Writing on Walls again
Relaunched. New cover art. Updated link to the video of the first story. Lower price (99 cents or 77 pence, I believe, but don’t hold me to it – the UK price will fluctuate with exchange rates). Now you can ignore it all over again. Or maybe just for the first time?
Eight short tales of horror and dark fantasy based on the understanding that one characteristic of being human is the ability to use one’s imagination, that imagination constructs reality, and that we construct our own worst fears and horrors.
It’s on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. And if you want to view the video, which is an abridged version of the first story, shot in an amazingly low-tech way using the embers of a fire and an oil lamp for lighting, I just uploaded it to Vimeo.
A taster? This is from a bit you won’t see on the ‘Look Inside’ function, the story MacGuffin. And yes, the narrator is the MacGuffin of the story. I take it you know the meaning of the term – Hitchcock popularised it in film to refer to a ‘plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue, protect or control, often with little or no narrative explanation as to why it is considered so important. The specific nature of a MacGuffin is typically unimportant to the overall plot. The most common type of MacGuffin is an object, place or person’ (I’m quoting this from Wikipedia).
The story opens this way:
It’s more difficult than you’d think to dig up a buried box in the woods at night. I have explicit instructions, a spade and a torch. But I have company; there are more people out here at two in the morning than there are in the town centre. Couples use a small clearing for alfresco exchanges of DNA. Illegal immigrants are camped a hundred metres away. Some kind of deal is going down near to where I left my car.
Thank fuck I’d done a recon when it was still light. Go to this point on the path, head for that forked tree, see that rock outcrop, dig one metre directly in front of the fault line on the rock. It’s probably an SSSI, digging prohibited on account of rare species. I’m in favour of environmental protection but right now there’s something more important at stake.
Clearing away leaf litter makes a hell of a noise, but no one seems to care. I shield my flashlight, and find a slightly sunken square of earth. At some point in the past it has been dug and loosely refilled.
Do I know for sure there’s a box under here? I swear at Giles for his cloak-and-dagger temperament, his love of practical jokes. I could get to the end of this and find some whimsical object with a sarcastic note.
I know you have severe reservations about my work. Perhaps you think I’ve had a breakdown and went insane. Perhaps you’ll find the world has had a breakdown and gone insane. It doesn’t matter. I’m just relying on you to have the same sense of honour you had when we were postgrads. You said on a particularly drunken evening that whatever our differences, I could always count on you as a friend.
You’re reading this because something has happened to me. My fail-safe was that this email would be sent automatically in such circumstances. I hope can still depend on your drunken promise, because the fact that you’re reading this means there is an important task I need you to undertake on my behalf.
You must recover some information and evidence, and make it public in a way that will attract the attention of the public – not the authorities, who will no doubt label me a deluded fool and deny everything, but capable, right-thinking people who are able to determine their own best interests and act on them.
The email was dated a year ago but arrived last week. Outlook has a function to delay sending selected messages, and my guess was that Giles just kept putting the date back until, one day, something had happened to stop him doing it. The countdown clicked to zero, the message was sent. With instructions: this path, that tree, this rock, one metre in front of, about half a metre down. There was more: reference to a housing estate he was ‘investigating’. The roads show on Google Maps but there are no street views. I’m guessing it’s a scummy little place, low priority on every local authority agenda.
I curse Giles for a drama queen, an overweight and pouty prima donna of melodrama. Had he come out here at this time of night to bury the thing? It would have appealed to his twisted sensibilities. But he was never one for physical effort, which makes the fact of his actually digging a hole – if it was him that dug it – significant.
Thank you for reading this. To ensure it remains secret, now please set fire to the device you have been reading it on…
Leicester street art
I’ve been having a quiet time. Actually a noisy quiet time since much of it has been spent doing things like putting in a new garden fence (much hammering, sawing and swearing). But I thought I’d share these, following a recent visit to Leicester. Materials: chalk on paving slabs. Artist: I have no idea, but I hope he – it was a guy working on them, anyway – does well.
Street art, Leicester, May 2013
Street art, leicester, May 2013
Random thought no. 51
Yes, I’ve been working on other stuff and neglecting this blog. But yes, I also have some stuff in hand I’ll be sharing in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, here’s a random memory that occurred to me while I was working in the garden (making a new garden gate, as it happens, but I don’t think that’s significant).
In 1980, I think it was, I went on a trip around Europe. I met a couple of Americans in France who were on a European tour. We exchanged addresses and about a month later they pitched up at my house in the UK. We spent a fair bit of time talking. In the course of this they explained something that hadn’t occurred to me. I’d assumed they were visiting Europe ‘just because’ – but it turned out they had a specific reason. They were convinced nuclear war was likely within the next year or two, and wanted to see the major centres and museums of Europe before they were destroyed. ‘We’re visiting,’ one put it, ‘the theatre of war for world War Three. We want to see it before it’s a nuclear wasteland.’
I’d grown up during the early phase of the Cold War. I still remember the leaflet my parents had on how to build a nuclear fallout shelter (they never did) and my childhood was influenced by concepts such as the Four Minute Warning. We’d watched news on the Cuban Missile Crisis, understanding for the first time that war could not only be truly global but that the first we might know about it would be a mushroom cloud.
However, for these Americans 1980 was the year they’d come to grips with all this. Detente had broken down, The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, Carter had deployed Pershing II missiles in Europe (and cancelled the US Olympic team participating in the Moscow Olympics). We were still three years away from Reagan branding Russia the ‘Evil Empire’ and announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative. But this pair had read the way the political situation and concluded there was a more than small chance that 1980 would be the last year they’d be able to see the major European museums.
I’m glad they were wrong. But the ‘what if’ and the idea of ‘last chance to see’ will maybe, one day, become a story I’ll want to write.
What you can learn from adverts
I know, I’ve been quiet on here for a long time. That happens when I’m busy, and I’ve been busy in a bunch of different ways. Some of them have been to do with looking at theories of customer service (yes, they exist) and others have revolved around me expecting that every time the phone rings or I get a text, it will be a message that X (a family member) has been self-harming again, and we have to go round the cycle of getting them stable one more time.
But in between the professional and personal stuff, I’ve lately been bemused by the morality and values projected by adverts. I always have, really, but there are a few recent ones that stick in my mind. For example, I’ve learned that:
- it’s considered acceptable in crowded urban environments to drive fast and perform stunts in your car while waving a coloured smoke flare out of your window. Fortunately I live near a chandlers so I can probably just get some marine flares for the purpose.
- if you don’t want to go home after a holiday, the travel company won’t mind if you sabotage the coach (I don’t know if their tolerance extends to sabotaging their aircraft, but you can always argue they’ve established the principle with the coach and you’re just being creative about applying it).
- if you buy a packet of crisps (potato chips, if you’re reading this in the US) the crisps will love you forever. Even if you eat them.
- otherwise, if you need to buy love it’s available in all good department stores at around £58 for a small bottle.
And apart from that, in relation to the ongoing horsemeat (and donkey meat) scandal it occurs to me that this is far from the first time companies have, let’s say, allowed their sources of meat products to be compromised. It happened with some regularity in Victorian times and was epitomised by Dickens in the character of a pieman who used cats “for beefsteak, veal and kidney, ‘cording to the demand” (in Pickwick Papers), and also of course in the story of Sweeney Todd, whose customers ended up in Mrs Lovett’s pies.
OK, I’m off to have an emotional relationship with a small packet of low-calorie potato snacks. If it’s as exciting as I expect, I may be some time…
CRM – fact or fantasy?
You may, or may not, know that periodically I write stuff about customer service issues – and on the whole I try to write properly researched stuff rather than fiction (though I have moments where some of the materials I have to read on the topic seem to come from a world I don’t recognise). The latest round of this relates to something known by the acronym ‘customer relations management’ or CRM.
The idea of CRM is that if a company has a customer, they have a relationship with that customer that is ongoing and over the course of time may result in the customer purchasing more services or products. Lots of business gurus have been advancing this idea for a number of years now.
But I’ve been taking soundings from friends about this idea and, while the phraseology is mine rather than theirs, I wonder if customer relations management has been undermined by the postmodern economy, and dropped into a black hole.
Consider the following examples:
- someone who used to work in a bank recalling a speech by the CEO that was supposed to motivate staff, though to do what, exactly, wasn’t entirely clear. What he said was, apparently, that the important thing was that the customer should ‘have the perception’ that they’d been served well. That phrase could mean a number of things, but the context was that customer service is about perception management, with a customer believing they’d been served well while the underlying reality might be somewhat different. After that, the bank started to get itself into a bunch of problems that, to be fair, paled into insignificance after the onset of the financial crisis of 2010.
- the comment from someone who knows about call centres that the basic problem is driving down the cost per call. The net result is, in their understanding, that call centres have become increasingly overloaded and offer a poorer service than they did, say, 5 years ago because offering a good service costs more. I don’t know if this is universally true. But the last time I actually tried to call a call centre, earlier this week, it involved a 25-minute wait with alternating adverts and a music track that appeared to have got stuck. The very fact I was waiting because ‘all our agents are busy’ didn’t exactly lend credibility to the services being advertised between the Stockhausen-type sounds that resulted from what was probably supposed to be a pop song of some description. The guy who answered the phone was polite and efficient. But then he had to admit that while he’d proposed a solution to my problem (which I tried in real time and it worked, fortunately), he wasn’t actually sure it would work because it only works occasionally.
- someone who works in a dual environment in an urban and a rural area, in a public service. The customer setup in the urban area is highly automated and enables people to get in and out of the place quickly. That in the rural area is highly automated which means almost everyone (it being a more elderly population etc.) needs to have a staff member on hand to make the automated systems work for them. It would be faster to decommission the systems and let staff deal with customers directly – and result in fewer frustrated customers.
I can see the value of CRM if you’re selling, say, large and complex things that cost millions or billions of pounds, because these projects take a long time and the context changes as the project goes along. If you’re building a dam or making turbines for a power station, stuff happens along the way and you need to know that you have to alter your designs because tab A on the original plans won’t fit into slot B when you come to install the thing, since tab B has been replaced by gizmo C. Or whatever.
But for most ordinary everyday purposes, the idea of customers who stay with a particular company and want a ‘relationship’ with that company doesn’t seem to fly any more. People ideally want stuff that doesn’t go wrong and doesn’t need much customer service, and if they do have to make that phone call then a good proportion of the time it will be because something’s broken and needs fixing – in other words, because they need help now and something’s frustrated them.
Meanwhile, the financial realities of the postmodern economy are such that reducing cost and increasing productivity is paramount, and if that means cutting corners on customer service which is often perceived as not being a ‘profit centre’ for the company, then so be it.
Are my friends right? Is my analysis of this credible? Have business gurus got this one wrong?
The usefulness of useless degrees
I’ve just been reading some news articles about ‘useless’ degrees. They include a two-year foundation degree in heavy metal (the music, that is) at New College Nottingham, a BA in Comedy Studies (though technically it appears to be listed as a BA in ‘Performance’), Enigmatology (i.e. puzzle setting and solving – however only one person ever graduated from the one course offered, by Indiana University in the 1970s), and assorted qualifications in areas such as puppetry, parapsychology and Viking re-enactment.
The thing I’ve been asking myself is this: in the 1980s, Thatcherite policies demanded that degrees should be ‘relevant’ to career choices and employers’ demands for skills. Various degree courses disappeared, for example language degrees in Farsi and some African languages – ironically enough leading to later problems within the intelligence community when groups speaking some of these languages came to be considered as security threats.
However, the current spread of ‘weird’ degrees isn’t all that strange. We live in a knowledge-based economy and in the UK at least, much of our economic output comprises cultural rather than physical goods. So having a supply of graduates with specific expertise in science fiction, horror, comedy, different genres of music and all the rest is very likely a good and useful thing for the economy as a whole, in addition to the ‘generic’ skills they offer in terms of academic research and practice, and the interests they offer for students. Of course these things don’t need to be learned through degree type studies, there are many other forms of learning. But there’s also no reason why they shouldn’t be degree studies if enough people want to learn in that format.
And if that isn’t a good enough argument, bear in mind that the University of Derby’s MA in Horror and Transgression, which covers diverse forms of film and literature alongside the works of writers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze, and transgressive writers such as Burroughs, Ballard and Burgess, lists a number of possible post degree careers. Among these is public service administration. Which is as clear a sign as I can think of about what the experience of public service administration will actually be like in the future.
[Edited to add: of course there will always be a need for degrees in traditional subjects - medicine, engineering, maths, history, biology, languages, computing and the rest. But consider the needs of, say, a computer gaming company or a movie production company that needs to find a new and credible way to develop a fantasy, scifi or horror conceptual world. Consider the needs of, in fact, almost any company looking for its 'next big thing'. The people with the design and production skills, etc., are clearly necessary to that process. Some of them may even need to make puppets, re-enact Viking dramas, tell good jokes or write and perform music to get to the point at which a product is made and marketed. But no product does well unless it links with human fantasies. Successful products also need their dreamers. Postmodernity (are we still in a 'postmodern society'?) has sometimes been described as the society in which the old modernist order of narratives has been corrupted, and that's a reasonable if overly general assessment. But that makes the ability to weave old narratives and create new ones all the more significant in contemporary society. Hence the need for studies that appear niche, marginal, or just plain odd.]
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