Elliott Smith with Chris, Alistair, Phil (the present "gig club" members). Hmmm-----ok. A bit too 'sanitised'. Chris's friend Bob was waxing about the lyric quality, but to be honest… ok, sounds stupid, but in a bona fide piece of art, if the guy can't say anything but fucking/fuck/fucked all the time then I think that's a bit lame. I kept thinking "this sounds like it would be in the sound track to some sub-Mallrats rip-off geek slacker movie. Turns out that he already has had a soundtrack tune in Good Will Hunting. So there you go, point made. But he was alright, you know… reminded me slightly of that sweet wee band from Canada, The Inbreds. Their album's great. Called something really stupid that makes them sound like a heavy metal band, but you know, you can't have everything.
Oh yes, I was going to mention Tom Paulin on The Late Review last night. Tosser. Oh god, words cannot contain the vile thoughts I was having about the things he said. The set up: the Paul Throux book about VS Naipaul. My opinion of it is a bit "duck and cover". I mean, I'm sure his editors briefly said "Do you think you should? Yes? Oh well - good-than-you-it'll-sell-thousands-and-be-the-cult-book-of-the-year", whereas in fact, it should have been published postumously, with about ten years distance between the writing of it and the re-writing of it (you can imagine the scene, Theroux reading his manuscript saying "Oh Christ, did I write that? Jesus, how embarrassing).
Anyway so the panel were reviewing this thing, and Paulin began to talk about the book as a history of these two authors. It was interesting in the places that dealt specifically with them both when they were struggling authors "leading the heroic life". Ok, so the heroic life in his case was - oh the poor souls, in order to devote their lives to writing, they had to do such awful traumas as write reviews to have enough money to live, so they could carry on writing.
Oh.
Oh the poor things, having to stoop so low as to do reviews for a living whilst they lived in garrets and ate at dinner parties only twice monthly… that's the kind of intellectual snobbery that almost makes me want to puke. This… this man having, as a fervently held opinion, a conviction that to be a good writer, the privileged soul struck with the muse must be in touch with poverty, must experience it. It makes me feel rancid inside to even think about it, frankly. Yes, I'm sure all of those people like that bus driver bloke whose novel became quite popular in literary circles recently - he really enjoys being on the front line of poverty, doesn't he, with his terribly difficult review writing job. I mean, I don't know when he had the time to do the thing that put food on his table, or paid his rent, in between the trials of writing reviews and his novel. Oh the callouses on the hands of Paul Throux, as he he scraped his living…
To be totally fair, I'm not dissing Theroux or VS Naipaul here, it's Paulin's ludicrous assumptions of this mythical "Heroic state". Poverty is not a heroic state, it is not something to be experienced by the middle class as a career option before moving on to something more lucrative. Poverty is something that no one who is poor wants to be. It's destructive, evil and anyone who grew up poor and becomes in some way not poor anymore is usually fucking glad of the fact. To equate the act of writing, and supporting yourself, choosing to embrace poverty as if that is somehow positive and to be applauded is an insult to people who genuinely have no option but to work their arses off in jobs they hate to scribble at home in the evenings, in the hope that they can escape their economic state and very possibly reality state (if only while they're writing). Don't forget, the university educated who refuse to go in to a "career" and who choose instead to work at achieving a place in the world, accepting that they might be broke for a while but knowing that at any time they could stop it - actually choosing the harder path - those people are NOT heroic. It is simply a different way of doing it. I did it for three years and looking back at it, fucking hated it at the time, but at least I had a damn choice. I could have gone and been a secretary if I wanted.
Fuckit if you can't have an opinion…