D.Litt….
August 7, 2008
It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can’t write anything remotely literary unless either you’re on drugs or you’ve given them up following a heroic struggle. Fortunately help is at hand for the pharmaceutically challenged: a new age of chemical inspiration is about to begin. Novel drugs will shortly be released which will not only result in the removal of the very phrase “writer’s block” from future dictionaries, but will also enable writers to elicit inspiration selectively in their chosen genre.
So if you find yourself stuck for a plot for your next whodunnit, just pop a pill of texasolvin and your mind will instantly come up with a convoluted mystery. Need help with your next Aga saga or similarly themed pink-covered book? Chixalit is the drug for you. Would-be comic novelists even have a choice of stimulation: icudnastoplaffin or mysydzasplitin should help the jokes flow. Graphic novels are stimulated by a dose of pikchurzazwel.
Nor should non-fiction writers feel left out: for biographers there is a series of compounds known as the laifantimes; travellers may find travlinanritin as essential as antimalarials; and for religious writers the controversial new compound skipixibuc is the answer to their prayers. If your literary criticism has lost its sparkle, cemiotix signifies the way forward.
Neither have poets been forgotten. If your finely crafted verse suffers from an excess of rhyming fervour, why not try norimzatol or its derivative rimezaborin? There is even an antidote to these should you overdose: tozatappin. Just be careful though, for some test batches of poetry drugs were contaminated with kalthisapome.
Incidentally, there is some evidence that two of the earlier, less desirable, litdrugs are already widely available on the street: itzabad and mybuxapawlin.
Pryzezforal is anticipated to be popular amongst the Booker set, as is ritinzadodal. Martzaprat and makuwinzadic will have limited use. Initial hopes for nobelzasert have not been met in trials, and quidzin has shown efficacy in only a handful of cases.
Some compounds have been developed with the rarefied heights of the litosphere in mind: tukopisold and sloazucan. Others, such as tomaftatome are aimed blatantly at the lower end of the market. And for ghost writers? Proxipen, of course….
Happy litpill-popping!
August 7, 2008 at 8:08 pm
A little bit of schoolboy humour to leaven the mix….
August 7, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Interestingly, I have a pingback on this article within an hour of posting….some cunt’s scraped it already….anybody interested enough can google a phrase and see who it is….I can’t be arsed….I’m about to quit blogging for good….
August 7, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Dear Doc,
Are you psychic? A tragic, real-life case of a kalthisapome contamination victim. . .
. . . from today’s NYT’s front page – where the mental state of Bruce Ivins, the Army boffin thought to have been the anthrax perp, who killed himself last week, was finely dissected:
==
Dr. Ivins composed poems — scripted to the nursery rhymes “Hickory Dickory Dock” and “I’m a Little Teapot” — about having two personalities.
==
A forensic psychiatrist consulted by the F.B.I. found that Dr. Ivins had been treated with antidepressants and anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medication, according to the documents.
===
By December 2001, Dr. Ivins began writing poems to himself about what he said were the “two people in one,” meaning “me+the person in my dreams.” In one, he wrote:
I’m a little dream-self, short and stout.
I’m the other half of Bruce — when he lets me out.
When I get all steamed up, I don’t pout.
I push Bruce aside, then I’m free to run about!
==
CapatinNed, if you ever drop in here . . .
‘writing out of academia can be as worthwhile as writing out of anywhere else.’
Consider the best British writers of the last few years: Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t until she’d stopped teaching, as far as I know; nor did Muriel Spark; Hollinghurst doesn’t, nor Julian Barnes; nor Colin Thubron, nor V.S.Naipaul.
And Art Pepper, yes indeed (with the possible exception of ’sordid’):
But none of it’s suggestive
Of heart or sordid groin;
It hits the ground
With the dull sound
Of posturing: false coin.
August 7, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Sorry, dgg, but we can’t let the scrapers grind you down . . . Wait and see what effect the DMCA complaints have . . . This is only the start of a looooong campaign. You can’t stop when you’ve barely begun — ?!
August 7, 2008 at 10:55 pm
steve: the problem with PEDs (Prose Enhancing Drugs / Poetry Enhancing Drugs) is the inevitable involvement of WADA (the Writers’ Anti-Doping Agency) and the fear of false positives and false negatives.
Who knew that, though Emily Bronte never once tested positive, she was a massive opium-fiend (though of course the evidence is clear to anyone who’s ever actually read her books)? Or that Jonathan Franzen’s drug-positive was actually for an OTC cough medicine he bought to help him get over a touch of man flu?
And of course there’s the inevitable cheating of the tests – look at the way HST and Irvine Welsh substituted their urine in order to hide the fact that they were clean-living tea-totallers.
And then of course there’s the world of semi-legalised doping allowed by the Therapeutic Use Exemption – we face a future of wheezing asthmatic novelists and poets winning all the major prizes, just as they scoop all the shiniest medals at the Olympics.
Of course, once the testing really starts catching up with the cheats and it becomes as easy to spot use of texasolvin and mysydzasplitin and pikchurzazwel as it is today to spot CERA, well then writers will turn to tried and tested drugs – like red wine and caffeine, and the judicious out-of-competition use of cocaine and marijuana – all perfectly legal under WADA rules.
The big fear of course comes when Werner Franke produces a sheaf of papers from his briefcase revealing the University of East Anglia has for decades been engaging in a doping programme that puts the goings on in Freiburg and Ferrara to shame. Pretty quickly Ian McEwan will fess up that yes, he too was a junkie when he won the Booker and he’ll tell Martyn Goff that the trophy’s in a shoe-box under his bed should he ever wish to call around and collect it. Though, of course, McEwan’s tardy confession will come as no surprise to anyone. You only had to look at where he was doing his ‘research’ to have cause to suspect his performance might have been chemically enhanced.
Salman Rushdie will, of course, come out with some self-righteous denunciation of McEwan, damning him for sullying the reputation of the prize that made him famous. Only for it to be revealed that he once tested positive for Viagra but got off by the use of a back-dated TUE.
Of course, there will also be the argument put forward by the likes of Tony O’Neill and the other Burtalists that doping should actually be lagalised, that we’ll have to live with doping. Pure writing, they’ll claim, is just an illusion. There comes a stage when a writer must be told the effects of a medicine. Then if he wants to, let him take it.
Guy Damann will chime in with some philosophy, noting that Hippocrates claimed the literary development is not natural; much better the ordinary healthy condition of the body. And then he’ll twist Blondin to excuse junked-up writers: “In a writer’s life, there are moments and places where circumstances require that he transcend himself. Each struggles to face up to that obligation As fans of literature, we prefer to dream about Simon Pures, somehow immune to the uppers and downers of our own pill-popping society. There is, all the same, a certain nobility in those who have gone down into God knows what hell in search of the best of themselves. We might feel tempted to tell them they should not have done it, but we can remain secretly proud of what they have done. Their sacrifices are for us an offering.”
Jörgen Leth will chime in too: “Writing is not a clean artform. It is an unhealthy artform, an extreme artform. And that’s how it is supposed to be. It is what I have always cherished about writing. It is filled with amazing, oversize personalities, eccentrics and people jeopardizing their life. Anything else is based on a stupid illusion that the artform is clean and writers should be role-models for young people. It’s a crock of shit in my opinion.”
Soon, people will be so bored with the whole doping debate overshadowing the books that reading will fall out of fashion and we’ll all turn to watching wrestling and baseball instead.
August 7, 2008 at 11:17 pm
The scene: A filthy alley behind Charing Cross Road.
Drug dealer: Psssst…yo..yeah, you…c’mere…you wanna write a novel?
Reuters, London- Novelist Martin Amis has died. Mr. Amis was found in his study, slumped over his laptop.
Mr. Amis’ literary agent Mr. G.W.Shark said,
‘It’s common knowledge that Marty had become addicted to icudnastoplaffin. He was writing two comic novels a day. He died of exhaustion. I hope Marty’s tragic early death will serve as a lesson to aspiring novelists. There are no shortcuts’.
Critic John Carey described Mr.Amis’ last 300 novels as ‘unfunny’.
August 7, 2008 at 11:34 pm
heh, heh – some funny replies….but nothing as sidesplittingly funny as Bindel’s latest piece of tosh on Cif….yes, I know I forswore the place – but reading about it in the Cif suggestions box (the least painful way of monitoring that treacle pit), I just couldn’t resist peeking….
August 7, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Bindel is frankly unhinged…guess I’ll have to have a peek.
August 8, 2008 at 12:02 am
Heavens to murgatroyd, I always knew that Bindel was as nutty as a fruicake and poisonous with it, but Jesus…that’s a bit much, even for her.
Brendan O’Neill, Bindel, Cohen, Tisdall, etc, etc..it’s wall-to-wall nutters, warmongers, neo-con dingbats, buffoons, frauds and liars…it’s a shame, really. CiF used to be quite good. It’s now wretched beyond belief.
August 8, 2008 at 12:18 am
Almost without exception, the 150 comments pointed out that she was wrong; Cif’s response: close the thread….although Bindel’s claim in a later comment that George wasn’t actually innocent, merely acquitted, might also have had something to do with that….
Cif is a joke….both technically and contentwise….
August 8, 2008 at 12:37 am
BTW, cs, did you catch the Patrick Leigh-Fermor program on BBC4? I always loved L-F’s books, especialy his works on Greece, Mani and Roumeli. Good program, I thought.
August 8, 2008 at 12:43 am
Yup, I saw that….thought all three progs were excellent – hope BA does some more like those….
August 8, 2008 at 1:24 am
Yes, I’d like to see BA tackle some more writers. Burton, for instance, could provide enough material for a series and God knows, someone should provide a corrective to the dire bilge that Rupert Graves was peddling the other week. Seeing a boyhood hero traduced in that fashion made me want to put my foot through the screen.
Joshua Slocum, the first man to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe and whose Sailing Alone Around the World was a boyhood favourite would make a great program. Peter Fleming, (Ian’s older and, to my mind, more interesting, brother), would make an interesting subject.
August 8, 2008 at 8:39 am
steve, has the scraper removed? Google only came up with you for me.
August 8, 2008 at 10:31 am
Yes, I googled a whole passage from your post, cs, shortly after you’d posted it and, like Billy, I only came up with this blog.
August 8, 2008 at 11:55 am
The speed at which different sites register on Google varies….I’ve googled the name of the site in question, and the number and type of results indicate pretty clearly what kind of site it is….for obvious reasons, I won’t put in a link to it here….
Also, *sometimes*, if these sites have been reported before, they may have been removed from some or all of the search engines – the pingback I get is, I think, an automated response independent of those….anyway, I now have the requisite details to file a DMCA notice, thanks to some late night searching & the help of some people on the WP forums….and I’ve dobbed that site in to a WP site which lists some of these sites and makes it easier for others to complain….