Literary Ramble VII: Richard Ford & Mike Hosking. + Rugby World Cup in Wowser World.

Some scattered thoughts with the loosest relationship to literary life, (in which I’m still struggling through Richard Ford’s Independence Day - [for the Philistines, that's not the movie with the aliens in it]).

Much of my problem sixteen years ago when giving up smoking (tobacco) was the publicly funded anti-smoking group, ASH. They were big then. I’d go cold turkey for a week until one of their busy-body-bossy ads wanting to clamp down on this, tax that, came on the telly, and then in a blind fury I’d get myself direct to a dairy and buy another carton. They turned smoking into a principle.

Since September last year I have dropped twenty percent of my body weight, making me four fifths of the man I was surprisingly easily despite my love of food and booze (it takes a little discipline, that’s all really) . The rough spots have been every article and news item with an academic wowser wanting to tax the foods and the booze I love; an Arrogance of Altruists who insist I be forced to their monotonous mantra that a long lived low calorie life is better than a happy one. I didn't lose my weight by counting calories, and had to sacrifice little enjoyment of life, but if I had wanted to remain my weighty self that was my business, so bugger off.

This dreadful state-advocacy wowserism slithering its way out of Progressivestan continues to take more words in here. Previously mentioned, as proof we have a progressive literature, I’ve even had the Going West Literary Festival lecturing me about my booze intake (for fucks sake).  

Progressivestan. I first mentioned that term in this post regarding the Progressive campaign to get Mike Hosking fired - not to make a point, to have him fired - over an interview he did (or comment he made – I can’t remember which and don’t care) regarding Ponytailgate:

… I’d rather a bit of discomfort, hurt feelings or anger from time to time, than a regulated media, thanks, or forced to live in Progressivestan [snip] ... The geography of Progressivetan is a grey and indolent wasteland, populated at each town centre with a public stock in which rebellious thought is captured and put on display for public learnings … for the common good (of course). There is but one colour in this lifeless land, red, the rivers of blood flowing from a Marxist past into the future.

After posting that a helpful follower on Twitter told me although I have some great ideas, I marginalise too many people.

Really? No, I'm not the one trying to close everything down, so your advice goes unheeded, but thanks.

American/Canadian author Richard Ford, of the Left politick before the Left destroyed any use they had via identity politics, pinned down the (Left)-liberal character well.

Quoting Ford’s character Frank Bascombe in the novel Independence Day:

“In truth I don’t much like Betty McLeod, despite wanting to rent the house to her and Larry because I think they’re probably courageous. To my notice she’s always worn a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It’s the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing.”

Now, go look at some of the vitriolic threads against Mike Hosking on Twitter. The ruling ethos of Progressivestan is an arrogant bitterness which overflows and poisons all it touches, as it attempts to control language, silence thought crimes, segregate the delights of difference, and control our bodies through our diets with its curious wowser’s puritanism that, as H. L. Mencken said, can’t stand seeing somebody – Mike Hosking for example - happy, with his upbeat, can-do, satisfied view on life. In reference to ponytailgate it’s what separates an important feminism born of individualism from the dreadful feminist sharia born of Marxism that would eradicate individualism and with that, free expression.

In that same novel, Independence Day, Richard Ford could have saved the Left (and its prisoners victims) a lot of trouble if they had heeded Frank Bascombe’s wisdom as he …’

‘… peer[ed] up at a control-less TV, bracketed high and out of reach and where Reverend Jackson in an opened-collared brown safari shirt is being interviewed by a panel of white men in business suits, who’re beaming prudish self-confidence at him, as if they found him amusing; though the Reverend is exhibiting his own brand of self-satisfied smugness plus utter disdain, all of it particularly noticeable because the sound’s off. (For a time this winter I considered him ‘my candidate,’ though I finally decided he couldn’t win and would ruin the country if he did, and in either case would eventually tell me everything bad was my fault.)’

Amen.

But then, Richard Ford; I guess he’s just another privileged, middle-aged white man, whose words are not valid because identity is validity in this world where we have cast adrift philosophy, volition, self-responsibility and meaning.

If you wonder why a man of reason like myself comes to the Gulags being built in Progressivestan with such anger, that’s because you can’t be party to the ‘why’ of my deep seated antipathy towards puritanism and humourless wowserism gained from an Exclusive Brethren past. My (immediate) family buried our father just this last March (here’s my eulogy given at his funeral to this gentle-man): during the burial, hiding behind a hedge of the Springston cemetery were two of his Exclusive siblings, or some type of direct relations – I couldn’t care less about them or who they were - who, as with all four of my grandparents, and all aunts and uncles bar one, have not been allowed anything to do with my family since I was four years old, when God (dripping irony here) was good enough to have impregnated my mother with an IHC daughter who the dour, whiskey breath elders took to be the work of the devil – nice buggers aren’t they - so we were happily cast out. And don’t panic, my IHC sister is probably the happiest of our clan.

So you better be worried when I see the same abusive, bullying thou-shalt-not-puritanism in Progressivism and its devotees humourless campaigns to silence and publicly shame every individual who is not them, and is found wanting. They need to be driven back to the joyless prisons they've created of their minds with all the passion and non-violent ferocity we can muster as free wo/men.

Another post in the service of whatevers; thank you.

Sorry, one more thing: if you're thinking of going to the local pub to watch Rugby World Cup games with friends, forget it, this is Wowser-World, there won't be pubs able to meet the new YOU CAN'T DRINK OR ENJOY YOURSELF regulations, and even if you could find one, and you drank moderately, under Iain Wowser-Galloway's halved blood alcohol limit you couldn't drive yourselves home again: that's why rural hospitality is, effectively, dead. Seriously, revolution: we're way past the time for one.


Related Posts:

Of Comedy, Freedom of Speech and Bounded Liberty.

Literary Ramble VI: Writing Against the Counter-Culture: A Wowser Literature. | Welcome to the Soberdome.

Apparently we have a writership of mums and dads with two and half kids, a mortgage and a Citroen which lives counter to the counter culture; that is, which stands for conformity, for being ‘inside’ in its content …

… [A literature that should be] on principle, refusing to use trigger warnings, knowing that offence-giving is vital medicine to vaccinate the population from the censorious tyranny of umbrage taking. A literature to which the notion of a ‘safe place’ would be repugnant if it weren't so hilarious. There should be no safety to, or from, writing. That's why though not of my politick, I was always going to love our own James K. Baxters and our irreverent, drunk, Sam Hunts ...

It is unsurprising I don’t have a big readership – freedom is passé nowadays, a busy-body bossy command state the accepted model for society (again): my most read post against Big Brother’s tax surveillance operations and the barbaric fallacy of the common good used to justify the tax take, has just over 22,000 reads, and my literary posts normally score around the 2,000 mark. Literary Ramble IV has been the top literature post at (currently) 3,264 page visits, albeit with continuing reads of about twenty to thirty per day – significantly, mainly out of the US. With that post weighing in over 18,000 words, I’m chuffed with that.

What I’m not so chuffed about is that every day the disappointing premise of Literary Ramble IV is borne out: today I find its correctness at a surprisingly mundane level.

To remind you of that premise:

State funding of the arts is leading to the stultification of western literature under the reactionary establishment of Left-Liberalism, also called Progressivism, which has largely captured the means of production via the agents and publishers, and quietly indoctrinates the authors toward a homogenised literature via creative writing courses in progressive saturated tertiary institutions. Ours is no literature that will seed Le Guin's resistance and change, or that can be ‘disturbed by power’, as Solzhenitsyn feared, because it’s a literature which embraces the ethic of that power, the supremacy of the state over the individual, and incredibly for the arts, a collectivism over individualism, with at its base, the tax take which funds a complacent publishing channel, while eviscerating our private lives, our digital innards disemboweled and served up in the offices of government officials.

A dead and dying literature, supplicant to the tax surveillance state for its victuals, no fight left in it.

From this premise, it will further not surprise that I am a writerly romantic. A lover of the rebel. I lov(ed) the rock and roll counter culture of Rolling Stones drunkenly wrecking hotel rooms, and Keith Moon throwing a tantrum over his drum set, then throwing his drum set at his audience.  I couldn't listen to their dreadful noise anymore, but I lov(ed) the punks of the 70s and 80s - my era - the glorious Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joan Jett, Blondie, and let’s not forget those anarchic lads, Sid Vicious/Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, Dead Kennedys and Ramones. Go to one of those concerts and get all jazz hands and you’d rightly be thought retarded - and if you want some potent symbolism of the death of counter culture look at pop culture today: tailored, clean living boy bands, rap pap, and pop princesses.

Flowing from this and extending my literary manifesto of Ramble IV, I view literature as a necessary counter culture, also, produced by the outsiders and outcasts who are able to look in, quite possibly intoxicated, high or tripping – perhaps because of it - and then report back, steadfastly on principle refusing to use trigger warnings, knowing that offence-giving is vital medicine to vaccinate the population from the censorious tyranny of umbrage taking. A literature to which the notion of a ‘safe place’ would be repugnant if it weren't so hilarious. There should be no safety to, or from, writing. That's why though not of my politick, I was always going to love our own James K. Baxters and our irreverent, drunk, Sam Hunts.

This is literature and art as the outside. The other. A literature questioning and poking and prodding its quills into everything that is received culture, every assumption, and all, ALL authority. Literature that is important. Literature that has purpose. Literature that can’t write when its freedom is bounded and won’t accept boundaries. Literature that won't accept censorship. A literature with its progeny traceable directly to the Enlightenment and the rational, individualistic ethos arising from that rebellion against the ancient regimes. A literature that knows collectivism means controlled lives lived inside the prison of each other's minds, which is the Gulag.

This when the Gulags of the twentieth century are still visible on the arms of living humans, not just in the history books, thus there was no excuse for this crumbling of resolve.

Concomitant with this – free living is a package deal; stay with me … - on the intimate, mundane details of traipsing through a life, I love booze. I love wine. I love martinis. I love whiskey, brandy and gin. I love these things also because nanny state would control them by admonition, rationing or prohibition, along with sugar, with salt, and with fat - all, of course, for my own good. Noting that to say I love booze is not to say I’m some type of raving alcoholic, I most certainly am not - well perhaps raving - but I have to make that qualification, because along with the ascendency of that gender and racially divisive politics and segregation known as identity politics, spawned by progressive collectivism, has come the busy-body, judgemental age of the wowser (and worse, the censoring social justice saint – Jesus Christ, Allah or George save me from the good intentions of the earnest eyeing my money). Thus my attacks on Labour MP Iain Wowser-Galloway when he had his wowser blood alcohol limit passed this last twelve months: I wrote then this would only punish the responsible, while those that drink to excess and drive would be oblivious to it, meaning the road toll wouldn’t be changed. And I was right; the road toll has gone up, dramatically, as rural hospitality and community are being destroyed – (don’t panic, this comes back to literature soon enough):

Guess the wowser blood alcohol limit was a waste of time - as I said it would be @IainLG   Only punished responsible. http://t.co/BrPRUqhFtL

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) May 27, 2015

I thought this tweet the end of that. I’d made my point, knowing the clock would never tick tock back toward freedom: it only does that after revolution. However, needless to say - getting back to first premises - I wasn’t expecting this:

@MarkHubbard33 @IainLG RTC deaths are only small part overall societal cost of alcohol - misses morbidity, violence and crime

— Going West Festival (@GoingWestFest) May 27, 2015

@GoingWestFest But the wowser blood alcohol level is only about road deaths. Hence, my point. As 4 the rest, so you would have prohibition?

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) May 27, 2015

@GoingWestFest And why is a literary festival account taking up a wowser argument against alcohol??

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) May 27, 2015

Told you I’d get this back to literature.

The @GoingWestFest Twitter account is the account of an annual literary festival, namely, quote: Going West Books & Writers Festival is an annual literary festival that takes place each September in West Auckland. And in case you just missed it, this literary festival account just admonished, nay, lectured me about the harmful effects of alcohol. If I have to explain my point, even to the post punk generation, then you, dear reader, are beyond the point, certainly of hope.

Move along, there's no counter culture to be found here. I would know our literature was in better shape if the Going West Festival had tweeted me this: Charles Bukowski drinking on the set of French television program Apostrophes - those were the days (hattip Steve Braunias - Twitter) ...

I had not fully understood, even in my Literary Ramble IV, the extent of the fail of our twenty first century progressive-centric-big-brother-state-wowser literature. Apparently we have a writership of mums and dads with two and half kids, a mortgage and a Citroen which lives counter to the counter culture anymore; that is, which stands for conformity, for being inside in its content, and I have no doubt backs the abuse right of the all-powerful state to prohibit alcohol from me, plus good times generally – no guesses as to what such a writership’s attitude to drug legalisation is, (and within an historical literary context what a tragedy that is).

Twenty first century literature has crumbled in all its strait-laced sobriety to this: the gutter of normalcy (and it ain’t looking up at the stars. It’s not dreaming at all, and is the last three-bedroom-toilet-and-en-suite you’ll find freedom loving peeps having a good time expressing themselves in.)

It’s all gone. Read my Literary Ramble IV.

There remains only to end on an ill-founded request I know will be ignored: will the boring-bound-prohibitionist-bureaucrat running the West Literary Festival Twitter account please put it carefully down. Take a step back from it. Another step. Now fuck off to Nanny and turn in early with your milk hot chocolate and butter short bread. You shouldn’t be anywhere near such a noble, important art, as this art of rebellion to authority, and today’s unprecedented abuse of the state’s authority with its regulation upon regulation, law upon law, snoops, spies, officials and IRD auditors inveigled into every intimate sphere of our private lives, where even language is being determined for us by those social justice thugs as between what is acceptable and what is not. Yes, we live in a near total surveillance State and our writing community, incredibly, is on the side of It, worshipping at the altar of redistribution and taking the rich pricks down, along with the right of each one of us to be left alone - I know that; but please, I don’t need your haughty lecturing on the harms of a ruddy drink reminding me of it.

The. End.

Of. Everything.

Welcome to the Soberdome.

Excuse me if I excuse myself for one of these ...

Literary Ramble V: Witi Ihimaera | ‘Where is New Zealand Literature Going?’

… yes, in part this post is another advertisement for my Literary Ramble IV – Standing Upright Here: do I think I got everything right in that post? No. My bluster aside, even I’m not that conceited. And it troubles me I would have a deal of trouble transferring the central premises of that piece over to the more important discussion of aesthetics. ...

I’m still waiting for the full script of Witi Ihimaera's speech at the Dunedin’s Writers and Readers Festival to be posted, but this regarding ‘Where is New Zealand Literature Going?’ - which ruffled some few literary feathers in my Twitter timeline - is interesting:

Later in his address, Ihimaera also talked about the preponderance of young writers coming out of creative writing courses, the effect of which seems to “melt” the writing into homogeneous prose that “blunted” New Zealand’s edge. “Where are the anarchic books?” he asked. This was a theme he returned to several times, saying that he “missed the sense of risk” in today’s literature. In the later Q&A session, Ihimaera also said that, though today’s writing was beautiful, it was “so pared back” that it doesn’t allow for “elbows jutting out” – while also acknowledging that “today we don’t go for that kind of imperfection”.

Those who have read my disquisition on our contemporary literature (Literary Ramble IV) will know I have – partially at least - spoken to that, and in the below am surprisingly close to Ihimaera’s thoughts in a single theme:

State funding of the arts is leading to the stultification of western literature under the reactionary establishment of Left-Liberalism, also called Progressivism, which has largely captured the means of production via the agents and publishers, and quietly indoctrinates the authors toward a homogenised literature via creative writing courses in progressive saturated tertiary institutions. Ours is no literature that will seed Le Guin's resistance and change, or that can be ‘disturbed by power’, as Solzhenitsyn feared, because it’s a literature which embraces the ethic of that power, the supremacy of the state over the individual, and incredibly for the arts, a collectivism over individualism, with at its base, the tax take which funds a complacent publishing channel, while eviscerating our private lives, our digital innards disemboweled and served up in the offices of government officials. I wrote in a previous post, forget anonymous aggregated metadata, give me your financial transactions for the last four years - as IRD demand daily of New Zealand citizens - and I’ll describe your life down to the details, including what’s happening in the bedroom, and under the newly signed OECD information sharing agreement putatively known as the Global Account Tax Compliance Act, that information is set to be shared, not just at will, but automatically, between every Western government, just as happens now under FATCA for the Americans.

No, no. Big breaths, big breaths. Stay with me, please.

Am I saying New Zealand writers are able to ply their keyboards full-time because of government grants? No, they’re not. Unless successful they still must rely on a paying job, just as it should be. What I’m getting at is more nuanced. We still have a Creative NZ, we still have a funding mechanism for the Arts, and artists, publishers, Book Awards devote some [great deal] of their time to the grants process. And even that’s still oblique to my point, which is the devotion to funding, wholly or in part, being symptomatic of the acceptance by the arts of a state and statist model for itself despite the lessons of history. I suspect the New Zealand writing community believes a more comprehensive state patronage is required over what we have at present. Much more. It’s that continual turning away of our societies from the knowledge that freedom is the only goal, and seeking succour instead in an authoritarian state with a command economy. It’s a literature on its knees with its face always upon politicians and bureaucrats, not the turning away from them to self-reliance and adult private lives.

It’s philosophy and metaphysics. It’s always philosophy and metaphysics.

Even from these two sections, however, it can be seen my differences with Ihimaera would yet be greater than the sum of our similarities. While we’ll agree about the lack of a living, anarchic literature bumbling (un)polished out of our Progressive academic humanities, I suspect Ihimaera would not be troubled with the Progressive tag being there, as well as disagreeing with my attacks on government patronage. For me the a-priori problem is the ethos of government funding: subservience to a big state model with its command economy is the death of a living literature as resistance, or capable of resistance, to the unbridled power of our tax surveillance states. Worse, all the authors I can think of would likely believe the tax state should if anything be bigger and more coercive in destroying the private lives of those ‘rich pricks’ demonised in our parasite societies – even though these same rich pricks already pay the bulk of the income tax take. In my opinion a literature that relies on government for its existence via funding, or even looks to it, via our twenty first century ruthless tax surveillance states that have had to make the state ascendant over an individual life, is anathema, but on 'all that' I suspect Ihimaera would disagree.  Perhaps disagree vehemently.

Similarly from a New Zealand – Pacific (?) - outlook, I don’t see an anarchic writing inspired by any indigenous literature that has prostrated itself, also, at the feet of Nanny State and Marxist mired identity politics, or any value from that in the context of a literature that seeds values supporting free societies sustaining the lives of free individuals and their expression of art. The stereotypes and tropes of the identity politick is the death of individualism, and without individualism there can be no art, only subservience to that emotive cult of redistribution, and inner lives lost trying to save an illusory Other. From Literary Ramble IV:

For a time I harboured a notion that it could be in the pages of indigenous writing that the rebellion against a state-endorsing literature might take hold, (given  classical liberal writing has all but folded its cards on the table): after all, a Maori oral literature had the 'trick of standing upright here' long before Mr Curnow sailed in. A literature working through colonialism surely must see the lie and damage of the state enterprise. Unfortunately, name me a Maori writer whose politick is not Left-Liberal, or advocacy for the future of Maori not tied to dependency on the welfare state? I don’t even think Alan Duff qualifies. So there will be no revolution away from a state literature born of Maori writing, for the same reason I have written there will be no Maori self-determination politically - and despite it appears arguable Maori did not cede sovereignty to the Crown via the Treaty (37) – because a progressive Maoridom is the antithesis of own-rule, individual or tribal. Indeed a progressive Maoridom is a culture happy to remain cowered on the leash of state also, accepting alms.

An assumption here, but I grok an identity politick playing in Ihimaera’s reviling of New Zealand’s enpensioner-terrible CK Stead when the latter put together his Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories – noting both Ihimaera and Stead have novels in my top ten New Zealand reads – as intimated by reviewer and editor David Eggleton – (despite Eggleton sent my Literary Ramble IV back from Landfall as if it had Ebola). This, as quoted on Stephen Stratford’s  Quote Unquote:

The Faber Book Of Contemporary South Pacific Stories edited by CK Stead … [snip] … comes to us as a loaded weapon, an artefact of the culture wars. Four of its commissioned writers – Keri Hulme, Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace – chose to withdraw their stories at the last minute, leaving a rather large Polynesia-shaped hole in the centre of the text. In the editor’s introduction Stead says the collective decision was as unexpected as it was unwelcome, and he’s still not sure why it happened. By implication, their studied absence is intended as a vote of no-confidence in someone with a purported track record of cultural insensitivity being given the right to help shape cultural hegemony in the South Pacific. In the battle for intellectual property rights, Polynesia is reclaiming itself and will not accept continuing ghettoisation. (Hone Tuwhare also withdrew, in a dispute over fees, and it is reported that Vincent O’Sullivan refused from the outset to be included.)

Stead acknowledges that he is a cultural engineer engaged in the invention of tradition but does not concede he is an unsuitable person for the job and, as if to disarm his critics, has ended up constructing a multicultural mosaic of fiendish ingenuity with almost every constituency catered for, though the book leans heavily on Wendt’s comprehensive 1980 anthology, Lali.

[Here’s another thing about our literature - (remember a ramble, rambles): the heroic no longer exists – ours is an anti-heroic age. Unless, perhaps and more mundanely, it is in the form of the embattled Mr Stead whom I’ve been noticing a marginalisation of – via denigration - by the identity politick which now rules our literature :) And I say that in full knowledge he is worthily being presented with the Honoured New Zealand Writer Award, 2015, this weekend at the Auckland Writers Festival. I would be fascinated to know of Stead's place in the current tertiary curriculum, compared to that of my degree completed in the 1980s. ]

But I may be ahead of myself – I didn’t hear the full speech. I will be interested to read in that the tension Ihimaera sees between nationalism – not sure of the terms on that - in our writing and individualism. While a valid talking point, the notion of a nationalist literature, proper, fills me with dread. Note I am not saying New Zealand authors shouldn’t write books set in our landscape with characters who are ourselves, because writers very certainly must do just that as the truthful expression of their individualism. Again, as I have stated, this is the problem for a progressive-centric literature:

I ask many of my clients, all businesspeople, contractors, farmers, what they read: the overwhelming reply is they don’t read fiction at all, certainly not literary fiction, with many doing that proud boasting thing Kiwis do, I only read non-fiction, what’s the point of that fiction guff, it’s not real life. And a related point, that personal remonstration I promised. My own second novel (the first awful, strictly bottom drawer) is now 117,000 words in progress, and because my mind seems better suited to long form, I can’t write short stories, and worse, I can’t write a query letter. If I can’t write a query letter, all the time spent on my novel is wasted, as I’ll never get an agent to read a word of it, so I sent a draft query to a site called Query Shark run by an American literary agent. She was great, in that she took the query on, and over about twenty or so iterations rightly destroyed it. I still can’t write a query letter. But one of the by-the-by things she mentioned when finding part of the plot revolves around an income tax audit – write what you know - was a throwaway quip that nobody would be interested in reading about tax; it’s just one of those things, we all have to pay tax, get over it.

The thing is, these businesspeople and farmers who only read non-fiction do have to put their minds and their cash flows to taxes; taxes are precisely where they live. And I wonder if they’re not reading literary fiction because the books we’re writing are not written where they live. They’re in the landscape, they’d recognise that all right, but the lives walking around on fiction pages aren’t their lives, especially if those lives have seriously inculcated this fantastical nonsense in The Bone Clocks.

The point of a literature is to speak to our lives, in this land, this place - (despite wondering if our literature does that vis a vis the silent majority of New Zealand). Indeed, the publishing wisdom that to sell books and be able to live off writing we cannot write our books local because the Americans don’t want to read anything set outside their navels is the truly depressing fact, as Sarah Laing gets to wonderfully in this cartoon strip. (If you follow no other link in this post, follow and read that one.) But literature as nationalism – if that was Ihimaera’s terms of reference - with the state worship engendered in that, or the equally mindless closed pumping fist celebration of an arbitrary geographic border, is repulsive - no, I don't think he can mean that?

Finally, while pushing links, yes, this post is another advertisement for my Literary Ramble IV: do I think I got everything right in that post? No. My bluster aside, even I’m not that conceited. And it troubles me I would have a deal of trouble transferring the central premises of that piece over to the more important discussion of aesthetics. But I do think it contains a lot of truths, regardless, despite I wrote it largely with New Zealand writing in mind yet the still increasing reads are ironically almost solely out of America, with scant interest from New Zealand’s literary participants at all – I write that with not so much sour grapes, but fermented.

Although talking of anarchic books taking risks, I think for my next post I might finally put up a piece from my own novel in progress – first draft completed. Think George Orwell meets Ayn Rand (oh the horror) set in a Clockwork Orange New Zealand that is yet absolutely recognisable, and you still won’t have it, not by any means, especially if you're now thinking dystopia, albeit ... well, you’ll have to read it, the most imperfect novel you're likely to see. Until next time.