FOR BIG DON K’ SHAYNE CLICK HERE

I intended this post to be Big Don K’ Shayne-related but the project — a multi-media endeavor — is proving very time consuming. So I’m leaving that for July 4. Until then, I offer a love poem (unfortunately, the indents didn’t come through).

In the meantime, please go ask Big Don a question since he’s generously volunteered to stay on Fourth Night as an advice columnist and creative juice maker. Many of you keep telling me you plan to ask a question. What are you waiting for? Is it really that hard? (You see, I just asked two in about five seconds…)

THE BIKER’S INDIGNITY:

A LOVE POEM

My dear abused bike.

My bike was recently knocked over twice in one day,

backed into by oafs on four wheels.

At least in both instances they righted her again,

unlike the many times last summer when I found her

on her flanks, downed

by barbarians and left

to lie amongst her spilled fluids.

Although not on her side this time, evidence of the offense was there:

the gas stain on the concrete, the displaced side mirror, the scuffs, the bent blinker mounts,

the sputtering protestation when I turned the key (she needed 45 minutes to be coaxed back to purring life).

The second strike took place an hour later, while I was in the post office, in a laborious

unmoving

queue

that I finally ditched, muttering

anti-government obscenities

(still riled up over the earlier fiasco).

I emerged only to find a large empty space in front of my bike where an SUV had been parked

and

a postal worker covering up the gas stain next to her with handfuls of grass he was uprooting from a sidewalk tree.

He sopped up the fuel with green clods of earth as I raged:

“I left this much space!” I brayed, extending albatross arms. “Ten minutes I’m inside and look what happens! New York drivers are idiots! How would they like it if tractors plowed into their sides? Morons!”

The postal worker bent to his task, unmoved, as I paced and seethed.

I wasn’t the first fellow he’d seen

go postal.

Anyway, he couldn’t have understood my outrage

just like those miscreants on four wheels can’t understand.

Only riders understand.

Especially New York City riders, who contend daily with the monumental disregard of lead-

footed knuckle-

heads who lane change as if in go

karts and park as if in bumper cars.

It takes thick skin,

or better yet, leather

to survive on two wheels

in a world overrun

by those on four, eight, sixteen,

where the rules of engagement are dictated by bumpers, seat belts, side impact protection beams, crumple zones, laminated windshields, suspension systems, electronic brake force distribution, automatic braking, lane departure warning systems &

for worst case scenarios

A/C to stay cool

as you wait behind an airbag for the medics to arrive.

No offense, drivers, we all know that your metal cages kill your kind

too.

It’s just that we have no safety apparatus to house us.

Our only protection is our gear:

leather, like the cowman,

a helmet, like the warrior,

maybe even some armored padding on the elbows and shoulders

since an ambush may always await over the hills

and far away

or at the next intersection

(the hand bikers extend to one another on the road is a greeting, but it also carries the possibility of a farewell).

If at times bikers strike you as disagreeably in-your-face

with their roaring engines and loud colors, it’s because self-preservation demands it.

Think before you scowl

at the Harley as it rumbles by, disrupting your precious

peace.

Unlike those obnoxious muffler-removing mustang

sallies on four wheels

there are practical reasons for being

heard on a motorcycle:

most motorcycle collisions occur from cars turning left

in front of the biker’s right of way

so from a biker’s perspective

and hopefully yours too

it’s better to disturb the peace

than to go flying over a hood

into a telephone pole.

Only riders understand the perils of the road,

just like only parted lovers can know the glittering caverns of heartbreak,

or soldiers the siren song of war and the crags

upon which it wrecks them.

I spoke of indignity earlier but I should

confess that

questions of dignity rarely arise:

usually I’m just pissed off

that some asshole knocked my bike over.

Only in retrospect, under the mellowing breeze of reflection,

do I see that indignity indeed provoked my ire.

Indignity,

because it’s not just some vehicle that’s been outraged,

not some object, some mere thing,

but your steed,

the mare upon which you charge the plain,

the stallion upon which you plunge into battle

(bikes, you see, come in neutral, male, & female

and sometimes even swing

between genders depending on the circumstance).

Perhaps I exaggerate.

When you first buy a bike, sure, it’s a vehicle,

but as the years pass,

the miles pass,

the trials pass,

you grow to recognize your history in its scars & dents,

like a kind of photo album

you always carry

when you travel.

It’s bulky for an album,

especially in the digital age,

but you never misplace it,

nor accidentally delete it.

Mine holds few family photos

mostly just backcountry scenes, and records

of bang ups & skirmishes.

Here,

come out,

take a look:

See these crooked handlebars?

They’re an oldie. A decade

ago my lobsterman friend, more adept

on water than land

spun her out a on a dirt road turnaround.

As a result, to ride straight I now have to hold

the handlebars as if I’m veering to the left.

In return, he let me dock his boat

(but didn’t

let me crash it).

The gas tank

makes me chuckle. It has a

moral: label any canisters with kerosene,

especially if they usually store gas,

unless you want to gum up

your carburetors and marvel

at the quantity of white smoke an exhaust can spew

(riders too commit indignities)

The Yamaha logo

is a microcosmos of my bike, broken & superglued

(from when someone backed

into it on Clinton Ave). And that dent on the other side of the engine? Another knockdown, also on Clinton,

other side of the street.

The bent front blinker stand

is from another spill.

Can’t remember which. Same with the jury rigged rear

blinker.

The battery,

ah, the battery!

Don’t get me started. Let me merely say that phasing out

the kickstart was folly.

Here’s one last one, the latest

addition to the album:

The dried oil under the engine

is from when my bike sprang a gushing leak outside Holland Lincoln

Tunnel a few weeks ago, stranding me in impatient

midtown traffic, leaving me gloomy

that my ’82 Yamaha Maxim, which I bought my junior year

in high school off a friend for a mellow $400

($1 per CC)

and which has endured a symphony

of outrages over the last 17 years,

some of which you now know about, may at last be

in its dying throes. I was

wrong: “You have to know when to jump

off,” the mechanic said, “but you’ll still get a few years out of her.”

His words were oil to my ears.

You see, as your album grows,

your bike transforms

from thing to steed.

(imagine my indignation

when I once heard her referred to as an “old thing”)

In fact, I partly owe my fierce love for my bike

to the indignities she has suffered

for without them

our album wouldn’t be nearly as

colorful.

In the end,

one can even celebrate these indignities

for they are part of the unruly

seas of riding, much like those

of love.

As with love,

you can go from 0 to 60 in a flick of the wrist

and 60 to 0 even faster.

As with love,

there is much to negotiate:

right hand for throttle & front break, left hand for clutch, right foot for rear break, left foot for shifting gears.

You may be on two wheels but

like spiderman

you must maneuver with all four limbs.

As with love,

you deal with exposure,

hard rains, breakdowns,

& close calls

like when my rear tire skidded out briefly on the Manhattan bridge last year after fast-slowing traffic forced me to to sharply brake and downshift

(caused by my daydreaming and consequent slow reaction

but fret not, mother, I

don’t dream & ride

anymore)

As with love,

sometimes you take a bad spill,

like when I was on a moped on the Greek isle of Skopelos

and braked hard

on a slick, steep, downhill

around a sharp bend

and

the front wheel flipped out,

sending me and the rental sliding across the opposite lane into the ditch seconds before a truck blasted by around the corner

As with love,

sometimes you do insane things that you hope

never to do again

like when a friend,

during a rough spell,

dislocated his shoulder

upon striking an open car door while riding drunk

and

fleeing the cops.

As with love,

riding is a high,

the addict’s rush and relief as you open the throttle, a brief movement of the wrist,

as simple as a thumb depressing a syringe

and usually not as dangerous.

As with love,

you have to know when to let go,

or as another friend, Zeke, (who has repeatedly crossed the continent and makes me look like a backyard putterer) put it,

“sometimes you have to bury your bike

before your bike buries you,”

like when the engine of his Honda

seized up on him on Route 3,

his tires instantly locking,

his bike suddenly skidding along

on two wheels at 50 mph

(he managed to stay upright)

burning rubber the length of a football field

until he came to a standing stop,

the bus behind him braking just in time.

He then rolled the stricken Honda into the field,

removed the plate and registration,

a rider’s sky burial,

and walked away

to find a new one.

For all he knows, the Honda is still out there,

sprouting poppies.

But me, no, I still have more photos to put in this album,

My bike and I.

True, we occasionally have to part ways,

she at the shop, me at the writing desk,

both of us being repaired,

but that’s just a matter of upkeep.

Now if you’ll excuse me,

my steed awaits outside

this coffee shop,

still standing,

I hope.

_____

or “The Convoluted Psyche of the Buenos Aires Porteño”

THE POLISH JOURNALIST Ryszard Kapuscinski opens The Shadow of the Sun, his humbling account of his time in Africa (humbling, that is, to anyone who’s ever worked in journalism), by pointing out that it is naïve and grossly simplistic to speak of “Africans,” as if they’re one broadly identifiable group with shared characteristics. There are no Africans: rather, there are Tutsis, Hutus, Twas, Ashantis, Dinkas, Nuers, Karimojongs, Itesos, Tuaregs, Bantus, Americo-Liberians, Afrikaners… Although Kapuscinski illustrates this by describing the astonishing array of habits, conflicts, and worlds within worlds among these tribes and ethnic groups, his penchant for bird’s eye rumination requires (and he’s been ungenerously criticized for this) that he invoke and comment upon that very same entity that he critiques as a concept: the “Africans.”

This piece explores, as the subtitle suggests, the psychology and behavior of Buenos Aires residents. To generalize about these “porteños” is nowhere near as elephantine a task as trying to muse about Africans or, say, South Americans, but the same predicament exists, just on a smaller scale. It is only when one narrows one’s focus from nation to group to individual that one can escape the half-truths of sweeping statements, and even then, as any good biographer will tell you, one still contends with mirages.

Unlike Kapuscinski, who spent years meandering about the continent in severe conditions and at constant risk of life, I spent a modest three months in Buenos Aires, and comfortable ones at that. My impressions, inevitably green and incomplete, are those of a transient – of someone situated between tourist and resident. It’s not, however, a bad position from which to speculate: enough time passes for you to shed the popular misperceptions you arrive with, but not enough for you to forget what those misperceptions were.

In Spanish, a porteño (or porteña) refers to a person from a port city. For the last century or so, the term has been almost exclusively employed to refer to residents of the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. It’s surely one of the most ill-suited titles ever given to a people. Yes, Buenos Aires lies upon water, namely the southern bank of the Rio Plata’s western estuary, but the relation to port culture ends there. The Argentine porteños define themselves not by water but by the surrounding flat grassy plains known as the pampas. While there seems to be a parrilla steakhouse on every corner in Buenos Aires, you have to hunt to find seafood, and if you do find fish, you must then examine it to make sure that, like a book long abandoned to its shelf, it isn’t yellowing. If porteños were to be clumped astrologically, their sign would not be the Pisces but the Taurus. Their folk hero is not the fisherman but the gaucho. And the primary social – one could even say religious – ritual of porteños is asado: the barbecuing of meat over coals.

Not that one can fault porteños for shunning the river for the plains. The vast surrounding plains are a kind of Eden for the grazing cattle, which in turn makes Buenos Aires a kind of Eden for carnivores. And anyone who’s ever strolled along the southern banks of the Rio de Plata estuary – especially during a southerly breeze, which carries with it the smell of the fetid brown waters – can attest that one would have to be truly desperate to eat anything fished from that Stygian murk.

But unfit as porteño may initially seem for describing Buenos Aireans, the more you get to know the people, the more fitting this contradictory and paradoxical term seems. Because the fact is, porteños are by nature contradictory and paradoxical.

One of the stereotypes northerners often have about southerners (a distinction of hemispheres, not countrymen) is that, although life is harder for them, they are simple, happy people. Aside from being a convenient personal philosophy for those of us whose nation’s prosperity depends to some degree, as it has for centuries, upon economic exploitation of the poor of the tropics and subequatorial regions, especially of lush and resource-rich South America, it can also be a comical inverse misrepresentation. Buenos Aires is a case in point. The mere fact that there’s a neighborhood in Buenos Aires named Villa Freud due to its high concentration of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts suggests that the people there aren’t quite as untroubled and simple-minded as the jaunty happy-go-lucky caricature suggests. (Argentina topped the world ranking of number of psychologists per capita in a 2005 World Health Organization study.)

The large number of therapists in Buenos Aires might surprise someone who first comes to Argentina with the usual expectations of silky porteño ease. Buenos Aires wields a primal aura over those who’ve never been there. Along with luggage, one flies into Argentina towing stereotypes: the men are suave womanizers, the women sultry sexpots, both sexes gorgeous and both tango experts, of course. Sex, tango, and sizzling meat – that’s the exported (or is it imported?) image. Perhaps only Paris can compete with Buenos Aires for such mawkish oh-my-swooning-heart-and-overheating-loins allure.

The above image, which is the kind of thing flaunted in every show tango brochure, does have some basis in reality, even if of the chicken-or-the-egg variety. It’s hard to say which came first, the sexy porteño or the reputation. Acutely self-conscious as porteños are, they are ever cognizant of their international reputation; aware of the power and status this affords them, they’ll play into their sexualized roles; this role-playing will in turn infuse them with the sense that, yes, they are a breed part, “Indeed, I am virile as a stallion,” “Yes, I am beautiful as a bird of paradise;” but being ordinary people like the rest of us this idealization will also plague them, consume them with doubts, fears, and night terrors that they will disappoint expectations: the men will suffer from impotence while the women will resort to anorexia, bulimia, ever more extravagant forms of plastic surgery; their lives will become one torturous seesaw between self-admiration and insecurity, confidence and anxiety. And of course, all along, while languishing in this condition, they will also observe it critically, and perhaps even dispassionately recount the ironic ordeal to their psychotherapists.

It makes sense that in a city with an abundance of psychologists, there’s also an abundance of books. Literature tends to cause disquiet, as any totalitarian worth his censors and dungeons can tell you. Like their Montevidean neighbors across the river, porteños are known for their love of literature. The number of bookstores in the capital is confounding; subway kiosks sell Shakespeare and Virgil; and even the city government (which one might assume would be indifferent to literary matters) throws an annual La Noche de las Librerias, or “Bookstore Night” in which citywide bookstores host events until 2am. These facts surely didn’t elude the jury behind UNESCO’s decision to name Buenos Aires “World Book Capital 2011.”

Porteño culture fuses two forces often posited in opposition: the macho physicality of smooth-talking players, gauchos, and heeled femme fatales on one side and the intellectuality of the bibliophile on the other. Is it any surprise then that Borges – that cerebral writer of labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, and encyclopedias who was drawn as much to themes of honor among soldiers and gaucho knife duels as to the poetry of Dante and Yeats – was a porteño?

TO BE CONTINUED FEB 4th*

*Not true. Unfortunately I never got around to finishing this essay. Maybe someday I will.

Gaucho Fest. Photo by Constantine Markides

I shot the  following photos and video at the 2010 Gaucho Festival in the Argentina pampas town of San Antonio de Areco on November 20 and 21.

You can see the Guacho Festival photos as a slideshow HERE

or just as a set HERE

Here is the video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtkU4vgsDNU

Black sand beach in California's Lost Coast

IN HIS EPONYMOUS collection of writings, the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu claims to have once dreamt of being a butterfly, entirely unaware while flitting about of being anything else.  Upon waking, he wrote, he was not sure if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. This butterfly dream, as it came to be known, would be later invoked repeatedly and its skepticism elaborated upon, most famously by Descartes, to question the legitimacy of sensory experience and the indisputability of an objective universe.  

Although we have launched ourselves into outer space, mapped out distant galaxies, and cloned new life forms, the dreamscape of our own inner space remains uncharted and inimitable, yielding the same ontological mysteries and dilemmas that Chuang Tzu experienced almost two-and-a-half millennia ago.  Perhaps the most definitive discovery in oneirology that we have made since then is that dream states and rapid eye movements are related, not exactly the profoundest of insights into the biology and function of dreams considering our advances in other fields of inquiry.

Our frontier spirit and technological advances may have forever condemned the earth’s terrestrial wildernesses to the same fate of the dodo and the quagga, but our dreams, with their ever-shifting terrain of flora and fauna, are impervious to codification and conquest.  Our dreamscapes may well be the remaining unmapped wilderness.  Like any classical wilderness, the dream world has no shortage of wild creatures.  The Metallica song Enter Sandman—with its video rendition of a child dreaming of drowning, being chased, and falling, while an old man, presumably the Sandman, looks on—memorably evokes this nightmarish dimension of the beasts one can encounter while in the Sandman’s grip: Hush little baby, don’t say a word / And never mind that noise you heard / It’s just the beast under your bed / In your closet, in your head.

Humans have always sought out mood- or consciousness-altering substances as a way to temporarily escape the monotony of existence or to heighten or destabilize their perception of it.  In our time tobacco and alcohol are the drugs of choice.  It is a well-observed irony that while these substances—one a relatively unstimulating stimulant, the other a depressant that begets belligerence more often than sedateness—are the all-time record holders in claiming human life, their widespread use and marketing makes them seem respectable (they are not ‘drugs’ after all, they are merely booze and cigs, essentials for a good time).  At the same time, less harmful, awareness-heightening substances like psilocybin mushrooms are outlawed, their mere mention invoking terrifying images of barefoot flower children swaying in solitary trance-like dances.

Psychotropics bear the greatest stigma of the many varieties of drugs, not necessarily because they are considered mortally dangerous like heroine and crack, or because they render the taker dangerous to others, but rather because they ‘mess with your head.’  No doubt, they do make you see the world through a different consciousness, often anew with a fresh perception that has been momentarily freed from conceptual frameworks; some psychotropics, and this is partly what can be so disturbing, deliver you into a different world altogether, much as in dream states.    

That said, despite the disreputable associations that the word ‘hallucinogen’ has come to carry, a number of ‘respectable’ writers and researchers have ingested psychoactives for explorative purposes and recounted their effects.  We associate mescaline with Aldous Huxley, peyote with Carlos Castaneda, LSD with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, the psilocybin and fly agaric mushrooms with Gordon Wasson.  While most of these substances (at least the naturally-occurring ones) have been essential as entheogens to vision quests, healing rituals and religious rites in tribal societies for centuries, they first entered the mainstream of what we call ‘Western culture’ with the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.  

One psychotropic plant, however, would remain obscure until the turn of the century.  It is a green leafy herb whose relatives can be found on most kitchen spice racks, belonging as it does to the sage genus and the labiate, or mint, family. It is also thought to be one of the most powerful natural hallucinogens known to man.  If a sufficient dosage is efficiently ingested, the plant sends one into what I think can best be described as a brief but intense waking dream state.    

Endemic to the Oaxaca region of Mexico, Salvia divinorum, or ‘sage of the seers,’ has been and continues to be used by indigenous Mazatec Indians for, as its etymology suggests, shamanic divination to aid healing sessions.  According to Mazatec belief, the spirit of the plant can reveal to the shaman the source of the sufferer’s illness.  Although the ethnobotanist Gordon Wasson published an article on salvia in 1962 for the Harvard Botanical Museum, it remained virtually unknown until the 1990s.  Not until the turn of the century did salvia become a recognizable name among the pantheon of consciousness-altering drugs, the sort one can find in any Amsterdam ‘smart shop.’  

Salvia remains legal in most countries, including the U.S., although a number of states have recently outlawed the plant or its derivatives.  There has been increasing negative media attention on salvia in recent years due to the surfacing of numerous YouTube videos depicting teenagers smoking concentrated leaf and then rolling about on the floor in giggling, gibbering fits (the Wikipedia entry on ‘salvia’ claims that the videos are ‘purporting to depict its use’ but there is no doubt the videos are authentic depictions; it’s what one would expect from kids insensately treating salvia like a party drug).  

Sensationalistic and misleading titles like ‘Deadly Dangers of a Street Legal High’ headline media reports by incompetent journalists who have clearly neither tried the substance for themselves nor researched the plant thoroughly.  Media coverage of salvia often cites the 2006 suicide of Brett Chidester, a 17-year-old from Delaware who was known to have experimented with salvia.  His parents and most journalists blamed the plant, assuming it had caused his depression, and a Senate bill passed soon after his suicide, implementing what came to be known as Brett’s law, which classified Salvia divinorum as a Schedule 1 drug in Delaware.

What is rarely if ever mentioned in the media is that some research has found potential medical uses for salvia as an anti-depressive. The director of the National Institute on Mental Health’s Psychoactive Drug Screening Program, Bryan Roth, believes that drugs derived from salvia’s active ingredient, salvinorin A, could be useful for a variety of diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to schizophrenia to even AIDS or HIV. Few would disagree that every effort should be made to keep salvia out of teenage hands and that the sight of teenagers blasted out of their gourds after smoking concentrated salvia extracts is an ugly one, just as it is ugly to watch teenagers sniffing glue or chugging Robitussin, but inventing scare stories or outright banning a plant with medical potential seems an inept way to go about it.   

Last month I flew from London to San Francisco for a friend’s wedding in the California town of Redding.  A close circle of my friends also flew in from various parts of the U.S. The mass convergence was a rare opportunity for an extended gathering so we all prolonged our trip to combine the wedding with some camping and hiking in the Sinkyone Wilderness (in the 21st century the name ‘wilderness’ has been reduced to meaning ‘where cars can’t go’), a hard-to-rea
ch coastal stretch of land in northern California characterized by lush redwood groves, Jurassic-like ferns, clifftop wildflower meadows, black sand beaches, herds of Roosevelt elk, banana slugs and the occasional recluse black bear or mountain lion.  Route 1 hugs most of the California coastline, but along this rugged strip it veers inland and then reconnects with the shore seventy miles or so later, explaining why the area is known as the Lost Coast.  

Salvia is legal in California and one of us, M, had purchased for the Lost Coast excursion two vials of 10x concentrated salvia extract in a smoke shop in Chico.  It was not my first encounter with the plant.  Some two years earlier I had read about it online. Both intrigued by and skeptical of the salvia researcher Daniel Siebert’s descriptions of the plant’s effects, which he claimed could include out-of-body experiences, ‘shamanistic journeying to other lands’ and ‘bizarre fusions with other objects real or imagined,’ I had purchased a 7x extract in Amsterdam in October 2006 while on route to the U.S., this time to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for another reunion with the same friends.  Nothing I came across suggested that salvia was toxic.  Nor was it considered dangerous so long as a sober person was on hand (a ‘sitter’) to watch over the salvia-taker: somnambulistic behavior, including thrashing and uncoordinated attempts at locomotion, sometimes occurred.  As it was not illegal either in the Netherlands or in Massachusetts, I was not risking arrest by packing it into my check-in luggage.  

While fresh salvia leaves can be rolled into cigar-like ‘quids’ and chewed, much like coca leaf, the powder or crushed leaf form of salvia is meant to be smoked from a pipe, ideally a water-pipe. A butane torch lighter is also recommended because the plant has a high vaporization temperature.  As we had no pipe, let alone a water pipe, I instead rolled up a kind of salvia cigarette, pouring the salvia powder into the body of the cigarette while filling the base, where the cigarette filter normally goes, with rolling tobacco.    

We went outside and sat in the grass under some boulders overlooking the Atlantic. We did not have a torch lighter, but the leaf powder still ignited and stayed lit.  Four of us smoked the salvia cigarette while the rest watched. I did recall for a moment feeling a slight shifting of spatial relations, as if the earth were subtly retracting from me or I from it, and the orange moss on a nearby stone took on a particularly curious glow.  But this was barely noticeable and short-lived. It was disappointing considering the remarkable accounts of salvia experiences I had read about.  It would not be until the Lost Coast that I would encounter the plant again.    

The seven of us—S, Z, J, C, K, M, and I—arrived at the Lost Coast trailhead on Sunday night.  Since J and K had to leave on Wednesday morning, we decided to leave our tents pitched as a base camp and just stage day hikes.  In the morning we went on a 15-mile hike along the coastal trail, traversing at least three peaks in the process.  We were too tired, either during the hike or after returning, to consider the salvia.  But on Tuesday we lazed around our base camp—which bordered an expansive black sand beach—with the tacit understanding that the day had been left wide open not only for hamstring recovery but also for a salvia session.  It was tacit because we were all wary of the plant, none of us enthused to dive into it.  M and S had smoked it one other time since the Gloucester flop and, for both, it had been far from uneventful.  

-You want to respect that plant, S had told me, because it will smack you down and laugh in your puny face.  

I initially put little stock in his warning. I’ve always been intrigued by the effects of psychoactive substances upon human consciousness as they seem to serve as vehicles that can awaken us to the awesome and portentous presence of the world, briefly granting us a direct and unmediated experience of reality.  Skeptics might consider that to be an illusory world, a perceptual manipulation resulting from alterations in the brain’s chemical balances; but even if one accepts this hardline stance on psychoactives, anyone who has temporarily accessed such worlds knows that, delusive or not, they possess a splendor that seems to share territory with the most intense degrees of aesthetic and religious experience.  I have never, however, shared the belief prevalent among some indigenous tribes for whom these substances are sacred that the ‘spirit’ of the plant or fungus is talking to me, unless ‘spirit’ is meant in its loosest sense.  It may be true that the closest I have ever come to a state of religious awe at the magnificence of the universe has been after chewing down a few mushrooms, the sort that one can find sprouting out of cow patties.  But leaving aside the fact that a powerful ‘mushroom spirit’ would probably choose a different place of residence than a fibrous pie of cow shit, I have never seen any good reason to ascribe a higher consciousness to a plant just because of its revelatory influence.  

Once in Palenque, Mexico—it was over a decade ago—I had purchased a bag of fresh mushrooms for 15 pesos from a Mexican farmer (I was walking down the road towards my hammock hut when a forearm and hand holding a bulging plastic bag emerged cartoonishly from the brush at my side while a voice whispered ‘hongos, hongos’).  A half hour later I ate them and then headed off towards the jungle.  On the way, a shirtless beaded American man with a great white beard who had spoken to me the previous day motioned me over.  He was sitting with a number of Mexicans who were also ingesting mushrooms, except they were first blessing them individually over a fire, reciting prayers before consumption. I felt like something of an intruder considering I did not share their reverential spirit. The older man, meanwhile, seemed perfectly at home amidst this ritualistic blessing.  He told me they were all going to soon head off into the jungle and that I could join them.  The mushrooms I had ingested must have been taking effect, because his feet, which were caked with dried mud, looked like they had never seen shoes, as if they belonged to some ancient being.  

He pointed to a bottle of water I was carrying and asked me for a drink.  

-I wouldn’t drink it, I told him, I’m getting over a cold.  It was true.      

-That’s all right, he replied. I’m sick too. Together we will share the sickness.

I wasn’t interested in testing his pseudo-shamanistic notions on overcoming illness through group transmission, so I handed him the water bottle and told him to keep it.  Politely declining his invitation to join the jungle expedition, I then slipped away alone for the jungle path, more interested in a solitary stroll than a group hajj.  It was not just because they were strangers that I wanted to go it alone; I also sensed that the group outing might be slightly too devout for my liking, resembling a mini-pilgrimage rather than a jungle wander.  I was not opposed to this sacred approach; it was infinitely better than the casual party stance of college kids who think the ultimate mushroom experience is a laughing fit in front of a screen saver.  Nevertheless, in my sensitized state, an overly reverential attitude would have made me just as uncomfortable as a crassly nonchalant one.  It is one thing to approach these substances with respect, care, and even awe, free of that grotesque adolescent buffoonery one sees in the salvia YouTube videos; it is quite another to deify them.  

Yet if there is any one substance that has made me question my profane attitude towards psychotropics, it is Salvia divinorum.  To
return to the Lost Coast, it was Tuesday late afternoon and none of us had yet mentioned the salvia.  But it was there, a presence looming over us.  We were just waiting for the right time.  I was lying in a hammock, relaxed.  The others were sitting around the campfire.  The sunlight had begun to mellow into warmer hues.

-I think I’m ready to give the salvia a go, I announced.  I’ll just do it right here in the hammock.

Within minutes M had brought over to me all the necessary accoutrements.  He packed a bowl of the fortified leaf into the water pipe and handed me the butane torch lighter.  

-Hold it in your lungs for a long time, he advised.

I placed a notebook and pen beside me in the hammock, unaware of how pointless it was to arm myself with these instruments of rational thought.  I then took a deep breath and as M held the fire over the leaf, I inhaled slowly.  The amount was too big for one hit so I held in what I could, exhaled some smoke, and then finished off the bowl.  I handed him back the pipe, held the smoke in my lungs for another fifteen seconds or so and then exhaled, while lying back into the hammock.  I had a serene view of birches rising above me, their papery trunks swaying mildly in the breeze.  A canopy of verdure rustled over each trunk.  

A few seconds after I had reclined back into the hammock the tree trunks began to wobble dreamily, as if made of rubber.  At the same time, the verdant patches of the treetops began to move about, shifting positions over the wobbling trunks.  This only increased in intensity, and soon the trunks—or rather the jumbo silver eels—were waggling about maniacally, crisscrossing one another, while the treetops—now ovals of emerald felt—were whirling about in a blur. I estimate all of this took place in the span of four or five seconds.  And then the hysterical landscape overwhelmed me and I went under, fully in salvia’s grip.

To be continued next month.

THE UK has an efficient rail system with comfortable high-speed trains that run frequently and on schedule.  While last-minute ticket prices are unreasonably costly for long distance travel, one can travel inexpensively by booking a seat several weeks in advance.  In this sense, the trains operate much like air flights.  Should you book ahead and later decide you want to alter your travel date, you must pay a change fee as well as the difference in price between the old ticket and the new.  This pricing scheme benefits those who plan weeks in advance, but obviously disadvantages off-the-cuff travelers, who must either opt for slower and less agreeable bus travel or dig deep to cover those hefty last-minute ticket fares, which seem like little more than subsidies for the well-organized.

The human creature is remarkably adaptable, especially in economic matters, and though I had always belonged to the off-the-cuff grouping, I soon learned to plan ahead for all UK travel.  And as I was entitled to a discount Rail Card that gave me thirty percent off standard or advanced fares, I was soon securing train tickets at up to half the cost of bus travel.

On Easter Day, March 23, I traveled by train from London to Newark North Gate—less than two hours to the north—to visit my relatives for two days.  I had purchased the return ticket a week earlier for £29.70 (£14.85 each way), not the cheapest fare for that journey, but still around a third of what I would have paid on the day of travel.

One of the Rail Card provisions stipulates that the card-bearer must always display the Rail Card for the discounted ticket to be valid.  In other words, if you don’t have your Rail Card, the train conductor will charge you—not just for the thirty percent of the original ticket price that you saved, but for the entire cost of a new last-minute ticket purchased on board.  It may not sting as much as having one’s hand chopped off Taliban-style for theft, but it is similar in that, considering the nature of the crime and the extent of the punishment, the victim can’t help but feel he’s been done over.      

It wasn’t until I arrived at King’s Cross train station that I realized I had left my Rail Card back in my room.  The train wasn’t departing for another ten minutes so I explained my predicament to a ticket sales employee.  He said I had two choices: to purchase another Rail Card for twenty pounds or another ticket for fifty (and this just a one-way).  Both were out of the question, the latter for obvious reasons (fork over $100 for a short train ride I had already paid for?) and the former not only because my train was leaving shortly and I lacked the two requisite passport photos but also, and more to the point, because I wasn’t going to be milked for the cost of another Rail Card.  With steep change fees and a non-refundable ticket policy, the National Express had several times in recent months cashed in after I’d altered or cancelled my travel plans; the last thing I was going to do was bend over for them. I decided to return to my apartment to get the Rail Card and then take the next train out to Newark, hoping that the conductor might accept the expired ticket after hearing my sob story.

Before leaving the station, I decided to stop by the front carriage of my scheduled train to see whether the conductor might accept my ticket without the Rail Card.  To my surprise, the conductor, who was standing on the platform, waved me onto the train good-naturedly, although he did first warn me that on my return tomorrow his colleague may be less accommodating.  Fine, I thought, I would deal with that obstacle when it came. And surely with a minimum of effort—a brief email and a phone call or two to the higher-ups—I could secure some brotherly arrangement to ensure a penalty-free return.

Ten minutes later I was sending an email to Customer Services, explaining my situation (on some train routes, free Wifi is available).  The next morning I received the following reply:

Dear Constantine Markides,

Thank you for your eMail.

Unfortunately you cannot purchase/travel with a discounted ticket without showing your Railcard.

The Terms and Conditions of the Young Persons Railcard state: You must carry your Railcard with you and when asked by rail staff, you must show a valid ticket and valid Railcard, otherwise the full fare will be payable as if no Railcard and/or no ticket were held.

Once again thank you for your eMail and I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Considering that I had emailed them precisely because of those terms and conditions, it was an exasperating response, akin to telling a junkie who has called in for an ambulance after an overdose that heroine is illegal.

On arrival I checked at the ticket counter to see if something could be done for my return leg.  As before, I was told I’d have to buy either a new Rail Card or a new ticket.

-Is there no-one higher-up I could speak to, I asked, anyone with the authority to issue a waver?

Unmoved, he looked at me through the booth pane with the detached weariness of one who has said all there is to say but is forced by circumstance to carry on the dialogue.

-It’s the rules, he said, quietly. And besides, it’s Easter Sunday.  Everything is closed.

-But what about tomorrow? I asked. Surely tomorrow I can call someone.

The corners of his lips lifted as he slowly shook his head.  No one was waiting behind me but our discussion had clearly come to an end.

I decided to deal in person with the conductor the next day, just as I had done at London’s King Cross Station.  The only problem was that the train was not originating from Newark North Gate; it was only briefly stopping there on route, which meant I had no choice but to board and deal with the consequences.  But I was confident I could convince the conductor, or at least work out some arrangement with him: I am usually capable of weaseling my way out of such predicaments.  It was arrogant posturing on my part and entirely unjustified keeping in mind my recent run-ins with the law, or rather with the rules.  After all, the rules of the game were different in this land: while smooth talk, charms and amiability may here as elsewhere get you a free lay, they won’t get you a pre-paid ride.

My seat on the return journey was in one of the rearmost carriages.  As it was a London-bound train on the evening after Easter, it took me at least ten minutes to work my way to the conductor’s carriage.  I had decided to approach him directly in private rather than wait to explain myself when he came checking tickets, since the presence of the other passengers, all undoubtedly versed in the fine print of the terms and conditions, might dissuade him from overlooking the absence of my Rail Card.

At the time I thought this the wisest course of action.  After all, just as statesmen who want to dispose of individuals or depose elected governments say We cannot allow a rotting apple to ruin the rest of the barrel or The virus must be cut short before it spreads, so too might the conductor have said, Innocuous as it may seem, allowing you to travel unpunished without your Rail Card may provoke discontent among those rule-abiding passengers who have from infanthood absorbed the understanding, which I should note permeates every one of our society’s private and personal institutions except of course for those delinquent ones that free societies by virtue of their very openness must ironically perforce tolerate, that one can only build a democratic edifice upon a carefully prescribed and adhered-to legal foundation, which must be defended not only by a vigorous judicial and legal class but also by a proactive general public who appreciates that even the slightest exception for something like a forgotten Rail Card exposes the good society to the mushrooming weeds of corruption and nepotism and therefore warrants civilized expressions of discontent, even outrage, although hopefully nothing more than that, for we would not want the public ire to snowball, however justifiably, into train riots, railway station occupations, mass internment, a coup d’ etat, civil war.

Had I better assessed the situation, I would have stayed put in my seat, seeing that with the crowded numbers on the train and the frequent station stops, it would be unlikely the conductor would manage to keep track of those whose tickets he had already checked and those who had recently boarded, especially if he was dispensing sermons along the way like the one above. 

I found the conductor behind the snack bar.  In a tone that was respectful without being deferential, I showed him my ticket and explained myself. He listened, taking stock of my words, and then pulled out his hole-puncher.  It had been as easy as I’d hoped it would be.

And then I made the error.  In my excitement, perhaps wanting to reassure him that I hadn’t just cocked up a story to save myself a few pounds, I told him I’d be willing to give him my debit card info so that they could later charge me if I failed to present them with proof of my Rail Card.  I should have just kept silent.  He paused, a look of troubled self-awareness coming over him as if the words ‘debit card,’ ‘proof’ and ‘Rail Card’ had snapped him out of a dangerous trance.  Although I didn’t realize it right away, it was obvious enough what was going through his head: Michael, hast thou forgotten the Rules and Regulations? O injudicious man, how now this folly? Honor thy rules and thy regulations as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee, that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

He put the hole-puncher away and pulled out a small fare booklet in which he began to run his finger down a column of train stations.  Even if he was merely obeying a deep rooted inner voice, his apparent change of mind seemed an act of malice, and the stooped gentleman with graying hair standing before me in the light blue shirt and red tie suddenly took on a sinister aspect.  Even so, I did not recoil at this sudden and unlikely incarnation of evil.  I assumed he was going to charge me the thirty percent of the ticket value that my Rail Card had saved me.  Fine then, so be it.  Let the devil have his seven quid.

His finger stopped its downward course and swept rightward along the page.

-Forty-four sixty-five, he said.

-What?

-That will be 44.65, he repeated in a flat tone.

I had heard him perfectly well the first time but I needed a few moments for the figure to sink in.  So the old goat was exhorting a new ticket out of me!  I stared at him wordlessly.  He waited calmly without meeting my eyes.

-Well, can I get my money back later if I show them my card? I finally said.

-The rules and regulations say that you have to have a Rail Card on you at all times, otherwise you have to pay for—

-The cost of a new ticket, I know, I know, I said, without hiding my irritation. Rules were made to serve men, not men to serve rules, I added imperiously.

The poetic force of my cliché had no apparent effect on him. He began filling out the ticket. 

-I find this astonishing, I went on.  What, you think I would go through all this trouble booking a ticket in advance that was invalid, just to save a couple of pounds? You actually think that—

-Wait a moment, he said, putting down the bill.

He walked away.  Again, I was confident I was about to be let off. He returned five minutes later.

-So that’ll be 44.65, he said, casually.

At first I thought he might be joking. The deadpan delivery would not have been out of keeping with British humor, which is the godfather of comedy precisely because of its variety and unpredictability, incorporating both highbrow and lowbrow, ironic understatement and outrageous slapstick, witty puns and nonsense.  I could have easily been in a British TV sitcom at the moment: all that was missing was the audience laughter.  In fact, considering how much of British humor emerged out of constrictive social conditions (i.e. the lewd and bawdy satire that one finds in films like Life of Brian is part of a larger tradition that developed in response to Puritanical stiffness and intolerance) I would not be surprised if the rules and regulations culture has contributed to the superb self-depreciation and irreverence one finds in British humor.

But seeing that he would not meet my gaze at all, I quickly realized that he was not just having fun with me.  Michael Kilburn was clearly no Michael Palin.

-Forty-four sixty-five eh? I said icily.  Fine then, I see how it is.

I was now sensing malice not in him but in myself.  But at the same time, I felt gratitude.  The end of the month was nearing and I had nothing in mind for my Fourth Night essay.  Petty vengeance is as good a spur as any for writing.

I was staring at his face intently as he filled out my ticket.  Outwardly he was impassive, but I could tell my malevolent smile had touched him.  It wasn’t enough: I wanted him to pay somehow too.  Malice is one of the most selfish of emotions: like greed, it is never satisfied with what it has.  I retrieved a pen and paper slip from my pocket.

-Could I have your name please? I said softly, while pointing at his name tag, which was facing the wrong way.

He turned it around but seconds later moved his body in a way that made the tag flip back around.

-I didn’t quite get that, I said.

He turns it around again, holding it up to me.  Michael Kilburn.  He then lets it drop again.

-I didn’t get your security number, I said.

-Oh no, not the security number, that’s not for you, he said, grinning unconvincingly, pleased with his little victory.

I was going to ask him why it was on his I.D. tag if it was not for me to see but decided it was enough for now. I continued staring at him as he finished filling out his ticket. His neck was a blotchy red, although I could not say if that was from my presence.  It’s not that I had no sympathy for him.  He was only doing his job after all.  But that was precisely why I resented him so much.

-How will you be paying? he asked civilly.

I handed him my debit card.

-The conductor in London, who let me on without any fuss warned me that other conductors might be less understanding, I said.  I now see what he meant.

He then mumbled something about having dispatched the station about my case but not getting permission from them.

-It’s up to you, not the station.  All you had to do was punch a hole in my ticket.

It was true and he knew it.  He handed me the new ticket and receipt.

-Happy Easter, I said, and walked away. 

It would be unfair to give the impression that UK train conductors are rigidly bureaucratic.  In my few other similar run-ins with conductors, they have always been fair-minded and exercised personal judgment in place of rules where it seemed reasonable to do so.  They also seem to be perpetually and genuinely in good spirits, despite being in the business of enforcement, not a role that can ingratiate them with the customers.  In this instance, Mr. Kilburn was in the unfortunate position of having to charge me close to $100 for an 80-minute train ride that I’d already paid for.  The fee seemed particularly ludicrous in light of the fact that three days earlier I had booked a roundtrip air ticket from London to Frankfurt for $45 (also ludicrous, but for the opposite reason).

The inconvenience was trivial, and I could never say I’d been victimized by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, but I still couldn’t shrug it off.  Had Mr. Kilburn acted out of personal gain, with the goal of pocketing the money, I would have maybe digested the offense more easily.  At least there would have been some purpose—perhaps not commendable but understandable nonetheless—to his heisting close to a hundred bucks off me.  But fining me this way, in the selfless line of duty, seemed chillingly inhuman.  It was rule not by the iron fist smashing down upon the masses but by the iron finger sweeping unswervingly along the terms and conditions.

I worked my way back to my seat.  A half hour later Mr. Kilburn walked through my train compartment, only to again traverse it after five minutes. He did not check any tickets.  Had I stayed in my seat in the first place, I would never have been fined.

I again made my way to the front of the train.  I encountered Mr. Kilburn in the passageway between two train cars.  He looked away upon seeing me.  But the relief was evident on his face when I merely asked him for the National Express contact details regarding refunds.  Really I had just wanted one final chance to see him up close, to get one final perspective on this person who was taking the lead role in my next Fourth Night. He set off down the corridor, shoulders stooping, arms hanging limp at his sides, the palms facing back towards me, resembling an upright anthropomorphized turtle like the Looney Tunes character Cecil Turtle.

Suddenly all the malice went out of me.  I felt sorry for this man who was sandwiched like a buffer zone between a strict rule and regulation culture and barbarians like me who had not grown up in such a culture and therefore not internalized its values and requirements. He was the victim of both the bureaucrats who carved the rules into stone tablets as well as the infidels who wanted the tablets smashed. He was like the policeman who is ordered to quell an anti-war demonstration while the masters of war remain unmolested behind their walls and desks.

Mr. Kilburn fumbled about briefly in a compartment drawer and then returned with a booklet.

-This is who you want to contact, he said with a warm smile, drawing a neat square around an address and email.

He did not seem at all annoyed with me.  In fact, he was only too happy to oblige. This was all strictly in keeping with the rules and regulations. I was overwhelmed by a sense of shame and compassion, although it was obviously still not enough to keep me from dishing him back an undeserved ticket, this time in the shape of an essay.

I ended up sending my train tickets and a photocopy of my Rail Card to the National Express requesting a refund.  Three weeks letter I received a letter from them stating that although it is the responsibility of customers to have a Rail Card in their possession, they were ‘happy to be able to offer [me] a refund as a gesture of goodwill.’  They included a check for £35.

I was devastated.  I had already written and posted the first half of this piece and so this defiance of protocol from the bureaucrats themselves, the gatekeepers of the supposed rules and regulations zeitgeist that I had been writing about, suddenly threw the rest of my essay into critical condition.  How much easier it would have been to receive a polite referral to Terms and Conditions!  Then I could have gleefully sunk my teeth into them.  Instead I felt like a hell and damnation preacher who, in the middle of his red-in-the-face sermon, suddenly realizes he no longer believes in fire and brimstone.

Thankfully, however, the National Express had only included a check for £35 not £44.65.  The reason for this was mentioned in the letter: ‘Please note the deduction of a £10 administration fee from the original ticket cost.’ (that they only deducted £9.65 to keep the math simple seemed to be yet another unexpected bending of the terms and conditions).

At least there was a regulation dictating procedures on handling refunds, in this case involving a £10 pound administration fee.  In a gesture of goodwill they may have defied one of the rules, but at least they brought another one to bear upon it.  All was not lost for Lament for Michael Kilburn, although there was no doubt that from now on if I was going to be lamenting anything, it was that I had made such a big fuss over such a small thing.

Constantine Markides

That is why I was initially resistant about writing an essay that amounts, behind whatever literary veneer, to little more than an extended whinge, just with the sights turned 180 degrees onto the UK.  While culture-bashing may be palatable and even laudably dissident on home soil, there is something inherently disagreeable about swinging at national piñatas abroad. 

I didn’t nurture any misgivings for long.  In reflecting back on my time in the newsroom of the English-language daily Cyprus Mail, the many British expat grievances over Cypriot corruption, lawlessness, failure to comply with EU directives, and so on, that I would listen to and then relay to the next day’s primarily British readers now leave me feeling that there is a kind of Hammurabic justice, or at least aptness, in my furthering the intercultural dialogue and cross-fertilization of ideas-to use the darling rhetoric of arts and academia bureaucrats-by being a whinging Cypriot. 

Not that this is purely a petty act of eye-for-an-eye.  Ironically, my initiation over the last six months into the British zeitgeist of rules and regulations-the source of my whinge-has made it possible for me to more fully empathize with those British tourists and expats in Cyprus whose fulminations I was putting into print despite a growing sense that in doing so I was only stoking a fire that could use some smothering.  No wonder they were so outraged that laws and regulations in Cyprus mostly exist for show and tell presentations to the EU headmasters rather than for implementation in the classroom.  I have even grown to feel an unlikely solidarity with them in terms of our mutual indignation, even if our woes are of a polar opposite variety, like what one might expect if a nudist were relocated to a nunnery and a nun to a nudist colony. 

One also cannot deny that the hyper-civilized adherence of the UK authorities and public to rules and regulations makes daily affairs on the whole proceed more smoothly and efficiently while minimizing hazards and fraud. Consider the orderliness of the queues in the UK; in even the lengthiest ones it is rare to encounter complaining or signs of frustration: the loud sighing, the rolling eyes, the headshaking, the lips pursing at the wristwatch.  It is as if everyone in queue shares the tacit understanding that they are in the best of all possible worlds and that the only other option would be to savage one another in a free-for-all dash to the front, which aside from obvious unpleasantries would only gum up the process.

This respect for order and organization finds its apotheosis in the British Library.  The staff is unyielding when it comes to the rules-whether that involves providing the requisite documentation for acquiring a Reader’s Pass, complying with UK copyright legislation for photocopying books, or adhering to the no-bags policy in the reading rooms (the nearby men’s bathrooms are among the few places where you can see men urinating with a laptop tucked under their armpit)-but far from being oppressively bureaucratic, these rules somehow seem essential to the successful functioning of one of the finest research libraries in the world.

Nevertheless, smoothly as the ordered society may function, one of the inevitable by-products of a thriving rules and regulations culture is a suffocating sense that you can never stray from the straight and narrow path.  This is markedly the case when it comes to Health and Safety provisions (the capitalization advertises the commitment to protecting the public) where the end result seems to be that the entire population is protected not only from most every hazard but also from ever doing anything. 

I recently came across a 2004 BBC article online that described how a council in east London had imposed a ban stating that table dancers and customers at strip clubs must be separated by a ’36-inch no flesh zone.’  The judge, however, ruled against their request to ban nudity, claiming that wearing a G-string or nothing at all made no difference for “preventing of crime or preserving public order.”  The three-foot security barrier of flesh-free space, on the other hand, presumably (and mysteriously) made for safer streets.  If it were true that physical contact leads to disorder and violence, then one might expect nightly mass killings and looting in every city in Cyprus considering the innumerable Eastern Europeans and Filipinas who are pimped out in ‘cabarets,’ which like restaurants feature take-away and in-house dining (except that in cabarets take-away costs more). 

It would be unfair to accuse the British authorities of exercising undemocratic favoritism in enforcing the rules. According to an AFP article, the actor Daniel Craig was forced to wear a lifejacket as he traveled down the Thames during his October 2005 press unveiling as the new James Bond.  The not-so-tough-guy image that this presented of him was often later invoked by hysteric James Bond ‘purists’ to discredit Craig, who had brought to the role an emotional depth unrivalled by earlier Bonds (in their fanatical witch hunt, they even established a “Boycott Casino Royale” website).  They claimed that the life-vested actor bore little in common with Ian Fleming’s wooden-spoken, comically-suave literary creation (thankfully, they were right).  It was an unfair slander: it’s just that in the UK, not even James Bond is above the Health and Safety law.    

Alongside hardness of breathing and nausea, yet another adverse side effect of a heavy handed rules and regulation empire is an excess of bureaucracy.  There is of course a case to be made for bureaucracy, which ostensibly exists to minimize corruption by establishing proper legal channels through which business must be conducted.  But when you wriggle through one legal channel only to find yourself staring headlong into another one, and then another, seemingly ad infinitum, you sometimes wish you could just slip some crooked bastard a ten-pound note and get on with things. 

Several months ago, while in a filmmaking workshop at University College London, I tried to secure permission to film in the Waterloo train station and along London’s South Bank-the promenade flanking the southern shores of the Thames.  I had been surprised when I first heard I needed any such authorization, especially for the South Bank.  I was sure that those hordes of tourists milling every weekend along the Thames with camcorders hanging around their necks had not contacted any officials or filled any forms.  But apparently the bulkier semi-pro video cameras we were using would make us an obvious target for security guards.

I first called the train station.  After a few requests by phone, which in retrospect could have been worded differently (“Yes, I’d like permission to do some shooting in Waterloo”), a government officer phoned me back telling me in a cordial but nonnegotiable tone that filming in Waterloo that Saturday would not be possible due to the short notice (it was Thursday).  They still needed risk assessment forms, university insurance forms, and other paperwork, which still had to make the rounds before approval was finalized.  Two days obviously wasn’t enough for such a multi-tiered operation. 

I then tried securing permission for the South Bank.  This proved far easier and within an hour or so my request was approved.  But upon closer examination of the notification email sent to me-which involved a detailed map of the South Bank divided into cross-sections-I saw that I had only been granted permission for a small part of the Bank, the one-kilometer stretch falling within their zone of responsibility.  To film along most of the southern promenade in Central London, which had been the plan, I would have to go through this process another five or six times. 

In our hyper-tech era, which has even made television retro, writers can often feel more commonality with archaeologists, or with the things archaeologists dig up, than with artists more in step with the times like filmmakers. But as I gazed upon that South Bank map-with its grid of cross-sections and names of the relevant Councils, each of which I would have to contact and request permission from-being a fossil didn’t seem all that bad after all. 

It is of course easy to complain about legislation and fall back on predictable condemnations about the “nanny state,” a phrase bandied about mostly within the wealthier strata of society by individuals who themselves were often nannied as children and who take offense that a fraction of their privileges might be extended to the masses (in denouncing the nanny state, they also proclaim the virtues of ‘free market’ economies, the word ‘free’ being an abbreviated codeword for “free for thee but not for me,” where the underclass must contend with market discipline while the corporate overlords unfussily accept the generous taxpayer subsidies and bailouts that are masqueraded as necessary economic stimulus measures).  But in fact an essay of whinging grossly misrepresents my impressions of London, a city which blends internationalism with local culture and big city vibrancy with small town affability better than any other place I have been. 

The unswerving devotion to law and order may have occasionally provoked allergic outbreaks in me, primarily due to the change of climate from Cyprus, but it was nothing to warrant a Fourth Night whinge.  Not, that is, until the evening of March 24^th, when I met Mr. Michael Kilburn.          

The second part of Lament for Michael Kilburn is the May posting.

I’d been out of school for almost a decade and so it was inevitable for me to initially suffer from a minor identity crisis that comes from the déjà vu feeling of being caught up—albeit in this lifetime—in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal recurrence.  It was impossible to not feel that I had regressed in some fundamental way.  But phobias and flashbacks aside, I soon found that study in the U.K.—where instructors neither hold hands nor wield whips—was especially well-suited to us older sorts who are referred to, despite the lack of evidence, as ‘mature students.’

I had come to University College of London with prejudiced notions that the educational format would be stuffy and buttoned-up only to find that it was less formal than in the U.S. (i.e. the first-name basis between teachers and students is not one-way).  And any lingering ideas I may have still maintained about uptight British education were permanently quashed when the ‘Issues in Modern Culture’ instructor one day said: “For next week, aside from the reading, go out around London and try your hand at a bit of psychogeography.  You can do anything you want, but I’d prefer not to have to bail you out of jail.”

Psychogeography emerged as a conceptual term in 1955; its aim was to jolt urbanites out of their humdrum utilitarian routines and into fresh experiential states through radically re-conceiving urban spaces (this might involve something as innocuous as navigating oneself through London with a map of Paris).  The notion of psychogeography was bound up with the Situationist International, a movement of Marxist pranksters and theoreticians seeking to instill and invoke revolutionary sensibilities by “creating situations” as they put it.  One of the most notorious examples of such a situation (although it took place before the movement had announced itself) involved a man dressing up as a monk and then reading a pamphlet claiming God was dead from the pulpit of the Notre Dame during Easter Mass.  Defacing monuments in creative ways was also part of the situationist stockpile.

I wasn’t feeling all that up to defacing any monuments or committing any situationist acts of political subversion (although there was a tempting irony in the thought of it, seeing that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, which funds all Chevenings, was sponsoring my course and that one of the conditions I had signed as part of my scholarship contract was that I would “not engage in political activities or in any other activities of a public nature likely to affect the British government adversely”).  I was however up for some psychogeographic sport.  So that Sunday evening, while out with a friend and emboldened by a few pints, I decided to give it a go at the London Bridge Train Station.

The first thing I did was request a one-way train ticket to Tripoli for the following Monday (“There’s no such place” – “No?  Are you sure? It’s on the coast in the South East…”).  But that didn’t seem to be going anywhere so I then tried posing a simple question to a number of employees in and around the train station: ‘How can I get to the Eiffel Tower?’  This proved far more fruitful.  As I had a micro-recorder on hand, I was able to transcribe all the interchanges, which I include below as a record of my psychogeographic edification:

TRANSCRIPTION FROM AN AUDIO RECORDING OF QUESTIONS POSED ON A SUNDAY EVENING IN AND
AROUND THE LONDON BRIDGE TRAIN STATION

STATION NIGHT MAINTENANCE

Q:  Excuse me.  Do you know by any chance the easiest way to get to—
A:  No, I don’t know.
Q:  —to get to the Eiffel Tower?
A:  No, I don’t know, sir.
Q:  The Eiffel Tower… I hear there’s nice views of London—
A:  I don’t know. Sorry.
Q:  Do you know who would know how I can get to the Eiffel Tower?  Do you know if it’s nearby here or how far away it is?
A:  Ask [inaudible].  He’ll know.  He has the book.  He knows everything.

STATION COFFEE BOOTH EMPLOYEE

Q:  Hello, do you know how I can get to the Eiffel Tower?  I hear there’s good views of London from the top.
A:  Um, which place? [nervous giggle] Which place?  What best views of London?
Q:  The Eiffel.
A:  What views?
Q:  From the top.  From the top of the tower.
A:  Tower Bridge?
Q:  No. Eiffel.
A:  No idea.
Q: You know how far it is?
A:  No.  I mean, I must have heard of it, but I don’t know where it is.
Q:  Or maybe that’s not the one.  I think it… or was it the Tower of Pisa?
A:  I have no idea.  I really have no idea.
Q:  All right. Okay. I’ll ask somebody else I guess. Great, thanks… But you think it’s nearby?
A:  I think it’s nearby here, but I’m not sure how to get there. That’s why. Sorry about that.
Q:  Okay, great. Thanks.

CASHIER IN STATION CONVENIENCE STORE

Q:  Do you know by any chance how to get to the Eiffel Tower from here?
A:  The Eiffel Tower?
Q:  Yeah, I hear there’s good views of London from the top.
A:  It’s not Eiffel tower here.
Q: There’s no Eiffel?  Really!  It’s not in London?  We’ve been looking for it all day.  They gave us the wrong directions…  So where is it?
A:  Paris.
Q:  They said there’s a tower here, with good views.
A:  Alton Tower.
Q:  Oh, Alton.  So it’s not Eiffel or Pisa…
A:  Two pounds ten please.
Q:  So is there a bus that goes from here?
A:  Certainly no idea. You need to call—
Q:  Does the underground?
A:  You need to call the TFL.
Q:  TFL?  What’s that?
A:  Transport for London.
Q:  And they can get us there?
A:  Yeah, yeah…
Q:  To the Eiffel tower? Okay, great.  Thanks.

CASHIER IN CONVENIENCE STORE OUTSIDE TRAIN STATION

Q:  Do you know by any chance how to get to the Tower of Pisa from here? No? You don’t?
A:  I’m new.
Q:  It’s an old tower, I think.  They’re saying it may fall soon.
A:  It’s my third day.
Q:  Oh, okay.  Great, thanks, thank you.

RECEPTIONIST IN COMPANY BUILDING

Q:  Sorry, we’ve been looking for the Eiffel tower all day and kind of thought it was along the river.  We’ve walked from Tower Bridge and we were wondering if it was near—
A:  I have no idea.
Q:  The Eiffel Tower.  It’s quite tall.  You should be able to see it really.
A:  Maybe if you go that way [motions to the right] it’s on the right hand side.
Q:  Okay. The Eiffel Tower might be on the water.
A:  [with growing confidence] Yes.  Because I’m first time here on this side.  That’s why I don’t know this area.
Q:  Ah, so the Eiffel Tower is on the other side!  We’ve been on the wrong side of the river, that’s why…  We’ve been asking so many people that don’t know. Okay. Great. We’ll cross the river then.
A:  Yes. I think so. If you cross the river, you know. If you go via the bridge, yes, you know, maybe it’s on the other side.

Constantine Markides

IN JULY I flew into Nairobi to write a series of newspaper and magazine articles on the Orthodox Archbishop of Kenya. Towards the end of my three weeks there, I accompanied the Archbishop to a church service in Kibera—the largest slum in Africa with an estimated population of one million, all living in an area the size of New York’s Central Park. During the liturgy I set off with some locals on a walk through the shantytown. There is something unavoidably repugnant about a white man wandering through an African slum with a camera, even if he can claim a journalistic motive. Nonetheless, it didn’t dissuade me from taking plenty of photos, though I did try to be discreet (my mid-grade ‘prosumer’ camera cannot approach an SLR in depth of field and image quality, but one of its advantages is that the detachable LCD monitor and powerful optimal zoom allows for photographing on the sly). A few days later I went on a three-day camping safari in the Masai Mara game reserve in hopes of witnessing the annual wildebeest migration. Initially I intended to post a photo essay from either Kibera or the safari, but I’ve decided to include both, with alternating photos. One might argue that juxtaposing images of wild beasts side by side with slum kids shares something in spirit with the khaki-clad imperial good old boys of the early 1900s who traveled into Africa to hunt big game and ‘encounter the curious naked savages.’ That may be so. The white man’s burden remains with us, not as Kipling conceived of it, but as an inescapable historical baggage of racism and upturned-nose colonialism that every white bears with him every time he steps onto African soil. It seemed especially appropriate, for cynical reasons, to juxtapose the two sets of photos after I read that there is now a tour guide outfit in Nairobi that offers “slum tours,” or as they also put it with alliterative and wordplayish flair, “Pro Poor Tourism” (doublespeak in structure as well as content). For a compassionate fee, the adventurer can tour some of the most impoverished areas of Africa and snap photos of the bipedal wildlife through the detachable roof. On its website, the company gushes on about how it “came up with the new noble idea of Kenya slum tourism” and assures its readers that “through tourism business” it wants to help make real its dream of “an Africa without slums.” Of course, one could argue that all this is in keeping with, or even an improvement on, the essence of the African safari. After all, normally on a game drive you hope to see predators in action; on a slum tour you have the chance to actually become one.

To see the photo essay click here:  PHOTOS: From Kibera to Mara

Constantine Markides

Instead the reporters dutifully scour the remotest depths of the non-event – a vital skill for press conference journalists – to patch together something that might be passed off as a notable news story. Or they corner one of the politicians and hope that, under intensive and relentless one-on-one questioning, the protective shield of jargon might be knocked aside long enough for a sentence or two to escape that posseses a shade of meaning.

Of course, it is the reporters, with their conspiracy of silence, who allow politicians to get away with language murder. After all, at press events it is the job of politicians, not reporters, to reveal as little as possible while giving the impression that a great deal has been said. But part of the reason no journalists protest these events is because they are treated to such a kingly reception. At no cost to you or your newspaper (at least for EU events) you are flown out to another country, put up in a hotel whose nightly rate might run in the hundreds of euros, and treated from start to finish to a parade of luncheons, cocktail parties and dinners. To bring attention to the fact that the emperor is naked might jeopardize any future flights, four-star hotels, and finger food.

The following two excerpts are selected more or less at random from EU press conference speeches: “The policy is ambitious since it aims at promoting convergence and territorial cohesion through innovation and competitiveness” … “I agree and I am certain that a more intensive use of private-public partnerships is key to the conservation and valorization of our heritage.”

There is nothing ungrammatical about these sentences and yet after reading them, let alone hearing them, one is left with an unsettled sense of having learned nothing. Ornamental phrases like ‘valorization of our heritage’ (a phrase often bandied about despite its incomprehensibility) and darling terms like ‘convergence’ or ‘territorial cohesion’ pepper speeches because, though they sound professional and high-minded, they are also vague enough to ensure that discussion remains safely in the ethereal skies of rhetoric, far from the frightening realities of the real world below.

Vague and stale speech – which is both the cause and result of sloppy thinking – is not limited to government bureaucrats. One can find it most anyplace where influential people congregate. The less educated often glaze over in hotel conference rooms because they have not been sufficiently initiated into the art of bullshit to appreciate the subtleties of garbled diction. It is not an exaggeration to say that at least 95 percent of talk in conference rooms is hot air. One must go to less respectable places like the pub – with its booze-fueled intolerance for bombast and pretence – to find people who do not sound like they are channeling deadly bores from other dimensions.

One of my more memorable New York City jobs involved a two-week stint as a temp in the Macy’s fashion marketing department. My job was to write up meeting summaries of the upcoming ‘Fall Lineup’ fashion presentations. During the meetings, clothing articles were introduced (“the Fall cashmere series is projected to be a $7.5 million trade, we’re very excited about it”) and passed around among the executives, who would make mundane comments and recommendations, which I had no trouble summing up. But when I passed in my first summary, my supervisor had me rewrite it in convoluted “professional” form using superfluous polysyllabic words, often with ‘-ize’ and ‘-ion’ endings. She wanted bloated sentences full of gas. It was obvious she had never made any effort to understand the content of the jargon she used in her daily memos. But I soon saw that that the meaninglessness was part of its charm.  Since it was all empty jabber, neither she nor anyone else in the department could ever be accused of making a mistake.

Depending on the subject of a particular press conference, the rhetoric lies somewhere between the shameless euphemisms of military talk and the junk vocabulary of corporate jargon. Because so much of big business comes down to the ancient practice of profiting off other people’s work, a special terminology is required to give the impression that what is actually taking place is a complex and sophisticated activity. An example: “We really want to leverage and monetize our synergy with this new initiative but there’s a disconnect in terms of our reorg.” Phrases like ‘thought leader,’ ‘cutting edge practices,’ ‘adding value,’ ‘enhanced output,’ ‘core values’ and ‘core competencies’ are characteristic of business speak.

Likewise, much of New Age jargon – with its own darling terms like ‘synchronicity,’ ‘serendipity,’ and ‘interconnectivity’ and its gooey talk about opening up the heart and unleashing the child within – serves as a similar kind of smokescreen. The siren vision of a benevolent universe and suffering-free life offers the troubled soul a slew of ‘mind, body, and spirit’ workshops, ‘inner healing sessions’, and other such transcendental services in exchange for a small fee (“exchanging energy” as some gurus on the receiving end of the exchange call it).

Unlike corporate and New Ageist jargon, which tries to give the mirage impression that a lot is happening, military language seeks to downplay facts by sugarcoating them. Hence phrases like ‘collateral damage’ (civilian death), ‘regime change’ (violent overthrow of government), ‘antipersonnel weapon’ (weapons for killing people), ‘engaging the enemy’ (shooting at other young men), ‘smart bombs’ (bombs with guided systems to ensure they inflict maximum destruction), ‘Defense Department’ (called Department of War prior to World War II), ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ (initially termed ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’ until officials realized the acronym was O.I.L.) and the most poetic of them all, ‘theatre of combat,’ one of the rare euphemisms that illuminates more than it obfuscates, alluding as it does to the drama of war, with its behind-the-scenes playwrights and underpaid actors.

In 1947 H.L. Mencken wrote, “All the great villainies of history from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers.” Few press conferences achieve notoriety as villainies – in fact most do not make it beyond the level of glorified bullshit – but Mencken’s assertion still applies to the bulk of them. Without sober speakers and a sober audience, the disciplined façade of most press events would at once crumble.

So the question then arises: what if the speakers and audience were drunk, or at least tipsy? A few strong drinks would surely go a long way to purging much of the claptrap. Who, after several whiskey and sodas, could stand up in public and say, “To conclude, the most important form of integration is the spirit of togetherness. The people understand each other and they build an awareness of togetherness.” And who, with a sensible dose of alcohol running through the veins, could hold a straight face on hearing it?

(That, by the way, was a quote from the European Commissioner of Multilingualism during the European Day of Languages. The event, appropriately enough, celebrates “linguistic diversity and the benefits of being able to speak another language,” something the Commissioner certainly has a knack for.)

Let us refer to this proposed solution for eliminating jargon from press conferences as booze therapy. The alcohol could be administered any number of ways. Vodka could replace the standard bottled water on the tables. Or a glass of spiked punch, the first of several of course, could be handed to participants as they entered the conference room. Though a costlier option, a full bar would satisfy a diversity of personal tastes and would especially suit EU meetings for obvious transnational and multicultural reasons.

Consider the therapy. A high-level official, buzzing under the influence of several margaritas, may suddenly discover upon turning on her microphone that her pre-planned speech – two pages of unremitting jargon – is patently absurd. She will then either have to try communicate the content in everyday, albeit slurred, language, or resign herself to the fact that the subject is so sterile that there is no point for her or anyone else to waste any more time on it. Considering the bustling condition of modern life and the prevailing economic view that every minute is a precious commodity to be fully exploited, few would oppose the timesaving results.

As with all good things, booze therapy is not without risks. Most officials rely on jargon like a blind man relies on a walking stick. When deprived of their seeing instrument (which doubles for them as a crutch) some of them may undergo a crisis of belief, their past press conferences suddenly flashing before their mind’s eye in successive babbling incoherence. Since such psychological strain is preferably experienced in private settings rather than in a roomful of journalists, an element of discomfort is unavoidable, although the alcohol may help ease the rockiness of the ride, something that lifelong drinkers swear is one of its most compelling and notable qualities. One can only hope that the press, which will anyway be in good humor thanks to the unique method of therapy, will be tactful enough not to report any of the intimate details.

In order to ensure that the press conference does not degenerate into another cocktail party, those participants who are unable to handle their BAC levels in a professional manner should be cut off at once from further consumption. If their presence continues to disrupt the proceedings, then in a polite but non-negotiable manner they will be escorted out of the room to a volunteer counselor booth, where a trained professional will outline with multimedia aids the ground rules and overarching philosophy of booze therapy, after which, pending satisfactory completion of a brief oral exam, they may return to the press conference.

Amorous activity of any sort within the conference room or adjoining hall will be strictly prohibited. Those whose rising libidinal mood continues to distract them from the presentation at hand can take their passions to the nearest bathroom individually or in groups of no more than three at a time.

Booze therapy is specifically designed to bring clarity and sense to press conference proceedings. But since the news presented is ultimately aimed not at journalists but at society itself, or at least at that dispersed and more or less myopic group of people known as the wider reading public (for reasons of diminishing time and motivation, the wider viewing public will have to be addressed another time), we must also consider the conditions under which the articles are written. Although the state of one’s motor senses bears more influence upon driving than on writing, it should be noted that alcohol, even when taken in moderate doses, causes significant swellings and contractions of mood that for better or worse can lead, among other upheavals, to narrative and stylistic coups in the writing, especially in essays and other forms of persuasive literature, which traditionally demand a clear-headed authorial voice that can be relied upon throughout the essay’s duration, much as one can rely upon a faithful dog for the duration of its life, assuming it does not go rabid, although one hopes that the essayist is more contemplative in nature than the dog, or at least less apt to drop everything for a dried bone. Alcohol affects each writer in a unique way, although the steady decline of inhibition does lead to one universal effect, namely that the author loses a tight rein over the writing, which like a freshly captured wild beast that awakens to find itself in a cage will seek to burst free of its grammatical straightjacket and slip out from under the author’s controlling hand, an act of insubordination that if successful will result in the sacrifice of poise and authority for gusto and inventiveness, not necessarily a bad thing. In short, if such an opening phrase can still be made after the last few sentences, while booze therapy is recommended without reservation during press conferences, prior and present experiments involving alcohol consumption during the act of writing offer mixed and controversial results, which suggests it should be up to the personal discretion of the writer to decide, hopefully in an honest and critical manner, whether or not it is a good idea to drink and write.

Constantine Markides

Unless you share, along with Dr. Jekyll or Gollum, the capacity to instantaneously morph into another creature for a few hours, it is not possible to be at once a novelist and a reporter. Part of the difficulty is that both the newspaper and the novel are slave drivers who demand, even while stroking your ego and chuffing you up, that you offer your soul—something that cannot be shared like bread. You may serve one but not two masters.

Each of the masters demands off-hours devotion. If you are in the thick of a novel, you may complete your writing for the day, but the characters will never stop whispering and bantering in your head; you may of course refuse to listen, but then you risk missing out on something essential without which your characters will turn out to be mono-dimensional phonies. In the same way, the reporter can never escape the news. There is no withdrawing from the noisy world, no peace of the recluse. If a ‘big story breaks,’ you must be there with recorder and notebook to get the story down, despite the fact that you may be in one of those morbid moods where nothing short of the Apocalypse will pique your interest.

I have so far done my best to resist the infiltration of the newsroom in my out-of-office hours. I must be one of only a handful of reporters, at least in the industrialized nations, who lack a cell phone. But it turns out that I am paying doubly for my unprofessional revolt. In recent weeks I have repeatedly woken up in a jarring anxiety because I cannot figure out the angle on the urgent news story I was just dreaming about. When you begin having nightmares over lead sentences, you know that, cell phone or no cell phone, your ass is now the newspaper’s.

But like Mephistopheles, the novel and the newspaper bestow spoils in exchange for your soul, though dissimilar ones. The novel offers freedom from all worldly trappings (resumes, supervisors, outfits, social niceties) and the electric sense that you are going for It, for the Big One, the novel that the slumbering century has been roaring for, the novel that will not render senseless all the transgressions and inflictions and errors of your life, that will transport you up over all the stifling tedium of your daily rote, that will make something alive and terrible and lasting before your life has hemorrhaged away, that will turn your days into a foolhardy one-in-a-million gamble, though a gamble for what you don’t even know nor do you care since it is the mad swinging thrill of the gamble that counts.

The newspaper, meanwhile, takes a blunt paws-to-the-earth approach in the booty it offers. There are the basics: a daily readership and a salary, even if a paltry one; the combination, at least to a novelist, approaches nirvana. Then there are the accoutrements: travel and social mingling, the opportunity to act upon your indignation at the corruption of power (ie. expose crooks in high places), the opportunity to be corrupted by the many freebies offered you in hopes of good press (ie. lunches, trinkets, flights, flattery), the opportunity to avenge yourself on those who wrong you or your family (ie. front page, you bastard), the confidence boost from seeing your name in print every day, the inflated sense of self-importance that comes from knowing that you are not only close to the events of your day but also writing their history, and the airs that result from having the weight of a newspaper behind you, something that always commands you respect no matter how unwarranted it may be.

This combination of perks and demands ensures that, as with the corporate or military life, you maintain absolute loyalty to your god. The same modern pressures that have rendered the under-forty crowd into an itinerant group of job-changers have also led to a rise in ‘holistic’ and ‘integrated’ lifestyles that blend such things as Buddha and Big Business. But, facades and frivolities aside, you cannot be a monk in the morning and a tycoon in the afternoon. The meditation room and the boardroom may amicably sit side-by-side, but you cannot serve God and Mammon. It was true thousands of years ago and it remains true now.

From afar the newspaper appears to win in the Faustian bid for the writer’s soul; whereas the novel’s intangible offerings are suspiciously subjective, the no-nonsense bounty of the press realm is indisputable. For example, I am currently on a Cyprus Airways plane heading to London for a weekend frolic known as a EU press event, compliments of the European Commission. No novel of mine has ever afforded me such an opportunity. The novel may offer dignity and bouts of exultation, but when it comes to material goods it cannot, except for a lucky few, even dole out a coffee, let alone airfare, room and board.

From up close, however, the newspaper life is less glorified. Inept bores and unscrupulous devils continue to run the world in great part because the press is constantly chasing after them with microphones and making a fuss over them. It is possible of course to ask the chieftains the right questions and to place their quotes against the relevant facts so that you are not merely telegraphing propaganda. But the fact remains that journalists clustered around a high-ranking official more resemble buzzards around a piece of rotten meat than they do purveyors of truth. In fact there is no avoiding the foul scene for reporters and officials rely on each other: the reporters need the ‘authoritative sources’ and the officials need the PR platform, even if it is not great PR. For better or worse, the unhappy mycorrhizal lifeline between the two is a permanent one.

A newspaper also affords no time for loitering over words, for the sculpting and buffing that is necessary to make the pages gleam. The essential matter for every newspaper is to fill the pages. An invisible sign may as well hang over all newsrooms: ‘Poetic sorts best not apply.’ If you manage to squeeze out a pleasing turn of phrase over the course of the article, then kudos to you, but like with public toilets at chili con carne fiestas, you will upset the others if you take too long to finish your work.

In its mythic idealized form, the newspaper promotes vigorous concise prose. But economic forces push newspapers towards the sort of vulgar hyperbole where a simple rain shower is made out to be a torrential downpour, or a fleecy cloud a thunderhead. This leads to the temptation to overuse action verbs: speculation rages, controversy swirls, rows erupt, and plans are thrashed out. It is easy but dangerous to fall back on them; and like with chain-smoking or masturbation, once you start it is hard to kick the habit.

Cousins to the action verbs are the action adjectives; so we read about ailing Archbishops, beleaguered MPs, and embattled defendants. On the whole these adjectives are inoffensive and can impart some needed zest to a dull topic. But due to time pressures, the temptation also exists to bang out the articles (note the action verb) by stringing together lifeless hand-me-down phrases and clichés. There is no avoiding every wooden phrase, but you can only handle so many blows beneath the belt, opened cans of worms, and wool pulled over your eyes before you fly off the handle, hit the roof, or maybe even go into a rage, turning purple in the process, of course.

It is obvious I am only spiraling further away from what I said I would do at the outset: demonstrate why one cannot simultaneously be a reporter and a novelist. I have made a feeble case so far. In fact, looking back, I can see that I have entirely ducked the issue, and have simply tried slipping in a few dodgy contrived reasons to justify my claim, which I now wish I had retracted and edited out long ago.

But due to procrastination it is now the night of December 4th, and so I have no time to cut-and-paste this essay into a more coherent and respectable state. But something must be done with it. Since I have been steadily dropping, throughout this two-part essay, from third person neutral (the reporter cannot), to second person inclusive (you cannot), to first-person confessional (I cannot) I will stick to the confessional mode.

When I wrote “one cannot be both a novelist and a reporter at the same time” what I should have written was “I cannot.” I may as well admit that I have proven incapable of finishing or even working on a novel while holding a job as a newspaper reporter and so I have been making sweeping God-like generalizations, based on my very limited experience, about the incompatibility of reporting and novel-writing in order to shift all the blame for my fiction hiatus onto the universe. In other words, much of this has been no more than a giant excuse to make myself feel better.

But not all of it is an excuse. The rest is the result of a feeling that may come over me after a laborious day in the newsroom, as I am sitting under a swaying light on the balcony in the cool of the rising breeze with the warmth of zivania upon me, overlooking the hum of nighttime Nicosia, properly alone with myself for the first time in days; at times like that my unfinished novel can strike, rising up out of my forgotten memory to stare at me grimly, to ask if I have stepped into the world only to step out of myself, to tell me that though I have been doing nothing but writing, in the end I have written nothing.

It is a feeling that brings to mind some words from a book that I read years ago on the shores of Sinai, when my days were long and brimming and empty:

Constantine Markides