The Teachers Union

So this is a thing I put together in response to a series of prompts I myself created, which were based around character archetypes, one of which was "the mentor." So this happened in my brain.

WARNING: Some very mild spoilers abound for Game of Thrones (up to Season 6, Episode 3), A Song of Ice and Fire (up to the already released material from The Winds of Winter), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Gandalf banged his staff against the floor, inadvertently releasing several small fireworks from it in the process. “I hereby call this meeting of the Mentors’ Association to order.”

He had been hoping for a reverent silence, but what he got was a rather glum one. Dumbledore coughed. Yoda shuffled slightly atop the pile of cushions on which he’d propped himself. Giles adjusted his glasses as noisily as possible. Professor Xavier polished his shiny, shiny head.

Gandalf sighed, almost inaudibly. “So… who would like to start?”

Even before he had finished the sentence, Bloodraven was attempting to work his hand free from the series of knotted tree roots in which it was trapped. Gandalf decided to take pity on him. “Yes, Brynden?”

“It’s those bloody showrunners again,” said Bloodraven. “Not only did they cut me out for a whole season, now they’ve changed my entire backstory! A thousand years… I swear to the gods, do I look a thousand years old?”

Heavy silence reigned for several interminable moments. Finally, Yoda broke it: “When nine hundred years old you reach-”

“Not the time, Yoda,” Gandalf cut across. “Look, Brynden, we’ve all got a century or two behind us here-”

“I beg your pardon?” said Giles.

“Oh, sorry Rupert. OK, most of us are ancient beings-”

“That’s hardly the point,” sniffed Bloodraven. “I know I’m not exactly in my prime, but I’ve got a rich backstory. Rebellion! Betrayal! Intrigue! And they cut it all just for the sake of a single line.” He shook his head. “And I’m not even the worst served. You should hear how Doran Martell talks about them.”

“Don’t talk to me about adaptations,” said Dumbledore morosely. “I mean, really. What was all that ‘HARRYDIDYOUPUTYOURNAMEINTHEGOBLETOFFIYAH’ nonsense about? Bloody Gambon.”

Xavier shrugged. “I can’t complain. I got to be played by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy. It’s quite flattering.”

Gandalf felt the meeting getting away from him. “I don’t think we have a full complement. Wasn’t Morpheus supposed to be here?”

“Took him away, did they,” intoned Yoda sadly.

Giles nodded agreement. “Just before you arrived, some fellow with winged sandals came by. Seems he’d mistaken Morpheus for Orpheus, and so he dragged him off to Classical Archetypes down the hall. I tried to follow, but when I got there the only person in the room was some man screaming blue murder about how much his heel hurt. I just thought it was a lost cause.”

Gandalf shook his head. There was no point appealing to the Muses; they had always been overly fond of the classics, presumably because that was where they most often got namechecked. He turned away from the group, took out his notebook and scribbled down “Rescue Morpheus from underworld.” He paused, and added “Don’t look back on return journey – will lead to complications.”

Giles cleared his throat. “Speaking of our membership, I should like to raise a point. I, er, don’t know to put this, but don’t you think we’re a bit, erm…”

“A sausagefest are we,” said Yoda.

“Well, yes. Quite.”

Dumbledore nodded agreement. “I did ask Minerva to come along, but she just sniffed and offered me a biscuit.”

“Probably just as well,” said Xavier. “The Classical people might have gotten their hands on her too, and then we’d have had no end of complications.”

Gandalf nodded. “I think we can agree that the whole Hero’s Journey thing has historically been a bit… weighted in terms of gender. I think the best we can do is just wait for another generation of writers to come up with more female mentors.”

That platitudinous sentiment seemed to placate the others, and Gandalf turned his attention back to the rough schedule he had carved out on a stone, there being no other writing implements available to him at the time.

“Let’s see… we’ve done ‘bitch over adaptations’… I think we can leave aside ‘complain about antagonists’ for a bit.”

“I’d like to know exactly who mine is first,” said Bloodraven.

Yoda nodded sagely. “Hurry up, should George RR Martin.”

“I think we can move on to the progress report on our young charges,” said Gandalf testily. “Er… Bloodraven, why don’t you start?”

Bloodraven shrugged, a difficult gesture when you’re largely encased in a tree. “You tell me. He hasn’t released any Winds of Winter sample chapters for Bran yet.”

Xavier leaned forward, pleased. “Well, mine are-”

“Oh, don’t let Xavier get started,” said Giles.

Yoda nodded agreement. “Go on all day, he will.”

Gandalf turned to his fellow Merlin-wannabe. “Albus, how’s young Harry getting on?”

Dumbledore smiled. “He’s taking on absurd amounts of responsibility, in the unwavering belief that he always knows best. I’ve never been prouder of him.”

“Rupert? How is Buffy doing with her, er, vampire slaying?”

Giles nodded contentedly. “Her kung fu moves are getting ever more needlessly elaborate. It’s quite spectacular.”

“Yoda?”

“Standing on a rock, young Skywalker is. Like Oliver Reed he now looks.”

Gandalf crossed off an entry on his list, and surveyed the room, pleased.

“All right. Let’s move on to ‘aphoristic but meaningless wisdom’.”

---

Down the hall, the Protagonists’ Association meeting was in full swing.

“…So you see,” Matt Murdock was saying, “between the verbal abuse and the occasional unexpected impositions on my life, I haven’t had the best relationship with my mentor.”

There was an outbreak of muttered agreement. Half of the X-Men, who took up most of the room, nodded darkly. Heads turned to look at Harry Potter, next in the circle, who shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like I had a pretty good relationship with mine. I even named my son after him!”

“Did you, though?” said Bruce Wayne, who had refused to take off his Batman regalia and now looked uncomfortably warm. “I mean, he did totally manipulate you, and withhold some pretty crucial information from you.”

Harry shrugged. “Yeah, but I get it. It was all for the greater good.”

“The greater good,” echoed a chorus of muffled voices from the next room. Frodo winced.

“That’s just the cult from Hot Fuzz,” he explained. “They always do that.”

“Try not to use the phrase ‘the greater good’,” added Buffy.

“The greater good.”

“Shut up!”

Keeping Up with Mr. Johnson

I wrote this yesterday, for a prompt to do with people trying to overcome a language barrier. The fact that this was the first thing to come into my head speaks volumes. Not very good volumes.

“ENGLISH! DO YOU SPEAK IT?”

“No,” replied the terrified receptionist, thereby exhausting her entire supply of English words.

Boris sighed loudly, and ran a hand through his bright blonde mop of hair, the mop that had twice appealed so to the voting populace of London. “All right then. Is there ANYONE” – he made an expansive gesture with his hands – “in this ESTABLISHMENT” – he attempted to indicate the hotel as a whole – “who speaks BLOODY ENGLISH?!”

The receptionist shrugged helplessly. To think, she had been so pleased when the big man who always appeared in photos on the Internet looking silly had come to stay! She had been hanging around the hotel even in her off hours, trying to get a picture of him puffing out his cheeks while playing tennis or sliding down a zipline or something. The fact that the hotel had neither a tennis court nor a convenient zipline hadn’t struck her as an obstacle particularly. A good funnyman always found an opportunity.

Now he was on the phone, pacing up and down in front of her and getting increasingly red-faced. “Yes, David, it’s Boris. Yes, I know. Yes, it’s this bloody backwater you’ve stuck me in. Nobody here seems to speak a single word of a civilised tongue. What can you… No, I don’t care what… No, I don’t want to talk to George! Why would I want to talk to… Yes, get William on it. Or Theresa, I don’t know. Someone. Iain, maybe- no, not him, actually…All right, yes, fine. I don’t what you think it’ll accomplish, but…” He turned back to the receptionist. “Look, I’m going to put the Prime Minister on speakerphone.” He attempted, poorly, to mime sound coming out of the phone. “He’ll sort this out. He’s got experience dealing with foreigners.”

He placed the phone carefully on the desk, and pressed the speakerphone icon with the air of a surgeon making an incision. A voice came from it: “Hello? Receptionist? Can you hear me?”

The receptionist looked from the phone to Boris helplessly.

“She doesn’t speak English, David.”

“Oh, yes, shit, you did say that. Erm, how does Hollande do it… Bonjour, mademoiselle. Er, je m’appelle David… or should that be Davide?”

“Tried that. She doesn’t speak French either.”

“Oh, all right. Er, Merkel, Merkel… Guten Tag. Ich heisse David-“

“Or German.”

“Oh, hell. Erm, ave-“

“Or Latin.”

“Well bloody hell, Boris, what languge does she speak? Where are you again?”

“I don’t know! Wherever it was the party sent me after that… incident. With… the woman. Surely you should know.”

“Surely you should know! You’re there!”

“I don’t know. It’s hot. There’s… trees outside. There’s a pool.”

“Did you catch a trace of any language you understood?”

“No. Why would I be listening to other people talk?”

“Look, Boris, I’ve got to go. I’ve just switched on BBC Parliament and Corbyn isn’t wearing a tie; I’ve got to go talk to the media about it. You take care of yourself.”

The line went dead. Boris’s eyes widened.

“You can’t leave me like this, David! Does Bullingdon status mean nothing anymore?”

The phone stubbornly refused to respond. Boris exhaled loudly and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“So,” he said finally, turning back to the receptionist. “Have we tried Ancient Greek yet?”

From Where Dreams Are Woven

So here's something strange. Just under three months ago, someone whose work has had an immeasurable impact on the way I write, not to mention the way I think, died, and I haven't mentioned it at all on this blog. My Twitter and Facebook, on the other hands, have been awash in tributes to the man I insist on referring to, thanks to Adam Buxton, as Zavid. Rest assured, though, he's shown up again and again in my writing since the 11th of January. Here's but one example among many. The prompt in this case was one fictional character writing to another about a date with a third. So, naturally, I went with Bowie personae. 

Note: It might be advisable to familiarise yourself with Station to Station before reading the following. Actually, I think it's just generally advisable to familiarise yourself with Station to Station.

From the desk of the Thin White Duke

Dear Jareth,

Salutations to you. I hope that all is in order in your kingdom, as it is in my dukedom. I fondly remember wandering your labyrinth and mistreating your subjects with you, and look forward to your official state visit to Malkuth next month. I drink to the men who protect you and I.

My search to find who will connect me with love continues apace. The latest applicant is a so-called “starman” by the name of Ziggy Stardust, with a distressingly unruly haircut and a face showing some kind of glow. Not the most promising start, true, but stranger things have happened, as well you and I know. On which note, I enclose the latest surveillance of Sarah.

Together, we undertook a trip to a restaurant at the end of the universe; perhaps you have been? I daresay it would appeal to your sensibilities. The journey there was pleasant enough, as we soared with sunbirds and drove like a demon from station to station. The fare, too, was pleasant enough. The milk was fresh and the red peppers spicy. Sadly, they had no cocaine, but I had brought my own supply, as is my wont.

Our meal was disturbed briefly by a tableful of tall Venusians, but I was able to deal with them in short order, thanks to the European cannon, which I had brought with me. Rather, the sticking point was Mr. Stardust, who turned out to be most tiresome. He would talk only about his dreams of stardom, and some kind of spiders who were apparently going to help him. Some nonsense about how the end was five years away, which was patently codswallop given that the universe was in fact ending before his eyes.

No, my dear Jareth, I fear that in this case it was in fact the side effects of the cocaine. Got to keep searching and searching.

Yours,

The Duke.

Incidentally, here is the greatest picture I have ever seen.

The Year of the Diamond Dogs

Diamond Dogs occupies a strange place in the Bowie canon (the European canon, if you will). It hasn’t quite got a space to itself; Zavid was still sporting aspects of the Ziggy look, and before the accompanying tour was quite finished he’d moved on to his Young Americans look and sound. Chronologically, it sits awkwardly between the rock-and-roll megastardom of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and the still-astonishing roll of musical changes that took up the ’75 to ’77 period – from Young Americans into Station to Station and then to the Berlin albums. And yet, it’s an album that’s very fondly thought of. According to an anonymous source who got in touch with Chris O’Leary of the brilliant Pushing Ahead of the Dame, it may even have been Bowie’s own favourite. And for good reason: it’s not my favourite album of his, but on some level I’ve always thought of it as the quintessential Bowie album, the one that most captures his unique appeal.

Maybe this is partly because of that hybrid identity I mentioned, which is, of course, so very Bowie. Despite being in part an adaptation of a failed musical project, the album lacks personae or characters of its own; the closest it comes is the rather nebulous Halloween Jack, whom Bowie never seems to have had much interest in developing. Yet it’s full of voices; (presumably) Winston Smith in ‘We Are the Dead’, the imperious narrator of ‘Future Legend’, the strangely removed warning of ‘1984’. Even other Bowies come in and out; ‘Rebel Rebel’ is such a quintessentially Ziggy song that it seems fundamentally out of place here, while the fanfare and paranoia of ‘Big Brother’ are like omens of the Thin White Duke’s coming.

Notice the Aladdin Sane-coloured mask.

Perhaps more than any other Bowie album, Diamond Dogs synthesises his disparate influences to create a strange postmodern fusion of elements. Take the title track; a melding of Orwell, Burroughs, Ballard and the Rolling Stones, with a reference to Tarzan and opening audience noise taken from a Faces live show. Despite its dystopian setting, Baz Luhrmann was able to appropriate it quite successfully for Moulin Rouge! Even more remarkably, despite being arguably the only song on the album (unless you count ‘Future Legend’) to deal directly with the album’s overarching concept*, it works perfectly well out of context as one of the most straightforward rock songs Bowie ever wrote. Once again, his gift for taking high concepts and bringing them to the widest possible audience is on show.

All of this without even approaching the album’s high point: the ‘Sweet Thing’/‘Candidate’/‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’ triptych. Mashing half-finished songs together to create a greater whole is a trick Bowie nicked off the Beatles, but nothing from Abbey Road stands up to this, as the ever-reliable Mike Garson thunders away at the piano and Bowie displays his remarkable vocal range more spectacularly than ever before. For all the darkness of the rest of the album, the high note he hits at the end of the song is one of the most beautiful, transcendent moments of his career. And isn’t that so very Bowie, to hide such a human moment in something so removed and intellectual? Just like how the austere Low ends with the emotional transport of ‘Subterraneans’, just like how an album written and to an extent set amid a divided Berlin contains arguably his most enduring and moving vocal performance, just like how his extended and cynical album-long meditation on the nature of rock stardom ends with a cry of “You’re not alone! Give me your hands!”

There are so many other triumphs. To my mind, ‘We Are the Dead’, with its strands of sinister nonsense (“It’s the theatre of financiers, count them, fifteen ‘round the table”) is the pinnacle of Bowie’s use of cut-up technique. The inclusion of an “intro” (‘Future Legend’) and “outro” for the album (‘Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family’) helps it to feel like an enclosed, coherent world. And, of course, ‘Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family’ is one of the finest names for a song (if it qualifies as such) ever devised.

I don’t think Diamond Dogs is destined to have the kind of wider cultural significance attached to Ziggy Stardust, Low or (perhaps) Blackstar. But I do think that every Bowie fan probably has a soft spot for it, at the very least. It’s a concept album with a less-than-coherent concept, a staging post between extraordinary transformations, the residual home for a few songs written for a project never allowed to get off the ground. And yet it’s also the home of some of Bowie’s finest music of the period. More than that, its high-minded brilliance, poised on the edge of absurdity, sums up precisely why we love him so much.

Plus the cover is a painting of him as a dog. It’s hard not to admire that.

* - While the 1984 songs obviously have a distinctly dystopian element to them, they very much belong to another world; ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ in particular are too blatantly Orwellian to apply to another setting.

Spotted on a Noticeboard Recently

Applications welcome for entry-level position in dynamic new company. Candidates should:

- Be professional and polite – should be able to quote verbatim from at least one handbook of etiquette

- Be aged between 23 years, 6 months and 14 days, and 23 years, 6 months and 16 days

- Have at least 15 years’ experience in the field, at all levels up to and including senior management

- Have demonstrable knowledge of at least seven languages, one from each continent, including Antarctica

- Bear the Ring of Khazza’hocknei, which sleeps in the Temple of Infinite Solace, guarded by devious traps and fiendish guardians

- Have impressive IT skills – ability to break through the Pentagon’s firewalls would be a good start

- Have perfectly symmetrical eyebrows

Successful candidates will be invited to interview between 2.50 am and 3.10 am tomorrow. Failure to attend will result in us being very disappointed. And you won’t like that. You won’t like that at all.