Well, well, well – a genius writes! Shame that it took until 2135 for the fucking world to catch on (by which time he was long dead)! And it’s not as though I didn’t do my fucking best to alert them! Fuckwits! What CAN you do!

In the previous post I suggested that, broadly, those who insist they ‘write only for themselves’ are talking bollocks. However, despite my apparent Attila the Hun persona, I do have a smidgin of ‘the liberal’ in my make-up (and stop sniggering at the back!) and I am obliged to concede that, yes, some folk do ‘write only for themselves’. Why, I don’t know, but I must accept that occasionally there are some and there is no faux modesty at play.

For example, my aunt, Ann Cipriani, (who is my stepmother’s sister but I regard her as an aunt) wrote short stories and poems ‘only for herself’ and knowing her, I believe that is true, or better, almost true. NB She chose for herself the pseudonym Annie Leary if you do look up here stories and poems.

What I mean by that is that a year or two ago she allowed me to have printed up a slim volume of four of her short stories and a second volume of several of her poems. If you do come across this blog – and again more later – you can find them here: the stories and the poems.

The printing was done by Amazon’s excellent KDP service which I have also used. It is ‘print on demand’ service which means that the books they print are all, as part of the printing process, listed on the Amazon websites (and worldwide if you ask them to so list them). That means that if you buy a book, that copy or copies of it are printed to order, i.e. there is not a stock of books.

I have used the service several times to have printed (and are thus ‘for sale’) a short novel, four volumes of verse, five volumes of short stories and my ‘magnum opus’ The Hemingway Enigma: How did that fraud finagle his status to become for many years, and possibly still, as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 2oth century?

That is not the title of the book (the true title is The Hemingway Enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame?) but it will give you a taste of my views).

But now to get back on track: I don’t just ‘write for myself’. However, despite having what I produce printed by Amazon’s KDP and put on sale ‘worldwide’ (fancy!), it is very, very, very unlikely to be read by anyone else despite my pious hopes and drams. And perhaps writing that is even overstating the case.

However, I do write to be read. As far as I am concerned, and to use the example I always use, cooks prepare meals to be eaten by others and writers write prose or verse to be read by others (and some of us, myself included and, as here, despite the preamble in the previous post) write blogs to be read.

You reading this – if anyone actually does come across it, might now be puzzled: didn’t I previously suggest that this was a ‘private blog’, not for anyone else’s eyes? Well, to be very clear and wholly unambiguous so there is not chance of any confusion: yes and no.

Yes, in as far as the posts relating to my private thoughts about family and friends are concerned, but most certainly no when it comes to this and subsequent entries are in play. THIS entry – even the version which appears in my ‘private blog’ – is fully intended to be read! And not just read, but admired and quoted and recommended and passed on! So do that now! The problem is, of course, that here being part of my ‘private blog’, the chances of anyone just happening across this are as close to none at all as it is possible to come.

As I have started drinking rum ’n Coke as I write this (well, actually Pepsi not Coke, but let’s not get anal) and have had rather a lot of ‘small ones’ to avoid becoming unsober, it is rather running away with me, but what the hell.

Anyway, this will be the last post I shall double up in that way, that is post on both blogs, from now, so enjoy it while you can. And to those reading this entry on my ‘main blog’, I shall make damn sure you cannot find the ‘private blog’.

. . .

The whole point of this post is that I, who does not ‘write for himself’, but most certainly ‘writes for others’, finds it quite useful to write down my thoughts by way of clarifying them when trying to think stuff out. For me that works and I don’t know why. And that is what I shall be doing from now on.

I began my main blog as a ‘diary’ at some point in the early 1980s (fucking more than 40 years ago! Damn, am I ‘getting old’? Yes, Ed). I did so as someone who has ‘wanted to write’ since I was 16 and had showed ‘a poem’ to a kind English teacher at my school. By the way, I far prefer call what some refer to as ‘poetry’ as ‘verse’.

This was at the Oratory School and the teacher was ‘Timmy’ Hinds, who did not take me for English, however, and was nicknamed C.T.S. Hinds because he kept posting Roman Catholic tracts. He read the poem and advised me to ‘carry on’. In fact, he simply did 

In fact, he simply did what all adults should do: encourage the young in whatever they are attempting, but being very young and a little stupid, I misinterpreted what he had told me as ‘frankly, Powell, you are a literary genius!’ and more or less believed that for the next 40 years until I, er, sobered up a little. 

And I believed it religiously despite writing next to nothing in those 40 years. It was not completely nothing, but I am certain that what I did write was in no way worth attention.

At some point in the early 1980s, I began reading East Of Eden (of which I can remember nothing) and somehow and somewhere (perhaps in the publisher’s introduction) I came across the fact that Steinbeck was having an attack of ‘writer’s block’ and found it difficult to start writing in the mornings.

So his publisher’s editor gave him a hard-back journal and advised him to try to get started by writing a short diary entry on the left-hand page to exercise his ‘writing muscles’ – my phrase, not the editor’s – and then to carry on writing his novel once he had ‘warmed up’ – again, my phrase.

Being very conscious that I was writing fuck-all for a guy who thought himself to be a ‘literary genius’, I decided that if I did the same, I might also start writing. Well, I bought myself a hardback A4 ledger and did start ‘keeping a diary’, but did I start ‘writing fiction’? What do you think?

As it happens I now have about ten or more of those A4 ledgers and carried on writing in them until I married in 1995, about 12 years later.

(NB My handwriting is so appalling I can very often not make out what I have written. And more to the point, I haven’t tried to read any of those diary ledgers, which, anyway doubled up as commonplace books as a dialy account of stool motions of every kind don’t much interest me and I can’t think mine will interest man others.)

The blog, my main blog that is, began as a kind of ‘son of diary’. But the rum has got to me and I am back off the track, so let me start again.

. . .

Those who have read my ‘main blog’ (from now on referred to without the rather coy quote marks) will know that I have already written ‘a novel’ and have had it printed and published by Amazon. Furthermore, I have plugged it rather a lot in my blog as well as the volumes of verse and short story collections, but so far no one has taken the hint and bought any them.

I am rather proud of that novel, to be honest. I do believe that I tried to do in writing it succeeded though it is perhaps not what one might expect and we should also bear in mind – and I do – the very wise and useful observation that

And for Christ’s sake don’t persuade yourself you are the exception, or even try to persuade yourself. Do yourself a big favour and accept that the observation is true.

Anyway, for several reasons I have not tried to get a publisher to accept it, and there are several reasons for that, one of which is that I hate loathe being obliged to ‘sell’ myself and always made a total fuck-up of it when I have tried.

However, what also occurred to me is the ‘second novel / second album’ dilemma, assuming, of course that the ‘first novel / first album’ was ‘a success’. So I thought that before I try my luck hawking that first novel around ‘the publishers’, I would have a second novel at the ready to be supplied as and when. And writing that second novel is what I am now engaged in and what this post is all about.

. . .

But here I shall end this particular entry as the rum ’n Pepsi is now getting to me a little and I want to go upstairs and bang away on my acoustic guitar. But don’t worry, more to come tho’ from now on only on my ‘private’ blog (and those fucking coy quote marks again).

Pip, pip!

Face it, America, you have finally fucked yourself

I am baffled. Although I am ‘merely’ a Brit and some might feel I am not at all qualified to criticise America, I’m going to do so anyway. Because I am baffled, so why not.

I pretty much have only yer average layman’s knowledge to the late 18th-century independence struggle, culminating in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but I’m sure the few facts I know are pretty correct.

I have long given up on dutifully swallowing the myth that good, true and honest colonial British subjects – as then they still were – rebelled because they did not want ‘taxation without representation’ or some such.

Similarly, I have long stopped believing, as we are intended and expected to do, that the aim of the rebellion was to promote ‘liberty for all and universal happiness’.

From where I sit, the essence of the rebellion was a power struggle between the landowners based in ‘the American colonies’ and those landowners sitting in their estates back in ‘the old country’.

The colonial British landowners simply wanted more of the action: and they finally got it and have not relinquished their grip one little bit since. As the French so pertinently say ‘plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose’.

The ordinary ‘colonial Brits’ – the indentured folk, the servants, the labouring classes, and the otherwise disadvantaged – felt they really didn’t have a dog in that particular fight: if you are at the end of the broom being swept willy-nilly this way and that, you really don’t give a flying fuck who is doing the sweeping, whether it is a rich Brit overseas or local colonial Brit.

And they were not too keen on risking their lives in an ‘independence’ fight from which they would not at all benefit. Hence the need for the, albeit, limited conscription the rebel leaders often felt was necessary to drum up fighting men.

Granted that all nations have national myths which they cherish beyond any possible reason: we Brits do (that the world envies us and our institutions), the French do (that they are a nation of intellectuals), the Germans do (that they know best, always) and you Americans do.

So it doesn’t matter whether or not I believe the United States genesis account. It doesn’t even matter whether or not it is true, completely false, partly true and partly false or anything in between.

Only one thing matters: that it is believed. The Roman satirical poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, known as Martial hit the nail on the head when he wrote ‘It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them’.

And to this day Americans whether Democrat or Republican, gay or straight, old family or immigrant-descended kneel before the myth and therey thus make it ‘real’. Shit, even black Americans, at least those with ‘aspirations’, feel obliged to ‘take the knee’ and salute the flag in spite of the unspeakable horrors afflicted their forefathers and even parents until very recent times.

How dare someone who is not American so rudely criticise the United States? Perhaps I should inform you who have so far not heard and remind you who have that no country on the planet regards itself as ‘the second-greatest nation on Earth!’

Sadly, given the irony implicit in that observation there might well be some who simply do not even understand the point it makes. And that would be an irony in itself.

I cannot square the notion that the much-vaunted ‘land of the free’ which has a total population of 335 million also has 1.8 million of its people in jail – a higher rate of incarceration than ‘Red’ China. China has a a total population at 1,400 million – four times as big – but ‘just’ 1.69 million under lock and key. Fancy.

For many Americans it would seem the ‘American Dream’ is not the usual one but simply to stay out of jail for as long as possible. And in a country where not using a designated road-crossing but ‘jay-walking’ can get you banged up, that might often be a tall order.

So far many, if not most, of you will think this is just another bloody lefty Brit on his high horse sounding off.

Well, first of all I am not ‘lefty’. Secondly, I am simply repeating a number of facts about the US which puzzle me a great deal. And one or two of those facts are really bizarre given the mythical genesis of the US, not least the US president’s right to pardon offenders.

Worse still, it seems to me to be very obvious that not all US citizens are ‘equal before the law’. That, too, is a myth.

Even those of you here who have by now come to loathe me and my ramblings above might agree that one Donald J Trump, an adjudged rapist, a convicted fraudster and a suspected insurrectionist and a man who – if the guilty

 

pleas of three co-conspirators are to be believed – attempted to rig the 2020 election result in Georgia and, finally, who finally stole any number of secret government documents, is now above the law.

You might disagree, but in your hearts you know he is: Trump has got away with it.

Even if he is as innocent as a newborn lamb of insurrection, alleged election rigging and theft, the American people will now no longer be able to find out: he will not come to trial.

The great United States myth you guys subscribe to includes that you were fighting to ‘free yourself from the yoke of the English crown’ and rid yourself of fealty to a king ‘who was above the law’. Well, face it, ladies and gentlemen, in the past 249 years you haven’t done that at all: all you have done is, in effect, created your bloody own ‘monarch’.

In 2024 the president can pretty much do what the fuck he likes – just as English monarchs could do what the fuck they liked until we chopped off head of one of them in January 1649, 375 years ago as a way of saying ‘not any more, matey!’

You Yanks adore our colourful pageantry at ‘royal’ weddings, trooping of the colour and state opening of Parliament. So you come up with your own ‘colourful pageantry’ – a 20-vehicle calvacade of armoured cars every time your prezzy ventures out and a pukey reverence for ‘Mr President’ that would nauseate even a hardened Brit sycophant.

What you don’t seem to realise is that we know all our pageantry is just for show, pure make-believe, pure colourful bullshit. But yours isn’t.

Face it: you have created your own king. And that process has involved the slow, slow, slow corrosion of those supposed ‘patriotic’ ideals before which you kneel and worship.

Granted that all – or perhaps only many – of you reading this wouldn’t piss on Trump if he were on fire. But you all still carry some of the blame for American creating King Donald I. Your sin: you took your eye off the ball. Your second sin? You now believe your own bullshit.

Because that corrosive process occurred of several decades, possibly over a century, it cannot and will not be rectified at all soon. And realising this, when I’ve had a couple, often about this time of day (18.02 as it happens), I become a little maudlin and believe that after almost 80 years of comparative peace and prosperity in the Western world, it will, over the coming decades, be ‘all change’.

Mass migration not experienced for centuries will be one catalyst for that change, certainly, and the impact it will have on trade relations.

But, in my cups, I also fear that after almost 400 years the ‘United States’ will gradually become rather less ‘united’, that the pressures it faces from the undemocratic inclinations of ‘King Donald I’ will be too much for some states, especially the ‘liberal ones’: why would New England any longer want to share a bed with Arizona or Texas of the loons in the North-West mountains?

On the other hand, out of my cups – so to speak – I think it’ll be fine, that that is all tosh, stuff ’n nonsense. But as someone who has increasingly read a lot of history these past few years I am these days less inclined to take much for granted, even when I suffer from a bout of optimism.

Would anyone in the mid-1980s have taken someone seriously who insisted that within four years the Soviet ‘empire’ would be no more. You get one guess, but you would be wrong. He or she would be sent off with a flea in their ear and told to stop being so silly. The US slowly fall apart? You think?

Now for another drink and hope that Donald fucking Trump really is just a bad dream.