How to waste time completely, utterly and successfully . . .

Lord can we waste time when we shouldn’t be. For the past few weeks I’ve got to a simple place in on of the accounts of Hemingway’s life, but wanted to be sure of certain dates. (His marriage to Martha Gellhorn collapsed and one reason was that she was an independent professional who refused to play little wifey to the old fraud. He took it badly.

They were together, first in an affair, then in marriage (about which she had her doubts from the start) for a total of around years, of which about four/five were as a married couple.

In those years Gellhorn tried to do as expected by she chafed at the bit and took off on journalistic assignments several time for, in one case, about four months. It is the dates of her trips I wanted to be sure off.

Well, after reading and re-reading parts of this book and that, I am now and yesterday and again today I was going to write the few hundred words to move myself on. I did a little yesterday, but today I have been faffing around like nobody’s business. And for the past 70/80 minutes I have been producing this Guardian spoof for no reason but a laugh. Here it is:

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?

What’s going on in Russia? Buggered if I know

I am writing this on the morning of Tuesday, February 15, the day before the mooted invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I say ‘mooted’ because that is merely a claim by the US, possibly just another element in the baffling and very odd ins and outs of the whole business.

The US is warning that Russia is now ready to invade Ukraine from three directions: south from Belarus north from Crimea and north-west from the Donbas area (where there has been what is described as a ‘low-level’ are for several years in which 14,000 people are said to have died). Whether the invasion goes ahead tomorrow or this

 

week or even at all remains to be seen. But as far as I am concerned baffling and odd are two very good descriptions of prety much all angles of what has been going on. Nothing is straightforward, not Russia’s — for which read Vladimir Putin’s — motives, not the West’s disjointed response and, to be frank, unconvincing response. And the logic of it all is certainly not straightforward.

As usual for ‘facts’ and ‘opinion’ I can here only repeat what I have heard on the radio and TV and read. I can, though, add my own thoughts. The fact is that Russia began moving troops to the Ukrainian border towards the end of last year, but steadfastly denied it intended to invade Ukraine.

Yet that build-up of troops continued, with more of them moved to the border of Ukraine with Belarus and to the Crimea (which Russia got away with annexing seven years ago and whose seemingly trouble-free acquisition might well have encouraged Putin to try his luck further).

The purpose of these troop movements seemed obvious: Russia intended to invade Ukraine. Well, that at least was probably the impression Putin wanted to give. It might well have been a form of blackmail. Russia has denied to this hour that invasion is its purpose, but it is difficult to believe anything else.

So the next equally obvious questions are: why would it want to invade Ukraine and if, as it claims, it has no intention of invading, why marshal those troops on the border? Well, the answer to the second question might, as I say, merely be to increase pressure on the West. But pressure to do what?

One issue has been Ukraine’s possibly membership of Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). Russia says, correctly I think, that at some point after the fall of the Soviet Union the West promised that it would not expand Nato any further than its then borders. However, it did and the Baltic states, all three of them former Soviet bloc states, are now members of Nato.

Then there’s another oddity: Nato is on paper, in theory, but also in reality a defensive body. Yet Russia’s stance on the matter of implies that Nato is essentially an aggressive body and, by further implication, will at some point in

the future be put to work aggressively. How likely is that? It is certainly far less likely than Nato fulfilling is mission to go to the defence of a member if that member is attacked.

In fact, arguing on purely practical grounds, an aggressive Nato would be unlikely to see action: far too many of its members would veto any such move, even if it meant Nato, in that jokey phrase, was ‘getting its retaliation in first’.

Thus how worried is Putin about Ukraine becoming a member of Nato. If, as I suggest, Nato is essentially defensive not aggressive, why on earth should he be worried. Certainly, if as he claims assurances have been ignored by the Baltic states becoming members he might rightly feel peeved. But is that really a good reason for invading Ukraine? It doesn’t seem obvious.

Another explanation for Putin’s actions are that he is worried that Ukraine, a democracy, is not a good look for Russia which is nominally a democracy but where real political opposition is discouraged. For example Alexei Navalny, a brave man if ever there were one, was poisoned, treated by doctors in Germany, then returned to Russia where he was silenced by being jailed. That, too, is plausible. But how would invasion help?

It might make Putin in the eyes of some a ‘strong man’ but it might equally persuade those who tolerate him no longer to tolerate him (though given that free elections are at present as unlikely as a month of Sundays that is more of the theoretical danger). Aligned to that reasoning is the suggestion that Putin is following the principle that if you have domestic troubles, take the country’s mind off them by causing trouble abroad.

However, in short there is no way of reading Putin’s mind and establishing just what he might be up to.

Another consideration might be — and this will surely have crossed Putin’s mind — that invading the Ukraine might create more problems than it would solven and it is very unlikely that Russia would be in the Ukraine for the long haul.

Invading would be the easy bit, but holding the country and dealing with certain insurgency would not. Putin will well aware of the fiasco that the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan became (and arguably it facilitated the eventual rise of the Taliban).

More likely would be that Putin would set about setting up a government beholden to him in the Kremlin, but that too might not be as successful as he wold like: insurgencies and possibly violent opposition might carry on.

Still, he would have made his point: that Russia is still of consequence in the world and it and its interest must be taken into account. Establishing a new status quo between Russia and the West, one which resembles the status quo of the Cold War, might be his goal. But it still begs the question: why? Is that really worth the hassle.

. . .

In its response to the Russian build-up of troops the West has been — I would like to say ‘predictably’ — at sixes and sevens. The US and Britain say one thing, France quite another and Germany for rather too long decided not to say anything at all.

One explanation for that I heard given yesterday by some bod who is an adviser on international affairs to Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz was that Scholz’s background is more in finance than foreign affairs and that he left the matter to his foreign minister. It doesn’t help the Annalena Baerbock, his foreign minister belongs to the 

Green Party and who likely solution to the crisis is to sing Kumbaya ever more loudly. However, Scholz has since been embarrassed into action.

On the question of retaliation to an invasion of Ukraine, the West is also badly at six and sevens. Military action would be out of the questions (unless, of course, Russia then attacked one of the Baltic states in which case Nato would be obliged to defend them). So far the talk is off ’sanctions’, notably shutting Russia out of the global banking system (which, as one commentator claimed yesterday, although I have no way of knowing whether or no this is the case) overnight ATMs — cashpoints — throughout Russia would cease working and folk would not be able to get ready cash.

Russia would, though, hit back, notably and most probably by shutting off the gas is supplies to Western Europe. That would hit Germany harder than other European countries. Overall, Russia supplies Europe with 40% of its gas, but Germany is more dependent on the supply ever since Angela Merkel, the previous chancellor decided to close down the country’s nuclear power industry a decade ago.

The final plants will shut down later this year. (Many Germans are baffled that although their country no longer produces power from its own power plants, it is quite happy to buy in such nuclear-produced electricity from neighbouring countries.) In the real world it is no surprise that Germany is, or seems to be, dragging its heels.

So, it’s not looking good, but the West must do something. If in time it pretty much allows Putin to get away with invading Ukraine — which, as I say, is not definitely likely to happen — other ‘hard men’ might be encouraged. As it is Viktor Orban in Hungary, who has not shown himself to be much of a man to encourage opposition, has been notably half-hearted in expressing outrage over Russia’s apparent plans. For one thing, Hungary is also dependent on Russian gas and oil, but for another he fears a war in Ukraine would see thousands of Ukrainian refugees flooding into Hungary, and he doesn’t want that.

. . .

As for the prediction from the US ‘intelligence sources’ that Russia plans to invade Ukraine tomorrow morning (Wednesday, February 16) I read that — as I’m sure the Russians do, too — merely as just another tactical move to disconcert the Russians, as in calling their bluff. It’s as though the PR departments of the various Western governments are calling the shots and formulating policy.

For example, the recent visit to Moscow by Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, to see Putin was widely seen as Macron knowing a good photo opportunity when he saw one: France will be voting for its new president in a few

months and although Macron has not yet declared his candidacy, he will run and it doesn’t harm his cause to be seen ‘statesmanlike’ discussing urgent matters with the president of Russia.

One final worry for the West is that if Putin pulls of whatever he is hoping to pull off — suggestions, please, on a postcard address to The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, No 10 Downing St., London SW1A 2AA as Johnson might like a hint for five — and does invade Ukraine, his fellow stooge in the line-up of The World’s Bad Guys, Xi Jinping, might be encouraged to try his luck with annexing Taiwan.

Tricky, eh. And it’s not ‘partygate’.

So, not a complete waste of time

What have I been doing? Well, I have been busy, though not with what I felt I should have been doing. Tomorrow is the January deadline day for the Deadlines For Writers prompt and this month I didn’t as sometimes happens forget about it. In fact, I’ve known about it pretty much since the beginning for the month.

The prompt is ‘Jewel’, but can I think of anything? Can I come up with a story? The obvious ones — a jewel, a gemstones or a gem and, perhaps discovery someone’s worth ‘as a friend’ or as ‘a parent’ blah, blah didn’t excite me. Then it occurred to me I could try a little lateral thinking and write something along the lines of ‘duel’ and ‘dual’. (I have two identities so submit two stories.

But still nothing sparked: I did think of one story, a ‘duel’ between two ultra-rich and snobby families in an exclusive ultra-rich ‘community’ in Vermont as to who was ‘top dog’ (that kind of thing is important to some people’ (and I have quote-marked ‘community’ because there is bugger all ‘community spirit’ there at all). But I just couldn’t get it off the ground.

Thought of this, thought of that, but nothing really convinced me, and so earlier today I decided I wasn’t going to force anything. It would probably been crap if I did. The trouble is that I was and am still feeling guilty about passing this month. It’s as though begging off will be the thin end of the wedge, and I’m proud that I have supplied two stories a month for over two years. But I had to be honest: I didn’t want to force anything and finally ‘gave myself permission’ to cop out this month.

That has helped a little, although not completely, but then life is too short. However . . .

I sat down around noon and started pissing around with Garageband and came up with this. I was trying to recreate a tune I cobbled together quite a few years ago, but in the event it turned out to be something different. I rather like it.

When I say cobbled together, that is precise: the guitar is an acoustic sent through a cheap portable amp (just €25 from Amazon) and the sound recorded through my Macbook’s pretty cheap and crappy ‘internal microphone’. Then I duplicated the guitar track twice and used a different setting for each of the three tracks. Here it is:

And here is the original, recorded as I say about 20 years ago. You can spot the similar bassline:

And I might as well post this one, what with that nice Mr Putin sabre-rattling and hoping to make a name for himself as a strong man. Not quite, Vlad, more of a prize dick, though I doubt I’ll get the chance to tell you to your face.