|
THE CRAZY OIKLET 6
JANUARY 2011
The Annotated Brett
A Commercial Opportunity
Oik USA
Defective
Arrangements
The Vanity of Authorship
Brett's Bedlam
All In This Together - A Critique
The Annotated Brett
Oik stalwart
Brett Wilson, convinced his fleeting lusts and tremors of existential angst are
worthy of general distribution, writes to acquaint an eagerly expectant world
with his current mental state.
Rant Number 3: I Like…
There are lots
of things I like. Nice tanned pins in tartan hotpants, white socks. Really
buttery shortcake. I like nurses in white stockings and suspenders, as long
as they’re slutty. That’s just a temporary thing. I like snowflakes. I don’t
like a ten day old beard, particularly my own, as that’s when it starts
itching. I like pictures of snowflakes falling when the light is
crepuscular. Talking of light, when the sun dips below the horizon,
sometimes the clouds are just right and everything under the canopy is
illuminated. I’m pretty sure I like white wines that cost more than £8.00 a
bottle. I’m not sure if that applies to reds.1 I like women with
flat stomachs, although a little bump can make me feel horny.2 I
keep returning to women don’t I? Never mind.
I like lots of
colours in my cartoons. Was a black and white cartoon ever any good? I like
my opponents’ arguments deracinated, especially when I’m drunk and they are
stone sober.3 I like kicking leaves in the garden as if I’m three
years old and I don’t care. All I want is to live in a state of wonder.4
Just for once
I’d like to get the better of a middle class trout in a queue in Sainsburys
who thinks inalienable rights flow from the fact that she drives a Range
Rover, but I know it will never happen.
I’d like to
eat onion thins on a large raft in the middle of a very warm ocean.5
I’d like to find gold in my belly button instead of fluff and toenail
clippings. I’d like to read Marvel comics under the bedspread with a torch
and a quarter of cough candy. I’d like to make love to a porno actress (here
we go again).
I’d like to
know why all the lunatics live in my neck of the woods. I’d like to know why
tomatoes don’t taste sweet any more. Can anyone answer that?6
I’d like to
live knowing who I am and where I’m going. I’d like to know if there is any
significance to life. And what is existence all about anyway? I’d like to
live as though this day is my last and then maybe I’d be free?7
Editor’s Annotations.
1. It is unlikely Brett has ever drunk a decent bottle in
his life. His current passion is for Prosecco (Fizzy white Italian shite which
panders to the oik prejudice, engendered by Champagne, that anything white and
fizzy is top notch – Champagne is also overrated). Brett’s reds, in my
experience, are usually titanically (if not simply tannically – ho ho!) alcoholic
throat rippers of a non-European origin pandering to another oik prejudice for
lots of alcohol and fruit – hence the attraction of Ozzie wines and alcopops.
Why not make your own from anti-freeze and Vimto? Or simply hit yourself over
the head with a mallet?
2. Some ambiguous syntax here. I think Brett is saying when
he’s horny he feels a little bump – an interpretation which I’m sure his
unfortunate partner will confirm.
3. Brett’s argumentative mode (like most mystics) is
insistent repetition (like Musso and Hitler and any JW). This gets more strident
when he’s drunk which may give him the impression he’s deracinating the
opposition.
4. Brett may act like a 3 year old but he is in fact 14 and
three quarters.
5. Surely the best place for him. The Oik would like to
start a Get Brett on a Raft fund. Donations to Oik central. I’ll supply
the onion thins when I find out just what they are.
6. English Oiks want cheap food, lots of it, and the
Supermarkets are happy to oblige. Brit tomatoes are grown in a polytunnel outside
Swindon and thus never ripen properly. Peaches, nectarines and other exotics are
also hard as rocks and bitter as cat piss which is why I’d never buy one here.
Go to France and you’ll find perfect examples of these things in any village
shop.
7. One pauses briefly to consider that final interrogative.
Why does this sentence end with a question mark when it plainly isn’t a
question? We see here the creeping Ozzie end-of-sentence uplift endemically
parroted by brain-dead pond-life (to use Brett’s favourite denigration). The
philosophical crux is ignorantly adolescent. Yes course we’d all like to think
there’s some point to life and that Jesus and Santa Claus are still alive – but
they’re not and there isn’t any point to life - just get on with it and stop
moaning. As for where you’re going Brett, I can answer that – to the grave.
A Commercial
Opportunity
One of the advantages of being a CEO (I
suppose I am after all the Chief Exec of Oik Enterprises) is that one is known
worldwide and contacted by entrepreneurs seeking to invest. I draw Oiklet
readers’ attention to Mr Arafat’s offer (below). Try as I might I can find no
use for $US 15m. Yes one could order, say, 4 million copies of Oik 8 and drop
them from a helicopter over the capital, and one might, realistically, gain
another ten subscribers – but so what? The Oik doesn’t seek popularity or wealth
– it burns with a small, steady gem-like flame (to quote Walter Pater) and
connects only with the happy few – the discriminating cognoscenti of oik lit.
However reading poor Yousuf’s harrowing
note once again one is more inclined to send him some cash (were he not
ridiculously flush already). I shall reply offering the condolences of myself
and all Oik subscribers. The horrors of being “bugled by some uniform men’s” is
too terrible to imagine. Still, this authentic use of Ozzie slang only confirms
Yousuf’s credibility. Down under beef bugle is a common term for the male
member. I was often warned during my short stay in the Holiday Inn at Coogee
Beach outside Sydney to avoid “bashing my beef bugle”. To have one’s entire
family so desecrated is quite shocking, even in the Cote d’Ivoire, where
indiscriminate bugling is probably more common than here.
Attn: Executive/CEO.
RE: Funds Investment and Management Proposal.
My name is MR. YOUSUF ARAFAT, the only son of Late DR.ARAFAT MOHAMMAD,
The Abidjan Cote d' ivory leading COCO Exporters who died recently during
the political crisis in my country, our residence ware bugled by some
uniform men’s sent by president Laurent Gbagbo. I am facilitating for a
private investor/nationalization, I need your help.
I have clean and unambiguous fund (US$15,000,000.00) to invest in profitable
long-term business in your country/company under your supervision.
I have however contacted you on trust to discuss your assistance and
commission in this Endeavour.
This project is ready for execution as soon as I hear from your. I look
forward to your swift response to this letter. :-
mryousufarafat@aol.com
Sincerely Yours,
MR. YOUSUF ARAFAT,
Oik USA
We welcome a new contributor from Kansas City - Kayti
Doolittle. Her story Sweet Nothings
is on the Spoik and there'll be more on the site soon
That's Kayti on the right - and no, the
tiger is real not stuffed.
Defective
Arrangements - How Small Mags Fail Part II
Even the great ST Coleridge
had a crack at publishing a small magazine. De Quincey in his Reminiscences
describes the debacle. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth were prodigious walkers
thinking nothing of doing 40 miles a day - Wordsworth got to the top of Helvelyn
in his 80s. Coleridge must have had many gruelling schlepps up to Penrith in all
weathers just to get the thing out. Who says things don’t get better? If Sam had
been doing it today we’d have had decades of his mad musing on German Philosophy
running into hundreds of issues. And if Proust had had a laptop with MS Word on
it A la recherche would be three times as long. Coincidental that The
Friend conked out at issue 28 – the very issue which saw the end of that
other distinguished North West mag The Penniless Press. Is this the
Bermuda triangle of literary magazines? The Oik remains in fair nick (as I
write) and we’re a long way off issue 28 but if it does fold I’ll blame
“defective arrangements” I was particularly struck by the “venerable female
relation of my own, who had subscribed merely to oblige me, and out of a general
respect for Coleridge's powers, though finding nothing to suit her own taste”. I
believe there are such, or at least one, taking the Oik today.
'The Friend,' in its
original publication, was, as a pecuniary speculation, the least judicious,
both for its objects and its means, I have ever known. It was printed at
Penrith, a town in Cumberland, on the outer verge of the Lake district, and
precisely twenty-eight miles removed from Coleridge's abode. This distance,
enough of itself, in all conscience, was at least trebled in effect by the
interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain which is scaled by a carriage ascent
of three miles long, and so steep in parts that, without four horses, no
solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring innkeepers to carry him.
Another road, by way of Keswick, is subject to its own separate
difficulties. And thus, in any practical sense, for ease, for certainty, and
for despatch, Liverpool, ninety-five miles distant, was virtually nearer.
Dublin even, or Cork, was more eligible. Yet, in this town, so situated as I
have stated, by way of purchasing such intolerable difficulties at the
highest price, Coleridge was advised, and actually persuaded, to set up a
printer, to buy, to lay in a stock of paper, types, etc., instead of
resorting to some printer already established in Kendal, a large and opulent
town not more than eighteen miles distant, and connected by a daily post,
whereas between himself and Penrith there was no post at all. Building his
mechanical arrangements upon this utter 'upside-down' inversion of all
common sense, it is not surprising (as 'madness ruled the hour') that in all
other circumstances of plan or execution the work moved by principles of
downright crazy disregard to all that a judicious counsel would have
suggested. The subjects were chosen obstinately in defiance of the popular
taste; they were treated in a style studiously disfigured by German modes of
thinking, and by a German terminology; no attempt was made to win or
conciliate public taste; and the plans adopted for obtaining payment were of
a nature to insure a speedy bankruptcy to the concern. Coleridge had a
list—nobody could ever say upon whose authority gathered together—of
subscribers. He tells us himself that many of these renounced the work from
an early period; and some (as Lord Corke) rebuked him for his presumption in
sending it unordered, but (as Coleridge asserts) neither returned the copies
nor remitted the price. And even those who were conscientious enough to do
this could not remit four or five shillings for as many numbers without
putting Coleridge to an expense of treble postage at the least. This he
complains of bitterly in his 'Biographia Literaria,' forgetting evidently
that the evil was due exclusively to his own defective arrangements. People
necessarily sent their subscriptions through such channels as were open to
them, or such as were pointed out by Coleridge himself. It is also utterly
unworthy of Coleridge to have taxed, as he does, many of his subscribers (or
really, for anything that appears, the whole body) with neglecting to pay at
all. Probably not one neglected. And some ladies, to my knowledge,
scrupulously anxious about transmitting their subscriptions, paid three
times over. And, on the other hand, some, perhaps, did, as a most
conscientious and venerable female relation of my own, who had subscribed
merely to oblige me, and out of a general respect for Coleridge's powers,
though finding nothing to suit her own taste: she, I happen to know, paid
three times over, sending her money through three different channels
according to the shifting directions which reached her.' Managed as the
reader will collect from these indications, the work was going down-hill
from the first. It never gained any accessions of new subscribers; from what
source, then, was the continual dropping off of names to be supplied? The
printer became a bankrupt: Coleridge was as much in arrear with his articles
as with his lectures at the Royal Institution. That he was from the very
first; but now he was disgusted and desponding; and with No. 28 or 29 the
work came to a final stop. Some years after, it was re-cast and
re-published.
The Vanity of Authorship
Sean Parker, author of Junkyard Dog was at Eddy’s. He’s
writing a follow up which will appear soon. Reporting my stalled, if not
aborted, attempt on his oik masterpiece I said it had more named characters than
War and Peace “It’s better than War and Peace” riposted Sean, and when I
remarked on its stylistic resemblance to Raymond Chandler – a kind of flippant,
slick opacity, he said it was better than Chandler. On the cover of the first
edition (mine is signed by Sean – the unsigned ones are v. rare) it quotes
Peter Walsh: "Junkyard Dog is as close to real life as
it can get.” I thought this might be ambiguously ironic – as if I’d said: “My
hundred metre dash is as fast as I can get”. To be uncharacteristically
pedantic, the crux lies in “it”. Does this pronoun refer to Junkyard Dog – ie
this novel can’t get any more realistic – or to the universal category of crime
fiction – ie no crime fiction can get more realistic?
We didn’t get into this arcane analysis but Sean, spotting a
book entitled Manchester Gangland prominently displayed exclaimed “That’s by
Peter Walsh!” and repeated the inflated accolade. “That’d be your brother I
suppose” I said. Sean Parker is a pseudonym necessary to protect the author from
criminal recriminations. “Er…no” said Sean “Just my best mate”
Literature! Wot a seething ratsnest
of mendacious,
self-interested back scratchers! It should be a requirement of all reviewers to
state their relationship to the reviewed. Hence Julian Barnes reviewing Martin
Amis’s The Pregnant Widow might more honestly begin:
“Martin used to be my best mate when he was represented
by my late wife Pat Kavanagh. He thought I was the dog’s bollocks and I
thought he was pretty good an all. But then my aesthetic sensibilities
sharpened somewhat and I realised in spite of a certain flashy word play he
was a shite writer and always had been. No idea about structure and plot and
as for characterisation – useless – everyone in his books is Martin Amis –
even the girls. Nevertheless, with this introductory caveat out of the way,
I now approach his latest novel without acrimony or rancour and am
determined to give it a fair shake.
Yis, as you would expect, it is a complete crock of shit.
Mart hasn’t got any better. It’s about a bunch of metropolitan tossers on
holiday in Tuscany (where else?). The protagonist, not unlike the young
Mart, is lusting after a girl with big tits and another, slightly older,
with a nice arse. Mart is perhaps to be congratulated in not falling for the
obvious ploy of conferring both these attributes on the same floosie. Then
there’s some confused buggering about with the time scheme (the last resort
of the untalented) when we’re whizzed back to the smoke to hear the
ponderous reflections on life by the now decrepit main character – again
quite remarkably like the present day Mart what with his hair an that. One
is meant to be overcome by these plangent speculations on lost time but
Proust it ain’t – not even Celeste Albaret. The bloke is irredeemably second
rate (just like his dad) and it’s no wonder he’s never won the Booker.”
Likewise Mart might be asked to review a JB confection.
“Julian used to be my best mate. We’d often meet up for
snooker in the Dog an Duck and later retire for some intellectual rabbit
with other titans of the current literary scene like Chris Hitchens, Clive
James and of course my old man who was not only screamingly funny but also a
major pisshead who went on to win the Booker and even get knighted. These
last two attributes will never be visited on Barnes since he’s not really a
novelist at all just a mediocre essayist on things French (and who gives a
monkeys about them). As for pissheadery Julian affects an enthusiasm for
posh Frog wines and has even entertained that trollop Jancis Robinson. Well
she can’t be a true pisshead since I’ve seen her on TV spitting stuff out.
So you get the picture JB is just a frenchified poseur – the frogs have even
given him a medal for outstanding frogitude. Strewth! Lately he’s too wanked
out even to do a novel (unlike my own magnificent Pregnant Widow
which is enormous) and has to gasp out tiny squibs which read like
inconsequential farts from a dying arse. The LemonTable, Nothing to be
Frightened Of, Pulse – feeble essays featuring old geezers banging on
about dying. No larfs in that – and no spectacularly endowed hornbags either
like what appear in my epic works. You wouldn’t be reading this stuff with
one hand. Poor old Jules! No, at this rate he’ll never win the Booker. He’ll
probably finish up as correspondent for The Decanter or get a job as
a supply teacher in French at the Hackney Comprehensive.”
Alan Sillitoe reviews
the poems of his
missus Ruth Fainlight.
Imagine the offspring of Keats and
Jane Austen marrying a sprog resulting from a conjunction between George
Eliot and Lord Tennyson. Then further imagine the issue of a congress between
these spectacular gene packages. This creature, inheriting the undiluted
genius of these four grandparents will give you a rough idea of the quality
and sheer brilliance of the poet Ruth Fainlight. These poems by Ruth (Selected
Poems Faber & Faber 54 pages £29.99) will change your life. They stand
as monuments of 20th century literature far above the trivial
effusions of TS Eliot, WB Yeats and WH Auden.
I recall verbatim a conversation I
had with Her Majesty the Queen when I was invested with the MBE: “Who are
you?” she asked as I basked in her radiance “Have you come far?” Nervously I
summoned my pre-prepared encomium: “Your majesty may I, a humble oik,
reassure you of the widespread affection and regard of my fellow oiks and
add that I am conscious of the great honour this award confers on all oik
literature. However there is one more deserving even than I. May I humbly
draw Your Majesty’s attention to a great talent, greater even than that old
bore TS Eliot whom I recall read the Wasteland to you and the Queen
Mum before the war and caused you some risible discomfort. I refer, if I may
make so bold, to Ruth Fainlight, a gigantic talent, the Akhmatova de nos
jours, far greater than that overrated old slapper Carol Anne Duffy, the
lesbian laureate, or Pam Ayers who I believe is a favourite of Princess
Camila’s, in short, to conclude this somewhat Jamesian peroration, I would
beseech your majesty to confer on this towering genius, Ruth Fainlight, the
Order of Merit. I do not, by this exhortation, seek to diminish the honour
of the MBE which I believe has become the standard reward for 20 years
service as an amenities attendant in the House of Lords, but urgently
request the nobler honour for this poetic genius in our midst.” Her Majesty,
brow slightly furrowed, raised her magnificent head adorned with a wondrous
crown, looked abstractedly in the distance and said in a loud voice “Next!”
Modesty forbids extensive quotation
from this collection which will come as a revelation to those used to the
impoverished modern diet of Larkin, Hughes, Reading, Betjeman, and Lykiard.
Yes, modesty, since I must confess at this juncture, that Ruth is my wife.
And to this catalogue of spiritual virtues I feel qualified to add a few
appreciative remarks on her physical perfection. Imagine the Venus de Milo
with arms or Jordan with the head of Ava Gardner. Ruth is a quite
exceptional hornbag, she bangs like a shithouse door in a gale and does both
French and Greek. What more could a writer ask for? Oh…and her rhubarb
crumble is out of this world…three star Michelin.
I’m sure such corrective adjustments will
restore some kind of integrity to the horribly corrupted practices of today’s
literary establishment. In the meantime you can rely on the Crazy Oik to tell it
like it is.
Brett’s Bedlam
I get many rants and other diversions from Oik writer Brett
Wilson. Only occasionally do these find their way into the Oiklet but the bloke
is a true oik and well crazy (as the current demotic would have it). I
have, therefore, created a niche (or padded cell) where these mad ravings can spread out for
the entertainment of the Oik community. It’s called Brett’s Bedlam and is lodged in
the Spoik, on a page of its own.
Exceptionally lucid or entertaining items will be promoted to
the Oiklet and may even appear in the Oik itself. Critics of this madman will
also be given space in the Bedlam as will trainee psychiatric nurses and social
workers.
In the 18th century people used to go to Bedlam to
stare at the lunatics. For a penny one could peer into their cells, view the
freaks of the "show of Bethlehem" and laugh at their antics. Entry was free on
the first Tuesday of the month. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000 such visits.
Wikipedia
Click on this to enter - visitors do so at
their own risk
Practical Criticism
An exercise on Tom Kilcourse's story
All In This Together is added
to the Workshop.
|
