Hunting Captain Nairac

 

I was at the Queens Film Theatre this afternoon for the last day of the Docs Ireland festival. The showing was "Hunting Captain Nairac" a documentary about the search for the human remains of people disappeared by republican forces during the troubles, in this instance an army intelligence officer who famously walked into a bar in South Armagh full of 200 people and was never seen again. It was an interesting and well made documentary it answered a lot of questions and debunked some old myths but it did leave me with a few questions. 

1. It did a lot to humanise Nairac and present his complexities as a person. Fair enough I suppose but I feel like they might be overegging things a little. It presents his Catholicism and seemingly genuine hibernophillia as being in contradiction with his role as an army intelligence officer. That is very simply not the case as anyone who is familiar with British colonial practice can tell you, that just made him better at his job, the British founded the SOAS to train their cadre in the complexities of the cultures they were sending them out to imperialise.

2. Fair play for trying to dispel 2 big myths you'd hear about Niarac, that his body was "fed to the pigs" as my aul Uncle Danny (RIP) used to say (and that was way before Snatch put that particular method of body disposal into the public consciousness). And that the rumours of his involvement with The Miami Showband massacre (which I also heard and believed once) was probably flack generated by the PIRAs counter intelligence machine. That said the extent and nature of his actual activities isn't really touched on. Troublingly, what he was literally said to be doing in the bar that night was to "Further a relationship" with the sister of an IRA activist. I'm sorry but to me that sounds like the very common practice in intelligence circles of undercovers getting in with a particular situation through a sexual relationship, which is rightly considered to be a form of SA as you can't meaningfully consent to sex with someone who is misrepresenting themselves at that level. That's an implication that seems rightly obvious to anyone familiar with these issues. Not that if it was the case that it justifies what happened to him, corpse-napping is a horrible thing to happen and its no more cool when the 'Ra were doing it than when the  CIA trained secret police were doing it across Latin America in the 70s and 80s or when Israel do it today, it just seems odd that that's put out there and handwaved very quickly. 

My take away from it was that it seemed oddly in step with the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man that was also featured at the Docs Ireland festival the night before (with live commentary by the editor!) about another eccentric wee man with terminal Main Character syndrome who intentionally put himself in the line of danger doing something he was passionate about and paid the ultimate price for it.

I do sincerely hope that his body is found and returned to his people. Its good that for the future generations here to heal properly we need a full reckoning with the past. I just don't want that to come at the cost of downplaying the seriousness of any aspect of the conflict in the name of "balance".

"Comics" and "Graphic Novels", definitions

 It started innocently enough. Someone on a forum I'm on just asked the question as to what the terms meant and what the difference was in the context of a discussion of a particular genre (horror in that instance) and while it does seem like a fairly simple thing to ask and explain, to do so actually requires a little bit of digging into the history of the art-form and strikes at a fundamental issue with it, i.e.  that in spite of four decades of a counter cultural movement in its favour for recognition many still see it as an innately childish genre.

Its also a question I've seen asked and have personally answered many times before so this post to my own blog is essentially so I have the answer down in one place handy to send to the next person who asks.

The preferred term is sequential art. We're talking about a series of pictures, anything from two to potentially infinity, arranged in a specific order to express something, like to tell a story or invoke a feeling or idea. This might or might not also include text though usually does. The general public however have been calling this art form "comics" for more than a century. This comes from when news papers would have short 2-4 panel "comic strips" (so called because they were typically meant to be amusing diversions from the daily news, and aka The Funnies) alongside the text, which some enterprising publishers started putting into "comic books" to sell on their own without the accompanying news articles etc.

Although this came to encompass may other genre, popular ones being horror, war, crime, romance and of course Superheros, "comic books" still stuck for the format. In most of the english speaking world these were and remained popular from the 20s onwards. In the 1950s there was a bizarre moral panic in the United states about juvenile delinquency and the effects of these comic books on the fragile minds of the youth which led to congressional hearings and the industry shitting itself and self-censoring anything that wasn't explicitly for children (this would be repeated elsewhere in the anglosphere by Communist Party front organisations, and if that sounds like I'm crazy or making this up, I fucking wish). This killed off most of everything except superhero comics put out by the Big 2, who would become DC and Marvel who instituted the Comics Code, which committed them to not put out anything remotely adult or even YA.

This state of affairs would continue for decades (in the English speaking world, South America, Continental Europe and most notably Japan always had and continue to have thriving varied comics scenes), with some exceptions in the underground and indie press. What happened eventually, to really simplify things, was writers who came up through 2000AD in Britain from the counterculture, starting with Alan Moore would give the entire industry a huge shot in the arm and actually write for the big American publishers with a level of sophistication and a subversive ethos that was lacking. It was still superhero stuff but they were bringing the psychedelia and the punk attitude, and some technical innovations to the storytelling itself. This eventually got picked up by the mainstream media who coined the term "Graphic Novel" to differentiate stuff like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns from the kiddie shit, long soap operas with guys in pyjamas and capes beating each other up. It would also get applied to Maus and retroactively to previous attempts to do more adult work in the medium, like A Contract With God.

Also, in most mainstream book retailers something you'll see labelled and sold as Graphic Novels collections of works originally sold as individual issues of 24 page comic books where a complete story line or "arc" that tells a relatively self contained narrative is put into one volume. In the west these are more precisely referred to as Trade Paper Backs or TPBs, though that's an industry term and Graphic Novel or comic are as good as any. I only really include it here for the sake of completion. In Manga culture when you see the similar thing of serialised stories taken out of their respective periodicals (Manga tend to be sold in huge compilations, a bit like 2000AD but much larger, Shonen  Jump and Animage being two important ones) some like to use the Japanese word Tankebon.

Personally I use sequential art as much as I can but only where appropriate, its the correct term but is really only known to those already acquainted. Most of the time though I'll use Comics as its what most people know. I don't like "Graphic Novel" except when specifically referring to something that has been written in a long format to tell a single contained story, i.e. like a novel, because there's an implied snobbery and hierarchy over mere "comics".

Things I Enjoyed in 2024

 

Having made and successfully kept my New Years resolution of last year (which I’ll get onto) this years is to write more and actually use the blog. Even if at this point blogging is a dead art form and nobody is reading this stuff or likely to make me even a modicum of “internet-famous”, it’ll at least alleviate the mild guilt I feel about not having written. This is essentially just for me, but I hope it’ll be something at least a couple of people might get something out of. 

This is going to take the format of a SuperEyepatchWolf season roundup video. Maybe not as good (I wish I had the work ethic that guy has tbh). This is really more about cataloguing and recording where I am with certain things. It will contain a mixture of things that are brand new in the sense that they came out this year, as well as a few things that will be noted as such that came out in previous years but I only got to experience this year for the first time.

In No Order:

Gaming:

So I’ve kind of stopped playing new computer games. I got back into gaming over the pandemic, got a PS4, played everything I’d been hearing about and wanting to play for years. It was great, but before the start of last year I kind of ran right out of steam. All I want out of games now is something diverting I can do with my hands while I listen to the sort of podcasts I actually want to listen to beginning to end and not use as a sleep aid. I’m still playing Streets of Rage 4, always the Survival Mode from the DLC where you have one life and have to fight your way through increasing hordes of enemies in an enclosed environment while levelling up your core attributes or adding buffs to types of attacks. I’m also playing a cheap Pool simulator (its just Pool in an Unreal 4 engine) and Slay The Spire. To this I have very recently added Balatro, a game with Poker and making poker hands at its core. 

I did get back briefly into playing Magic The Gathering on Arena for a couple of months but that software is a piece of janky shit that after a certain update just became crash-y and unusable on both the devices I was using it on, and is basically unplayable on a mobile phone anyway, like how small the text is makes it functionally unusable unless you already know the cards by the cover art and don’t need to read what anything does. Yeah you fucked up there Wizards, you could have had me back suckling on your milky duds for the odd fix that beating up on people from across the world at Magic can give me, but you bollocksed it.

Podcasts:

Yeah I ought to say what podcasts I’ve been into listening to while gaming since I literally just mentioned they’re my entire reason for continuing to game. Chapo Trap House, I don’t agree 100% with everything they say but we hate a lot of the same things and they are genuinely good crack. They called the US election correctly and their coverage of the proceedings has been sterling in terms of making that whole mess explicable to someone like me over here with the rest of the world looking on at the absolute mess happening over there. TrashFuture, a podcast with a similar bent and humour but by queer Brits. The Only Podcast About Movies, slightly lighter fare but good analytical takes on mostly contemporary cinema. I also like, though don’t listen to quite as much as I did, RevLeftRadio – a Marxist podcast on a variety of subjects including; History, Current Affairs, Theory, Philosphy, Esoterica and hosted by a Canadian Maoist called Brett with a blessedly ecumenical approach to intra-left factionalism.

The ones I do listen to for sleep I do so not because they are boring or anything (it actually has to be interesting or it won’t hold my conscious attention, which is part of the trick I’m playing on myself), but because they are soothing and not likely to get me angry or excitable the way listening to stuff about politics generally will. These include; The Blindboy podcast - which I’ve been on since pretty early in the day, Ghibliotheque, A Podcast About Studio Ghibli - but has actually come to encompass all sorts of animated media and this year has covered the works of Makoto Shinkai, Linklaters animated films and the work of Nick Park, and The French Whisperer ASMR. Ghost Notes, a podcast broadly about music of all sorts from the two guys that do the Polyphonic and 12tone Youtube channels is the real best of both of those projects and the guys bounce off each other nicely.

YouTube:

This seems to follow on neatly from talking about Podcasts. Feels like I’m not coming across many new channels that are really grabbing my attention but I’ve got more than enough established favourites now to eat up as much of my spare time as I can throw at it. Novarra Media continues to be a good news resource. Iconic early video-essayist Every Frame a Painting returned after an 8 year hiatus with a whopping two new videos over four months, and it being an oldschool Youtube channel, these have been ten and five minutes respectively. Better than nothing, still great quality, one can hardly complain. 

Overly Sarcastic Productions and Extra Credits / Extra History continue to be an absolute joy in terms of delivering a weekly fix of good informative history and media-analysis. Red of OSP (the team don’t use real names, just colours like in Reservoir Dogs) is an absolute super-star, like if I could get to live in a house and hang out and just have the crack all day with anyone off the internet right now it would be Red by miles, hands down. 

Super Eyepatch Wolf, my distant cousin (maybe) whom I’ve already mentioned, continues to be one of the best things on the platform. I only saw his guest appearance on the Trash Taste Podast (not to be confused with Trash Future, a different trashy thing altogether) this year for the first time and it was an absolute joy and also got me into watching their stuff again which I had done in the past but bounced off for some reason. 

Fiq The Signifier's ongoing coverage of and eventual long form video essay on the Kendrick V Drake Beef that went on last spring and summer was absolutely magnificent. 

The Leftist Cooks, only managed 4 essays this year, fair enough considering they managed to conceive and birth a child between them and their essays are all feature length these days. Still killing it, really insightful and heartfelt with a lot of intellectual heft. This is maybe best exemplified in the video essay where they announce their good news itself, that sends Neil into a deep dive on the topic of anti-natalism to the point where he writes a book length refutation of David Benatar that you can buy from their patreon. Based.

Georg Rockall-Schmidt, the man is out here doing gods work. Some media analysis, just him talking movies or about stuff on TV with a reasonable amount of anti-corporate videos where he just goes ham on some particular set of capitalist bastards, be they Shein, Temu, The Sacklers, American Healthcare in general. I’m living for how snarky my boy is.

Less on the political side, the music channel Trash Theory (again, not to be confused with either Trash Future or Trash Taste) continues to be one of the most consistently entertaining and informative things on the platform. Its kind of a 90s nostalgia channel but he does cover other eras and some contemporary music. He always sounds genuinely enthused about whatever it is he's covering,  in a way that brings you along with him even if you're not mad into whatever the topic is yourself.

Music:

(Sigh). Y’know. I’ve not been on top of music at all. I’ve barely listened to anything new. I think when I stopped DJing or their being any prospect of me DJing much ever again, even for myself or to post online, that just lost my focus on finding new stuff. What I have been listening to, Cerys Matthews and Mark Radcliffe’s Blues and Folk shows on BBC Radio 2, Sherelle’s Saturday night shows on Radio 6 and other random bits and pieces on the BBC digital radio stations which I’ll generally have on as background when I’m doing my breakfast or dinner.

I loved the ØXN debut LP that came out in 2023. ØXN are a side project by Radie and the other non-Lynch member of Lankum that is if anything even darker and more Lankum-y than Lankum itself. I missed opportunities to get to see them play live this year, I literally didn’t make any festivals this year, to my shame.

What I did enjoy also that was actually from this year was Chelsea Wolfe’s latest album She Reaches Out to She where she’s still bringing the dark doom-metal-y goodness but has gone more industrial and a little trip-hop-y. She played Belfast on the tour for this one and I did get to see her, and she was great.

I did manage to get to a fair few nights and gigs about Belfast, and over to Glasgow with my sister to see Max Cooper’s big AV show. I think the best one might well have been getting to see Caribou live in the Telegraph building, which luckily for me has now been immortalised forever as it was a Boiler Room event.

TV: 

I’ve been on quite an animation tip this year. I’ve managed to finally get around to Star Vs The Forces of Evil and Amphibia on Disney as well as the masterful OK KO, Lets Be Heros!, of which I will not say too much other that they were really good since a couple of them may or may not feature on the return of a regular segment that has long been in hiatus on this corner of the internet. Arcane came through with a second and final season which while not quite up to the standard set by season one still fucking well kills dead near enough any other western animation series. 

I watched and mostly enjoyed The Dragon Prince, like I only started it this year not knowing that the final season was dropping in December. If I’d have known it was written by the Avatar The Last Airbender (which I did rewatch and loved all over again) team I probably would have got to it sooner tbh. If has what are for me some rough edges, the world is nowhere near as interesting or unique as Avatar, its just some guys DnD campaign – which is fine just not that original, I don’t like the occasional segues into goofy naturalistic dialogue. The tone shifts are jarring, to me at least, but not enough that I bounced off. It also falls for some ball achingly obvious tropes in storytelling. Its actually decent though and worth seeing. The animation style is really class, really pleasing to see something in 3d that is that old and doesn’t look like ass.

Speaking of tone shifts and a “some guys DnD campaign” setting, The Legend of Vox Machina was a whole heap of fun once again. The tone shifts were seamless and yes, this is literally a DnD Campaign turned into a series but they nailed the transition its just great fun.

Anime; I feel like I’ve rinsed the well of classics from the OVA era that I would care about. At least until Angel’s Egg makes it back to the big screens (maybe this year?). I have actually been enjoying some new stuff. NGL, those are some really basic picks for those in the know and will probably appear on most if not all anime commentators Best Of The Year lists. I will mostly just watch a small selection of the stuff I think sounds interesting from the handful of people I follow in the space and maybe see getting recommended on my socials. I’m not out here seeking out the really obscure stuff, I don’t think they still make much of the type of anime I like anymore, but the odd thing that filters through I get a lot of joy from.

Dan De Dan is one of the big anime series of this year and its not hard to see why. On paper the plot my make it appear to be more typical shonen weeb trash but it was done by Science Saru, the studio led by the guy that did Mind Game and who also did the Devilman Cry-Baby series a few years back. It scratches that itch for the genuinely unhinged shit that Anime has been lacking for a while. 

I really liked Frieren: Beyond The Journeys End, a very meditative and mostly glacially slowly paced fantasy series about an Elf mage who is, as elves are in fantasy, extremely long  lived, going on immortal that does have some great high fantasy magical combat in it but is mostly about the idea of human connections and what its like to live long enough to see your mates live and die while you stay essentially the same person. 

Less serious but equally good (better imo), Delicious In Dungeon. Like some of the other stuff I’ve been talking about it’s a very DnD-esque setting but it dares to ask questions that DnD players rarely ask in these last 50 odd years of the game, like what does dragon taste like? Does a gelatinous cube have any vitamins and minerals or is it just empty calories? Are the giant mushroom monsters that you have to fight some times going to kill you or get you high if you try to eat them or are they just a good source of zinc to the weary dungeon-crawling murder-hobo? You wouldn’t ear a person, probably not an Orc either but would Merefolk be more like fish or people, and is it ok to eat them? Its really just a good sprawling adventure fantasy with some great characters and also some interesting dissections of the notions of taboo and the value of good nutrition.

In terms of live TV, yeah there’s been some fire stuff out there. Something I only watched for the first time this year though it’s been out for a while; Wu Tang: An American Saga with the kid from the middle section of Moonlight as RZA I found and watched earlier in the year. Yeah it takes some liberties with the truth and leaves some stuff out for dramatic purposes (like RZA and ODB both had kids by the time the main plot starts, this does not come up at all) but it does their whole story and schtick really well. There’s three seasons, the third season isn’t quite as good just because the story itself IRL is less compelling than the coming together and coming up of these outsiders from Staten Island, seeing them get rich and famous and fall out with each other is not nearly as much fun. We are spared seeing Ason’s fall into madness and self destruction though that does somewhat hang over the narrative its not handled in a way that’s prurient or anything. 

Say Nothing, is yet another somewhat controversial take on actual historical events. This is about Sinn Fein / The Provos, the Finucane murders and the life of Dolours price. It managed to recreate the old Divis tower block accurately enough, down to the vibe, that it retraumatised my Mum who lived there during the events dramatized in the series. It’s good seeing something made about here with that sort of attention to detail and period accuracy, that also treats all sides reasonably fairly. Like there’s literal Gerry Adams in there as a low-key villain in the piece and he’s not some sort of moustache twirling cartoon. Shame that they blew a lot of the good will in a completely unnecessary plot point in the last episode that only seems to be in there for the sake of a Bad TV Writing climactic reveal involving one of the few players in the narrative that’s still alive and as I write is in the process of suing Disney. Worth watching in spite of all that.

The new series of Interview With A Vampire kept up the quality of the first and was if anything even better than the first. That show does a lot right, the fifth episode about the circumstances of the actual first interview that fills in a lot of Molloy’s character and story was just edge of the seat stuff from beginning to end. Like if you know the book or the film, you know exactly what happens to Claudia and Louis in Paris and you just spend the season waiting for the other shoe to drop, but this was unique to the series (afaik) and made for really gut-wrenching emotive TV. 

Books:

I was mostly using Duolingo to learn gaeilgé in my down time this year. I got the paid version after getting my first bit of paid work of the year and have finished the Irish course (standard Irish though, not Ulster unfortunately). That and The Mists Of Avalon being a long slog, and not just because of the length of the book or the writing style (see my review), I didn't really get reading nearly as much this year as usual. I did hit my years reading goals of finishing the three series I'd stated in the previous couple by reading the final books in the series. These were Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (a good cap to the trilogy but the first book definitely rocks the others, okay to read on its own), Ancillary Mercy, which finishes the trilogy out well but doesn’t add a whole lot to the last ones in terms of world building and Emperor of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay which is the second of his books about Sarantium, the Byzantium of his fictional universe that runs analogous to our own medieval and ancient history but isn’t and so gives him license to tinker with the world building and throw in some magic and supernatural elements. It was pretty good, probably best read straight after part one Sailing To Sarantium and not a year-ish apart like I did it. 

Other things I read and liked included Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, the latest Blindboy Boatclub collection Topographia Hibernica which only came out 2023, and the collection of shorts by Norman Spinrad from the 1960s No Direction Home.

Comics / graphic novels, wise I read Bone for the first time. Its cool, like very a typical high fantasy that just happens to have three Fleischer Bros. / Old Disney cartoon characters as the Hobbits that bungle their way into the scenario. I also started Berserk, completed the first volume of the big over-sized collected editions just before the end of the year. I am already digging the vibe and we’re only just getting to what most people agree is The Good Bit, the first part of The Golden Age is what that edition finishes on.

Best book though was Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. A new book from this year that is not his first non-Tingler as in actual proper novel but is the first one I’ve read and its incredibly good. Easily as good an exploration of Queer people’s relationship with certain types of media and place in that media as I Saw The TV Glow (which tbf I also liked a lot, even if it didn’t make my top 10). The prose is a constant pleasure, readable while also being wry and funny, scary or disturbing where it needs to be. It has a lot of heart in it too. Its also low-key based AF, as in the subtext is almost pure Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s exactly where Chuck is coming from but I see it and even if unconscious its definitely in there.

Movies:

I already have a top ten for the year up on my Letterboxd. Just to reiterate what I said there, Kneecap was my favourite of the year closely followed by The Substance. When I get to my favourites of this decade these will definitely both be in there. I am very much the target audience of Kneecap, or course I’m going to love it. I have been semi-adjacent to that life in my own city for parts of my own, some of the stuff in the film literally happened to my mates, I’ll not say what so as not to implicate anyone living or dead but it is very close to my heart, even if I know for a fact that they aren’t the complete spides they make themselves out to be or the best rappers on the local scene (though they are definitely the best at doing it bilingually and best at promoting themselves). The Substance gave me everything my body-horror loving degenerate arse could ever wish for in a film, a very straight-forwards feminist allegory that goes bat shit in the last act and is really gross, people were leaving. People left my showing like 20 minutes before the end, that never happens but they must have just been like “yeah I’m already two hours into this thing and we are close to the end but this is already way past my comfort zone and is just going to get worse from here – I’m out”. Normally I would decry such behaviour as weakness but in this case I say fair play to those people. It did just keep getting worse.

We had a lot of other great films this year, see the list. A few of the big Awards-bait movies from last year that dropped in January here were, right enough, some of the best most interesting, medium pushing and generally great films of the year, Poor Things, Zone of Interest, All Of Us Strangers, The Holdovers really had us spoiled. It was a good year for horror - Oddity, Longlegs, In A Violent Nature, Stop Motion. Big Popcorn actioners gave us Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, Dune 2 and Deadpool Vs Wolverine (which was essentially a Zucker Brothers screwball comedy set in the current Marvel comic book movie landscape). Not such a good year imo for animated features, 2022 and 2023 really had us spoiled, but The First Slam Dunk was very enjoyable, we got a new Wallace and Gromit film which was awesome and my favourite animated film of the year Robot Dreams was an absolute joy. It was though a good year for Irish cinema. I’ve already sung Kneecap’s praises (did I mention just how viscerally funny it all is? No? Well it’s hilarious), but we also did have Small Things Like These and That They May Face The Rising Sun, which was incredible and will hopefully bring John McGahern’s legacy and work to a new generation of people across the world.

 

I think that just about covers everything I feel it’s necessary to say. As I said up top I’m trying to get back into updating this thing a bit more regularly. I have a steady enough job now I could see going for a wee while that could give me the sort of schedule I could see myself building a decent routine around that might lead to me being able to do more writing. Here’s hoping anyway so watch this space. 

Monkey Man (Dev Patel, 2024) A Review

Of all the various genres of contemporary popular culture the superhero origin story feels like the most played out, with the action-revenge thriller not far behind it. So it seems odd that last weeks release Monkey Man, which is decidedly situated in both and playing the tropes of each fairly straight, might be one of the freshest and most exciting releases of the year.

The film is a passion project from the British-South East Asian actor Dev Patel and marks his directorial debut. Some readers may remember him from his start on the TV series Skins as part of the first gen, or from later more prominent roles in Slumdog Millionaire, C.H.A.P.P.I.E. and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel series, or my favourite, David Lowery’s Art-House fantasy adaption of The Green Knight. He has definitely done some good work over the years and worked with some of the most interesting directors working at the moment. However as a martial artist since childhood, long before he was interested in acting and fan of action cinema he’d always wanted to be in one of those films, preferably as the lead. Problem was though that the film industry doesn’t tend to see him in that sort of role, and his only way to be in that sort of film would be as “the guy who hacks the mainframe or the comedy side-kick”, unless he made the film himself, which is what Monkey Man is.

 

As much inspired by the classic Hong Kong Kung Fu films, post 2000s South Korean revenge thrillers and The Raid series moreso than anything from the various ‘x’-ywoods of the Indian sub-continent, the film nonetheless wears its status as a product of Indian culture on its sleeve. The titular Monkey is based off of Patel hearing the stories from the Ramayana from his Indian grandfather, specifically that of Hanuman, the Monkey King who assists Rama over the course of the epic, mostly by fighting various gods, mortals and demons with his magic club and martial arts abilities (and yes, if that sounds familiar, this is also widely thought by scholars to be a major inspiration for Sun Wukong, the King Monkey from the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West). 

 

As well as the references to Hindu mythology, authentic Hindi dialogue in some places, the Indian trad elements in the score and OST, and the general aesthetic which does a brilliant job of depicting the modern Indian city as a hellish neon-lit cyberpunk dystopia, it also shows its cultural specificity in the social commentary and messaging. It seems that conscious of this being his first directorial feature and possibly his only, Dev Patel threw every single thing he had at the screen and made sure he said everything he could conceivably want to say, and the top of that list was to stick two middle fingers up at the BJP.

The story of the film concerns a nameless protagonist who infiltrates an exclusive club for the ruling class of a fictional Indian city in order to enact revenge on the corrupt head of Police responsible for the destruction of his village when he was a child. Along the way he tries and initially, fails, succeeding after finding community with other among oppressed to fight not just for his own personal vengeance but for all those dispossessed by the ruling Hinduja elite. The club not-for-nothing is called Kings (the icon styled after a European coronet) in a fairly obvious nod to the Raj and India’s postcolonial status and is full of portraits of the co-opted rulers through which the British exercised control over India. It is full of not just the criminal elites and dirty cops, civil servants and politicians but religious figures, one in particular Baba Shakti who over the course of the film becomes emblematic of how the corruption of the Hindu religious traditions by capital plays into everything.

The story behind the scenes seems to have been as interesting as anything we see in the film itself. The shoot took place during the pandemic and was fraught with practical difficulties and setbacks, including Patel injuring himself several times and running out of money in the middle of production. Even after it was completed getting distribution was a whole other saga. Initially meant to be a Netflix release, they seem to have not reckoned with the political themes and shelved it fearing alienating one of their key markets for distribution. It was eventually picked up thanks to Jordan Peele, who one imagines must have seen an affinity between his own work which explores contemporary political and social issues through a populist genre while also being a solid example of that genre on the black (in both senses of the word) horror comedies Get Out, Us and Nope. Both those things work in its favour, the scrappiness of the production is appropriate for a hard as nails action thriller, that getting a cinematic release and not going straight to streaming is very much appropriate to a movie such in incredible visual sensibility. There is an absolutely gorgeous psychedelic sequence right at the heart of the film that would thoroughly satisfy any fan of Jodorowsky, Russell, Noe or Panos Cosmatos that for my money, as one myself, is worth the door tax on its own.

 

So, if you like action films, prefer them with good politics and you can handle a bit of the old ultra-violence (the 18 cert is exclusively for that, some of which to be fair borders on body-horror) this could well be among your more enjoyable cinematic experiences of the year.

ArcTanGent 2023

 Ok, so to not bury the lead journo-style: main thing is ArcTanGent was great and I can indeed still hack a 3 day Camping festival. This is my first since Life 2014, I have broken both legs and swore off them since then, but when I saw the lineup for this I knew I had to make the effort to get over. So I did.

First thing I'll say that as festivals go, I thought it was fantastically well done. The production, curation, provision of site services and essentials, cleanslyness and usefulness of the bathroom facilties, the pre pitched tent I sprung for, and just the general vibe and atmosphere were all great. I was impressed with the dedication to being enviromentally conscious, it was weird buying tinned water (particularly since the design on the stuff at the bar was very Repo Man esque) but it was good that the place wasn't covered in plastic.

Also for a Metal festival, generally lefty AF, aside apparently a few boneheads who turned up for Heilung who I personally didn't see but heard about from a few people. Hielung themselves are conscsious by the nature of what they do inevitably attract a bit of that sort of thing but have distanced themselves from it publicly to the extent that they can. Other than that, I saw plenty of antifa patches on peoples stuff, lots of leftist, feminist, queer and trans artists and just people about the place in general. 

Pure family vibe too. Like there wasn't a play pen or stuff specifically for kids, but there was a good few babies and actual childer knocking about. Not many but enough that it all felt wierdly wholesome. I saw some folk with their kids (always with ear protectors) up on their shoulders at the main stage. Parenting goals tbf.

I found the way they ran the thing interesting. Everything started really early, first bands on 11ish, and everything runs up to 11pm, after which there is a "Silent Disco" where everyone who wants to can go to a stage and listen to DJ sets being played through headphones. Presumably this is to get around local sound rules and regs that dogged Boomtown the last couple of years I was there. Not the worst way to placate the NIMBYs if that's what you need to do, beats turning the sound down on the main stages after 11pm.

The stages were all pretty close together, had they all been on full time they'd have noise polluted each other out, but with this being basically all bands and stuff that required a set up they staggered the set times so at any given time one stage was on they'd be prepping for the next act on the other stage. I'm guess that's probably relatively normal for that type of festival but I'd personally not seen it before so yeah. Cool. Also made it easy to have a wee snoop about the different stages if you'd a mind to.

What I got up to: Thursday, flight got delayed getting from Belfast to Bristol and the coach into town took a bit longer than I had thought from the (admittedly somewhat rushed) research I had done into the transpot situ so I ended up getting charged dear for some of the camping equiptment I had to get from the last camp shop open in Brizzle by the time I got there (which means I need to do a few more of these things to get the use out of them, oh well....) and I didn't get to do some of the shopping I had planned which meant I had to rely on the then unknown quantity of making do with whatever I could get onsite. It also meant that by the time I got up to the site and got my shit together I had missed practically everything on the first day. No Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs for me unfortunately. If I'm back I reckon I'll need to look into arranging things a bit better with that in mind. It wasn't a complete washout, I did get to see a good bit of Converge who were headlining the mainstage and most of my first big discovery of the weekend Straight Girl who had played the wednesday and was covering for someone who had pulled out, apparently due to getting stuck on the UK border. I had literally just nipped out of Converge to have a quick snoop at the other stages to see what they were like, not intending to really be away for too long when I heard bass, breaks and beats coming from up the hill. Unreal, and short, enough that I caught the latter half of Converge. After that I was wrecked after all the running around so I booked and got my head down. 

Friday I had a pleasant morning catching up with the neighbors (a girl from here and her mate from down South, nice!). Made frieds with a bunch of sound lads from Cardiff, who I'll refer to as 'Jeff's Mates'. I got to see most or all of Joliette, Ashenspire and CLT DRP and really liked them. I saw And So I Watch You From Afar, actually for the first time live, now feel like a bit of a nob for not having done so before. I saw Pet Brick again who I'd had the absolute best time watching at Bangface and gave it absolute stacks, probably the most lively I was all weekend. I didn't get drawn into the mosh pit but I was sorely tempted. Big highlights from the friday tho, not unexpectedly as they were along with Igorrr the big draws for me of the whole thing; Swans and Hielung. Swans was just darkness,vibe and intensity. I got complete full-body frission. It was great. Hielung was just on another level. For those that don't know, they basically do a sort of reimagining of Norse/German pagan shamanic rituals using costumes, instruments etc based on the type of things they have in the historical record or found in Iron Age burial sites from Northern Europe and a good bit beyond (but that's not important and they're not going for full dilligent authenticity). The stage craft is really elaborate too. Off all the stuff I saw, they'd be the only thing that if someone put them on in the Waterfront or something I'd take my parents to see them.

That was the day of the really horrible weather (in the middle of f'ing August, this is what global warming is for the UK btw) and it blew me right into my tent past any feeling towards sociability on my part. And I was just knackered tbh. 

Saturday, having actually just had a really good rest I was intent on making the best of the last day. I caught A Burial At Sea, mathrock group Land Wars (Davitt / Parnell reference? one of the guys is from Cavan so maybe). After that I caught some nice queer, gothy-gazey act called Cultdreams and bumped into my mate Big Mike at the end. He took me to see Gggolddd, cracking dark, moody synth/trip-hop. We split and I had saw Grub Nap for a bit of a change of pace, 2 lads from Leeds doing aggy Sludge-core. Great stuff. Simmilarly the Callous Daoboys were a lot of fun and really heavy, Rolo Tomasi, Health and Loathe were all awesome in different ways and for different reasons. Deafhaven were great, aside from the technical difficulties which I didn't mind so much but I could see people who are more emotionally invested in them getting upset over, especially since they were doing their iconic Sunbather album beginning to end.

Absolute stand out of the day though, again predictably, was Igorrr. I love Igorrr, have been into them since back when he was releasing on NI's own Acroplane and Ad Noiseum. Saw him play a set at Bangface 2016. Seeing him blow up on the metal circuit and bring in more live elements to the shows since then has been an absolute pleasure. This time he had the full band, him on his hardware, his live drummer, guitarist and an opera singer providing vocals going through mostly stuff off the last two albums. he opened with a wee bit of breakcore and finished off again just by himself banging out the glitches, bass and drum breaks. 

I ended up only seeing a wee bit of Devin Townsend, actually bumped into a guy I met in his own house last week after Kneecap, ended up hanging with him, his brother and their mate who I'd been talking to earlier at the start of Igorrr, then finished the weekend hanging with Jeff's mates, and other people who came around, including two lads from Lambeg, one of who recognised me from activist stuff back in the day and grew up in the street opposite my house, and his mate who was at Lagan literally just as I left. This country is a village.

Silly crack was had. It was a good end to a good day and the festival in general. I had a great time, could see myself coming back if they pull out another lineup like this years that just has a lot of stuff on it I really like. Or that could prove to be a fluke, we'll see. Would be good to get a crowd up for it if I do go back.

Blindboy Boatclub, the Left and New Media Celebrity Culture in Ireland

A long time ago I had intended to write an article about Russell Brand for this blog. This would have been about 2013/14 between the Jeremy Paxman interview and the 2015 General Election. We were at that stage more than half a decade into the crisis and while things hadn’t quite descended into the infernal quagmire we find ourselves in now they were certainly gearing up. During that time Russell emerged as a voice of a type of politics that is as old as power structures themselves, that has been around in something approximating its current form since modernity began and has always been there, though rarely articulated in the mainstream of political or social discourse. Also, the specifics of they way in which it blew up and other people reacted to it said something very interesting about the culture around politics and the media in general at this juncture in our history. As ever and to my own personal annoyance, in spite of the fact that I felt I had some unique insights to contribute to the conversation I never got around to laying those thoughts down in a coherent manner, which is inconveniencing me right now as there seems to be something similar happening right now in Ireland with two other public figures and I don’t have that previous work to refer back to.

So, failing that and without getting into the whole Russell Brand thing at length I’ll now sum up the salient points of this essay that never was, or as I see them the three features of what I’d call The Russell Brand Moment:

1) Revolutionary or even quite a lot of the time left-reformist politics are ruthlessly no-platformed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media out of the general political discourse. On this occasion an individual circumvents the gatekeepers by already having access to a platform due to their celebrity status built in a long career elsewhere in the media as an entertainer.

2) This was assisted by a use of social media platforms as a way of bypassing said gatekeepers and reaching a wide audience in a way impossible just a decade ago and unthinkable in any other generation.

3) That said, there are limitations that we must understand, no point getting over enthusiastic. The individual at the centre of this is usually part of the movement and reasonably well informed, but about to the level of the average cadre, which is understandable, they already have a full-time occupation, i.e. whatever propelled them to their celebrity status in the first place and may hold contradictory positions; they may slip up on particular issues when called to voice opinions outside of their immediate span of knowledge. Added to that their no more free of any unreconstructed societal attitudes than the rest of us. It would be churlish of us to expect otherwise.

The 3rd point I had actually observed at the time and was bourn out by the trajectory the whole Brand thing took over the course of 2015. Essentially Brand fell at the first hurdle making the rookie error of seeing a modest shift leftwards on the part of the Labour Party as a new dawn in UK politics and backing David Milliband in the 2015 general election. In doing so he shot what credibility he had and retired temporarily from public life and the one man war against the media and political establishment he’d been on since the Paxman interview.  He’s been back since but that moment has tangibly passed. I’m sure he’s kicking himself now that the actual labour left has made a breakthrough, but maybe we’ll look back and see the Brand moment as a precursor to the ascension of Corbynism.

So with that in mind I’d like to talk about what’s going on with a public figure in Ireland; Blindboy Boatclub of The Rubberbandits.

The Rubberbandits

The Rubberbandits are two friends who grew up together in Limerick that go by the aliases of Blindboy Boatclub and Mr Chrome. They were early stars of Irish social media, making their name initially on Bebo and Myspace with a series of humorous prank phone calls. In 2007 they started making comedic hip hop and gigging a live show. In their music videos and while performing they both always wear a plastic shopping bag with eye and mouth holes cut out while their DJs dressed up as disgraced former government minister Willie O’Dea. Their first video Horse Outside went viral and took them from 'internet famous' to genuine notoriety. The humour of these songs has a certain off-the-wall sillyness and broadness to it, but like some of our best (O’Brien, Milligan etc.) it is belied by a fierce wit and satirical eye, the targets of which have ranged from the hyper-sexual machismo in hip-hop to ill informed armchair republicanism to hipsters.

By the beginning of this decade the Bandits were hot shit and have only gone from strength to strength, scoring TV work for RTÉ, The BBC, ITV, Channel 4. They had one of their songs featured in the new Trainspotting film and have played gigs and festival appearances up and down the island and internationally. Through all this they have managed a degree of relative anonymity for two people in the entertainment industry who are household names in a modern country. Their names are out there and can be accessed with a cursory Google but there’s only a single picture of Chrome’s face sans-plastic bag and none of Blindboy. Seriously, you can find a picture of what Burial looks like IRL easier.

More recently, Blindboy has authored and published a book of short stories, The Gospel According to Blindboy in October 2017 and started doing a podcast which was initially to promote the book but has taken on a life of its own, topping the iTunes podcast chart since its first episode continuing to do so through to the time of writing.

Through that time Blindboy has used his media presence to articulate the common sense perspective of his generation, using his platform to talk about pertinent issues if the day, mostly looking at them through the lense of mental health, sharing his own experiences to destigmatize something that’s still heavily taboo in Ireland. An early intervention was in 2006 when he spoke out against Bebo’s use of profile views, which he considered psychologically unhealthy to the point where it might lead to someone taking their own lives and called for the practice to be discontinued. This lead to his page being shut down without discussion by Bebo in spite of their popularity (the interview has now been reproduced in the feb 20th podcast God's Posture where he speaks about it at length). The evils of social media and potential deleterious effects on the psyche of the users and unconscionable business practices of the various platforms is something that we’re now all familiar with and has been discussed and analyzed to the point of cliché but in 2006 looking at that type of media through psychological theory was quite novel. He understood social media as only someone who grew up using it could.

He’s also used this as a way into the wider issues effecting Irish society, critiquing capitalism by looking at the socio-economic conditions which drive metal illness and talking about the psychological benefits for men of embracing feminism on the Late Late Show where he’s a frequent guest and expanding on these themes at length in the podcast. More recently he’s weighed in on the movement to repeal the 8th amendment. In a recent podcast he interviewed the film and TV star Cillian Murphy, who rarely gives interviews but had reached out to him to collaborate on some repeal propaganda, specifically orientated towards young men who the usual political discourse wouldn’t reach and might otherwise be apathetic on the issue. When the referendum was won by a substantial margin what most activists in the field have known for years was accepted, finally, by the establishment, i.e. that the pro-choice position had (in Gramscian terms) transcended good sense to become the common sense position. One can’t underestimate the role of pop-cultural figures in expressing and solidifying cultural turns like this.

Getting back to what I’ve proffered as the three features of the “Russell Brand moment”, the first two points seem to be fairly self evident based on what’s been outlined so far. There are differences though, he’s not been as confrontational or taken on the beast as directly as Brand had been doing, even now much later it still astounds me that Brand with his YouTube channel was in a running dialogue with the Murdock media empire and that he could goad them into responding to him on the nightly Fox news shows.

Also, Blindboy’s personal politics are quite different to Brand who consciously and overtly identified with the revolutionary tradition and specifically Anarchism (though a somewhat muddled and idiosyncratic one). Instead Blindboy talks about his family history in the West Cork IRA in the 1920s though he doesn’t identify with any contemporary Irish republican organisation. When he gets down to it he’s decidedly left-reformist, stopping a good way short of anti-capitalism though decidedly to the left of the Irish Labour Party. Which seems fair enough to me as it would put him about where most Irish people, and in particular those around the great social movements of recent history are at the moment, i.e. conscious and even proud of the republican revolutionary tradition, to the left of consensus politics on most issues and if not up for a full overthrow of the state, are certainly disillusioned with it as-is and yearning for change. 

Which brings me to the question of how should organisations of the left ought to relate to him? Is there a right way to respond to these figures that as they occur in the culture, especially since with the continuing prevalence of social media and the disintegration of the institutions that were traditionally the gatekeepers of the cultural discourse this sort of thing is liable to happen in the future.

Again, I’m sorry that I never managed the Russell Brand post because a lot that happened on the left in the wake of the Newsnight interview and subsequently is instructive. You had stuff like the “I Support Russell Brand’s Call for Revolution” facebook page. I will be generous and assume this was the work of one Brand fanboy who was an SP member rather than a party social-media initiative, but it struck me as a bit band-wagon jumpy and opportunist. Basically it was an SP member using the Brand moment to proselytise for his specific fraction by creating the page to share Brand content and SP content, often content specific to his local branch in Coventry. Now I wouldn’t want to pick on the guy unduly but I am singling him out as an example of people on the left getting overly enthusiastic and just being narrowly focused on how to further their sectional or even personal agenda without looking at the bigger picture, which ought to be inclusive.

Still, I prefer this approach to the churlishness and negativity that a lot of leftists and activists responded to Brand with. For those unfamiliar I’ll refer you to Mark Fisher, one of the few people on the left who at the time had what I’d call the correct take on Brand:

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance (on newsnight) had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason…. Brand had outwitted Paxman...

The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic ‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution – something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his sexism.

Rather than be happy that our politics were suddenly being articulated in the mainstream he was lit on for past personal indiscretions and problematic material from his old stand up routines. Now I’m not going to defend any of that, just saying that when something like that happens that this was a lot of people’s first response does not speak well of them as individuals or the movement they inhabit. It felt to me at the time that after decades of defeat and retreat and so many years in the bunker that a lot of these activists just didn’t know how to take it when something good happens. There was also a tangible element of jealousy relating to the whole thing. These h8rs were people who had spent years or decades in the trenches being patently ignored by the media. Seeing someone from so far outside their club, who is a bit of a clown, doing what they could and would have done if only they’d been given the opportunity. I can only imagine how that smarted.

And I’ll reiterate, its not like he’d done nothing, a lot of the criticism was legit to some extent. Nobody should be afforded a pass for bad behaviour just because they’ve done some good work. But, again getting back to Mark Fisher’s peice:

It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”

So far though there seems little sign of anyone of any significance on the left doing that to Blindboy. Partly this is because of how he’s been handling himself. Also, I’d put that down to the political culture on the Irish left as not being so hostile, unlike Britain four years ago we’ve not had a series of defeats, disappointments, organisational schisms and wasted opportunities to build a culture of begrudgery out of. Far from it. The backlash might happen, some of the stuff from the Rubber Bandits is pretty off the wall and if one were so inclined one could go back through his work looking for stuff you could decontextualise and paint as problematic I dare say you could nitpick enough out of it to make whatever point you wanted if you were so inclined.

But then why would you?

Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I propose as the right and sensible thing to do in this instance and in general: constructive engagement. When the political discourse gets opened up beyond the usual quarters of the activist left we should be in there, not just to capitalise on it for our own benefit but to engage with the people coming to it from that direction with our ideas and the good sense we’ve acquired through decades of struggle and also to be open to what we can learn from them.

One thing that I’d also propose is to acknowledge the immense potential someone like Blindboy has in overcoming something that’s been a bit of an issue on the left. Again because we’ve been on the defensive for so long we’ve got to a point where we seem to spend a lot of time concentrating on telling people what to not do. I think that having a vision of how things could or should be is also important if we are to get anywhere. It’s particularly good to have this discourse directed towards men. With the cultural revolutions and progress towards gender equality a lot of the traditional role of men in society has come to be seen, quite rightly, as oppressive. The traditional narrative of patriarchy has been torn down but we should do more to provide something for men in its absence, if for no other reason than if we don’t somebody else will. Jordan Peterson has made a bit of a splash doing exactly this. That said, depending on your position in the movement that might not be prudent or appropriate, so when Blindboy talks on the podcast about physical exercise, mental exercise and how one relates to the other, that is what he’s providing. In fact since the early drafts of this piece when I wrote the last sentence he has basically said this on the podcast in response to a listeners query about the Jeepster.

It also means to an extent acknowledging that while he does have a part to play in the struggle he’s not an expert by any means in organising or experienced in the practical side of the movement. So, when he does drop the ball, as in his recent comments on the Trump protest or letting his podcast guest Vincent Browne rabbit on in an ill-informed and inaccurate manner about the organised left parties in Ireland (including mine), that we at least have that in mind when we engage him back on these issues.

For now though, I’m just looking forwards to enjoying the show. It is a part of a national conversation that people my age are having in public that isn’t going on anywhere else and I’ll be happy to see it continue. I am interested to see where he takes what he’s doing in the future.

Appendix 2: Literature as a consumer product in 1890s Britain and Gissing’s New Grub Street.

This is one of two term papers written as practice and a way of getting my thoughts together in preperation for my masters thesis which I have published on this blog here. It has been e put up here for the sake of completion. The other one has been posted here.

In Britain in the 1880s and 90s there was a perceptible shift in the production and distribution of literature.  The reading public, who had been increasing incrementally over the previous two centuries, suddenly expanded as the business of writing and selling books, magazines and other forms of literary culture was revolutionised.  It is in this context that George Gissing wrote New Grub Street, the novel that would make his name and come to be regarded as his finest.  The Novel takes as its subject the world of writers around 8-10 years before it was written.  The Gissing specialist John Goode, referring to Gissing’s diaries, puts the novel as having fermented over the course of 1890 before finally being written in the late autumn and early winter of that year[1].  The novel begins in autumn 1882[2] with the main plot covering the next 2-3 years up to July 1885, ending with a short denouement set 12 months after[3].  In essence Gissing is chronicling the formation of the productive relations that he was working under in 1890 by excavating their origins in the novel format[4].  The main theme of the book is Writing in the context of the changing mode of production in literature, especially the effect of this on the work that writers do and the daily realities that writers are faced with.  When one takes into consideration that Gissing himself lived through this period on the bottom wrung of the publishing industry as an impoverished writer, New Grub Street appears not so much as fiction but also as auto-biography, cum reportage as well as advancing a particular aesthetic thesis.  As such, it provides a unique insight for historians of the period into the experience of those relations of production and consumption by writers and journalists and it provides insights into the operation of culture within Late-Victorian capitalism.

In Britain in the 1880s and 90s, this printed culture of novels, periodicals and magazines was the mass media, occupying the same place that television does today.  Significantly, this was the time in British history when the novel as a means of cultural transmission was at its zenith, however its influence was being challenged by a factors emerging from a new range of conditions of production and consumption.

Although Gissing did not express the process in economic terms in his fiction, what he is really describing is the commodification of writing and the intrusion into the writers’ literary production of the market, reducing the writer to a mere artisan.  This change is encapsulated in the first pages of New Grub Street by the bold statement that “Literature nowadays is a trade[6]”.

The plot of the novel reflects this in its structure, which,

 “is based on a common convention in Victorian fiction, which is to have two independent stories which in narrative terms are largely independent of each other but which echo and contrast”[7].

The precise nature of what is echoed and contrasted in the novel is the lives of two writers, their work, their relations with women, their attitude to each other and, by extension, their place in the edifice of literary production. This also leads concomitantly to their consideration of literary consumption.  Specifically, this is the contrast summed up at the start of the novel by Jasper Milvain, then protagonist of one of the story threads, in reference to his friend Edward Reardon, the protagonist of the other;

“The thing you must understand about a man like Reardon and a man like me is that he is the old type of unpractical artist, I am the literary man of 1882.”[8]

Milvain then goes on to conceptualise the difference in their relations to the market;

“He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t make them; he can’t supply the market…your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman.  He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of good begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising”[9]. 

In the course of the novel this is just what Milvain goes on to do by becoming a Journalist, a vulgar populist writer of ephemera, in contrast to the scrupulousness of Reardon’s devotion to his muse.

The novel also goes into the wider literary scene through the secondary characters, each of which are involved in the business of writing in some way.  These include Milvain’s sisters, who he introduces to the trade, Biffen, a writer, Whelpdale, a failed writer who becomes a literary agent, Alfred Yule, a man of letters and failed periodical editor and his daughter Marian, assistant to her father and up-coming woman of letters in her own right.  Each of these characters adds another facet to the picture of the literary world that Gissing is trying to paint in the novel.  By concentrating on this circle of friends and acquaintances and their relationships the author brings into sharp focus the personal cost of the holistic intrusion of market forces onto the creative intellect, i.e. the way it effects not only the work of writers but their relationships, personalities, health and behavior.

Implicit in Gissing’s argument is a formulation we may term as a “Moral-economy of literary production” that was common in the Fin de Siecle[10].  This is the notion that artistic production should exist free of any concerns except whatever artistic concerns inspire the creator.  Mainly this refers to the idea that great art requires freedom from commercial concerns and stems from the perennial dynamic tension between the personal and social nature of artistic production, favoring of course the personal to the detriment of the social location within the capitalist mode of production.  Although this, “Moral Economy”, was not successful or effective in the way the social phenomenon described by E.P. Thompson was[11], we can nonetheless see a constant negotiation of the commercial nature of their work by artists and writers.

Recent scholarship has convincingly suggested that the reason why Gissing, and others of his generation, favoured the personal factor in this creative dialectic as a reaction against an intrusive and disconcerting nature of the social factor.  For writers in late Victorian England this expressed itself in the form of the rapidly changing productive relations in literature in the late 19^th century[12].  This was largely distributor led and favored certain forms and subjects over others[13] married to an increasing sophistication of publishing practice with its perennial need to maximise profits.  Hence we can see that the balance of power in this relation between production and consumption favored the tastes of the distributors, not the producer.

Exemplifying the writers’ Moral economy in the Novel are the characters of the two novelists, Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen.  Both are true artists who can’t adopt themselves to the market.  The difference between them is that Reardon has a family to support which forces him to try fruitlessly, to adapt to the market. Which in turn leads to the ruination of his physical and mental health and family, whereas Biffen is unencumbered, with only himself to look after, and lives at the edge of poverty but without compromising his art. 

Biffen is the purest example of the literary producer in the novel.  He writes his fiction without reference to the market either in terms of subject, form, content or potential audience.  This is because the production of literature is everything to him, the end in itself.  Whether or not his efforts are ever re-numerated are incidental. In a conversation with Reardon he claims not to expect his novel to even be published.[14] None the less he pushes himself to the point of starvation and eventually charges into a burning building to rescue the only copy of his manuscript from the flames[15].

Reardon’s position is more complex. The struggle between Reardon and the hated market constitutes the drama in this thread of the novel.  Before achieving a degree of literary fame he had lived much as Biffen, but sustained by a job as a clerk.  His day job and lack of familial commitments mean he is unencumbered by commercial pressures and so is able to work as he likes.  By the beginning of the action in the novel his writing has brought him with success the responsibilities of a husband and father.  If Biffen represents the ideal of the writer, Reardon represents something like the reality as in order to maintain his family he is compelled not just to write but to write something sellable.  Because the money it brings in is a necessity he has to continually produce in order to survive, even if it means compromising on the quality of the work itself.  In Gissing’s depictions of Reardon’s struggles it is clear that being able to create depends on a number of psychological factors an important one being that forcing yourself to write is destructive of what makes one capable of it in the first place.

Jasper Milvain is the antithesis of Reardon and Biffen.  He engages with the market as a professional.  He writes only what he can sell.  Although, as is implied in the novel, he is no less talented or capable of creating great works of art than Biffen or Reardon, he instead engages with the market by cynically pandering to vulgar tastes and fashions.  Instead of pushing the medium and creating something unique or original, which is at least the intention of Biffen, he only seeks to reproduce that which is commercially reliable.  In advising his sisters as to how to go about writing as a profession, he makes this abundantly clear, telling them:

“There is a tremendous sale for religious stories, why not pitch one together?…I tell you writing is a business.  Get together half-a-dozen fair specimens of the Sunday school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day.”[16]

One interesting thing to note in this context is the ways in which the writer is conceptualised as a tradesman or a businessman.  Some commentators seem to suggest that because of the emergence of writers unions and the mechanisation of the industry that writers were becoming proletarianised[17].  Actually the position of the writer appears closer to a petty bourgeoisie, i.e. those who labour but own their own means of production.  In a sense, if we take Bourdieu’s description of creativity as a natural resource[18], they are comparable to small farmers.  Although Gissing doesn’t employ such metaphors himself, the use of agricultural metaphors is not uncommon in describing the creative process.

The work cycle of Reardon as laid out in the novel does have a similarity to that of a small farmer.  That is to say, labouring over a novel for an expected sale at the end of the period of cultivation.  For example, borrowing towards the end of that period when the money from the last harvesting is becoming scarce on the expectation of selling the product is something that characterised the micro economics of small holding peasants in pre-famine rural Ireland[19], and according to Gissing, the Reardon household towards the end of one of Readon’s novels.  Similarly, a bad (i.e. unpublishable) novel was disastrous in the same way that as a bad harvest was disastrous for the small producer.

The mechanical way in which Milvain works and manages his labour time is among the aforementioned factors which has led Bowlby amongst others to wrongly assert that writing was proletarianised. Actually since its inception the term, “Petty Bourgeoisie”, has been taken to infer proletarian forms of labour, the distinction between the two mainly being the relation to the means of production and distribution[20].  Hence, the particular mode of literary production, as depicted in the novel, was both alienating and mechanistic and self regulated.  The breakdown of Jasper’s working day[21] is very precise, like a manager’s log, with the total monetary value of the time worked out to within a couple of guineas.

So too for Marian Yule, who at one point fantasises about a literary machine; “some automaton to supply the place of creatures such as herself, to turn out books and articles”[22].  The mechanised process of literary production is described in the same terms as “only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single new book”[23].  Jasper describes his method of working up new articles thus;

“From five to half past I read four news papers and two magazines, and from half past to quarter to six I jotted down several ideas that had come to me while reading”.[24]

Between these two sections from the text we can observe something at the heart of Gissing’s conceptualisation of this mode of consumption, i.e. that where this writing comes from isn’t the heart of the writer or their observation of real life, which would give it some sort of higher relevance, but from other writing alone.  This isn’t creation, the act of a creative mind, but more akin to recycling, the shuffling around of pre-existing writing that has relevance only to and of itself.  While the product may be entertaining or well written, it doesn’t further human culture.  This is what Milvain means when he refers to his day’s work as having literary value, “equal to the contents of a mouldy nut”[25].

This explosion in the consumption and production of literature that constituted the crisis, as Gissing saw it, was facilitated by a number of factors.  Firstly there were technological advances in the mechanisation of printing as well as more efficient paper making processes[26].  Also, the repeal of Stamp Tax in 1855 and Paper Duty in 1860 had removed one non-material barrier to the mass production of paper[27] and encouraged a great expansion of the News Paper industry that had also been gathering pace incrementally over the preceding centuries.

The main factor however, as perceived at the time, was the education acts of the 1870-90s, which gradually introduced universal primary education.  Literacy had been increasing incrementally over the preceding centuries[28], but the acts expanded the reading public to an extent unheard of, creating for the first time a literate reading public[29]. 

The effect that this Cultural Revolution and the sort of reading it engendered had on those already literate classes was the unleashing of a storm of reactionary ire and condescension.  In the organs of the literary establishment the “disease” of “unproductive reading” by this upstart literate mass reading public was lamented and tied into contemporary discourses on degeneration[30], and critics of the time were horrified at the national out pouring of grief at the death of the revered and popular poet Tennyson[31].  This indeed could be said to be the period that saw, to paraphrase Thompson, The Making of the English Literary Intelligentsia[32].

At the time when Gissing was writing New Grub Street the production and distribution of novels in Britain was mired in an archaic system of private lending libraries, the most important of which being Mudies, which has been described as having a “grip on the fiction industry”[33].  Unlike America and France, where the advances in printing had meant the sale of literature directly to consumers, in Britain the novels were mainly produced as three volumes, so called, “Three Deckers”.  These were mainly sold to circulating libraries which the would-be consumer of literature had to subscribe to to use[34].  For the author this meant that the crucial notion of what was saleable, or permissible to print, rested in the hands of the small group of owners of these lending libraries and not the reading public at large.  Mudies in particular was notorious for its conservatism[35].  This is also one of the main reasons why British literature appears stuffy and repressed with regards to its content and themes, especially in comparison with French literature of the same period.

It also created the precarious position of the author’s finances, i.e. the way the novelist could only really expect re-numeration for their labour at the point of sale to his publisher because then, as now, sales generate royalties, not the rental of an already sold item.  It would also seem that when the reading public purchased books in the 1880s-early 1890s, they were generally bought second hand, as is most of Reardon’s personal library[36].

This particular system of distribution would eventually be swept away, but not until after New Grub Street was published, although we can see the beginnings of this process in Gissings depiction of the literary world of the 1880s.  The way they are depicted in the novel is interestingly catastrophic.  Just as In TheYear Of The Jubilee prefigures the Baudrillardian critique of consumerism[37], the depiction of the mass culture prefigures the 20^th century debates around the degradation of society and the inner life of the individual[38].  He also harks back to Matthew Arnold’s notion of culture as an expression of all that’s pure and good in society, extending the arguments of Culture and Anarchy into the decades after Arnold’s death.  Arnolds contribution to what I have referred earlier as a “Moral Economy” of literary production was a mid 19^th century positivism with regards to perfection and the perfectibility of society through Culture.  Arnold is a pervasive but unacknowledged presence in the novel.  Reardon in particular can be described as having distinctly Arnoldian tendencies is his view of art and his taste in Hellenic culture and civilization, something undoubtedly shared by his creator[39].

Inherent in this idea is a particularly elitist notion of what constituted good literature. Culture and Anarchy is actually where the English usage of the word ‘Philistine’ is used in the pejorative sense of someone who is not just un-enlightened, but actually oppositional towards the Arts.  In New Grub Street Philistineism is most directly associated with the manufacturing end of book publishing, specifically in the character of John Yule who we meet in the second chapter[40]. The arguments he articulates in his exchange with Milvain and his brother Alfred are the direct opposite of Arnold’s in Culture and Anarchy.  Yule, has little appreciation of the literature he publishes (reading little besides papers[41]), little sympathy with the authors (including his nieces, husband, Edwin Reardon, who he says he’d pay not to write[42]) and would rather people spent their leisure time on the outdoors.  He even goes so far as to wish to see “the business of literature abolished”[43].  That his trade is the manufacture of paper is indicative of Gissing’s more general association of mass production with philistinism.  This is evident in the exchange between Milvain and John Yule when Milvain remarks about paper that;

“‘if that article (i.e. paper) were not so cheap and so abundant, people wouldn’t have so much temptation to scribble’”[44]

It is because of this dilution of the Arnoldian ideal of the improving mission of writing by the mass education and mass culture - which was driven, as Gissing clearly saw it by the philistine owners of the means of book production - that his reaction to the very forces which would remove the system of book production that he struggled under would be so completely pessimistic[45].

To begin with a new generation of publishers was arising to challenge the established publishing houses and orthodox publishing methods.  This was to provide a new space for innovations in the production and distribution of literature, as Jonathan Rose points out, in late Victorian Britian, “often the most innovative authors are taken on by the most aggressive entrepreneurs, those who are ready to adapt to and exploit a changing literary marketplace”[46].  In New Grub Street this particular form of Victorian capitalism is embodied in Jedwood, a publisher who has only recently come into the business after a marriage to a rich woman[47] has begun to take risks and overturn some of the publishing practices that emerged under the established houses.  Jedwood is very much the new type;

“He talked much of ‘The New Era’, foresaw revolutions in publishing and book selling, tried every week a score of untried ventures that should appeal to the democratic generation just maturing”[48].

Those revolutions weren’t complete at the time of publication, New Grub Street itself was a Three Decker that was first sold to the lending libraries, they would be completed by the middle years of the decade[49], and would have been noticeably well under way to a professional novelist like Gissing.  And yet in the novel this development, and all the others that would change the literature industry, objectively for the better, is treated with horror or disdain.  The description of Jedwood is hardly flattering, the idea that he’s married into money, rather than having had the decency to be born to it, carries the implication of gold-digging.

Another factor that had revolutionised the consumption of literature was the mass transit system.  Again Gissing seems to regard this as a negative development.  One of the main themes of New Grub Street is the rise of the relative importance of the magazine in relation to the novel and the related process of degeneration of the novel itself[50] because of these conditions.  The rail networks provided short intervals of time when the urban commuter could snatch a little reading time.  It was soon recognised that the commuter was an important market for publishers, as near to a captive audience as one could wish for, hence bookshops and stalls were opened in railway stations (this is how the high street chain WH Smiths began[51]).  Magazines full of short articles that would only take the length of a train journey to read were produced, with great success - Newne’s Tit-Bits in particular, which;

“From its inception…was denounced as the bastard offspring of the commodification of literature:… exploiting readers with limited literacy and short attention spans.”[52]

The arguments around this development[53] are dramatised by Gissing in a three-way exchange between Jasper Milvain, his sister Dora and Whelpdale.  Whelpdale proposes a plan for a new magazine that a Victorian audience would have understood as a none-too subtle proxy of Tit-Bits[54]. The magazine and it’s audience are described in terms which explicitly links its format to educational standards and a debased type of reading related to the use of public transport;

“I would have the paper address itself to the quarter educated…the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board Schools, the young men and women who can just read but are incapable of sustained attention.  People of this kind want something to sustain them on trains and on Buses and ‘trams...Everything must be short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches.”[55]

Jasper approves of the project, calling it half-ironically, “one of the most notable projects of modern times”[56].  Dora on the other hand objects to the project on the grounds that, “Surely these poor silly people oughtn’t to be encouraged in their weakness”[57], and is only placated by the notion that even reading such fare as Chit-Chat on the train is better than reading nothing, “So long as they only read the paper at such times”[58].

The diversification in literature is another part of the process that would end the Three Decker novel system, and like magazines and the new publishing houses, would be subtly railed against by Gissing in New Grub Street.  One of the most notable and historically significant parts of this process, was the emergence of a degree of gendering in the market.  This was essentially the beginning of an identity consumerism where instead of trying to address the whole reading public the publishers found it more profitable to create books for sale to a specific niche.

This practice was directly contradictory to Arnold’s vision of a Culture that “seeks to do away with classes”[59] to create a singular culture for everyone to partake in, which in practice meant a monolithic cannon.  Gissing seems to have taken a particular exception to this in the form it took when targeting an emerging generation of newly literate women as a particular niche market.  This is certainly the most common form of niche marketing that we encounter in the novel.  When Milvain first suggests his sisters take up writing to supplement their income, it is this sort of gender-specific writing that he has in mind[60].  There is of course an undertone of misogyny to this as well.  As Carey has observed, Gissing found the new generation of women that had benefited from the education acts contemptible and pretentious[61].  Although this strain of Gissing’s isn’t so evident in New Grub Street, the refrain that semi-educated women, who are incapable of being more than that are imperiling the health and well being of the nation is evident in his other novels[62].  That said however, in the novel professional writing is presented as differently for women, who are not allocated the same status as the male writers.  Milvain’s sisters do the sort of hack writing described above, but for a specifically female audience.  Marian’s literary endeavors are all in the service of her father and are almost a form of parental abuse that exploits the subject and is detrimental to her femininity.

One conclusion that we can draw from the novel is that the products of print culture, novels, magazines and newspapers[63] have a dual existence as commodities and as cultural artifacts.  These two lives that books have are almost, but not entirely independent of one another.  Pierre Bourdieu has given us the useful notion of a Field of Cultural Production, a sort of idea-space for the functioning of the creative mind that is framed within the productive relations of its time but not dictated by them.  We might say that the Writer’s Moral Economy, as exemplified in the novel by Reardon and Biffen, is the mentality of the field of cultural production.  Milvain’s perspective is also within the field of cultural production but it is more of the productive relations that frame it than the field itself.  These two positions representing a continuum of thought and behavior, in the field channeling different currents to different ends.

The way in which the field of cultural production expresses itself in material reality is in the production of a symbolic configuration on a material form.  By which I mean that at its most basic level, the act of filling the pages of a book with words and pictures is commodity fetishism on a grand scale, quite literally imbuing an object with a symbolic meaning beyond its materiality.  However this isn’t quite the same thing, as it is from the symbolic content of a printed commodity that its use-value is derived.

However the commodity fetishism of printed culture expresses itself in other ways.  Advertising and the reputation of the author are also important factors, ones that Gissing spends some time over.  For example, near the beginning of the novel, Milvain spells out the importance of having money and a presence in society, to getting published[64].  Also, the importance of favorable reviews in imbuing a book with a saleable value is another recurring concern that comes up at several points in the novel.  At one of these points Milvain observes that in the, “struggle for existence among books[65]”, good reviews were necessary for a novel’s success as a saleable commodity.

The physical form of the novel, the binding, typography and illustration etc. is no less important to the novel as a consumer item.  Although the success of a cultural commodity might not be predicated on this “Packaging”, Maura Ives work on the production of the novels of George Meredith have shown how the physical presentation of novel acts to bolster its appeal[66].  For example in the typeface, the size of the print etc. recreates the identity of the author and itself acts as a form of advertising[67] and that the watermark and indenting the first page with the author’s initials acts as a physical connection between the author and consumer[68].

Finally, what New Grub Street demonstrates human experience of the changing dialectic relation between the consumption and production of literature in the 1880s and 90s.  Although Gissing has a particularly singular vision of this world, one of his skills as an author is to present an argument or debate from both sides and to make the two as real as to have an equal emotional truth.  Although there are some exceptions to this, when Gissing sets up an opposition he can present both sides so as to make them credible and articulate.  For as much as Milvain is the authors wry mouthpeice for everything he saw wrong with modern literature, Jasper Milvain still has a real emotional life and our sympathies.  Although we know from biographical information which side of the fence he was on, a purely textual reading could put Reardon and Milvain on a par, or even put Milvain as the most favoured out of the two, since he both survives the novel and gets the girl in the end.  It is for this reason that the book was, and continues to be, a useful indication of the interior life of writers living in the new Grub Street of Britains Fin-de Seicle.


 Bibliography

Adorno, T.W. & Horkheimer, M., The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso; London, 1997)

Arnold, M. Culture and Anarchy (1882, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/nonfiction_u/arnoldm_ca/ca_ch-1.html)

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Bowlby, R., Just Looking; Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing  and Zola (Methuen; Cambridge, 1985)

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Gissing, G. New Grub Street (OUP; Oxford, 1998)

                - John Goode, ‘Introduction’ ppvii-xxi

Goode, J. George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction (Vision Press; London, 1978)

Jordan, J.O. and Patten, R.L. (eds.) Literature in the Market Place: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1997)

-          Maura Ives, ‘A Bibliographical Approach to Victorian Publishing’ pp269-288

-          Kelly J. Mays, ‘The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals’ pp165-194

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Thompson, E.P. ‘The Moral Economy of The English Crowd of the Eighteenth Century’ in Customs in Common (;,) pp185-258

Trotsky, L.D. Literature and Revolution (Redwords; London, 1991)

                -Lindsey German, ‘Foreword’ pp9-42

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[1] J. Goode, Introduction p.ix

[2] G. Gissing New Grub Street p6, 8

[3]  Ibid., p511

[4] R. Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Gissing, Dreiser and Zola p.102

[5] Cit.

[6] G. Gissing, p.8

[7] J. Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction p.131

[8] G. Gissing, ibid. p.8

[9] Ibid, pp8-9

[10] See for example Howell and Colderidge’s comments, quoted in R, Bowlby, p 92, and also the comment in the article from the Scots Observer that, “Literature exists of itself and for itself”, quoted in P. D. Macdonald p.9

[11] E.P. Thompson, The Moral Economy and the English Crowd

[12] eg. A. Poole, Gissing In Context p.119

[13] See for instance Gosse’s comments on the Novel.

[14] Gissing, p.370

[15] ibid., pp.428-433

[16] ibid. p13

[17] E.g. R. Bowlby p.90

[18] P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production p.76

[19] C. O’Grada, The Great Irish Famine, pp.32-3

[20] See for instance in K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Part 1 p395-6

[21] G. Gissing, p.181

[22] ibid., p107

[23] ibid., p107

[24] ibid., p181

[25] ibid., p181

[26] R. Williams, p.190

[27] Ibid. p.217

[28] ibid, pp.177-189

[29] J. Carey, The Intellectuals and The Masses p5

[30] See. K. Mays, ‘The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals’ in Jordan, J.O. and Patten, R.L. (eds.) Literature in the Market Place: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading Practices

[31] McDonald, P.D. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880-1914 pp.3-5

[32] Kelly Mays points out that in this period and in relation to these discourses the idea of “Study” as opposed to “Reading” is seriously formulated (p. 181), and amateur learning clubs give way to the professionalisation of intellectual labour through an institutional structure that is effectively the beginnings of the British University system and the epistemological authority of academic citation (pp.183-4).

[33] J. Rose, ‘Was Capitalism Good For Victorian Literature?’ p.496

[34] R. Bowlby, pp85-6

[35] J. Goode, Introduction p.xiv

[36] G. Gissing, p.208

[37] i.e. the thwarted desire of the middle class urban consumer, J. Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction.

[38] See for example T.W. Adorno’s theories on mass culture, or his fellow Frankfurt School associate Herbert Marcuse.

[39] We know that the sections of Reardon’s travels to Europe and recollections of Greece were semi-autobiographical.

[40] G. Gissing, pp.15-27

[41] ibid., p.20

[42] ibid. p.25

[43] ibid. p.23

[44] ibid. p.23

[45] Interestingly, this was actually at odds with what Arnold actually said in Culture and Anarchy, whose ethos was more in line with an egaliterian one-nation Toryism, not dissimmilar to his literary contemporary Mrs Gaskell.

[46] J. Rose, ‘Was Capitalism Good For Victorian Literature?’ p497

[47] G. Gissing, p164

[48] ibid. p.167

[49] J. Rose, ‘Was Capitalism Good For Victorian Literature?’ p490

[50] J. Carey, pp107-8

[51] R. Williams, p190

[52] J. Rose, ‘Was Capitalism Good For Victorian Literature?’

[53] See for example the aforementioned Scots Observer article quoted in P.D. Macdonald (p.) for an example contemporaneous with New Grub Street.

[54] When describing the contents, the word “Bits” is used by Whelpdale six times in the same sentence to hammer the point home. Gissing, p.460

[55] ibid. p.460

[56] ibid. p.460

[57] ibid. p.460

[58] ibid. p.461

[59] M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (preface)

[60] G. Gissing, p.35

[61] J. Carey, p.100

[62] Ibid. pp.97-103

[63] And we might perhaps extrapolate this out to include and mass-produced cultural artifact.

[64] G. Gissing, pp.28-30

[65] Ibid. p.456

[66] L. Ives ‘A Bibliographical Approach to Victorian Publishing’ p.275-288

[67] Ibid., p.278

[68] ibid., p.274