We Need To Talk About China

Ah, China. And Chinese economics... I have been obsessed with China, and in particular its uniquely lunatic economy, for the past few years. Why? Because Chinese economic policy has been the biggest elephant in the global economic livingroom since 1989, lumbering around breaking things while the West says "Elephant? I don't see any elephant. Owch, my foot."

A charming and self-explanatory graph, courtesy of The Daily Reckoning, Australia

I’ve come up with, and abandoned, half a dozen plots for satirical stories about the Chinese economy, I’ve written draft after draft of a satirical BBC radio play about the Chinese economy, I’ve read and researched obsessively on the subject. And, every year or so, for the past five years, I have opened up a new file in Scrivener, and started, with furious energy, to write an over-long and over-complicated blog post about China, and how its mysteriously placid economic surface masks a series of catastrophic Communist Party decisions, over the past thirty years, which will lead at some point to China’s implosion, economically and socially… Each time, the post becomes book-length, and I abandon it… Well, here we go again.

Here’s my take on China, boiled down.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; democratic protests swept China; and the Party panicked. They murdered unarmed protesters across the country (including the students in Tiananmen Square), arrested four million people across the country in the following weeks, and then tried to pretend nothing had happened.

Party leaders were determined that China would not collapse like Soviet Russia. So they abandoned Soviet-style economics, and built a gigantic new national financial system, modelled loosely on the Western financial system; but with the state performing every function. As Carl E. Walter and Fraser J. T. Howie put it (in their excellent book Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise), “The state is involved at every stage of the market as the regulator, the policymaker, the investor, the parent company, the listed company, the broker, the bank and the banker.”

And the state decided that 8% economic growth was the target; and the entire economy was configured to hit this target… Well, if you only look at the GDP figures, the Party succeeded. Western free-market economies go up and down like yo-yos, but China has not had a recession since 1976. Even more ridiculous, it's not had so much as a single year of low growth since 1990.

But those reassuring figures mask the roaring balls-up the Communist Party has made of the real economy, particularly in the past decade. Pre-2005, although growth was horribly lop-sided and manipulated, much of it was at least real: the cities that needed connecting were being connected by road and rail; ports and airports were being built in places that needed them; financial reforms were being pushed through; etc, etc.

In 2005, the financial reform program ended, when the leading reformers were ousted (like Zhu Rongji) or died (Vice Premier Huang Ju)– China’s GDP growth figures have been, increasingly, bullshit, driven by terrible lending by the state banks to state industries, massive malinvestment in ever-more-useless infrastructure, and a huge property bubble that has built entire cities and airports in the wrong places.

China’s banks have gone bust once every decade since the seventies, but each time the government managed to recapitalise them, or roll over the bad loans, without writing down the debts. It can’t write them down, because it owes itself the money; to cut the value of the non-performing loans is to say the state can’t pay its debts. It’s trapped. Every bank collapse is a sovereign debt default: and so there can be no bank collapses. But at this point, in my opinion, they’ve finally run out of road. Total debt in China has exploded to unprecedented levels in the past five years.

China, now, is essentially a multi-trillion dollar Lehman Brothers, circa 2007, but with a billion employees. It looks OK, but it is totally hollow; it’s massively leveraged, it’s out of capital, a shit-ton of the assets on its books are in fact worth nothing, and people are starting to believe it’s not good for its promises.

And so China isn’t going to collapse like Soviet Russia; it’s going to collapse like Lehman Brothers.

A giant, weird, slow-motion Lehmans, because it owes the money to itself. So, it will take some time for the collapse to take place. It can print money, roll over debt, do all the things it’s been doing for decades. But, in propping up the fake economy of 8% growth forever, they’ve broken the real economy.

When China finally gets its recession, it's going to be so godawful that it will almost certainly destroy the legitimacy of the Communist Party, which, after 70 years in power, is essentially an incompetent, wildly corrupt, third-generation mafia. Sure, there are some good people in there, but the system itself is totally corrupt, and corrupting, with no mechanism to reform it; and all the alternatives to the Communist Party have been annihilated. Plus, the concentration of power, wealth and influence at the top of the Party has made the leadership of China essentially hereditary, with all the incompetence that entails. (For western examples, think King George III and IV of England, or Presidents George W. Bush I and II, of the former colonies.)

OK, a prediction isn’t a prediction if it isn’t specific. A vague “bad things will happen… somewhere… sometime…” doesn’t count. So here goes.

• The recession will come within the next three years, and will be extremely deep: the Chinese economy will shrink, for the first time in nearly 40 years (and that’ll feel horrendous, from 8% growth to negative growth).
• Many State Owned Enterprises will go bust; the Chinese banking system will collapse; the enormous shadow banking system will collapse; the Chinese stock market will collapse (well, that’s been happening while I wrote and edited this, over the past week or two, so no credit for that prediction).
• How this collapse of the financial system plays out is hard to predict, as it’s all the Chinese state owing itself money, and printing money to pay itself. But that pressure should break the renminbi, which is a joke currency anyway. And pretending to fix the banks won’t work, if nobody believes in them as a safe place to store assets any more.
• In the real world there will be massive unemployment across China (over 15% officially but far more in reality).
• Social unrest will get out of control, with huge street protests and riots in the cities and in the countryside; uncontrolled population movement (something the Party has always feared and tried to control through the hukou residency permit system, which will break down); and anger expressed through violence against anything associated with the Party. (You’ll see a lot of police stations on fire.)
• I believe the Party will lose legitimacy; will lose control of the country; and that, within the next decade, China will break up: Neither Tibet nor the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighur territories in Western China can be held without a functioning Party and Army to enforce their occupation.

That’ll do for now.

So why didn't I finish writing and editing all my previous China blog posts, and put them up? Well, the story was so big, and I kept trying to say everything in a single post. But you can't. (And there was always fresh information, new knowledge.) And it was always so much easier to just post a link, or make a sarcastic remark, on Twitter. Sigh. Twitter has ruined my ability to blog. And, five years ago, I felt that if I said "China will collapse", it was probably too soon. I figured China's leadership would be able put it off for another few years.

But now I don't think they can put it off much longer. They will try; but this time I think it's over. I suspect the shadow banking system has already begun to collapse (along with the housing market and the stock market), and with it the Party leadership's control over events.

Anyway, my greatest regret, as a (former) blogger, is in not posting my thoughts about China. (Every few weeks, for about three or four years now, I’ve woken in the night groaning, why didn’t I blog about China six months ago?) So, over the next few months, I'm going to try and put down a few years' worth of thoughts. It's too late for me to get credit for the prediction, but it's not too late to be part of the conversation. And we're going to be talking a lot about China over the next 5 years.

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

To celebrate the paperback release this week of Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008, I've reprinted my Irish Times review of the 2012 hardback, below. (That original review has now vanished into the Irish Times archive, behind the paywall.) For those too busy to read the whole review: basically,Extreme Metaphors was my book of the year. I read it with delight, frequently chortling. An extraordinary alternate history of the 20th century, packed with prescient ideas which help explain the 21st.

- Julian

A photo of my copy of Extreme Metaphors, taken five minutes ago. The image links to more information, from the website of one of the editors, Simon Sellars.

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara

Fourth Estate

503pp, price £stg25

J.G. Ballard might be the greatest English writer of the 20th century. He was certainly, for much of the second half of that century, the least understood, and most misread, when he was read at all. In 1970, when Nelson Doubleday Jr, a senior executive at Ballard’s American publishing house, finally got round to reading a finished copy of The Atrocity Exhibition, he was so horrified he ordered all copies pulped. In the UK, the reader’s report for Ballard’s 1972 novel Crash famously said “This writer is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

But live long enough, and respectability eventually covers you, like jungle vegetation claiming a wartime runway. In 1984, his most nakedly autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Martin Amis says on the back of this handsome hardback collection of interviews, “Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century.” Will Self concurs; “Ballard issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipated.”

Ballard most certainly did. The chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition which so disgusted Ballard's own publisher was titled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan”. In it, Ballard portrayed the former Hollywood actor, who’d co-starred with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, as President of the United States. It would be over a decade before reality caught up with Ballard’s imagination.

Indeed, some of the interviews here are almost comically prescient; Ballard predicted Facebook before the internet even existed. In 1979, dismissing the BBC and ITV news as “that irrelevant mixture of information about a largely fictional external world”, he describes a future in which we video everything, and

“…the real news of course will be a computer-selected and computer-edited version of the day’s rushes. ‘My God, there’s Jenny having her first ice cream!’ or ‘There’s Candy coming home from school with her new friend.’ Now all that may seem madly mundane, but, as I said, it will be the real news of the day, and how it affects every individual.” (And yes, he goes on to predict Youporn…)

He predicts the future; but he also questions the present. And many of the questions he raises here have not yet been answered. The real issue, behind all the fake issues, in this year's American election [2012], was summed up succinctly by Ballard in 1984, talking to Thomas Frick:

“Marxism is a social philosophy for the poor, and what we need badly is a social philosophy for the rich.”

As with a number of the more interesting American SF writers of his era (Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek), Ballard became a science fiction writer by default. The SF market was the only available outlet for fiction this odd. But he is not a science fiction writer. He is not, indeed, a writer, in the normal sense of the term. Ballard is a visual artist. He makes the point again and again here; the greatest influences on his works are not other literary works; they are the paintings of the surrealists. As he said in an interview with James Goddard and David Pringle in 1975,“They’re all paintings, really, my novels and stories.”

And it is true. You read his spare, functional prose, and the most astonishing images erect themselves in your mind. The beauty of the sentence itself didn’t interest him. (This makes him hard to quote: reading Ballard, you drift into a dreamstate which can’t be evoked in a couple of lines.) Certainly he set much of his work in the future. But there isn't a space ship to be found. (Well, OK, one, in an early story.) As mainstream SF explored outer space, J.G. Ballard explored what he came to call inner space. He wasn't similar to SF writers like Heinlein and Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, he was their opposite, a point he makes in an interview from 1975:

“You can’t have a Space Age until you’ve got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I’ve often argued the point when I’ve met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I’m certain you can’t have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded.”

I get the feeling J.G. Ballard passed Ireland by. He was seldom piled high on the front tables in Easons. Seen, perhaps, as too English for our tastes? But of course, he wasn’t English at all. His sensibility was formed in Shanghai, where he was born to English parents in 1930; and in particular in the vast civilian internment camp of Lunghua, where he was interned by the Japanese (at the age of 11), along with his family. In this book he frequently talks of never getting used to the England he first encountered aged 16, in 1946, as a traumatised child of the tropics.

Exiled from Shanghai, an alien in England, Ballard nonetheless had a spiritual home. No matter where his books were ostensibly set, Ballard always wrote about America; not as a place, but as a state of mind. America as a condition. America as a psychological disorder… He loved America. Though Crash is set in England, on the motorways connecting his quiet home in Shepperton to London, the cars in Crash are American cars. His Shanghai childhood — in an Americanized Asia — was a century ahead of its time. He grew up in the future. As a result, these interviews have aged well. It helps that Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited this 500 page book with such love, intelligence, and deep knowledge of the material and its context. Extreme Metaphors presents, in chronological order, 44 interviews from the many hundreds he gave. (The editors estimate the total wordage of the novels as 1,100,000; short stories, 500,000 words; non-fiction, 300,000… and interviews, 650,000.) The interviews they’ve chosen have a very low fluff content. Many of the best originally appeared in long-vanished, never-digitised, photocopied fanzines, and are genuine, deeply engaged and engaging conversations about important subjects. Nobody is trying to sell you anything (it’s often impossible to tell what book Ballard is supposed to be promoting).

The wide range of interviewers adds to the pleasure of the book. Ballard attracted intense, usually male, interviewers, who had a deep engagement with his work. There is a pleasantly kaleidoscopic effect, as each sees Ballard through the lens of their obsession. Fellow novelists Toby Litt, Will Self and Hari Kunzru take a literary approach. John Gray is philosophical. The Russian Zinovy Zinik gets Ballard to talk about Soviet utopias and dystopias. With Iain Sinclair, Ballard discusses the design of 1970s multi-story carparks in Watford. (Ballard; “They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”)

And he is very open. When Joan Bakewell says of Crash, “Now, this is a deeply disturbing book. Were you very disturbed when you wrote it?” he replies “I think I was. I think in a way the novel is the record of a sort of mental crash that I had in the mid-sixties after the death of my wife…”

Ah, death. Yes, it’s everywhere in his work. Ballard’s fiction is largely set in the dead spaces of the modern world. Underpasses, flyovers; abandoned and disintegrating runways; nuclear test sites; blockhouses; drained swimmingpools. The tide of humanity has gone out. What is left is returning to the natural world. The atmosphere is that of Max Ernst’s Europe After The Rain. The organic and the inorganic are inextricably linked. Things grow, and things crumble. The work of man is absorbed by the jungle.

It’s hard, reading this book, not to think of contemporary, Americanised Ireland, with its motorways and drive-thru McDonalds. Of Dublin, with its low corporate tax rate, reckless financial zone, and Euro-HQs of American corporations; with its expat communities of British, German and US workers in gated dockside settlements, surrounded by grinding native poverty; an open city, in a state too weak to defend itself. Dublin was, for a decade there, the closest thing Europe had to the booming, buckaneering Shanghai of the 1930s.

Now, in neglected Dublin back gardens, the outdoor hot tubs fill with dead leaves. Beyond the M50, the ghost estates are reclaimed by the whitethorn bushes. Ireland has become a Ballardian landscape. Given the extraordinary relevance of his work to Ireland’s psychological condition, it might be time for more Irish people to start reading J.G. Ballard. And this lovingly curated book of interviews is a fine place to start.

I will be very surprised if any novel this year gives me as much pleasure as this book. And I can guarantee (now that Ballard is dead) that no novel will contain so many provocative, intriguing, and visionary ideas.

Julian Gough is an Irish writer, living in Berlin, whose work was shortlisted this year for both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the BBC International Short Story Award. His latest novel, Jude in London, is out now in paperback from Old Street Publishing.

ENDS.

An old scratchy photo of Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

I've been so FLIPPING busy that my blog has been left unfed since October. (Also, I will admit, the crack cocaine of tweeting has weaned me off the long opium dream of blog posting.)

But my old friend Suzie Shorten just sent me this photo, so feck it, I'll slap it up for your amusement.

Major flashback... Galway, 1997... Town Hall Theatre bar. Left to right: Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Suzie (who's at MCD now), future president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, and me (with blond hair).

Some cowboys, in the Wild West, 1997: Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

By golly, a night out in Galway was a NIGHT OUT in those days. Malcolm had finished his talk, and was about to be taken away by the Arts Festival organisers, to the respectable and venerable festival club in the Warwick, in Salthill. They'd almost got him safely into the taxi when he escaped from his minders, trotted up to me and my beloved (we were sheltering for a last few minutes in the theatre doorway from the inevitable Galway rain) and, under the entirely mistaken impression that we knew where the cool clubs were, asked us where he should go. (I was a milk-drinking, hot-water-bottle-using homeboy who went out about once every three years, and my beloved was worse, but he wasn't to know that. It was the hair, man. Blondes DO have more fun.)

I had heard of an illegal wine bar, in a cellar under a solicitors on Abbeygate Street - passwords! secret knocks! - but I'd never tried to get in. It turned out that "er, yeah, that's Malcolm McLaren" was a secret password. And so Malcolm held court, enthroned in a very comfortable old leather armchair, in the Galway underworld, till pretty close to dawn. Stories, theories, stern lectures, good advice (which I never took), even better anecdotes, and his complicated, multiple, silly, brilliant future plans. (He was most excited by his Chinese, satirical/situationist, pop group, The Rice Girls... I don't think he ever did get a record company to fund that one...) A highly entertaining man. (Oh, if any tabloid journalists are reading this; the future president retired early - long before the illegal wine bar - don't worry.)

For a more detailed account of the night... er, email me.

Twitter & Tweets: Who Can Read What (And How And Why To Use The Dot).

I started to use the mighty "." on Twitter today, and immediately got into about 50 confused conversations about it, most of which started "What's with the . thing?" Trying to tweet 50 different bitesized answers did not lessen the confusion, so I thought I'd explain here what I'm doing (or what I think I am doing).

May this post give you the strength to make the dot a good thing, the self-restraint to avoid making it a bad thing, and the wisdom to tell the difference.

See? Many of humanity's problems, incredible as it seems, predate Twitter. (Explosm sell this as a T-shirt! Site seems down, so I've linked to info on the Cyanide & Happiness guys.) 

SOME BACKGROUND ON HOW USERS DRIVE TWITTER'S EVOLUTION

A lot of people, especially new users, are not entirely sure how Twitter works, or who can read what, when and how. This is unsurprising: Because Twitter has evolved so fast, features that didn't even exist a year ago are at the heart of the Twitter conversation now. Users are constantly finding new implications of those new features, and creatively using (& misusing) them, in turn. And those new, user-invented features and workarounds that are popular and useful get turned into new, official features: When I started using Twitter only a few months ago, for example, retweets had to be done by hand, and there was no agreed syntax ("Retweet", "(RT)", "RT:", "Via" and others were all in use.) ...Twitter only installed an official button for retweeting in September this year. (We will get to the meat of the matter after you jump the shark. With its black dot for an eye.)

A lovely blue shark 

SO WHO CAN READ WHAT?

Before we talk about the mighty dot, we need to be clear on how tweets work. As things stand today (and this wasn't true last year, and may not be true next year), this is who can read what. Let's say I send a nice ordinary tweet, like "I am eating the most amazing pickled shark testicles." That tweet
will appear in the stream of everyone who follows me. It also appears in my own stream (where I can read all the incoming tweets from those I follow), and on my own page (where all my tweets are stacked up one after the other.)

But if I reply directly to someone else's tweet, like this: "@sharklover Sorry, I forgot you were a vegetarian. And married to a shark. Whoops." ...then that reply will only appear in the streams of the people who follow BOTH me (@juliangough) and her (@sharklover). Twitter don't make this very clear, and it isn't intuitively obvious, so a huge number of Twitter users assume that everyone who follows them can read all their replies. Not so. However, that last tweet is defined by Twitter as a reply simply because it STARTS with a name, @sharklover. If I hand-crafted a reply like this: "Well listen, @sharklover, obviously I wouldn't have eaten his testicles if I'd known he was your husband" ... then, because it doesn't start with a name, Twitter will treat it as a regular ordinary tweet, and all my followers can see it in their stream, whether they follow @sharklover or not.

WHICH IS WHERE THE DOT COMES IN...

Which is, at last, where the dot comes in. Hitting reply is handy: there's the person's name, the cursor is blinking after it, all you have to do is type the message and send. Building your tweet either side of the other person's name, however, just so your reply will be visible to all your followers, is not handy, and can sound really awkward, like a tweeted, 140-character version of stilted Victorian dialogue: "So, @moriarty, we meet again, in the shadow of the Reichenbach Falls..."

Of course, most replies are not of general interest and the system, by hiding them from most of your followers, works fine. ("@mum I left @dad drunk in the coal shed.") But sometimes a reply would be of interest to many, or all, of your followers (not just those who follow you and the person you are replying to). For example, I sometimes get asked interesting questions about my novels, or about my old band: I know that a good chunk of my followers are fans who would appreciate seeing my reply. And sometimes you just want to open up the conversation with a reply, and give others a chance to join in. And sometimes you want to start a big fight.

But how do you quickly and easily convert the reply into an open message? You can't just type a letter, or letters, directly in front of the name with no space, like this: a@sharklover. That stops it from being treated as a reply by Twitter, sure, but any letters touching the front of the "@" mess up the name, stop it from being searchable, prevent it from appearing in the @replies box of the person you sent it to, and mean it is no longer hyperlinked (that is, you can't click on it and go to their page). So, what, add a letter and a space? A quick abbreviated explanation? It starts to get messy, and distracting. And eat up scarce characters.

But you CAN type non-letters, such as punctuation marks, directly in front of a name, without messing it up and breaking it as a link and all that bad stuff. And the simplest, smallest, least annoying punctuation mark is the full stop. This guy, inside the quotes: "."

So if I send this: ".@sharklover I've always loved you, I've had fins surgically attached also intromittant organs, feels weird having a double penis, marry me", now everybody who follows me can read it. Which may or may not be a good thing, but it's a nice option to have.

A WORD OF CAUTION

The dot allows a personal conversation to be overheard by many others, so use it sparingly. Think - is this private remark really going to interest many of my other friends? If not, don't dot. Otherwise you run the risk of being the person at the bar shouting loudly at their friend, in the vain hope of impressing the whole pub. Don't beat yourself up if you overuse it at the start and annoy a few friends. It is natural to get a bit carried away at first (he said, after an entire day's experience). I certainly did. But I had calmed down by teatime, and so should you. A cup of camomile should do it.

WHO INVENTED IT?

I've no idea, but I'd love if you could tell me. I first noticed guys like @glinner using the dot recently, I had no idea what it was, and (too shy to ask) worked out what it meant by context. I have noticed that comedians and scriptwriters are prone to use it. (The dot is particularly useful if you are replying to a friend with a cracker of a joke and don't want it wasted.) It just seems to have spontaneously evolved, because it was needed, and may have many mothers and fathers.

A FINAL THOUGHT ON DMs (DIRECT MESSAGES)

Oh yeah, while we are at it: there is one other type of tweet. DMs (direct messages) can only be sent to people who are following you, and can only be read by you-the-sender, and the individual you sent it to. But bear in mind, if YOU aren't following THEM, they can't DM you back, which can lead to an embarrassingly public tweet like this: "Sure thing @juliangough I'll DM you an answer to your DM requesting the name of my drug dealer as soon as you follow me." So it's probably best to follow people BEFORE you DM (direct message) them.

Also bear in mind that nothing in human cultural history has grown as fast as Twitter, and that this is just a snapshot of the evolving situation in late 2009. It will all change, change utterly, and within a few months this post will seem as quaint as advice on the kind of red flag your servant should be carrying as he walks sixty yards ahead of your self-propelled mechanical vehicle.

THE PREHISTORY OF TWITTER

For those interested in the prehistory of Twitter, and how such arcane events as the great #fixreplies revolt of May 2009 shaped the current Twitter universe, here's a couple of links:

The Evolution of Retweeting. This article from August 2009 (only two months ago as I write!) gives a flavour of how users drive the development of Twitter, and of how tentative and confused the developers can feel in the face of such pressure from below. The retweet option they initially planned to build is nothing like the one that they eventually delivered.

The Great #fixreplies Revolt of May 2009. This battle reshaped the modern @replies. A bit like the slaves' rebellion in Spartacus, the revolt failed but left an enduring legacy, and scared the pants off the Emperor (ie this is when the chaps who set up Twitter first realized they were not in fact in total control of it).

The Invention of @replies and @mentions. Back in November 2008, when the world was young, @replies were formally adopted by Twitter. This Twitter blog post now feels like the Magna Carta.

Throw in comments, advice, argument below, or attack me frenziedly on Twitter itself (@juliangough). Feel free to link to, copy, or pass this onto friends if you think it's helpful. And be nice to each other out there. Oh, it's all fun and games in the Twitter playground till somebody loses an eye.

Meanwhile, to reward you for reading so much stuff about such a small thing, here's a real dot to play with. Focus on it. Now lean forwards, and backwards. Feel the power of the mighty dot! (This probably won't work for you, Momus, or any other visitors with one eye.)

Feel its power

Must We Fling This Filth At Our Irish Indie Pop Kids?

I am in Tipperary, for reasons mysterious. And yes, that means I am typing on a computer older than time. I strike a key; the computer begins to think about perhaps carrying out an action; I go off and make coffee, play a game of chess, solve a major global problem, write my memoirs in longhand, and return to the computer; it carries out the action; I realise I had pressed the wrong key; and so the long day passes.

So no complicated blogging.

But, seeing as we were talking about Toasted Heretic (about a week ago)... I was interested to see that an act of wanton vandalism by, er, me, has been chosen as one of the Top Twenty Moments in The History of Irish Indie Music by Hot Press magazine.

Hmmm... I may have photos from back then... It would take me about six hours to put up a photo here, but I might when I get back to Berlin...

Meanwhile, all you pop kids (well, the Irish ones) - Hot Press are asking what would you nominate as your top Irish Indie Moment. Throw in your fivepence worth in the comments section here. And paste a copy down below, I'd be interested. My top Irish indie moment (leaving aside Toasted Heretic) was probably Cathal Coughlan-related. Personally - seeing him play an astounding lunchtime set with Fatima Mansions in a slightly dodgy club New York, and then getting trapped there for half an hour afterwards, as the cops fought a gunbattle with some drug dealers a little further down the street. (And this was lunchtime, imagine what that street was like at 3am...) Must have been 1990.

A more objective top Irish indie moment (ie one I didn't see myself), has to be Cathal Coughlan buggering himself onstage with a plastic Virgin Mary holy water dispenser in front of 50,000 very angry Italians, when he supported U2 in Milan.

I could write a small essay about the significance of that moment, but I am very tired.

They Didn't Teach Music In My School

Speaking of Toasted Heretic has reminded me of a small but annoying itch I'd been meaning to scratch. Here goes.

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has finally been published in Ireland. It is 2,000 pages long. It tells us that the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland (which ran most Irish schools until very recently, including the one I attended, the Christian Brothers, Nenagh), systematically sexually and physically abused the children in its care, particularly the boys. In particular the "industrial schools" run by the religious orders were tiny gulags. I have been reading, with mild annoyance, responses to this. John Banville's, in the New York Times, is typical:

"Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

Hmmm. "Everyone knew, but no one said." Below are the lyrics of a Toasted Heretic song, released in Ireland (on vinyl and cassette) as part of the Smug EP in 1990 (well within Banville's definition of that "closed state"). The song is called "They Didn't Teach Music in My School". Its real title is, of course (as it should be in any good pop song), the key line of the chorus, "Sliding Up Seamus". However, we foolishly believed that it was a good song, that it was - in as much as a pop song can be - an important song, and that the national broadcaster RTÉ might actually play it, so we made life easier for them by giving it a title they could actually read out on air. They, of course, didn't play it.

They Didn't Teach Music In My School.

"When your calls go uncollected and the neighbours have electrified the fence

Then will you start thinking, will it sink in, will you exercise some sense?

Everybody hates you, thinks it's great you got the flu, do you know why?

It's because you're such a shite we'll laugh all night with sheer delight the day you die

Your hand inside your habit, you would grab it and emit a gasping noise

As you walked in your black cassock past the showers and slapped the buttocks of the boys

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're inside

For sliding up Seamus

In our religion classes you would glare through black-rimmed glasses down the back

And summon up the sinner who'd regurgitated dinner, to be smacked

Vomiting in terror was a tactical error, he'd find

As you lowered his trews and began to bruise his behind

Picture our joy when you were caught inside a boy behind the bike shed

Oh summer holidays forever, and much better weather, when you're dead.

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're still inside

For sliding up Seamus..."

Of course, pop culture never gets much credit for saying anything of any importance, though it often speaks truth well ahead of high culture. John Banville, who is an excellent writer (though of the kind of novel I don't like), and by all accounts a very nice, decent man, appears to be speaking for Ireland when he tells the readers of the New York Times "Everyone knew, but no one said." "What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours." "We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

Well, it's not MY bleedin' shame, mate. "Sliding Up Seamus" was being played live in towns across Ireland, and being cheered to the rafters by pupils and ex-pupils of the Christian Brothers, twenty years ago, before it was even recorded. And my friends and I officially released our report, on vinyl and cassette, 19 years before the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released its report.

And, of course, being a disposable piece of pop, existing only in analogue recordings on vinyl and cassette, on an indie label,  before the internet, it has vanished almost entirely now. I don't even have a copy myself. But just to prove it existed, here is a rotten recording, with terrible sound, of a live performance of "They Didn't Teach Music In My School" - which we may as well officially rename "Sliding Up Seamus", now that it doesn't matter any more - in Róisín Dubh, Galway, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour Tour.

(The actual vinyl version was unusually well recorded, for a Toasted Heretic song, and sounded darn good. Renouncing our 4-track Tascam 244 for the first time, we recorded the Smug EP on 16-track in West One, with the great Pat Neary engineering.)

A final point: The song, rather optimistically, places the chap in the black cassock behind bars. In that, "Sliding Up Seamus" was less a description of the Irish present in the late 1980s, when it was written, and more a projection of a possible future, a wish-fulfillment exercise written to cheer up some friends of mine, who had suffered under the regime, and give them a laugh. No priests or Christian Brothers were getting jail sentences back when that song was written. But it is slightly sad to be reading this on Wikipedia, twenty years later:

"The report itself cannot be used for criminal proceedings (in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission to prevent its members from being named in the report) and victims say they feel "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions,^[18] and "because of that this inquiry is deeply flawed, it's incomplete and many might call it a whitewash."^[17]"

American Stars 'n' Bars

If you've read Jude: Level 1, you'll know I'm highly entertained by the glorious free-market energy of the US prison system. (The total number of people in prison, on parole, and on probation, in the US at the end of 2007 was 7.2 million - damn near twice the population of Ireland - so that's a lot of entertainment.)

But a magnificent new twist has emerged, which even I hadn't thought of. Over in Pennsylvania, people eventually started to wonder why the local judge was sentencing teenagers to serious time for crimes like putting up a spoof Myspace page about their assistant headmaster (a page marked "this is a joke"). As the New York Times reports..

"The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled."

Brilliant... Sigh. I am simply too innocent to be a real satirist. It never occurred to me to formally employ the judges.... Anyway - and skip this if you've read it before - while I'm at it I thought I might as well paste in a big chunk of Jude: Level 1 at this point, for the amusement of new readers. (I'm hardly going to sue myself for copyright infringement.)

In this bit, Jude has lost his voice, got a crick in his neck, is stuck in a wheelchair, and has been mistaken for Professor Steven Hawking. Barney O'Reilly FitzPatrick McGee, the Irish-American CEO of the great American communications company, Westcom,  is showing him around a huge, secret, underground unit in their Galway plant...

From Jude: Level 1...

    “You’ve noticed they’re mostly Black, huh?” said Barney.

    I looked closer, and saw that most of the faces around me were indeed unusually deeply tanned for an underground Irish workforce in mid-winter.

Barney nodded. “Might be the last generation of authentic, home-grown Blacks to work for Westcom, and I’ll tell you why…” He looked about the great space, and a drop of moisture swelled in the corner of each eye.

    I settled back in my chair. I liked a story.

    He blew his nose, and cleared his throat. “Back when old man Fitzpatrick grew tobacco, the procuring of labour was an arduous, expensive, time-consuming business. Black men had to be sourced and purchased from unscrupulous Arab middlemen and imported by ship from West Africa. Spoilage rates were as high as 50%. Oh, times were tough for old man Fitzpatrick. Sure, eventually we had sufficient spare capacity to provide a breeding stock, and we were self-sufficient in labour. But then the cost of raising our African workers fell entirely on our family, a manifestly unfair situation. Often we’d get a good crop of sturdy young Blacks raised up to five or six years of age, near enough ready to do productive work and repay our investment: and they would all sicken and die in the sheds, and we had all the weary work to do all over again. The situation was intolerable, it was against natural justice: and so we campaigned for the abolition of slavery.”

I nodded my approval of this virtuous campaign.

“Came the glorious day, and we could kick them all out and they could rear their own brats on their own time, and their own dime. We rehired them, as needed, when they had matured. This improved profitability enormously. Productivity shot up too, for now the workers no longer had a cushy berth for life. The excess money saved, we invested in mining and smelting the iron ore in the hills too steep for cultivation. But, for that, a steady supply of strong male labour was required. We couldn’t be willy-nilly hiring by ones and twos. And so we contracted with the local prisons to supply our needs. They sourced the male labour as required. A vagrancy sweep, or a crackdown on gambling would supply peak labour demand at the mine. By now we were Western American Steel... But pretty soon we were paying so much out to the prisons for convict labour that we had a change of heart. Old grandpappy Fitzpatrick built our first prison. And so we could get the State, then later as we expanded into Federal Prisons, the Federal Government to pay to feed and house our workers, and we could pay ourselves for their services. So we were getting paid for them to work for us. It was soon our most profitable unit… You may have heard of our correctional subsidiary, American Stars ‘n’ Bars? Our Patriot Prison? With its uniquely flexible modular system?"

“Hmm?” I had been watching the green-eyed woman, who was very carefully taking something out of a safe and transferring it to a silver container that bounced light across her cheekbones, her noble nose… I shook my head, though as my head was on its side this involved rotating my face vertically rather than horizontally relative to the surface of the earth. Barney tilted his head in sympathy with mine.

"That's a... yes. Ha ha. Are you nodding or, ha ha... Anyway, as WAS became Westcom, and our jobs moved up the value chain, our prisoners, chiefly Negroes of little educational attainment, simply weren’t cutting it. Oh, they were bright and willing, but training them up costs time and money, and these guys simply weren’t inside long enough to make the investment worthwhile. They were missing out on training opportunities, the chance of betterment… Why, it was a crime. It was worse than a crime: it was a tragedy. So we lobbied Congress long and hard to give us time to really make a difference to these young men’s lives. And so we got their sentences doubled.”

I nodded, sideways, and stared at the face of the dark haired, green eyed woman. Head bowed over the silver container, staring into its depths.

“…But as Westcom became a favoured contractor on Federal Government Defence contracts, and we came to understand the Federal Government better, we came to… if I may use the word… love the Federal Government. And we began to feel concern for its welfare. You’ve got to see the bigger picture, and take the longer view. As the Federal Government pays us up to $500 for a screwdriver on our Defence contracts, it makes sense to maximise the State’s revenues so that they can pay us… Thus, if we can lower the burden on the Government, we can increase our income and profitability. And our prisoners are fine, fine, people. But they cost the Government a fortune in benefits, in healthcare and education, in providing streetlighting to their ghettos and so forth, before they are old enough to graduate to prison. It is the old problem my ancestor faced, of covering the overhead on their unproductive years. So the future lies in outsourcing labour to foreign slave-states. Let the Chinese and Hindus and so forth raise the whining infants to maturity. Not on America’s tab… We will build our prisons abroad, and ship the goods home. Indeed, we have used this opportunity to rethink the entire prison paradigm. In our next-generation foreign prisons, the prisoners will be kicked out after their shift and will have to feed and house themselves at their own expense. It is quite, quite brilliant, and will enhance profitability threefold… And so these are the last, I fear, of the great Black American workforce which my family has served so proudly and so humbly for so long. Here, meet some, before they vanish, like the Buffalo…”

He waved, and two young men in dark suits walked over to us. Barney whispered in my upturned ear, “Lately many of them have discovered Religion. I have encouraged it, for it makes them more Punctual, but Christ Almighty, they tend to go on about it… Gentlemen! I’d like you to meet Professor Stephen Hawking.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

I asked them about their religion. Barney groaned.

“Well sir, we are brothers in the Brotherhood of Brothers of Muhammad in the Hood.”

“Followers of the teachings of Muhammad…”

“It is a little known fact that Muhammad was a Black man, of Africa…”

“It is a little known fact that the first man to whom the Prophet gave the honour of giving the Call to Prayer was a freed Black slave, Bilal…”

“And so we follow that great Religion…”

“A Religion blind to the colour of a man’s skin.”

”A Religion of compassion.”

    “Religion of Love.”

    “Religion of tolerance.”

    "... for the Prophet taught us to hate no-one.”

    "And thus we hate no one."

    "Except the fucking Mexicans."

    "Yeah the Mexicans. And the fucking Koreans."

    "…’king Koreans. And whitey."

    "Yeah, whitey."

    "Fuck the Man."

    "And the cops."

    "Fuck the cops."

    "Nothing worse than a black man in a cop jacket."

    "Fuck those negroes."

    "Yes, fuck them."

    “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Barney.

    “Sir.”

    “Sir.”

    They bowed and left.

    “Oh well, it is better than Marxism,” said Barney.

(From Jude: Level 1, published in the UK by Old Street Publishing. And published in Greek by Topos Books, very handy if you're Greek...)

(Oh, and the terrific image is borrowed from Prison Penpals, check 'em out.)

Young, Massive, and Hot

There is something deeply satisfying about living in a time when universe-spanning discoveries are made on a fairly regular basis, every few years, or months... or weeks... (of course, this depends on how easily you get excited). Imagine living in the Middle Ages, and twiddling your thumbs for a few hundred years, waiting for someone to rediscover that the earth moves around the sun. Boooooooring.

Even back when I was a kid (which isn't that long ago) the universe was much smaller than it is today. We had to crouch.

Anyway, I'm very excited that two teams of astronomers have (separately) just managed to take the first photographs of planets whizzing round other stars. These planets are young, massive and hot (they're the easiest ones to photograph because they're pouring out torrents of infrared. Or heat as we called it when I was a lad). Up until now, astronomers had been finding planets by indirect means (the wobble of a star as a vast planet invisibly circled it, the dimming of a star as a big invisible planet passed in front of it). These are the first direct sightings.

All the details here, in Science News.

Election Day USA 2008

At last, it's election day in the USA. Who will win? Well, I think Obama won the election six weeks ago, on Monday 15th of September 2008 when Lehman Brothers , the hundred-and-fifty-year-old American investment bank, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection. (And, somewhat addicted to the high-wire of public prediction by now, I'm typing this before the votes have been counted. I haven't even looked at an exit poll, if any are out yet. There's hours of voting left to go in parts of the US.) That was the event that made the collapse of not just banks but the whole deregulated financial system unstoppable.

Check out the graphs in the second half of this excellent video from John Authers of the Financial Times. (You can skip the stuff on the dollar at the start.) In the crucial states Obama needs, Obama trailed McCain until the day of the Lehman's collapse, and then bam, his line shoots up and McCain's plummets, and McCain has trailed Obama in all of them ever since.

Almost everything written about this election has been fluff. The economy will always drive politics in a democracy. Only when things are going fairly well will people bother to vote on any other issue. When the economy implodes, so do the hopes of the incumbent party. McCain actually ran a very good campaign under incredibly difficult circumstances: he stayed in the race until the entire American banking system collapsed. His problem was that he had to run as two mutually conflicting things. To get the Republican party to vote for him, campaign for him, and finance him, he needed to run as a Republican. But that's only 40% of the voters. Not enough. And President Bush was so unpopular (this week he recorded a 20% approval rating, the lowest in history, lower than Nixon in the last days of Watergate), that to win the votes of anyone else at all, McCain had to run as a crazy maverick who wasn't anything like Bush and, sure, was hardly a Republican at all, at all. And you can't be both King of the Republicans, and the Scourge of the Republicans. (Look what happened to the last guy who tried to walk that tricky line.)

It has been very refreshing to have two presidential candidates that I really like and respect running for the big gig. (I wasn't impressed by the character of either candidate the last time.) It has been sad to see McCain ripped in two by the situation he put himself in. Much of the anger he expressed in that last month was probably at himself. I think he will be very glad indeed when this is over.

Obama had the easier task but, even allowing for that, he has run a stunningly good campaign. I think he'll walk this election. On water if necessary. He's not trying to win the popular vote (fat lot of good winning that did Al Gore), he's aiming to sweep the Electoral College. I think he will.

OK, that's who will win (oh, and one last prediction... Obama will do well among white voters, getting a bigger share of them than Bill Clinton got, and all that talk about the Bradley effect will turn out to have been fluff too). But who should win? I don't think novelists should have opinions, especially political opinions. It damages their work, by ruling out certain readings, and closing down ambiguities that should not be closed down. I do have private opinions and preferences, but they are private. And my books do not necessarily share my opinions. So I shall outsource my opinion to someone much older and wiser than me, the very wonderful Alan Abelson, of Barron's (Wall Street's favourite newspaper): "This election pits one candidate who should have been elected eight years ago against one who should be elected eight years hence."

There you go. Fair and balanced.

May the best man win.

Though personally, as a satirist, I would like to get in early, and officially endorse Sarah Palin's 2012 bid for the presidency. She has given so much to us, we have a duty to give something back.

I know, I know, you've already watched it fifteen times, but indulge yourself one last time...

And, above all, on this day of all days, it is your political duty, if you haven't done so already, to click on this link, and then click on everything you see when you get there, with the sound on.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:14 by Julian Gough

The super-duper New York Times interactive map is addictive and delightful. I've been enjoying making my own calls on the states, ahead of the networks and newspapers, by zooming in and trying to work out, county by county, how the tide is flowing. I'll make a call here, for the fun of it: I think Obama will just pip McCain in Indiana. As I type, McCain is only .2% ahead, and there's still a lot of votes to come from Lake County, which contains the city of Gary, which is breaking 2 to 1 for Obama. McCain is winning in the rural counties, but they have largely been counted by now.

And now I'm off to bed, it's nearly 5am in Berlin.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:36 by Julian Gough

Nah, I couldn't go to bed, it's too exciting... Florida looks like a big win for Obama. He's 2% ahead of McCain as I type, but McCain's counties are counted, the big blocks of votes still to come in are all Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties, (so, urban - Miami, Fort Lauderdale - and Democrat), and they are going to swing it strongly to Obama.

I really should go to bed, this election is over. Ah, it's a great shame McCain was robbed of the Republican nomination by the Rove/Bush machine in 2000. That really bent American democracy out of shape. And what consequences...

But in 2008, Obama deserves his victory. Here's the bravest and most important speech of the campaign, from either candidate. Character is destiny, and Obama has character.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:54 by Julian Gough

Yes, it's officially over. The networks have called it, and after the Kerry/Bush debacle, they ain't going to be leaping to wild conclusions. Wow. President Obama.

I'm incredibly happy. What a great day for America. What a relief for the world. (What was the global opinion poll result again? 75% of those with an opinion were for Obama?) The number of wounds that this helps to heal... holy cow.

God Bless the U.S.A.

With only a fistful of days to go, well yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts about the US election but, you know, who cares about my thoughts on the US election. Here's a clip that doesn't contain any footage of Barack Obama, John McCain, or Sarah Palin. (OK it does contain footage of Joe Biden, but hey, perfection is for Allah.)

And, wonky sound and all, this clip contains that strange, sideways something about the USA that makes me like the place so much. I'll warn you, if you're European - this clip is corny; it is cutesy (and the sound sucks); but get past that.

To make a clarifying statement which is not as cynical as it seems: America has the potential to be the country it thinks it is.

I have often found myself repeating W.H Auden's lines (below), from "On The Circuit", as I fly away from another astonishing, infuriating, sickening, exhilarating, inspiring encounter with America. I wonder do the candidates find themselves murmuring something similar sometimes...

"Another morning comes: I see

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don't remember which was which:

God bless the USA, so large,

So friendly, and so rich."

So, what happens next?

Well, like I said, blogging about seeing value in some areas of the equity markets last Friday "would have made me look fierce cute for a few hours." Markets go up a record breaking amount Monday - and back down nearly the same amount Wednesday. And the US markets give investors whiplash Thursday (way down, then way, way up in the last hour.)

I'm not going to bother talking about these immense shifts, because they are largely noise, not signal. They're the meaningless volatility you get around around major economic transition points. A huge one-day leap does not mean everything is going to be OK, and a huge drop does not necessarily mean it's the end of the world.

The Plain People of the Internet: What transition?

Well, the crisis is finally transferring from the financial economy to the real economy.

The Plain People of the Internet: What will that mean?

Some class of a recession. Less credit means less borrowing, less investing, less money, less jobs. We will save more, and spend less, because we will have to. Which will be good for us in the long term, but bloody painful in the short term. No chocolate on our biscuits for a while. And for a lot of people, no biscuits at all.

The Plain People of the Internet: Will the real economy collapse as much as the ghostly financial economy has?

Jesus, I hope not. The shadow banking system (which grew up outside the regulated banking system over the past decade), has been completely destroyed. The real economy will not be completely destroyed.

Within the financial sector, entire business models, an entire worldview, and an associated set of incredibly stupid but almost universally believed economic theories, have been annihilated. Basically, the financial sector has lost its money, its job, its house and its religion. The real economy will do much better than that. It might get quite a nasty kicking, but I am strangely optimistic about the real economy in the medium term, say the next few years. (Short term, sure, it's going to be horrible.)

The Plain People of the Internet: Will the markets fall further?

Yes. At least 20% and almost certainly much more.

The Plain People of the Internet: Will house prices fall much further?

Yes. US house prices will fall at least another 15%, and almost certainly much more, unless there is a massive government intervention in the mortgage market (on top of its recent interventions in the financial markets). The next US president will be inheriting a foreclosure catastrophe. Millions are set to lose their homes, so some major further initiatives are likely. This is a very dynamic situation, and it's hard to predict how it will turn out. The nature of the way in which mortgages were sliced, diced, packaged and sold on makes the problem very difficult to solve.

Oh, and Irish house prices will have their arse kicked much harder than that. There will be parts of the country where you'll be picking up houses for a few grand in another couple of years. I've seen ghost estates, built on spec in ridiculous places all over Ireland, that noone will ever live in.

The Plain People of the Internet: Is it the end of the world?

No. It's just going to be the big, bad recession the West should have had after the dot-com crash, but put off for years - and made much worse - with low, low interest rates and loose, loose money. (OK, if I wanted to be fair and balanced I'd mention a bunch of fascinating technical stuff about how the Chinese government stopped the country's dollar income reaching the workers, and diverted it straight back to the US instead... but that stuff gives people a headache, and needs a post of its own.)

Bear in mind, a country cannot get rich through its people selling houses to each other at ever higher prices. The ongoing collapse in house prices makes people with huge mortgages worse off. But it makes a heck of a lot of people without houses better off. Rents will go down, first-time buyers won't have to sell a kidney and bankrupt their parents to buy a dodgy flat, etc.

In fact, people, on average, are happier in a recession (as long as they don't lose their job or their house). There's a lot less status anxiety, and people appreciate what they have, rather than wishing for what they have not. And pop music always improves in recessions. So it's going to be great!

The War Against Icelandic Bank Terror

I am extremely pleased to see that the sweeping powers of Britain's Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act - passed in 2001 to keep Britain safe from global terror - are being used to defend Britain's shores from the lethal threat of Icelandic bank accounts.

Although lawyers, the Financial Times, and other lily-livered defeatists who would capitulate in the face of Icelandic Bank Terror are less pleased:

"Lawyers said the Treasury’s unprecedented use of anti-terror powers to freeze Landsbanki’s estimated £4bn UK financial assets could create knock-on problems for other institutions with which the failed lender was doing business.

The freezing order was issued under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act that was passed after the September 11 attacks the same year."

More news from the latest front in the global war on terror here...

We must remain vigilant. This is just the start. Iceland's sinister banking sector may have sleeper units all over the UK. We cannot show weakness. We cannot show mercy. I hereby call on Gordon Brown to authorise an SAS raid on Björk's Post Office Savings Account.

Look at her. Quite clearly planning to destroy our free markets by unleashing weapons of mass destruction. Quick, stop her! She's reaching for her piggy bank! We haven't a moment to lose.

And cancel the Oyster Cards of Sigur Rós while you're at it. You wouldn't know where they'd be going...

The Great European Competition Hurdles - and they're off!

Ah, now, look, that's cheating. The Irish Government have robbed me of victory in the The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes. And I'd put my last eleven euro on the favourite!

Here's the Irish Times, talking about the Irish Government's meeting in the early hours of Tuesday morning:

"The option of allowing one particular bank to fail and then moving to nationalise it was seriously considered, but it was decided that legislation to protect the entire banking system would have a better prospect of achieving long-term stability."

I'm pretty damn sure the bank was... well, I'm saying nothing. No point making things worse for them. (But, in one of those crazy coincidences no doubt, I got a huge number of hits over the past 48 hours from people who'd googled: anglo irish bank collapse.)

Incidentally, Anglo Irish shares soared 67% immediately after the announcement of the Irish Government scheme.

I'm still not entirely sure how a government as small as ours can "guarantee" the debts of a banking system as big as ours. As a number of helpful commentators have pointed out, the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, and finance minister, Brian Lenihan, have just promised to back liabilities that are ten times greater than our national debt. And, though the two Brians have postponed the Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes, they still have the EU Competition Hurdles ahead of them. (The job of running Ireland is a veritable pentathlon lately.) The British (and others) are furious at this move, as it gives Irish banks a huge competitive advantage, and could suck money out of fragile English banks. (AIB have a big presence in the English business sector, Anglo Irish do a lot of UK property loans etc.)

And the English, Dutch, Belgians and Danes all own banks in Ireland (Ulster Bank, ACC Bank, IIB Bank, and the amusingly named National Irish Bank- it's Danish), which will not be covered by this scheme, so they're afraid they'll lose all their depositors to Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, and - God help us - Anglo Irish Bank. There's now a strange, competitive, nationalist element to bank bailouts in Europe, as each government bailout or promise destabilises the banks of its neighbours. We need a unified EU response. And in a pig's hole will we get one, not till a few really big banks go under. Try getting twenty-two finance ministers to fly to Brussels this week, when they're all up till 5am every night, fire-fighting the collapse of their own national banks.

Of course, national banks have grown to become European banks, all over Europe. Many countries now face the problem of trying to save banks that are bigger than the country that, technically, controls and regulates them. The Financial Times has a beautiful overview of this. You'll see from it that both AIB and Bank of Ireland have liabilities that are almost exactly the same size as Ireland's entire GDP...

Well, on a lighter and more entertaining note, Momus has written a wonderful piece on the pleasures of having nothing. He did me the great honour of including some video of me in this intriguing meditation on Brecht, Wilde, and the end of the world as seen from Berlin.

We've been through all this before. It's not so bad. Nicht so schlimm...

"There is no money in this town! The whole economy has broken down! Oh, where is the telephone, is here no telephone, oh sir, goddamit, no!" - Brecht

Update on 2008-10-01 13:39 by Julian Gough

...And here's the latest on the Great European Competition Hurdles, from the Irish Times twenty minutes ago. Will Brian Lenihan even make it over the first hurdle?

Choice quotes:

The European Commission (EC) today confirmed that Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is in contact with the Government and will examine under state aid laws the move to guarantee all deposits in Irish banks.

“It [the Commission] will look at any state aid involved as a a matter of urgency. It expects notification from the national authorities and will take decision under the state aid rules soon afterwards.”

And yes the British are very annoyed:

British banks compete with Irish banks both in Britain and in Ireland and have voiced fears they could lose out competitively to Irish banks that enjoy the full guarantee.

The Irish pledge on Tuesday to underwrite the country's banking system triggered a flood of cash from British businesses to Irish banks, a senior Irish stockbroker said.

"We just want the Irish government to look quite closely at the arrangements they are putting in place to make sure they comply with EU competition law," the British government spokesman said. He added Britain was in contact with Irish authorities at a high level over the issue.

The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes - and they're off!

Well, it's not the end of the world, but it's going to feel like it for quite a while. The US government bail-out plan was voted down by Congress a few hours ago. If the plan had been passed, it would have given the illusion that things were going to be OK. (Things would not have been OK.)

Now, we won't even have the comforting illusion.

An an Irishman with my fortune (eleven euro) in an Irish bank account, I have a keen interest in the future of the Irish banking system. The main question seems to me to be, in what order will they fail? I reckon it's going to be a photo-finish for first place between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life and Permanent. (Though will dark horse Irish Nationwide Building Society make a late surge for the line?) After that, who knows. But they're all banjaxed.

Every Irish bank is massively over-exposed to Irish and UK residential and commercial property, and to Irish developers who can no longer service their vast loans. The Irish banks have been keeping their developers afloat artificially for the past year, in the hope things would miraculously turn around. Things haven't, they won't for years, and soon all the bad debts will have to appear on the books, dragging both banks and developers under. If the Germans and Swiss find the books of the Irish banks too revolting, and can't bring themselves to purchase the wreckage, then the Irish government (with some very irritated help from the European Central Bank) will have to recapitalise the entire banking sector. All this will have to be done during a global financial crisis. It's going to be comically awful, like having to change your tyre in the middle of a demolition derby.

I lived through the Irish property boom of the past decade with ever-mounting incredulity. It really was the most extraordinary case of mass delusion since everybody drank Kool-Aid in Jonestown. And if you want cast-iron evidence that I'm not pretending to be wise after the fact, here I am on Irish television, in May of 2007, saying exactly that, to the stony silence of the studio audience, all of whom had just bought an investment property the day before, and would be buying another one the day after.

(Oh yeah. banks and hedge funds and other financial institutions will also be imploding across America and around the world after this, but I'm so bored with the USA, I thought I'd talk about Ireland for a change... Ah heck, one more US prediction: good, old-fashioned, retro, Depression-era bank runs in America, starting tomorrow.)

The Long Night of the Museums in Berlin

Tonight was the 23rd Long Night of the Museums, here in Berlin. I came home in the early hours of the morning with a couple of sixty-million-year-old shark's teeth, bought off a palaeontologist in the Natural History Museum for a euro.

What a great city. Of course, Lange Nacht der Museen has been so successful that cities all over the world now do it. But it started in Berlin.

If you're ever here when it's on, check it out. Well over a hundred museums stay open till 2am, and put on special events (including prehistoric shark's tooth jumble sales). One ticket gets you in to everything, and fleets of buses will take you around any of ten nicely designed routes. It starts with a party, at 6pm in the Lustgarten (er, no, it just means Pleasure Garden...) and ends, as does everything in Berlin, with a bangin' techno party, near the Brandenberg Gate.

Most of Berlin's immense, world class museums of art, culture, history and science take part. But so do the smaller museums, including the Hemp Museum, (Hanfmuseum), the Gay Museum (Schwules Museum) and the Garlic Museum (Knoblauchhaus... no I haven't got the German names mixed up. Knoblauch means garlic in German. Though, yes, the English-speaking world is crying out for a gay nightclub called Knoblauchhaus).

There's a little history here, and this year's program in German here...

And if you can't make it to Berlin, at least check out the great 1996 coding of the Hemp Museum website. Only The Man ever updates code.

Séamus Brennan, 1948 - 2008

(Photo: Michael D. Higgins, Julian Gough, and the late Séamus Brennan, at the NUIG Alumni Awards Gala Banquet, on March 1st 2008. Photo by Aengus McMahon.)

The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.

I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).

The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."

I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.

He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.

I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.

Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.

I liked him a lot. May he rest in peace.

Croatia

 

I'm back from Croatia, and suffering an immense emotional hangover. That was one of the most intense, action-packed and enjoyable weeks I've ever had. I feel as though, since June 1st, I've lived an entire short, vivid life at high speed.

I was there for the International Festival of the Short Story, which took place this year in Zagreb and Dubrovnik. I cannot praise the festival highly enough. Best festival I've ever taken part in. And of course, as always, the quality comes down to the people. Charismatic organisers, magnificent volunteers, excellent translators, and great rattling crates full of terrific writers.

I'll post again on this, but right now I'm still too full of sights and sounds and memories I haven't processed.

Also, I can feel a lot of what happened in Zagreb and Dubrovnik already beginning the mysterious alchemical transformation into fiction. (Examples - I wrote a poem I really like, in the quarantine buildings outside the walls of Dubrovnik, and  got the entire plot for a damn good film while walking through the Square of the Loggia. And there's more on the way, I can tell by the tingle... It's extraordinary to think that in 1991, the year I was enjoying a hit single in Ireland with Toasted Heretic, this city was being hit by artillery shells and guided missiles.)

So, anyway, I can't really blog about the most intense or interesting stuff, because it would interfere with the fermentation process.

 But damn, I laughed, I cried, I swam, I ran, I nearly died.

Kassel Rocks.

I spent last weekend in Kassel, pretty much spang plumb in the middle of Germany.

Why Kassel? Well - for reasons I may explain later - I wanted to visit the town which the young Samuel Beckett visited so often. (Between the ages of 22 and 26, he made eight lengthy visits to Kassel.) Beckett went there to see his cousins, the Sinclairs, and in particular Peggy Sinclair. Peggy and Sammy (as the kids  in the neighbourhood knew him - they thought he was American, or English) had one of the all-time great disastrous relationships. He writes very cruelly about Peggy in his first book, More Pricks Than Kicks, and very tenderly in one of his late plays, Krapp's Last Tape. That's blokes for you.

She died of TB in 1933, and the Sinclairs returned to Ireland. Beckett never returned to Kassel after Peggy's death.

Many years later, a doctor in Kassel, Gottfried Büttner, wrote, care of Beckett's publishers,  to say how moved he had been by a performance of Happy Days. Beckett wrote back, mentioned his connection with, and affection for, Kassel, and asked about the city. Beckett had heard much of it had been destroyed in the war. (The RAF smashed Kassel then burnt it, using high explosives and incendiaries, in late October 1943. Ten thousand people, the vast majority civilians, died as the medieval city centre was consumed in a firestorm.) I have a great affection for the RAF (after all, my dad served in it, and his RAF medals are on display in my parents' house, right beside my great grandfather's IRA medals). But I do wish they hadn't deliberately burnt down quite so many cities full of civilians. 

Anyway, Beckett asked Dr. Büttner to find out if the Sinclairs' old neighbourhood had survived (it had, being a few stops by tram away from the town centre... which reminds me of my favourite German word. Strassenbahnhaltestelle. It means... tramstop. And that is why German translations of English books are always 30% longer... Strassenbahnhaltestelle. For tramstop. Jesus.). They continued to correspond regularly for many years, and even met up a few times in Paris. Beckett said he could never go back to Kassel, too many memories.

A highlight of the trip was meeting the Samuel Beckett Gesellschaft (or, in English, SamSoc), and many of their friends. All together, an amazing bunch of people. Frau Büttner very kindly allowed me to visit her house, and see the portrait of Peggy Sinclair by Karl Leyhausen. (Leyhausen, unable to make a living as an artist in Kassel, went to Paris shortly after painting Peggy. Unable to make a living there either, he killed himself in 1931. He was 32 years old.) The photo of it here doesn't do it justice. A gorgeous, lively oil painting, it looks like it was painted last week. The scarf hops and pops in blocks of colour. You worry the paint might not be dry. But it's over eighty years old.

Mapping Economics Onto Reality

 

I was recommending this article to my friends the other day, so I may as well recommend it to you guys too. I know my economics stuff is of minority interest, but how we live is going to be severely bent out of shape for the next few years by this single fact -  the economic theories used for the past two decades did  not map onto reality, and have totally screwed up the financial system, global credit, the housing markets, et bleeding cetera.

 

George Soros, apart from running one of the most successful hedge funds of all time, making a billion in a day by knocking sterling out of the EMS,  and then using the money to prop up democracy around the world,  is a terrific and original thinker on matters economic. (He's greatly influenced me. Those who know me may have have noticed that over the past few years the quality of my economic thinking, and of my predictions, has improved a great deal. A fair bit of that is down to reading Soros.)

 

Here's a juicy and clear-sighted quote from the article, in Wednesday's Financial Times, if you're too lazy to click:

 

"About 40 per cent of the 6m subprime loans outstanding will default in the next two years. The defaults of option-adjustable-rate mortgages and other mortgages subject to rate reset will be of the same order of magnitude but occur over a longer period. With single family home sales running at an annual rate of 600,000, foreclosures will overwhelm the market and cause prices to overshoot on the downside. This will swell the number of homeowners with negative equity who may be tempted to turn in their keys. The fall in house prices will become practically bottomless until the government intervenes. Cutting foreclosures should be a priority but the measures so far are public relations exercises."

The rest of the article is here.

 

In fact, if you liked that, you should read his interesting overview of the background to the crisis, going back sixty years... 

 

And if you're up for a bit of really meaty economic philosophy, there's a good 1994 paper on reflexivity by Soros here...

 

Did I mention I'm reading in Prague next week? Oh, I'll blog about that tomorrow.

Memories Of A Small Tribe In Galway

Along with a few other writers (DBC Pierre, Howard Marks, Sebastian Horsley etc) I was asked to contribute some of my few surviving tattered memories to the current issue of Hot Press. The issue is a wonderfully exploitative and tacky DRUGS!!! special, with a coke-smeared model on the cover who happens to look a bit like the young Irish lingerie model, Katie French, who died recently after her coke-fueled 24th birthday party.

As the memories I contributed were from the same place and time as the Toasted Heretic gigs we've been discussing in the forum, I thought I'd repeat them here...

My earliest experience of drugs was as a member of a small tribe in Galway.

We would collect magic mushrooms in the traditional manner, on the sacred golf-course of Knocknacarra. Every season, Joe Seal, a priest of the tribe, would make magic mushroom wine. My first trip, the young men of the tribe gathered in a holy place in Salthill and drank deeply of mushroom tea. A heck of a lot of mushroom tea. Then we went to the Warwick. The night lasted several years, and I sank into the floor several inches whenever I lay down, which was often. Then it started raining in the Warwick. Then tribes of pygmies wandered across the dance floor.

It was unnerving, and many of our tribe fled. (Days later, we discovered that a busload of dwarves on holiday were staying in the Warwick: and that the place was so packed the condensation had been pouring from the ceiling.)

Some of us ended up in Spar, where one of our number demanded that the shopkeeper slice his Mars Bar into many slices with the bacon slicer. However, his urgent request was not understood, and our tribesman fled. Soon many of the tribesmen were in flight, through space and time. Several walked a number of miles out of town. One slept in a field. Another was found at dawn, still walking, past Spiddal, and was brought home by the forces of law and order.

They were the best days of our lives, and they destroyed many of us. Over the next few years, some of us achieved enlightenment. Some of us died. Joe Seal died in India. A girl I liked killed herself. A girl I loved lost her mind and never found it again, and is still lost. Quite a few of us ended up in psychiatric hospitals, or with terrible depressions… We didn't know what we were doing, we didn't take it seriously enough. As Philip K. Dick said of his friends, and of mine,

"They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow."

I have two very strong opinions on drugs. Those who are against drugs should take more of them: those who are for drugs should take less of them.  Most societies make sure that their young people take dangerous drugs in controlled circumstances, very rarely, and with an experienced guide to make sure they come back with new knowledge of themselves, and of their relationship to the universe. We neck anything that's going, head down to Abrakebabra, and fight. Few achieve enlightenment in Abrakebabra.

 

A note on the images in this post:

The first is a fabulous fractal freakout called "This Is Your Brain On Drugs", by the artist Sven Geier, who also works in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The second image is of Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi, visiting London from the island of Tanna, at the southern tip of the island nation of Vanuatu. It is from the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, Meet The Natives.

The third image is a crop of a digital landscape called "Enlightenment", created using Terragen by the Arizona artist Pat Goltz.