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The world of the computer has already been very much invaded by the wretched, and the cheaper things get, the more wretched it becomes. Not because the poor are necessarily wretched (though they often are, sometimes even as much as the rich), but because cunning people will use the wonders of technology to further brutalise the poor, the kind of poor who live in tin shacks with television antennae on the roof. And in doing so, they, i.e. ‘the powerful people’, also brutalise themselves. They’ve always been brutes, in one sense, and now they’ll become even more brutal, thanks to technology. The internet will leave the cultural sphere where it began once and for all, and will instead be under the control of businesses and states. But even so, the structure of the computer, and the intelligence of the human race who made it work, will always be there. It will always be a world to be untangled, a world you can converse with, because it must necessarily be governed by logic. Without logic, the machine doesn’t work. Even if the person using it isn’t logical. These days a drooling football fan can press a few buttons and get a few results. Soon he’ll be able to do a lot more, with even less intellectual effort. Nevertheless, there may always be a few individuals who’d rather converse with the inner workings of an operating system on Christmas Eve, indifferent to the firecrackers and drunken revels. Of course I find this solitude somewhat painful; things could easily have been another way. Of course I submerge myself in the world of the computer to numb the pain, which is more nostalgia than pain, or a kind of nostalgia, the kind you find in tangos, which doesn’t need to relate to a concrete fact or a real-life experience. Nostalgia for what a race, or a country, could have been. Ah, people …
damn. prescient
The manufacturer was a Texan man, and he turned out not to be particularly nice. I wrote him a very interesting, entertaining, agreeable email, explaining the difficulties I had in getting to the post office because of my advanced years, and how people here steal any money you post anyway, and how I was poor and didn’t have a credit card; and I offered to send him some amusing stories in exchange for the codes that would get rid of that damn box. The whole thing was a huge effort because my English isn’t very good, and back then it was even worse (because now the internet has made me practise a lot). But I couldn’t soften his hard Texan heart; he responded briefly, coldly, and even went so far as to say that whenever he gave things away, people forgot to say thank you. As if that man had ever given anything away. In an attempt to win him over to humanity a little, I wrote back, thanking him for having replied, and ended up repeating ‘thank you’ in a sarcastic-sounding way. I was very frustrated, and obsessed with finding a solution. There was no similar program online; nothing matched what I was looking for. I tried making a dialler myself, but I didn’t have Visual Basic back then, and nor did I know enough to be able to do it.
lmao
I think I’m not strictly a thief; I don’t have the right mindset for it. So why do I steal programs?
In response to that, I’d say that I don’t steal programs, but rather the right to use them. The program isn’t a physical thing; it’s information, a kind of information, just as one of my novels is a kind of information. It doesn’t bother me if one person lends another a book I’ve written, and if that borrowed book is passed around many more people; on the contrary, it’s a practice I approve of and try to encourage. In the same way, it doesn’t bother me if people make photocopies of my books. I’m even tempted to publish my books online, so they can be downloaded for free. It bothers me if a publisher steals from me, and they do, often, as they do from all writers, one way or another.
i'm with you!
When I ‘steal’ a program I’m exercising my right to culture, which isn’t anyone’s private property. The programs I ‘steal’ don’t earn me any money; on the contrary, they make me waste time. I don’t derive any material benefit from them. Culture, the product of intelligence and sensibility, is something that should circulate freely, with no charge; it can’t be anyone’s private property, because the mind isn’t anyone’s private property. If I was able to read in the mind of an unknown Texan a procedure that let me use his program, that means something. If I write a story and then destroy it because I feel like it’s not ‘mine’ (and a long time afterwards I find material proof that it wasn’t ‘mine’), that means something. A text I’ve written isn’t ‘mine’ because I own it; it’s ‘mine’ in the way a child might be ‘mine’.
We ought to find a system that would allow writers to survive without needing to traffic in copyright; we ought to destroy this rotten system of blood-sucking publishers, of books as objects, of penalties for photocopying or pirating work. It’s true: a writer who hits on something that matches popular taste can get rich overnight (unlikely in this country, of course), and writers of software even more so. But as we all know, becoming rich like that is also a way of becoming poor, and anyway, if people want to be part of that system, fine, I’ll leave them to it.
I lit the end of a candle, left over from a previous power cut, and stuck it in a clean ashtray. I carried the lit candle to the bathroom, resigned to facing the second phase of my martyrdom – damn those antidepressants – while trying to shake from my mind the uncomfortable notion that I was falling prey to the shadowy machinations of even more shadowy powers.
I feel more like a Beckett character by the day.
lol
[...] The girl would have been, I don’t know, I can never tell how old people are, but I think she would have been between fourteen and sixteen years old. And yet she behaved as if she were younger, with that stiffness, that dependence on the old lady still rooting around in her handbag. The girl had her eyes fixed straight ahead and her gaze was guarded, or rather it was as if she were hiding a second gaze underneath. There was something stupid about her expression, but it was a proud kind of stupidity and suggested she was extremely ignorant as well as not very clever. But something beneath this gaze slightly refuted what I’ve just said; not about the pride, but about the stupidity and the distance she put between herself and the world; as if she were watching everything out of the corner of her eye, amazed; as if she were deliberately avoiding looking around so as not to be amazed, because she’d realised that what she saw would amaze her. My God, I don’t know how to explain it. She wasn’t ugly. But she wasn’t very beautiful either. I don’t have a clue what it was I found so attractive, but I was violently attracted to her nonetheless. I could even pick up the scent of her, not because she smelled bad but because I’m sensitive and have a powerful imagination; she smelled of the countryside, of sunshine and dried grass. When I passed nearby, I stared at her with all the enormous eyes at my disposal. When I reached the exit, I turned back for another look. My God! I wanted that girl so much! I spent the whole walk home thinking about her, imagining different scenarios, those erotic fantasies I’ve always looked down on and never let myself indulge in. I gradually realised that my desire for her was violent, and a desire for violence rather than sex, or violent sex, at any rate. I didn’t imagine myself seducing her so much as forcing myself on her. Taming her, like an animal. That was it: she was a dumb beast and wouldn’t understand any language other than brutality. But there was a lot more inside me than this. At one point I imagined I was a feudal lord, saying to the old lady: ‘I shall take your daughter away,’ and the old lady had no choice but to hand her over. The thought of being alone in a large room with the girl drove me crazy. I wanted to make the struggle last forever, because she wouldn’t give in just like that; I had to make her, I had to fight, and she’d fight back, biting and kicking. I’d have to hit her and dominate her, I’d have to rip off her clothes. Oh, my God, my God. And all in silence, without a word; with nothing, perhaps, but moans. I couldn’t picture her naked; my mind lingered on the struggle, or the point before the struggle: the moment she found herself shut inside the room with me alone, preparing for a defence that she knew would ultimately be futile. I’m sure she wouldn’t alter her gaze, her shyness that looked like pride or distance; that in the end, whatever I did, I would never reach her real gaze, and that this would be her triumph, and my defeat.
HA HA HA!
I have defeated summer! The air conditioning is installed. To celebrate, I had half a glass of wine. I’m drunk.
[...] Meanwhile, on the pavement, the nightmare had taken the form of a very old man clutching a guitar and singing (so to speak), first a little waltz, and then a tango. I caught a few snatches of lyrics that helped me recognise them. As for the notes he was attempting to extract from the guitar, not one bore the slightest relation to any kind of melody or harmony. He was using the guitar more like a percussion instrument, hitting all the strings at random with his rhythmic slapping. And the voice … all that was left of the old man’s voice was a pathetic squeak, and needless to say, it was completely tuneless and lacking intonation. I feel sorry for people like that, and I was ready to give him a few coins when he came over to our table. But he didn’t come over to anyone’s table at any point in the whole half hour we were sitting there; he went on singing and battering his guitar, and as soon as he finished one song he launched straight into the next. As if he was only trying to express himself.
lol
[...] All those years spent doing the work of bureaucracy had taken their toll – and it looked like there’d been plenty of years, too, filled with all the vices attached to her job: stress and disappointment, yes, but also a kind of malicious sharpness, of being constantly on the lookout for opportunities to exert the slightest bit of power. When I arrived, she was in conversation with a woman. Soon, though, I realised it wasn’t a conversation, and in fact the receptionist was applying a very sophisticated form of torture. The moment she saw me arrive and stand in front of the desk, she sent the woman away with some final instructions, and while the woman was leaving with her own quota of stress, the employee turned to face me, practically licking her lips, like a vampire who spots a demijohn of fresh blood on the way over. Unfortunately for her, my business was very simple, and there was nothing she could get her teeth into. She just applied a bit of pressure by asking me if I was the account-holder with the electricity board, hoping I’d say no, but I said yes, leaving her with no further options besides giving me a number and telling me to go up the stairs I could see to my left.
lol
I did go out in the end, by myself; I went to the Feria del Libro and came back with four detective novels. I hadn’t even heard of one of them, though it’s by a writer I collect. Another is that Ellery Queen book, Drury Lane’s Last Case. It was still there and I decided to go ahead and buy it, in spite of everything. After all, when I’m in one of these extended phases in which I want to read detective novels more than any other kind of book, my thinking is: better to have something not very good to read than to have nothing at all. Addictions are like that, and you can end up suffering terrible humiliations out of desperation for the drug. I’ll end up reading Agatha Christie one day, I know it.
lmao