Gonzo publishing IV: On writing

Any attention-seeking approval whore will tell you that the greatest profession to stoke the ego is; writer. As soon as you have one book in print, you’ve made it, because if it sells a gazillion copies you can revel in your fame and wealth and, more importantly, really stick it to anyone you felt ever crossed you. Or even better, pretend not to be happy and want to be taken ‘seriously’, thereby driving anyone who every actually crossed you into a foaming peak of rage by having fame and wealth but not enjoying it while they have no fame, no wealth and are made miserable not just by your success but by your apparent ingratitude.

If your copy sells one to a dozen copies, (depending upon the size of your family), then you can develop a shell of bitterness that it would take a tactical nuke to crack and sit inside it, stewing in your own misery but knowing, though never actually telling anyone, that you will be hugely popular after you are dead. Then who’ll be laughing? Probably whoever handles your estate.

Anyone who has ever put pen to paper wants to be published. Now, you can be. If you can have photographs printed into hardback albums then presumably you can have text printed up too. It’s the ultimate form of vanity publishing, but there’s no moment when you have to face the fact that nobody is ever going to want to publish your seven volume history of the trans-Pennine cycling club because of ‘lack of interest’. (Fuck them, these are the books that make Britain great, with passages like ‘as he shifted down a gear, Chunky Stevenson didn’t see the sheep in front of him and swerved to late to avoid it. The sickening ‘bahhhhhhhh-thunk’ was the very herald of doom for Chunky. As I came upon the scene of blood, guts, derailer parts, torn cagoul, wool and 3 in 1, I knew this was going to be grim).

Why stop at photo albums? It’s time to take back the shelves of our bookstores. For instance, I fail to see how paying three quid for a little book is going to make me, in any way, shape or form, calm, unless it contains the addresses of all the doctors in my area who are relaxed about prescribing tranquilisers. So why not slip a ‘little book of serenity for the soul’ onto the shelves with helpful passages like ‘feeling stressed? Tried lager?’

Better still, target your audience. Inside the glossy, pink, sexy hardback cover of the ‘ultimate sex and the city companion’ are chapters like ‘why does Daisy (or whatever their f**king names are) have so many boyfriends? Well, it’s unlikely that she spends her weekends watching DVD box-sets and eating ice cream).

Best of all, what’s the one book you expect to see in hardback? That’s right, text books. Now, I’m a fairly easygoing bloke, but when I hear somebody expounding the myth of Creationism, I get a twitch above my left eye. This is followed by a stabbing pain, usually in the speaker’s throat but the chest will do if he’s tall and I can’t get the knife up above the shoulders in time. Chapter 1; ‘unicorns’, how they are real and how having people laugh at you in public makes you a better person.

The trick is, of course, to get somebody to pay you for your thoughts. This is insanely difficult, as so many people give their thoughts away for free, usually after two large gins. Even less people know how to structure their thoughts in such a way that, on the printed page they make a) sense and b) the reader have an emotional reaction. The people who can achieve this are called poets. The worthy poets try to put into words what seeing the sunlight reflected on the rippling lake water on a winter’s day while they suddenly realise that they always have and always will love their ex more than the lover currently holding their hand, feels like. The others work for Hallmark, go home at five and eat well. They can also rhyme 275 words with ‘birthday’.

Yet more Gonzo Publishing

Printing has always been the province of the professional, with the notable exception of ‘Readers’ Wives’ providing a platform for the amateur. Now though, mortals can see themselves in print without having to go to a vanity publisher or sprawl on a kitchen counter with their arse in the air while their boyfriend snaps off a few ugly beaver shots with a poleroid.

Companies convert your photographs into photograph albums for you.

Sometime between having your portrait painted by a grumpy Dutchman and being able to take pictures your telephone, people used cameras with a strip of film. This film was typically bought for a holiday and traditionally some of it was used before the camera was brought back home and put on a shelf somewhere and forgotten, only to be rediscovered again at Christmas or a birthday. The film was then used up and sent off to be developed and, two weeks later, you had 36 photographs recording anywhere from a few months to three years of family activity, a few shots on the beach, one or two totally black photographs (the result of trying to capture the magical effect of the Christmas tree seen through the after effects of a huge dinner and half a bottle of cooking sherry by not using the flash) and, if you were trying ‘to use up the film’, seven pictures of the dog.

You selected the best photographs, put them in the family album, put the album on the bookshelf and forgot about it. Traditionally, it was not seen again until you brought your fiancée home to meet your parents and your mother got it out, open the page of you, age six, about to go to casualty with a toy train stuck up your arse. Or naked on a rug as a baby if you’re into that sort of thing.

Today we can back up all our photographs and keep them all. The difficulty is how to display them and this usually means, depending on your class, using your expensive printer to produce a hard copy of your favourite shot or, if you live in a caravan, having a photograph blown up and printed onto a four foot square canvas. Two things to note here, tattoos rarely photograph well and, when enlarged, that hilarious shot of you and your best friends on a beach at Ibiza clearly shows a bloke in the background masturbating. Into your beach towel.

The alternative is to get a hardback album printed and bound for you and, I have to say, they look amazing on the adverts. The finished result is just like those coffee table books of photographs that people used to buy in the seventies and I would guess that, if you are that way inclined, seeing yourself in hardback glossy print must be quite a hoot, especially as you can put captions under the photographs.

Why stop at the family album and the coffee table though? If you can get a book of photographs then why not a book of pictures and text, like a children’s book…that you can then slip onto the shelves of the local Waterstone’s. then you can sit back and watch the fun as some outraged parent verbally assaults a baffled store manager because their tot has been found sobbing after picking up ‘Mr Bunny and Mr Fox’, with illustrations along the lines of H G Geiger meets an explosion in a vivisectionists. Or, fed up with the head librarian never stocking enough of your favourite author? Slip the children’s classic ‘Burn pikey-kid burn’ onto the shelves and apply for the position yourself once he’s sacked for ‘ordering’ it.

Why stop at the library. Want to impress your neighbours? Note if they have a photography book then reproduce it, making sure to insert, say, a carefully photoshopped picture of you hanging out with the Rolling Stones. Next visit, substitute your tome; ‘Hey, you have this, have you seen page 42, gosh, yes, that’s me. Sign it, well, sure.’ Extra points for using a photograph from the 70s, showing you exactly as you are now. You can tell if they have seen ‘The Shining’ by the degree of freak-out that occurs.

Gonzo Publishing Again

The best thing about making your own printed page is, of course that you write whatever you like, usually scurrilous and it looks, well, more real. Because whatever else the printed word might lack, it does not lack authority. If you came back to your car to find a hand-written note from a traffic warden informing you you had a ticket, you’d probably ignore it – handwriting has authority in only two circumstances, the first is when the message has been left in lipstick on the mirror in your bedroom and says something like ‘you are a crap shag. Have borrowed your car, hope you don’t mind, Trixie xxx’. The second is when the message is written in blood on the wall of the cabin in the woods you are staying in. In both cases justification, font and point size are not really relevant. In the latter case, let’s face it, not even the message is relevant, not even if it’s ‘enjoy your complimentary muffins’. You’re gone!

That’s why people buy newspapers. They are the voice of authority. Well, for people who can read they are, for people who can’t read, they are the source of partial nudity, celeb scoops (usually two scoops, out of a bikini top, on a beach in a fuzzy long lens shot (it’s hard to focus when you’re masturbating behind a gorse bush being scrutinised by curious goats) and footie news or, even better, speculation.

Increasingly, it’s speculation that populates the pages of papers. Or columnists. I don’t have a problem with traditional journalism, where some bloke, sometimes in a dirty mac, sometimes not, goes somewhere, finds out stuff and writes it up in a concise and amusing way. I do have a problem when they rely on unnamed ‘sources’ or simply on the sauce for inspiration. It’s opening up a twenty page paper and finding ten pages of ‘comment and analysis’ that shocks the hell out of me.

Comment and analysis is, I think, a slang term for bigotry and opinion. Read the pages long enough and the same people offer the same opinions – but about completely different subjects. It’s truly astonishing, from the situation in the middle east to the way that the economy is affecting sales of garden gnomes, these people will link to their pet subjects, usually something about their forthright views on immigration, which, being about as palatable as a turd sandwich (on brown) leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth.

The worst thing is that these people have been paid for their sub-standard annoyance of a contribution. By you. Suckah!

Because no matter how insightful, how erudite and how informed any blog might be, whether it be on politics, gardening or cooking, it’s free and so, by today’s twisted value system, it doesn’t carry as much authority as a newspaper. This view might be changing slowly, but it’s up against some tough challenges, namely, that if you have paid for something, you are reluctant to admit that you could have got better for free elsewhere (prostitutes are the exception that proves the rule, if you want to have crap sex with somebody who is bored by the whole process, get married).

Newspapers mine blogs, reprinting swaths of them, but blogs rarely reprint whole sections of newspapers. This is because when a blogger makes it to print it’s the literary equivalent of being allowed to sit at the adults table (with the shock of seeing your work edited roughly the same as the shock experienced by children when they realise how dull adult conversation is, that you are expected to eat your peas rather than demonstrate your ‘nose cannon’ with them and that crayoning on linen tablecloths is a great way to earn a slap if you are lucky, or a steak-knife through the back of the hand if you’re unlucky enough to be sitting next to the great-grandmother who brought that tablecloth over from the old county).

Journalists and especially columnists are not happy to see their work appear in blogs. This is not just because of copyright, but because such blog entries often start ’72 fundamental errors in this piece of crap’.

Gonzo publishing

People have known, pretty much ever since there were people rather than a group of hairy sorts using bones as spoons, about the power of the printed word. Primitive man knew all about making the word material. That’s why when Lug, Ogg and Dud were scratching and grunting about what a great elk hunt they were in for, Gug was busy drawing a successful hunt on the cave wall. If only Gug had used his imagination and painted a machine-gun, he could have really saved some effort then the whole tribe could have hunkered down for a winter of getting fat and watching the firelight flicker on the cave walls or, as we call it today, ITV.

So the printed word has power. For instance, you can spout crap all evening in the pub and nobody will pay any attention to you, but if you start handing out leaflets in the high street outlining your manifesto to burn down every Tesco in Britain, you’ll soon find yourself in a small room with no natural light being interviewed by a man with little hair and less humour who may, or may not, stamp on your dangly bits until you cough up your spleen or the names of your co-conspiritors, depending on how quickly you can make up some realistic sounding names.

Printing has evolved of course, but not really all that much and not nearly as much as, say, meat flavoured snacks. In printing, we moved from woodcuts to block printing to hot metal to today’s offset litho or whatever the hell it is – it could actually be done by magic for all I know, it makes about as much sense. How do the words get from the screen to the printed page? Toner cartridge maybe…but if somebody told me that toner is the ground up bones of fairies, I’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise.

(In the same timespan meat flavoured snacks have moved from small cubes of gristle on a platter to meat on a stick, cooked meat on a stick, meat in pastry, meat in cardboard wrapping, meat in Styrofoam containers that will still be landfill when the sun goes out, meat in cardboard wrapping again and, finally, meat flavoured crisps – an express way to get all the meat flavour you need without all that tedious having to digest protein or mop grease off your shirt. Compared to printing, meat snack technology is practically at the stage where the next step is opening a meat snack shop on Jupiter, or the past).

More impressive than the revolution in printing that has happened over the last few hundred years in the real world is the revolution in printing that has happened in the last two decades in boys’ bedrooms. It used to be that if you wanted to do printing, proper printing that looked real and everything, you used a John Bull printing set.

This incredibly fiddly process left you with a few lines of purple print and the nagging sense that whatever printer’s were paid, they earned it. Basically you had tiny rubber blocks with reverse letters on them, which you arranged on a wooden block, then pressed to a purple ink pad, which you then pressed to the paper and, tad dah, five lines of whatever juvenile crap you had come up with, unadulterated by the constrains of your shocking handwriting.

There were several shortcomings with the printing set. The first was the lack of fonts and point sizes. For any junior tabloid editor this was a real set-back, as it meant you were unable to get your screaming head lines (‘The Green Lane Gang Smell!!!’) into a suitably eye-catching front page splash. It’s also a shame that society missed out on a chance to identify future tabloid editors in their juvenile stage where, through gentle re-education and, failing that, depositing down a disused mine shaft, we could have been spared the damage done to the world when they reached their more destructive adult stage (if that ever truly happens).

Why the ink was purple I have no idea. Possibly to ensure that whatever was produced was not mistaken for, say, ‘The Times’.