"Publishing from the Provinces”

The most obvious meaning of the title of Ivor Indyk's essay is that Australian publishing is “from the provinces” of the world's geography as well as from the southern extremities of the old British Empire. Though Indyk immediately says this is not what he means, it is still something I’d like to examine for a moment. The provinces of Australian writing lie at the bottom of two stacked English language gravity wells, not just one.

The two great centres of English language publishing are London and New York. The geographic outer provinces of publishing are everywhere, even in London and New York. The question of provincialism goes on and on; it all depends on who has the talking stick and where the azimuth is. (Hence the irregular Gobshite Quarterly essays or rants under the general title “Every Edge A Centre.”)

Non-empires have small (i.e., unimportant, unbroadcast) literatures. If a work is found to be astonishing, e.g. Norwegian Knausgard's six volumes of autobiography, the work is translated, its author praised, raised and highly paid. Norwegian writing is not.

Norway is not a current or recent world power: there are no colonies or former colonies where Norwegian is a mandatory subject at every school, Norwegian books are on every syllabus, and Norwegian is the lingua franca of business, government, social mobility and ambitious writing.

The literary/artistic worth of things written, painted, played, drawn, built or projected is often inseparable from the current economic power and associated standing of the culture producing it, its possession of cultural colonies.

This point was elided when post-colonial literature in English was called “Commonwealth Literature,” complete with intellectual sniff. There was no real azimuth outside London. “Literature” stood alone and above the working class, slanting the clattering factories, the conditions of women, gunboat diplomacy, slavery, trading triangles and the bloody reality of imposed paradigms. The Church of the Book stood beside the Church of England, a two-person trinity as immanent, eternal and unchangeable, regarded and disregarded as the original.

The concerns of the books we studied were held to be universal or universally applicable when they were often, also, if not only, the concerns of a (foreign) ruling caste.

In my own literal province, “American Literature” only appeared as a studyable subject during the Vietnam War. (Britain left the Common Market in 1964. Time to study our new paradigm, our new friends, defenders, masters...)

(Perhaps I was the only one befuddled. Perhaps I resisted understanding that all these magic nets of language were also foreign and self-interested flim-flam. My parents’ and culture’s quarrel with “education” was based on the long experience of a working class and religious minority of the political nature of education. Perhaps I resisted their understanding because I resisted their insistence that that was all there was to it. I was already outside the family and the group. I was a teenager, a foundling, mix-up at the hospital, a writer to my fingertips and spine.)

But Indyk is actually anxious to discuss a certain kind of writing, what he calls "the outer provinces" of imaginative writing in English in Australia.

He describes and discusses five titles: the novels Blindness and Rage, by Brian Castro, Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane, and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, and the poetry collections Empirical, by Lisa Gorton, and Heide, by Pi.O. All these are recent titles published by Giramondo Publishing, of which Indyk was the founding editor and publisher.

Of Castro he says:

… [T]his play of mirrors, of repetitions and inversions … is characteristic of the imagination at full stretch, in the province of literature I am describing…. In this far province the imagination rules, in its own unruly fashion.

Of Murnane he says:

It is as if he is out to demonstrate, that the imagination which produced … worlds within worlds is still active, still revelling in its own inventiveness.

Of Wright he says:

Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book begins with just the kind of recursion I have been examining … that movement in which the imagination seeks to expand beyond the condition of neglect or indifference, or in the Indigenous case negation, to declare its power.

Of Gorton and Pi O he says:

Both titles make use of citation and montage, and draw on an encyclopaedic range of sources, and both mobilise expansive perspectives through these means.

And of this type of work in general he says:

The sense of being unregarded, and therefore unconstrained (the element of play), the recursive inventions of an imagination which seeks to move beyond its frontiers, the encyclopaedic aspiration which seeks to discover the whole world in a remote part of it – all these suggest a willingness to experiment with perspectives, in both space and time, both formally and in terms of the responsibilities perspective entails.

From the type of work these writers create Indyk moves on to describe the writer's hope and puzzlement at the general response to it:

To reside in the literary world, in the outer provinces of publishing, is to become used to the discrepancy between expectation and response. Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting, and because of the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination. I suppose no public response could ever do justice to this sense of value… What to make of this craziness, the absence of readers?

I understand Indyk's sympathy for writers whose books are lost in the marketplace because they do not do what more commercially successful books are doing. I admire him for going to bat for the writers he publishes. At the same time I think there are other contours to the situation.

Indyk says, “Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting and the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination.”

There’s a marvellous passage somewhere in Pilgrim At Tinker’s Creek where Dillard describes, vividly, how our stupendously over-productive world runs on wasted effort: uncounted trillions of unnecessary sperm, rivers of unfertilized fish-eggs...

The built-in prodigality of natural processes means that some writers will produce some books which don't find readers. Effort alone does not create significance or value. Significance and value are communal judgements. They can't exist in isolation; they can't come into being because one individual announces them. There's nothing as isolated as an unread book. A book's contribution to its community or culture is also a communal judgement and decision.

On the other hand, not belittling the kind of book and writer Indyk is describing is a matter of common decency and respect. Respect is a matter I’ll return to in a moment.

If we ask, How can a largely unread book contribute to language and the imagination? answers can begin to emerge.

If books like these were taught they would start to become known, their methods shown to have value, as saying something the community or culture can learn, as seeing something that had not been seen before, saying something the community or culture might find beautiful or witty or amazing. Under those conditions books like these could begin to make a contribution to the community's language and imagination. Books like these have to be aggressively championed into communal awareness before they can become part of a culture's conversation.

Failing that, being admired and discussed by, and influencing, other writers is the only way this kind of writing can make a contribution to culture. Books selling 50 copies or so (which is the figure Indyk quotes for Brian Castro's title — in any case, books selling fewer than a thousand copies in Australia) will not be able to contribute to "language and the imagination" unless a significant number of those copies are bought or read by productive and more widely circulating writers who use or praise the original work. The chance that posterity will resurrect and re-evaluate an unknown or forgotten work is so small the notion should be classed as a delusion.

The kinds of writers Indyk is speaking of used to be called writers' writers. The phrase implicitly admits the work doesn't have a wide readership. But it also includes respect for the work and the writer's skill. Sometimes it also means the work has been mined more than once for useful tropes or techniques, making/keeping the writer's reputation alive at least in the writing community.

In general, baroque or rococo recursiveness in writing is the taste of a small percentage of readers. It’s a literary game you do or don't enjoy, a taste you may or may not have. Once these books become more widely known and perhaps taught, discussed, acknowledged, I suspect their popularity would still be on a par with a week of Difficult Listening.

But respect and influence and popularity and money aren’t the same things. Only a thoroughly mercantile culture would insist they are.

Working in or from the outer provinces is hard on artists generally, not just writers. You hear of one, a completely neglected genius of a painter, fifty years ahead of his time, who spends the last twenty years of his life in illness and alcohol, when in New York he’d’ve been rated as highly as De Kooning. You hear of another, who's left the schmoozing art world altogether, makes watercolour sculptures, pencil drawings, and laser print collages, hundreds of works in his basement no one has ever seen. You hear of a third, whose experimental fiction doesn't sell, who destroys his marriage and reputation because he can find no publisher for anything beyond a book review.

In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, my question is: But how much should the "losers" lose?

Mercantile culture most often speaks of writing/art in terms of prizes, print runs and sales. The real question is respect, of which money has become the general index.

How can Australian culture respect its artists? (A subset of respecting everybody.)

This is a genuine question. The farthest province of physical and imaginative Australian cultural production also contains the opposite of being ignored into artistic nonexistence. That opposite is being worked to death, out of sight, into functional nonexistence because your work is in such demand.

The farthest province is a shed in the outback. It contains the forced labour of elderly Aboriginal painters.

And so in my Moebius strip of a question, the other side, the same side, is this: In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, who are the winners?

And how, and how much, and what, should the "winners" win?

Not Watching The News

I can't watch the news. Oh, I can see most of it, headlines on the net & any article I think I can stand to read. But the talk-show analysis I have not been able to stand, not since the day after Robert Mueller’s Congressional testimony — the ghoulish, triumphant ways the press, even the non-trumpian parts of it, characterized what they saw as his failures. Which were, of course, their own. I pitied his obvious, unexpected, frailty.

And so I have watched other things.

Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.

I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.

So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.

Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.

After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,

The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.

At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.

Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.

Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.

Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.

I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.

In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.

In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.

And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.

That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.

If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.

Stained Windows & Xfixes

Mark Mordue reminded me of staring at stained glass windows out of boredom.

What you absorb staring at stained glass out of boredom! At stone or brick walls, through windows, at gardens, statues, sky! (Newtonian gravity slowing the brick's ascending arc, muscles and the sun rippling on the brickie's labourer's back.)

Those Stations of the Cross in so many parish churches: cream bas-relief, the figures so exaggeratedly moulded they seemed about to fall off the wall, Mary & Veronica minor-key harmonics of the anguished Holy Face… rounded calves & thighs, strained & cabled tendons, gaping spear-wounded flesh…

There was a slightly self-conscious modernization in the illustration style of a lot of ecclesiastical art & devotional artefacts & ephemera from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, of catechisms, prayer-books, rosary beads, saints’ medals, holy pictures, gospel study handouts. The very streamlined illustrations in paper media seemed to emanate from the U.S.

The crucifixes of South Australian Catholic churches & cathedrals from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s were often designed & executed by Middle-European artists who came to Australia after World War II. These were noticeably more symbolic than those of the old style derived from the southern (mostly Italian) renaissance art & its C16-C19th descendants.

I suspect this was symptomatic of new confidence, consumerism, money and medicine: a not necessarily consciously-formulated perception that life was no longer itself a kind of crucifix, no longer had to be "offered up," was no longer predominantly made of or for or by constant difficulty and unrelieved suffering.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to God or man, I wanted to look at the weather forecast. I was waiting for a phone call so I tapped the weather app on my phone.

When I got there, there were text boxes. Essentially: we want access to your location & other material on your phone/in your cloud storage. (This app had come with the phone, I’m pretty sure. Yes, it did. I’ve been using it occasionally for going on for two years.)
Read our privacy policy
I understand / Uninstall

The app said I could alter things later in my settings. (I’m not so late to the party as to believe anything I want to do will be in the settings.)

Standover tactics have always got my back up. I Uninstalled and the thing went away. Presumably.

This meant that I needed a new weather app. Looked online, and each one I was considering wanted access to my photographs in storage “beyond [my] device,” my location, or other collections / clutches & records of information on my phone. One of them, whose name is lost to infamy by my swift decision to move on to the next possibility – also wanted access to my text messages and browsing history.

By this time I was ready to scream: why do you want access to my photos, texts, contacts, phone messages, and browsing history? You’re telling me the weather! And I pay for your app by suffering your ads to occupy part of my screen!

Why do you want access to my location? I want weather information about a particular place. Where I am is not necessarily related to my search! GET OUT OF MY STUFF!

Long story short, though I did download one of these horrors I found out how to uninstall it. I’ll get my weather information somewhere else, thank you.

I PAID FOR THIS PHONE. And it wasn’t cheap.
I OWN IT. And it wasn’t cheap.

In the world of Amazon’s self-publishing, “unpublish” does not mean “delete,” even though we might want it to. On Facebook “delete” means “unpublish,” even though we press a button or link that specifically says: Delete. Amazon and Facebook both retain our files not matter what we, the alleged owners, might have wanted or even explicitly asked them to do with them.

Even though Amazon and Facebook have long worked & traded on the difference between ownership and control: I DO NOT AGREE THAT CONTROL TRUMPS OWNERSHIP.

I know every remaining app on my phone does much the same thing, and there’s somewhere between little and nothing I can do about it.

And so we come to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, New York, 2019).

The basic situation that Zuboff describes is this: there are two sets of activity on the internet for every single thing we do. The first, the one we are aware of, consists of the searches we make & the results we get, the pictures we put on Facebook or Instagram, the things we say on Twitter, and so on. These are the trails we are aware of, and this trail was the thing there was public concern about when website cookies were new. The concern with cookies was that our fondly imaged to be anonymous jaunts across the web could be tracked and we, money-having creatures, could be advertised to on the basis of our cyber-tracks, and persuaded to buy, or, at greater jeopardy, tracked for political or law-enforcement reasons.

However, for each of our overt and intended actions there is an unacknowledged second stream of data created simply because the net works the way it does. This data is pretty much the source of Google’s fortune: it is extremely granular, recording our behaviour in such detail that highly accurate predictions can be made about it. Selling these predictions to advertisers is what Google began doing very early on – it ceased not being evil about 2002. Selling these predictions to advertisers is Google’s core business.

Internet surveillance was ignored as a civil rights issue in the U.S. particularly because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At that moment preventing another attack became the new Department of Homeland Security's highest priority, and was made highest priority of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Before the Spaniards invaded Mexico they first laid claim to it. They did this by means of declarations, written in charters which were kept in chests on the ships to be conveyed back to the king. They were written in a language the Indians did not understand; they made the Indians subjects of the king, subject to the king’s punishments for disobedience. “Disobedience” covered everything from existing to resisting.

Those declarations removed the land and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, minerals and other contents, from inchoate social space into private space owned and ruled by a single identifiable entity. Those declarations were the written foundation/justification for the crimes of invasion and colonialism.

Before attacking villages, as sufficient notice, the invaders whispered these declarations into their cuffs.

Zuboff points out that Google and other corporations have laid claim to the second stream of data our internet activity creates, which originated in and was also part of common, inchoate social space. Like the land and people of the Americas.

(When a declaration is made about common space that was barely conceptualized before, it is named and defined and identified, and identified as now being under the rule of a particular and foreign and other entity. In the matter of "Netiquette," I've always wondered who declared, who had the right to declare, on behalf of everyone, and despite the labels on 16mm documentary film cans everywhere, that "all caps is shouting." I have shouted above. Oh, why not. The whole thing is to scream.)

Google and later others, such as Microsoft, and lately our friendly, corporate ISPs, were never forthcoming about the second stream/set of data that everyones’s internet activity generates. They have acted at all times to obscure its existence.

Zuboff maintains that this data, created by the users of the internet, should belong to the users. That is, it should belong to us, to be used as we see fit, not as large, secretive, profit-driven companies see fit. The fact that this stream of data is not being treated as belonging to the people who create it constitutes an unimaginably large, new kind of theft.

Zuboff sees ongoing research into more ways to use this data to manipulate users through apps for commercial gain, particularly at this scale, as a new form of colonialism. Oh, says the screen you're not supposed to watch while you're driving, you’ve been to this restaurant before. How about now, since you're driving past...

But these commercial applications of highly accurate behavioural predictions are just the beginning. The next obvious application is political, surveillance of all of us and our political activity via the COINTELPRO boxes in our pockets, the face recognition technology in CCTV cameras in public spaces interior and exterior, the fridges and personal digital assistants which listen to more than our commands, the smart TVs that watch us as we watch them. An Internet of Things constantly detecting and reporting... All the dystopias anyone’s ever nightmared about, everywhere, all the time.

Nowhere will be unmonitored. Sanctuary will cease to exist.

Industrial capitalism came to terms with labour and ultimately supported the workers it employed, Zuboff says; this was a social contract that was explicitly negotiated. (Though it did take bloody battles from the Luddites to the New Deal for labour to accomplish that.)

Surveillance capitalism has made no such agreement: the sheer speed of the tech firms in seizing this data leaves the deliberative processes of democracy far behind. If lawmakers don’t know what’s being done they cannot gather information about it, debate it, legislate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a complex and lucid book, a formidable accomplishment. However, I do think its predictions for the future may rest on a fact not often alluded to in overviews like this: most of us have less and less money.

Google & its pards can poke us all they like, point us at any point of sale they like, but we have less and less money. They can advertise what they like using all the data since the Big Bang; but without money, we just ain’t buyin’. Google, etc., are getting so rich, determined as they are to force us back into the dust from which we came, I can see them collapsing for lack of users/used to throw to their actual customers, the vendors who pay for super-reliable predictive sales data.

And so it seems to me that our general financial impoverishment will make political surveillance and ever-nastier law enforcement the enduring purposes of the net. (And Google and FB will join law enforcement to keep themselves relevant and solvent.)

A note on author photos:

Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a formidable intellect, complex, comprehensive, and lucid:

While I was reading this I did what I always do when I’m greatly taken with a book: I gaze at the author photo wondering where and how, under the skin, between muscle and bone, the writer stores the magic that’s in the writing.

Zuboff’s both is and is not a very female photo. There are 4 circles close to its centre: the lenses in her glasses & the hoops of her earrings, a small, cheerful, symmetrical path through the picture, echoed by the curls at the end of her hair and the round pendant below her neckline. There are counter-currents creating tension, too: short hair brushed to her right but long hair falling over her left shoulder; her straight gaze.

And yet it’s a puzzling photo. Two of the fingers of her right hand are bent. I finally realized my question actually was: why is the author’s right hand in this photo at all?

Her gaze is direct. Without her hand the photo is still interesting: her hand has not been placed on her right cheek quest to enliven an otherwise boringly symmetrical composition. Without her hand cradling her right cheek, we are left with Zuboff’s very direct gaze and her perfectly symmetrical face and eyes. Perfectly matching eyes are unusual and arresting in themselves.

In Anglo culture, at least, a direct and unwavering gaze is a challenge. It’s “staring,” it’s “rude,” particularly if it’s coming from a woman.

Placed along her cheek, cradling or supporting her cheek, Zuboff’s hand is a much larger element in the image than her eyes and their remarkable gaze. The angle between her hand and her wrist is awkward and sharp; it directs the viewer’s eyes to her neck and throat, vulnerable areas, showing age, indicating fragility and mortality. Zuboff’s right hand de-emphasizes her gaze. Its positioning directs the portrait into the semantic area of I'm just a girl, works to lessen or remove any sense of challenge the reader might feel in the face of either her eyes or intellect.

And yet it also works against its intended distraction.

By stretching the skin on her cheek, her hand stretches her smile. The left side of Zuboff’s mouth seems to be smiling (the upturned end of her lips), but the right side does not. The smile has become a grimace. Her lips can still be read as smiling if the viewer isn’t paying much attention. That the positioning of her hand may not have been the original concept of the portrait seems indicated by her two bent fingers. They suggest that she isn’t committed to this placement, isn’t “authorizing” it, isn’t anxious to smooth over the subversion of the image its inclusion has led to.

A direct and close-up gaze is generally avoided in women’s author pix. After a short and informal survey of author pix on a local literary website, this is the range of poses I find:

Medium shots:
the writer’s body faces the camera/viewer but her gaze does not
the writer’s gaze is directed towards the camera/viewer but her body is not

Close-ups:
the writer’s face is turned towards the camera/viewer but her gaze is directed above the camera/viewer
the writer’s face looks upward to the camera/viewer
the writer’s body and face both fully face the camera/viewer, but her head is tilted

There are lots of smiles.

By not aligning the writers’ faces/gazes with their bodies, all these poses lessen authorial assertion, conviction, or challenge.

These conventions are so enduring and so well understood they are gleefully parodied in this portrait:

But, delightful as it is, this photo was taken a long time ago.

If parody is the best or all we can do in the face of these imperatives / conventions / imperatives, then we're already in a panopticon beyond the dreams of glass, a digital debtors' Bedlam and prison which no-frill phones won't be enough to dismantle.

The Wheel of Fortune

We were launching Golems Waiting Redux at Publication Studio in 2011. Friends came, bringing an old friend who has bicycled all over the world. This friend mentioned that he worked near the Houses of Parliament in London; the Millennium Wheel is been built where he used to park his bicycle.

I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.

But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.

The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.

Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.

There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.

At that moment something very strange happened to me.

The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.

But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.

The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.

Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.

So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.

And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Our Signature Activity

Some books of contemporary essay leave me muttering, “I’m not your therapist.”

Porn is essentially voyeurism. Surveillance – all those drone-shots in all those military & espionage movies, security cameras, speed cameras – is essentially voyeurism. When information is currency, voyeurism becomes the culture's signature attitude & activity. Memoir becomes voyeurism…

Aah, security

Alarm at 3. Taxi at 4, airport at 4:30 because Alaska strongly suggested we “needed” to be at the airport 2 hours before the flight. There might be long lines at Security.

Ah, Security... Shoes off, the raincoat you’re carrying into the basket, also, if you’re less than 75 years old, your black plastic vest into the basket, also, phone, keys. No, no iPad, tablet, laptop hidden in the bag, only the phone. Step this way into the x-ray chamber. Feet on the yellow footsteps (i.e., legs apart). Hands meeting above your head.

"Step over here. You alarmed the machine in these areas." Yellow circles on the shoulders of the outline I suppose is mine. "So I’m going to have to pat you down."

My shoulders contained, surface to centre: cotton shirt with cotton seam-stitching, no metal studs; camisole shoulder strap, black, indestructible, with perishing spandex, possibly made from recycled milk cartons; skin, sub-surface skin layers, veins, capillaries, layers of tissue, bone, bone marrow.

The girl pulled my shirt sleeves up to my armpit, both arms, and found: nothing up my sleeves, nothing under my arms.

So, firstly: the machines don’t work. Giving false positives isn't "working."

Secondly (looking around): this is an industry.

Thirdly: the industry’s primary purpose is to make money for the manufacturers of the machines. Michael Chertoff – remember him? Heckuva job Brownie’s best friend? Dubya's Administration? – had invested in that company. If the machines don’t work, i.e., if they give false positives all the time, then their primary purpose cannot be to detect explosives. The only thing they do do, unfailingly, all the time, is cost money. So costing money has to be their primary purpose.

Fourthly: the industry’s next purpose is to make you understand that officialdom can do whatever it likes. To you and to anything else.

And tangentially, lastly, but not leastly: Homeland really doesn’t mind if whatever you’ve inserted into your Nike heels blows up in a Social Security Office. SoSec offices have metal detectors, but no transparent, feet-in-the-yellow-circles x-ray chambers.