For me, The Rainbow is the right story right now. It’s beautiful and it’s honest, with less of the literary self-awareness of other novels of the time I like, such as those of Joyce or Woolf. Admittedly, I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, but unless it has a really bad final third, it’s shaping up to be one of my favourite books in a long while. Which surprises me, actually, because I didn’t previously rate D. H. Lawrence that highly, even if he is probably the most famous writer to have come from my home city.

I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover a few years ago, and I admired him for the frankness with which he described physical love-making (you’ll probably notice his influence in some of my more explicit work), but I found his writing style to often be quite blunt, almost crude, a little thrown-together. He has a tendency to repeat himself quite a lot as well, like he might use a word or a phrase and then you’ll see that word or phrase again half a page later, as if he can’t quite let go of it and wants to make sure you’ve noticed how good it is. He does that in The Rainbow too, sometimes to greater effect, sometimes to lesser.

He was a talented writer though, not as ambitious as my other early twentieth-century literary heroes perhaps, but talented nonetheless. The Rainbow, I feel, has both the broad strokes and the subtlety of a Turner painting, and when he starts describing the weather, and the way the characters experience it, like the sky pregnant with rain about to break as Tom Brangwen goes to visit Lydia Lensky to ask her to marry him, it is of a Turner painting that I am given a distinct impression.

I think, however, that if I had read it at another time, while I was at university perhaps, I would not have been so captivated by it. I would probably have read the first hundred-and-fifty or so pages, and then become bored with its apparent repetition as it moves down the successive generations of the Brangwen family and how each falls in love and marries. But I can appreciate it more now, now that, for the first time, I am living with my girlfriend, and living through the new and unfamiliar joys and challenges that brings, because, while in some ways The Rainbow is a love story, it is much more than that.

It’s not just a fall-in-love-and-live-happily-ever-after story, it’s about the way love grows up and brings a new awareness of oneself, how it makes your blood run hotter and brings you to a new life, how you relate to another person and how you mature with them as you live together and begin to know one another. It’s about how love and your regard for another person can be constantly shifting and altering, moving through subtle shades, and sometimes contradictory. Lawrence’s character, at least when they are young, are not living a static, easy life of marital bliss, they are constantly trying to understand each other, to re-evaluate themselves, struggling with their passions and their angers and their desires.

The effect of the characters’ experiences is all the greater because the reader watches the characters grown and mature, Tom from a young country farmer to an old land owner in the first generation, and Anna from a little girl to a mother of five in the second generation. I liked the way Tom was shaken by his first drunken sexual experience with a Nottingham prostitute, and the way it sobered and matured him, made him wiser and less happy-go-lucky, so that he was nervous and awkward when he first encountered the young widow Lydia Lensky. I liked the way, when they were first married, he would run away to the pub because he was almost frightened of how he could not understand his wife and her past life in Poland, though he loved her and they made love, and then how they gradually come to understand one another and their connection becomes deep and unbreakable.

I liked too how, when Will and Anna are first married and moved in together, though they passionately love each other, they also hurt each other without meaning to. How she would become so absorbed in sewing or some other work that she would forget to make the dinner for when Will returned, and then he would become angry, and then she would become angry and want to hurt him, and they would argue and then they would come together and be passionate again. I’m putting it bluntly, but Mr. Lawrence does it much more subtly. It seems honest and realistic the way he captures the shifting moods within a relationship, the way two people have to adjust to each other and can affect each other.

I actually found it disappointing, almost upsetting, to read when Will tried to cheat on Anna with a girl he sat next to at the theatre, because I empathised with the characters and wanted them to succeed. What actually happens though is that the girl rejects his advances and Will goes home to Anna and she asks him about where he’s been and he says he went to the theatre on his own and met nobody, and she can tell that he is keeping something from her, but then she decides that she doesn’t care, and when he realises that she is indifferent, it reignites his passion for her, and their marriage becomes stronger and more secure after that, even though it had started to sour.

And the book is not just about the love between men and women, but also parental love. It’s touching the way the love grows between Tom Brangwen and his wife’s daughter, the young Anna. At first Anna rejects him because he is not her real father, but he is patient with her, and they grow to love each other, and Tom almost takes solace in his love for Anna when he feels unable to connect with his wife. Then, much later on, Anna and Tom have a disagreement, and Anna accuses him of not being her real father, but immediately regrets it because she loves him and because it makes her feel less secure in the world and it feels like she has broken something between them.

The Rainbow is a love story then, but it’s about the changing shades of love as one grows older, as a person moves from a child, to a lover, to a parent. It’s about the people relate to the people around them, and how this can be both difficult and life-affirming. The thing is, all lovers argue sometimes, and all lovers, in their everyday lives, sometimes hurt or frustrate each other, people are as inconstant as the weather, sometimes we can happy or sad or lonely or irritable, sometimes several of these at once, and that can make living with someone you love difficult. But you stay together, and grow together.

I’m not complaining, and I’m not trying to make The Rainbow sound in anyway negative, because it’s a very positive novel, at least so far. Obviously, I’ll have to wait to see how it ends before I can say what my ultimate lasting impression of it will be. I’m very happy living with my girlfriend, of course, but it’s a new experience, a different way of living to when you’re living with friends or your family. Sometimes you can argue without really knowing why, or one of you could be sad for some reason completely unrelated to the other person, and that can directly affect the other person. You can both have your doubts and hopes and fears and joys, and they all get mixed in together. I don’t think this is abnormal nor necessarily bad, it’s just part of being in a relationship and living together, but The Rainbow acknowledges this in ways I haven’t really seen before, perhaps, to an extent, in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time, but not in a way that speaks to me like this work by a writer from my home city. Right story, right time.

I think these videos are beautifully put together, and I often watch them in the mornings, before I go to work. I find them both inspiring and humbling. Certain phrases from Carl Sagan’s narration often stay with me all today, phrases like: “It will not be we who reach Alpha Centurai, and the other nearby stars, but a species very much like us, with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses … for all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness,” and “we long to be here for a purpose even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident, the significance of our lives, and our fragile planet, is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning.”

Sagan had the ability to step back and view human existence from a distance, to take it all in without bias or preconception. I do not think this is uncommon among scientists, particularly astronomers, but what set Sagan apart was the poetry with which he could express what he saw. His timing and intonation are perfect. He was one of those people who serve as the human face of science, the link between the arcane discoveries of men in white coats and the general public, the artists, the dreamers, the people in the street.

That’s an important role for someone to fill. After all, it is easy for many people to mistrust scientists and scientific theory, simply because they don’t understand it, especially when it doesn’t fit in with your every day experience. We still have people like Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, along with many others, to fill this role, but none have had quite the same power of expression as Carl Sagan, nor his passionate optimism. Richard Dawkins, while brilliant and intelligent, can often be quite acerbic, while David Attenborough, well, he’s close to Sagan in his almost child-like wonder and passion for all things living, but is no poet, is just a presenter, one of the most distinguished and respected presenters of zoological programming, of course, but just a presenter.

I’m not saying that everything Carl Sagan was unequivocally amazing, from reviews I’ve read, some of his books are a bit hit and miss, and I’ve seen a couple of episodes of Cosmos which were fairly boring, compared to the brilliant peaks that show occasionally reached, which I couldn’t say, for example, of The Ascent of Man, which is consistently boring. What the above videos capture, however, is Sagan at his absolute best. The length and selection of the quotations is spot on, and the images match them perfectly; I love the synchronisation in the first one of “we who cannot put our own planetary home in order” with the image of the oil-covered bird and the riot footage. I think everyone should watch these videos, I think they should be required viewing for the human race, because these words are the words that should make a person realise that the universe does not revolve around our own young species, but that we, as a whole, can do great things. These videos should inspire people to begin work, in their own small way, on those “new wonders, undreamt of in our time, [which] will … have been wrought in another generation, and another.”

Now, have you ever considered the similarities between these two characters? Here’s a list:

• Both are heroes, obviously, but both are the same type of lonely hero. Only child Bruce Wayne lost his parents in a robbery gone wrong, the Doctor lost his entire race in the Time War.

• Both refuse to use guns, or to kill people, regardless of the cost. There are a couple of exceptions to this, with Batman wielding a gun in Year Two, and the Doctor has tried to wipe out the Daleks several times, but generally they both stick to this strict moral code. They’re certainly not any-means-necessary anti-heroes like Rorshach from Watchmen, for example. Instead both Batman and the Doctor really on their wits to rather than brute force to save the most possible lives, even if that means granting the villain a minor victory elsewhere. 

• Sidekicks. Batman has Robin, the Doctor has his companions.

• Detectives. They’re both essentially detectives, identifying what’s wrong with a situation and trying to rectify it and restore justice.

• Secret identities. Batman is really billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. The Doctor is, well, he is ‘the Doctor’, but he has a secret name known only to a very few characters, and he has a mysterious past; he was once both a father and a grandfather.

• Time travel. This is a minor point, but there has been a precedent set for Batman travelling through time in one of the most recent story arcs, and obviously the Doctor does nothing but travel through time.

• Both are highly intelligent.

• They’ve also both appeared in the same sort of media over their many decades of existence: comics, television series, movies and videogames.

So, having established that they are similar sort of characters, they could slip quite easily into similar sorts of stories, in the way that, say, Batman could never fit into an X-Files episode. But what would really be interesting would be how each would face the other’s enemies.

How would Batman outwit the Daleks? The Doctor always keeps them distracted with words and bluffs, and in the later episodes, holds them at bay mainly by reputation of his Dalek-beating alone. Batman’s more a silent man of action than a man of words though. Would he stalk them from the shadows, waiting for his moment to pounce even as they slaughter innocent victims? Would he blind their eye-stalk with a batarang, or try something more ingenious?

And how would the Doctor square off against the Joker, a man who fears nothing and cannot be reasoned with? Would he be goaded into violence against a villain who understands nothing else? Or would he set up an elaborate joke of his own? Would the Doctor pity the Joker, like he did the Master, and try to save him, or would he decide the Joker was beyond redemption?

It’s a shame there’s no history of Doctor Who crossovers, really. I mean in a way it’s good they’ve kept the brand pure, so to speak, but I don’t think a couple of one-off novelty editions really hurt a brand’s identity, and there’s certainly a rich history of Batman crossovers, even encompassing a fight with the Predator race from… Predator. What do you think? Is this something you’d like to see, or is there not that much overlap between fans of Doctor Who and fans of Batman?

*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.

Anyway, being a fan of terrifying myself with videos of the Slender Man, or ‘The Operator’ as he is known in MarbleHornets, I cajoled my mother into buying me Danielewski’s cult novel for Christmas. After reading the first few pages I remember thinking something along the lines of “this might be one of the most important novels since Ulysses”, which put me in mind of a quote from the experimental novelist Bryan Stanley Johnson where he asked “Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened?” True House of Leaves is very much more towards the post-modern than the modern, but it has very strong elements of modernism in the Joycean stream-of-consciousness side-notes of its main protagonist, and in its relentless T. S. Eliot-style theft of famous literary and mythological phrases.

In the post-modern fashion however, its central concept is as difficult to grasp as anything Italo Calvino of John Fowles ever wrote, approaching more the complexity of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (which I have not yet attempted to read, I must add), but I shall try to sum it up for you: A young Los Angeles tattoo-apprentice named Johnny Truant finds a series of notes in the apartment of an old recently-deceased blind man named Zampano. These notes were dictated by Zampano and amount to a critical work on the subject of a supposedly-famous documentary film that does not exist. To suggest that the film does in fact exist, the notes extensively reference other critical essays, many of which are also fictitious.

To draw a parallel, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman has sometimes been referred to as a ‘braided narrative’ due to the contextualising footnotes it contains, which support and enhance the content of the main story. This ‘braided narrative’ could be said to have two threads; the thread of the main story and the thread of the footnotes. House of Leaves shows a comparable, but more complicated, braided narrative in that there’s a constant interplay between the thread of the story of the fictitious film, the thread of narrative within the critical essays about the film, the fictitious titles referenced in the footnotes which, though non-existent, suggest ideas that support the critical arguments, the thread of Johnny Truant’s comments, and the final thread of the appendices, which contain such items as around 50 pages of letters sent between the young Johnny Truant and his institutionalised mother. If you want to get into proper post-modern terminology about it, you could say that House of Leaves is a novel that plays with a multitude of ontological layers, constantly shifting and undermining them to create feelings of uncertainty and paranoia in the reader which mirror the unpredictable and incomprehensible movements of the titular house.

That’s a point; I still haven’t really said what the novel, or rather the ‘film’ at its centre, is about. Well, the ‘film’ that Zampano’s notes discuss is called The Navidson Record which is a film made by a supposedly famous photographer about his family’s move to a house in the country. Despite being a documentary film, the notes reference the fact that a lot of people have called into question its authenticity, due to the events that occur within it. Nevertheless, it starts out ordinarily enough, with the family adjusting to their new life, but then the house starts to change: first, after they’ve been away for a few days, they return to find a cupboard on their landing which had not been there before and is not on any of the original blueprints. Next, the wife, Karen, is putting up some shelves in an alcove. In the film there is a moment when she puts books on these shelves and then they fall over like dominoes, but fall against the wall, and so remain on the shelf. When, by chance, the books are knocked over again a little while later, they fall off the shelf because the shelf is no longer flush with the wall. The most dramatic of the house’s changes, at least up to the point I’ve reached in the story, is that a doorway appears in the living room that, due to being in an outside wall, should lead straight into the garden, but instead leads into an ever-expanding unlit space, superficially resembling a house, but without any windows or furniture or fixtures or a very, very long list of very, very specific items that is detailed in one of the footnotes.

So that’s what the film is about, but of course the film is only the creation of Zampano. The thing is, Zampano died alone in ‘mysterious circumstances’, the implication being that his death was somehow linked to these notes. And then Johnny, reading the notes, starts getting really paranoid and lots of strange things start happening to him, which sounds pretty trite, but it’s handled with a reasonable degree of subtlety, and the structure of the book makes for an unusual way of building tension, going into long theoretical discourses about, for example, the scientific explanations and mythological representations behind the ideas of echoes, before suddenly revealing a moment in the film where one of the children’s voices can be heard to echo, despite there being no room in the house large enough to cause the phenomenon, except of course the impossible hallway through the living room. The book also does some clever things with layout so that the form mirrors the content, like for example in a chapter about labyrinths printing footnotes in weird places on the page, and having footnotes link to other footnotes, which then refer back to earlier or later footnotes and sometimes just go round in circles.

It’s clever in a way that is not entirely original, but is certainly under-used when most writers do still write as if the revolutions of modernism and post-modernism hadn’t ever occurred. Certainly I’m enjoying it and am eager to return to it each night, except for one criticism I have with the book: too much sex.

I don’t find Johnny Truant a particularly relatable or likeable  character, and he lacks the depth the rest of the novel delivers, but he’s passable. What is beginning to annoy me about him is that almost all of his longer notes turn into long, graphic descriptions of all the sex he has and, so far, I don’t think he’s described a single female character he hasn’t then had sex with, regardless of the context of their original meeting. Now, people have expressed to me a lot of shock at the amount of sex in my book (still on sale at Lulu.com, by the way), which I didn’t think was that gratuitous or even that shocking, eighty years after Ulysses and forty years after The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but House of Leaves is something else. Every single woman!

There’s a very fine line between art and pornography; D. H. Lawrence had to go to court over which side of the line Lady Chatterley’s Lover occupied, but the key factor with Lawrence’s novel was that the sex scenes were thematically necessary in establishing the development of the attitudes of the character’s and, in particular, Lady Chatterley’s sexual liberation. My work is more about sex and sexual tension than actually containing all that many full-on sex scenes, but where it does contain graphic scenes I hope they are always thematically justified, as necessary to the story as any other aspect. In House of Leaves however, unless Danielewski ties it all together at the end, the sex scenes read like superfluous erotic fiction, serving no purpose other than titillation. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with erotic fiction, if that’s your thing, but it detracts from the overall quality of the work here and, rather than, as it was possibly intended, holding the interest of otherwise bored male readers, distracts from what is otherwise a distinct and enthralling novel.

I never thought I’d really care about politics, being quite generally apathetic about a lot of things, and until recently, I never really knew anything about the different parties or what they stood for. I’ll tell you what made me start caring about politics though: Nick Griffin. When he was on Question Time, I watched the programme for the first time, and it inspired me. I sat there, and I watched his fat, lop-sided toad face articulate his racist ideologies, his holocaust denial, I listened to the audience booing him, and I realised at that moment that, as a person eligible to vote, I had to do everything in my power to make sure somone like that never got into any position of power.

Since then I’ve watched Question Time every week, and as the weeks went by, I started to notice something: the people on the show I most agreed with, usually the most vibrant, healthy looking people, compared to the tired, stressed Labour and Conservative politicians, always had a Liberal Democrat title appear under their face. When the politicians from the other parties were just spouting rhetoric and spin, the Lib Dem people always said something sensible, and then were promptly ignored. They were like Cassandra from Greek myth; able to predict the future, but with no one to hear their prophesies. So I became kindly disposed towards them, and I want to suggest why you should too.

But, if you’re already interested in policy, arguably the most important aspect of politics, then you probably already know from the leaders’ debates, manifestos, papers, etc., what the parties’ main proposals are. And if you don’t know about those already, then I’m sure you can find them out from more reliable sources than me. So let’s put aside all the political ideologies for a moment as I argue why I think everyone should vote Lib Dem based just on the names of the parties.

Let’s start with Labour. ‘Labour’. Who likes ‘labour’? Labour means doing hard work. It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘working hard’, which is a good, positive thing, it means doing hard work, as in ‘manual labour‘. No one does that for fun, people only do it if they have to. No one wakes up on a Sunday and thinks “you know what I’ll do today? I’ll do some labour, yeah!” And then it gets worse. You have ‘labour’ as in ‘child labour‘, ‘slave labour‘, ‘going into labour‘. Those aren’t good things, no one wants those things.

Next you have the Conservative party. Ain’t no party like a Conservative party, because if you went to a conservative party, how much fun would you have? Not much. “How was that conservative party?” “Not very good; they were conservative with the snacks and booze.” Being conservative is like not sharing, not sharing power, not sharing money, holding back, keeping for oneself, being guarded. A conservative person wouldn’t want you getting close to them, finding stuff out about them. But surely, you might say, being conservative can be a good thing, like conservatories, fruit conserves and conserving energy. Conservatories I’ll give you can be quite a good thing, though they’re often either much too cold or much too hot. Fruit conserve too is nice on toast, but no one calls it that any more. I mean, who does buy fruit conserves nowadays? People buy jam and marmalade. It’s basically the same thing. We can live without fruit conserves. Conserving energy on the other hand, no bones to pick with that. Same with conserving the environment, the natural world, wildlife conservation parks, they’re all excellent things. Ironic then that the British Conservative party contains some of the most vocal climate change deniers in the country. Sorry, I said I wouldn’t get into ideology (I just like the Conservatives least by a long way of the three main parties).

Onto Liberal Democrats. How can you not love that name? Let’s start with the first part. Liberal. Giving freely, in abundance. You like Radox bath products? We used to get Radox bath salts sometimes. They smell so nice. And you know what it used to say on the back of the box? “pour liberally into your bath”. Not “pour conservatively”, not “pour laboriously”: “pour liberally”. “How was that liberal (democrat) party?” “It was great, there was a liberal amount of booze and snacks, everyone had a good time.” Remember ‘slave labour‘? When William Wilberforce lead the movement to abolish English slavery, he liberated the slaves. You can’t argue with that. And liberal comes from the same root that provides liberty, and who doesn’t like having their Liberty, the freedom to live their lives as they want. And that’s just the first half of the name.

The second half gets better: ‘Democrat’. A ‘democrat’ is someone who believes in ‘democracy’. Only tyrants, xenophobes and those with deep-seated prejucidices don’t believe in Democracy. North Korea doesn’t have a democratic system. You want to live in North Korea? And in Iraq, Afghanistan, in many places across the world, people are prepared to die for democracy, for the right to vote. It’s more than just an idea, a cute little privelege: it’s the right to have your voice heard. Why would you not want that?

So, while the other two parties chose a single undesirable word for their names, the Liberal Democrats’ name is composed of two very good words. And if that on it’s own is not a good enough reason to vote for them on Thursday, perhaps you should go check out their policies or something.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

If this sounds cliche, like any number of romances, or even Shakespearian drama, it is, in a way. What Walpole sought to do with The Castle of Otranto was create a ‘new romance’, a new take on the tales of chivalric knights that had been written for several centuries before him. His new take involved adding elements of the supernatural and macabre, harking back to the superstitious Dark Ages when the story is set. He called this new style ‘gothic’.

For me, the most obvious examples of gothic literature are Dracula and Frankenstein, with Wuthering Heights being another novel incorporating gothic elements that springs to mind. But The Castle of Otranto was the first to introduce many of the elements that would define that genre: it has the overbearing castle, obviously, a secret underground castle, mysterious happenings, a ghost, a prophecy, a mysterious stranger, scenes of the macabre, and probably some other things I’m missing out.

The tightness of the narrative is what so impressed me though. There is no lingering upon the unexpected absurdity of giant pieces of armour, even on the giant foot some servants claim to have seen, rather, the characters act according to their most immediate desires: the prince relentlessly pursuing his son’s former fiance, Isabella trying to escape his pursuit, and everyone else caught up in the middle. There is no great complexity to the story or the characters, yet from simple elements, Walpole weaves a compelling narrative, which is, of course, the best way to write: to create something complex from simple elements. The Castle of Otranto is like, to paraphrase a metaphor from Philip Pullman’s Clockwork, a beautiful piece of machinery that can be wound up and set going in an intricate display of delicate precision.

That characters are archetypes, yes, have even been described as ciphers, which allows you to immediately understand them. But then, as part of the machinery, they are also more. The Prince, Manfred, for example, though tyrannical and monomaniacal during the events of the novella, can also be seen as a sympathetic character. He is not entirely unreasonable, except when gripped with passionate rage, and there is suggestion that in less desperate times he was a well-liked ruler of his people.

In short, The Castle of Otranto has enthused me. I was getting rather bored with Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, which isn’t as good as her later novels, and I’ve been losing enthusiasm for my own writing. My current work is far too aestheticised, and the story is being lost in it, so I no longer like it. I feel I may have to at some point, if not before my next assessment, significantly rewrite parts of it to make it more natural, more readable and more compelling. I kind of feel like I’d also like to try something new, because I’ve almost painted myself into a corner with my writing, gone so far down a Modernist-style route that I’ve lost my way. I think I need a fresh lease, though I’m not quite sure in what direction that will lie. For now though, since I’ve finished The Castle of Otranto, I have been inspired to return to Don Quixote, which is the most similar novel I currently have, and I had forgotten how well-written and how funny it is.

An explanation of what The Slender Man is can be found here, but if you can’t be bothered to read that, it’s just an urban myth that was fabricated on the internet. Some guy came up with it on this fake paranormal photos thread and attached a little story to it. The story is that there is this being who stalks and kidnaps children, who has no discernible face, wears a business suit and is able to extend its limbs and even increase their number. On the face of it, it sounds somewhat ridiculous and generic, but some of the fake photos of it are pretty good.

They’re nothing compared with the videos on MarbleHornets’s YouTube channel, however. I recommend starting with ‘Introduction‘ and moving along them in their numbered order as intended. They are brilliant. They are the sort of videos that YouTube, that the internet in general, exists for. Apparently there’s some sort of ARG (Alternative Reality Game) attached to them, which is ongoing, but the videos as a series are accessible without participating in that, so if you didn’t know what an ARG was, just watch them.

Want more explanation before you jump in and make the time commitment of a few minutes to the videos? Well, the story goes, as is explained in ‘Introduction’, that this guy Alex was making a student movie. Halfway through the project his behaviour changed, he became irritable and paranoid, and then he abandoned the project, even though he had filled up all these tapes. He planned to burn these tapes, but his friend, a fellow film student, asked to have them in order to save them from the fire. Alex agreed so long as the tapes were never mentioned again. The guy who took the tapes didn’t do anything with them for a while, then got around to watching them. He noticed that Alex had started filming himself more than the film, and was carrying a camera with him wherever he went. That’s the start of the story.

The videos themselves are presented somewhat out of order and are a mix of footage from Alex on the set of his film, Alex’s house and interviews with the film-cast. It’s all done incredibly realistically, without the contrivances of, say, Cloverfield, and for the most part the videos are quite mundane. The thing you start to notice is that in the background of a lot of the shots is a humanoid figure, often stood motionlessly watching. It shouldn’t be nearly as creepy as it is, and it wouldn’t be if the figure ever moved or attacked or anything, but it doesn’t. It just stands.

It seems that Alex has become somewhat obsessed with this figure, or perhaps it is obsessed with him. He often leaves his camera recording overnight while he sleeps, and often snatches it up when he becomes aware of something near him, frantically trying to capture footage of this creature which stalks him. He only ever gets snatches of it, except in the lingering day-time shots where it stands in the background.

The videos also have a clever use of various effects which make the footage much creepier. For example, some of the videos have massive sound distortion or no sound at all. When this is coupled with mundane footage of Alex location-scouting, it somehow becomes really sinister.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how or why these videos are so creepy, but they are. Go watch them. At night. With the lights off. I’ve never written a horror story, but if I did, this is the sort I would want to write, this sort dealing with pervasive insipid horror. There’s never yet any direct confrontation with anything, with the Slender Man figure, just a feeling that he’s always there, waiting, watching. It’s the stuff of childhood nightmares.

There are a couple of minor instances when the videos border on the farcical, suffer from being, as they obviously were, made by students, but as YouTube videos they are perfect, they deliver the kind of story, the kind of horror experience, no film, no conventional novel, could ever hope to. That they’re creepy in spite of the Slender Man figure being acknowledged to have been created on the internet from a few explicitly fake photographs, is all the more to their credit. It rather reminded me of something Stephen King once said, which I can’t remember exactly, so I’ll paraphrase. Something along the lines of:

“My audience are the intelligent, rational people who does not believe in such things as ghosts and monsters, but keep their feet under the covers just in case.”

That’s the effect I felt the Slender Man videos had on me: of course I don’t believe it, it’s just a story, but I wrapped myself up tight in my covers after watching them, and I turned more lights on than usual when I went to the toilet in the night.

Go check out:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets

and

http://www.youtube.com/user/totheark

When you’re young, you feel your youth will last forever, you can’t ever imagine being old and achey and not able to do things. When you’re young, summer holidays last forever, at the start at least, six weeks is forever. Often, I feel, people, unless it’s just me, can’t imagine feeling any different to how they feel at a certain time. If you’re in the depths of a dark depression, you can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. When you feel happy, you wonder whatever you were so down about. For a few days before Christmas I was ill, some sort of flu or a strong cold or something. It was only three, maybe four, days, but when I was lying in bed all congested and nauseous, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel like that. Now I’m in my final year of university, Childhood’s End, and yet the days and weeks and months, what’s left of them, stretch out before me and I can’t imagine them ever ending, that there will ever be anything other than the house I live in now, and the people I live with now, and the course I’m on now.

I wonder how I’ll grow old, I wonder too what will happen in my lifetime. I was talking with my grandmother the other day about her life and the times she grew up in, and it seems unlikely the twenty-first century will contain anything like the technological advancement that was seen in the twentieth. And yet scientists are a lot more technology savvy, and futurists seems more confident in their predictions. I remember Ray Kurzweil recently talking about the possibilities of matter teleportation in the next hundred years and I think he said something about time travel, though he though Faster-than-Light travel was still at least five-hundred years off, if it was at all possible (it was on a recent Guardian science podcast if anyone’s interested).

Anyway, my grandmother is old, though it’s easy to forget. Right now she’s closer to her eightieth birthday than her seventieth, but she often seems about twenty years younger. Sometimes I think she works too hard, does too much, but then, as far as I can tell, that’s what keeps her going. She dyes her hair, doesn’t have many wrinkles, frequently gets my ten-year-old cousins off to school, cooks, cleans, tends the garden, and meets weekly at a lace society. Perhaps she is like a shark in that if she ever stops, she’ll die, but I can’t imagine either of these things happening, she seems far too tenacious to ever succumb to the reaper, at least for a good few years yet. Maybe everyone feels that way about their grandparents, their parents, that because they always have been around, they always will be around, but I can only see my grandmother going in the next ten, twenty years through illness or some accident, not age, which of course I most strongly hope against.

That’s what happened to my grandfather. He died of cancer four or five years ago, younger than my grandmother is now, but if he hadn’t, I think he’d have gone on for another decade: his father was eighty or ninety when he died, and his father’s father about the same. Seventy years is a long time, an almost impossibly long time to a twenty-year-old. “Life is long and you are young and there is time to build again, but then one day you find ten years have got behind you, no-one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

This post is perhaps getting rather morbid, but maybe that’s not uncommon for me. Maybe it’s just my Victorian Sensibilities coming through. But from time to time I wonder, as I imagine everyone does, what I’ll be like when I’m older. I suppose it depends entirely on the sort of life I lead. People with money, who live comfortable lives, often seem rather more radiant than people who don’t, though this might an impression formed from a few examples. I fear I’ll look gaunt, or more gaunt, when I grow old. I look a lot like my father, but I think my face is thinner and sharper, and I have more prominent cheek-bones, which makes my eyes appear more heavily set. I’ll have dark insets below my eyes, and sallow cheeks. I’ll have lines where my dimples are, but probably not too many crows feet because I don’t smile enough. Or maybe it won’t be so bad. I don’t think I’d mind so much if I went bald, but I’d rather be properly bald than just have thinning hair on top, like my grandfather had and my father is getting. Maybe I’d just close-shave my head and wear more hats. I’d definitely try a beard though, and I’ll be disappointed if I can’t grow a good one by then.

But enough about me, for now at least. The Horizon programme got me thinking about some of my favourite literary passages about growing old, and I’ve thought of three of them, which I shall now divulge in no particular order. The first is from that bastion of English poetry Alfred Lord Tennyson, and from one of my all-time favourite poems, Ulysses:

“I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all Experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

…

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

This next is from one of the most poignant short story’s I’ve ever read, William Faulkner’s Tomorrow:

“Uncle Gavin rose, and I remember how he looked at the jury – the eleven farmers and store-keepers and the twelfth man, who was to ruin his case – a farmer, too, a thin man, small, with thin grey hair and that appearence of hill farmers – at once frail and work-worn, yet curiously imperishable – who seem to become old men at fifty and then become invincible to time … The lowly and invincible of the earth – to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Finally, a few lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -

(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin -

(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

…

I grow old… I grow old…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?

.

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

.

I do not think they will sing to me.”

Finally, to close this off, and relating back to the Faulkner quote about men who are old at fifty and never grow older, I’ve noticed before now that the animals and plants that live the longest always seem to be the ones the look the oldest to begin with. Tortoises and elephants for example, living up to two-hundred years and eighty years respectively. They start out all wrinkly and old-looking, then never get older. Same with really old trees, the ones that live the longest always seem to grow as gnarled, twisted things and remain that way for hundreds, even thousands of years (there was one tree in Attenborough’s The Secret Life of Plants which was almost five-thousand years old and is believed to be the oldest living thing on the planet). Whereas other animals, like say dogs and cats, never really look old until usually the last sixth months of their life, they tend to look just the same once they’ve grown to adult size and then they die after ten or twenty years. Maybe the key to growing old is looking old…

One of the reasons the film is so good, despite being obviously low-budget, is that it works with its budget-constraints rather than against them. Most budget horrors over-reach, trying to create scary, supernatural monsters, and falling into the traps of cliche. There were only a couple of times in Satan’s Little Helper where the effects let it down, but these were minor and brief. Mostly the film avoids gore, making its sudden appearances all the more shocking, not that the film relies on jump-scares.

Perhaps most surprising about the film was the quality of the characters. The casting was perfect, though I’m not sure whether that was down to the actor’s being great actor’s, or the roles suiting them so well, but they were all really believable. The kid for example, who is the titular Little Helper, was a much more accurate portrayal of a child than anything in, say, Spielberg. He’s obsessed with this violent videogame, strangely enough called ‘Satan’s Little Helper’, and it colours his perception, so that everything becomes an extension of the game. When he meets his sister’s new boyfriend, who he’s jealous of, he immediately threatens him with the wrath of Satan, when some other kids mock his costume, again he tells them they’ll be sorry when he finds Satan to go trick-or-treating with him. It would be easy to suggest SLH is a negative critique of violent videogames and their affect on children, but rather, it never moralises, never condemns the videogame, and instead seems to be about how any character, any hero-figure, even one as unlikely as Satan, can capture a child’s imagination.

This comes across in more subtle ways, like if you look closely in a few of the shots in the kid’s bedroom, there’s some crayon drawings of Satan’s Little Helper on his wall. It’s little things like this, as well as the way the characters interact with each other, that suggests a life beyond the plot-line of the movie for them. It all feels very natural, which is rare enough in any film, let alone a horror film. But, this being a horror film, of course scary stuff has to happen:

The kid storms off in his SLH costume after his sister invites her new boyfriend to come trick-or-treating with them. As he walks down the sunlit road he witnesses a man in a costume dumping a body on a bench outside a house. “Wow, that looks so real!” he exclaims, peering over the fence. He’s similarly impressed as the man goes into the next house down the road and, after a few moments, drags out a man with a knife stuck in his chest and makes him part of a graveyard display. The kid realises this must be Satan and so offers to become his helper. The masked man agrees without speaking and the kid asks why he does not speak. “Is it because you don’t need to?” The man nods his head.

Here the obvious comparison with John Carpenter’s Halloween surfaces: A silent, masked psychopath. Except this film is far more orignal and, even, far better than Halloween, if perhaps not quite as scary. Certainly it’s more believable than the essentially invincible Michael Myers ever was, though where Satan’s Little Helper really excels over Halloween is in its dark absurdist humour. Most of this comes from the kids utter obliviousness to the sinister nature of his ‘master’ and from the way Satan gets his meanings across without words. But the film never sacrifices believability for comedy, and what it does best of all is quickly turn from comedy to horror and back again. There’s a few times in the film where Satan interacts with the kid’s family, and both the kid’s sister and his mother believe that Satan is the sister’s boyfriend, an amatuer actor, ‘in character’ for Halloween. The kid keeps saying “that’s not Alex, that’s Satan” but they assume it’s all part of the game, indulging the kid as grown-ups do, and perhaps a little swept away with the Halloween spirit themselves. It’s funny in the way that cases of mistaken identity in fiction often are, but there’s several times when the sister or mother nearly figure out that something’s not right, until there’s a sudden interuption, usually by the kid, that throws them off. SLH’s handling of suspense is pretty masterful.

Then there’s a point where the sister does realise that the guy in the mask probably isn’t her boyfriend, and is simultaneously trying to convince her mother while trying to hide her knowledge from Satan, but her mother thinks the sister is now wrapped up in the game. There’s a really palpable feeling of the slow realisation that dawns in the sister as she moves from elation to annoyance to fear. But of course, knowing who Satan isn’t is not the same as knowing who he is when he’s wearing a mask. From the beginning it’s obvious that Satan is just a man in a mask, but rather than try to hide the fact it becomes a key feature of the story, for a mask can always be changed, put on someone else to throw people off. And what does Satan change into? A Jesus costume. One could read into that fairly deeply, but the film has no pretence of encouraging you to: it’s a nice little bit of irony that was well set-up earlier in the narrative.

So yeah, I quite like this film. I’d recommend it at whatever price you can find it for, but if you see it in a Poundshop, among Dead Man’s Hand and Skinned Deep and Zombie Chronicles and Doll Graveyard, you’ve found a diamond in the rough.