beat: James Burt's weblog

The end of 2011, the start of 2012

2011 was something of a strange year. I'd expected great things but it turned out to be a year for quiet personal growth. 

The most notable achievements were with my running. In April, I finally ran a marathon. I followed this up with two more, a faster one in Nottingham, then the incredible Beachy Head Marathon in October. I spent most of my twenties inactive, so I'm very happy to have run three marathons in my mid-thirties.

I am, however, a little unsatisfied with my overall progress. I ran a total of 740 miles throughout the year, but I also spent long periods of times resting with injury, so much so that there were times I wondered if I should give up running. In 2012 I am going to concentrate on running slower and more sustainably, and look to increasing my speed once I can manage the distance consistently.

I did a lot of writing this year, but very little of it reached fruition. Notably both Clown Stories Volume 1 and my Clown Heaven performance were finished but have yet to make it into the world. I was very happy with the things I did finish, and particularly pleased with my White Night/Catalyst talk and the performance I did at the last Artists, Models, Ink event. And, although only one copy will ever be made, I enjoyed writing a booklet for a friend, The Rules and Regulations of the Puppet Hotel.

Most books on productivity (for example Getting Things Done) start with the assumption that life is inherently busy and stressful. They aim to manage all the commitments people have on their time, keeping track of them and making sure everything receives attention. In 2012 I plan to be less busy, doing less and enjoying it more (something suggested by, among others, Zen Habits). Maybe a life that requires to-do lists is one that is too complicated. in 2012, I am going to focus on doing one thing at a time.

But before that I am off on holiday before I come back in the Spring to begin a new phase of my life. 2011 has been a quiet year, but a useful one. I've had a lot of fun and learned a lot about myself. I don't know what 2012 will bring. There may well be sorrow and misfortune, but I am also confident that amazing things are on the horizon. I'm looking forward to what is coming.

Let's execute the copywriters

Early Friday morning, I was walking one of the little woodland paths that circle the university. My favourite one runs between a road and a car park, in a deep dip so it feels as if you're miles from anyone else. At the wooden steps where the path ended, a piece of litter caught my eye.

A cup from McDonald's. Someone driving by had tossed it away, or someone walking the same path had finished their drink before re-emerging into the world. The cup had been discarded and stepped on, but the brightly coloured design caught my eye, in particular two words: THIRSTY FUN.

'Thirsty' and 'fun'. Two words that have probably never been put together before, except maybe in avant-garde poetry or pornography. The sort of inanity that the fashion for wackaging has deadened us to. 

Long ago, I studied theoretical physics at university and learned about the anthropic principle. This is the idea that universe we observe and measure must be consistent with the existence of humanity. While this sounds obvious, it leads to some interesting conclusions. Among them is the explanation of why we live in such a massive, empty universe. It takes billions of years for nucleosynthesis to occur, billions more for life to form. In an expanding universe, the age implies the size of it. All those stars and galaxies and empty spaces between them are pre-requisites for a universe old enough to contain a single human life, a single poem.

The existence of an object implies a history for it. This piece of litter implied so much: meetings, prototypes, emails, invoices, sign-offs. The planning sessions, the whiteboards and thought-showers, the tedious creativity. At some point a real human being sat down and wrote the words THIRSTY FUN. What did the words mean to them? What moments in their life, joys and difficulties might be summed up in those words?

Let's put aside the arguments about branded litter. Firstly they're not relevant to this rant, and secondly, I'm sure that McDonald's don't mean for their littering clientele to function as a street team. The logos are just there as part of the end-to-end brand experience of consuming a McDonald's meal. It's an accident that I seem to see this litter everywhere, marking out the restaurant's territories.

Let's put aside the arguments about branded litter. Someone wrote this copy to pay their mortages (what Christopher Buckley referred to as the "Yuppie Nuremberg defence"). And the words THIRSTY FUN are bitterly ironic when placed near the logo for Coca-Cola, a company often criticised for their effects on water supplies in the third word. Did anyone think they were doing the right thing as they designed, printed and distributed this cup?

Maybe I've got it wrong. In the same way as the existence of a single book requires billions of light years of universe, maybe we cannot have the Society of the Spectacle without the cultural emptiness of a squashed McDonalds cup? But I'm sure that can't be true.

What sort of person devotes their time to writing a phrase like THIRSTY FUN on a cup intended to litter verges and woodland paths, decorated with logos advertising murderous corporations? Who were they? Did they have nothing better to do with their time?

Clowns!

Clowns are all around us: 

(Photo via my sister)

(Photo via my friend Kate)

Thinking about Time Travel

I've been thinking a lot about time travel lately, and messages from the future.

Some weeks back, there was a game on twitter: #tweetyoursixteenyearoldself. The idea was to send messages back in time that would have been useful to you then. My advice to myself was simple:

Don't bother with uni. And take English Lit & History, not Maths and physics for A-Level.

The game started me thinking about what would happen if I received a message from my future self:

Of course, it would be more useful if my 50 year old self could tweet me and give me a heads-up

I've been thinking a lot about time travel lately. Because I am travelling into the future day-by-day, and I'm not sure what lies ahead of me. Before you know it, you’ve leapt fifteen years on, and you’re not the person you expected to be. Those little day-by-day steps in the past seemed to be in the wrong direction. 

I’d probably have thought less about this, except for an article I read in the paper, where a woman had drawn up a bucket list, a list of things she wanted to do before she died.

Bucket lists are a disturbing idea in general, the idea that life can be reduced to a series of goals that you achieve or don't, and a life fails if some are left unticked. (And what are you supposed to do if you do finish the list? Start another list of things you really have to do?) There were nine items in this woman's list, some of them things she'd been planning to do for years and not got around to. One item was to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical, The Phantom of the Opera.

If this person could send a message back in time, it might be to see Phantom at some point in the next 20 years. But maybe there were other priorities. In each of the 7,000 nights she could have watched that show, something else was happening. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." 

And I've been wondering about the me in the future, and the things I might want to scream into the past, the days here and there that were squandered thinking there would always be more to come. Something interesting happens when you consider your future self and your current self as two separate people. Decisions I make now have an effect on me in the future.

And I make decisions now that I will live with in the future. Douglas Coupland expressed it well in Girlfriend in a Coma:

"Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley, "and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered."

I imagine the tweets that would be sent by by 54 year old self. Or the one in six months time. So many of the things that were important to me at 24 seem irrelevant now. I might have been able to justify how I spent that time a month later, but now I can't.

The clash between past and future selves is one of the main sources of procrastination - we imagine our future self will be more willing to do the work we don't want to do now. Behavioral economists and psychologists refer to it as dynamic inconsistency ("when somehow the preferences of some of the selves are not aligned with each other") or present-bias (as a brilliant youarenotsosmart.com article described it, "This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys."). It's hard to guess what the future you will want. 

I expect my future self will be similar to me, in that he would be frustrated with the short term goals that his younger self sought, the time spent doing fake work. He would be annoyed that focussed on the things that really mattered.

While I hate the idea of a bucket list, it's worth asking, what am I doing right now that might still seem worthwhile in twentry years? What would I want to have done before I die? Only a few things. I guess I had better get on with them.

I've been thinking about time travel lately.

Back at work

I'm back at my desk today after a long weekend in Wales. It was lovely to be out in the middle of the nowhere, no laptop and no mobile signal. The weather was damp and misty, which made the scenery incredibly atmospheric. I went walking, ate good food and read a pile of books. The highlight of the reading was Nicholson Baker's latest novel, The Anthologist. I am becoming convinced that Baker is one of the most important novelists working today.

I've taken a little bit of a break from the weblog over November. That's not because I've not been doing anything - the exact opposite, in fact. I have a pile of exciting announcements, including the next Brighton Creative Writing Sessions course, an article in Friction magazine and an anthology publication. I will write about all of these over the next few days.

Lives as a single day: Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs

Imagine human lives considered as a single day, all those events compressed into the hours between rising at 7 and sleeping at 11. 16 hours of wakefulness. 

Take Kurt Cobain: each hour was twenty months, the time sweeping past. Nirvana formed at 6pm, and released their first record almost an hour later. At 8pm Cobain met Courtney Love. It was almost 9:30 by the time Smells Like Teen Spirit was a hit. Kurt and Courtney married just before ten pm, when the day was almost over. At eleven, Cobain put an end to his life.

William Burroughs died at 83. Each hour of his life was more than five years. At 2pm he shot his wife Joan Vollmer, when Cobain was 11 years old. He released his first book, Junky, at 2:30pm. Kerouac died at 5:30. At almost 8pm, Burroughs lost his son. His final novel, the Western Lands, was published at 9pm. 

Cobain and Burroughs met in October 1993. Years of real time separated the two, but if you consider their lives as a single day, it was 10:40pm for Cobain and 10:12pm for Burroughs.

Imagine a world where you knew how long you had left. What time is it now? What do you still need to do?

Miscellany: The Iraq War, poetry and Hank The Angry Dwarf

1. The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize is having something of a Hank the Angry Dwarf moment, with supposedly 'organised' voting boosting some of the entries (including my friend Justine Kilkerr's excellent novel, Advice for Strays). This has resulted in a 'recount', with a further vote to pick between 'promoted' and 'unpromoted' shortlists. It seems strange to see such controversy at this stage in the web's life. How can you exclude new members from a forum without turning it into a clique? And why would you want to, since some of these new people may stay around? I liked Justine's comment on the recount and will be fascinated to see how this plays out (particularly since the first shortlist broke no explicit rules). I'm very glad I don't have to make the decisions here.
2. James Bridle (whose excellent dConstruct talk I discussed here) has posted about his Iraq War historiography, a 12 volume book containing all the versions of Wikipedia's article on the Iraq War. The talk and slides are also online.
3. My Friends In the Internet (via Bea Devile): "The Internet is a real place. There are real people on it and in it."
4. Speed Dating Four Poetry Pamphlets is an interesting review of some poetry books, including Ellen de Vries' pamphlet Girl in the Air. I find the idea of objective poetry reviews seductive, and am tempted to add up the cost-per-poem of some of my favourites. I like to think of Ellen as reassuringly expensive, the Waitrose of the poetry world.
5. Iain Sinclair on Marine Court in St Leonards which he describes as "one of the glories of the south coast". I used to work for an IT company in this building, and a friend lived in the residential part. A small group of us held a champagne breakfast one morning on the balcony, with a beautiful view of the ocean. Sinclair's novel, Dining on Stones, features some scenes set in St. Leonards around the time I was there, and I recognised some of the passers-by he described.
6. I feel appropriately chided by Matt Sheret's post Beyond 'Peak Culture', as I've been guilty of the same promotion of 'Austerity Culture'. His counter-argument has set me questioning myself.
7. The Brighton Life Drawing Sessions have some incredible plans for White Night. I've also heard that the clowns I saw on Friday will be returning. It's already starting to look like White Night 2010 will be amazing:


 

An over-long post about the Insane Clown Posse

'Fucking magnets! How do they work?'
After the release of the Miracles video, I ended up reading a lot about the Insane Clown Posse. They're a Detroit based rap band with their own involved mythology. I listened to them a lot about ten years ago. Most of the songs are boorish and dull, but others have a spark of something wonderful.

For a band that are ignored and mocked by the mainstream, they've done an amazing job of building a following, making a virtue of not being played on the radio. The band have legions of devoted fans called Juggalos who wear the same black and white clown make-up as the band. Often mocked by society, the fans follow the band, not so much as musicians but as a lifestyle. One article describes the extent of the band's networks: "a huge and more or less self-sufficient underground with its own distribution network, porn, churches (seriously), charities, file-sharing services, anti-drunk-driving coalition (JADD), initiatory secret society, GLBT activist, pro- and backyard-wrestling circuits, and two MySpace variations (ninjaspace.net and the possibly defunct myjuggalospace.com).". Although, as some people point out, when you go around wearing clown make-up, you're probably going to need an alternative social structure. The Juggalos are sometimes treated as a gang, as in this 'expose' by Martin Bashir

For the last ten years the Insane Clown Posse has hosted the Gathering of the Juggalos, which features a series of guest acts as well as a whole constellation of rappers in black and white clown make-up. There was an infomercial produced which spends ten minutes detailing what visitors have in store, including "Magicians and hypnotists walking around that bitch."

One thing I love about the Internet is the detail which you can find on obscure subjects. Following the Miracles video and the infomercial, a series of spoofs appeared on the web. Providing a key to these skits is the article Fool's Gold: An Oral History of the Insane Clown Posse Parodies. The article contains an in-depth discussion of recent ICP parodies and the revelation that the Juggalos are studied in American college anthology courses.

Nobody is sure how seriously the band take their music. There is something to be said for artists not being ironic. David Foster Wallace once quoted Lewis Hyde as saying that irony 'has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.' Or, as Violent J says, "I’d rather be the dumbed-down guy appreciating everything than the guy who knows everything and doesn’t appreciate anything."

The Fool's Gold Article also quotes the ICP on the magnets issue: "I mean, yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible. You can push something across the table without touching it. And as a kid, I found that fascinating. I still find that fascinating." - Violent J. "Come on, a rock that pulls metal towards it or pushes it away? Yeah, it has to do with the magnetic polar caps and [stuff]. But for real? Come on, man. You’re just holding a U-shaped thing that pushes metal away or attracts metal or something. The North and South Pole makes a rock magnetic, and if you touch a piece of metal with it, that becomes magnetic? That’s crazy." - Shaggy 2 Dope

In that same article, Mr 2 Dope also describes the giraffe as "some crazy-looking animal that only lives in Africa and Detroit"

Vice magazine sent an embedded reporter to the Gathering of the Juggalos, which is described as 'like the horror-rap equivalent of the Hajj' It's a fantastic article and well worth reading. The most interesting section is where they describe the game of Morton's list, one of the mystical aspects of the Juggalo lifestyle:

"Eventually I crossed paths with Daff, who ... wanted to introduce me to a Tennesseean ninja named Brad who was deeply involved with another of the Juggalos’ more cerebral offerings, Morton’s List. The way Brad broke it down for me, ML is basically a mystical fraternal order as determined by an RPG-version of truth or dare. You roll a thirty-sided die three times, match your numbers to an entry in a big book of quests, and then have one hour to complete your assigned quest or at least give it a decent effort. If you’re successful you ascend to different degrees, like in Freemasonry. Brad had a bunch of the degrees he’d earned tattooed on his arm, and was going to do the rest as soon as he got the money together."

And this is the thing that fascinates me most about the band: Morton's List. The game is simple. You roll a dice and devote yourself to a randomly chosen quest, which you work at to the best of your ability. The quest, apparently, could be something like baking a cake, improvising a bowling alley, jousting with cardboard weapons - or even volunteering for a charity. There's a full description of the game here. It's basically a way of finding Things To Do. The Morton's list website has a free cut-down version of the game. And, um, instructions for making a T-shirt into a ninja mask.

Every time I write the ICP off as stupid, I discover something odd or subtle about them. There's a fine line between clever and stupid. The Insane Clown Posse can be daft and boorish, but they also seem to be smart. Like Jordan, I find it hard to believe you can be as successful as they've been without some level of cunning.

Were you still up for Lucas?

The (first?) 2010 general election was a serious matter, but it was also great fun. For the first time since 1997 I've found myself excited about voting. While I was registered in South Derbyshire (Conservative gain from Labour), I've been closely following the Brighton Pavilion race and hoping to see the election of the first Green MP.

I started last night at a birthday party in Leicester. Things were winding down at three thirty so I headed across a quiet city to the bus station. I phoned Glue Gun 91's party head-quarters for news (they had a 6am license at the Victory). No updates on the Brighton counts, but it sounded like a successful event.

The bus journey was slow and dull. The book I had was irritating me so I snoozed, occasionally vibrated awake by texts from Mr. Pashley with the latest results.

Just after dawn I reached East Midlands Airport. I found the pre-paid taxi booth where I was amazed to be quoted £13 for the 4 mile journey (£4 for the first mile, and £1.80 a mile after that, apparently). I've definitely changed since my recent holiday. I found a taxi and haggled over the price. It was still expensive, but I had enough of a reduction to salve my ego. All those early morning negotiations with auto-rickshaw drivers have come in useful!

Back in my rural hideout I followed the election with digital radio and my dodgy GPRS connection. I applauded the empty room when I heard Caroline Lucas give her acceptance speech. It's been a long and often contentious campaign, but I think the results will be remembered long after the petty smears are forgotten. (What do you expect from a candidate who can't even throw a birthday party for a horse?) Too excited to go to bed, I hiked to the next village to watch events on my parents' TV. I stayed up until the BBC called a Hung Parliament then crawled off to sleep in their spare room.

The next few days look like being confusing, fascinating and exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing what changes a Green MP makes. And I'm actually looking forward to another election. I think I want to be more involved in this one.

Off on my travels

I meant to write a couple of posts for the turn of the year but I didn't have time. It's interesting to think about 2009/10 now, almost three weeks into 2010.

2009 was a little disappointing. Programming took more of my energy than I'd have liked, meaning writing projects, including the novel, didn't get the attention they should have done. The year was pretty good - I ran 600 miles, did over a dozen readings, made great progress on my novel - but I would like to have done more.

So far 2010 has been a blast. Despite the snow, I've managed to do some running and am, just about, on track for the Brighton Marathon in April. My talk at the Catalyst Club, on How to Escape on a WW2 POW Camp, seemed to be very well received.

The most exciting news is that I've become a freelancer. I'm planning to do both writing and programming work in 2010, but so far I've been exclusively working on some writing projects. One of these was an essay which included some fictional sections - I'll announce that when it comes out.

Even more exciting, I'm off to India tomorrow. It's amazing to think that in about 30 hours I'll be landing in Delhi. I'm going to be away for a couple of months and will be taking the opportunity to get away from my computer as much as possible. I will be contactable by email, but I'll only be checking every few days. There will also be some blog posts, as a friend has agreed to scan in some letters.

2010 has been pretty good so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what more it brings.