Books: Part 13

This one’s a bit of a cop out, and perhaps unlucky if you’re the superstitious type, there’s just not much going on at the moment. In my brain, that is, though in the normal sense as well it’s a shame to say. The two meanings are of course related. I’ve been clearing out old things to pass the time, I took a saw and carved off one level on one side of a shelving unit I’ve had with me across two bedrooms. The reason, so I could take that same saw afterwards to a cheap wood laminate desk/ computer table stained by spilt dark beer and tea so many times they’ve seeped through into the plastic, altering the patterning permanently. The removal of that ugly thing, far oversized for the purpose I held onto it for — the new space I created serves not just equally well, but more effectively — lifted my mood a degree, but still the dissatisfaction remains.

Clutter can look so pretty on camera, even more so in hand drawn or painted art, yet in person it’s usually so ugly that it dulls the spirit. Only curated can it achieve half of what it can in depiction. I’ve been enjoying the films from Studio Ghibli so much lately not for the fantastic otherworldly imagery and stories, not primarily anyway as I did when I was little, though of course I still derive great enjoyment from that aspect of those films, but from the way they beautify mundanity. It’s almost heart-breaking how /comfy/ they allow you to believe a child’s bedroom or a small family kitchen could be. It provides a kind of internal peace to see rooms and dwelling places, our own lone retreats, look so lovely. I’ve never seen a bedroom, not in all my days as little kid visiting the houses of friends now lost, which had that aesthetic I’m looking for.

Now as an adult, I am in charge of an entire flat (apartment). I failed that possibly impossible task of giving life to a room which provides me with solace through it’s aesthetic arrangement alone as I — somewhere along the way — decided is an old soul’s purpose. And now that duty has been extended to several rooms. More than this I now also must contend with a malignant entity hell bent on breaking my will, one primary means by which this attack on my very spirit is achieved being through the promotion of the same ugliness I’m trying to banish. I struggle to merely make my environment aesthetically bearable because of this. Yet here I stand, still pushing back against it. Even making inroads from time to time, though losses are taken too, which is all I can do.

One act in this war for my own sanity is documented here in some detail on this blog, the failure of which backfired some. I started this series a year ago, A WHOLE YEAR! Slightly more in fact, Part 1 (linked two lines above) was uploaded on April 9th. And yes the whole rigamaroo is enjoyable and it gives an excuse as it does today to fill in an empty week with feed for hungry mouths that may not really be there, and if they are whose hunger may be a Pavlovian product of my own rigidity. We really can be our own worst enemies sometimes, the idiom has some truth to it. Nevertheless, it was never meant to be like this, a pile of books on the floor for a year or more is the opposite of what I wanted. All I wanted was to throw some old things away, this time old books. So, today I’m going to talk about books.

The Big Trip is a book I was given as a gift by my uncle shortly after I turned 18 all about “travel” (in 2k20, it is a noun), it’s written by a bunch of middle class journalists and professional bohemians whose names I have no desire to know because really the book is by a company — Lonely Planet. They write travel books, if you were wondering. And I could go on and on ad nauseum about how gross this book is, how much it oozes petit bourgeois superficiality. Of course it does, it’s written by people who use “travel” as a noun, and “adventure” as a verb. Fuck please tell me I’m not the only one who feels an intense and immediate revulsion when reminded that these people not only exist, but are happy.

I’m not against the idea of tourism — though these people would deny that label that is what they are, tourists with pretensions — but the whole LARP from these unbearable strawmen is that they’re somehow different from the legions of Chinese families you see crowding around every major European monument. Well, maybe not anymore but until a couple months ago. I say strawmen, but if I’m being honest it’s more often than not women who fit into this unfortunate modern archetype I’m describing. Modern travel culture is just consumerism, and women are better consoomers than men. At least the ones I’ve known, which is probably a lot more than you might think for a shut in loser incel. They all seem to love trinkets, little things, scrapbooking, photo albums, all that faggy shit.

That’s what travel today is, the fabled “new experiences” these people claim to be seeking are just more trinkets to be bought. I’m not against that, in fact I think that given how cheap and easy it is thanks to modern globalisation for people to visit exotic places of natural beauty or famous historical sites that it’s probably a little less vapid to consooom that way than to consooom pornography and shitty TV shows from your cuck box in any modern western city. The purchase of “experiences” seems to be a slightly better deal than the purchase of new car, new shoe, new pop-science bestseller, new phone, etc. Five Guys is healthier than McDonald’s, but they’re both fast food, if you’re picking up what I’m laying down.

I just resent the mystification of “travel” that is so propagated nowadays, you’ll hear people talk in vague terms about how they learned so much, found themselves, etc. I’m not sure if it’s a lie they’re telling to justify what is ultimately a completely superficial endeavour, or if it’s something they actually believe. Usually when you believe something however, you can explain your point of view in much more certain terms. What I’m saying is, the world is utterly tamed. Most of the world, most of the third world even, is one big amusement park. Unless you’re going on some kind of religious mission or pilgrimage, or to study perhaps, then I don’t expect you’re learning or “growing as a person” any more from slumming it in India or Thailand than from spending a weekend at Disneyland.

There are very few places left on the planet where the thot fears to tread, and only in those places might you have these developmental experiences that these people talk about. I’m dissillusioned if you can’t tell. That being said, I think that if you have the opportunity then go for it, we live in a bleak and hopeless neoliberal hellscape where everything has been commodified, you work so you can consume product and get excited for next product, and then you die. You can’t escape, almost all of what you do is meaningless. The aesthetic pursuit is actually quite a pure one in light of this, shed the burden of seeking “experiences”, seek beauty in and of itself, drop the pretence. I suppose visiting a particular person is valid as well, though even meaningful human connection is something that I worry may not even be possible anymore. Fuck this book, fuck the people it represents, into the trash it goes.

This post is taking on a very polemic tone as I go, I usually have to restrain that impulse when writing for this blog because I think it’s unbecoming, especially if I turn out to be wrong about something later down the line, but it had to be said. Moving on — though I’m trying to hold to a loose theme throughout this post, hopefully it isn’t going unnoticed — the next book in the pile that has been there too long is Chavs by Owen Jones. Owen Jones is a man, and here in the UK he’s become a fairly well known figure in the last few years, not quite a household name but one step away. He’s a left wing, socialist, progressive commentator, who was a journalist for years before becoming a political activist. I used to really like him, or more the idea of what he could be, back in my mid to late teens before I got radicalised by the far right.

This book in it’s own small way might have pushed me in that direction actually. “Chav” is a slang term in England for working class/ poor people, or at least a certain type among them. They’re like our equivalent of gopniks, and although the term itself is generally used in a derogatory way in both cases I think, there’s a particular vitriol behind the term “Chav”. See in Russia they still look down on those people I’m sure, but at the end of the day they are all the same people. Here, as I’ve talked about before, class division is almost like a mild form of ethnic division, especially in the most populous urban areas. This is before even taking into account actual non-native ethnic groups who’ve arrived in recent decades.

From a very young age I’ve grown up around both people who use that word, and people who are being described by that word, and I hated it. My mum and uncle grew up in a very comfortable environment, my dad explained it to me when I was quite young in this way: When my mum was born in 1959, she had a colour television; when my dad was born roughly a decade later, he still remembered having black and white television. It might seem like a very shallow or materialistic means of differentiation but it’s just there to illustrate in a small way the drastically different backgrounds they had. My mum didn’t come from an incredibly wealthy background, but it was a very comfortable middle class one. Big house in a London suburb, luxury family car, plane trips abroad in summer which was a big deal in the 60s. My dad slept in a suitcase for the first few months of his life.

Some people say class is not economic in this country, it’s cultural, but that’s misleading. Rather, the economic division alone doesn’t equip someone foreign to this rainy little island well enough to understand the division. It’s economic, and cultural. See, plenty of people from a background like my dad’s can and do get to a point where they’re earning at least a lower middle class income, a small few become incredibly wealthy either through luck or determination. But they will always be seen as working class, until the day they die. I guess the best example is Alan Sugar “the working class billionaire”. Social mobility is a multi-generational affair, a working class man can become wealthy but he will always be his background, his children however will be middle class even if by the time they reach adulthood they are not particularly financially well off.

The recent history of my mother’s side of my family is actually a perfect example of this. Being the daughter of a working class man — I still remember my granddad occasionally lapsing into cockney rhyming slang when talking to me, telling me stories about growing up during the blitz — who became relatively wealthy, my mother was given a very middle class upbringing. She was sent to elocution lessons to learn to speak proper English, all her school friends were middle class, and after leaving home and entering adulthood she knew her parents would always be there to support her if she failed.

Because of this she spent most of her life in a sort of bubble, she was in a way a prototypical example of the “travel girl” caricature I was talking about at the start of this post. She lived in the third world for a few years teaching English, could afford to take a year long road trip around the US, that sort of thing. By the time I was born she had settled and found a stable career at a school library, but she was earning far less than my granddad at that age. If class is only an economic category then I definitely grew up working class, at least until my granddad passed away when I was seven. The money my mum inherited allowed us to move into the flat I live in now which is much nicer, and to this day most of my money in savings is from that inheritance.

Class isn’t an exclusively economic category though, and so my mum was always considered middle class, and more interestingly so am I. I didn’t go to university, I have a job which pays by the hour, but because of the way I talk which was learned from the friends my mum had while I was very young I am perceived as middle class. I would say my background is possibly more similar to my dad’s than my mum’s, but it doesn’t matter. If I had the exact same background, or a very similar one, but my mum spoke differently, then I’d be working class. Most people who grow up in this country spend most of their lives primarily around members of their own social class, almost like two separate ethnic groups who live side by side in a geographic area and have occasional inter-mixing but remain functionally distinct. Naturally the group which is generally worse off becomes resentful, and an ugly sense of superiority develops among the better off.

I saw all this growing up, and due to my unusual positioning, I never really saw myself as belonging to either group. I suppose I do feel a bit more comfortable around middle class people, but I also have a kind of disdain for them that I don’t have for working class people. The working class may be kind of rough, and crude, and — my dad being a perfect example of this — they are generally much more lazy and content with ugliness; but sometimes that’s preferable to the very feminine passive-aggressive posturing of the middle class. The middle class existence is filled with many hypocrisies, the biggest being that they are all very left wing — “tory” is an insult among the urban middle class, which is who I’m talking about — but clearly despise actual working class individuals when they encounter them. It’s almost like the working class they defend at their dinner parties are just an abstraction, unrelated to the actual working class as they exist.

This is what I thought this book would be about, but it’s not. This really disappointed me when I read it, I think during my last year of secondary school, because I was becoming completely disillusioned with the left because of this. It wasn’t until I read a book by a man who Jones has actually been compared to (a ridiculous comparison, imo), George Orwell, that I found someone else who had intelligently covered this issue. The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier talks about exactly this subject, but I didn’t read that until it was too late. I read a few other books by Orwell while I was in secondary school, but I didn’t read The Road to Wigan Pier until much more recently, certainly after 2016. I really do wonder if I had read it earlier whether the trajectory of my political beliefs would have changed, but that’s a subject for the next part in this series.

In fact, I’m going to continue talking about “Chavs” in the next part as well, maybe not the next upload but it might be, because I think I might need to skim through it again before I can give my final thoughts on it. As I said, at the time I was disappointed that it was not what I thought it was about. In fact Owen Jones is complicit in the very type of demonization of the working class I thought the book covered, in more recent years referring to working class people who oppose mass migration to this country as “gammon”, an explicitly racialised slang term aimed at working class men. A little ironic for a public “anti-racist”. Instead the book is mostly about how government policy and rhetoric in the 21st century has harmed the working class. A topic which is actually worth discussing, but I don’t have time to give my thoughts on now as it’s been eight days since my last upload, I know this post sucks but it’s better than nothing. Thanks for reading.

Link to Part 12