*Disclaimer – please note that it is not my intention to cause offence in this post; this is merely a discussion of words which people find offensive. If you were offended by the first word of the title, I wouldn’t recommend reading any further.

The radio was playing in the car the other day, and Kanye West’s All of the Lights came on. It’s so rare that I listen to the radio as opposed to my own music that I was mildly surprised that one of the songs I’d been listening to frequently since getting the album a couple of weeks ago suddenly had a few words missing, most prominently the word nigger.

Nigger’s a strange word, because it’s not really a swear word, it’s not like you’d hit your thumb with a hammer and shout “argh, niggers!”, but it’s likely to cause as much, if not more, offence than, say, cunt. So why is that? Well, it’s a derogatory racially-specific term. I think that second part is the most important aspect of it; dickhead is derogatory, but not racially-specific, and would be considered much less offensive.

Presumably then, it’s the combination of being derogatory and being racially-specific. After all, there’s plenty of racially-specific words which aren’t derogatory: ‘occidental,’ ‘Aryan’, ‘kiwi’, ‘Asian’. Okay, I suppose these are more or less geographical, but the ideas of race and culture are inextricably linked with geography.

So, assuming that the racial-specificity of word is not in itself a bad thing, but rather acts as a modifier depending on what other labels can be applied to the word, is the word ‘nigger’ still derogatory, and therefore offensive?

Historically, of course it is. The connotations of the word run deep and remain as an ancestral relic from a time the people of the western world would like to, but never should, forget. But the connotations of words change over time. Does anyone use the word ‘gay’ to exclusively mean ‘happy’ or ‘cheerful’ any more? So is the derogatory connotation of ‘nigger’ still the prevailing sentiment?

In Hip-Hop culture, a powerful, primarily African-American cultural force, probably more so in the US than here, the word ‘nigger’ is used without care or restraint, admittedly still referring almost exclusively to a black person, but almost never in a negative manner. My interpretation of it in Hip-Hop, and African-American culture in general, is that the word is almost a synonym for something like ‘brother’; a mark of solidarity.

One thing that does occur to me is that the adoption of the word nigger by the very people it referred to, could in fact be ironic. A kind of verbal rebellion against the subjugation to which black people were subjected by the white men who called them ‘niggers’. But used ironically or not, it could still retain the ideas of brotherhood and solidarity.

Take for example the line I heard censored on Radio One the other day, from All of the Lights: “Something wrong, I hold my head, M J gone, that nigger dead.” Whatever the deal with Michael Jackson was, he started out as an ordinary black kid, had some cosmetic surgery, and ended up looking pretty Caucasian. Maybe he had some skin problem, maybe he was a bit unstable, maybe he wanted to look more ‘white’. That’s not important. My point is that by calling him a nigger, Kanye West is reasserting Michael Jackson as a member of the African-American community as a mark of respect and a lamentation over his death. In that context, is the word ‘nigger’ offensive?

Of course, context is everything. If there’s a guy in a white hood stood by a burning crucifix saying ‘nigger’, you can be pretty sure its neither a mark of solidarity or respect. If that guy starts talking on Radio One on a Sunday afternoon, I’d expect them to censor everything he says and replace it with several minutes of complete radio silence or, even better, some Miles Davis. Okay, that’s not entirely serious, I don’t really believe in censorship, as we’ll come to in a minute, but I do believe that saying anything discriminatory or with an agenda of discrimination against a group pretty much immediately invalidates your argument.

So I’ve given two examples where the word ‘nigger’ has such disparate meanings as to be almost two different words. But those are two extreme examples of a word being used within particularly groups. A word doesn’t change its connotations by being used by small groups of people, it changes by entering the mainstream world of every day language. But can that every happen for a word as charged as nigger?

One thing to bear in mind is that words do not inherently have meanings, and therefore are not inherently offensive or anything else. Words are just a series of vocalised sounds that can be represented as symbols and to which meanings are attached. If you say ‘cunt’ to a three-year-old, they’re not going to be neither offended or phased. They would treat it with the same unbiased curiosity as any other word. And if everyone said ‘cunt’ on a day-to-day basis, not in a derogatory manner, but in the same way that you might say the word ‘balloon’ for example, it would cease to offend anyone. Words are not inherently offensive.

What can be offensive is the meaning behind them. Now I’m going to take a guess here, because I can’t back this up, but I would say that the majority of people in Britain today, maybe not the vast majority, but, I would hope, a growing majority, are not racist. I’m sure everyone colours the world based on their own beliefs, and racist people probably believe the majority of people think like them too. There’s no use pretending racism doesn’t still exist, but I believe, on balance, Britain to be a fairly tolerant country.

So if the average British person head or used the word nigger, there would be no racist sentiment behind it, and it would be at worst neutral and, perhaps, mingled with a sort of inherited shame, because, yes, it is an uncomfortable word to use.

Now what’s the one weapon a racist has? I mean, sometimes, sure, they have sticks and petrol bombs, but generally the only weapon a racist has is language, which, in the long run, is much more powerful than anything physical, because words, for all their ‘vocalised sounds’ are, essentially ideas. There are no ideas without words to express them, no thought without language.

If the ‘brother/solidarity’ meaning of ‘nigger’ starts becoming predominant, if we overcome our initial discomfort at using the word, it ceases to be any more offensive than ‘Asian’ or ‘occidental’. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if it did, you deprive racists of that word. Sure they could come up with new offensive words to express their views, but fear of a word only increases its power. That power can be diluted to nothingness just by using the word.

So, should Radio One have censored the word nigger? I don’t know to be honest. I don’t believe in censorship, but I do believe in restriction. I believe people should be allowed to make Saw and the Human Centipede and gay groupsex porn, but I do I think children and teenagers should be able to watch them? No. And I do I want to watch or discuss or even think about any of those things? No.

It’s up to the BBC whether they want to censor certain words or not. Actually, it’s probably up to Ofcom. There obviously is a need to avoid certain words on the radio and television, at least before the watershed, because certain words shouldn’t be glamorised to children to the detriment of other, more intelligent words that would help them articulate themselves better.

I’m definitely conflicted on the issue though. It was recently announced that an edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to be released with the word ‘nigger’ removed. I’ve never read the book, but as far as I’m aware, the word is not used as a derogatory term but rather as part of the everyday lexicon for the time and place where the book is set. Whether for good or bad I believe that both words and work of literature are important relics of the time when they were created and should not be tampered with just to become more ‘palatable’ to modern tastes. Adapted into new works based on the original, maybe, but not edited.

The counter-argument for this is that because of that one little n-word, the book is banned in American schools. Remove that word and, hey presto, American schoolchildren are suddenly given access to the work of one of the important writers of the twentieth century. That’s good, definitely. But what if they did that to To Kill a Mockingbird? “Don’t say black person, Scout, it’s common. Say ‘Negro’.” I was taught that book for GCSE English, and I still hold it as one of the finest books ever written. But what poignancy and impact it would lose if you started censoring it. “Why I saw that yonder gentleman of colour ruttin’ on my Mayella!”

Then again, Enid Blyton’s Noddy books were edited for racist content when the evil gollywogs were photoshopped out and two politically neutral goblins were photoshopped in. Now again I’ll admit ignorance and say I’ve never read a Noddy book, and I certainly can’t speak for Enid Blyton’s intentions, but I’ve heard she was not a very nice or sociable person and that she didn’t particularly like children, despite writing for and about them all day, but, it’s my understanding that the gollywogs were the villains of the stories, so I would suggest there might be some conviction beyond sheer chance that all the other toys got on together nicely, but the black toys were evil, motivating that decision. So yeah, fair enough, if kids like what are otherwise considered to be ‘delightful’ books, then quietly remove the blatantly racist content and let them go nuts.

So those are some of my thoughts on the word ‘nigger’ and offensive words and censorship in general. One final thing I want to mention is that one of my absolute pet peeves that really annoys me in is when people swear but censor themselves, like f*%&er or sh@t or really stupid stuff like b*gger. Either have the balls to swear properly or find a different word that more accurately reflects your sentiment. If you don’t want to swear, fine, but don’t make a half-hearted, limp-wristed gesture at swearing. And don’t be afraid of it. They’re just words, and words are just tools, and all tools have their job and their purpose.

Until next time I update, remember, all of you who read my site, you’re all my niggers, feel free to send me love, hate and opinions in the comments below.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

Considering its age, it is in good condition, having been kept on a bookshelf where, for several years, the sun struck the spine and front at an angle, fading an L-shaped block of cloud-white into the cover. Obviously the books either side of this one where smaller, their imprint left in a rectangle on either side of A Skeleton Key that must be closer to the cover’s original colour. Inside, the book smells of what it is: old paper; the same smell that the case of an ancient Zenit camera I used to own had. There’s no smell of dust or tobacco or food. I like to think it was kept in some airy study somewhere.

I don’t think it was ever read though, not all the way through at least, because the final page of the conclusion is uncut. (I don’t know exactly how books used to be made, but I think they were printed on sheets bigger than the pages and then cut in half after they were put in. Sometimes pages must have been missed). Inside the front cover, someone has carefully written the number 47 in pencil, and on the following page is an indecipherable signature, probably of the previous owner, certainly not of one of the authors. Otherwise the book is unmarked. The following two pages are blank, and then there is the title, alone on a page in plain Times New Roman font. The next page has a slightly larger title with the authors’ names and the publisher’s information and then the book begins.

Here we move onto the content, which is what makes this book elitistly obscure. People who read my site or study literature are probably aware of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of them might even have read it. Further afield I would guess, and this is a complete guess, that fewer than 1% of English-speaking people are aware of Ulysses. Much fewer had read it. Of the people who are even dimly aware of Ulysses, I would guess that fewer than half are aware of Joyce’s fourth novel Finnegans Wake, and probably fewer than one-in-ten of the very few who read Ulysses have even attempted to read Finnegans Wake. I bet a tenth of those never reach the end.

And so, of that tiny proportion of people who are inclined to read the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake, how many do you suppose are inclined to hunt down a book that discusses the novel? Naturally such an elitist challenge piques my interest, so now that I have finished university, I have set myself the ‘summer project’ of reading and understanding Finnegans Wake. Last year I read the first fifty or so pages, but comprehension escaped me, so I moved on to something else. Now I’m making the time for a second, proper effort at the book, with my guidebook, my skeleton key to Joyce’s secrets, firmly in hand. I’ll write about the novel itself at some later date.

Without further ado in this short, sharp little post, the three lines I have stuck in my head, that I thought I would share are:

i. Yes I said yes I will yes.

This, as everyone really ought to know, is the final, triumphant line of Joyce’s Ulysses. I love the emphatic expression of affirmation it embodies. It’s only seven words, and yet it is so enthusiastic in conveying its message. It’s so well-balanced as well, the way two words separate each of the three yeses. It’s probably even my favourite line in the whole novel.

ii. Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands.

This is the opening line of my favourite Simon Armitage poem. I don’t know why I like this line so much, but it’s ambiguous and sort of loving. Perhaps I just project onto this line the weight of the rest of the poem, and that’s why it gives me such a sense of the enduring importance of a mother to her grown-up son.

The same is probably true of the first line, that it resonates so strongly for me because of its context within the novel, but the last line, the one I’ve been thinking about most, does not have much context for me, because I only read it recently, and it’s from a novel I haven’t yet read. According to the short story I first read it in, it’s one of the most famous lines Joyce ever wrote, but a google search turns up almost nothing about it. I feel it stands on its own merits, without context, as an excellent line, though it is only four words:

iii. Is love worse life?

It sort of doesn’t make sense, but it’s from Finnegans Wake, so that’s to be expected. I’m not sure I can really explain what it means, not any better than it explains itself, but I’m sure it means something. It’s the kind of sentence you can go away and think about. At least that’s how I feel. I also feel that James Joyce should be taught at school instead of Shakespeare. Both are difficult, but Joyce is difficult because of his linguistic experimentation, not because his language is archaic like Shakespeare’s. And in terms of wordplay and clever expression, Joyce is at least Shakespeare’s equal, if not his better. Well, I’m not going to go too far into this, but I’m passionate about James Joyce, while Shakespeare just feels out-dated, good for his day, but past his prime.

And that’s it, I really just wanted to share those three sentences. A follow-on to the last Videogame Diaries will be up soon.

I digress: when I read, and often I read books with very few, very long chapters that cannot easily be finished in a single sitting, I leave off at the first end of a paragraph on the left-hand page. That way, rather than wasting valuable seconds scanning around for exactly which area across the two pages my bookmark could potentially cover, I know exactly that I shall start at the first fresh paragraph of the left-hand page. This is not always so easy with someone like Proust, whose paragraphs can often span multiple pages, even going from midway down one right-hand page all the way down to the midpoint of the next, and is not always necessary for books such as my recently-read Tom’s Midnight Garden, which has the bite-sized chapters I remember from books of my use, but otherwise stands me in good stead.

Lately, with all the critical reading I’ve been doing for my dissertation, I’ve developed more ‘advanced’ reading and place-keeping techniques. For example, I’ve found it neccessary to distinguish between pages I need to rememer for quotes, and pages I have reached during sequential reading. It would be hypocritical of me, following my earlier outburst, to sully a book with even the lightest of pencil underlinings, and since I have repeatedly forgotten to purchase post-it notes, I have taken to folding small pieces of paper over the pages I might want to reference later on. This initially led to the aforementioned problem of where across the two possibly pages I meant to keep in mind: not useful when I’m midway through making a brilliant point and I need to quickly find a supporting quote. I quickly solved this however, with the simple system of leaving more paper on the side I mean to quote from than the side I don’t, unless, I suppose, I mean to quote from both sides, in which case the paper proportions would be equal…

So is anyone else this OCD about reading, or do you all have your little quirks? Do you even just go by memory and flick through until you find your page each time? Go ahead and leave comments below.

On an unrelated note, here’s a picture of my pumpkin this year:

It sat on the window-sill of my housemate’s room until I threw it down into our concrete front yard, where it remains, waiting for someone to put it in the bin. Disappointingly, it didn’t really explode like we thought it might, perhaps becuase it was quite think and quite dry, it just sort of cracked.

Go check it out and tell me what you think, either through email or in the comment box on this post.

I’ve also recently added to the Highlights section and, if you hadn’t noticed yet, added some more icons to my blog‘s sidebar, linking you directly to my RSS feed, Facebook page, Twitter and Email.

Hope everyone’s enjoying the site and, as ever, leave me feedback on anything and I shall respond in an appropriate manner,

Henry.

You may recall that in my last post I briefly mentioned how the Aspiring Writer’s first birthday was coming up, and would be missed because I would be in Yorkshire (which was fun by the way, and I may upload some pictures at some point). Well that day came and with it brought the expiration of my original domain registration with HostGator, which should not have been a problem because it should have been transferred to Fast Hosting Direct. However, it turns out there was some problem with the transfer, meaning that it was left to expire with HostGator. I’m not sure exactly who was to blame, but after an exchange of emails between myself and the two companies I decided it would just be easier to swap to a new domain than go through all the hassle of sorting out my old one.

Apparently, that wasn’t too difficult, since I learned a few tricks from swapping Web Hosts, and I managed to complete the transition fairly painlessly over the course of a single afternoon, which was rather better than I predicted. The only problem now is that I have to build my traffic back up to this new domain, since I can’t just redirect everyone from theaspiringwriter.net, so, y’know, feel free to tell your friends about this amazing site featuring original short stories and some other crap. Also, nearly a hundred posts, as this one is, in fact, post number 99. I’ve got a special story (well, I think it’s good anyway) lined up for post 100, and shall hopefully have that up tomorrow. In addition, and as I always promise, there’ll be new updates coming soon and regularly.

This new domain, now with the .com extension that everyone seems more likely to remember even if they forget my name, should herald the start of a bigger and better The Aspiring Writer, and I hope not only everyone who read my site before will find their way here, but some new readers will too. Oh, and since you are here, don’t forget to click the ‘subscribe’ link either here, on your left, or at the top right of the page, to get RSS updates of every new post (if you’ve not used RSS feeds before, it’s dead easy, just click the link, leave the drop-down menu as ‘live bookmarks’ and you should get a nice little button on your tool-bar with a list of the most recent posts). Also, if you enjoy my writing, tell other people about this site, my goal is to break one million on the Alexa Rankings (I got within 70,000 places before).

Hope to see you again soon,

Henry.

But you’ve already decided whether or not this is of interest to you. If you’re curious though, head on over to 8bitpeoples.com and check out the discography section. Like I said, the artists have put all there work on there for free. Personally I would recommend anything by Trash80, Random, Firebrand Boy or Mark DeNardo. And that’s all I have to say. I’ll write and post a story or something soon.

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

This is a monthly podcast presented by the New Yorker’s fiction editor where, every week, a writer is invited to read and discuss a short story which they admire. So not only is it a free short audio book, but it’s a light critical analysis of the story. The value of this for any writer of fiction speaks for itself, since the constant advice to budding writers, after ‘write as much as you can’ is ‘read as much as you can’. And outside of quality anthologies, which are relatively scarce, it can be hard to find really good professional short stories, on the web or anywhere else, so it’s great that there’s a place where they can not only be picked out for you, but read to you.

Since the benefits of a free audio story and discussion are so immediately obvious, there’s really nothing more I can say about it, except go there now and download some. Hopefully by the time you get back, I’ll have some new original content on here. (Also, I’m not done updating the aesthetics of the site, I’ve just been busy and it takes time).

Well, I got bored of reading the recipe, and decided I could go forth and forge something edible. So I chopped up a couple of large potatoes and began to fry them (keeping them moving so they wouldn’t stick, as I was informed to do). Once they were all brown and nice, I threw in some sliced mushrooms, mushrooms being the kind of cheap ingredient you should always have to hand, and then two eggs.

Oh, I also poured in what was left of my Basics Herb Mix following the copious amounts I used to make the pasta sauce edible. Finally, I threw in some cheese for extra flavour. Then I was worried there mightn’t be enough food in the pan, so I fried some bread as an extra.

Well, for a recipe I’d never tried before, it worked well. It actually looked pretty appetising, and, since it had both protein and carbohydrates, was a fairly well-balanced meal. Admittedly, it could have used some bacon or some ham or something just to add a little more flavour, maybe even onions or something, but it was still tasty, and it was what I would call ‘good food’, which is a term I have a little difficultly qualifying. By it, I mean food that you can shovel down and it fills you up, like stew or curry or egg-fried rice or fish-shop chips; food that doesn’t assault you with flavour or require fiddly manipulation like steak or peas, but just warms you from the inside and leaves you feeling full.

So I’m thinking, I’m going at add this ‘Spanish Scrambled Eggs’ to my roster of meals, particularly as it’s also pretty cheap. Let’s see… about 30p for the two eggs, 10p worth of mushrooms and maybe 15p of cheese, and about another 15p worth of potatoes, this might even be the cheapest meal yet, and possibly the tastiest this week. If only my luncheon had been as successful: that consisted of Basics 45p Baked Beans and Sausages. They didn’t taste too bad while I was eating them, but afterwards they leave your teeth feeling sort of coated, while you just feel dirty.

The curry I had just tasted of generic mild curry, with a better flavour than the sauce’s 7 pence price tag would have suggested. As for the chicken, which was again of the budget variety that didn’t taste any different from any other packaged chicken breast once it was cut up and cooked. I also threw in a Basics Naan bread, which made it basically like a proper curry only cheaper.

Apart from that there’s not a lot I can say about the curry: I can’t berate
it like the pasta sauce, and neither can I commend it on any outstanding qualities, except the price: I’m reckoning that the curry I made is about three portions, so that works out at about £1.07 per portion.

That breaks down as:

7p for the sauce

£2.39 for the chicken

59p for the Naan breads

about 30p worth of rice

So anyone needing to save money on food, a cheap curry is a fairly viable proposition.

It’s beginning to look like I’m going to be eating this curry at least twice more this week and not a lot else: it’s possibly a little harder than I imagined to live on £10 for a week, since the curry and the pasta were my two main planned meals, and all I seem left with is an amount of pasta, potatoes, rice, cheese and eggs, which will most likely lead to some rather bland meals without supplement.

I have been helped along however since my housemate came back from work at the Co-op on Monday with a bag of about fifteen or twenty packets of out-of-date ‘Rainbow Cookies’. Looking at the amount of E-numbers in them, I can see why they didn’t sell, but, hey, they’re free, so we’re all eating them.