marginal gloss

edwin

I had been seeing Edwin for two hours every Sunday for three weeks before he finally decided he could talk to me, and even then it was not until I had finished my last chapter of the day. We sat by the window in his room overlooking the gardens of the place, I with my glass of water and he always with his cold cup of tea and single uneaten digestive biscuit. I would read to him and he would nod sometimes, or hold up a hand when he wanted me to stop, but until that day he never spoke a word to me. 

‘Why are you here?’ he asked. His voice was higher and clearer than I’d expected from such a little old man. For a moment I had no idea what to say. Ought I to be honest?

‘I’m a volunteer.’ I said, then, feeling braver: ‘It’s for my community service.’

‘So you’re not really a volunteer. You had to come here.’

‘But I chose to do this. Reading to the elderly. They said I had a good voice for it.’

‘Do you read many books at home?’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’  

‘You suppose so.’

‘Yes. I like to think I read enough.’ 

‘That means you really think you don’t read enough. And so you have some ambition related to reading. You want to be a writer. Am I correct?’

I shrugged and nodded simultaneously. I was very keen to diminish publicly the intensity of my feeling for what I believed to be my chief calling in life. 

‘Do you believe you have talent?’

I had never been asked this before. Of course I wanted to say I did, but instead I said: ‘I don’t think I’m best placed to judge that.’

‘Well. You must think you have talent or you wouldn’t bother. What do you understand by talent?’

‘I suppose it means to be gifted with a natural ability for something which others find difficult to understand.’

‘“Which others find difficult to understand,” you say. Now that is very interesting to me.’ He sat in silence for a while before he began again. ‘Do you feel that a talented person has a significantly greater appreciation of life than an untalented person?’ he said, speaking very slowly, his voice taking on the rhythm of a odd-shaped stone tumbling erratically down a long hillside. ‘And by a “greater appreciation of life” I do not mean they are necessarily more content regarding their situation. They are not happier than the rest of us. They simply see more of it all. Do you believe that to be the case?’

I tried to guess what he wanted me to say. I have always found it prudent to tell the elderly what they most want to hear. ‘Yes,’ I said eventually, ‘I think that’s right. The truly talented take something from the world which the rest of us can’t see, and put it into a more-or-less accessible form we call art. That’s the purpose of art. To make you see.’

Edwin said nothing for a while. I thought he seemed satisfied. Then he said: ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m on community service.’

‘I heard that. But why are you on community service? Or rather, what dreadful thing did you do that requires you to spend your Sunday afternoons reading Charles Dickens to a constipated old fogey?’

‘Copyright infringement.’

‘What?’  

‘Copyright infringement. I’m a pirate. I downloaded a file containing about a thousand cracked ebooks from a torrent site. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, but I then wrote about how easy it was to do on my blog. One of the authors I downloaded strayed across it, and their publisher threw the book at me. As it were.’

‘I shan’t pretend to understand most of what you just said. You stole books?’

‘I don’t believe what I did was stealing. I copied them illegally.’ 

‘Because you can’t afford to buy them?’

‘No.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because I could. Because they were there.’ 

‘You are a reader. You want to write. Do you feel this theft was an investment, of sorts?’

‘I suppose so. I think reading is enriching, personally. I think information wants to be free.’

‘Do you think it will make you a better writer?’

‘Yes. Yes, reading makes you a better writer.’

‘What about talent? Is that more important?’

I considered this for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said. ‘You could read all the books in the world and still be a terrible writer if you didn’t have talent.’ 

‘Because the talented person has something most do not have. They see more of it all. And their duty is, as you said, to make us see. Do I understand you?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ 

‘What is it you see, then, that I do not?’

He looked at me quite seriously. 

‘I couldn’t just say it out loud,’ I said. ‘I suppose I would have to put it into art, wouldn’t I? I’d have to write it down.’

‘And once you have written it down, how would you know it is something I have not felt? How would you know that your experience was exceptional, as far as the majority of the human race is concerned?’

‘I couldn’t know that.’

‘This notion of talent,’ he said, quite calmly, ‘is nothing but a sham. It is a lie that presumes control. You think yourself more capable than I am because you perceive something else. But it is not more or less than I perceive. It is only something else. You have not felt a thing which I have not felt. Nobody has felt a thing which others have not felt – ’

‘But that’s not all there is to it. There are talents which are indisputable. A child who learns to play the piano without tuition, or to draw or paint from scratch – that is a gift, isn’t it?’

‘And what do you suppose they make of their gifts?’ he snapped. ‘All being for the best in the best of all worlds, they would nurture their abilities to exceed the expectations of their audience. They would lift their admirers above the morass of humanity with their greater appreciation of life. Ability necessarily confers responsibility. Don’t you agree?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps not.’

‘What if one has talent in one sense – in that indisputable sense of easily mastering some great skill – but not in the sense of possessing an elevated perception, or even anything resembling artistic ambition? What then?’

‘I suppose they wouldn’t make anything of it.’ 

‘No. They would not be able. But if they played on at their instrument regardless – could there not be something in that? Something which is great regardless of ambition, or perception, or elevation? Something that is merely a craft taken to a higher level? What I am trying to say is that this idea you have – that the artist must somehow bring a light to the common unfeeling masses – is a lie. It’s a dangerous fiction. He can never escape the masses. He is never more than one of them. Enclosed on all sides. Crushed to death. Eaten alive by his audience. No writer ever met a better fate.’

I was unsure of how to reply to this. Happily, the nurse had already arrived to take away Edwin’s cold cup of tea, and to give me the silent smile that said our time was up. As I was led away from the room, the light, the chairs and the old man, I asked her about him.

‘Oh, Edward? Has he been saying his name’s Edwin again? I don’t know where he got that idea from. He’s one of our youngest patients. He’ll be fifty-three in June. I’m not surprised you thought he was older. I think it was all the screens myself. They’re what did for his face, the poor man. The light from the screens. He used to be in computers, you know. One of those internet startups. Lost all his money. I’m sure he’s been telling you about his blogging again. I’m sorry if he was being difficult. He has a very selective memory these days.’ 

• fiction
• tumbling erratically
• senseless contrivances

drank

Of all the myths which foreigners continue to harbour about England, the idea that our public houses are either very very friendly or very very unfriendly is the one in which I have most frequently found some semblance of truth. Allow me to share a few anecdotes from my own experience. 

Several years ago, me and my lady friend of that time were out on a pleasant country walk when we decided to take refreshment at a little place which I had often passed but never entered. It was one of those little old buildings with thick walls and tiny windows, and though we could see little of the interior through the dimpled panes, I felt reasonably confident that this would be up to our standards. 

Since it was a sunny day, my lady friend decided to go and take a seat in the garden around the back of the pub, leaving me to squeeze past a brand new Mercedes, a Porsche and a BMW Z3 simply to get to the front door. (I had yet to learn the general rule that if there are a lot of expensive cars parked outside, the pub is likely to be full of wankers inside, no matter how rich or poor the surrounding area.)

Still, it seemed pleasant enough. The ceiling was low and the fittings were old, and every inch of the walls was covered in old lithographs or photographs or cinematographs or I don’t know what, beermats and dusty musical instruments and an oar from a boat, and a framed copy of a yellowing bar menu signed by George Orwell. There was nobody seated at any of the tables, but almost every inch of the little bar itself was surrounded by regulars seated on stools. They were all men of a certain age – I would not say they were gentlemen, despite their ostentatious modes of transportation – all decked out in polo shirts and stonewashed jeans a size too small, displaying an inch or more of white sock above their clean white Reebok Classics. It occurred to me then, as it does now, that a certain kind of American would find their garb immensely appealing, and perhaps I even allowed myself a little smile, one which was instantly checked by their weary glances and a lull in their murmured conversation as I approached. 

Since there was no free space at the bar, I was forced to twist sideways and insert myself between two of the regulars. This would prove to be my undoing. I asked for a pint of Guinness for myself and a Coke for my lady friend. The barmaid (the only woman in the place) went of to get the drinks. Wallet in hand, I waited. 

‘You’ve just made a big mistake,’ said the man to my right. I looked at him. His polo shirt was baby blue with a little bird over the nipple. I don’t remember very much else about his appearance. Whenever I think back now to this moment, he has the face of my father, but I am entirely willing to accept this as merely the projection of repressed sexual anxiety.

‘Excuse me?’ I said, or something equally banal.

‘You just made a big mistake.’ He pointed to me, or to where I was standing, or both. ‘You’ve just interrupted our conversation.’ 

I could not replicate the nuance of aggression in his tone if I tried. I suppose I could have challenged him. I could have pointed out that if he and his chums weren’t taking up the whole bloody bar then there would be room elsewhere for me to get through. I could have made the point to the barmaid that perhaps the reason this pub was so bloody empty was because idle bastards like this one were making things thoroughly unpleasant for anyone else who might happen to drop by while in search of a new local. I could have said many things.

I said I was sorry. In fact, I said it several times. He said some other things which I don’t recall but I am sure they were very rude. No doubt he felt he was exercising great restraint because I was only young and did not know what I was doing. Any other man he would have thumped. I felt lucky. I moved out of the way, all the way down to the end of the bar – that distant region where the staff stack dirty glasses and crockery before they go in the dishwasher. I stood there, blushing what felt like a deep purple, while the man in the baby blue shirt went back to talking to his friend in a low and unsavory tone. Most likely they were talking about how terrible I was. He was that common type who has absolutely no conception of themselves as seen by others. 

***

Another night, many years later, I was with a different lady friend in one of our favourite haunts, an old gin palace off the Shaftesbury Avenue. I don’t know if it is still there or not. It had high ceilings and handsome cut-glass designs in the windows, and we liked it because it had retained all its old trappings of high Victoriana. They had even kept the old divider between the saloon and public bar, though since we were all middle class back then, the furniture remained identical on both sides. There was also no television, so no risk of bumping into gangs of uncouth supporters of our national moronisms, but the proximity to the West End did mean that our progress in search of liquid refreshment was frequently obstructed by braying Yankee tourists and lost-looking families in search of a quiet meal. 

 It was very busy that night. Perhaps unwisely, we had ventured out at around seven o’clock on a Friday night, which meant that the local theaters would soon be packed to the rafters, and that everybody was in search of a meal accompanied by a handsome quantity of booze to ensure the appropriate level of relaxation which is now more or less mandatory if one wishes to wring any enjoyment at all out of our sadly-declining standards in the dramatic arts.

It being too busy to stand comfortably downstairs, we took our pints upstairs. I had never been upstairs in this pub. Ordinarily there was a sandwich board on the stairs stating that it was CLOSED FOR CLEANING, and so that night when we scaled that staircase in search of seating, we half-expected that some bustling matron figure would scurry before us to attest our progress across her spotless parquet. But as it turned out, there was nobody at all up there. 

We sat at a table by the window. I could not face the thought of placing my beer glass (wet with condensate) on such a clean and thickly varnished surface, so was forced to ensure the clucking tongue of my lady friend while I dived momentarily behind the empty upstairs bar in search of a coaster. And then we sat in silence and drank for a while. She sat on the padded bench before the window while I sat opposite, as was our custom. Once or twice she spoke to me but I do not recall what she said. I suppose I was listening too intently to a raised voice downstairs, or to some distinct noise that rose up from the busy city streets below us. I am easily distracted and not the finest of conversationalists. 

After I had drank perhaps half my pint, I heard footsteps climbing the stairs behind us. When the steps crossed the floor I felt I could give in to my compulsion to look around without seeming unwelcoming. It was a man alone, holding a bottle of beer, looking slightly lost. He was anonymously dressed in a suit with a loosened tie and unbuttoned collar, holding a rucksack and a raincoat in one hand, as if he had come straight from work. He sat alongside us at the next table. I thought this more than a little odd, since the room was large and full of empty tables. 

‘Is this the…’ he said to me, raising his eyebrows as if to finish the sentence by sheer force of expression. I looked blankly at my lady friend.

‘Yes,’ she said. She gave me a little smile. The man looked relieved, settled back into his chair, and took a swig of beer. I did something with my eyebrows as if to ask her what on earth she was playing at. She did something with hers as if to say wait and see. I suppose we were all doing things with our eyebrows that night.

It wasn’t long before more people began to drift into the upstairs room. I went downstairs again to fetch us more drinks and found that though people had begun to leave, there were still no seats available. By the time I made it back with our drinks, seven or eight people were sitting upstairs with us. They were all men, all about the same age as the first, and all dressed in more or less the same attire. They were what you would call ‘white collar’, these people. I moved to sit alongside my lady friend on the bench seat. We held hands under the table. We felt like something was about to happen, but we were not yet sure what that thing would be. 

After a few more minutes, an older man in a dark blue blazer with shiny buttons appeared at the top of the stairs. He was not carrying a drink, but once he arrived he immediately began to rearrange the furniture. The other men helped him as he cleared the tables from one corner of the room and moved the chairs so as to face this corner in a quarter-circle. He said nothing at all to anyone while he was doing this, only hummed a faint little tune which (though I cannot remember clearly enough to repeat or describe it in detail) seemed distantly familiar to me . 

The older man was very tall and lean except for a little pot belly which poked comically out from between his blazer (buttoned only at the top) and sharp-creased brown suit trousers. He was quite bald, and wore glasses with such thick lenses that it was difficult to tell where he was looking at any one point. Soon the upstairs room became so full of people that there were no more seats available, and the young men in their shabby suits were forced to stand in between tables with their beer and their suitcases and their weary, anxious expressions. 

And then the bald man moved into the corner he’d cleared and began to sing. He sang loud and clear over the hum of conversation from downstairs and the traffic from outside. He sang a song of deep, rounded vowels in a language I did not recognise. At once the other men turned to him if standing and got to their feet if sitting and moved slowly towards him, forming a close wall of shoulders and backs to us as we sat. They sang too. Nobody gave us a second glance or questioned our presence as their voices rose in unison with that of the older, balder man.

What is it about me that I cannot remember this music? 

Somebody turned off the lights, but the glow from the street meant it wasn’t anything like a true darkness up there. I could no longer see the bald man in the blue blazer, only a series of male backs and shoulders, their voices raised only softly in song so that his rose above them like a ship carried on the waves of a strange sea. I remember that I said ‘I think we should go now,’ to my lady friend, who was by this time holding on to my arm with the lightest of a grip that was even then slipping from me. 

I felt afraid. As the sounds began to rise and enfold us, I looked towards the door and the staircase. The way was blocked by suited bodies. And then I felt angry. Not only were they bothering my lady friend, they were blocking our way! These people with their voices and their language. If they wanted to come over here and sing their songs they could at least sing good English songs. For all I knew they were singing about us. Such a sound they made that their voices began to ring in my chest. The bald man in the blue blazer was smiling like a fool. I wanted to punch him in his stupid bald face. I got up to go. ‘I cannot stand this noise,’ I said to my lady friend, in what I thought was a voice loud enough to be heard over their song. ‘Let’s go. Let’s go now.’

She moved her lips so as to outline the words ‘I’m fine.’ Or at least that’s what I think she said. I couldn’t hear. I leant closer and she did it again. I’m fine. She smiled at me and craned her neck to look over the shoulders of the many besuited men. Their song was building to what you would call a dying fall as I left her, shoving my way out of the indifferent crowd and back towards the stairs and down the stairs and out of the pub into the cold night air. I did not see her again.

***

One more. Last weekend I went to a new pub across the river from my home. I was feeling good about this because it has a microbrewery and what they say is a pretty fine kitchen. My good feelings were aided by the bright, clear afternoon air. The sparkle of the winter sun playing across the water of the old river was a delight to me as I strolled across the bridge to this new pub.

Imagine my confusion when the first thing the barman said to me on entering the aforementioned establishment was: ‘Please take a seat.’ I could see myself in the mirror behind the bar. My mouth hung open. A little black square. ‘I’ll have someone come to take your order in just a moment,’ he said. He then moved back over to take a credit card payment from some silly woman with an enormous handbag. I hovered, wondering if I should not try and attract his attention again with the impetuous wave of a tightly folded five pound note, but I detected that I had somehow become invisible to him. I did as I was told.

The closest free seat was an enormous leather couch with a good view into the street, so I sat there. I sank deeply into the couch until I was quite sure that my backside was in fact lower than my ankles. I can’t reach my pint, I thought, but then I remembered that I hadn’t even got one yet. I tried to relax. I looked up. A television was on above my head, showing not sports but the BBC News. I had never seen a news channel on in a pub before. Here, people actually seemed to be watching it. There was a big boat lying on its side in the water. The other customers were mostly middle-aged couples and families. There were no grumpy old blokes propping up the bar at all – in fact, there weren’t even any barstools. And there were children everywhere.

Other things that were everywhere included large mirrors, signs from shops made new to look old, and painted reproductions of LP covers with price tags hanging from one corner. There was a bicycle with flat tires hanging from the ceiling. An oar from a boat. A touch-screen jukebox. The woman serving tables – there was only one – did not seem to have seen me, sunk into my seat and glowering across the room at the barman. I looked at the menu. I didn’t want anything to eat, but since I was now getting table service I felt I ought to order something. I picked a starter and waited. She walked back and forth several times. I made the eyes. I made all the hand signals. My eyebrows were practically touching the ceiling.

Twenty minutes later, I gave up. I went back to the bar and said ‘Excuse me,’ while she was checking her mobile phone. I ordered a drink and no food. She gave me the pint right away, her eyes up and settling on me for a half-second before rolling way back into her skull, her head and hip cocked as the beer poured. I am sure she thought she was better than me. Her boss passed by but didn’t give me a second glance. I looked up at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. At last I had become invisible. Good. That was something.

Something bumped quite hard into the back of my right heel. ‘Excuse me.’ I turned to look at who it was. It was a young man pushing a pram. Sitting in the pram was a chubby little face floating in a sea of fleece. The front wheel of the pram was an inch from my foot. There wasn’t quite enough room for it to pass between me and a large brick pillar at my back. ‘Would you mind,’ he said pointedly from behind his glasses and cardigan and fancy foreign girlfriend hanging off his arm. 

I shook my head and supped my pint, shaking my head. He reached out and tapped my shoulder. I didn’t speak or move. Why don’t you just piss off. It’s your own fault for bringing that ugly little sprog in here. Prams are for outside. Any fool can see that. You with your children and your bloody sense of entitlement. You can’t just go barging through wherever you like and expect everyone else to. No. It’s not a bloody battering ram. You can fold it up at the door and leave it there. I wouldn’t come in here with a wet umbrella held over my head and expect you to just get dripped all over. You can fold it up at the door with the fucking child inside it for all I care. The thing is old enough to walk. Look at him with his great fat face. It’s because he won’t walk. What is wrong with you people. Bringing prams into a pub. 

Jesus wept.

• england
• fiction

the crest

One evening we were in the pub waiting for our dinner to arrive and not saying very much. I was looking past her shoulder to the bar and watching the regulars, of which we were not. They were mostly men but also one woman. I suppose you would call her an ‘older’ woman but she could not have been much older than my mother. She was with one man but she was laughing with another man several stools down the bar from her. They’d had a joke and she and the other man were almost bent double into their drinks with the laughter. And I thought, when was the last time I laughed like that?

I never laugh like that, I said. I know, she said. I laugh all the time, I said, but not like that. Not that kind of full-body belly laugh. It’s not like I don’t laugh. I chuckle at jokes. I laugh at my own jokes more. I laugh at the TV the most. That Larry David. We’d been watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I enjoyed the part where he tried to set up that muslim woman in the burqa with his blind friend. Did you know she was actually played by Frank Zappa’s daughter? Moon Unit Zappa. That’s her name. I looked this up. Moon Unit. She also did all that valley girl stuff on his song Valley Girl. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? 

I don’t think I’m enough fun, I said. In person I am kind of stiff and inflexible. But I have these little daydreams sometimes. In my dreams I’m a popular guy. For example maybe I am having a party and playing some songs and everybody complements me on my choice of music. That’s awful, she said. So you only care about being perceived as a cool kind of guy because of what kind of music you like. Is that what you really want? No, I said, of course not. That’s why I’m not that kind of guy. But you are, she said, because you said that’s what you want. You just said. You want to have a party at your place and you want everybody to be invited and you want them all to say what a great taste in music you have. 

What I’m trying to say, I said, is that I would really like to be seen as a fun kind of guy. Someone who laughs with his whole body. Not just a wry little chuckle now and again. Not just a begrudging giggle at some stupid sitcom. I want to entertain and be entertained by people. I mean real people. Ordinary people who sit at bars and laugh together through the shared joy of their experiences. I cannot go on laughing more at television than I laugh with real people. 

Why not, she said. Maybe real life isn’t that funny. Maybe what you really want is to be liked and to be looked at. You find things just about as funny as you ever did, no matter how much you start twitching and convulsing as a byproduct. Laughing a lot is not the same as being a funny person. In fact I might go so far as to say that the funniest people do not themselves laugh very much at all.

You want to be a performer, she said. No, I said. Yes, she said: you know you have a stick up your backside, but you just don’t want everybody to see the sharpened edge poking out the crest of your spine. No, I said. Yes, she said: not that a stick is such a bad thing. You may be inflexible, but we all need something to lean on from time to time. I am finding this conversation increasingly less funny, I said. 

Our food arrived. The chef bought it out himself and asked if there was anything we wanted. We wanted only ketchup. As we ate, I developed a silent determination to make her laugh as long and as hard as I possibly could. Immediately I began to develop a plan. It would not come about through a sequence of quick, dumb comic thrusts. It would not come through an elegant verbal riposte to some banal observation of hers. I had to hit her hard and fast when she was least expecting it with the greatest joke ever told. And when she heard it she would never be able to stop laughing. 

• fiction
• curb your enthusiasm

like a ghost in its old home

• books
• ernest becker
• middlemarch

‘But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.)’

– George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’

I recently finished playing the HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus on the PS3. I bought it mainly off the back of countless recommendations which cited it as one of the finest games of the previous decade. Not only did it promise to deliver an immersive and action-packed adventure story, but many critics had praised it for its unexpected emotional depth. Steven Poole (one of my favourite writers on gaming) described his reactions as follows:

‘My enchantment at the kinetic challenge and haunting beauty of the game was quickly replaced by a sense of waste and guilt at my serial murdering of these dumb giants. I suspected that this was perhaps going to turn out to be the point, but I couldn’t bear to carry on. For me, the aesthetic pleasures weren’t enough to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering. If a game of violence is so effective in its message of anti-violence that you actually stop playing, does that mean it was a success or a failure?’

Having read this and other similar sentiments expressed elsewhere, I was all set up for a veritable blubfest. I should confess that I am vulnerable to this kind of thing in all kinds of storytelling media – I will shed a tear at the slightest emotional provocation, even when I don’t have any particular admiration for or interest in the story being told – and this made it all the more surprising that when I finally got around to playing the game, I found myself oddly unmoved. 

At first I could see where they were coming from. Killing the first few creatures seemed almost too easy. For the most part, they didn’t seem inclined to fight back very much. As with its predecessor ICO, the attention to detail with which the creatures were animated gave each one an expression and a character all its own. Defeating them felt much like putting down an animal which – if not wholly defenseless – could only manage to put up some kind of confused resistance. 

But the creatures soon became much more challenging, and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for a gaping serpentine maw tearing towards you through desert sands, or to feel something about great glowing eyes which start shooting lasers at you, or to feel empathy for giant infantile hands trying to crush you with a stone knife the size of a house. As the colossi become progressively more difficult to stab in the head with your sword, each battle becomes less a balletic dance between player and machine and more a frantic struggle to stay alive as well as (literally) on top of the situation. 

(As an aside, seeing Shadow of the Colossus as a sequence of overwrought boss encounters is kind of true but it’s also besides the point. The boss encounters of most games require the player to discover one or two key actions required to defeat a seemingly unstoppable adversary; this is true of SotC, but there are so many different elements, challenges and key actions required to take down most of the colossi that each beast begins to resemble an entire level of most games in miniature. The intermediary scenes in which the player must ride across a deserted landscape to face the next colossus act as a sort of buffer in between levels; they’re largely void of conventional gameplay, but like the map screens in old platform games they provide a meditative neutral ground for the player to relax and collect their thoughts before the next encounter.)

The sympathy ploy is a classic bait and switch: initial feelings of wonder are soon replaced by fear, anxiety and anger which drive the player to kill out of frustration, until at last the strings begin to swell and they look down in disgust at their darkened blade and soiled hands. So it goes for each battle. But it’s not until very late in the game (the final colossus) that the basic dynamic of confrontation changes: after a long sequence of dodging powerful energy blasts and scaling the complex platforms and overhangs of the creature’s armour, the player is forced to attract its attention by hurting it in an exposed area. The creature then reaches to touch the wounded area, and the player must quickly grab on to its palm, climb around to the back of its hand (while the hand is moving and inverting through the air!) and up its arms towards its shoulders and head. All of which is pretty difficult in and of itself. But what really struck me about this sequence is how docile the creature becomes once you begin to scale its sides. When it reaches towards its wounds, it is not trying to crush the player, knock or scrape them away – it is simply placing a hand as we might touch a mosquito bite or a paper cut. It’s a shockingly tender moment. 

Other games take a similar three-step approach to emotional engagement with their adversaries. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution (previously) the game starts out by (a) nudging you towards a stealthy, non-lethal approach, before; (b) the enemies get really nasty in the mid- to late-game and it becomes tempting to go all Robocop, until; (c) the endgame presents you with whole rooms full of people who you don’t really want to kill but who seriously want to kill you. Such are the moral dilemmas of modern gaming! But at least in Deus Ex you still have some semblance of choice; the only option presented to you in SotC is (as Poole suggests) to not play anymore. 

And that’s fine. What I appreciate about Shadow of the Colossus is not that it presses my emotional buttons at any given point (even a Richard Curtis movie can do that from time to time) but that it provides some kind of moral ambiguity beyond everyday head-stabbing. After a certain point in the game, it became pretty clear that I was doing something bad and possibly evil in killing each colossus. But I didn’t want to stop. Why?

I felt I could separate my character’s motivations from my own. As with Orwell and his elephant, it became clear to me that my avatar had no choice but to go on to commit terrible acts. I only wanted to see how terrible they could become. Poole says that for him: ‘the aesthetic pleasures weren’t enough to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering’, but for me whatever ‘sense of regret’ there was in the game was rendered only as an inextricable part of its aesthetic pleasures. Regret may have touched him (my little man with a digital sword) but it didn’t touch me. I only wanted to see what would become of him if he kept on doing what he felt driven to do. This is the stuff of tragedy. And though it is relentlessly downbeat and borderline inexplicable, the ending of Shadow of the Colossus is one of the most rewarding and memorable I have ever seen in a video game.

• gaming
• shadow of the colossus

what to write at the wake →

‘So here we are, on this side of the mountain, nostalgic for the great storm-struck plateaus where our writer-ancestors once worked their magic, but knowing that we live on the lowlands. Here we are at the end of Literature and Culture, stripped, bereft, embarrassed. We are children tromping in old boots. Perhaps even Bernhard and Bolaño are too grand for us to imitate! We should study the perverse doodlers, David Shrigley and Ivan Brunetti. Their very choice of medium shows how they have embraced their doom. We should disconnect our computers and put the books out on the stoop and forget we ever learned to read or care. But for those of us who cannot escape the need to scribble and type, here are a few pointers.

‘Use an unliterary plainness. It knows the game is up, that it’s all finished. The style of The Savage Detectives is notably unliterary, almost inelegant, for all the virtuosic restlessness of its narrative voices. It has “a choking directness.” Even Bernhard, for all his grammatical convolutions, writes, finally, with a kind of pathetic obviousness, he does not gussy or adorn, but spews instead the stuff of his complaint. The abyss needs the clear steadiness of a testimony, it needs the day-after sobriety of a witness-report to remember what went before. Literature is no longer the Thing Itself, but about the vanished Thing.

‘Resist closed forms, resist masterpieces. The urge to create masterpieces is a kind of necrophilia. Writing must be open on all sides so that the draft of real life—gloomy, farcical life — can pass through it, rifling its pages. Vila-Matas says that he feels it is necessary for whoever writes a fictional text to show his hand, to allow an image of himself to appear. But it is an image of farcical lifethat shows its hand in that literature which comes after Literature. The author must give up on aping genius. Rather show the author as ape, the author as idiot. Don’t have the hubris of being the comedian. You are the straight man in this farce; the universe is the funny man. So don’t be silly, cute, crack jokes, or play coy, but allow hilarity, a cleansing painful laughter that splits your sides and your heart. Follow your own foolishness like tracks upon the sand.

‘Write about this world, whatever else you’re writing about, a world dominated by dead dreams. Mark the absence of Hope, of Belief, of Commitments, of high-flown Seriousness. Mark the past from which we are broken and the future that will destroy us. Write about a kind of hope that was once possible as Literature, as Politics, as Life, but that is no longer possible for us.

‘Mark your sense of imposture. You’re not an Author, not in the old sense. You haven’t really written a Book, not a Real Book. You’re part of no tradition, no movement, no vanguard. There’s nothing at stake for you in Literature, not really, for all your demented strutting. In addition, very few people are actually reading: mark that fact, too. No one’s reading, idiot! There are more novelists than readers. There are so many books…

‘Mark your gloom. Mark the fact that the end is nigh. The party’s over. The stars are going out, and the black sky is indifferent to you and your stupidities. You’re with Bolaño’s characters at the end of the quest, lost in the Sonora Desert, and at the end of all quests. You’re drawing stupid cartoons to pass the time in the desert. That’s it, the whole of your oeuvre: the drawing of stupid cartoons to pass the time in the desert.   

‘Don’t be generous and don’t be kind. Ridicule yourself and what you do. Savage art, like the cannibal you are. Remember, only when the thing is dead, picked at by a million years of crows, gnawed at by jackals, spat upon and forgotten, can we discover that last inviolate bit of bone.’

• books
• manifesto
• writing

no banker left behind

We have some very specific ideas about corruption in Britain. Essentially, it is still seen as being about dodgy-looking men exchanging briefcases full of cash while muttering assurances in overheated hotel rooms. Such notions are confirmed when the British public is treated to the spectacle of something like the recent Pakistan spot-fixing scandal, which the tabloids enjoyed because they hold mythical notions like ‘good sportsmanship’ in the highest esteem, and because only people from the wrong team had to go to jail. 

For the most part, we are content to believe that Britain is Not the Sort of Place in which That Sort of Thing can occur. When it does, we can take comfort in the idea that the system is self-correcting after all, and we can always look to Russia or Nigeria to point to extreme examples of what we believe we are not. But other insidious forms of corruption have been so incorporated into the ways and means of our public life that we frequently cease to notice anything is wrong. 

Recently, Liam Fox was forced to resign from his position as Defence Secretary after his links with Adam Werrity and neocon foundation Atlantic Bridge were exposed in the papers. In his stunningly glib and self-satisfied resignation speech, which began by comparing his own troubles to dead children in Libya for a ‘necessary sense of proportion’ – what, because he hadn’t personally murdered any kids? – Fox went on to stress the idea that the reason he had to resign was because: ‘it is not only the substance but perception that matters’. No, Liam: it is the substance that matters. Because what you did was corrupt.

Not that Liam Fox could be expected to understand this. Lobbying has been a mostly unregarded part of our political system for so long that it seems impossible any politician could ever see it as institutionalised corruption. Political parties have to get their cash from somewhere, right? And since nobody is willing to make the argument for more public money going straight into party coffers, they see no conceivable alternative to taking money from rich people with very specific interests.  

(Similarly, the principal reaction of politicians to the expenses scandal was not shame but a weary bafflement that the public should be so concerned at them taking what they thought of as their dues. If the system could reward them better elsewhere [i.e. with a high-ranking job in the private sector] then it was only logical that politicians should be better ‘compensated’ for this loss in their real income. Curiously, this argument does not apply to lesser paid public servants.)

The modern politician does not have any problem serving the interests of the very wealthy because they see it as a natural extension of their duties to their constituents. So when David Cameron goes to China to petition the Premier on behalf of vacuum cleaner magnate James Dyson, this is understood as being exactly equivalent to representing the interests of the British People. After all, James Dyson is a British Person who employs a lot of other British People, and who (we assume) pays more tax than you or I. So if Dyson could be said to count more than us, then Cameron is actually only doing his democratic duty in parroting Dyson’s concerns on an international scale. 

Equally, going to Europe to directly and personally represent the interests of the City of London is totally fine because as the last decade has shown, our financial sector definitely has the interests of the rest of us at heart. On no account should any of this be understood as corruption. Because corruption would be paying somebody a lot of people to represent your interests ahead of those who have less money. And then where would be be?

• corruption
• lies
• politics
• power
• liam fox
• david cameron

the curse

I was listening to my music on the tube this morning and looking at nothing in particular when a woman sat alongside me and took out a small blue exercise book from her bag. My gaze, having nothing else on which to rest, naturally wandered over to see what she was reading. At first I could only see stacks of numbers written in red biro; my first thought was that she was a teacher catching up on her marking, not only because of the exercise book, but also because she seemed to fit my own idea of what a schoolmarm ought to look like: older, frizzy of hair and spare of tyre, with a slight stoop to her walk, though presumably she remained vigorous enough to subdue an unruly class of teenagers.

By chance the paper was so angled that I could look down upon it without turning my head too much, and in drooping my eyelids low I felt I could effectively disguise my curiosity lest it become apparent to the passengers sitting opposite. As I looked and looked, I saw that there were other layers to the writing in the book. There were words written in pencil, in a cursive script which was all long loops and curves. I did not think I could have read them, even without the numbers.

The numbers were written in red biro and they covered almost all the white space, scattered apparently at random, as if she had picked up a handful and dropped them across the page. They were grouped as either four or six characters together, the figures split into pairs with dashes so as to resemble dates; but if they were dates, they matched no calendar I could discern. Some were within brackets, but I saw no other mathematical symbols suggesting equations. Some of the numbers had been marked with an orange or yellow highlighter pen, while others had been hastily scribbled out in rabid streaks of red biro. And she was reading this as if it were a novel.

As I looked on, I saw something move across the page. At first I thought it was something in my eye so I turned my head briefly away, blinked a few times, made a show of rubbing my eyes and yawning; but when I returned to my former position, I was sure that not only had she further opened the pages of her book to me, but that I had not been previously mistaken when I saw the figure ’00-00-00’ wriggling slowly across the lines of the page as if it were a little jointed creature. 

I did not look away or say a word. This is not the way one behaves on the London Underground. To be a resident of this city is to learn to tolerate the extraordinary in various degrees. To be a resident of this city is to learn to watch without being seen to feel. And that is what I did. I watched as the numerical absence made its way across the page. I saw that as it did so, the other numbers seemed to tilt themselves towards it, or to shift aside almost imperceptibly slowly so as not to be in its path. 

At first I did not notice that the numbers were forming a shape. A circle within an oval: an orb on the page, the numerical absence forming the keystone of a curving iris. The open eye lay quivering, focusing itself upon me. And it was then that I realised I could read that faint cursive writing on the page behind the figures. And it said: ’I was listening to my music on the tube this morning and looking at nothing in particular when a woman sat alongside me and took out a small blue exercise book from her bag…’

• fiction
• not fiction
• london

the parodist

‘Who has not heard at Paris of her that caused her face to be flayed only for the fresher complexion of a new skin?’

— Michel de Montaigne, ‘That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends on the Opinion we Have of Either’ (1580)

When we asked what brought her to the internet in the first instance, she could only reply that it had always been there. At six, her parents had been the ones who helped her to set up her first profile on a social network for kids. She immediately linked herself to her entire class at school. The links were reciprocated, but even at that age she was selective about those with whom she would exchange messages. Later she archived that profile, as with everything she created, but she would not respond to our questions about it. ‘I have not looked at any of those old things in years,’ she said to us, ‘and I have no intention of ever doing so. It is all in me anyway so what do I care,’ she said.

At thirteen, she created another blog named after her dog (a Chow Chow named Cardashian because she preferred  the letter C to K) and there she uploaded low quality photographs of herself and her friends at the mall, in class at school, at the food court. She thought it very amusing to take candid photos of people unaware and post them on the internet. Since she could not resist telling the other kids at school whenever she took a particularly funny photo, the blog became notorious in their little circle. When her teachers found out, they were not happy. The school threatened to suspend her if she did not take the blog down. But her parents were not angry. Secretly, they were delighted. They saw this as an early manifestation of an entrepreneurial creativity which had marked out those who they regarded as the most talented (and wealthy) of their generation.

When we asked her why she thought taking photographs of people and posting them on the internet without their permission was a good idea, she said: ‘I saw something different in people when they didn’t know I was watching.’     

She did not take Cardashian offline. She set it to Private, so that it could only be seen by her. This, too, was archived. But it was not long after she made it inaccessible that she began keeping a video blog on another website. She had recently acquired a laptop with a built-in camera, and every evening she would sit with it in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, dictating her thoughts and hopes and fears in video clips which would often last up to half an hour. Watching these now is not a task for the impatient; her sentences run on and merge into one another, forgoing grammar and sense, and her explanations are often entirely composed of irrelevant details, non sequiturs and opaque, incredible metaphors. 

She was at an awkward age. She told us that speaking had felt easier for her than writing. She never edited nor reviewed her clips once they had been filmed – she simply uploaded them to the website and fell asleep with her computer stowed under her pillow. ‘And the next day I would forget everything,’ she said. 

It surprised her to learn that people she did not know had found her videos on the internet. Some had posted appreciative comments, while others were rude about her voice or her looks (mainly her looks). Somebody posted a remix of her which made it look like she was saying some very unpleasant things about herself. She would not tell us what things she appeared to say in the video (which we have been unable to find online). She only said they were ‘unrepeatable’. 

Again, word got back to school about her video blog. A boy with unrequited affections for her had found it while doing a deep search on her internet presence. When she rejected him, he sent a link to the blog around the school with a cruel and entirely invented comment about her sexual preferences. Again, she was forced to render all her entries inaccessible. Socially, she did not recover until she left school for college.  

She told us that though she wasn’t aware of this at the time, her parents had always known about the video blog. It was not unusual for her mother to sit up late in bed with her tablet, listening intently to her daughter’s quiet voice through earbuds while her husband slept alongside her. They did not ask her about it for fear that she would stop posting.

When she left home for college she found herself spending a lot more of her time at a computer. She wanted to write something and put it on the internet, but she was no longer interested in blogging about her own life. It was, she thought, not very exciting compared to the lives of others. Most days she spent working indoors and looking out of the window. 

One night she set up a blog called Parisian Walkways. We asked her why she had called it that but she said she couldn’t remember. It purported to be the blog of Estelle, an English exchange student living with her French boyfriend in the city of the same name. It was mostly text, garnished with the occasional photograph culled from an obscure corner of somebody’s long-forgotten photoblog. Since she could not write much about the city without betraying her lack of knowledge, she settled instead for describing Estelle’s daily routines in minute detail.

She had very particular ideas about what made Paris special as a city. A lot of black coffee was drunk and a lot of pain au chocolat consumed. There were stories about how she had met her boyfriend (romantic and incorrigible) in a bistro, how he had seduced her between glasses of Prosecco and phrases picked out on his classical guitar, how they walked by the Seine, rode the Metro to Montmartre and Notre Dame, and took the last elevator of the day to the top of ‘La Tour Eiffel’ to view the city by the light of ‘La Lune’.

Nobody much wanted to read this. She lost interest in writing Estelle when she ran out of ways to describe a life that became precisely as dull as she imagined it to be. Estelle left her boyfriend – apparently, like all Frenchmen, he could not be trusted with the opposite sex – left Paris, and went back to somewhere called ‘Middlesboro’. The blog remained online and only attracted a certain small fame in later years when the identity of the author became common knowledge. Would-be detectives visited the dead site in their hundreds and left comments discussing the implications of Estelle’s actions, advancing theories as to how they might relate to the true events of the author’s life. Many claimed that the characters she’d created were portraits of people she’d known at college, but she refused to comment on or verify these claims for us.

Her next experiment in blogging coincided with her first full-time job out of college. She worked late shifts as a sub-editor at a local paper, a dull occupation which mainly involved pulling stories off the press wires and sifting them into something resembling a house style. 

We suspect that it was while ‘surfing the blogosphere’ at work that she came up with the idea for Claudia. Nobody knows where she got the photographs from that became such a part of her appeal. No-one ever stepped forward to claim that they were the original of Claudia, and image searches turned up no results for the photo copied out of context. Some suggested that the author paid a girl she knew in real life to send her pictures of herself in various poses, but no records of any such transactions can be found. We have asked many times and she refuses to be drawn on this point.

It is now generally agreed that the photos were a major part of Claudia’s appeal. ‘People on the internet, they like looking at pictures of people they don’t know,’ said Internet Expert Dr Smorgenstern, in his recent TV documentary on the subject. ‘And what has always surprised me about this is that these people who are internet famous don’t even have to be attractive. In many cases it’s better if they’re not attractive. Because women, you know, even though they spend a lot of time looking at really beautiful women – they do not always like this! It makes them uneasy about themselves. Better if they see somebody who has a habit of picturing themselves as other women do – which is to say, sometimes they are gorgeous, sometimes they are a little disheveled, sometimes they just want to hide their face altogether. But always they are worth a photo. If you are a woman, there’s no state in which you can’t be photographed on the internet and score a hit, or ten thousand. Except maybe when you’re on the can. And even then! And even then.’

Claudia, while not (in Smorgenstern’s words) a ‘classic beauty’, did at least have ‘the advantage of being much more attractive than the author of her blog!’ The question of whether the photographs of Claudia sitting or standing or reclining in various poses and states of undress in front of the camera came before or after the accompanying written entries remains to be answered. Some have gone so far as to question whether the same author wrote Claudia’s words at all; given that she plagiarised the body of a woman to take her place in over two hundred JPEGs, why not steal somebody else’s writing too?

Most of Claudia’s early posts revolved around things that had happened to her as a child or in her adolescence. There were stories of her childhood in an unnamed midwestern state, of kindly aunts and weekend boyfriends, of old pets and how they died, of high school friends and what happened to them, of her body and how it changed. A close textual reading reveals that most of her entries were centered around anecdotes which contained at least one moment of epiphany, three thoroughly self-critical descriptions, two little inside jokes, and a faintly self-congratulatory conclusion. It was formulaic, but there was an impulsive flourish in her style, reminiscent of the Beat writers, that her readers found appealing; especially when combined with a dramatic, flirtatious image, such as the much-copied one which found Claudia leaning in the doorway of a suburban house at night, part-obscured behind a screen door, her shoulders given an otherworldly glow by the dim light from the hallway behind her. 

Though Claudia had developed a small following of regular readers, the author was again running out of ideas for new posts. There could only be so many anecdotes to tell, and since nothing was happening in the author’s life, she could not conceive of much more happening in Claudia’s life. It was for this reason, she told us, that she had to introduce James. In what was perhaps her most honest and coherent statement on the matter, she said: ‘People have to believe in their own deliverance.’

James first appeared in a public comment (posting as ‘J’) on an entry in which Claudia described a night of driving to see her cousin one night the previous week. She had driven for half an hour in deep snow before realising she’d left the house still wearing her pyjamas under her outdoor clothes (‘but whatever’). An encounter with a gas station attendant with an unusually roving gaze prompted a meditation on the nature of authority in public space and her right to security from such unpleasantness. The author then took the step (borrowed, some argued, from the conceits of certain TV soap operas) of introducing James as an antagonist critical of our heroine’s firmly-held conceits about gender relations. James wrote: 

Hi, this is J. Long time reader first time commenter. I just thought you should know I know the guy you mentioned a little. He’s an ok guy. You shouldn’t assume those things you said about him. even if he does seem like a creeper. He’s bored, he’s single, he works nights. You’re a looker. Have a little empathy. 

Having said that I will be happy to drop by one night and kick his ass.
You’re welcome.

J.

This comment provoked a storm of discussion as to whether the particularities of any man’s circumstances gave him the ‘right’ to look at a woman in a way that made her uncomfortable. There was no consensus reached, but James did at least end up apologising in a way that avoided any real admission of guilt on his part. 

Claudia’s posts began to reference him obliquely as ‘my local correspondent’, suggesting that he lived in a neighbouring town without ever venturing into specificities of location. The first her readers saw of him was in a photo posted without comment of her sitting alongside a young man in the window booth of a roadside diner. Both were sipping milkshakes from straws, her strawberry, him chocolate. He was good-looking, perhaps a little older than her. Some of her readers were surprised by the colour of his skin and expressed their incredulity in the comments, none of which she deleted. She told us she thought they made him seem more real to her.

(Later, a more critical readership would cite this photo as evidence of a conspiracy between the author and her two characters. They pointed out that the angle of the photo suggested that a third party had to have been sitting in the booth opposite and holding the camera across the table for it to have been possible. She has never addressed these claims to our satisfaction.)

Claudia’s relationship with James bloomed in public. Their photos became more intimate: here they were walking through the woods near her home, the sunlight through the trees casting them in a romantic fantasy of the author’s own making; there they are sharing fruit loops and black coffee on the couch, him reading the New Yorker, she in boy shorts with her hair in bangs and her legs crossed across his lap. He was rarely mentioned by name in her writing, but he became a presence, usually referred to as ‘bf’ or ‘him’, or by his nickname, ‘the dog’.

For a while, they seemed happy. Claudia posted less frequently, and when she did she only posted photographs of her with James. As she explained in one of her lengthier missives, they were busy together all the time, and his near-constant presence meant that writing ‘a daily emotional weather report’ just became an impossible chore. She told him everything, and so to tell the internet all that and more would feel like a betrayal of sorts because there was nothing she wanted ‘you’ to know that ‘he’ hadn’t already heard. Once or twice she did write something stark and unexpected, perhaps to give the impression they’d had a fight, but for the most part this was a happy time in the tone of her blogging.

The tip jar appeared on the site shortly after Claudia announced that she was leaving home to be with James. In a post entitled ‘the rent’s still too damn high!’ she announced she was moving to his apartment in a neighbouring town, which meant she’d have to give up her job as a teaching assistant in the local primary school. ‘And basically, we could use a buck or two,’ she wrote, adding that she hated to ‘beg’ but she spent a lot of ‘unpaid’ time on this site ‘to bring you my love’. She urged her readers to show their appreciation by making a small ‘donation’.

And, while the author of Claudia was still make a comfortable income from her sub-editing work, still living alone in the same quiet condominium as she always had, the ‘donations’ began to roll in. Most were only a few dollars, but one or two were much larger – one anonymous benefactor gave her $500. She expressed her effusive thanks in one entry even while warning in another that she wasn’t promising anything in return for said money (‘no nudie pics!!’).

It was around this time that the parody blog appeared. ‘Deconstructing Claudia’ took each of her posts and subjected it to a merciless dissection. Both her style of writing and of living were taken apart and put back together in a grotesque register. But as its anonymous author made clear, the intention wasn’t only to mock her – from early on Claudia was branded ‘a liar’ and ‘a thief’. At this point there was no implication that Claudia was herself the invention of another writer. It seemed like the ‘Deconstructor’ had an obscure grudge of their own to play out, but it was impossible to detect a motivation from the fragments written outside of parody.

Claudia’s fans tried without success to trace the parodist back to a real individual. Claudia herself claimed not to be troubled by it. Her blog was experiencing a surge in traffic, and she seemed to ignore even the most offensive comments left by the trolls who now frequented her threads. She and James had moved in together, and she’d found a regular job as a nanny for the young child of a local couple. Photos of her with a charming, wide-eyed baby boy followed. She wrote that she was happier than she’d ever been. Breathless, she wrote: ‘I am no longer a small town girl but a grown woman and I believe I am so much the better for that.’

It was then that Deconstructing Claudia began to post a series of photographs of the principal subject with a man who was not James. She and her unidentified companion were pictured together waiting in line at a movie theatre, eating fast food in the darkened parking lot of a drive-thru restaurant, and leaving a fashionable bar, their arms laden with bags of shopping from designer stores. The parodist gave no explanation for these images, which appeared to have been taken with a powerful DSLR from within a stationary car. 

Some of Claudia’s readers did not believe it could be her, arguing that the image was too blurry, or that it had been doctored to add her face or replace James with another man. Others, self-proclaimed experts, studied the photos and asserted that they were unmodified. At first Claudia refused to write about it, until the level of comments about it on her blog became (in her words) ‘ridiculous’ and ‘offensive’. After a long preamble to the affair, in which she announced that she was only writing this because James (‘who totally trusts me’) had asked her to, she gave her answer to the parodist’s supposed scoop: a webcam photo of herself pulling a face while slurping a slushie from one hand and giving the finger with the other. James could be seen standing in the room behind her: he too was slurping a slushie, flipping the bird. 

Needless to say, many of Claudia’s regular readers were not completely reassured by this show of solidarity, especially since the photos of her and the mysterious stranger kept appearing on the parody blog. Finally, a group of her fans decided to establish once and for all the truth behind the allegations. They began by cross-referencing the timestamp on the parodist’s photographs of Claudia with her mentions of what she had done and where she had been on or around those same days. They found that for the most part, Claudia had no other alibi for the exact times at which she’d been pictured with the stranger. But given that her posts had been fewer and further apart since moving in with James, this was hardly surprising, and ultimately inconclusive.

They began to dig further. They managed to locate online most of the places pictured both on Claudia’s blog and on the parodist’s site, and they marked these on a map. Then one of the group, who happened to live in the same state, offered to drive down to the town for a weekend to ‘scout out’ these locations, in case Claudia appeared. None of the group asked the scout what they would do if they saw Claudia. Perhaps it was taken as given that they would not approach her.

Despite making a tour of all Claudia’s favourite haunts, including the building which the group had pinpointed as her probable home (a deduction made by guesstimating the distance to and bearing from the spire of a local church, visible from a window in an old photograph on her blog) the scout could not find Claudia. The group found this surprising. They decided to do a little more digging and found more which surprised them: the account into which the tip jar paid was registered to a bank in another state, in the same region which sometimes routed her IP address. 

The group wrote to Claudia with these and other findings. They asked politely if they might meet with her in a public place to ‘discuss their concerns’. Claudia did not respond for a week, then Replied To All with a curt, one-word response: ‘no.’

Still they did not give up. They contacted the parodist. Some in the group felt this to be a betrayal of Claudia, but they were outvoted by the rest. Most already felt like Claudia showed no affection for them. They emailed the parodist with their evidence and theories. The parodist’s response was swift and unexpected – the address of a house in another state. The state of the IP address, the bank account. The home address of the author. 

What happened next was told and retold in the mainstream media for the next month. Given how unpopular the author was for that brief time, we find it astonishing how quickly the internet forgot about her again. A picture of the author leaving her house in tears, trying to shield her face with a newspaper which also bore her face, was published internationally across hundreds of outlets. After she repaid all the money ‘Claudia‘ had taken in ‘tips’, the group dropped all charges of fraud. 

Claudia and her Deconstruction remain online, for the curious. One theory is that the author of Claudia was also the parodist; no evidence of this has yet emerged, but then neither has any explanation of how the parodist would have come by her home address. We asked her about this. She said: ‘I got sloppy.’

Some have argued that there is a continuous, semi-conscious narrative thread woven through all of her writing. They say that even across all the different blogs she inhabited, she was expressing a deeper truth about herself, even while she actively misled her audience as to her real identity. But no watertight thesis has yet emerged as to what this secret story might be — nor, might we add, does anything resembling a ‘real identity’ transpire from the tale as commonly told. 

We asked her whether she thought that the ubiquity and anonymity of the internet meant that establishing the true self of any given individual had been made more difficult than ever before in human history. She said: ‘I wasn’t exceptional. I was just lucky.’ 

• fiction
• the parodist
• tl;dr

We finished playing Heavy Rain last night. When I say ‘we’, I mean my girlfriend and I, and we played it in a way I hadn’t played any game in years: together, sitting on the sofa, swapping the controller between scenes while the spectator offered advice and/or irksome criticism to the player regarding the onscreen action. Playing this way was a lot of fun, and for the first time (ever?) I found myself being the tough guy in our relationship. Often she would squeal and press the controller into my hands as the game forced us into another tense (but slightly ridiculous) fight scene; at one point she got so startled she screamed and threw the wireless controller across the room, forcing me to dive after it in order to save a character from their untimely demise. 

Heavy Rain is in the odd position of being scoffed at by hardcore gamers and largely overlooked by casual players. It’s become something of a joke for its use of QuickTime Events (frequently referred to as QTEs, even though QuickTime isn’t always used) where the player is challenged to hit, hold or manipulate the controls in time with icons which flash up on the screen. Traditionally, if you fail to complete one of these events, the game simply ends and you have to repeat the sequence until you get it right, but in Heavy Rain (as in its predecessor, Fahrenheit) the game rolls on regardless. Except that characters may still suffer, and even die in the process. Oh, and there’s no manual save function. Your decisions are pretty much final.

What this means is that it’s basically impossible not to finish the game. Most of the critical challenges aren’t very difficult, and apart from the occasional moral conundrum you’re never really unsure of what to do next. You can blunder your way through most of the QTEs, and even if one or more of the central characters dies, the game will continue. You might not get a very happy ending, but you will have ‘finished’ the game. This, along with a self-consciously cinematic aesthetic, is what makes Heavy Rain more similar to an interactive movie than a traditional gaming experience. 

That’s not to say it isn’t fun. Perhaps its most fascinating aspect is that even as you have to scour crime scenes for clues or save store clerks from armed robbers, you also spend a lot of time doing menial stuff; one sequence requires you to work out what to do with your son after he comes home from school. Do you let him watch TV all night and leave him asleep on the couch, or do you give him his dinner, make him do his homework and send him to bed early? The clock is ticking. Do nothing and time rolls on without you. Partly these sequences serve to slow the game down to a more reflective pace that breaks up the action sequences and demonstrates the remarkable level of technical detail invested into this world and its people. But really these moments are about getting to know the person you’re playing in a way that’s still quite unusual for most games.  

The question of motivation never usually comes up. As Charlie Brooker pointed out in one of his recent columns, most videogame characters are dicks. Normally it’s what the player desires in the moment, not the feelings of their character, that matters. And what the player desires in the moment is – given that their main method of interacting with the world is usually the barrel of a gun – normally something stupid and awful. There’s little that could really be said to ‘matter’ in most games beyond the life or death of the protagonist; when you die, the game is over, so anything that might keep you alive is therefore the good and right thing to do. Heavy Rain does rather better than most games at presenting you with the illusion of meaningful choice, but in doing so it does seem to sacrifice a lot of what makes most games gamelike.  

Perhaps what I liked most about Heavy Rain was playing it with my girlfriend. For a short while, it became a real thing for us. At a time when the most popular video games have foregone hot seat or split-screen multiplayer in favour of creating an environment where strangers from across the globe have an equal opportunity to be abused by raging pre-teens, it was a pleasant change to share a game with somebody else who was equally invested in the experience. 

• heavy rain
• gaming