Model, Schmodel

My fascination with Tyra Banks is based on how no matter what she happens to be doing, no matter what heart-warming story she is creating on her various shows, she always manages to relate it all back to herself. In the Tyraverse Planet T is the centre and source of all that’s good. Possession of a strong sense of self is de rigeur if one is going to appear alongside her. as the Jays demonstrate on America’s Next Top Model, an awareness of how special, how brave and how unique one is, is essential; but pity the fool who thinks he or she is all of those and also the equal of Ms T. Hence among the ANTM judges Nigel Barker is a ‘noted’ fashion photographer, as opposed to a famous one and Paulina Porizkova was billed as a supermodel but also ended up being fired for having too big an ego – code surely for an ego approaching the orbit of Tyra’s.

When the series was franchised out to other countries, I immediately took a shine to the New Zealand version. The fabled kiwi understatement was fully to the fore and the lack of pretension was charming: “How was your week?” to a shuffling, shyly grinning aspirant. “It was pretty shit, actually” was the forthright reply. Even Colin Mothura-Jafee’s antics looked like Miss Jay on a lithium day.

Then of course came The Moment of series three. On their way to the airport the seven hopefuls were full of excitement for their first overseas trip to the Middle-East. Only the journey was full of incident and none of it accidental. Plants were put in their way in the taxi, at the airport, on the concourse – note that the budget only extended to three actors. One of these was playing a lone photographer, a ‘papparazzo’ if you please. So distant is the freelance tabloid photographer culture from these shores that the girls probably had to take the hints of the film crew swinging their own cameras in the hapless actor’s direction before the import of the situation dawned. We viewers got the benefit of seeing the papp’s-eye-view (a knicker shot, though not within coo-ee of the Peaches equivalent) and then when the photographer, seemingly targeting one contestant got very close and was pushed away, the fatal blow was struck. Sara Tetro asked for the return of the boarding passes clutched tightly in the contestants’ hands and announced that the whole morning had been a set-up (which hadn’t been obvious to all – they really are not the sharpest knives in the drawer) and that one was about to be sent home on the strength of their behaviour during this gotcha moment.

Aroha, the ‘plus size’ girl, the rousie from Gizzy, and really a politer version of last year’s winner, Tokoroa’s own Danielle Hayes, was told she didn’t come up to snuff and was sent away.

I got angry at this point and leapt straight online to write my disapproval and missed the rest of the episode. Seems I wasn’t alone. The programme’s website was filled with disgusted letters, along the following lines:

Boo: “TV3 went too far with Aroha being sent home like that...It doesnt matter who it was, the whole thing was unfair to cancel a girl's trip once she had already checked in! TV3 has lost a lot of fans with this one. Big dislike. Who cares who wins NZNTM, its not a fair competition now. Also, if some weird guy was taking photo's of the girls, how were they to know it was paparazzi...come on, we dont have a huge paparazzi culture in NZ, so she was probably just trying to keep the girls safe. Not happy.”

Lizzy: “You should all be utterly ashamed of yourselves. I think it is the most despicable thing any human can do to another. Needless to say I won't be watching your programme ever again. Shameful treatment of a beautiful Maori girl who's MANA you have stepped on.”

L. Mackay: “Aroha earned her trip overseas. That was a lie. You then set her up. You then bullied her. You then went back on your undertaking to take her overseas and on to the next round. And you now have a PR problem because you were mean and not just a little bit cruel.”

Etc.

It struck a nerve with me because I was involved in a similar sting and it stunk.

I was a second year drama student at New Zealand Drama School (now known as Toi Whakaari). Ginette McDonald asked the class to be actors on a practical course for floor managers. However, there was an extra element: we had to behave as badly as possible and to make the trainee floor managers' experience as bad as possible.

 To sum up we met our brief very well and the floor managers were miserable. Although forbidden to do so, we 'fessed up as soon as the last group went into the studio. It did nothing to change their very low opinion of us, but for me there was worse to come.

 One trainee failed her practical and years later when she had become a casting agent we met at a casting. She recognised me immediately and told me in no uncertain terms how deep her sense of humiliation and failure was on that day, and how she hadn't got over that. I hated being involved in that gross deception. It was the single nastiest episode in my two years of professional training.

I’m aware worse has been perpetrated in the name of entertainment and that the looking at a maggoty dead rat has a certain fascination – the motivation surely, a a lot of reality genre – but it’s the very ordinariness of New Zealand’s Next Top Model, the bit-of-a-worry, wasn’t-the-best, sweet-as character of most New Zealanders that was affronted. We can look at American dirty tricks and over the top hysteria as part of their decadent grandiosity and be fascinated by it. We can sneer at Australian attempts to be like America and secretly believe they were always Yankee lapdogs, but importing it to Godzone? Yeah, nah, mate. That’s a bit suss, eh?

Bricks and Mortar

I haven’t lost faith in bricks. Mortar perhaps, but bricks aren’t the things that seem to break much in this city. On the morning of the 4^th of September 2010 when the noises we heard sounded like we were being pounded by the rocks that were undoubtedly rolling down the sides of the valley, we discovered in the light of the coming dawn that quite of few of those noises were being made by the chimney collapsing in upon itself. In the weirdly misguided attempts to clean up the city’s air, the Regional Authority had offered those people with old fireplaces a bribe to get heat pumps installed. The major proviso was that any existing fireplaces be blocked up and if possible, the chimneys removed. And so it was with this house. However the chimney structure below roof level remained. Until the earthquake that is. Being as they were between bedrooms, we were advised by builder friends to remove them as quickly as we could for safety’s sake. When the men came in to take the bricks out, it was appallingly easy to do this job. The mortar was mostly sand, it seemed, and even cleaning the bricks for re-use hardly needed anything more vigorous than a little shake and a mild scrape with a bread and butter knife as it were.

But the bricks! They were as hale as they had been made a century previous in Murphy Brothers’ Brickworks. It was clear from the robust M stamped into their hollow faces that was where they’d been formed. Though I had never made any bricks as such, I had worked at Murphy’s when I left school at 16 with only School Cert to my name, so I felt an emotional attachment to these bricks. Mixed emotions to be sure; while I loved working on the drain pipe manufacturing line, I ended my time at Murphy’s with an odious task. Twenty seven thousand bricks, the last of the Centaurus Rd site’s output, had to be sorted into five different categories. The new Auckland based owners, Ceramco, had decreed that nothing was to be wasted, not even the twisted and misshapen chunks of ceramic agony that looked more like the product of a Rodin, reductio ad absurdum, than a manufactured brick. These blood-red horrors had a new name, Cashmere Reds, and were being used in contemporary design as decorative features, and so too were the four other types of brick Ceramco was putting into glossy catalogues for the building trade. And I was the poor bastard condemned to the brutal December sun of the brickyard to sort these twenty seven thousand fired clay Calibans into orderly pallets, 10 by 10 by 10.

I got that job at the tail end of the fortress economy, when a job surplus was a reality and a glide time nation knew quite conclusively, she’ll be right. My foreman had been fifty years in the job and was looking forward to retiring two years from then.  How bizarre to find relics from that time in the National Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, encased in glass and bearing labels speaking of another time. Lichfield shirts, Crown Lynn china, Europa petrol stations, all familiar to generations brought up on the Guaranteed Price and the Family Benefit.

It’s strange looking back. As I pass from one collapsed building to another in this maelstrom of upheaval and liquefaction people once called Christchurch, I see only too clearly the city’s ripped backsides, insides and outsides. I can see the histories laid bare, though only few can read them before they are hauled away into the dumping sites of ephemerality by the trucks that gather, seven times an hour, the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of us and our memories. Ghosts evicted from red stickerville.

There was the fish and chip shop, its white tiled wall once holding the price list – Fish 15c. Chips 5c (1 scoop). The once gaping mouthed youngsters I’d regaled with stories of how cheap things used to be now don’t have that as a reference point. Next door, the bicycle shop, serving as such since my mother’s day, now flat as a puncture, its verandah sheltering nothing but bricks.

Now we are all Macaulay’s New Zealanders, surveying the detritus, the ruins of our cathedrals. Now we are all Ron Mason’s Eskimo Masters, naming the parts of the barren landscape with only rubble and remnants as reference points. As we pick our way through the dust of dried out liquefaction that was a city it’s terribly easy to dig the broken remains of a statue and to read the faded legend: ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.’

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?

Here's a funny wee tale. A friend of mine graduated from the University of Canterbury with a degree in Geology. He went off to South Africa to settle accounts with his native country and picked up a job prospecting for diamond mines near Kimberley.When we caught up I asked what he did.

"I walked around the veldt with my team. I pointed to a bit of ground and said 'dig here.'"

"That's cool," I said, "How do you know where to dig?"

"I don't. One bit of ground looks much the same as another out there."

"So what's the difference between you and me going out prospecting?"

"I've got a degree in Geology."

Today I took the dogs for a walk at Gollans Point near Sumner. Do have a wee look at the link because you can see the area in its pre-quake state quite nicely. On this fine sunny nor'westerly day there were half a dozen men abseiling down the cliff face you can see opposite the car park. They were pulling clumps of rock by hand off the face of the cliff, all six of them busily using ice axes and what-have-you. Traffic was held up for a good 1000m each way while they were doing this. When I had finally got to Sumner I walked back towards Gollans Point where I could observe this at close quarters. I understood what was going on. They were stabilising the cliff face, by pulling it to bits. I know that's not immediately obvious, but I live in Heathcote Valley where cliff stabilising was proceeding along very nicely aided by dynamite until a boulder very carelessly arrived in the middle of a man's lounge via the eastern (hillside) wall and took up rather too much space. Even that wasn't enough space for the boulder, because, get this, there was a stick of dynamite still embedded in the boulder complete with charge. The lounge owner didn't bother getting into a dispute with the boulder of course; he was far too sensible for that. He took it up with the boulder's supervisor who, according to The Press, said it was perfectly safe. Although that was not by any means the only boulder to have been exploded after the quake, the whole blowing things up to make the hillside more stable seems to have fallen from favour. And fair enough too.

But pulling them down by hand? They may know better than me but frankly I think the only difference is they have a degree in geology.

The Earthquake Blues

Some of the strangest things get me bent out of shape about the quake. Things like a familiar building in ruins, obvious things like that. Or being in a crowded restaurant amid the buzz of conviviality only to hear someone say a Christchurch word, like 'munted' or 'red-stickered' and I'm back in the midst of it.

Sometimes a day will go by without an aftershock and being lulled into the delusion of security is easily possible. Then a series of shakes will take me back to the fear that struck in September and in February. In February there was darkness and no power or phone, but there was water, sewerage, the comfort of the radio and my own knowledge of geology. I could offer comfort based on what I knew and we could pick things up and carry on. Even leaving the house when it was yellow stickered wasn't too bad; we were with friends and the infrastructure was still in place. What remained with many people after September was the noise and the terror of things shaking, falling and cracking in the darkness. Our daughter trapped in her room by fallen furniture. My friend flung across the room and slammed against the wall by the force, breaking bones and putting him in hospital. Despite the mayor and the prime monster assuring everyone that no one died in September, they didn't say that they had decided what was an earthquake death and what wasn't, so that the most seriously injured survivor could be touted as a hero, even though he himself had done little other than rest up and heal in hospital. The scores of people who had died from stress-induced cardiac arrests are not listed on any role of honour and their friends and family grieve privately.

My son and I went to Wellington to celebrate his brilliant academic year. While in Te Papa we went into the earthquake simulator. After exiting in fits of laughter at how mild it was compared to what we'd been through we both recalled the noise, accurately, if a little quietly reproduced in the exhibit. It made us both recall our experiences and sobered us somewhat.

Then came February. I watched agog at the car-sized boulders bouncing erratically down the sides of the valley I live in. Fearfully I wondered how one could avoid one of those stone behemoths and resolved to get out as quickly as possible. It was the stuff of food-poisoned dreams. A stunned road worker was waving people away from the Ferrymead Bridge. I slowed down and grasped his hand. It was shaking. Crowds of people wrapped in blankets sitting on camp chairs outside their wrecked houses, dozens of them. I finally had to double back and pass by outcrops of columnar basalt, cracked and cracking. The container park, with its stacks of shipping containers six high were tipping drunkenly off their centres, looking like a giant's game of Jenga. My arrival at school was celebrated like a return from danger. I guess it was. There I heard the tales of parents running from the central city, some with blood running down their faces, terrified their children were suffering the fate of many they saw.

We didn't stick around. We left for Greenpark and a week later Auckland. That trip through the North Island was emotional to say the least. Every small town we passed through had signs in windows supporting Christchurch, red and black streamers and balloons abounded. In the middle of nowhere a huge sign reading 'Kia Kaha Christchurch' was carved into the hillside. We all shed grateful tears. Everywhere we went in Auckland people were raising funds, having sausage sizzles, busking. We got massive discounts on clothes we had to buy, places we went to visit. Furniture appeared from the most obscure connections as we set up residence in my wife's sister's garage.

Even all the hospitality from all the wonderful Northerners who gave us so much couldn't forestall the inevitable return to responsibility and uncertainty. It was a heavy homecoming. After the insulation of Northland bach holidays and friendly Aucklanders the shock was deep. Streets are frozen wave forms of the earth moving. Conical features, left over from bubbling liquefaction put CV joints and suspension at risk. The character of the February aftershocks is different to September's. Our house, so close to the epicentre is still rocked and shaken and the big ones, above 3, start us all wondering 'is this going to build? Is there worse to come?' People everywhere looked tense and drawn. Sleep deprived. A conversation at, say the garage, becoming an emotional sharing of stories of loss. and everywhere, the rubble, the broken streets, the listing houses, on sunny days the dust, on wet days the sludge. A trip across town becoming a mission amongst the demo sites and army cordons, routes changed, landmarks missed. All the time knowing that where there aren't chemical toilets and port-a-loos, there are broken sewer pipes and raw sewage flowing into our rivers and estuary.

Battered. I feel battered. And better off than many. So lucky.

God Almighty!

Atheists give me the bloody pip! They really do. It's... oh don't get me started.. no, wait this is my blog and I can say what I like: it's their arrogance, their total conviction that they are right, that they have all the answers. Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion, right? My opinion is that they are not entitled to their opinion. And the gloating! It's always Copernicus this, Galileo that, Spanish Inquisition the other thing. And Darwin? Oh boy have they got Darwin! Just putting aside the fact that the Beagle's voyage consisting of travelling to strange new latitudes, encountering strange new phyla and killing them! Yes, while the Victorians' thirst for museum-going grew and museums fell over themselves trying to acquire newer and weirder exhibits, there were hosts of scientists eager to oblige and plenty of shot for the shooters to bring down as much as they possibly could.

And science, science is always the first and last resort of these scoundrels. Science is Rational! (this is a good thing) Science is High Minded! (scroll down for some of the pettiest quarrels science has got in its back catalogue) Science is Rigorously Peer-Reviewed! (the idea is that if a hypothesis stands up to every man and his animal-quadruped-canine having a go at it, they upgrade it to theory and commence teaching it in schools).

All righty let's look at what they taught in schools, shall we?

The fifty-five crystal spheres. This is going back a ways, but the stars have been around for a lot longer and people have been looking at them for about as long as people have cared to. At around the time of Plato, who was born around 429B... er, C, OK? The Common Era? Bloody hell, it's Christ, all right? Christ. Good. Anyway, Plato had a school and one of his bright sparks was a chap named Eudoxus. Eudoxus placed all the fixed stars on a huge sphere, the earth itself a much smaller sphere fixed at the centre.  The huge sphere rotated about the earth once every twenty-four hours.  So far, this is the standard “starry vault” picture.  Then Eudoxus assumed the sun to be attached to another sphere, concentric with the fixed stars’ sphere, that is, it was also centred on the earth.  This new sphere, lying entirely inside the sphere carrying the fixed stars, had to be transparent, since the fixed stars are very visible.  The new sphere was attached to the fixed stars’ sphere so that it, too, went around every twenty-four hours, but in addition it rotated slowly about the two axis points where it was attached to the big sphere, and this extra rotation was once a year.  This meant that the sun, viewed against the backdrop of the fixed stars, traced out a big circular path which it covered in a year.

It wasn't a bad start, but the model didn't quite match what observers were actually seeing, so a few more spheres with a few more circular motions had to be introduced, until they wound up with fifty-five of them altogether. And that was the cosmos. Quite beautiful, and quite poetic really, though poetry isn't exactly scientific. It's a bit too spiritual for one thing, and that's just not rational and can't be proved in an empirical way. Aristotle, reckoned to be the bee's knees amongst thinkers, swore by the fifty-five, and good on him say I. If you have a loony notion, stick to it.

This held sway for a goodly while, some 900-odd years. During which time it became so fixed in people's heads that it was completely outrageous that anyone should thing different. The come the early heroes of the Age of Reason: Copernicus,Tycho Brahe, Keppler, Galileo, et al. Ask your average atheist who was responsible for the suppression and the obligato response is the Church. The church had an awful lot of power in them days.

Supposing you had ideas that didn't meet with the Pope's idea of a good thing. You could be excommunicated. Put outside the circle of those who commune with God through the Church. Heavy shit, because you couldn't do business - business transactions had to be sworn, usually on a Bible. You couldn't baptise any children - necessary if you wanted those children to be taught in school, in the hands of the Church; or to inherit anything of yours - administered by Guess Who, and incidentally bastards couldn't inherit anyway, or be employed by anyone. Hey! Who said anything about bastardy? Well excommunication took care of that, too, because marriage vows don't count when a couple get the cold shoulder from the Church... so all in all, excommunication is a Big Thing. A bit like membership of the Communist Party in socialist states, or carrying a Union card in places where they don't let you work unless you have one, or try and conduct your business outside the reach of the State generally, but I digress.

You see, science doesn't have any difficulty with peer reviews. Who pays the piper calls the tune and lest we forget, there were an awful lot of industry funded studies that told us we couldn't get cancer from cigarettes; that leaded petrol was perfectly safe; that Agent Orange had nothing to do with infertility or deformity amongst veterans' children; that nuclear power was so safe and cheap you would be hard pressed to even charge for it. And fights and scandals? Yes, even High-Minded Science has one or two of them in the back pocket. Alfred Nobel, he of the dynamite fame, discovered his wife was having an affair with a mathematician. That's why the maths johnnies had to come up with their own prize.

The man who helped Captain Cook navigate so successfully, a watchmaker named John Harrison, came up with an ingenious chronometer capable of keeping accurate time at sea. This enabled mariners to know where they were in relation to their port of origin - a useful thing to know if you didn't want to wreck yourself on unexpected rocks. With a prize offered by the British Parliament of £20 000 Harrison wanted a successful trial to claim it, and Cook's log was full of praise for Harrison's wonderful Watch. All good so far, except there was a competing method for reckoning longitude involving observation of the stars and the moon and calculation of those observations against almanac tables. If it sounds a touch on the complicated, it is, and rather weather dependent too - bad luck if a typhoon happened to be blowing. You think a reliable chronometer would have it all over the moon and stars, but for the slight wrinkle that the Astronomer Royal favoured the lunar-star method and he also sat on the Board of Longitude. Nevil Maskelyne kept poor Mr Harrison on a string until the poor bugger was nearly dead before George III took up his case and ensured he got his just desserts.


This is not an isolated case. Scores of tales of back-biting, feuding, slander, sabotage and murder abound in the history of science. Far from extending the glad hand of acknowledgement one is more likely to encounter brutal suppression in the scientific lark. That is unless your backers happen to have enough money or political clout to arrange that you present the right result. Whole industries of chemicals, power generation, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, space exploration and extermination of both human and animal populations are based on this neat little premise. God save us. Science probably has a vested interest in us not being saved. Empirically this is more likely than not.

Which brings me to my other bug-bear. Atheists are fond of saying there is no empirical evidence for God's existence and that the burden of proof lies on the faithful to prove His presence. Bollocks say I. I don't have to prove anything to anyone. What's the point? What possible measurement would satisfy them? How much compassion can you fit into a petrie dish? What is the correct formula for Byron's She Walks in Beauty? What colour is love?

These are stupid question. However they are in essence the questions the Atheists ask when they require proof of the Divine. "What's jazz, lady?" asked Fats Waller, "If you don't know I can't tell you." When faced with questions like "Is there a God?" the Buddha would reply "It does not further."  In other words, an inquiry like that has no relevance to the pursuit of achieving Nirvana, so why are you wasting your time over it? There can never be any point to such a question. It is a hindrance on the path to self realisation.

I think the most pathetic objection to God is "How can a being of infinite love allow such things as famines, tsunamis and volcanoes to happen?" Give me a break! I never realised Atheists had such tender spirits. That's right, they have no spirits. Tender feelings then. Shame we can't quantify those. A favourite of the Godless camp once said That which does not kill me will only make me stronger. Conflict, struggle and terror are actually the stuff of life, that is if you happened to be attached to such ephemeral phenomena. One thing Christianity offers (if you're prepared to do the work) is life eternal. All the Atheists offer is death. Yer pays yer money and yer takes yer choice.

Review - Pygmy

I picked up an uncorrected proof copy of Pygmy at a crib I was staying at for a holiday from the quakes and was immediately excited. The prospect of the clue finding otherworldliness of Chuck’s writing had me salivating – and it delivered in spades up to a point, but remained ultimately unsatisfying because the promise simply didn’t live up to the set-up.

Plot is something that emerges in Chuck’s books. Fight Club has so much twist and convolution that I was simply hanging on and enjoying the read as I became absorbed in the story almost without realising it, only to be sucker-punched by the big reveal.

Pygmy has something similar going on with the variation being the big reveal is pretty much revealed in the beginning with the obvious promise of more to come. In an article Chuck wrote about payoffs in fiction called Hiding the Gun he calls the device ‘basic’, ‘obvious’ and even ‘dumb’. Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy technique to master. The form of the book shows Chuck’s hand: it’s the diary of a secret agent, trained since childhood to infiltrate the US via a bogus student exchange programme on a mission, code named Operation Havoc, to destroy America from the inside. It’s a bit like Project Mayhem, but not so much that it grates. It’s not all it seems in Pygmy though. In a book that’s essentially about how power is gained and maintained the big conflict is set up not only between nations with the eponymous  Pygmy’s un-named country pitted against the US, but also on the domestic level with Pygmy against his host family.

This puts Pygmy in the same company as Donna Tartt’s debut The Secret History, and it’s a demanding technique; telling the reader right off the bat what the core of the plot is and then leading them down the historical path to that point and beyond it. In Donna’s skilled hands Bunny Corcoran’s death takes on more aspects than a cat has hair and the consequences in beautifully rendered Tragic style show much more than the opening reveal could have even hinted at. Masterly writing. By the time I caught up with Pygmy’s scheme in the main narrative thrust the big totalitarian plot hinted at wasn’t as big as I had imagined, nor did it have the far-reaching thematic spread I was sure was waiting just out of sight.

This makes Pygmy’s reveal frustrating in comparison because it becomes a smaller book than the plants hint at. Pygmy’s historical recollections do little to penetrate the opacity of Pygmy’s motivations. The satires on American consumerism, teenage commoditised sexuality and power structures, and revivalist religion don’t hit hard. Perhaps because they are such ‘big, dumb’ targets.

It doesn’t sit well beside morbid dystopian visions like The Handmaid’s Tale, which sticks the pig of American conservative Christianity like no other novel. Margaret Atwood creates a society as monstrous as it is bland and joyless. The cruel ironies and flagrant hypocrisies are so rank they are institutionalised. Publisher Jonathan Cape describes Pygmy’s mid-western host family as Simpson-esque. Chuck’s own website calls the book The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park. Somehow in comparing the book to cartoons that have outraged the public at various times with satire so vicious it has made peeps squeak, Pygmy manages to come off second best.

The fabulous aspect of the Americanization of Pygmy is how despite his ruthless indoctrination, he just wants to fit in. He wants to be liked, just like anyone else. Hitler, much quoted by Pygmy’s ideologue masters, peddled only hate, a pride in ‘otherness’ and revenge. That he got so far with that is surprising in a way. Jesus and Buddha, both notably absent from Pygmy’s bank of quotations, went a lot further and have more influence talking about love, self-realisation and unity. Without knowing it, that’s what Pygmy chose in the finish.

The most striking aspect of the book is the use of English by the protagonist. Pygmy speaks in translationese, and I am a fan. I adore the European daftness in translating the vernacular literally, the overly complex syntax of the Chinese and especially the unwitting poetry of Japanese writers in English. Humour, irony, tragic failure to communicate and again, American buffoonery come across deftly in Pygmy’s broken Broken English. There again, however there are inevitable comparisons and Chuck’s writing doesn’t fare well. Anthony Burgess’ brilliant Russian influenced slang in A Clockwork Orange effectively echoes thematic disgust with socialism, predicated on an assumed Soviet victory in the Cold War. It also provides a violent and sonically new onomatopoeia: tolchock is a vivid word-image for a heavy blow; droogs, so drone-like in its visual rhyme, makes Alex’s mates so much more the brainless followers in this one word than pages of description and allusion could ever do. And how about James Joyce’s tragicomic overhauling of the language? Arguably there could be no Clockwork Orange without Ulysses.

These are big shoes and when writers walk in them I want them to give me a distinct gait. Tread the same path, by all means, but show me a different view. In Modernist art Marcel Duchamp hung a urinal on a gallery wall and called it art. It took 90 years before Michael Parekowhai produced a truly profound response that wasn’t simply a variation on the same theme. In his work Mimi (1994) there is dialogue with Duchamp, asserting that anyone going into this territory is simply a copyist and that one may as well produce objects like that on an industrial scale if that is all you are doing.The word ‘mimi’ in Te Reo Maori means ‘to piss’; this also plays on the French word ‘mimer’: ‘to copy’. In choosing the form that is familiar to many, the plastic framed do-it-yourself kitset, Parekowhai comments on colonialist received notions of art in the Pacific. Import an Airfix (say) model aeroplane kitset from England and you have an English conceived and executed object reflecting English aspirations. Your only contribution is to put it together according to the maker’s directions and there’s your objet d’art. And that is all such endless repetitions of received notions are worth. Art that comes from the core is personal, particular and resonates all over the world.

Am I wanting too much? Where Chuck is concerned I don’t think I am. Fight Club is searing, visceral and grotesque. Image after image of values and morals twisted and butchered and shockingly recognisable. This is what we’ve come to. Beyond caring, the characters stumble from one ghastly situation to the next looking for something to stimulate their anaesthetised senses. It’s the same world in Pygmy. The rituals are subjected to a gaze through a lens of political hatred and yet they don’t fare as badly as they do in Fight Club. The middle path seems to be the one that will win out here.

For the language alone it will reward repeat readings. Chuck Palahniuk will always dazzle and intrigue and this puts the book well above an average read, just not much above Chuck’s own average.