Rags Of Filth

‘’Ngh...yeah...oh yeah, that’s what I like...that’s how I like it, so cold and hard, so rough and rugged, that’s what I’m into lads, that’s what – oh hello, I didn’t see you there. Oh, you know exactly who I am. Remember me, the acid-tongued columnist from the Daily Mail? You're not a reader? Oh dear, you must be some snivelling fool from the under classes, or even worse, a Guardian reader. Oh, heavens forfend! I’m sorry you caught me like this; I was just shooting my load off over this circa 1940s helmet, British forces, of course. Best in the world rah, didn’t you know. What’s this? Oh, just a few odds and ends from the war – ah, the second world war, what a heavenly thing to have been whirled up in, don’t you just love to reminisce about it? I’ve got a few old guns and whatnot lying about here too, I just adore shooting my load off to it all. It’s the roughness, the derring-do and the sheer nostalgic quality to it all – yes, we Mail journalists do have a true fetish for anything hearkening back from that lovely period. Golden age, didn’t you know. Now do turn around a second, while I finish off.''

‘‘Pass me those tissues – lovely. Thanks. You know, it’s funny that you should have mentioned the second world war because I have a profound adoration for everything anti-Nazi, especially planes, lovely things, planes, and it just really makes me stir...down there. People claim I’ve got a nasty habit for trying to link everything back to the war, but they’re a bunch of ignorant young people. Good God, I can’t stand young people at all – so bloody arrogant, so bloody alternative. Plagues of the nation, truly plagues of the nation, we ought to exterminate the brutes! Where were we? Ah, yes, the extermination of those Jew-killing German bastards. Yes. Well, you see, I wasn’t the only one seeing clear links between the England match against Germany and the war – in fact, everyone at the Mail does, did I mention we all just absolutely love the war and everything vaguely resonant of it?’’

‘’What?! Of course it was appropriate to compare the efforts of the brave, patriotic and heroic British, oh the British, oh the Britishers, Oh God save our gracious....Ahem! Yes, it was certainly right to compare...their...efforts, I like to call them ‘the few’, don’t you know – CAPITALIZE THAT WHEN YOU PUT IT IN WRITING YOU SWINE, AND SHOW SOME BLOODY RESPECT, YOU YOUNG NAIVE PIECE OF TRASH – and the English team, referencing that rather ghastly match. And I’ll tell you why – it’s my duty, as a noble and patriotic citizen, a columnist to boot, to make sure that no one who ever reads our paper – those who don’t read us aren’t worth the efforts, they’ve all been brainwashed by the liberal media – can ever forget how profound the difference is between German people and BRTISH PEOPLE and, perhaps more importantly, are never able to cast the cast-iron stereotype of Germans out of their minds. Post-war relations? A fig’s end!’’

‘’Was that a knock from outside? Open the cell door, will you? No doubt my editor, he’s in rather a foul mood today, after England lost the football to Germany and all – what’s that, master? Yes master. Young people urinating on memorials in Manchester, master? Awful, master, awful, awful, awful. Repugnant. Of course I’ll sort them out, master. I’ll find the little runt. I’ll bite his cock off. Yes, master. We do, master. No, nothing worse than a following generation of new world values or, perish the thought....liberal ideas, master. That truly would be a hideous world to live in – see you tomorrow, master. Are you still here? Good heavens, if only they hadn’t scrapped national service, little bastards such as your ilk wouldn’t be poisoning the streets – off with you! And make sure you take your bloody hat off when you walk past the English flag, you self-interested, misinformed, blinkered, ignorant bastard!’’

I Support Freedom Of Speech...Lol, jks I'm Nicholas Sarkozy

''Fascist....moi?''

It’s not every day that a pesky little chunk of political discourse called freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, for that matter, gets, to put it bluntly, defecated upon from above, but of course that’s because most countries in Europe aren’t unfortunate enough to have an image- conscious, lecherous demon of the Cabinet like Nicholas Sarkozy.

Heads rolled this morning as the admittedly brutal and acid-tongued political humouriste Stéphane Guillon was fired, no, enthusiastically thrown out on his ass, from Radio France due to his comments on the show regarding (you guessed it) Sarkozy being perceived by certain sensitive members of the public, in effect, conservatives, as ‘nasty.’ It must be said that the French word ‘méchant’ does no justice to our sorry Anglophone equivalent, but I suppose ‘sanctimonious cunt’ makes a vaguely suitable substitute for it.


Understandably, the left wing are furious, as although Guillon claimed to have attacked both conservatives and liberals in equal measure, Sarkozy certainly seems to have recently become his favourite toy. Foaming at the mouth, drunk on his own colossal political power (I’m talking about Guillon, actually) he can’t help but drool over the microphone as he spews out onto the radio waves some of the most scathing and destructive political insults known to man and beast. Even the word weasel came up a few times, perhaps in a subtle transatlantic nod to everybody’s favourite acid head, mescaline chomping Hunter S. Thompson. He’s so awesome it would be a total crime not to throw up a large picture of him, and hell, he would more than approve of Guillion’s anti-Sarko craziness.

But mindless drizzle aside, there is an alarming implication at the centre of the media furore – it would seem that Sarkozy, urging to lick his wounds and massage his bruised ego (heavens knows he’s taken a beating in the last six hours, let alone six months) Sarkozy has simply decided to make those that criticize him disappear. Thanks to the darlings at Le Grand Journal, Guillon got a little bit of final exposure on his way out, but for all we know, he could be breaking rocks in some Cuban jail or something, right now. Goddamn Conservatives.

HP Lovecraft A Racist Fiend?

The Rats in the Walls alluded to it, The Horror at Red Hook beat us over the head with it – but the question still stands: was the talented and controversial writer of cosmic horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, revered across the world for his flamboyant, corpulent horror fiction, a massively racist bigot?
 I have a lurking feeling that re-printing the phrases Lovecraft uses in his work would get this sorry salvatory of bloggy flesh sent down immediately, so I can only allude to his verbal assaults against black people, Asians, Indians and Arabs in passing – but anyone who flips through a copy of Lovecraft’s fiction will most certainly know what I’m talking about it.

 Lovecraft sure as hell wasn’t violently racist – his wife, Sonia Haft Greene, often commented that he would, to cut a long story short, go ape-shit around foreigners but this is the only solid evidence other than Lovecraft’s fiction that implies he was stoically, enthusiastically or passionately racist. The old wives’ tale that he was contacted by an emerging National Sozialismus Partei during the early thirties has been disproved by numerous scholars – S.T Joshi couldn’t find a trace of evidence that even alluded to this kind of lunatic theory, yet the racist label remains steadfast and difficult to remove.

 Of course, perhaps one loses sight of the fact that Lovecraft, for all his wonderful horror fiction, was something of a reclusive snob, who certainly held prejudices against the crude, uncultured American masses – so why shouldn’t he hold the same disdain against foreigners? By the same token perhaps he, not unlike Conrad, Waugh and, I suppose Fitzgerald, was simply a product of a generation which held racism as a common value – a fundamental pillar of a society which had an irrational fear for immigrants.


Personally, I think the fiction actually speaks for itself – I’m not even referring to the cat called n***** man, or the ‘grotesque negroid features’ of a black boxer. Anybody who scares the shit out of people by writing about creatures which, fundamentally are aliens, is bound to be housing some kind of racial views – the creatures and hideous creations of his fiction are, perhaps, simply crude allegories to illustrate his own racial venom in an acceptable medium. Hell, I don’t know.

I Want To Dig Up A Certain Metaphysical Poet And Chop Him To Messes

I’ve got the shovel, the lantern, the battered copy of the Necronomicon and, to put it bluntly, I’m about the walk out the door and act out of my vindictive rage-fuelled fantasy on a certain metaphysical poet, who has been the epicentre of much stress and pain in my insignificant and ancillary existence, being a box of worm seed, salvatory of green mummy and slab of fantastical puff paste, over the last year.
 Yep, it looks like I’m through the hysterical stage and now I’m just gonna march over to the poet’s corner, pretend I’ve come to renovate, or paint, or something, and then I’m going to dig in, dig out, and tear up a few bright bracelets of hair around bones and if I get the time, an outward soul.

Goddamnit, I am sick of the motherfucking conceits in those motherfucking poems – I can hardly take it anymore. I don’t care if that subtle wreath of hair which crowns his arm will keep his limbs her provinces from dissolution and all that other happy go lucky orthodox crap. If it wasn’t for John Webster’s casual and refreshing nihilism, elegantly reminding of us of what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness doth, fearful and womanish mankind live, then I probably would have ran screaming from my educational institution by now.
 I guess it’s time of evening, although I should not harm nor question much that – goddamnit. I’ll have to leave it, just in case it breeds idolatry. Goddamnit. Donne must be turning in his grave.

John Donne: The Lusty Misogynist?

I’ve got an exam on this nightmare angel of linguistic deviance, so I might as well try to kill one bird with two stones (or rather, merge two hemispheres with one compass) and spew out some kind of commentary on his identity as a woman-hating sleazy bastard. I guess I'm also, rather conveniently, spreading venom about Conservative politicians. Anywayy, the twentieth century vision of Donne, outside of Eliot’s opinion, certainly seems to be one of unaffected scorn towards metaphysical poet and ‘massive priest’ John Donne. This is, of course, understandable because feminism has become saturated into not only popular culture but also a healthy dose of post-modernist (whatever the hell that is) works, and so any derogatory comment levelled against females is, according to the masses, an implicitly misogynistic comment.

There is more than a germ of truth in that last sentence, regardless of whether one attacks Donne as a feminist, a historicist, or a fellow misogynist. Lines in his poetry such as ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair,’ or ‘Hope not for mind in woman, at their best, sweetness and wit they are, mummy possessed,’ stand as potent ammunition for anyone who wants to brand the ‘M’ word onto Donne’s pious forehead. However, I would imagine that the same people who count Donne in this dubious circle of writers also include Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis and of course Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t got a god-damned clue if Amis is a woman-hater, I still haven’t got around to reading Money, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regarded in this way due to the presentation of females in his novels.

However, most readers who bring up these rather dubious comments that Donne has made –and apparently if you think those are offensive, wait until you get an eyeful of his letters – will of course neglect statements which imply the complete opposite if misogynistic impulses. There is a pervasive theme of spiritual equality in Donne’s work – the sexual union is a spiritual union – and both the female and male entities are equal participants. Take The Good Morrow – ‘my face in thine eye, mine in thine appears’ weaves the image of two lovers equally fixated upon each other. Likewise, ,Donne’s statement in The Fever, that her sickness will burn out fast because ‘much corruption needful is to fuel a fever long’ contradicts somewhat the bitter epithet of Twicknam Garden that ‘alas, hearts do not appear in eyes, Nor can you judge what woman thinks by her tears, than by her shadow what she wears .’ It’s also an exaltation of purity in woman that contrasts violently with his smug assertion in an early Song that ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair.’ People seem to neglect the fact that Donne, to a certain extent, has steeped most of these poems in imagination – although scholars are hell-bent on proving otherwise – and therefore the opinions expressed within them are not necessarily supposed to correspond with each other. Nobody thinks that the internal monologues of Browning belong to the same character- so why think the same about Donne’s poetry?

The second reason to suspect Donne’s identity as a misogynist is the fact that everybody was a misogynist during the 17th Century, just like everybody was terrified of going to the Hell in the 16th and everybody wanted to burn witches in the 15th. We don’t brand Conrad as a racist –ok some people do – so we shouldn’t blame Donne for being a product of his environment. By the same token, the entire artistic community was possessed by the theme of female infidelity and mindless fucking. We see it everywhere else, but we only reprimand Donne for it.


There are all kinds of reasons to hate Donne – he was deeply religious, his poetry was shamelessly egotistic, he, to paraphrase Ben Johnson, ‘deserved hanging for not keeping accent’ and perhaps most frustratingly of all he weaved insane threads of deviant logic to come to fucking weird-ass conclusions – twisted ‘iron pokers to true love-knots’ indeed. Oh man, I’m exhausted. I think I left some cider in my wardrobe – Big Time...

Reznor's Side Project A Train-Wreck?

What the hell happened to Trent Reznor? One minute he was the brooding Byronic hero for the MTV generation, spreading gorgeously casual nihilism across the otherwise sterile channels of the music industry across the globe, and now he’s spewing out contrived and unimaginative crap alongside his spouse, whose name has almost completely escaped me, and some other guy that I’ve never even heard of. So much for being objective and doing my goddamn research.


The ‘train wreck’ in question is an EP which was recently released for free download on the band’s website, howtodestroyangels.com, or some crap like that, and has raised all kinds of strange questions about Reznor’s artistic credibility. The problem is that most of his fans revere him as the epitome of an anti-commercial musician, and his ingenious viral marketing and refusal to charge for his music downloads stood as a testament to that. So does the extremely generous gesture of releasing copyright free tracks onto nin.com, which fans are able to take for themselves and create their own remixes. Happy discovery. But the latest Reznor offering has only managed to engender concern amongst his closest fans and followers. Or maybe they just hate his wife, I don’t know.

How To Destroy Angels takes its name from that rather wonderful signal by that old creepy industrial band Coil, who hung around the same kind of dark dingy Gothic ruins as Boyd Rice did, and seems to attempt to pay homage to the track itself through the jarring, discordant riffs and the baying of some crazy-ass machine of groaning cogs and wires in the background- hell, I don’t know what they’d call that in the music industry. Taking a shit on a snare, or something? I don’t know.

 As someone who tries to defend the merits of industrial music in the face of a society almost crippled by its obsession with the same old god-dammed Lady GaGa hooks, I want to exalt Reznor’s EP as a grand offering of mechanical dissonant joy, but the problem is that by rights, it just doesn’t sound like industrial music. Admittedly, nor did Trent’s material as Nine Inch Nails, but his own leathery voice and laborious panting merged with the clanks and whirrs and screams of his music rather brilliantly. The same just doesn’t happen in How to Destroy Angels. Except the opening track. Wait a second, where the hell am I going with this...

The bottom line is that Trent’s churned out something of a howler this time round, and although it’s by no mean the finished product, the quality of the EP itself has cast some doubt over the minds of most industrial fans, mainly because the female vocals make the whole fucking EP sound like some kind of Blondie/NON cross-over. That should be pretty cool, but it How to Destroy Angels is anything to by, it’s not. Nevertheless, if you really want to, you can download the EP here.

Motive-Hunt for Cumbria Killer is Meaningless

Only the morally squeamish and those poor fools striving to uphold some long dead derivative of old world values and chivalry will have anything to gain from sifting through the corpses that lie in Derrick Bird’s wake in search of a motive.

The reality – and one which nearly all institutions will continue to deny, regardless of how many of us take up arms and start murdering our neighbours – is that this rampage was by no means a ‘sick fantasy played’ out in all its brutal physicality by a ‘bloodthirsty freak or lunatic’. The truth is quite the opposite and one which few people are ready to deny. And the more articles that newspapers churn out expressing their total bafflement at a solid motive for Bird’s killing spree, the more likely it is that the true root of the problem will be buried forever under heaps of the usual sensationalist trash.

The whole debacle is to a certain extent reminiscent of the Columbine and Virginia Tech killing sprees – with only one fundamental difference in that whereas Bird seemed to be a happy family man, the college killers were isolated, alienated, frustrated and voiceless. It probably draws people’s minds to the otherwise normal and happy middle aged men who ‘went postal’ during the 80s and walked from cubicle to cubicle, shooting everyone in sight. The grind and the filth and the misery of the life of an average Caucasian male became simply too much. But of course, it was really easy to bracket Seung-Hui Cho and the gang into the bracket of ‘kids brainwashed by Marilyn Manson,’ or ‘impressionable youth corrupted by television’ but that’s just not the case for Derek Bird.

Newspaper editors, and by proxy their readers, seem so fixated upon the importance of indentifying a cause and effect trend in a killer’s background that might point to a motive. This means branding violent video games, films or music as ‘triggers,’ the Ausloeser fuer Gewalt which apparently sparks off every rampage that ever takes place in an institution for young people. But could it be that for a surprisingly large proportion of the population, there is no visible trigger to sudden excesses of extreme violence?

Of course, it’s unlikely that ninety per cent of the population conceal murderous urges. And statistics can tells us (because we oh so adore the refuge of cold figures) that it’s highly unlikely that a rampage like this will occur again in England for a very, very long time. The search for Bird’s motive, then, may not be rising out of moral or legal grounds. If Bird had a motive, then it would of course distance him from the rest of the general population: ‘Sure, poor guy was abused as a child/lost his parents/ was bulled/ was a eunuch, that’s why he did it.’ This desire to distance oneself from the killer seems to be the motive for searching for a motive – people are two terrified to accept that Derrick Bird was a perfectly healthy human being. Just like them.

‘No!’ People will protest, ‘Bird was a monster!’ But the differences between ‘humans’ and monsters are rather superficial, and if normal citizens are able to gas millions of their co-workers, family friends and contemporaries, then the moral transgression towards personally taking out one’s frustration isn’t such a giant leap after all.

Nothing triggered the killing spree – maybe something in the minutiae of his lifestyle brought the killings themselves on – but the actual desire to violently vent his frustration on innocent, well-to-do people would have lain dormant in Bird’s mind for month, maybe years, growing bloated on his disdain for Man and all his grotesque, selfish, narcissistic habits. No one wants to accept that the same aggression just might have been festering in everybody else’s brains too – anybody could have turned out like Bird. It’s not a mathematical formula of cause and effect that defines someone’s desire to start murdering people. It’s a long, slow process of gradual alienation, frustration, loneliness and general feelings of anger that are expressed everyday but thousands of people on the internet, radio, on the TV – it’s the same discourse in a more saleable manifestation.

The End

Anybody who turned up with a head full of sentimental nostalgia, or memories turned palatable and warm over the years, would have been disappointed. In fact, if anything, most people seemed hell-bent upon making sure that the ghastly spectacle of two hundred unrelated students, thrown together by blind luck and perhaps a handful of reluctant common interests, did not become exactly that – the husk of some awful social rite of passage, paraded across Facebook and god knows where else while, presumably, the same perverse ritual was carried out across hundreds of educational institutions across the country. It was.



But there were no sad, chubby children with men’s faces pining wistfully in the background of a photograph and no damp-eyed wretches flitting from clique to clique with a doomsday book of thoughts, or jolts in the brain that resembled thoughts. Nothing but an hour or two, mediocre and anonymous in the sense that those very same gestures were being, had been and would be replicated across the globe thousands of times over, and with each passing occasion it seemed that no statement gained any gravity at all.


There’s the poor cunt with whom you slept/spoke/spat out rumours, and they promise they’ll stay in touch and there seems to be an air of regret/resignation/righteousness about them, but it’s certainly rather bright out here which, it seems, has a habit of dazzling things out of proportion. Of course, they’ll stay in touch, they say. But they won’t.


Nor will you shake hands. I wouldn’t trust those lusty spades, if I were you.