Facebook | Fiction | Death To Facebook! Long Live the New Flesh!

“She knew several thousand people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”


My God, I love The Machine Stops. On-the-nose, some claim, but it’s deliciously so, I think. And besides, who can scoff at such straightforwardness when it hits the mark of the pitfalls of today’s modern society so often, and so much more accurately (I’d argue) than 1984 or Brave New World, its bigger, more famous cousins.

Like when Vashti turns off her “isolation switch”, and is assaulted on all sides by the voices of the people she “knows”, wanting to communicate with her,

“What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas?”

Hello, Facebook Chat.

If you don’t know E.M. Forster’s savagely anti-technological short story, it describes a world in which mankind has not so much been imprisoned by a totalitarian regime as imprisoned itself, through slovenliness, convenience and the desire to escape reality. All life is focused around the Machine, which is....just that, a great machine that stores information and enables communication between all members of society. In a quick burst of dark humour, the only book left in the world is an instruction manual for using the Machine, which is just beginning to become a sort of holy book in the minds of some.

Hello, Internet.
And if on-the-nose makes you cringe,

“We created the Machine to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”

If I’m being reduced to copying out passages verbatim instead of being rather more interesting in my discussion, well, it’s because I can’t fault Forster’s logic. The obvious link of carnality to pornography doesn’t intrigue me quite so much as the suggestion, elsewhere in the story, that physical contact with another human being has become abhorrent to us. I’ve met, myself, some young men of my age who have come to prefer the safety of pornography to the reality of sexual contact – to the risks of dealing outside the Machine. “Second-hand ideas” themselves become preferable to those experienced IRL. And that our sense of the spaces around us is lost – I couldn’t possibly disagree with that, having known, myself, the horrid, fuzzy feeling after breaking away from two many hours staring at the screen, as if reality itself has become unreal.
And, more worryingly, for our purposes, living outside the Machine becomes living outside society itself – becoming “homeless.” Damn straight. In order to preach this Luddite sermon about how the Internet is killing us, I, er, have to go onto the Internet and post it, and for people to agree or disagree they’ll have to do the same. And in order to write, I use my laptop, and in order to research, I use the Internet. I am becoming a slave, of sorts. I even feel a little guilty for typing this, because, hell, the damned thing is immensely useful, and it’s convenient. It seems inconsiderate to blame it because I’m too feeble to use it without it using me.
Or perhaps it’s wrong to call The Machine Stops Luddite. It doesn’t believe in the evil of technology so much as the frailty of humanity, when faced with great power. But it does have an enormous satisfaction to it when the Machine does finally come crumbling down. And I have to ask myself – if Facebook or the entire Internet itself collapsed today, for ever, I might be panicked, because I’d lose a great deal. I’ve stored a lot of photos there, a lot of memories. I’d be rendered pretty much blind, deaf and dumb. But I’m not sure I’d be saddened. I might even, in the end, be a little pleased.
That final exchange between Vashti and her son, as the Machine comes crashing down, all around them – perhaps one of my favourite dialogues in all of literature;

“Is there any hope, Kuno?”

“None for us.”

We are all children of the Machine now. We rely on it; we’re all tainted. But perhaps there is a way we can stop future generations from ever becoming addicted.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Facebook | Introduction | More of an update really...

Week 12 | Facebook | Contents

Tuesday | Poetry | Banter

Wednesday | Fiction | Death To Facebook! Long Live The New Flesh! 

Thursday | Music | Cultural self-diagnosis, or, Dr Zuckerberg will see you now

Friday | Chapbook | To The Last Mark, by Joseph A. W. Quintela

This week we will mostly be thinking about facebook. A tribute to our brand spanking new facebook page.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT


We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve here so we suggest you 'watch this space'. In the meantime, below are a couple of links to the best of FailBook.com

1 | 2 | 3

Editor-in-Beef
James Harringman

Bees | Mixtape | Mixtape X, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, by Jack Underwood

 

Music As Reading: Mixtape X, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, by Jack Underwood

We could drive down to another beach,
Even tan, your skin seems white;
All our friends have gone away from here,
So let’s disappear from sight.

We were going to save this one for a special occasion. But earlier this week, I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy sing in a gorgeous late-medieval church in Coventry, and it was such a sublime experience that I figured we owed it to the Silkworms readership to offer them something of it.

Jack Underwood wrote a poem about Bonnie “Prince” Billy in his superb Faber New Poets pamphlet, the fourth of the first crop. We thought getting a chap who’d attempted to distil something of BPB into verse to then re-soundtrack his poem, as it were, via a sequence of songs, by BPB and others which constitute the musical basis of his relationship with the singer’s work, would represent a fascinating (if somewhat confusing) Music As Reading experience. The following represents a compelling insight into one of the most interesting Young British Poets Working Today’s ideas about music interacting with reading/writing and vice versa (and, indeed, a pretty good introduction to what makes BPB such an extraordinary artist).

(The poem, Bonnie “Prince” Billy can be located in Faber New Poets 4, published by Faber & Faber. Jack’s mixtape is, due to even more pronounced Spotify shortcomings than were apparent last week, our first YouTube Mixtape. Click on the track-title for audio/video.)

1. My Home is the Sea – BPB and Matt Sweeney (Superwolf)
2. You Will Miss Me When I Burn – BPB (Greatest Palace Music)
3. FYH – Mat Riviere (Follow Your Heart – Riviere’s brother, the poet Sam Riviere, first played me BPB. I was in his room, we were at art-school, the song was No More Workhorse Blues I think.)
4. No Bad News – BPB (The Letting Go – I don’t know this album that well, but I like the prickly folksong verses.)
5. Kiss – Scout Niblett feat. Will Oldham (This Fool Can Die Now – when I went to see BPB I bumped into Scout Niblett in the foyer and got my ticket signed! I’m a big fan. I think her shrill voice on this track is skin-crawly good, and the video’s good fun too. Just a beautiful, dangerous song really) 
6. I See A Darkness – BPB (I See A Darkness – lots of people think this is BPB’s best album. I’m not so sure. I think I like the spangley, slightly ‘too-much’ country and western stuff on Greatest Palace Music more. Palace Music, the earlier record, is also interesting because it’s earthier and more DIY. Anyway, the point is, this is a great, moving song, but I think it’s a bit self-consciously reaching for a dark place, or ‘minor place’ as he puts it, and I think he does that better when he’s not trying so hard.)
7. The Brute Choir – BPB (Greatest Palace Music – this is precisely that OTT, lush country and western thing I was talking about: those ladies singing ‘the choir, the choir’ at the end and the wonderful slidey lapsteel. I also love how this song develops without really repeating itself. And of course, that rolling piano.)
8. Joan of Arc – Leonard Cohen (Songs of Love and Hate – I think BPB lives in this song a bit. Perhaps it’s the voice of fire speaking, which has that kind of melodrama about it, but in any case there just has to be a common lineage here: see/hear next track!)
9. The Way – BPB (Master and Everyone – see/hear what I’m getting at?)
10. Sittin’ In An All Night Cafe – Warner Mack (No real link to BPB here, except that I think he generally makes country music accessible or more palatable to the more ignorant, pop-washed listener. So I thought I’d put one of my favourite country songs on here!)
11. The Static That Comes From My Broken Heart – Herman Dune (Mas Cambios – people who bought ‘Bonnie Prince Billy’ also bought ‘Herman Dune’.
12. Gulf Shores – BPB (Greatest Palace Music – this is my favourite BPB song: the candy-striped swimsuit, letting the family down and the suggestion that ‘we could drive down to another beach’ as if that might somehow help the situation. I just think this is so lyrically well-pitched, and although I never had one in mind, if one song were to prompt me to write my poem again, it would be this one. But of course, if the poem works, it’s really about all songs, or at least whichever one the reader brings to mind.)

Thor and Electro-Magnetism - UPDATE

Or, MegaRightWing Internet Poesie.

Or, Were Goebbels around today, he'd have a MacBook Pro.

As Charlie Brooker once pointed out, BNP publicity will always look (and feel – horrid, horrid paper) like primary-coloured diarrhoea because MegaRightWing gifted graphic-designers don’t exist. Gifted graphic-designers are too sensitive and intelligent to be MegaRightWing. Fuckers’ll have to teach themselves Photoshop, bless their (ironically, black) little hearts.

(It’s true, Goebbels might have something to say about this assertion, were he around today. It can’t be emphasised enough, were Goebbels around today, he’d have a MacBook Pro. Goebbels would go mad for apple. Go mad… Hohohohohoho! Goebbels had a Ph.D., having written his doctoral thesis on 18^th Century romantic drama, would you believe...)

The same, it seems, can be said for internet poetry. Yes, there is a tradition of batshit crazy artistic fascism coexisting with once-in-a-generation poetic genius (hello Ezra, you mad old bastard) but as a rule, MegaRightWing internet poetry is gloriously shite. Take the following IT’S SARCASTIC, GET IT?! example from the comment-feed what lies beneath Melanie Phillips’ just fucking frightening Spectator blog: 

What’s Left?

I envy the moral perfection
Of the folks on the cultural left;
Surrounded by such a collection
Of saints I feel lost and bereft.

There isn’t an issue to mention
They haven’t a remedy for,
And they’re positive all global tension
Is due to our actions before.

For the West is the world’s only evil
And nothing’s as wicked as we,
And they’re certain that every upheaval
Is the fault of white bastards like me.

But when you examine it closer
You might be surprised what you find,
For the issues that make them verboser
Are the ones buried deep in their mind:

All the violent rant against warfare,
All resentful remembrance of race,
All repeated insistence they do care
As they purple and spit in your face

You can see is the angry denial
Of thoughts they can only admit
By projecting and putting on trial
The stench of their own disowned shit.

By Mark Allinson. ‘WB’ responds:

Mark Allinson @ 12:22 a.m.

Did see your ballad and thought it a clever reflection of Maelanie's poster. Enjoyed :-)

I wonder, Melanie, how it feels to know that the only people commenting on your blog are fucking retards. ‘WB’ sounds like a dyslexic Yoda. And yet Mark Allinson appears positively Eliotic (the loveliest of all the poet-name-coinages) in comparison to the following man-of-letters. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Lee John Barnes, the man Nick Griffin describes as ‘a strange and complex character.’

(It seems MegaRightWing folk aren’t very fly with the ol’ video-editing software either. How weird, par exomplur, is this…)

(Before I post an actual poem, here’s a blogpost entitled, no joke, ‘Thor and Electro-Magnetism – UPDATE.’ There are no words.)

Right. Let’s call the below Lee John Barnes does a Hopkins.

I have been working on this poem for a while. A year or so I was visiting the Valley of Rocks in North Devon when I saw a sparrowhawk sitting on a crag amidst the rocks, then he took off and whirled away over the cliff tops and into the sunset.

The Hunting Hawk. 

This is my sky, his cry seemed to say,
And I am the master of all I survey,
As upon the highest crag he perched,
The sky itself seemed his church, 
For atop that simple throne of stone,
He committed no crimes to atone, 
For what need of he for laws and gods,
Those chains that tie us to the sod, 
For he is free as lightning, fleet as fire,
Blessed as he rode the rain rushed gyres. 

The whistling winds beneath those wings,
Will never condemn or shame with sins,
The savage desires that fill his soul, 
For only we tarnish, whilst he is gold,
The simple sorcery of his ascensions,
Were a magic beyond my comprehension,
And the blood that ran into that beak,
As precious as a sermon for the weak,
And as he crucified his prey upon those talons,
God was joyous, and adored him in his vision.

Bees | Chapbook | 'There There' by Daniel Payne

 

CLICK HERE TO READ

 

Vol XXIII, There There

Daniel Payne (6.8.10)

 

Conceptually striking, audacious in word choice and full of poems that drum along in great bursts of word-smithed language. Headless in Finland is a particular treat.

Bees | Music | Blow Job Betty

Nick Cave’s Grinderman side-project has been universally described, alongside The Death of Bunny Munro, as the noises a mad-gifted man makes when he grows old disgracefully. And No Pussy Blues, the former’s best-known track (‘I thought I’d try another tack / I drank a litre of cognac / I threw her down upon her back / But she just laughed, and said she just didn’t want to…I got the no pussy blues’) not to mention the opening paragraphs of the latter’s third chapter (‘beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically-shaped cumulus, loads of fucking girls are up for it, big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, young ones, old ones, give-me-a-minute-and-I’ll-find-your-beauty-spot ones’) make it pretty bloody easy to see why.

Actually, Cave is growing old considerably less disgracefully than, I don’t know, Ronnie Wood, with his face like a smoker’s lung and his soggy phallus not even wedged between the thighs of a Kazakhstan-born teenager anymore. Cave is happily married to that lady off-of the front of the Roxy Music best-of. Cave has charming twin boys who play silly games with the Bad Seeds. The middle-aged Cave is, really, only as disgraceful as the sexual content in his work – by which token Craig Raine, Sebastian Faulks and innumerable other joylessly gentile writers can also be considered dirty old men.

Which does a disservice to dirty old men the world over, right? Cave only gets this shit because he has a beautiful moustache.

Anyway. What’s important here is that an important facet of Cave’s latter-day ‘disgracefulness’ is a casual misogyny that manifests, time and time again, in the phraseology he uses to address babes. And at least twice on the first Grinderman record, this means references to his ‘honey bee’. Harmless enough, until the context is thrown into the mix:

…She’s my honey bee and here she comes
Cancer rabies SARS
Hairy beards and hurtling stars
Won’t somebody touch me?
Won’t somebody touch me?
Honey bee lets fly to Mars
Buzzzzz buzzzz buzzzzz…

On second thoughts, maybe this song isn’t about a chick after all. But we’re too far in to worry about that. It being Bee Week, then, and what with my Silkworms column increasingly resembling a weekly celebration of Nick Cave, here be a Honey Bee Let’s Fly To Mars-inspired celebration of borderline-sexist slash reallyreallysexist approached to addressing women in poetry and music. Derek Walcott and his wandering hands would surely approve...

Louis XIV’s Finding Out True Love Is Blind

Pitchfork did such an unsurpassably good job of rinsing the first Louis XIV record (astonishingly, there was a second) penning it in the form of a conversation between singer Jason Hill and his doctor…

-Good morning, Mr. Hill.

-Doctor Bolend, what's going on man! It’s been too long, man.

-Long indeed, Mr. Hill.

-Almost as long as my dick!

-That’s nice, Mr. Hill. Looking at your file, I see it’s been three years since your last check-up. How have you been feeling?

-Better than ever man. I'm so healthy I can drink more than pregnant hookers in heat. I’m so ripped I can stick needles in my arms, then stick needles in my needles’ arms. I’ve fucked so many girls in the last five minutes that I’m gonna be orgasming straight through May. And don’t even get me started about how many girls I’ve fucked in the last five minutes.

…that I’m going to list some of the terms of feminine address in their biggest hit, Finding Out True Love Is Blind, and leave it at that:

‘Chocolate girl’
‘Your little Asian friend’

‘Carrot juice’
‘Your vanilla friend’
‘Miss little smart girl with your glasses and all your books’
‘Brown girl’

Und so weiter.

John Berryman’s Dream Song No. 4

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken paprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

‘You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry’s dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni. –Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

–Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast…The slob beside her     feasts … What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

–Mr Bones: there is.

The entire Mötley Crüe back-catalogue

The following are the lyrics to the Girls, Girls, Girls (1987) track All In The Name Of… I suspect the, turns out, criminally amoral Mötley Crüe could do and did do better than ‘honey bee’ but unfortunately I can’t bring myself to listen to their awful, awful songs:

She’s only fifteen
She’s the reason – the reason that I can't sleep
You say illegal
I say legal’s never been my scene
I try like hell but I'm out of control

All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll
For sex and sex I’d sell my soul

Pretty, pretty so innocent
She says you ain’t seen nothing yet
Brings me a dirty, dirty magazine
There she was for all the world to see
I try like hell but I’m out of control. All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll
For sex and sex I’d sell my soul

Says to me daddy
Can I have some candy
Wanna be your nasty
Anytime you want
You know you can have me

All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll.

The entire Charles Bukowski back-catalogue

Extract from The Most Beautiful Woman In Town from 1983’s The Most Beautiful Woman In Town & Other yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwn:

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not. And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men…

Lord Byron’s objectifications

As everybody knows, where literature was concerned, Byron was only in it for the snatch. She who Walks In Beauty, not to mention Lara and his Beautiful Quaker – that shit’s obvious. More interesting is the fact that when he’s talking about Newstead Abbey and The Vision Of Judgement, he’s almost certainly still thinking about the puss.

But all of these pale into insignificance when placed alongside the frankly extraordinary thing that is Too $hort’s Blow Job Betty. As one youtube commenter put it, ‘I love this dude. He’s the reason white women over 30 hate rap.’ Bukowski, you, sir, are a pussy compared to this guy (actually, LyricsFreak seems to suggest, shockingly, that the below is the work of five different hands…)

…Too $hort baby, I'm so hard
Pimpin' these hoes on the boulevard
But I'm not here to tell ya bout me
I got a little story bout a nasty freak
She's the kind of girl you think about in bed
Blowjob Betty givin' real good head
Bust a left nut, right nut in her jaw
Sperm on her cheeks is all ya saw
She could blow more head than a whale blows water
Blowjob Betty make your dick get harder
She's a one of a kind, a hell of a girl
A trip and a half around the world
Catch her gettin' busy, bitch wouldn't stop
She's the kind of girl that'll make your toes pop
Every time I used to see her, I would know what's up
Blowjob Betty better blow me up
I remember the day when I first met her
Bitch kinda loose so I knew I'd get her
Walked up to her said
"my name is $hort, just what
you've been lookin' for"
Pimp is my game, I do it the best
Hoe fuck with me, she don't get no rest
Well after that, I G'ed the freak
I used to stop by and fuck about twice a week
And from the very first time I went to her house
Walked in the door and stuck my dick in her mouth
$hort Dog'll get bitches anytime I wanna
Got a big dick and lay it right on her tonsils
Only stick it in about half way back
Cause if I put it all in, it bust straight through her neck…

The likes of the above examples, ladies and gentleman of the jury, testify to the fact that Colony Collapse Disorder constitutes the great ecological challenge of our time. A world without the honey bee would be a world without misogyny. To work, then!

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Things That Benedict Cumberbatch’s Face Looks Like – part four

Sincere thanks to Tash Hodgson for the following suggestion (and Kirk Gillard for the image):

Part four: the front of a bike