KURT VONNEGUT ON CINDERELLA & WRITING

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This chart, devised by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), is his stripdown of the ideal story plot, shown by deconstructing Cinderella. And much more useful than the advice he offered in his 2005 memoir A Man Without A Country:

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

But he’s a very quotable writer, and this is one sample bite from among the hundreds you’ll find online to save you the trouble of reading his books. It comes from his 1990 novel Hocus Pocus :

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”

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NOT SAVING BUT DRONING

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While western leaders pretend to debate whether economies should cut back or spend to achieve growth, it’s worth remembering how much they spend on “defence” (ie. arms) regardless.

And when the complaint is that much of this phenomenal expenditure is wasted on projects that come to nothing (as if the rest is value for money) there are always a happy few who don’t complain. Naturally, these people tend to be close to the politicians responsible for the budgets.

Here’s an excerpt from Andrew Cockburn‘s excellent and painstaking piece on Obama’s remote-controlled wars – in this section tracking how one three-star general came to rake it in thanks to drones that don’t work properly. It comes from the London Review of Books (Vol. 34, no.5; March 8, 2012)

“In the first Gulf War, US military technology was more successful, indeed it seemed to function flawlessly. TV images relayed from cameras mounted on bombs as they homed in on their targets turned the war into a spectator sport, and the swift victory did much to dispel memories of Vietnam. A coterie of airforce officers who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision.

“… Deptula made no secret of his desire to turn the entire business over to remote control as soon as possible. The technicians operating drones from US soil, he told an interviewer, were ‘very comfortable with the responsibilities of finishing the kill chain when called upon to do so’. He retired from the air force as a three-star general in 2010 and became chief executive of MAV 6, a company describing itself as a provider of ‘enhanced situational understanding’ of battlefields. MAV 6 now has a $211 million contract to develop Blue Devil Block 2, an unmanned airship 350 feet long that will carry automated intelligence collection systems capable of intercepting and tracing a high-value target’s mobile phone, recording video of his location, and relaying that information to drone operators. Hovering four miles above Afghanistan for days at a time, Blue Devils will cover huge areas and transmit enormous quantities of digitised images back to the US – the daily equivalent, according to Deptula’s airforce successor, of ‘53,000 full-length feature movies’.

“The Gorgon Stare surveillance system, which is destined to be carried by the Blue Devils, was developed at a cost of $500 million and can supposedly keep cars and people across an entire city under constant video surveillance. Civil libertarians, apprehensive about the expansion of the ‘surveillance state’, have objected to its being deployed inside the US. But a December 2010 report by a specialised airforce testing unit in Florida suggests they have little cause for worry. Gorgon Stare’s camera images could not distinguish humans from bushes, or one vehicle from another. It had severe problems working out where it was. It broke down, on average, 3.7 times per sortie. The testing unit recommended that it shouldn’t be deployed, advice rejected by higher authorities, who quickly dispatched it to Afghanistan.”

Oh you masters of war…

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BOB DYLAN & THE TITANIC: A RUMOUR

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My sources suggest that the forthcoming Bob Dylan album may well include a song about the Titanic: a song that is about 14 minutes long. I know no more – and I can’t really “know” even that much. But if it turns out to be true, it’s surely a very rare example of his releasing something to tie in so handily with the centenary of a famous event.

Not that it would be Dylan’s first allusion to this maritime disaster. As I wrote in Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, he first mentions the Titanic in ‘Desolation Row’:

“The most striking evocation of impending catastrophe [in the song is] achieved very simply – in the one arresting line ‘The Titanic sails at dawn’. That summarises concisely the tone and colouring of the whole song.”

Then there is Dylan’s evocation of this same sense of foreboding in a rather later song. Quoting again from Song & Dance Man III:

“In 1981’s ‘Caribbean Wind’ (issued on Biograph, 1985)…the ‘Street band playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’’ is not only an allusion to the meaning-loaded event of the sinking of the Titanic… but to the group of blues songs that arose to express it decades before Dylan first uses its symbolic clout himself in 1965’s ‘Desolation Row’: a group of songs which includes Hi Henry Brown’s ‘Titanic Blues’: ‘Titanic sinking in the deep blue sea / And the band all playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.’ “

The footnote attached to that paragraph includes this: “The clutch of such songs reflected African-American delight at the sinking of the Titanic, because it signified whitey’s come-uppance, pride coming before a fall and so on. This feeling, however, was not restricted to black Americans. The Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok wrote: ‘The sinking of the Titanic has made me indescribably happy; there is, after all, an ocean.’ ”

Hi Henry recorded his song 20 years after the sinking of the ship. I’m interested to know, 80 years further on, whether Bob’s forthcoming Titanic track (if it exists, and if it is forthcoming) will draw upon any of these old blues songs, perhaps interweaving some of their lines of blues lyric poetry into his own 2012 text.

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The Haçienda – 30 Years On

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One of the world’s most celebrated clubs, The Haçienda in Manchester, opened 30 years ago today, on Friday May 21st 1982. In June 2007, a little after the 25th anniversary, the inimitable Manchester-based writer / musician, John Robb, author of books including ‘The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City 1976-1996’ (2009), ‘The Stone Roses And The Resurrection Of British Pop’ (1996) and ‘Punk Rock: An Oral History’ (2006), did a short interview with me about the club’s legacy: WHAT WAS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THE HAÇIENDA? The fact that this was never a club in the conventional sense, somewhere underpinned by sound business logic, but more about the passion of the individuals behind it, people like Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton and Mike Pickering, who had a vision that they could cultivate a club in Manchester that compared with their favourite New York venues, most notably Danceteria and the Paradise Garage Continue reading →