Chasing butterflies
by Dave Lordan
[ fiction - may 09 ]
I am an idler by nature. The prospect of there being more pleasure elsewhere than there is in my bed is the only thing that ever gets me out of it. Luckily, I am a writer. A successful writer. So my life is full of every kind of pleasure. Just in case you think I'm some kind of watered-down shaman, I mean purely physical pleasure. Nothing beatific or sublime. The finest wines the finest meals the finest air-conditioned rooms the finest white sheets the finest hottest hardest young bodies to stain them with. I travel around the world in luxury, tasting all these things together or in turn, with or without punctuation. And I never pay a brown penny for any of it.
Some people think that becoming a writer will ennoble them. Believe me, being a writer is as likely to ennoble you as shoveling panda-shit in Shanghai Zoo is. Most writers are gross. Scorpions. They will do anything to sting each other out of the competition. They dance on the graves of a million dead children to get a mention on a Friday night chat show. Even, god love them, the radio.
It's true. They're always writing about bad bad bad things that happened long ago, about how bad bad bad the powerful were long ago. There's a lot of fame and money to be had in that line. You can even end up in Hollywood, pretending to be shy and humble.
Writers who pretend to be shy and humble are usually about as shy and humble as a dog's cock.
Not that writers aren't cheap either. Give them an economy flight and three star accommodation along with a makeshift pedestal and they will shake hands with anyone.
I love the dignitaries who sit in the front row at literary festivals, with their chains of office and their military decorations. I love bamboozling them with my fine, airy nonsense. I love spraying them with my spittle as their eyes glaze over, gazing right through me, smiling and nodding, smiling and nodding.
Most of all, I love to share in their nostalgia for those former friends they are presently having buggered to a pulp in the cellars.
It's considered grossly impolite to try and spark up serious conversation about literature at a literary festival. Of course you can talk vague and high-sounding shite all night to 'readers', 'literary journalists', 'arts officers', backpackers, and other doe-eyed amateurs, in the hope of bedding one or a few of them. More often than not it's the backpackers you end up in bed with, since they are usually both desperate for a fondling and paralytic drunk, and since the others only ever have sex with their feeyawnsays or their housebangs.
Of course you could even end up spitroasting with the main event, the American or the Brit, if you get him drunk enough. Just drunk enough though. Writers don't ever do drugs or promote their use in erotic gameplay. They wouldn't be caught doing anything illegal. If chin-stroking was made illegal, writers would immediately stop stroking their chins. Writers would jam double-strength concrete up there arses if farting were declared unlawful.
Or you can nod politely and agree with the general assessment of life the universe and everything emanating from whichever oyster slurping dypsomaniac of an 'award winning writer' you've had the misfartune to be sat beside. That's what everybody else does. But it would be foolhardy in the extreme to try and discuss the work of someone who has just read, or will be reading. After all he/she was/is almost certain to be without interest, and you almost certainly weren't/won't be really listening, and neither were/will they be for you. Writers only ever listen to their own voices. They only ever really like their own work too. Otherwise, why would they bother?
I hope that doesn't give the game away for my peers, who really want you to believe that they are listening to you, as that is their way of making you feel obliged to listen to them when it's their turn.
As for other writer's, who aren't at this particular festival, well what do they matter, unless you want to get a good dig in at them; don't worry, you won't be going out on a limb- as if, everyone else around the table will be sure to join in with you. Writer's get a palpably physical pleasure from backstabbing other writers. They get palpitations of joy from it. It speeds up their heart rate. It's like mainlining base for some of them, you can see the sudden bloom of their pupils, their eyes almost bursting with the hit, like deep-sea fish brought up on deck and exploding with the bends.
Writers: a shower of total fucking cunts if you ask me. The lot of them. Myself included.
It helps to narrow things down a little. Let's focus on poets for a while. Poets are the greatest gobshites in existence. Stupid beyond belief. If there's one thing I cling on to with certainty when all my other convictions fail me, it's that. They are comical gobdaws. Infinitely vain. The whole world is only a magic mirror for a poet. It only gets looked up at atall if it agrees to trumpet the Napoleonic genius of their verse.
A good way to check if you have a sense of humour is to spend a few minutes with your nearest poet. If you can't laugh at a poet, you can't laugh.
Most of them are stupid, ignorant, dishonest, and cowardly enough to believe that the nil pointes popularity of poetry is an indictment of the population, not an indictment of poetry, and poets and the population.
The unacknowledged legislators of sweet fuck all.
Just unacknowledged actually.
If you removed poetry from world history the only thing that would therefore be missing is...poetry.
Some 'commentators', herald the above fact as something poets should congratulate themselves for. As if being useless, irrelevant and totally unknown and uncared for, outside of a small band of trench-coated, crazy-eyed-inverts, gave you a special place in the order of the universe.
It doesn't.
When something new arrives in poetry, the existing poets gather round it in a circle, wait for it to tire out a little, to close its eyes for just a minute, then they go at it with hatchets, lances, torches, stakes and surgical instruments.
I say I'm a successful writer, who spends most of my time getting paid in the currency of my choice to get sozzled, laid and talk rubbish at festivals in exotic places, but that doesn't mean I have ever done any writing. Not a bit of it. Instead , I hold dominion over a number of alternative universes. In one of these, I keep an infinite number of butterflies being eternally chased by an infinite number of perfect copies of a certain obvious writer. The algorithmic patterns produced by all of this motion are recorded by sensors attached to an unbelievably powerful super-computer of God-like intelligence. This computer, by dint of processes sub-sub-sub-atomic and suitably arcane, translates the ceaseless fluctuations of the algorithmic flow into poems, short stories, plays, novels, and what have you.
Suspended above all of this, I have put in place a huge and well maintained bureaucracy of the anal-saxon personality type, whose job it is to to sift through all the billion billion libraries of my universal text generator. My good old UTG. This last, by the way, I got as a handsome ransom for the return of a polish machinist named Stan, back when I was a professional kidnapper.
My mandarins ceaseless searching on my behalf is, of course, done in order to separate out all the sub-canonical type of copy-rat books, the likes that get you flown around the world for free and treated like Cleopatra in Rome every time. As this kind of book is so common, I always have trillions to choose from, and, as I'm confident you will have already guessed, what makes me really really really powerful and wealthy is selling on my spares to all the other 'writers' I meet at these festivals.
If the UTG ever fails me, or I decide to sell it on, I can always go back into blackmail.
It's a great life. A carousel of delectation. I have no problems whatsoever. Sometimes, in the heat and thrill of a city centre evening in late Spring, I feel like a Godzilla stepping from the streets of Lisbon to the streets of... Bombay... Rio... Galway... St Petersburg... or Rome, ready at any moment to smash like ants with a swingeing thump of my monster-sized arms the unknowing anonymites that are passing me by, the giant that is walking there among them.
But I have many other feelings, and qualities, as well. In fact, as well as all of the above, I am very handsome, extremely charming, loquacious, very well-hung, simpatico as the Italians say, and in possession of numerous secret potions which allow me to do whatever I want with people, or any other animal.
