The legal term for someone who is "probably guilty" or "almost certainly guilty" is "innocent".)

4: Because Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong, Carole Richardson and Andrew Malkinson were definitely guilty.

5: Because it would involve keeping the story, and the criminal's face, on the front page of the newspapers, possibly for decades to come. (This is also why the tabloids are in favour of it.)

6: Because the Daily Mail would claim that defence lawyers and appeal judges were enemies of the people.

7: Because the Sun would run morbid, comedic, punning headlines ("Hang To Rights" "Swing Voters" etc etc etc.)

8: Because it would not satisfy the mob, who would call for more tortuous killings and a greater degree of public spectacle.

9: Because in 1950s crowds used to gather outside prisons to see legal documents being pinned to doors

10: Because in the 1950s the Home Secretary used to receive several letters a week from people who wanted the job of executioner.

11: Because in 1955 the children in the school near Holloway prison were well aware of what was being done to Ruth Ellis and were ghoulishly excited by it.

12: Because it was wrong for Tony Blair to exploit the murder of a small child for political gain in 1997; and it would be equally wrong for the Tories to exploit the murder of several infants for electoral advantage in 2024.

13: Because I literally don't know what you mean by "evil".

14: Because almost every nurse who has ever lived has not been a serial killer.

15: Because of the smirk on some Tories faces when they talk about this stuff.

16: Because of that Dave Allen story about the time he lost his temper with one of his kids and thumped them while chanting "Never! Hit! Anyone! Smaller! Than! Yourself!"

17: I object to the damage it does to my spirit for my government to kill people, because my government is supposed to be me and I object to me killing people. It's really simple. - Steve Earle

18: A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. - Oscar Wilde

19: Making life means making trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed. - Bernard Shaw.

20: I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge. - Albert Pierrepoint.

This subject is not open to further discussion; and the question of whether it is open to further discussion is not open to further discussion. It is my intention to completely disable my internet access and avoid all news media between 19 Nov and 17 Dec. 

Reply Piece Reply

[I imagine this will all go into the eventual PDF, along with the Right of Reply I asked my friend ChatGPT to write.]

[Who said "I do not have time to make this shorter?"]

Stephen Brohan

I do read your articles on Lewis with interest. So let's start with the conversation about a waterfall.

If I say to you that a waterfall is sublime I am telling you little that is factual about the waterfall. Maybe I make you curious to look, but you have learned slightly more about me, maybe that I am the sort of person who gushes about waterfalls. In any case, the payload of the message is communication between you and me. Maybe I will share my feelings about the waterfall, maybe you will think that I am a pillock.
When I read Burroughs' description of a swordfight, maybe he will communicate to me a feeling of excitement, maybe he will share his vision of the struggle to live on Barsoom, maybe I will get an insight into his enthusiasms, maybe I will think he is a worthless hack writer.
In any case, he has exposed himself to me to some extent and the potential value of the transaction is tied to communication between him and me (communication may be limited to us sharing a vision, I don't have to be interested in the speaker as a person for communication to take place, though it does enrich it).

To take a different angle on the same thing, and to comment on a question you ask elsewhere. Suppose I read a comic, and enjoy the story in a superficial way. Then I read it again, getting a different angle on the story by seeing how the text and graphics interact. Then, having got interested in the story, I look at some panels in detail, seeing things I hadn't noticed, wondering what the author means by them, how they relate to the story. The story has become part of my imaginative life.

Suppose I then realise that the author only wrote the text, the pictures were generated by AI. I feel cheated. The channel I thought was open into the author's mind isn't there. I was looking at details of a panel I thought the author had left for people like me to see, but now I think maybe those details were generated by AI. I still have the superficial reading of the text that I started with, though even that is diminished, but I'm not going to pore over the details any more

I think what we are discussing here is 

1: The intentional 'fallacy': Does a work of art have a meaning in itself, or does it only mean what the writer intended it to mean? 

2: Formalism: Is the main thing we ought to pay attention to when looking at a work of art its shape, or should we be more interested in its wider context? 

I think both positions can lead to absurd conclusions. At one extreme,  the song “Let it be” is reducible to a dream that Paul McCartney had about his mother. Once we know this, any other ideas associated with "Mother Mary" magically vanish, or are prohibited.  Or as my English teacher said (I am not bitter about this), I am not allowed to think that Fanny Price is self righteous prude, because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that. But at the other extreme, you end up talking about geometrical arrangements of lines and contrasts between specific colours on the canvass, without actually mentioning whether you are looking at an icon of the Virgin Mary or a portrait of Winston Churchill (and certainly have to pretend you don't know who Winston Churchill was.)

If I am faced with a choice, I’d go for formalism. If you say “Have you noticed how a particular word keeps being repeated?” and “Notice that the meter changes in line three?” you are actually talking about the poem. When you say “I think that he is writing about daffodils to express the grief over the death of his pet Spaniel” you are often not talking about anything at all. (Even if you can prove the spaniel thing from the guys' letters.) 

1: Lewis and the waterfall. 

I think you have summarised very well the opinion that Lewis (unfairly, in my opinion) attributes to the bad-wrong post-modernist school teachers. They draws a distinction between, as you say, factual statements (“The fire is hot”) and value judgements (“The fire is beautiful.”) Lewis’s claim is that if “The fire is beautiful” means “I am experiencing emotions connected with beauty” then you have effectively denied that value judgements can ever be true or false. In which case, why not raise children to think that waterfalls are ugly, or that murder is beautiful, or that empathy is a disease? 

Lewis’s view (seems to be) that waterfalls have an intrinsic quality of “sublimity” and would have had even if there had never been any human beings to appreciate them. He doesn't directly say "because God put a little nugget of a substance called sublimity" inside them, but this seems to be what he's driving at.

I agree that if you say “The waterfall is sublime” then we are communicating with each other, and the very fact that you chose to say it is telling me something about you.  And perhaps I might reply “No, it’s a piddling little stream, come with me to Canada and I will show you something truly sublime” -- which would tell you something about me. But we would not be talking nonsense or disagreeing about nothing. (“The waterfall is Tuesday” or “The waterfall is pahootle-snurdle-ptang-ptang”) 

2: Sword-fights

I think that when we are reading an adventure story then the first, second, third and fourth things that we care about are the story: the thrill of the actual situation (two men sword fighting on the edge of a chasm in the middle of a desert) and the overall narrative (will our hero get back to the city in time to warn them of the impending invasion?) I agree that literally any story will also have additional meanings — for example “Men should be honourable”, “It is okay to fight with lethal weapons over points of honour” (or “marriage is desirable” or “pink things are the best things”.) And I agree that a book that you only read to find out What Happen Next is not a good, or a great, or literary book. Edgar Rice Burroughs may not be sufficiently bad writer for my example to work!

Two people are sitting in tavern, and in return for a drink, the first person tells the second person a story. Is the main thing which is happening an interaction between the two people; or is the main thing which is happening a story is being passed on. Is what I take away from the encounter “the man I once met with a beard and cloth cap, who told the most fanciful stories about djinn and dragons, with a look in his eye that said he didn’t believe a word of it”; or is what I take away “the tale of the young man who sold his mother’s cow for a handful or beans…”. As a critic, is what I pay attention to the odd little hand gesture the story teller makes when a new character is coming into the story, or the indefinable accent he gives all the baddies? Or do I say “notice the clever way the story seems to be about the relationship of the naughty boy to his old mother, and transitions into one about giant slaying...”?

Again: it is highly unlikely that you would exclusively take one line and completely reject the other. But when you find out that the story teller was actually an actor from the local theatre school playing the role of wise old traveller to get free beer, does that change the story? Or make it valueless?

This comes up all the time in folk music. Woody Guthrie learned the song Git Along Little Dawgies from an old cowboy in a saloon. But, says the ethnomusicologist, the cowboy very probably heard it on the radio, or on a 78 record. Does that spoil the song? There is a story that one of the old folk collectors, possibly Vaughan Williams, heard a fantastic old song from an old yokel name Mr Pittinger. Some time later, someone told him that it wasn’t really an old song, but that Mr Pittinger had made it up. “Well, so much the better for Mr Pittinger.”  

3: AI Comics

“Suppose I then realise that the author only wrote the text, the pictures were generated by AI. I feel cheated….I still have the superficial reading of the text that I started with, though even that is diminished, but I'm not going to pore over the details any more.”

I think the answer to this is that it is probably the case, but not necessarily the case. 

It is absolutely true that a lot of my writing about Spider-Man was focussed on “What was the relationship between the artist and the writer” — I argued that their artistic and political disagreements were playing out on the page. If I hadn’t already known about the posthumous reputation of Stan Lee, I might not have wanted to ask those sorts of questions. A very strict "New Critic" would say “You don’t actually need to know anything about Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to make the observations you are making: either the words clash with the pictures, or they don’t; either the narrative undergoes a change of direction, or it doesn’t — and in any case, Stan Lee is a public persona and Steve Ditko is a recluse, so you aren’t talking about the actual people.” 

I have said occasionally that when a story “works” I don’t pay attention to its artistic merits or technical strengths. I saw the re-release of Avengers: Endgame last week, and forgotten how well it works just as a story. For 90% of the movie I was not thinking “I see what they did there” or “Isn’t Robert Downey Junior a skilled method actor”: I was thinking “Oh, god, no, that’s Tony Stark’s dad” and “Arrgh, Thor is going to have a drink and mess it all up.” Of course, as a critic, “why did that story just work” is a perfectly good question. (And I have noted that very bad artistic works can often be more successful than much better ones in this regard. The Henry Cavill Man of Steel was a much more sophisticated work of art than the Makers of Kellogg Pepp Present The Adventures of Sooooooperman but I know which version of Superman I believed in.  And in fact, I have no idea who wrote the radio scripts.) But very often, my paying attention to camera angles and special effects is a sign that the movie has, at the more basic level, failed. One reason I often don’t review films I’ve really liked. 

But on the other other other hand....there are movies which positively want you to pay attention to the technicalities and the artistic vision of the auteur.  The director might think it very odd if you started to think that Antonius Block (I looked it up) was a real person. This is why people who like arthouse movies don’t see the point of superhero movies and people who like superhero movies don’t see the point of arthouse movies.

Why did the scene in which Obi Wan gave Luke Skywalker his father’s lightsaber make such a deep impression on me the first time  you I saw it?

I mean, there are lots of answers: because I was already aware that it was like scenes from the King Arthur stories and the Narnia stories. Because I was a boy and was subconsciously aware that swords represent penises. Because the scene conveys a humanly real situation about growing up and moving on from home and parents. Because of the incongruity of a device which is both futuristic and old fashioned at the same time. Because gadgets are cool. Because Carl Jung. Because Joseph Campbell. 

Suppose it turned out that Star Wars wasn’t mostly written by George Lucas, but by Marcia Lucas? Not by George Lucas or Marcia Lucas, but by his script-doctor, Tom Stoppard? Not by any of those people, but by a Hollywood committee who hired an actor to play Lucas because he fitted in with the image of the movie they wanted to make? 

Is that quite interesting? Yes.

Would it answer the question? Not really.

Would it spoil the film or make me feel cheated? I don’t think so.

We could push it to a further extreme: suppose the person who really wrote Star Wars was a toxic gender critic who thought that scenes with WISE OLD MEN and ABSENT FATHERS and PASSING ON THE TORCH and GREAT BIG GLOWY PHALLIC SYMBOLS would make boys grow into real men and stop them wanting to be girls…. ? Well yes, that would be interesting. (Every year we read of devout atheist discovering that the Narnia books have a not-very-well hidden meaning and feeling VIOLATED.) Would it change the movie, or spoil it? Maybe. Not necessarily.

And if it turned out that someone had built a machine and shown it all the great adventure movies there had ever been and all the great science fiction stories there had ever been and the complete text of Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God and then said “Write the biggest and best science fiction movie you possibly can?” Would that ruin it for me?

“Ah, but if someone had done that, it wouldn’t be the greatest science fiction movie ever made. It wouldn’t have been Star Wars. It would have been flat and artificial and lacking in the divine spark.”

I agree. I think we are talking about hypotheticals here. I don’t think AI has produced texts comparable to human texts, and I doubt if it ever will. My distinction is still between "Anything produced by AI is slop" or "Slop is the only thing AI can produce." 

Reply Piece

 Someone wrote a thoughtful reply to my long essay on AI! 

It is worth getting up in the morning after all!!

Stephen Brohan

Reading and writing is a human activity in which we participate even if only as readers.

We make a mistake if we regard a piece of writing primarily as an artifact and talk about its meaning and value as though they are intrinsic to it as a thing.

Reading ERB I form a human contact with him. The activity of reading gives me a possibly illusory insight into his mind. He wanted readers and, despite his demise, I am doing something for him by reading him as he has done something for me by writing.

It's the value of the activity that is what reading and writing is all about.

As far as I know, AI doesn't want me to read it's output, and in reading AI work I am in a pathetic relationship with a rubber doll, rather than in a minor but real relationship with a human.

Response

1: "Reading and writing is a human activity in which we participate even if only as readers."

Agreed

2: We make a mistake if we regard a piece of writing primarily as an artefact and talk about its meaning and value as though they are intrinsic to it as a thing.

Partly agreed. There are certainly literary critics who very much think we should concentrate on the thing itself and try not to think about who made it and when and why. But there are other literary critics who think that actual poems barely exist outside of the conversations readers have about them. (Stanley Fish, who spent his life reading Paradise Lost, claimed not to know what "Paradise Lost" actually is.) Objects do have intrinsic qualities: we can agree that the statue is big and white and made of marble, and we can probably agree it represents a male figure. But it may be that it only represents King David because Michelangelo intended it to represent King David. And we need to know stuff about the Bible, and Michelangelo's patrons before we can say why he thought a big marble statue of King David was worth making. And once we know all that, "how does the statue makes you feel" is a question only I can answer.

I don't know if you are reading my series of essays on CS Lewis. He found a school text book which (allegedly) said that when we say "That waterfall is sublime" or "That sunset is beautiful" we are not talking about waterfalls and sunsets but only about our own feelings. He said that that kind of thinking would literally lead to the end of civilisation as we know it. But maybe thnigs that human artists make work differently from things which God made?

3.1 Reading [Edgar Rice Burroughs] I form a human contact with him.

I am not sure if I do. I have complained about all those Facebook Memes, which allege that reading Willard Price as a kid "took them to Africa" or that Anna Karenina and Jean Grey are more real to them than any of their friends. I don't quite believe that, either. When you are reading, you certainly form an impression of the person who is telling the story from his words; and those words can't help giving you some impression of what the person who is telling the story is like. "The person who is telling the story" maybe very much like the writer who is actually typing the words, or the story teller may be another fictional character. (But, granted, it tells me something about the author that he created that fictional story teller.) 

All this is fine, but if you are not careful, you get caught up in a feedback loop: "By reading McBeth, I can tell that Shakespeare was a socialist, or a conservative, or straight, or gay. Therefore, McBeth can only mean what a socialist, or a conservative, or a gay guy, or a straight guy, would mean by it." 

Which is why I would rather concentrate on the words he definitely wrote. At any rate, I don't think that many readers of Gods of Mars spend a lot of effort working down the chain from Captain John Carter to Edgar Rice Burroughs the story teller to Edgar Rice Burroughs the actual typist. What they are enjoying is the sword-fights. 

3.2 The activity of reading gives me a possibly illusory insight into his mind.

It kind of does. I can definitely infer things about him from what he say -- he approves of honour, doesn't think slavery was too bad, idealises women but thinks they are mainly decorative, had romantic ideas about primitivism and noble savages, believes in Lamarkian evolution, has a thing about naked people, etc etc etc. But those are really comments about his books, not his mind. I think this even applies to much more autobiographical writers. I don't think I would particularly want to meet Proust or Knausgaard. What is interesting is the texts they have created out of their very ordinary lives. (A bit like the visual arts: people sometimes ask 'Why on earth is anyone interested in that particular bowl of fruit'. The answer is 'We aren't, we are interested in the skill and technique with which the painter has represented it on a canvass.')

This is quite an important difference, isn't it? Do you regard a work of art as a thing which someone has made or a medium for communion with other minds? (The answer is almost bound to be "A little from column A and a little from column B.) 

It reminds me a little of the discourse around an old Doctor Who story we had a while ago. One faction said "This story is racist; therefore, the script writer was racist; and you obviously shouldn't watch TV shows written by racists." The other faction said "I actually met the script writer, and he definitely wasn't racist, so the script can't be racist, so any racism you see in the story is coming from your own mind." I was kind of like "It's a TV show, with qualities, and one of those qualities is certainly racism, but that doesn't exhaust what there is to say about it." For many years the only music I loved was written by a proto-Nazi, so I have practice in this area. 

3.3 He wanted readers and, despite his demise, I am doing something for him by reading him as he has done something for me by writing.

Now, that's more in tune with my way of thinking. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a craftsman, and what he built was stories. What he wanted to do for me was to thrill and excite me, and possibly titillate me: to help me pass the time without wasting it. Granted some people -- like Ray Bradbury, I think -- have said that he also makes you think that there could be other worlds where things are done differently, and that's a political act. I don't entirely disagree. But mostly, I read him for the sword-fights. 

I picked Edgar Rice Burroughs as my precisely because he was a pulp writer. Perhaps to make the point work I needed to go further down the literary ladder: Enid Blyton and genre westerns and Saturday morning cartoons and soft pornography. Things that you read but wouldn't re-read: things that (to quote Prof Lewis again) you use rather than receive. You might say that if a book doesn't have meaning and significance beyond the bare thrill of finding out what happens next (or imagining yourself having lashings of ginger beer or sexytimes with a lady) it would be better not to read them at all. 

Who said that literature is worth some effort, but trash has to grab you from the first sentence? 

The Guardian Art Critic thought he could tell by reading a single sentence that Terry Pratchett wasn't Great Literature and therefore wasn't worth reading. FR Leavis said given George Eliot existed, there was no point in reading Dickens more than once or Thomas Hardy at all. I am not sure that is any way to live: I would rather say "The Birdie Song is not Beethoven's fifth symphony but then Beethoven's fifth symphony is not the Birdie Song."  

4: It's the value of the activity that is what reading and writing is all about.

Do you mean “That activity — making mental contact with the author — is the point of reading and writing?”

If so, I agree that it is one of the points, but not the only possible point. Did I read Jerusalem (a mere 1,500 pages) because I wanted a quasi-relationship with Alan Moore? Or because I have enjoyed the ways he puts words and pictures together in the past? Or just because I wanted to say that I had read the complete works of Alan Moore? (Or are they all the same thing?) 

The idea of the author makes a difference. "The book was written by an elderly comic book geek who believes himself to be a magus" is a fact about Jerusalem. I thought about this a bit when Neil Gaiman did whatever it was that Neil Gaiman has done. That nice chap with the shades who looks a bit like Dream and thinks we should make good art is certainly a component of Coraline and American Gods and now that nice chap doesn't or might not exist. It would have been much worse if (gods forbid) something bad had come out about Terry Pratchett. It didn't matter one way or the other about David Eddings. JK Rowling is a special case. (All discussions about books end with "JK Rowling is a special case.")

5: As far as I know, AI doesn't want me to read its output, and in reading AI work I am in a pathetic relationship with a rubber doll, rather than in a minor but real relationship with a human.

Well, there have been times in my life when I have had close relationships with objects made of synthetic fur and stuffed with sawdust. And with pieces of plastic with five points of articulation. And I am pretty sure that the point of Star Trek is my imaginary relationship with Captain Kirk, not with Gene Roddenbury.

I am not even completely sure that the man who purchases a rubber sex doll is pathetic. If he thinks it is a real person, that is pathological; and if he plays with the doll rather than going to the bar to meet actual women, that will probably reduce his long term happiness. Its worse than some things but better than others. 

I remember reading something on a problem page somewhere some time ago, in which someone recounted a very sad story about a woman who had lost a child, either to still-birth or else to SIDS, and was lavishing disproportionate attention on an elaborate figurine of a science fiction character. (Presumably Grogu!) The agony aunt said that, so far as she could see, this was as good and helathy a way of working through a terrible and complicated grief as any other. 

I admit that I have a bee in my bonnet about the "books are brilliant" memes on facebook. I think that they are probably typing the kinds of things that they think that people who like books ought to type about books that they like. But let’s assume they are talking about something real: it follows that (hold the front pages!) different people read books for different reasons." For some people, at least, "reading" means "experiencing a state of mind somewhere between an hallucination and a day dream." While the text is in front of their noses, they somehow feel they are actually on Mars or on the deck of the Hispaniola. They don't particularly feel they are in contact with the soul of Jilly Cooper or Dan Brown or that guy who writes the Reacher books.

Now, suppose you gave that kind of reader a book. And suppose he looked up from it and said "By Crom! I have been utterly transported to Mars! I could utterly see the Therns riding Oliphaunts to Mordor, and felt that I myself was chastely stoking Deja' Thoris's incomparable buttocks." And suppose you then revealed that the book was not written by a human, but generated by a computer. I think he would say that it didn't matter. And you might say that it ought to matter. And he might say that it didn't matter that you thought it ought to matter.

My Dad used to tell me that I couldn't possibly really be enjoying Blakes Seven: I was just pretending that I liked it to vex him. 

Actually, I think that the computer generated day-dream generation device would simply fail: the reader would read the words but not be transported to Jane Austen's England by them. Writers, however low-brow, have a skill in creating mental illusions that computers can't achieve. Or can't achieve yet. 

My question was "If an AI could convincingly emulate the work of a human author (which I don't think it can) would it matter?" I am not sure that we have got beyond "It would matter because it would not have a human author."

Ecclesiastical Minimalism

 

Patreon Subscribers have advanced access to my latest "boxed set". 

Part 1: Conjuring tricks with bones. 

Part 2: Occam's razor

Part 3: A very weak case for Easter

Part 4: Proof and Faith

Part 5: A much stronger case for Easter

Part 6: What the Bible actually says 

Slop

1: Shanties and Slop: Why do all gig posters look the same?

2: Television and Steam Trains : What would my granny have said.

3: Authors and Authenticity: Can a machine write a folk song? 

4: Groucho and Basil: Can a machine write a joke? 

5: Influence and Originality: Can a machine have a soul?

6: Plagarism and Pastiche: Could a machine replace Stan Lee? 

7: Practice and Purpose: Will a machine replace me? 

Liar Pieces

Patreon supporters are currently getting to read pages ripped from my writers diary: a little more chatty and personal than my main essays.

Liar Piece

I have started doing morning pages again.

Anyone who has ever tried to write will know about the theory of “free writing” or “morning pages”, where, instead of getting down to actual work, you procrastinate by typing whatever drivel comes into your head and never looking at it again. 

There are a number of theories about why this helps. I just read a book by Steven Pressfield, who is best known for writing a very macho novel about golf. I assume it is a macho book: I can’t imagine that he would write a writers' guide in the persona of a shouty PE teacher and then write a novel in which the way to knock little balls into little holes is through self care, soft furnishing and accepting who your are. 

It is called The War of Art which I am not going to deny is a very clever title.....

Souvenir Piece

I am so very, very sorry.

In the last month, I have twice promised that I will write a particular article “when I get a Round Tuit.” 

Which is a really smug, unfunny joke, derived from a piece of seaside souvenir shop tat, and I hate myself for having referenced it. 

Do seaside souvenir shops even still exist? I am not thinking of the places which sell plastic buckets and spades for kids; and water bottles and sun-cream and deckchairs for grown-ups, along with inflatable toys that would be incredibly dangerous to use anywhere near the sea....

Coffee Piece

I am in Cafe Kino which used to be my regular hang out when I lived on Stokes Croft. 

The Boston Tea Party, which was at the bottom of St Andrews Road has closed, and still looks decrepit and boarded. Ironically, they have another branch just a few minutes walk from my new flat. There is a bakery that sells artisan cakes and coffee literally outside my window.

When I first arrived in Bristol there was only one single Boston, on Park Street, which stayed open until 10pm, and sold sandwiches at half price from about 9pm. 

There was a kind of writers group there on a Thursday, and it was a kind of hang out the rest of the week. Unbelievably they must have decided that staying open til 10 for the benefit of writers who only bought one cup of coffee and didn’t pay full price for the sandwiches wasn’t a viable business model. They now have branches everywhere: I suppose they are a chain, although they slightly retain the old bohemian feel...

Dead Politician Piece

Dick Gaughan wrote a wonderfully vitriolic song about a hellfire preacher who had been described by the Rev Ian Paisley as “a wee bit of an extremist”. The sleeve notes of the album add that apart from his views, Rev Jack Glass was a charming and urbane person.

Many, many years ago, the Guardian carried a series of interviews with some convicted sex offenders (after they had served their jail time). Like any good journalist, they had an eye for specific detail: one of the interviewees served rather fine Russian tea from a silver pot. Inevitably, a letters’ page correspondent fulminated that having good taste in tableware does not make it okay to molest kids.

I don’t think anyone was insinuating that it was....

Toilet Piece

I have a confession to make.

On my way home from Sidmouth, I used the Ladies’ lavatory at Wells Bus Station.

In my defence:

1: Both Gentlemen’s lavatories were out of order or otherwise unusable.

2: There were no women, or indeed anyone else, around.

3: It would have been a bit of a faux pas to have shit my pants on the number 373 bus....

Revision Piece 

I see teenagers in the library. And I talk to people with teenaged children. I am still just about young enough to know some people with teenage children. My friends all started a bit late, if they started at all. The wedding and Christening invites have finally dried up, but the funerals haven’t started yet. It appears that if you are a teenager, life revolves completely around something called REVISION. There are books about REVISION and packs of REVISION cards and whole TV programmes about REVISION.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine per cent perspiration. I am sure that is true. I am also sure that it is the sort of thing that someone who thinks that they are a genius would have made up in a post-Calvinist society. Hard work is virtuous; rich people worked hard; therefore rich people deserve to be rich.

I was very good at English Literature and pretty interested in History and Sociology. I don't consciously remember REVISING before my exams. I suppose I reread the text books and looked at my old essays and practiced writing new ones from memory?

I did sort of OK. Two Bs and a C and a 2/1 and a Masters....

It only costs $5 a month to join my Patreon, and new followers

a: Make me feel good about my life

b: Give me pocket money to save against my frail old age.

Come over and have a look.

Slop [7]

Here is another thought experiment.  

Suppose there were a blogger who had an idea about writing comic strips. 

Writing about his life, say. 

And suppose that he couldn’t draw worth a damn. 

Now, if he took a generative art package and said “Generate a comic strip about my life” it would not be a very good comic strip and it would definitely not be about his life.

It would, in fact, almost certainly be slop.

But suppose the blogger wrote a script for the strip he wanted to write. Worked out what incidents he wanted to include. Broke it down into frames. 

Suppose he described the characters to the generative AI software,  and went through many iterations until the soulless algorithm had produced sketches he was happy with. 

And suppose he did the same with each location. 

And suppose he described each frame, and didn’t stop until he was happy with the result. 

“So, I want character 1 to go into location A, and notice that character 2 is already there, but he pretends not to see them, because he is embarrassed that he can’t remember their name, so character one walks over….”

And suppose the result is quite good. 

Has he outsourced his consciousness to a machine? 

Has he abnegated the whole concept of art? 

Or is he simply using an interesting new tool as if it were an interesting new tool? 

Is AI incapable of producing anything but slop?

Or is anything AI produces slop by virtue of it having been produced by AI? 

I don’t know what the point is, but I am pretty sure it isn’t that.

I have a habit of starting each day with some “improving” reading. A page or two from the Bible (I am still trying to get my head around Maccabees). Some poetry: I enjoyed the huge Being Alive anthologies, but am now reading some collected works of one or two of the poets whose names I underlined. An American named Alden Nowlan, since you asked. A little literary fiction (the short stories of Julian Barnes.) And I am always reading Books To Encourage Writers. The one I am reading at the moment is by a man named Seth Rodin. It is called The Practice. It is more drill sergeant than yoga retreat, with a strong overtone of Dragons Den. No such thing as talent...just showing up and putting the hours in...the only thing stopping you is you....etc etc etc.

But something which resonated with me was his emphasis on practice. Not in the sense of a guitarist practicing his chords or a tennis player practicing whatever it is a tennis player has to do to become adept at playing tennis. “Practice” in the sense of spiritual practice, in the sense of doing the same thing every day whether you want to or not. 

I have noticed that the signs in modern art exhibition often talk about the artists "practice". This seems to recognise that there isn't a clear demarcation between 'life' and 'art'. “Putting things on top of other things” and “Sitting in a bag” is much part of being an artist as actually producing paintings and sculptures.

What you as a writer or a painter or an artisan baker have to develop is your practice, says Rodin. The art is a by-product. But the better your practice, the better your art.

I’ve been working on this essay for, I suppose ten days. Semi-retirement (committing myself to writing full time) allows me to find a practice which suits me: I spent several days sitting in cafes writing and writing and writing and writing and since then have been sitting at my desk editing and editing and editing and editing--which includes a lot of deleting. And quite a lot of googling, I admit. And I am doing this because I like it, or if I am being cynical, I am doing it because I don’t know what else to do. 

“Nay” says the nay-sayer; if we do not stop it, right now, then AI will do your job. If AI really does get to the point where it can write a chatty but meaty article as well as a semi-retired librarian could have done, then there will be no jobs for writers. 

And definitely, that would be a shame. 

But what would I do if all the articles in all the papers and all the comic strips and all the movies and all the streaming boxed sets were being written by robots?

I think that what I would do would be to get up, read a few pages of poetry, and then write, write, write, write and edit, edit, edit, edit. Because that is what I do. Because that is who I am. And because I don’t know what else to do.

And I very much assume that the same thing is true of painters and musicians and artisan bakers as well.

Support your favourite human writer