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This page
is a short introduction to the British Popular Press, intended as a primer
for audiences in America and the English-speaking world. It has rude,
rude words.
Part One: The Daily Telegraph.
The Muppets : Marionettes, or Puppets?
Are they marionettes, or are they puppets? Or both?
Apparently, they are both.
Part Two: The Guardian
Why am I surrounded by stupid people?
The shits who smashed up my car last week haven't come back to fix it
and when I see them I'm going to smash their faces into the ground because
it's a fucking Citroen DS and it's a posh one, too, with the headlights
that follow the steering. And like a big flying shit this would have to
be the week when I have to go into the office. Normally I can just email
my column from sunny Marlow, but this week I had to go out for drinks
with one of my publishers. Bastard. I didn't mean that, by the way. He's
a great guy - he also has a DS, in fact he had his before mine, but mine's
better.
And so I found myself having to buy a train ticket. What is it with Britain?
France is much better. They have everything sorted over there. Anyway,
I go up to the guy, and it's a corpulent soul brother, sitting behind
the counter, looking for all the world like Suge, banged up in old chokey,
waiting to be let out so that he can tap Dre.
"My man", I said, and he just looked at me, the ignorant shit. I made
smalltalk. "I want to live in France. It's much better than this pile
of shit".
"Where to?", he said, the ignorant shit. Piss-head. Probably has no mind
of his own. Probably just a big empty blank space in his head where his
brain would go. Probably smashed up my fucking car. I just walked off.
I blanked him and made a little grin and went 'heh, right' as if I knew
something that this fat black ignorant shit didn't know, which is too
fucking right because I'm a fucking columnist for the fucking Guardian.
I wasn't talking to this piece of crap. He can just take his ticket and
shove it up his fucking nose, because nothing else is going up there,
not with those clothes. I've got a fucking degree - from a proper university,
not some shitty little polytechnic. I'm a fucking columnist for the fucking
Guardian. You'd better watch it, because I'm fucking there, right? You're
probably reading this in your fucking lunch-hour - I don't care. I don't
have a lunch-hour.
Next Week: I have just read Neal Stephenson's 'Crytonomicon', fifteen
months after the rest of the world, and I think that I am the first person
to finish it because I haven't seen any articles about it in the popular
press because the popular press is written for and by people who simply
do not care, at all, about what they are doing, other than the barest
minimum of effort needed to perform their day-to-day tasks, and this includes
the supposedly 'creative' efforts of the bits of the newspaper that could
not be generated by a complex computer programme. And you start to think
that the stuff the paper covers, from music to sport to the arts, is made
in the same way - by people who do not care, people who exist to spot
ideas by people who do, and debase them by recycling them endlessly.
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Both a puppet and a marionette : but why? |
