Who does he think he is?

(This is prompted in part by a blog post by my friend Namwan, about the moment she realised nobody else had a bloody clue either.)

Very, very occasionally, I go to some sort of social gathering – not a party per se, I’m far too old and tired to do that sort of thing any more – and someone will ask me The Question: “So, what do you do?” It’s so dangerously close to “So, who are you?” that every time I encounter it I find myself teetering on the edge of an existential crisis. And of course, rather than actually dealing with the problem, I construct a banal response-cum-coping-mechanism that will satisfy my new acquaintance’s curiosity without encouraging any further probing.

This wasn’t always a problem. Way back in the mid-90s I was a contestant on A Well-Known TV Quiz Show and between my being accepted and actually recording the episode I went through three different job titles. Confusion inevitably set in so I responded to Magnus Magnusson’s (yes, it was That TV Quiz Show) request for my occupation there was a brief pause and he said “That’s not what I’ve got down here.” It wasn’t the first question I got wrong that day.

Later I had a brief spell when I enjoyed a job title that actually prompted people to say, “Wow, that must be really interesting!” which was nice, although it was also the only job from which I’ve been fired, which wasn’t. And since then I’ve done a number of things that are to a greater or lesser extent connected with words, sometimes juggling two or three of them simultaneously and frankly it’s too much effort to explain it all to someone who’s only really making polite conversation so I just say “I’m a journalist.”

Which isn’t exactly a lie, because I do write things that then appear in periodical publications. But it might serve to mislead someone who thinks that journalists are either battle-hardened crusaders for the truth or sleazy dredgers-up of titillating scandal. I’m neither of those. But there’s also been a shift towards the notion that anyone with a smartphone and a Twitter account is a journalist these days. I’m not one of those either and I do still hold true to the notion that there’s a distinction between news on one hand and Buzzfeed quizzes on the other. And I do have sympathy with the stance of those such as Barney Hoskyns who are campaigning against the tendency to take advantage of journalists and other creatives by asking them to work for nothing “because it’ll get you some exposure.” But that does raise the question of what a journalist’s work is. If I write something and then someone wants to interview me on the radio about it, I might say OK, because it will draw attention to my work. And although I’ll be using my verbal skills I’m not actually writing, so I don’t feel so dirty.

But once of or twice over the past few months I’ve been approached by e-mail by people who are writing pieces about the current situation in Thailand, asking me what the hell’s going on. I respond by e-mail, which makes it seem more like work, but at the same time I know the reason they’ve got in touch is less because I used to write things for The Guardian back in the last decade and more because I happen to be in Bangkok. So since I’m not being a journalist, what if I throw in a few factual errors or spelling mistakes? Is it OK not to be paid then?

Maybe I should just blur a few edges and call myself “a writer”. Because that’s what I do and the term doesn’t insist on payment as part of the deal. Quite the opposite, it seems, as this article in today’s Observer by Robert McCrum suggests. And then if I ever do get off my arse and go to a party we can talk about the gap between wanting to be A Writer and actually Writing.

Although, as Truman Capote would doubtless have argued, I’m not really a writer – I’m a typist.

Social Me, a name I call myself

Undeterred by my fleeting flirtation with Klout and passively encouraged by that digital pimp Everett the-sometime-Legend! True, I have joined some grisly entity going under the name of Social Me, which essentially casts a baleful eye over one’s Facebook posts and treats them to a bells-and-whistles version of what we used to call the Gunning Fog Index. So:

• I like to talk about Literature, Social Media, and Philosophy. I am Artsy and Confident. (Really not sure about the last one.) I post statuses to Facebook most often in the morning.
• My posts are most often Humorous, Loving, Excited and Happy. (Yeah, right. And some of them seem to come under the heading “Your Day” which implies a certain diary-like banality. Gee, thanks.)
• I post about 9 statuses per month. The average person posts 12.8 statuses per month. (So I’m officially below average. Yay!) I posted the most statuses in one day on Jan 18, 2009 (which was the day after I joined Facebook) with a total of 6 statuses.
• I am Extroverted, Confident, Strong-Willed, Organised, Artsy. (In most of these, only on Facebook, I’d suggest. And the only one that sounds at all valid is “artsy” and I’m not sure what it means, especially as its antithesis is given as “Traditional”.)
• I have posted as many words as a book. (32,049 at about this time yesterday; and not including the Facebook post that will be automatically generated when I publish this blog post. How meta is that?) In fact, I have posted more words than Charlotte’s Web, which has a total of 31,938 words. (Yes, but it’s a very short book. I’ve actually written three books that are longer than that. To be fair, none of them was as successful or as good as Charlotte’s Web, although they did make me cry almost as much.)
• My most popular updates were smartarse one-liners about Kindles, Mo Farah and Rebekah Brooks. Here’s where it gets interesting, though:
• I use more words per sentence than 88% of people.
• I use more emoticons than 90% of people. :)
• I use more commas than 87% of people.
• I use fewer exclamation marks than 94% of people.
• I use more apostrophes in his writing than 86% of people.
• I use longer words than 96% of people.
• I use words with more syllables than 96% of people.
• I use fewer concrete words than 97% of people.
• I use fewer imaginative words than 99% of people.

I’m guessing/hoping that “imaginative words” is a euphemism for words that don’t really exist. And to be honest, all the stats about punctuation and so on are pretty irrelevant unless we know whether I’m using the many apostrophes and few exclamation marks properly. And it’s only particularly relevant if you’re labouring under the misapprehension that the real “you” exists within the ones and zeroes of your Facebook profile; whereas mine is on Twitter, of course. The real “real me” went out to buy some milk some time in 2008 and hasn’t been seen since. So I don’t know what any of this means. And I’m still baffled about the whole “confident” thing. Oh go on, you do it for yourselves and come back and tell me what it says and give me your best guess as to how accurate it is. Especially the stuff about commas.

Of course, no sooner had I disgorged my Zuckerbergoid self into the Social Me bucket, I remembered that there’s another method of self-analysis via one’s own writings that doesn’t focus on the banal, superficial blatherings of my pokey/likey persona. So I pasted a few recent posts from Cultural Snow into I Write Like and discovered that I write like HP Lovecraft, which is intriguing because I’ve never knowingly read more than two or three sentences of Lovecraft’s prose. And then I did the same thing with some text from my new David Foster Wallace blog – which you’re all reading, I know – and was informed that, no, actually I write like the late David Foster Wallace. Which is at one and the same time entirely to be expected and also a bit weird, as if I’ve been typing on someone’s grave. To coin a tortured simile that DFW would probably spurn; although he does at one point come up with the sentence “He went to the bathroom to use the bathroom” which is pretty bad. Hey, I can say that! I write like him! Which means I’m pretty much him.

Doesn’t it?

Everything I know about psychology, I learned from a trombone solo by Big Jim Paterson

Want to know yourself a little better? Forget EQ tests, Scientology, all that time-consuming hassle. Just decide what your favourite Dexys Midnight Runners song is.

If your favourite Dexys Midnight Runners song is 'Geno', you are a 40-something male, essentially content, but with a distinct feeling that things haven't quite worked out as you hoped they would. You never actually saw The Clash in concert, but you drop hints that you might have done to younger female colleagues, who have no idea what you're talking about, and laugh about you in the toilets. In the film of your life you will be played by Neil Pearson.

If your favourite Dexys Midnight Runners song is 'Come On Eileen', you enjoy nightclubs where the dress code is 'Grange Hill uniform' and your main source of solid factual information about the wider world is those list programmes on Channel 4. In the film of your life you will be played by Jennifer Ellison.

If your favourite Dexys Midnight Runners song is 'This Is What She's Like' (the 12-minute rant from their dressing-like-accountants period), you are a music critic on a broadsheet newspaper, and you hope there is no record of the fact you thought the album was incomprehensible bollocks when it first came out. In the film of your life you will be played by Richard E. Grant.

If your favourite Dexy's Midnight Runners song is in fact from that Kevin Rowland solo effort where he wore women's underwear, you took rather too many drugs at the height of the mid-90s easy listening revival, and you are now physically incapable of distinguishing 'ironic' from 'please summon medical attention immediately'. In fact you are Alan McGee, although when the time comes for the movie you will be played by Steve Coogan, who will just play it as Steve Coogan with a faint Scottish accent, but Alan McGee himself will make a brief cameo, as will Kevin Rowland, probably as a park keeper or bin man.