Introducing the little-known writer Eugene Mahlzeit and wasting my time as usual and feeling a tad guilty but not too much. And anyway at least I am productive, if not in a very useful way

Here’s a thing: I am concentrating on finishing my ‘Hemingway bollocks’ and I am getting there. One advantage is, of course, that not only do I have no deadline, not even a self-imposed deadline, but it is of absolutely no consequence to anyone in this world whether or not I finish or even whether or not is is even interesting. No one, but no one, except me gives a flying fuck. That is an advantage.

One of my major failings since I was very young was to rush everything. Perhaps it had to do with having an older brother who was good to excellent — or so it seemed to me then — at whatever he turned his hand to. It seemed effortless. He was good at sports, I wasn’t. He was good at school, I wasn’t. I was always — and still am, though now I am proud of the fact — a plodder. Plod, plod, plod.

In my work as a newspaper sub-editor — I was only a reporter for six years — my tendency to rush, to cut corners, to make do and all the rest, was at times catastrophic, though purely in the sense, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, that newspapers are ‘A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation’.

So take ‘catastrophic’ with a pinch of salt, as for many leaving for work without their smartphone is ‘a disaster’. Oh, and (a sub writes) note to Mr Shaw: in the generally accepted sense of the word a newspaper is not a ‘device’. ‘Institution’ might have done the trick, but we take your point.

As for my point, it is that since I retired (four years ago come Monday, April 4) I have simply stopped rushing, simply because there is really no need to rush, none at all. There are no deadlines whatsoever. And that means I give myself all the time in the world to do whatever I am doing to ensure it is just as I want it.

It would be different if, say, I had a publisher who was hassling me for ‘your second novel’. But I don’t, and the chances of that happening are rather slimmer than the Pope taking advantage of new same-sex laws and making an honest man out of Donald Trump.

This is not to say that there is no slight pressure, but it is self-imposed. Why, I have no idea, but concluding this ‘Hemingway bollocks’ so I can get on with other writing and making sure it is not embarrassing is a form of pressure, and I find I feel oddly ‘guilty’ at the end of the day if I ‘have done’ nothing, i.e. not written a bit more (or rewritten and edited with a view to improving it, on it).

I have been very good these past few months and though progress has been slow, it has been steady. Then came yesterday.

. . .

Yesterday I decided to prepare my Sony digital 8 camcorder for sale on eBay. The model is a DCR-TRV 460e. and I bought it about 20-odd years ago because it in that particular range it was one of only two that could also read analogue tapes. And I had a lot of those from my children’s childhood. 

The trouble was it had developed a fault — and I seem to remember somewhere that is was a design fault — whereby on playback there would be three thick horizontal lines of distortion across the picture. By pressing down on top of the camera this could be temporarily remedied and at the time it worked.

However, as everyone and their pussy cat can now take video on their smartphone — and I can (though the quality is not as good) I hadn’t used it in years. I recently took it out with a view to transferring some short clips to my laptop to burn on a DVD, but found that the remedy to ‘cure’ the fault didn’t work. So I decided to sell it on eBay and yesterday set about getting it ready. But this time the remedy did work.

I had only three of the many tapes I recorded to hand and went through parts of them and came across about ten minutes worth of utterly pointless shots of the lane outside our cottage. I could not and still cannot think why I recorded them.

Then at some point I decided to use them with a simple soundtrack I knocked together into a short video about little known American modernist novelist Eugene Mahlzeit (look him up though you won’t find a lot because mainstream he ain’t, but his three novels are worth it).

And this again I didn’t do any work on the ‘bollocks’ and felt guilty. No matter that I enjoyed every second of knocking together the video (below) and no matter that I succeeded in doing what I wanted to do, I still felt and feel guilty. So if you don’t enjoy it, I shall be very annoyed. Here it is:

Something else which interests, no, fascinates me is how much a soundtrack can influence or reactions to a film or video. As far as I am concerned the soundtrack, whatever it is, is crucial to eliciting the reaction the director/producer (I never know who is ultimately in charge) wants to get.

Watch a horror film with the sound off, and it very soon becomes not ‘horrible’ at all. And that soundtrack can be very, very subtle. The ‘piece of music’ I constructed — a more honest word than ‘composed’ — for my video about consists of just four notes and a recording of a clock ticking I found on Freesound.org.

It was made using Mac’s free Garageband software and consists of three tracks, each doubled up and the instrument changed and reverb. Thirteen years ago (I know that because I have just downloaded these two videos from You Tube to which I uploaded them 13 years ago) are a case in point: the exact same video but it creates a different effect merely because of the music chosen for each.

Take a look.

It is the almost identical video (I made one or two slight changes for the second, upbeat version, but nothing of relevance here) but the music used is wholly different. The first is the song Orik Gullaganda by the Azerbaijani singer Sevara Nazarkhan, and the second is (and I had to look this up using Soundhound because I couldn’t remember) Cotton Tail by duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The first is doomy and the images are vaguely sinister. The second is upbeat but the — same — are just images.

‘Ah’ (I think) I said, ‘Putin won’t invade. He’s not THAT stupid’. Guess what? As for that nice Mr Xi, what is he to make of the antics of his new best friend?

Well, I got it wrong. I think — I really can’t be arsed to read through my last blog entry, but I’m pretty sure I remember correctly — that I suggested it was all some big bluff on Putin’s part, that all he wanted was to scare the shit out of the West and to remind them that he was still around and that in the event he wouldn’t invade, because what would be the point?

Well, to be frank from what we know now there is no point: Putin seems to have shot himself in the foot badly and there seem to be no advantage of any kind he can gain from his ‘special operation’, the phrase the Russians are using in to avoid calling it a war.

I feel oddly uncomfortable referring to ‘the Russians’ in that way as if the bear some of the responsibility for the invasion. They don’t. This is Putin’s war, Putin’s doing, not Russia’s. ‘The Russians’ weren’t consulted, not least the parents and women who have already had a son or partner killed.

And given that, as is the way of dictators, Putin has now shut down every media outlet he does not control, the only ‘news’ a great many Russians are getting, especially those in the back of beyond, about what is going on in Ukraine is what Putin wants them to hear: that the ‘special operation’ was necessary to rid Ukraine of a cabal of Nazis who were perpetuating genocide (on whom is never made clear) and that Ukraine can be returned to the bosom of Mother Russia.

It is also all ‘going to plan’. So please, let’s not lump in ‘the Russians’ as being in any way to blame for the killing and bombing. This solely down to Putin and those around him supporting and facilitating him.

. . .

As for the ‘facts’ of the case, I would not deny that the West is also inclined to put a suitable spin on what is happening, but given the nature of our media it is very unlikely we are being spun a crock of lies simply because to do so is nigh-on impossible.

I shall, though, reiterate that all I can do in these blog entries as far as the ‘facts’ are concerned is repeat — parrot? — what I hear on the news and, to a lesser extent, read in the papers (though I am inclined to give more credence to reports in the Financial Times and The Economist than in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail).

Apart from those facts, there is also the central mystery: why is Putin doing this? Why has a man who hitherto was regarded as supreme pragmatism and rational to a fault undertaken such a stupid operation.

One popular explanation is that he is ill, possibly with cancer or Parkinson’s and being treated with steroids. That, ‘they’ say, would explain his puffy face and, ‘they’ say, it could be the cause of what the tabloids call ‘roid rage’, personality change which makes you more aggressive.

Bodybuilders who use a steroids a lot are known to suffer from ‘roid rage’ (two words which for the tabloids has the useful virtue of being just four letters each and which will fit very nicely in 200pt Franklin Gothic in a splash headline. What would fit was also a consideration when the tabloids arbitrarily renamed (‘dubbed’) Prince William as ‘Wills’ — shorter and more suited to a snappy headline).

We are also being told here in the West, and it is a very plausible explanation, that the pitiful nature of Putin’s invasion is because is intelligence service are so scared of him now that they tell him what they think he wants to hear. The same was true of Hitler.

So he seems sincerely to have believed that his invading troops would be welcomed by the Ukrainians with open arms and there would be very little resistance. That is one reason for his opening strategy, to send in light vehicles in an intended swift operation rather than rumble in with heavy and slower tanks. He seems to have expected to have taken over Kiev in a matter of days.

We are told he was also badly informed about the state of his armed forces. Supposedly a great deal of money has been spent over the past decade modernising his army, but we now believe a lot of the money was syphoned off to pay for baubles and yachts for those able to syphon it off.

One example given is that the original tyres (US 'tires' though I don't know why) on one state-of-the-art military vehicle were substituted with cheap Chinese retreads which would and did not last at all long.

But in a sense all this is just me whistling in the wind. What is going to happen? Will Putin behave in some way which gives the West, as in Nato, not choice but to get involved, (and so far they have been keeping their noses very clean because of the likely consequences)? Could the war in Ukraine spread to other parts of Europe? Will nuclear weapons at some point be launched? Will other states hostile to the West — Iran and North Korea — use the problems the US and the West have on their plate to cause them trouble elsewhere?

One of the tunes we are, perhaps, whistling is that Xi Jinping, China's president (a kind of more upmarkat Vladimir Putin) is getting very worried about the effect the Ukraine war will have on the global economy. It seems that China's wheat harvest this year will be terrible and it will have to import wheat whose price is soaring because Ukraine will not be able to produce as much.

China imports 70% of its oil and 40% of its gas. So it will pay a hell of a lot more than most on oil it uses. Russia will, of course be able to offload some of the oil and gas the West will no longer be getting on China — but, China is not sentimental and given that beggars can't be choosers it will be able to push down the price considerably. It certainly won’t be paying top rouble, besties with Russia or not.

Another dilemma is that in world trade, China does far more business with the US and the EU than with Russia: just $147bn with Russia last year but $828bn with the EU and $756bn with the US. What with sanctions flying around, China will really not want trade with the EU and the US to collapse - and the comparatviely piddly Russian trade wouldn't help.

A related embarrassment for Xi is that at the launch ceremony for the Winter Olympics, his Vlad the Lad came along and Xi proclaimed him to be his best mate. All fine and dandy but . . . Did Putin tell him that he was

 

planning to invade Ukraine? If he did, Xi will look very bad indeed, especially in view of all the problems it might cause China. And bearing that in mind, it we might speculate that tried to talk Putin out of it.

If he did not? If he knew but kept schtumm? Well, it makes the image he likes to portray as the wise, farsighted, all-knowing leader China needs look very silly. Farsighted? Not quite. Xi Will not be a happy bunny and might no longer want to be besties with Vladimir.

So how's it all going to end? Who knows?

On March 9, Russians forces shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, in the south of Ukraine, Mr Xi. Several women were giving birth when the shells struck, but they survived because they were sheltering in the basement. Is this really the kind of thing you want the world to see you associated with, Mr Xi?