I finished another novel last week, the second this year. I have a non-fiction book on A Clockwork Orange to complete editing before the month is over. In the brief interim between these tasks, a little poem of my own emerged, not for once a (mis)translation.
I don’t personally know what to make of it really, except that it came very quickly and almost complete, requiring only the careful editing eye of a poet friend to identify the couple of lines which needed tweaking. So, I tweaked, and here we are.
Make of it what you will. Normal service, such as it is, will be resumed in a bit.
The Reset Button
It’s an insult really, isn’t it, life
on the easy setting, thrown about
like privilege, a cut of envy. No,
life’s not fair and never will be. Is it
even possible to discern
the wailing at the hated mirror or
the late-night puking in the eyes
of the most-liked, the prettiest girl?
Money doesn’t mean you don’t have
problems. You just don’t have money
problems. Instead you struggle
with how others don’t have any and
how you think they’d like yours. Or
so I’m told through shiny embarrassed teeth
by people who have never loaned me any.
Every day, every single day, thousands
of men cross forests and deserts, sailing in
frail flotillas on oceans of desperate envy, to these
Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, a fintech company, hit the headlines earlier this year when he sacked his entire HR department, claiming that they’d been “creating problems that didn’t exist.”
It didn’t take long for HR execs the world over to round on him. Their responses were varied, but tended to cluster around the argument that HR wasn’t creating problems but documenting them. In other words, the problems that seemed to vanish had simply ceased to be addressed.
HR inhabits an especially denigrated position in popular culture. On the one hand, they are often seen as the lackeys of management, who pose as the friends of the workers in order to shut down challenges to authority. This is how they are denigrated from the left. From the right, they are a woke vanguard, wasting workplace time on endless initiatives involving DEI, pronouns and cultural sensitivities.
So HR is an easy target, with few allies, and Breslow’s drastic initiative therefore was widely acclaimed, and not only on the right.
But obviously the criticism he has also received has irked him somewhat, to the point that he agreed to an interview with the Daily Telegraphto expound on his actions.
In it, he makes a different interesting point, somewhat at odds with contemporary corporate culture (and indeed the culture of other employers which may not be fully corporate but which nonetheless emulate many aspects of corporate behaviour, such as educational institutions, charities or indeed state and semi-state bodies.)
Addressing his workers somewhat metaphorically via the Telegraph’s pages, he said: “I’m not a camp counsellor. I’m not your social circle leader. I’m your chief executive. I’m your boss. We need to make the business successful. And that’s all I want to hear about.”
In short and to summarise: “It’s good to get a little personal and understand the human side of one another, but not too much. This is not your family.”
And nor is it. I’m not sure when the insidious corporate rhetoric of the ‘workplace family’, ‘work wives’ and so on first began to infiltrate contemporary culture, but it is long since established by now. It is in fact commonplace to hear cheery CEOs boast of their ‘family culture’ or how their operation ‘is one big family.’ It’s the kind of thing one hears in job interviews incessantly. Indeed, it sometimes even appears in the copy for the ad.
It would be interesting if someone were to research this emergence alongside the parallel explosion in familial estrangement, I think. I believe they may well be connected. The tragic exponential rise in familial estrangement is usually attributed to the ongoing encroachment of therapy and therapeutic jargon and methods into popular culture. And I don’t doubt that as a point of origin.
However, to gain the kind of reach that the phenomenon has now attained, whereby huge numbers of families in the West now experience some form of parental, child or other familial alienation, therapy alone cannot be responsible. There simply aren’t enough people able to afford ongoing therapy to account for the scale of the issue.
But if a workplace is also a family, then a family is something that you can get sacked from. If a close work colleague is a ‘work wife’ or ‘work husband’, then divorce is nothing more than someone choosing to move on to a better opportunity.
This pernicious attempt by corporate owners to rebrand their impersonal, remote, multi-sited behemoths as some kind of neo-tribe functions differently to the Japanese zaibatsus of old, which did actually attempt to foster some loyalty by emulating familial activities. But the office Christmas party (often held in January for cost reasons) or summer picnic or ‘team bonding exercise’ is today a cheap and cheapened mimicry of actual family celebrations.
And if their attempt to muddy the lines between corporate collegiality and family bonds has been in any way successful, it has not worked in the direction they desired. Gen Z do not view companies as families, and they as younger workers are the ones most likely to reaffiliate their loyalties, as they generally have not started families of their own yet.
Instead, I’d argue that the company = family formula is working balefully in the other direction. If a job in a company is inherently precarious, then perhaps so is being part of a family. If walking away from a job for a better opportunity is legitimate, then so is divorce. If some stresses or disagreements are enough reason to quit a job, perhaps it’s also enough reason to quit on your parents, or your sibling or your child too.
Corporatism sought to rebrand itself positively in order to emotionally blackmail workers into ever more labour in return for the same or less remuneration. Instead, what they have achieved is the turbo-charging of societal alienation.
Whatever you may think of Breslow, at least he recognised the lie. Your workplace is NOT your family. And nor should you treat your family like it was a workplace.
Firstly, I should say that I do like Michael Palin. This is no sideswipe or snide gotcha at all, as I hope will become clear. I think, of the very many people who get accused of being National Treasures in Britain, he’s one of the few that might actually warrant it.
Certainly, as the man himself has proven in his many crissings and crossings of the Earth, it is constitutionally impossible to dislike him. Everywhere he goes, he seems quite organically to endear himself to all. If that were his only talent, it would be astonishing. As we know, he has many others.
One of those talents, perhaps his primary one, is writing. Yes, he is an estimable performer – an actor, presenter and comedian from if not the top shelf then not far below it. But he has a talent and ability with words, no less written than spoken, and he has clearly spent a lot of his life practising this art.
Much of that time was spent writing his famous diaries, which cover his life from the Monty Python period well into the current century. And of course, we are reminded of this annually on Greatest Diary Entry Ever Day, when once again his entry for Sunday November 13th 1977 goes viral, as it has a number of years running now.
It's the anniversary of the greatest diary entry of all time, from Michael Palin.
It DOES sound like he had a really lovely Sunday. He evokes it beautifully, but as I said, he is an estimable writer, author of no less than a dozen best-selling travelogues (most of which he kindly allows people to read for free on his website – I told you he’s impossible to dislike.)
And then there’s the four volumes of diaries from which this gem has been unearthed. There’s also five children’s books (three of which he wrote in one year), three books of history, and a play. He’s even written three novels, one alongside fellow Python Terry Jones.
So I’ve got no doubt whatsoever that this diary entry is not merely beautiful and good, but also true, to apply Aquinas’s transcendentals. I have no doubt whatsoever that in November 1977, as he sat there with the scent of roasting beef in his nostrils and the wisps of smoke outside, Michael was indeed reading over an incomplete draft of a novel, and had worked out how he should complete it, and was eager to get on with it.
But. I am so sorry there’s a but. But there’s a but.
Michael Palin has, in his estimable and extensive list of published works, written three novels as I said. One of those, the Jones co-write, was published before 1977. The others, Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth, were published in 1995 and 2012 respectively.
You see where I’m going with this, presumably. Either that novel Michael was writing in November 1977 took at least another 18 years to complete and make it into print, or else it was never finished at all.
Is this enough to ruin a diary entry once described as epitomising ‘the beauty of enough’?
I hope not. In fact I hope it actually does more. I hope that in addition to inspiring people to appreciate what they have, and live in the moment, and practise gratitude for the small quotidian comforts, it might also act as a kind of warning.
Not everything works out, not even the things we feel filled with confidence about. But that doesn’t mean that they must lose all their value because of it.
We can apply this lesson to almost the whole gamut of our messy human existence, from love affairs even to the loss of loved ones, just as much as we can to Michael Palin’s missing novel.
Because in November 1977, the failure of that novel was still ahead of Michael. And the fact that it didn’t work out in the end in no way eradicates the joy it gave him while he was in the moment of appreciating how much he’d achieved of it and how far it had come.
Very arguably, his diary entry about that joy has gained greater traction, and been better appreciated and much more widely read than the book, if finished, could ever have been.
Were George Orwell and William Faulkner, two giants of anglophone literary Modernism, actually driven by demons, whether literal or metaphorical?
It’s taken quite a while, because AI is a slow learner, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Pynchon. But the algorithms of social media have finally woken up to the fact that I’ve been writing a book.
It’s not the first time I’ve written a book. The draft I’m currently nudging slowly to completion is or will be the sixth, actually. Of these, three are already in print, and another one is contracted for publication already. The remaining two are both literary fiction, for which the equally mountainous task of seeking representation has begun to loom before me.
And suddenly, social media has begun throwing quotes at me about writing, despite years of my best efforts to throw it off my scent. What socials I possess, and most were obtained reluctantly in spite of my own inherent Luddism in this regard either for work or else to remain in easy contact with friends scattered across the planet, were formerly easily duped.
So I would often see adverts for things like gold lamé trousers, or Jesus onesies, Volodymyr Zelensky “collectible” action figures or electric self-pleasuring devices. All of these are absolutely real incidentally. I write fiction, but I’m not that outrageous.
Perhaps I became complacent when the algorithm began to desperately hurl adverts for ever more preposterous items, be it a vaginoplasty or electric sheep shears or insurance for full security extraction from war zones. It knows me not, I felt.
But I perhaps ought to have known that through a process of endless sleepless attrition, eventually I’d inadvertently seed enough genuine data about my activities and interests to allow the algorithms to close in on my actual activities.
So very recently the algorithm has been chucking motivational quotes from authors at me about the process of writing itself. What interests me is not what those authors have to say, though perhaps that should. When you’re used to receiving turds in a box, eventually you cease to value the boxes, even if they start arriving filled with diamonds. That’s simple Pavlovian response.
What interests me is that some of these quotations do not appear to be real. Are algorithms hallucinating quotes by Modernist novelists, or is it something only slightly more insidious? Are they instead passively collecting them from the hive mind sewer of the internet and passing them on gullibly as truth to almost equally gullible people?
There are two quotes in particular that raised my suspicions, largely because they both contain the same notable phrase. The first, “attributed to William Faulkner” according to one sloppy academic article, runs as follows: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”
The other, widely clothed in the hallowed gown of Orwell, states: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
Once upon a time, I was a professional researcher, and before that I was a trained academic and before that again, I was a national newspaper reporter. This means I have a certain process when it comes to encountering information of most kinds.
In a quotation that seems false but is actually verified, the former football manager Sir Alex Ferguson once said “When an Italian tells me it’s pasta on the plate I check under the sauce to make sure. They are the inventors of the smokescreen.” I too like to check under the sauce to make sure. And when I went checking these quotations, something strange occurred. I couldn’t find them in any of Orwell’s or Faulkner’s work.
Where I did find them was all over the internet, on fan content sites like Good Reads, and offered for discussion on Reddit, as the poster-type memes designed for social media attention spans which had been spammed to me, but not (except in one instance) in the kind of places one expects to find genuine author quotes, that is in academic articles about those authors.
Now perhaps I missed something. It’s certainly possible. But it seems strange that such notable phrases haven’t emerged in the works of these authors I possess electronically (and therefore quickly searchable), nor do they attract attention among scholars either, as searches of JStor and Google Scholar revealed. There was one guy, but I’m not going to shame him. I hope he comes to realise that “Attributed to” is not a sufficient citation in future.
I can’t be entirely sure of the process. I suspect what’s happened is that someone somewhere has created them. Unless things have already degenerated to the point where AI has begun rewriting the Modernist canon, I have to assume these quotes originally came from people. I wonder about why they’d do that. Perhaps, as unrecognised writers themselves, they wanted to see if something they wrote could be passed off as the work of someone famous.
But where did that key phrase come from, really? We see it almost identically in the 1992 title of a song on Pantera’s best-selling thrash metal classic ‘A Vulgar Display of Power’. But it goes back further, to Alan Moore’s run on the comic book Swamp Thingin the early 1980s which made his name as an author. That’s my best guess at the lineage here. And while both Pantera and Alan Moore are estimable artists in their own rights, they don’t quite have the cachet of Modernist literary giants of a century past.
So I wrote this in the rather vain hope that if someone else should decide to check under the sauce of these particular quotations, they might just find this post and realise that it’s not pasta at all. It’s just more slop, created by trolls and propagated by AI algorithms.
This is obviously not important in the great scheme of things but it does serve as a cautionary tale. CHECK EVERYTHING that comes to you online. We are now fully immersed in Baudrillard’s age of the fakes. The lies come at us incessantly now, in all forms, by demons driven.
