10/12/2020
My mate whose illness I wrote about in my last piece, written too long ago, died after all, and I just got added to a WhatsApp group called Funeral, with a link to watch it tomorrow afternoon. The group has no display picture — just pure grey space — and the link looks like Web 1.0. It’s in the same crematorium where over the years I’ve attended back-home funerals at a steady-ish rate (first my father’s when I was young, then home from university for strange weekends to watch a de-facto aunt, two nans, and one family friend burn in an array of pointlessly fabulous boxes), and, buffering or lag notwithstanding, I’ll soon be there again, watching a great pal of mine depart across a distant conveyor belt, via the internet, on a laptop I still pay for monthly, three days before my thirtieth birthday.
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It’s my thirtieth, but in all the bios I’ve attached to agent letters, I’ve said that I’m twenty-eight. I’m trying to leave it in there under the guise that I was twenty-eight when I wrote the boilerplate, and I have just forgotten to update it. Really, I thought it would look impressive if I got an ambitious and torturous novel published while I was still in my twenties. I’m that sort of cunt.
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Since I last wrote there has been movement towards representation, but it steps slow, bursts into life with a shower of emails, attention (which only happens when I shake the tree, swallow my pride and follow up ‘awfully-politely’), before stopping in the manner of an emergency brake: I get a short story published with a great site (the mighty Common Breath; link below±) and the excitement rises and fades, like a dying motor; I get a Distinction for my novel, for my Masters overall, and I think it all means something until that dies, too, and I realise that I’m just a lad behind a bar with two arts degrees and a load of unused annual leave, which I’m now taking so as to not get completely fucked over by furlough. (My graduation will take place online, by the way; they’re preparing the link). I get a shite message from work, telling me about some new, in-the-New-Year nonsense, and I think that this might be an anecdote for the future, how I was going to have to start my thirtieth year with an unpublished novel (after so many promises) and go into work and clean the ketchup-crusted plates of rich people, until that very same night, when I got a reply from my dream agent and she told me that she wanted to take the book on, and I knew then in that moment that I could start to inch my way into the life and work of being a real writer. But then my Mail app bleeps its miserable bleep, and it’s Levi’s telling me that their Black Friday deals haven’t truly ended, or Wix, this blog’s host, telling me that I haven’t posted for a while but not to worry — a unique domain name is still available at half the normal price. I pay it.
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Some things keeping me going: David Keenan’s recent interviews surrounding his new novel, Xstabeth, which interviews seem to be a writer’s collective response to the adoration of 'stories', and how this is bollocks, actually, because it’s all about rhythm and technique and energy — stories have a point, definitely an end-point, and art shouldn’t. (One of the culture’s dumbest additions in the internet years has seen an increasing desire to try and ‘solve’ art, which is about as depressing an attitude towards the ethereal, unknowable nature of the thing as I can think of.) This is my idiot reading of what Keenan says, anyway, and I love him for it because it is so attuned to what I personally find valuable in fiction, to the point where I’m jealous that it’s not me saying it, when someone asks me why my novel, which is full of suicide and incest and ancestral suffering, full of sex, addiction, the fault-lines that run through a working-class community so often shunned in mainstream modern fiction, when people ask me why my novel, which I’m not ashamed to say (but only because writers and editors I respect have told me so) fucking sings in certain places, why this book of my life has no ‘plot’?
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(Other things: the early Cronenberg films I’m watching for the first time; Takeshi Kitano’s first three pictures; my Wire re-up; post-Astral Weeks Van Morrison; the snooker and its curative melodies (I know of no more soothing sound than the constant clack clack clack of resin on resin); Lennon’s solo stuff; Annie Ernaux’s autofiction; filling in my Claire Denis gaps; and Dylan, always Dylan.)
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I also read a few hot novels of the moment. They were okay, good, probably quite good. Then I read Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan and I know I’ll never think about them again. I’m now spending the last weeks of my twenties reading Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, which Burn quotes in Cogan. To use a current expression that I don’t find entirely middle-class and embarrassing: I have never felt so 'seen' in the first thirty pages of a novel.
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I deleted twitter from my phone the night of the recent attacks in Vienna. I spent a week there last summer and fell hard for its hushed somnambulance, so I was especially disturbed to be reading about what happened there. Like a curious moron I clicked away from official channels and ended up on rando tweets and takes, eventually watching a video of a young man get shot up a wall, cornered against the concrete by a gunman with vague ideas about doing it for God. I felt the blood leave my face, became colourless as for some reason I watched it again. Then I reported the egg-account, deleted the app, read some George Saunders for his radical kindness, his genius. Last night I put twitter back on my phone so that I could read some self-flagellating comedy tweets about my football club failing to win a big game while I was taking a shit. I ended up watching a CCTV video of a young kid being stabbed in the stomach when some on-the-rob lads targeted him as he was coming out of a club, not far from the city I was born in. He fought four of them off before the delivery of the fatal knife-blow, but not before he chased them down the street afterwards, as if to show them what they had done. His bravery astounds me. A few years ago I got into something similar, when some sad bastards from back home battered me because I confronted them about throwing eggs at people coming out of the Co-op (it was Halloween (and it's all in the book)). I didn’t watch the video of that poor lad and think that it could’ve been me (a baseless observation), but I did well-up watching him wobble away against the cold wall, three hours before his death — it reminded me of the footage I saw a few years ago, not long after those lads broke my zygomatic arch, when my sister’s best boy-friend was stabbed to death at a fundraiser for another friend who had been stabbed to death the year before. I delete twitter again.
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All of which might fall under a current phrase I have less time for: Peak 2020. But see the date has nothing to do with it. The people I know, and people like them, suffer this shit all the time, year after year, pain quenelled on top of grief, to be eaten and swallowed but never shat out. Yet still, each make their own tickings in the sound of time, to borrow Wolfe’s words, each deserves to be seen, and, if you’ll allow me one quick moment that isn’t complete imposter-ish self-doubt, let me say, if only to assuage myself and keep me on the blood-slick track towards publication before I fuck it all off forever, that my own words could help shine a light on such people, if only someone would let them.
± https://thecommonbreath.com/blog35.html
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