Directory of Lost Causes

You can click on this link if you would like to send an e-mail or letter like the one below to your MP:

Dear ....

I do not know how many others will be sending you this e-mail. I suppose it's possible that I am the only one who will do so. Just in case you receive a large number of them, however, I thought I would at least write something a little different to the text prepared by the WWF at the top of my e-mail.

I am not sure how eloquent I can be, but I would like to appeal to your conscience and your reason. I'm sorry also, if that sounds like an assumption that you usually heed neither, but in these times it seems that it is rare for a politician even to possess those two things. We are seeing in the world now in at least two ways, how the politics of economic expansion is ultimately to the detriment of all. We are suffering for the greed of those with power not only through the loss of the beauty of our environment, and the squandering of resources, but also in economic instability. Can we afford to continue in such a short-sighted manner? I urge you sincerely to do the utmost in your power as a politician to support those changes in our society that will ensure we continue to have a coherent society. The words below are not my own, but I have read them and back them wholeheartedly. Thank you for reading:

I am writing to you as my MP to urge you to seize this last opportunity to help strengthen the Climate Change Bill. It is vital that three important changes are made to the Bill to ensure the UK does its fair share in tackling climate change.

Firstly, the emissions reduction target for 2050 must be increased to at least 80% in order to reflect the latest science. As you aware, the Committee on Climate Change has just given its advice to the Prime Minister that the UK should make a reduction of at least 80% by 2050 and it is vital that Parliament amends the Bill to reflect this. In addition, the 2020 reduction target must also be strengthened to 40% to ensure that the Government starts making substantial cuts straightaway and sets the UK on course towards a low-carbon economy.

Secondly, the UK’s fair share of emissions from international aviation and shipping must be included within the targets of the Bill. As you will be aware, the Committee on Climate Change also recommended that the 80% target cover all sectors including international aviation and shipping. It does not make sense to exclude the emissions from rapidly growing sectors when every other part of the economy will have to do its bit to meet the targets. Successful efforts to reduce emissions will be undermined by the growth in aviation and shipping unless they are brought into the Bill. Therefore, I urge you to vote to include international aviation and shipping within the targets of the Bill from the outset.

Finally, it is essential that the vast majority of these emissions reductions are actually achieved here in the UK. At present the Bill contains a loophole which allows the UK Government and business to buy an unlimited amount of carbon credits from overseas to achieve the reduction targets. Ultimately this loophole could open the door to a whole new generation of unabated coal-fired power stations, such as at Kingsnorth, which will ruin attempts to build a low-carbon economy. The Committee on Climate Change has called for a fully decarbonised power sector in the UK by 2030 so the overreliance on carbon credits is crucial. Therefore, it is vital that a requirement, added in the House of Lords, that 70% of the emission reductions are achieved domestically, is reinstated in the Bill.

The remaining stages of the Climate Change Bill mark a final opportunity to improve this legislation to ensure that the UK truly does its fair share to tackle climate change and is able to agree a strong global deal at Copenhagen next year.

Yours sincerely,
Quentin S. Crisp

Is something that you must never do.

If I took this particular Britishism too seriously, I'd be very worried right now, and in something of a quandary. How do I disagree with the Daily Mail and still hate Tony Blair, for instance? Anyway, the Daily Mail has just released, or is about to release, its list of 'the fifty people who have wrecked Britain', which is a pretty fun sort of concept, and, having seen the top twenty, I'm afraid I find myself nodding my head in many places.



How far do these views represent those of the management, I wonder? How worried should I be about this? The actual author is one Quentin Letts, a fellow who shares my first name (which is always a bad sign unless they also share my second name), and who looks like a more emphatic and dynamic version of Gyles Brandreth.

Here are the fools, knaves and vulgarians who ripped up British honour and glory and set in its place the tawdry and the trite. Will my list of prime suspects match your own? Read on and find out ...

So writes Quentin Letts. And 'let's' follow his suggestion.

1 Jeffrey Archer. Say no more. I agree. I think everyone does. Not sure about placing him so highly, but there you go.

2 Richard Beeching. Agreed. Absolutely. I'm trying to ween myself off my blog expletives, so I won't write the word that immediately comes to mind. I grew up partly in Ilfracombe, which had once been on the end of a branch line, a branch that was singled out in the 1963 report for Beeching's Axe, though the actual end came later for this particular branch. In These Things Take Time, Morrissey wails, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the sacred Wunderkind/You took me behind a disused railway line", thereby evoking the landscape of decline and waste so familiar to the British, which Beeching had created. (To me that particular line always meant Ilfracombe.) We are now, of course, realising more and more just how wrong Beeching was to destroy so much public transport.

3 Howard Schultz. Once again, agreed. I'm afraid I'm guilty of patronising Starbucks, but that's because people unimaginatively suggest it to me as a meeting place, and I'm really a very mild-mannered sort of person. I have never suggested it as a meeting place myself. Of course, it's recently come out that Starbucks wastes about fifty trillion gallons of water every second (can't remember the exact figure).

4 James Callaghan (for making British money decimal). I have no opinion here.

5 Diana (as in Princess). Yes, I agree. There is something wrong and deranged in the way that people have soaked her corpse with snot and tears like an old hanky, or something. Having said that, it does seem that she was used. I mean perhaps that should be no surprise, since the nobility have been using people since the dawn of time. I think that must be the definition of 'nobility', isn't it? People who use people? So, perhaps other members of the Royal Family could be inserted here to better effect. But then, perhaps this highlights what is, after all, an obvious part of the agenda of this list. Other royals could not have 'ruined' Britain, because they've always been there. The assumption behind the list seems to be a 'golden age' kind of assumption. That doesn't mean it should necessarily be dismissed, but it might be worth examining.

6 Greg Dyke. I don't have an opinion on Greg Dyke. Michael Grade, on the other hand, from this distance looks like a complete...

7 Charles Saatchi. I don't have much of an opinion on Saatchi, to be honest. I'm skeptical of the value of the work produced by the YBA, and have a lot of time for Billy Childish. I do think artists should be allowed to play and make possibly bad art in the name of the exploration of ideas. However, I also agree that there seems to be something wrong with the current British art scene. A friend, whom I hope doesn't mind me alluding to our conversation, told me of his applications for art school, and of how he disagreed with the teaching policies. Much of the grade was to be made up of essays explaining one's art. Art, he said, should not need essays explaining it, but should stand on its own. It seems like much art in Britain today is the product of this conceptual, explaining culture, and is shit.

8 Graham Kelly. I don't even know who Graham Kelly is.

9 Anthony Crosland. If this is the guy who is responsible for the very poor education I received at Ilfracombe Comprehensive School and Community College, then I hate him.

10 John McEnroe. I suppose he's another one of those who eroded native Britishness with Americanisation, in all of the many ways it's been eroded, for instance, with the introduction of credit cards. I don't really have a strong opinion about him, though.



11 Stephen Marks. I have mixed feelings about this. He's credited by Letts with (should I say 'accused of'?) degrading British language by promoting swearing. I'm afraid that I have mixed feelings about this. I'm very, very guilty of this kind of thing myself, though I do appreciate the idea of keeping language pleasant for the sake of civility and so on. There is also another possible factor here, though. Someone once - and it does seem rightly - pointed out to me that this is a class thing. The British middle classes are far more likely to turn their noses up at swearing as at a bad odour. For the working classes, 'fuck' and its variants, are general-purpose adverbs and sentence filler, not entirely dissimilar to the American 'like'. "I was, like, really, like, amazed", for instance, becomes, "I cunting fuck was fucking cunt amazed. Cunt." Maybe. I still get annoyed by loud swearing on the train, though.

12 John Prescott. I don't have an opinion on.

13 Frank Blackmore. This is all to do with 'mini roundabouts'. I don't drive and never have, so have no idea why these are considered a curse.

14 Sir Jimmy Saville. Sir Jimmy Saville? Sir Jimmy Saville? Surely not! Oh, all right, then.

15 Edward Heath. This is an interesting and loaded one. Letts accuses Heath of creating the current climate in Britain whereby it's impossible even to discuss immigration as an issue. It seems that you either support an open-door policy or you join the BNP. No discussion. I do believe such a climate exists. Is it Heath's fault? Possibly. But what about Enoch Powell's fault for provoking Heath's reaction in the first place?

16 Janet Street-Porter. I'm not a fan of Janet Street-Porter. I don't have a particularly strong opinion about her, but, again, from this distance, Letts's comments about her ring true. She does look suspiciously guilty of contributing to dumbing down through 'yoofism'.

17 Margaret Thatcher. Milk-snatcher. Personally, I hated having to drink milk at school, but I think I'm right in saying that the snatching came too late for me. I wasn't very interested in politics as a teenager, and I'm still not now, really, although I have been following things more closely this century than last. My image of the Thatch is not a good one. It's almost like that of Hitler, of unquestioned evil. That must say something about the circles in which I move. I believe that she took us closer to American-style capitalism. Not a good thing.

18 Alan Titchmarsh. Why? I actually never watch his programmes. I mean, I don't watch TV much anyway. I suppose he has released celebrity books (he must have), and for that alone, he must die.

19 Topsy and Tim. Never heard of them.

20 Tim Westwood. I haven't been following his career, and I'm not interested in it. He's accused here of corrupting the English language. If that's what he has done then I have some sympathy with putting him on this list. As mentioned above, my own education, probably due to that Anthony Crosland cunt, was woefully poor. Beyond the parts of speech, and commas and full-stops, I was taught no grammar at school, for instance, and had to learn the little I know later, in adult life (I'm still learning English grammar). I have been an English teacher, and I am a writer, and declining levels of literacy in Britain are frankly depressing to me. But we're not allowed to care, because that's not cool.

A slightly different version of the same top twenty here, also names Tony Blair and Richard Dawkins. On Blair, Letts apparently comes close to breaking his own rules on clean language:

There is a good, rough word to describe Tony Blair but we had better not write it out here in full.

Needless to say, I agree.

I also agree with the inclusion of Richard Dawkins. I have no idea what he's like in person, but as a public figure, I don't like him. Even if he's not responsible for any cultural damage (and he probably is; I was greeted recently by someone who told me he found a particular festival we were attending challenging because he was an atheist and had just read The God Delusion; I didn't know why he felt he had to tell me that and wasn't impressed; it sounded to me like he'd found his one book and was standing by it; notice how badly I've used semi-colons thanks to my poor comprehensive education) he still symbolises what I believe is one of the worst aspects of British and particularly English culture - the old imperial scoffer. "Nonsense, just native superstition, old chap. Just a lot of these blighters' mumbo-jumbo."

I have included less of this kind of opinion on my blog recently, since following Justin onto the Richard Dawkins message boards for his thread, 'The Cell-Theory of Organic Life is a Hoax'. The reason is not that I was persuaded of the error of my ways, but that I found my prejudices to be confirmed to a greater degree than I had imagined. I felt both a sense of resolution over things that had been bothering me, and a feeling that there was no point in going looking for trouble, and I should just let these idiots get on with it if they wanted to. I should not like to do a disservice to the intelligent and cordial people who did respond on that thread, and I certainly asked for some of what I got by being a loud-mouthed git, but those intelligent and cordial ones appeared to be a minority, and the rest seemed to possess little in the way of humour or warmth. Richard Dawkins is not a humble man. Make no mistake, this is a powerful figure. It seems to me, as professor for 'the Public Understanding of Science' at Oxford, he is a man surrounded at various distances by concentric circles of toadying cronies. And if you wander into the den of one of these outer circles and don't show the proper respect, you can expect venom. So, no, I don't like Richard Dawkins. I'm not impressed.

I hope I can phase out the usage of the word 'cunt' and the Richard Dawkins references (funny how they seem to go together) to make this blog a more pleasant place in future.

If you have lists of your own, feel free to post them.

There's more at Chomu.

Here and here.

You might as well just keep checking.

Good things are afoot at Chomu:

Here.

And here.

And especially here.

Not to mention here

Morrissey and Philip Larkin connection #27:

In his poem 'Deceptions', from what is generally held to be his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, Larkin writes arrestingly of someone whose "mind lay open like a drawer of knives".

I believe it's fairly well-known that Philip Larkin was sexually attracted to Margaret Thatcher. From his correspondence we have the following:

Your anecdote reminds me of a brief exchange I once had with Mrs. T., who told me she liked my wonderful poem about a girl. My face must have expressed incomprehension. “You know,” she said. “Her mind is full of knives.” I took that as a great compliment – I thought if it weren’t spontaneous she’d have got it right – but I’m a child in these things. I also thought that she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines, not that I don’t kiss the ground on which she walks.

But I rather think that her mind - and her drawer, or drawers - full of knives must have been part of the attraction for Larkin.

In his song, You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side, Morrissey sings similarly arresting lines: "Someone kindly told me that you'd wasted/Eight of nine lives." Famous for his Freudian slip-like live lyric changes, during performances of this song he has been known to change the lyric to the seemingly nonsensical (so we are told): "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives". I remember it from performances I have heard as "very sharp kitchen knives". (I know people who collect very sharp kitchen knives.) (Incidentally, Moz also seems to have changed this lyric along the lines of, "Someone kindly told me that you'd thrown away, every day of your precious teenaged life.")

The website It May All End Tomorrow suggests that such lyric changes by Morrissey are flippant and without particular meaning. I would suggest that, like Freudian slips, they have more meaning than is at first apparent.

To indicate the direction in which I am thinking, imagine the line, "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives", as being sung by Philip Larkin. To Margaret Thatcher.

Which brings us to Mishima Yukio, and we've almost come full circle.

For some reason I felt like re-writing the lyrics of Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl. The original looks like this:



I thought I'd be really clever and witty when I re-wrote the lyrics, but then I realised that was completely beyond my ability. Anyway, here's what I wrote. Don't ask why:

I Kissed A Girl

This was never the way I planned;
Not my intention.
I needed a shave, razor in hand
I bent over the basin.
It's not what, I'm used to,
To be goosed by a midget in frou-frou.
I'm curious as to why
You did that, actually.

I kissed a girl just after Mike did:
The taste of his Marmite chapstick.
I kissed a girl, it’s true, I can’t deny it.
I wonder what my platonic companion will have to say about this, oh yeah.
It felt so wrong.
It is against both God and Nature.
Don't mean I'm in love tonight,
Because I’m rather keen on catching the latest episode of Doctor Who.
I’ve heard it’s meant to be quite good this week, yeah.

No, I don't even know your name.
It doesn't matter.
I’m not very good with names anyway, you’ll have to excuse me there. It all stems from a childhood trauma to do with self-introductions, and that’s why I’m acting a bit weird. Damn, I’ve really fucked this up now, haven’t I? No, really, it’s cool. It’s cool.
Just human nature.
And the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Good god, do girls do
This sort of thing usually?
My head gets so confused,
Hard to obey. But we can talk about it, if you like.

I kissed a girl and I felt ambivalent about it:
The taste of her chap Terry’s stick.
I dissed a girl just to try it.
Everyone says that's the way to get laid, but she gave me a funny look. So I nervously retracted my comments about slugs and so on, and said it was just a really bad, inept joke, and we should just forget it. Perhaps fortunately, this was after I'd already kissed her, and she said, "Whatever!" and things kind of went okay from there for a while re the whole kissing thing:
It felt so wrong.
It felt so frankly bizarre. I had to go up to the flat roof of the building and ponder for a while, half hoping she’d follow me up and ask what had happened, so that we could play mind-games, but she didn’t.
Don't mean I'm in love tonight.
Though I will be for a while
When it really sinks in that she wasn’t at all serious. Damn.

Girls, by all accounts, are extremely magical.
Compared to a feller, about ten times more biological.
Hard to resist their wardrobe.
Too good to deny it.
Ain't no big deal, I really want to try on that miniskirt and boob-tube.

I kissed a girl and I’ll have to think over the implications of this for the fragile identity I’ve constructed for myself and my future generally.
The taste of Terry, her chap’s stick.
I kissed a girl uninvited.
The worst part is I’d really only bent forward to try and catch what she was saying over the noise of the party.
It felt so wrong,
I think I might have accidentally bitten her tongue.
Don't mean I'm in love tonight.
Because I’m well past that kind of adolescent excitement, unfortunately.
I don’t suppose anything will come of it.

Some time back I wrote a few bits and pieces online about Thomas Ligotti's extended essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. There was, for instance, a thread I started on Thomas Ligotti Online, and one or two blog posts. The essay is, ostensibly, one dealing with the origins and development of the horror genre. It also carries in it, quite explicitly, an argument, or plea for, the voluntary extinction of the human race, not for the sake of the planet, or anything like that, but simply in order to reduce human suffering. I suppose it could be called something like the case for genocidal euthanasia, but that would be misleading, since the main solution to the problem of human suffering that is put forward is simply not to perpetuate that suffering by procreation.

At the time I was ambivalent towards such a conclusion and the arguments upon which it was built, and I suppose I still am. However, I feel like making a certain qualification now to the remarks I made then.

In as far as anything ever is right or wrong, I think that Ligotti is probably right here. Or to put it another way, unless there is such a thing as mass-enlightenment, there will always be a sense of intolerable suffering to human existence, and the only way to end this will be through extinction. Some means of extinction will be gentler than and preferable to others.

To state that even more simply: Yes, I agree; it's always better not to be born.

That wasn't the qualification I wished to make, actually. But before I make my qualification, I should perhaps qualify my qualification by saying, I think I am far less consistent in my views than Ligotti, and likely to vacillate wildly.

At one point in the thread - I believe at more than one point - a poster calling himself 'The Yellow Jester', who is, in fact, Thomas Ligotti, if, in fact, such an entity exists, makes a distinction between emotional pessimism and cerebral pessimism, claiming as his own the latter:

In my own case, I can say that my pessimistic outlook is a matter of cerebral introspection and not "emotional thinking." No matter how I felt on an emotional level, I would still say, "It would be better not to be born." That is a constant which could only change should I become the victim of a brain tumor or something of the sort that would derange my thought processes.

At the time I noted, but did not quite appreciate this point. I'm not sure that any thinking can ever be free of emotion, or at least, of something like 'personality'. My own pessimism (not that I especially want to own it) I have always thought of as emotional, of consisting in a sensation that no one else would ever understand, because I could never put it into words. It was an almost physical entity, as reasonless as any object on Earth, like a ball of fear and loneliness inside me.

Now, however, I appreciate this point much better.

At the time that the essay came out, my strong reaction to it was probably due to the fact that it was 'too close to home'. Now my reaction to it is less powerful. It seems little different to any other accumulation of letters that I may read or ignore at will. For the past few months I have not had the intense depression that I suffered for many years before. I feel relatively detached now, and it seems to me that, no, you do not need to be depressed to think that it's better not to be born. You might even be enjoying an ice cream - as I believe Ligotti himself remarked - and still think that to be born is a curse that should not be visited upon anyone. I agree.

What, after all, is everybody looking forward to? What have they been looking foward to throughout history? Why has it taken so long without finding that thing - which cannot even be conceived - and people still go on and on reproducing? I do not understand.

In the meantime, Thomas Ligotti has joined H.P. Lovecraft, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in their riotous and strangely touching adventures with Korean sex symbols Jeon Ji-Hyun and Kim Hee Sun, iiiiin, Thomas Ligotti and the Strange Case of the Orange-Flavored Lifesavers.