The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 10
The Autodidact

This one is about me, if you’ll excuse the slight diversion. I guess I’ve been so busy sharing some of our stories that I’ve neglected to dwell on your ever so ‘umble narrator. What prompted me to mention this was that I was trying to have a bit of a read of Nausea the other day, and got nowhere. Strange, because at one time that book was something of a touchstone for us. A sacred text. Ah the foibles and follies of youth.

Skimming its pages I was nevertheless reminded of the nom de guerre my cherished comrades bestowed upon me back in the day. The Autodidact. Charming eh? It was certainly never that clear to me why. It was never really clear to me either what Sartre made of his Autodidact in Nausea? A determined soul working his way through the library shelves, literally educating himself. Was it grudging admiration, he felt, or patronising pity?

Similarly when my colleagues called me The Autodidact, what were they getting at?
Mind you, they had a point in a way. I did spend an inordinate amount of time around the local library. Busily browsing through the bookshelves. Following up leads. The Autodidact in Nausea had his method. I had mine, after a fashion. My method came from my music. My music was my education, if you like. I’ve always argued that punk and beyond opened so many doors, led me down so many different paths. A proper, if rather random, education.
You think I’m making this up? Well, take the Buzzcocks and the Mondrian designs on their shirts. Magazine and the references to Dostoyevsky. The Television Personalities and all those allusions to the kitchen sink films of the ‘60s. The Fall, The Cure, and Camus. Dexys and Brendan Behan. Joy Division and Ballard. Josef K and Kafka. The Fire Engines and Popism: The Warhol ‘60s. You can see how one thing led to another. You can see why I got so caught up in things.

Take Cristina’s wonderful song Things Fall Apart. That took me to Chinua Achebe and his wonderful book Things Fall Apart. That rang bells with me somewhere. And then I realised its main ‘hero’ reminded me of the fabled Okonkwo twins from north of the river. A couple of characters that from time to time popped up in the early editions of the style mags. Identical twins marooned in the here and now of London who were our sort of people. Dreamers and romantics, living out their fantasies through denial. Early photoshoots had them as mods or rude boys, immaculately turned out, practicing martial arts and planning for better things. Later shoots showed them in a much more esoteric vein, dressed in a perversion of utility work wear, ardently avoiding the world of work, and still dreaming of finer things. As I said, they were our sort of people. And for some reason I couldn’t get it out of my head that I should write a play for them because they inevitably were going to be stars.

Ever the romantic, I had been reading about Ewan McColl and the Theatre of Action, Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop, and Arnold Wesker’s east end trilogy. I could see myself being a part of something like that. Some hope. Nevertheless when I wasn’t home hoovering up the contents of dusty tomes, I spent my time sitting in the warmth of the library’s reference section, sketching out ideas, scribbling notes for books never to be written and plays never to be performed. There were worse ways to waste one’s time.

The trouble was I knew nowhere near as much as I thought I did, or anywhere near as much as I pretended I did. Those were days where you’d pick up all these interesting old books from charity shops, and try to take them all in. But truth be told, I really didn’t know my Quattrochi from my Alex Trocchi, my Tom Nairn from my Ian Nairn, my Mayakovsky from my Dostoyevsky, my Daniel Cohn-Bendit from my Nik Cohn and Stanley Cohen. And I’m not sure that was a bad thing at all. It’s just that I thought I needed to know everything, and that’s where I guess my nom de guerre The Autodidact came in. I guess I earned it.

At one point I got totally frustrated at my floundering. I’d been reading James Cameron’s Point of Departure, a master class in reporting. It was way beyond my random writings, and I figured I needed some structure to my life. I needed some tangible skills. So, okay, why not start by learning shorthand? Like a proper journalist. I would be ready for anything then.

So no sooner the word than the deed, and I did get hold of a Teeline instruction book for next to nothing. What sticks in my mind most now that I have unlearned the art of shorthand, I’m ashamed to say, is that flicking through the pages back home I was intrigued to discover a selection of small slips of paper, neatly folded, and scattered seemingly carefully throughout the book. Intrigued, I started the process of unfolding the slips. More intriguingly, it became apparent that the slips contained instructions for some sort of adult game, whether it were forfeits or flights of fancy. I got all hot under the collar, and then couldn’t stop laughing. I just had visions of some distressed soul suddenly realising what they’d done, and becoming increasingly alarmed at the saucy surprise someone would get.

Or, as I began to wonder, had someone done it deliberately? Perhaps as a calculated move to spice up someone’s study session? I rather liked that idea. I don’t know if it happens so much now. But back then it was quite a challenge to find a library book of some substance that was free from the dreaded notes scrawled in pencil. And they were always so dreadfully earnest and dreary. The Teeline teaser gave me an idea though. Why not leave messages in library books that somehow challenged? Some serious fun could be had in that way I figured. I didn’t really know my Situationist slogans from my Emmett Grogans, but I knew a good idea when I’d stumbled across one. So if perchance you were one of a number of people round our way wondering what on earth that slip of paper in your library book was all about, well it was just me having some fun, in the name of The Outside of Everything.

Funnily enough I found some of the slogans and whatnots I appropriated scribbled down in an old red hard backed notebook buried at the bottom of an old cardboard box. “Pullovers and jeans will claim the streets, mocking savagely empty idols, powerful yesterday.” “Action = not reaction – but creation”. You can see where I was coming from. Ah the innocence of youth. My cherished comrades caught the bug too, and took to planting slips with strange slogans and more inside magazines in newsagents and dentists’ waiting rooms, and other everyday places. Perhaps we were wasting our time. Perhaps we planted some seeds. Perhaps someone hung onto one or two.