Not Voodoo's Heroes of Prose: David Foster Wallace

Yeah, sorry about last week. Student lifestyle innit? I don't know if you've spent any time in the British Library (let's face it, I don't know a damn thing about you) but it is an incredible place. I think you know you're a nerd at heart when you get butterflies in your stomach just walking into the Humanities Reading Room.

And when I said that the next Hero of Prose would be a less obvious one, that was a massive lie.


Even casual readers of this blog will know I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. The name of this blog, comes from his story Mr Squishy:

One of the first things a Field Researcher accepts is that the product is never going to have as important a place in a TFG's minds as it did in the Client's. Advertising is not voodoo. The Client could ultimately hope only to create the impression of a connection or resonance between the brand and what was important to consumers. And what was important to consumers was, always and invariably, themselves.

A friend gave me his book of short stories, Oblivion, in 2004. A book that would literally change my life, leading inadvertently to my giving up drinking, entertaining the prospect of not being miserable and almost certainly saving my own personal map. As well as being a provider of revelatory experiences DFW had one of the most engaging written styles in modern literature. One good thing that emerged from his suicide in September 2008 was that the coverage it generated contained some significant insights into the way that he wrote. In fact, if you imagine someone with an IQ close to 200 writing extremely fast and with a biro you will get the idea.

There is also this amusing primer which began circulating on the internet last year - to my mind, it only covers the style he developed for Infinite Jest, and actually towards the end of his life, he was moving towards something if not spare, then very much sadder.

I don't feel at all qualified to write about his writing. But here are a few things that I have tried to copy.

Just ending sentences where the hell you want in the interest of producing a realistic cadence:

I mean, it has to be something about me if you can't trust me after all these weeks or stand even just a little normal ebb and flow with always thinking I'm getting ready to leave. I don't know what but there must be.

Punctuating third person narration with spoken idiom, just being confident that the reader will read intelligently in the voice that you offer them, and just letting it come out:

The Advanced Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between pictures of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote except this guy's also like totally, almost flamboyantly bald, and to top it off he's wearing a bright-black country-western shirt with baroque curlicues of white Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders, and a string tie, plus sharp-toed boots of some sort of weirdly imbricate reptile skin, and overall he's riveting to look at, grotesque in that riveting way that flaunts its grotesquerie.

Getting up ahead of the reader:

I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.

The night before he died I was actually watching his Charlie Rose interview on YouTube, which doesn't seem to be there any more. I did keep meaning to write to him to say that he'd made a massive difference to me, but had somehow never got round to it. Sad really.

Sad too, but I think this going to be my last post here after all. I will be posting on the other blog, but my other commitments aren't leaving me with the juice to write this one too, and it's mainly just making me feel awful.

So thanks very much for reading, it's been lovely.

Ride on time!

GC submitted his column for Nursery School Assistant Magazine on time this morning, including two uses of the phrase 'queening stool'. The new blog is up at a secret address. And this afternoon he's hanging with Paul Smith at the Design Museum. Pretty sweet Friday.

Planners are evil

Taxi receipt, looks fairly innocuous, £15 probably rounded up from £12 on a I'll-do-you-a-receipt-then-shall-I-nudge-nudge-basis. But look, there's some gibberish on there. Turn it over and you're confronted with this:



Obviously this is a warning-as-advert par excellence. Presumably the best thing about having an affair is the thrill, the sheer un-wisdom of it. That once, just once, you're prepared to give in to a libidinal urge in the face of all that accreted responsibility and prove that yeah, underneath it all you're really young and alive after all.

So in this case a warning of the dangers, for those looking for danger is the best possible advert.

Plus 'having an affair' sounds just much more fun than 'working on or ending a marriage' doesn't it? A Cornetto is not an alternative to a back hand slap across the face.

As the product of what was once quaintly called 'a broken home', now known as a normal family, GC feels somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand I've got the whole libertarian argument a la Hegarty that says if they sell it, we sell it. But on the other is the straight-forward commonsensical aversion to the promotion of something that's bound to cause more misery, in a world already superabundant in misery.

And don't say, well, by allowing people to select an appropriate partner to have an affair with MetroEncounters are preventing the pain and misery caused by people beginning affairs with the wrong people, because that is so much sophistry. You might as well offer humane murder training for those considering doing a murder. ('Not everyone is suited to murdering, but if you would like to quietly smother your partner to death...')

I'm not sure I'd work on it, but I'd like to meet the planner who did. As would several thousand angry, angry spouses within the radius of the M25 I expect.

Whaddyouthink?

Not Voodoo's Heroes of Prose: Charlie Brooker

The second in a series of features in which I pontificate about people who write really well in an utterly transparent attempt to establish myself on some kind of equal footing with them.

This week Charlie Brooker.



I was going to save him for later, but he wrote this piece on the horrible horrible Windows 7 launch parties thing that Microsoft made. It's fine when he's writing about TV, but when he starts on advertising then I'm like oi Brooker stay the fuck off my patch you trout-faced old hack.

He's over at his desk laughing. Ha, ha, ha. That's the relationship we have you see.

All male journalists under 30 want to write like Charlie Brooker. Which is ironic, given that he's rapidly approaching 40.

The extraordinary thing about him is that, in an age when the media cares less and less about talent and more and more about youth and beauty, he's managed to build an extremely successful career, work with Chris Morris, present TV shows and poon beautiful former Big Brother contestants, on the basis of a powerful imagination and an expletive-laden prose style. And it all starts with the writing - initially for PC Zone, then for his own website TVgohome.

TVgohome is still the funniest thing on the internet. It doesn't seem to get old. I had to stop reading it during the years I spent working as a medical secretary because people kept coming into the room to find me with my head on the keyboard apparently crying. Whilst I was living in South America I used to read it to remind me that there were parts of the world where humour was relatively widespread.

Here is a hasty and inadequate survey of some of the characteristics of his writing:

• hyphenation and conjunction - so A&R men are shark-eyed, Nathan Barley is cock-haired, his friends are shitcreeps, etc. By stacking a load of these up you can create the impression of language straining to accommodate spleen, or misery or whatever else you're trying to express.

• surreal flights of description, but studded with weirdly poetic detail. So here, describing his experience of a minor neck operation: 'What if, just at the crucial moment they stuck the needle in, I was seized by some awful Tourettes-like urge to suddenly jerk around on the slab, cackling like a madman in a rainstorm, deliberately severing my spinal cord against the cold, hard spike?'

• precise technical specifications. In 2002 Nathan Barley was using a Sony Vaio laptop and a Nokia with an infra-red connection, today Brooker revels in the full name of the Mac operating system 'Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard'. These add sudden moments of focus and clarity and give the whole schtick an Easton Ellis-type hypermodern feel. (He's up on product numbers because he used to work behind the counter at CEX, not sure which one, maybe down the road from Dave Trott's place, which raises the possibility that they might have met, and probably argued, neither one aware of the other as a culturally significant prose stylist.)

• Cloacal fixation cf. the fictional Ralph Fiennes vehicle, Widdleplop III on TVgohome.

• All of these things put to the service of an amazed horror at human selfishness, cruelty and self-regard eg.: 'While filming himself receiving fellatio from a coke-twisted anorexic work experience girl plucked from the corridors of his uncle's TV production company, Nathan Barley momentarily interrupts his warm-gummed prickbliss to read a text message from the Ananova automatic news update service informing him of the latest Afghan death toll, before sliding his hideous gitprong back into position and intuitively grasping the back of her head like a man trying to pierce a basketball with his fingers.'

Interestingly, it is a rule in advertising that the more like Nathan Barley someone actually is, the more likely they are to namecheck Nathan Barley as a self-aware conversational gambit.

So there you go. Charlie Brooker, we salute you.

Next week will be less predictable, I promise.

I'm not going to be posting much tho', because I've just started this MA and am already having anxiety dreams about writing a book.

In the 90s, this kind of behaviour was considered quite cool

Rather than that of a preening imbecile.

Britons: America's Australians

I don't know who made this ad - might be Fallon, might easily be the first execution of the idea that DDB took them from Fallon with, it's impossible to tell from the caption in the Campaign article I nicked this picture from. Lazy journalism if you ask me.

At any rate, this ad is around at the moment in every paper format going. They even wrapped Time Out London with it the other week, which I found ironic, given that the picture clearly shows no city on this island.

Good times. They're out there.

Not literally out there obviously. But somewhere. In America maybe.

The British are peculiarly susceptible to this idea: somewhere there is a glamorous city where you will shake off your social anxiety and be much more like a fun-loving, and yet fashionably sardonic, character from a 1990s sitcom. You'll get phone calls behind the bar. You'll play pool on those tables with the massive pockets. Women will assume you're intelligent, because of your accent, even if you're technically an idiot.

In fact, this is the archetype, if not for all advertising, then at at least for the majority of advertising for booze.

How do I get to this magical place?

Should I take a plane or catch and ocean liner?

No old friend, you just have to drink enough Budweiser.

Then you will have no fucking idea where you are.

The other thing that lends this advert its weird archetypal feeling is that it's actually the only advert you can make for booze now, since it became illegal to show attractive people having fun, socialising and drinking.

Good times. Woo!

How not to write No. 2

Surf YouTube collecting as many intro sequence to 90s yoof TV show 'The Word' as you possibly can. Watch them over and over, and try to work out what the word is for how they make you feel.

It should exist between 'nostalgic' and 'embarrassed', but it's just not there.

I believe Quiet Storm made this one.



If you want to waste extra time not writing, try uploading your videos straight to Blogger. It takes much much longer, but it does seem to get round the no-embed code that Channel4 put on their videos, no-fun sticklers for copyright that they are.

This is going to be sort of a 90s week on Not Voodoo. For precisely no reason.

The 90s were a really long time ago

Let's just take a moment to appreciate how long, with the help of this video.