Meat Artistry

The other night, Dani and I visited Greensmiths on Lower Marsh, where the resident Master Butcher from the Ginger Pig, Martin Kavanagh, was giving a demonstration of meat preparation. Using a collection of impressively sharp knives, cleavers and saws, he took apart a 50-day-aged side of beef. He extracted the fillet and topside, removed the spine and ribs, and took the rump apart, skilfully removing as much fat as possible. The bones cracked noisily and the air filled with a pungent meat aroma, and the small audience's eyes watered as though they were watching an autopsy. Afterwards, a rare côte de boeuf was carved and served up with carrots, broccoli and potatoes dauphinois.


Martin is a skilled craftsman, but also a performer and a engaging communicator. He does his work in the shop window facing street precisely to attract curiosity, because his job is as much about people as it is about animals. He explained how important it was that people ask questions about meat and engage with the topic. (He confessed that the recent horse-meat-in-lasagna scandal had been good for business, as more customers wanted to ask about the origin of their food. The more he could tell them, the more they were interested,)

Like a great artist, he has developed over the years a skill, a profound knowledge of his subject and a distinctive personal style. What makes him different from many "proper" artists is his dedication to sharing his experience as transparently as possible. Rather than mystifying his art, as some writers and performers do, and talking in deliberately ambiguous terms that leave you wondering by what superhuman magic how he does what he does, Martin feels – without any false pride – that to be as direct and honest as possible with the public is an integral part of his job. He trims the fat from both the beef and his speech. And that's a pretty good way to go about your work, isn't it?

Speed Novel Writing

I've mentioned briefly before my passion for French feuilleton fiction of the early twentieth century, which was aroused principally by Fantômas, the epic crime soap opera novel (arguably the longest novel ever written), written between 1911 and 1913 at a rate of one volume per month, non-stop for thirty-two months, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. I'm proud to say I've read the whole thing in French.

Sadly, my activities these days don't allow so much time for reading avant garde French pulp fiction. Some years ago, I made a start on translating Gustave le Rouge's sci-fi horror novel Prisoner of Mars and its equally bonkers sequel, War of the Vampires, into English, and the promises to myself that I'll finish the job have become an annual fixture. Finally, however, someone else has done it for me, somebody a lot more competent and qualified: Brian M. Stableford, who is both an expert on and a prolific exponent of the genre.

I'd like to quote to you from his fascinating introduction, which I hope gives a flavour of the environment in which these books were produced.

Alexandre Dumas, one of the great pioneers of feuilleton fiction, had set a very conspicuous example in his amazing productivity and his distinctive methods of composition, which routinely involved collaborators. These collaborators sometimes did his background research for him and produced rough drafts for him to expand and polish, but their primary duty was to serve as amanuenses. To a great extent – no one is sure how great is was, because the authors were routinely secretive about it – feuilleton fiction was not so much written as dictated, and the duties fulfilled by the dictation-takers often went beyond mere copying to various kinds of embellishment. Productivity became a matter of pride to many feuilletonists, as did speed of composition; Second Empire writers like Paul Féval and Ponson du Terrail openly competed in the matter of how many daily serials they could compose simultaneously, and Ponson not only thought very highly of himself for being able to do five at a time but boasted that he had got them done in time for lunch, so that he could spend the afternoon doing more interesting things. (His amanuenses, if he used one – he never admitted it – presumably could not.)

By the time Le Rouge got into the act, the art – or craft – of fast composition had been perfected by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the creators of Fantômas, who produced books in ten days flat, spending the first three on planning an outline, the next three dictating and the final four correcting the typescripts. (The invention of the typewriter, including an automatic double-spacing level, had made it easier for shorthand typists to produce easily-correctable copy for their bosses to look over.) Allain and Souvestre were, however, regarded as perfectionists by some of their contemporaries, who thought that outlining and second drafts were for wimps and took a perverse pride in never planning or revising anything. It was not so much that they were proud of being slapdash, but they were sufficiently laid-back not to care about such minor matters as leaving plot-ends hanging loose and vital questions unsettled.

While some of these authors appear to be arrogant hacks of the worst order, their collaborative approach to creativity is pretty liberating. It is a world away from the image of the tortured artist alone in his candle-lit garrett plucking honed expression from his strained heartstrings. It is more like Michelangelo doing the Sistine Chapel with his team, doing the layouts and the faces, and letting the students fill in the drapery and backgrounds. I personally find this style of work hugely exciting. It's not 'slapdash'; it's spontaneous and full of life.

Thoughts of Angel

I spend more time in Angel these days. In the ticket hall of the Tube, there's one of those whiteboards containing a daily witticism – a piece of cod wisdom or popcorn irony that normally makes me groan.

In recent weeks I've been allowing myself to get increasingly angry about these mottoes. It's not their triteness that upsets me; it's the cynicism of the exercise. They're dishonestly designed to give the impression that in some back-office of Angel Tube sits an eccentric, moustached and rubicund Station Master behind a mahogany desk, his study lined with leather-bound books of poetry and framed photographs of steam locomotives. In the corner, a gramophone plays Elgar. Tapping out his pipe, and gazing wistfully at the specks of dust dancing in the morning sunlight, he reaches for his fountain pen and chooses the day's memorable morsel of philosophical wisdom, before giving the brass buttons of his uniform a polish.

But surely these daily sayings are in fact emailed in from from some centralised and overbudgeted TfL marketing department, who have cut-and-pasted them from some crappy Facebook group riddled with kitten photos, then pre-vetted them for customer appropriateness according to a set of satisfaction-quotient criteria. They're then soullessly copied out every day, complete with spelling errors and bad punctuation, by one of the cleaners.

As it turns out, neither of these scenarios is entirely true. For I was rather pleased to stumble across the Thoughts of Angel website, which carries this prominent disclaimer.

And there are details of recent charity fundraising efforts by the station staff, and a few other bits of local news. It's scanty so far, but apparently genuine. And I cannot find fault with creating 'a link between the daily commuters and members of staff'.

45 Astonishing Minutes

Every day, I walk to my work in Kentish Town. I have always walked to and from the office, because I have lost whatever steel-hearted stoicism I once had, which London public transport demands. Even when I lived in Wood Green I walked to work, and the journey took well over an hour.

As of next week, my office is moving to just down the road from where I live, cutting my walk from 45 minutes each way to a little over 20 minutes.

In essence, I am gaining an extra 45 minutes to every day. This is great news, but not true. Firstly, it implies that the Earth's rotation will slow down by 3 per cent, causing the sort of disruption that will far outweigh any personal convenience to me. My friend Baz describes the tragedy in the following helpful terms:

Well one thing's for sure, if the change was instantaneous then everything not tied down would keep going at the old speed and fly off the surface at quite a pace. At the equator surface stuff is travelling at about 1000mph so it would fly off at about 30mph!! If it was tied down then it would be like an immovable object lets say a train or the ground (!) hitting it at 30mph!! This initial devastation death and destruction would probably cause all services, water, electricity, gas, telephone etc to instantly and irrepairable fail as every tree, building, phone tower, powerstation, Dam etc would fall, burst or collapse!!.... There wouldn't be much left to celebrate the extra 45 minutes a day!!!... 

(I welcome scientists of the 'pub speculation' school of thought to flesh other, more mundane, consequences of this disaster.)

Secondly, the time I spend walking to and from work is not 'wasted' time. I fill it either listening podcasts, music, language tapes (those of Michel Thomas are a current firm favourite). Or, if for any reason I have nothing to plug into my ears, I indulge in one of several imaginary scenarios in my head:

• reliving past conversations and substituting better things I could have said
• playing out both sides of an argument I might have with some appropriately inarticulate straw man or other, in which my victory is both inevitable and spectacular
• speculating in paranoid fashion that everyone I love and trust has been secretly working against me, and plotting my strategy for revenge when this secret is uncovered
• Lotto win scenario (I do not play the Lotto)

Wasted time? I think not!

Either way, from next week I will be forced to spend 45 minutes less every day walking to work, listening to that stuff and thinking those thoughts, and 45 minutes more doing something else.

Something? But which something? Any something. Anything. Anything is better than nothing.

It's the anythingness of the unspecified something that unnerves. The range of 45-minute activities is overwhelming. But here is a shortlist of things I could quickly accomplish by putting an that extra time aside every day towards a clearly defined goal:

• master the accordion
• write an oulipian novel
• cook all meals using fresh ingredients
• jog, swim and boxercise my way to a beach-worthy physique
• meditate my way to not being such an arsehole
• transform my garden into a paradisus terrestris
• finally read all those Arsène Lupin novels

Truth be told, with just a little bit of time management, I could have found those 45 minutes years ago. Now I have no excuses. One is as likely as not to be terrified of failing, and I have already written about the fear of the blank page, but the fear of success often runs deeper. 

Why not put aside 45 minutes a day to accomplish astonishing things?

Dennis Severs' House

On Monday I visited Dennis Severs' House in Spitalfields. I heartily recommend it – arrive early to beat the queues. The house's arch motto Aut visum aut non! – 'Either you see it or you don't!' – hints at an implication of snootiness towards those who don't 'get it', but there's plenty to see even if you think you don't get it.

I don't want to prejudice your interpretation of what's on display by giving you a mundane description. It certainly isn't what I assumed it was when I first arrived – a museum reconstruction of an eighteenth-century interior. Suffice it to say that artifice and naturalism are blended, as are past and present. Part of my experience involved taking the role of a time-travelling detective looking for clues, though it wasn't a murder I was investigating, but rather a subtle, unspoken trauma of the heart that had become imprinted onto the day-to-day activity of the house for generations.

About a dozen visitors are allowed into the house at a time. With the fulcrum of centuries so delicately poised, the illusion would be spoiled if talking were permitted, and we were warned against doing so, first by the doorman and then repeatedly by prominent notices displayed throughout the house. So it was surprising that several of our fellow visitors found it so hard to keep quiet.

I've seldom come across such a clear example of language being used to inhibit communication. Something uncanny and disturbing was going on in Dennis Severs' House, and it would take much more than a single visit to get to grips with it. All that is required is to observe, listen and smell. But this requires a certain submission and vulnerability that is far from straightforward. There was a strong impulse to block out the house's story. You could see from the pained expressions of the chatterboxes' faces that they earnestly wished they hadn't succumbed to the temptation to speak. I felt sorry for them.

Get yourself to Dennis Severs' House at your earliest opportunity! Shh!

Against Imagination!

In recent years, I have become increasingly annoyed by the high regard in which 'imagination' is commonly held. The word is used almost synonymously with 'creativity'. It is time for me to speak out. I am against it. There. I appreciate that to declare yourself to be against imagination is to equate yourself with the worst excesses of Gradgrindian utility, or fascist suppression. 'Imagination liberates,' you will say, 'whereas reality is a prison.' You are wrong. Imagination is a dead end.

I don't believe that reality/imagination form a true opposition. 'Reality' is itself such a murky concept that almost anything could be placed in opposition to it. I find system/madness a more useful distinction. If madness consists in the chaos of the unknowable, and system is merely the makeshift collection of stories and games we call 'knowledge', which we indulge in to make sense of it all, then 'reality' becomes little more than a tradeable commodity along that axis. We need madness to refine and adapt our knowledge and understanding of the world, but gaze too deeply into the chaos, and all our systems, laws, accounts and logic begin disintegrate. All true creativity springs from that dangerous madness, but imagination is something else.

Imagination is not creativity; it is a product of the same rational part of the mind that creates those systems that limit and define us. We use imagination in order to shield us from the madness that threatens those systems. Imagination merely supposes a world in which knowable elements are swapped or substituted as a sort of stand-in for the realm of madness. A cow that flies, a car that talks, a dancing tree, a bee that sells you insurance: these delightful and fanciful images could be assembled by a computer using an algorithm to pick out interesting combinations. Imagination is rarely edgy, hardly subversive, never destructive. Notions that derive purely from the imagination cannot undermine us. Madness, however, is treacherous and impalpable.

When we are ready to look beyond imagination, to use parts of our brains in unthinkable ways – beyond the rational, conscious skill of contriving unlikely combinations – to risk our very identities, to kill 'the watcher at the gates of the mind', to transcend language, to submit to the deadly madness that crouches in the shadows of all our daily activities, then, and only then, are we creative.

Fear of the Blank Page

On Sunday, I'm starting a new website devoted to my improvisation-related activities in association with monk-like improv anagarika, Luke Beahan. It's called Luke & Michael. Click here!

A new blog these days is like a new exercise book used to be. I am not alone in my fetish for stationery products, and I'm a proud lifelong fan of Ryman. There is something emotional about their shops. The promise they encapsulate – in all that pristine paper, those fully-charged pens and empty filing systems awaiting content – is overwhelming. The entirety of human creativity is there, suspended in perpetual potentiality. Ryman is a sacred time-locked temple of the possible.

When I was at school, my slowest, best handwriting and my most carefully considered words would fill the first page and a half of any new exercise book. Thereafter, with the first crossings-out, dog-ears and smudges, the quality would rapidly diminish. By the end of term, the thing was a complete disgrace.

By the age of twelve, I realised that maintaining the perfection of a new exercise book was a practical, philosophical and linguistic impossibility. In order to combat my instinctive terror of the first page, I got into the habit of deliberately spoiling it with messy scribbles or spillages. This act of rebellion against the blank page's stern reproof (an assertion of the supremacy of the id over the super-ego), liberated my creativity, and allowed me to write what I wished, free from the injunction to be perfect. Thus, content and creativity were always born out of a destructive act.

The notion of reality being born from an imperfection is well rehearsed in both religious and scientific narratives. The Big Bang is a wobble, the accidental imbalance of quarks and anti-quarks that crudely spits out matter and energy from pure undifferentiated light. Gnostic myths also tell of the physical world being an imperfect emanation from an uncreated sphere of unity.

Vestiges of that pre-Creation perfection remain in our imaginations, like a half-remembered Platonic Form, even as we get older. We see it in a freshly-laid carpet of snow on a January morning, into which we feel compelled to rush out. Or a blank canvas. Or the surface of a crème brulée. Or, if you like, the empty stage that exists in the moment of an intake of breath, just before an improviser steps out and opens his mouth to speak.