Gluteus maximus wasn’t a Roman emperor. Medulla oblongata wasn’t his wife. Latin is the favourite chance card of the lazy — they think it grants them some kind of day pass into the club intelligentsia. Anyone can parrot that bullshit for a little while but push past the superficiality of any act and you have to start learning to possess a degree of substance or you’re fucked.
You can re-draft the masterpieces of Leonardo Da Vinci ad infinitum but if you don’t bring anything new to the table then you may as well be sat there with a scanner and a printer. Who will be interested? The fakes and the fakes alone. That’s ok: that is enough for some people. It’s not like it’s an inconsiderable market by any means. Perhaps the concept of originality is only a premium amongst those who seek to be original.
Being original doesn’t necessarily mean being truthful. Look at all the writers out there who use pseudonyms and who are basically building whole worlds out of lies - they are still considered originals. It’s all about either doing something that no one else has done before or doing something with a bit of flair in a new and interesting way. Not that novelty is the be-all and end-all of everything, or that it is some kind of benchmark of quality or anything, but it does cont for something.
Who wants to live in a decade that is only known for being a pale reflection of what went before? Photocopies degrade the more copies you make: copy drift. Ideas can suffer in the same way.
He shut himself off from so much because he didn’t want to be merely reactive. As soon as they badged you with post-this, post-this, neo-something-or-other you were fucked. You’d be buried as soon as the movement was flushed. It was critics that lived within the remit of the quotation mark and could only explain what you were if they resorted to comparison. Sometimes the neat summing up of something new was a reach too far and people saw that and they knew that something genuine had been thrust into the spotlight, no matter the illegitimate means.
Everyone was too knowing now. Retards could skate by if they could operate a search engine and click a hyperlink and even that was becoming unnecessary — the whole world existed in a state of everything being cheek by jowl. Culture was a marketing exercise. You moved things around on the supermarket shelf to shift product that wasn’t doing so well. A book, a band, a film, not performing as well as it should? Then re-brand it. Re-tool it. Retrofit it with irony, build the excuses for watching it into the marketing strategy and spin cool out of the uncoolness. But everyone knew the truth — really they knew the truth: some things were just crap and some things weren’t. Some people were arbiters of cool and some people rode on others coattails.
When he emerged it would be with something brilliant. No man is an island. Hmm, island was an old geographically bound notion. Communities were no longer built around geographical location — they were built around ideaspace. Every man is a network worked better as an analogy; every man is the nodal point in a shifting map of consciousness. The notional position of a person could change in an instant, and when it changed the whole system it was part of changed, links changed, significance changed, roles changed, and possibilities changed. One man could truly do a lot from where he was now. He believed that. Carling believed he could truly make a difference.
Filed under: Prose, Short Story, flash fiction, literary, update | Tagged: fiction, literature, paul grimsley, Prose, skull cull, something new, story, update, writer, writing
