Ion's blog

In other words, blogs aren’t just about factual journalism. They’re about fictional narrative, too. Writers have always used the net to distribute novels and poems that could appear in print. But there’s a tradition of experimenting with online forms such as email and chatrooms to tell stories that could only work online. Writers are taking this further by working with blogs. Indeed, with their short daily entries, reader feedback and links to the net, blogs seem purpose-built for creating episodic stories.

Jill Walker, a specialist in interactive and online narrative, based at the University of Bergen in Norway http://huminf.uib.no/~jill, says many writers see blogs as a natural way to update/extend the traditional fictional diary (eg Bridget Jones’s Diary). “But what’s genuinely new about blog fictions is their use of the network.” Most blog fictions haven’t really used the net yet, she continues. “Imagine a fictional blogger who left comments in other people’s blogs, chatted with people, and responded to reader comments as the story unfolded.”

Rob Wittig’s blogfiction is closer to weblogs in form and feel. A fictional group weblog, it features entries by Wittig and two friends who aren’t real, though, Wittig jokes, at times they doubt his own reality. Even as they map out the friendship among the three bloggers, the blog entries link to real-world events.

Wittig, who has written email and web-based narratives before, says he’ll incorporate and respond to reader comments within the story. He compares blog fictions to 18th-century pamphleteering. “Addison, Steele, Dr Johnson and the rest would invent a persona, the Spectator or the Rambler, who was mostly the author, but partly fictionalised, and then comment on events that were either real, partly fictionalised or wholly fictionalised. The fictionalising was done in part to skirt lawsuits and, in part, as the novelist does, to create a fiction exemplary of fact.”

With 20 minutes to kill, I stumbled into HMV on Oxford Street. And now I realise the real reason why I haven’t been to a record shop for ages.

The truth is: My ability to work my way through a record shop (or an entertainment/ media emporium as I’m sure they see themselves) have been eroded by the net, just like my skills at mental arithmetic have been whittled away by using a calculator.
Without stars, reader reviews, audio samples and ‘people who bought this also bought’…I’m completely lost. I stand at the front of the store, rather like a pensioner waiting for someone to help them cross the road.

If my trip hadn’t been cut short, I would either have bought a load of the cheap back catalogue stuff that’s filling up the front of the shop and I feel I ought to own (more Bowie/ Clash/ Pet Sounds which I’ve never got round to buying…and have lived perfectly well without all these years. But at least I’d know what I was buying.

Or I would have bravely ventured into the new music area, where I would have been buying on the basis of ‘what have I vaguely heard of?’ and’what’s got the coolest cover?’. Unfortunately, I have bought too much shit, too many times to go down that route.
Oh, and I’m obviously devastated to find that most of what I think of as quite new and cool is either in the charts, or reduced at the front of the store.

Do they offer a personal shopper service, me wonders?

Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England – the M25, the world of business parks, industrial estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas, cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts… That’s where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”

Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Heathrow airport, which kills three people. The proposition of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new proletariat”, with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led, as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attacking the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and then out into the suburbs.

But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take their claims of oppression? At one point in the book, there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Marina might change the street names to those of Japanese film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might damage property prices”…

At the extreme end of Jewish Porn, the terror of the concentration camps is re-enacted for sexual gratification. In Holocaust Porn, Jewish women are shown squatting and defecating in packed trains. They are shown having their heads shaved. They are emaciated, with their ribs poking out. They are incinerated in open ovens. They are gassed. They are sodomized with severed limbs, sometimes their own limbs.

One can find staged photographs of a naked and shivering woman under a showerhead in a tiled hygienic facility. I have seen photos of a man dressed as a stormtrooper emptying a tank labeled “Gasoline” into a woman’s mouth. The woman holds the funnel and masturbates the Nazi with her right hand. These photos are grainy black-and-whites, yet are clearly contemporary.

And here things get dirty: The Holocaust Porn industry is based in Israel. The films are mostly made by Israelis, and they are also mostly purchased by Israelis. The actresses are overwhelmingly Israeli-Russian immigrants.

Is Israeli involvement in Holocaust Porn a sick manifestation of an addiction to persecution? Is it a reaction to assimilation—or a product of it? Is it the blackest form of satire? How different are these re-enactments from those rare bits of genuine Holocaust footage passed around for erotic consumption?