Distraction or, Look at that Shiny Thing

I have come to accept constant distraction as a part of the writing process. Having written with permanent internet access for most of my life, I can’t switch it off and concentrate fully on the open text. Because so many things swirl around in my head from sentence to sentence, I need to be able to click away, to check emails and Goodreads notifications and Facebook every four minutes. Things like: is this sentence as good as the preceding sentence? is this the best word choice here, what about these seven different words instead, is this working in the piece overall, what’s missing from this scene, is this the sort of thing I should be writing, what do I want to say here, do I want to say anything etc, etc, etc.

By keeping the internet on I am distracting all the wagging tongues in my head constantly questioning every word I write, trying to undermine my progress. But recently, I’ve found myself even more restless when writing short stories. Either I am coming around to the usefulness of the short form, or looking to evolve a long-ish short story form for the perpetually distracted reader of these times. I wrote two collage-like pieces called Digressiana that consist of complete microfictions, stories that break off halfway, little weird doodles, self-commenting snarks and bits that run throughout the piece as a whole.

The effect—which I tried last year in a story that simulated channel-hopping—is to create a form that responds to the contemporary attention span—esp. the online attention span (where these pieces may be published, if anyone publishes them at all), where the outcome of (or details pertaining to) one story is not necessarily all the reader cares about. Having many, many stories running at the same time, stories that are dropped or resumed, interrupted, replaced with better or worse ones, might be an interesting response to the distracted reader (and writer) dilemma. Or it might make it worse, by simply encouraging the problem. Who knows. Time will tell as I explore the form. Oh look—a shiny thing!

The Past is Tense

I often have moments where, thinking about the past and what could have been, I get pangs of melancholy. More recently, I have found myself aware of these moments and can easily dismiss them with the logic that, being the person I am with the upbringing I had, events would have turned out more or less similar regardless of minor alterations made to specific events in the distant yonder. Large differences in my personality and genetic makeup would need to take place for a more well-rounded person to have emerged to the one that exists now.

What I find strange is that when I was a depressed teenager, aged seventeen or so, I had the notion that I would look back on these moments of depression, of being lost and alone, for the rest of my life, since I knew the significance that one’s late teenhood has on the rest of your life—the teenage period as a nostalgia nerve-centre, where a person reflects on how their life turned out the way it did, all the decisions they made in early youth. I was right in that I do dwell on that period often, almost ten years on now, as being a pivotal moment in my life—an unhappy one, which I knew I would never reclaim. I knew I was missing out on the experiences people of my age group were having due to my shyness and fear, and I would never be able to relive this period.

I don’t find myself feeling down for very long—I have moved on in so many ways. In many ways, I am still the same, but I am happy and contended in my life at the moment, touch wood. But I do find myself more interested in exploring this unhappy period in my fiction: it seems so significant in terms of who I am and what I want to communicate to the world. Perhaps I’ll figure out why. In the meantime, let’s lament for nostalgia: it isn’t what it used to be.

My Month in Novels, Part Two (Aug)

9. James Joyce — Ulysses

First, about the haste. This book is a page-turner. Forget Stephen King. Joyce is the man you read in bed, furiously tongue-fingering the pages to see what seminal modernist technique he invents, masters, inverts, spins on its head like a circus freak with a whirligig in his bonce. The first five episodes set the pace perfectly, setting the reader up for the all-singing all-dancing feats of outrageous showboating that follow in the remaining thirteen chapters, each adding a few Jenga blocks to the superseding chapters to challenge the reader and keep her on her toes. Look, Joyce loves his reader! He’s the most unpatronising author this side of L.L. Cool J.! Joyce believes in you. He believes everyone has the capacity within them to crack his boggling Enigma code, and if that isn’t some heartwarming Sunday school moral, what is? So what if Joyce was wrong and every reader would need The New Bloomsday Book merely to scratch the surface of this amorphous, expanding superbrain of a book? Ulysses is an infinite novel. Unlike Finnegans Wake, where every attempt at some semblance of lucidity and meaning falls flat—the book a distant satellite fated to drift forever in space—Ulysses is an infinitely re-readable supernova of emotional and intellectual replenishment. Pure aesthetic pleasure. Everything that followed Ulysses expanded, plundered and rehashed Ulysses. It was the end and beginning of literature. If you like any books at all, anything post-Ulysses, you’re an ideal candidate to read Ulysses. It will break your heart, and your brain. End of.

10. Charlie Brooker — Unnovations

Spoof ‘innovations’ catalogue. Russio’s review covers this one adequately—a mostly crude and misfiring curio from the otherwise darkly humorous, clever satirist. In his series Screen Wipe and the Guardian Screen Burn columns Charlie Brooker perfected his one-man lonely bedsit crusader against TV mediocrity routine, before then he was almost as rude and perverted as many of the nitwits he was spoofing. In his series of TV dramas Black Mirror one of the stories revolved around the Prime Minister sodomising a pig—in the drama this was played in a deadpan, serious way—here the pig sodomy appears twice for crude laughs. What a strange recurring motif. Anyway, the entries in this were written by a series of writers (credited in small print in the opening page), so the blame and shame can be shared. Largely sweary, vaguely sleazy male-dominated humour for the self-loathing late twenties cynical male market. The saddest existing market. (For cheapskates or curious the whole thing is archived online here at Zeppotron).

11. Nicola Barker — The Yips

The middle point between Darkmans and Burley Cross Postbox Theft. Attempts the weaving of a series of anarchic comic plots à la the latter with the palpable if underunderstated tone of pathos of the former. The Yips is a yelping comedy, stuffed with manic eccentrics, their manic eccentricities cranked to eleven in the form of larger-than-life dialogue tics—ludicrous overemphasis, autopilot whimsy, cartoony character traits, etc. The book’s linking solvent comes in this questionable notion of ‘embracing pain’—each character learns to accept their shortcomings and internal agonies like religious virtues (one character is a female vicar, another a Muslim fundamentalist manqué) . . . this seems somewhat curious from a writer who wants to see people “lit up by the beauty of their suffering.” Hmm. Pain aside, Barker completely exhausts her laughter muscles in this one—the agenda is largely one of manic tittering at the expense of narrative heft. Sadly, the pace flags and the relentless kookiness of her personnel really does begin to grate after a while, and the investment we have in these characters, esp. the agoraphobic tattooist Valentine, isn’t quite satisfied as the 500th page is turned. Where will her next novel take her? A reprise of the more moody literary wonders of Wide Open or Reversed Forecast? Why not? Newcomers, do Darkmans first.

12. Deborah Levy — Swimming Home

This queer, disquieting novel blends a dark, surreal Topor-topos with a Hollywood noir of forties vintage. Taking place in 1994 over a week in a French holiday resort, the novel centres around stuttering botanist and exhibitionist depressive Kitty Finch and her interaction with a ragbag of unlikeable snobs, poets and snotty brats. Like her 1995 book The Unloved, Levy creates an unpleasant world with little empathy, where language is the only refuge, where the icy shimmer of the exacting prose keeps the reader entranced. The novel brought to mind This Mortal Coil’s Blood. For each moment of beautiful clarity, such as ‘Mr. Somewhere’ or ‘With Tomorrow’ there are oppressive, opaque instrumentals like ‘Andialu’ or ‘Loose Joints’ that create a stifling atmosphere, that strain to add layers of darkness to the already dreamlike beauty of the vocal-led songs ‘You and Your Sister’ or ‘Til I Gain Control Again.’ (I made my own version of Blood a few years ago, cutting out the floatier, drearier instrumentals to create a more ‘perfect’ LP). Anyway, a worthwhile investment and pleased to see this on the Booker longlist.

13. Jerry Kosiński — Being There

Peter Sellers’s last (and best?) performance was in Being There—directed by Hal Ashby with Kosiński’s screenplay—one of my favourite American tragicomedies. The original novella compresses the meat of the movie into straightforward and simple chapters, mimicking the simple mind of Chance, the anonymous simpleton whose plain-talking homilies propel him into the top of American life within four days. The film brings the character of Chance into being through Peter Sellers, who expands upon the simple phrases and bland dialogue in the book to make the character an unforgettable, profound, hilarious and tragic figure, not unlike Sellers himself. So these five stars are for the screenplay and novella. If you haven’t seen the film it’s a beautifully paced, slow-moving and surreal satire, exquisitely performed by all and with a moving melancholy tone, and perhaps one of the most spine-tingling endings in all cinema. Bravo.

14. Osman Lins — The Queen of the Prisons of Greece

The last novel by a noted Brazilian writer (smiling in his author photo—always a good sign). Part highbrow reflection on the art of fiction in relation to reality, part faux-academic analysis of an unfinished manuscript by the narrator’s deceased inamorata. Diaristic in form, immensely creative and erudite in content, Prisons of Greece is a captivating experiment with occasional patches of dreariness and esoterica. Builds to a dazzling and disturbing climax when the writer’s handle on reality loosens completely—a response to unutterable loss? a writer overanalysing himself into madness? absorption into his lover’s manuscript? Loved this. Also from Lins in English, Avalovara and Nine, Novena. 

15. Charles Dickens — Bleak House

Roll back to 1986—I was touring with Loudon Wainwright III upon the release of his More Love Songs album (which includes the famous ‘Your Mother & I’) when Loud strikes up a confab about Dickens. “Nicholls,” he begins, bunk-loafing in his usual roguish manner. “I do declay-ah that Bleak House is the greatest novel of the century, yessir-ee.” I was strumming a zither at the time, co-writing a song that would later appear on History. “Loud, you must be out of your mind. Everyone knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century.” Never one to miss a literary quotation, Loud shot back: “Thank you, Mr. Burgess. How many other books you read this week, one or two thousand?” Those were fine times, until the drinking and restraining orders, etc. And now, twenty-five-and-a-bit years later, I have read Bleak House, and I can see why Mr. Wainwright was so smitten. Sprawling in his epic sprawlingness—a Gargantua of fog-blocked Weltschmerz—a complex, challenging dual narrative—a scathing satire on the circumambiguities of the law and the chancers who practise—a vibrant and lively Dickens crackerbox of eccentrics and noble memorables—a long long long long saga of such sublime and intolerable long long long longness other long things seem short in comparison—a breathtaking final third where all the plots converge in a most invigorating heartsmacking masterful manner—oh Yes. Take that, Loudon.

16. Alison Bechdel — Are You My Mother?

Once more Alison Bechdel knocks a stellar work out the park (after half a decade of torturous self-analysis) and repositions the suffering neurotic artist at the forefront of serious art. By turns frustrating and self-absorbed to such mindboggling depths of solipsistic screwdriver-in-the-head nuttiness, the novel slowly reveals itself as a complex rendition of mother-daughter psychodynamics, touching upon Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and pioneering feminist psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott along the way. A much-too-intimate soul-on-the-page work of quite outrageous braveness and unrepeatable, wrenching and yucky emotional honesty. Read to the end. Honestly, the ending pardons everything. You won’t like her, but you will love her. As good as Fun Home.

My Month in Books, Part One (Aug)

This month I tried to focus on my Dickens obsession, but a series of comedy books and obscurios distracted me, plus tackling the Twin Towers of David Copperfield and Bleak House was an intimidating prospect. I started a Ulysses reading group in a Glasgowshire alehouse, and planned to read the novel over four months with folkinos, but Ulysses being so darned captivating I ended up reading the whole thing in five days. More on that tomorrow. Reviews pasted from Goodreads.

1. Charles Dickens — David Copperfield

Finished. Having a hard time spinning superlatives for this review. It is more or less established I strongly like, or passionately love, every Dickens novel I read so why not slap a five-star badge on this masterpiece and hop down to Bev’s café for a veggie burger, free sexual innuendo with every purchase, a fly in every milkshake, and a 50p discount on all half-cooked omelettes? Fine. Some highlights. Improvements in characterisation. Notably, the villains. David’s friendship with Steerforth partially blinds the reader to his scoundrelly tendencies until his flitting with sweet Emily. Uriah Heep’s squirminess and umbleness wrongfoots the reader until his scoundrelly tendencies are unmasked (although David outs him as a beast from the start). The first-person narrator opens doors of eloquence in Dickens’s prose hitherto closed in the topographical omniscience of previous works. As usual, a memorable cast of eccentrics, stoics, loveable fuck-ups and social climbers. No sagging secondary plots like in Dombey and Son. Deeply moving passages on the passing of time, memory, penitence, friendship and naïve love (Dora is a female Peter Pan). High-class comedy a-go-go. An enriching experience. Your soul glows reading this. You want more from a book? Geddouttahere. Time for that veggie burger. Open til nine and never over capacity.

2. Agnes Owens — Bad Attitudes

Is it wrong to have a mental sweepstake as to which of my favourite elderly writers will pop their clogs first? Yes. But I have such a mental sweepstake at present and I can’t stop it. The four principals in the running were Gore Vidal (86), William H. Gass (88), Agnes Owens (86), and Alasdair Gray (77). Gore Vidal passed away last Tuesday, so as penance for this cruel mental sweepstake, I will read another of his novels this month. This isn’t much penance, because I was going to anyway, but hey ho. I have an unfortunate relationship with my favourite writers—usually I discover their work only a few years after their deaths. Gilbert Sorrentino, died 2006. I started reading him in 2009. Kurt Vonnegut, died 2007. I started (seriously) reading him in 2009. David Foster Wallace, died 2008. I started in 2010. Now there are the unfortunate cases when I’ve discovered writers, eagerly anticipate their work, and they silently pass away. Gilbert Adair, died 2011. I read all his novels in 2010. J.G Ballard, died 2009. I started to read him in 2008. I got into Christopher Hitchens a few months into his cancer diagnosis. Now, Mr. Vidal. I wish my favourite writers would stop dying. When I read Agnes Owens, for example, there’s a tension that this writer, who doesn’t live too far from me, might be expiring as I read her work. When I read William H Gass, I wonder will this be the last one I read while Gass is still alive? Should I read more Gass while he’s alive? If I complete the canon in the writers’ lifetime, is that somehow more psychically satisfying for both reader and writer? These are the questions. These two novellas are Owens’s last. But not her last fictions, yet.

3. Jane Bussmann — The Worst Date Ever

Jane Bussmann has contributed to some of the most challenging comedies of recent times—Chris Morris’s Brass Eye and Jam, along with other seminals The Friday Night Armistice and South Park. So it’s no surprise this book—blandly packaged as a screwball comedy—has the same unflinching bite and relentless bad-taste assault of her other handiworks. What the blurb doesn’t make clear is that this is a screwball comedy about Ugandan atrocities, particularly those by Joseph Kony—a charming lunatic responsible for the kidnap, enslavement, habitual rape, torture and murder of over 20,000 Ugandan girls. Yes, har har. Bussmann’s ‘inciting incident’ (as they say) is a crusade to quit her career as a showbiz hack in LA and her crush on hunky African Affairs director John Prendergast (clearly her attraction to this man is a narrative fabrication) and an attempt to become a Useful Person by reporting on the horrors for a UK broadsheet. The result is a mix of Candide and Mr Bean. An extremely funny, inappropriate, necessary book. Just don’t read it under a depression. Bussmann’s humour lifts no spirits, she only reinforces the pointless, cruel absurdity of existence, and there’s stuff in here so howlingly sick and unfair, you'll no doubt forget you were supposed to be laughing. But Bussmann’s real agenda is merely to get this story out to a wider audience, why not use comedy? The absolute bloodyminded brass of this woman is staggering. P.S. If you live in the UK and dislike Ugandan torture you might want to pass this petition on to your MP via this portal.

4. M. Hunter Hayes — Understanding Will Self

An entertaining rip through the Will Self canon. Half scholarly, half straightforward discussion and analysis. Will Self is the most prolific author in Britain at the moment. His ability to produce high quality work in ludicrously short amounts of time is nonpareil. How the Dead Live was partly written in a three-week fury in the Orkney Islands. Cock & Bull was written in another three-week fury in Spain (under the heroin influence). The man’s output is growing exponentially as I write this. By the time you read this, he will probably have written another 100 articles, a story collection and two novels. Is all this work worth reading? Nope. Is it always interesting and amusing and erudite and stuffed with deliciously recondite words like epiphenomenal or imbroglio? Yep. This short book makes a strong case for Self as a part-time postmoderist and metafictionist, his body of work as a roman-fleuve (one long work when all the novels/stories are stitched together, like Proust), and his intertextual cleverness. The Self style is highly musical, word-greedy and clinically inclined. Read him. Start with Cock & Bull.

5. The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files

I will treat this review simply as a place to promote Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, In the Loop, and the recent American remake Veep. There. Go watch them. This ‘missing file’ contains various snippets pertaining to the employees of most incompetent government department in the world, DoSac. Based on Labour’s recent decline into gibbering drooling madness, this is a mixture of gov-speak satire, ritual abuse from Malcolm Tucker, and fun extras from the BBC series. It is somewhat depressing we’ve come to expect incompetence and hypocrisy from our governments and that governments basically conform to our expectations, as though moulding themselves into the bastardy shapes we expect. No one in this country who isn’t rich likes the Prime Minister. Depressing. Fortunately, this collection of foul-mouthed missives provides erudite respite from one’s boiling rage. If there’s one thing you can rely on in Britain it’s savage mockery and contempt for our leaders.

6. Armando Iannucci — The Audacity of Hype

Iannucci’s book collects ‘columns’ he wrote for UK papers The Observer and The Telegraph between 2002-8. The focus here is on maximum silliness and exhaustive surreal humour over humorous articles. The silliness usually takes the form of lists and made-up panel show rounds—clearly Iannucci needed an outlet for this stuff since leaving The 99p Challenge and Charm Offensive (Radio 4 panel shows)—so the collection overall becomes tiresome and tends toward bathroom reading. His ‘proper’ articles are actually quite insightful and hilarious in their own right—more would have been welcome! Anywho, this is still better than most ‘humour’ books made in this country. While we’re here, here are my proposals for ten humour books Michael O’Mara might wish to publish:

1) World’s Funniest Teacosies
2) World’s Dumbest Mental Defectives
3) Spain’s Weirdest Paella Enthusiasts
4) Luxembourg’s Wackiest Hillocks
5) Kathleen Hanna’s Hairiest Militant Feminist Friends
6) Nicole Ritchie’s Cutest Poodle Turds
7) Michael O’Mara’s Smuggest Smirks At Getting Rich Pedalling Cheap Toilet Books
8) Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Craziest Ankle Socks
9) Elaine Kraf’s Oddest Bicycle Pump Retailer Polaroids
10) World’s Funniest Guide to Pulping ‘World’s Funniest Guide’ Books

(£111,999 advance, please).

7. Elaine Kraf — The Princess of 72^nd Street

Another sparkling little novel plucked from 1970s small-press obscurity into latter-day small-press obscurity. The paradox with Dalkey reprints is that the books no one has ever heard of remain books no one has ever heard of . . . the difference being Dalkey keep them in print in the hope one day, some unshaven Scottish misanthrope might read them and plead for a wider readership for them on Goodreads. Has that been successful so far? Of the 110+ Dalkey books I’ve read, how many have gone viral on GR, passing from user to user with shrieks of admiration and clucks of wonderment? Um, none. Although my GR friends have read writers like Sorrentino, Queneau and Dowell and so on entirely of their own initiative, so who needs the middle-man? This short (and small-fonted) novel is a melancholy trip inside the claustrophic mind of an artist having a nervous breakdown or suffering from long-term manic-depression with hallucinatory spells. She retreats into her mind, creates an alter ego Esmeralda and turns her breakdowns or episodes into “radiances” where she imagines herself as the “Princess” of her neighbourhood. This destructive behaviour sends her into the arms of various self-obsessed male suitors, oblivious to her mental problems who use her for their own artistic, neurotic purposes. Since her suitors can’t see beyond themselves to the Princess’s pain, she remains trapped in her condition until a final, tragic episode binds them to her forever. A lyrical, funny novel, highly original with a scorching feminist undertone. Tell your friends.

8. Harry Blamires — The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses

Essential for the Ulysses neophyte, like me. Don’t attempt Ulysses without reading this alongside. Some people, understandably, won’t read books that require additional explanatory texts—Shakespeare, we all know, can be completely incomprehensible without the side-by-side notes, and no fun or spoiled when rendered in updated English—but this essential précis illuminates and 100% enhances one’s pleasure from the Ulysses experience. Fact. Most attention is paid to the extremely difficult chapters—Oxen of the Sun, Circe and Eumaeus—and often the summation barely matches up to the text, but The New Bloomsday Book is entirely necessary to comprehend the subtle, esoteric parody skillz Joyce is laying down (esp. in Oxen, perhaps the hardest overall chapter). Sadly, the book is out of print or merely expensive. An updated Idiot’s Guide is needed. Perhaps all us Ulysses lovers on GR can come together and write one? (And whittle it down to under 2000 pages?)

Letter to the Agent

Sent to Andrea Messent at Darren and Associates:

Dear Darren & Associates,

It is with some regret that I sit down to write this correspondence. I understand your reluctance to read voluminous missives so I will keep this missive as unchunky as my e-pen allows.

On Sep 4^th 2010 I sent to your agency, via recorded delivery, my novel When Bees Attack. I sent this following a verbal agreement between myself and your agent Cariller Cray when I met her at a catered affair for Bernard Share’s eightieth birthday. We had a thoroughly encouraging conversation about the passion for knowledge common to fellows in the academic arena—the “epistemology of the heart,” to quote my own phrase. At the climax of this discussion I mentioned in passing my sexually provocative novel When Bees Attack about a retired Oxford professor who opens a bee sanctuary on the Norfolk coast. Ms Cray was deeply impressed at the breadth of my apian knowledge and offered to read my manuscript with a view to representation by your agency. 

I received no response for six months save for a Tower Bridge postcard sent by Cariller with “we cannot use” scribbled in (what appeared to be) child’s crayon. Upon a closer inspection with my nose, I did indeed ascertain this message to have been written in crayon. I sent a polite enquiry letter a week later, asking for a more formal response to my manuscript. The following week I received my returned manuscript, each page covered in crayon marks, with large blood-red scrawlings of ‘HA HA HA’ in the margins. I sent yet another polite enquiry. A week later I received a single page of foolscap with the same scrawlings—‘HA HA HA’—across the page. This is not professional conduct. I am a patient man and I do not appreciate being treated in such a bizarre manner.

All I seek is confirmation that my novel, When Bees Attack, has been read by your agency, and whether representation is possible on the strength of the material submitted.

Yours truly,

William Mason

*

Reply:

Dear Terence,

I’m think you may have got our Agency confused as there is no Darren or Cariller Cray working here!

Best wishes,

Andrea

Will Self @ Bookfest

Will Self, 9.30 at RBS Main Theatre, Charlotte Square Gardens, Edinburgh Bookfest Aug 25 2012

In conversation with Stuart Kelly—author of the bibliophile’s wet dream, The Book of Lost Books—Will Self was loose, witty and cerebral. His latest novel Umbrella was showcased in two furious readings with Self assuming the voice of his Cockney protagonist, a woman struck down with mental disorder encephalitis lethargica, teasing the audience with the book’s daring stylistic experiment, his apparent “paean to modernism.” Self was, as usual, acerbic and willing to dérive on any topic thrown his way, batting away comparisons with Joyce and Woolf in Umbrella’s subtle shifts between protagonists and time periods, trouncing the conventional novel’s reliance on metaphor and simile to render the experience of being inside a human brain. For a moment he invited us to share the consciousnesses of everyone around us, which might have been a fun experiment, if a little messy. One questioner picked up on Dylan lyrics inserted into the text—it seems Self has made cunning use of popular song in the novel in an attempt to dodge the copyrighters—so it’ll be interesting to see how far the line of influence has extended, and how successfully he managed to sidestep this legal hindrance of the novelist’s art. A terrific evening, especially for Stuart Kelly, who was described as a “prim spinster” during the course of Self’s improvised comedic spoutings. And finally, my sister shook Mr. Self’s hand on the way out. Nice chap.

Writers, Cornered

As 2012 cluck-skips along like a limp chicken on a treadmill, four million writers ponder the inevitable question: Why bother attempting to publish? Should we, whose novels remain unpublished and unloved, rise up and seize control of the means of production ourselves, abolish all agents, publishers and booksellers? The brief answer: no, we shouldn’t. Writers can’t be trusted to play nicely, we’d only publish ourselves and our friends. The answer to our current dilemma is simple—three and a half million of us need to fall on our swords. 

We need to cull more writers. The more writers in existence, the more page-turning mediocrities clogging up the marketplace. As writers, we have only one task—to innovate, to present old ideas in all-new makeup and backless ballgowns, to fool critics into thinking we can “steer the novel in exciting new directions” in an age where the novel has undergone such feats of contortion it’ll probably never walk again.

I would fall on my sword happily, if I weren’t part of the small mass of shipwrecked Crusoes, signalling desperate, never-seen-before signs from my desert island in attempts to escape my prison of isolation. I may be twice as redundant as the well-trained prose-makers who assemble novels like IKEA cabinets—the populace would rather have a thumping good read over a detailed analysis of the songs of Kathleen Hanna set in a postapocalyptic ski resort, written in Danish iambs—but at least on my deathbed I can look back on a lifetime raging against the mediocre. Epitaph: AT LEAST HE WASN’T FUCKING BORING.