Failure of the Small Presses

When I first started writing for publication I favoured the small plucky presses manned by a team of enthusiastic oddballs over the (Royal)-We-are-Overworked-and-Too-Popular-For-You intimidation of larger presses. It made sense to start with the underdogs and move towards venues with larger readerships, as I wanted to have stories published without the wait and slog of resending to motivate me as a writer. As I acquired a decent roster of small plucky press credits, the time came for me to try my work in more popular magazines, and the frustration of having to wait a long time to be turned down was less prominent—I was able to let stories vanish into inboxes and work on novels without the need to be validated by frequent publication. Over that period, I noticed the wait for responses became longer, and the likelihood of no peep of a response became stronger—even among small presses.

I have an innate craving for the underdog. I love the rabid underdoggery of small presses. I prefer reading esoteric literature ignored by the masses. I find difficulty in books more stimulating than flowable prose and conventions. My own writing refuses to make itself accessible or find a snug niche to help publishers sell. If the large presses represent a willingness to adapt one’s writing for a mass audience, to be understood by thousands, the small presses are meant to represent the tendency in literature to be cryptic, stubborn, unpigeonholable. I have an ideal view that the small press world should be one integrated community, where underdogs bark and bray to publish innovative, daring and original literature, and to be “accessible” in a way that large presses are “stubborn” when it comes to communicating with authors.

Alas, doggie’s lost his bone. There is a distinct failure among small presses (I am leaning more towards those that publish novels over short fiction here) to offer an alternative to the large-press wall-of-silence that comes when a manuscript is posted into oblivion. Small presses manned by a staff of two, in full-time employ, with full-time families, cannot possibly offer feedback to writers who submit manuscripts, and one has to wonder—why are these people running presses, if they aren’t kicking against the frustrations that tussling with large presses bring? Why do small press owners never seek to prioritise offering (brief) feedback to manuscripts or to speak to authors about improvements? If small presses can’t take the time to fart out a small paragraph of encouragement or advice to authors, can they ever expect to receive work of the standard they desire?

The problem is, small presses, like large ones, want masterpieces in their inboxes ready to publish with a minimum of editing (although large presses do have editors and want to work with authors to improve manuscripts). They aren’t willing to waste their skill as editors or teachers on work that has definite promise, or could become a masterpiece—why waste time when a masterpiece may turn up on their doorstep from one of the thousand or so MA programs?—and even if a masterpiece shows up, there’s nothing they can do if it won’t sell. The small press is even more helpless in the marketplace, and innovation is the first thing to die when it comes to finding a selling hook—money being the natural slaughterer of all things beautiful. These things aside, I still feel the small presses have an obligation to communicate more with authors. If the supposed guerilla DIY presses are simply as silent and unwelcoming of manuscripts as the big presses—the author continues to be the one getting stiffed.

One press I submitted to boasted “we are the future of publishing.” After sending my manuscript for consideration, I received no confirmation response, and over four months has passed without a reply. Some future.

Turning Misery Into Art

One of the most disappointing realisations I have faced as a writer is that living through unpleasant or dark times does not automatically bestow me with an instinctive talent for writing about these dark or unpleasant times, nor does it give me instant access to the necessary emotional tools to create powerful and haunting prose wrought from the blackest caverns of my suffering. A prose style has to be sculpted to accommodate one’s flair for language, stylistic quirks, eye for detail or character insight, around the sympathetic or natural part of one’s personality responsible for the more arresting emotional peaks in a piece of work.
 

If anything the more suffering a person endures, the less likely they will be able to express themselves in lyrical streams of moving prose. Too much suffering creates psychological barriers between you and the work (writing opens old traumatic wounds), or leaves you too depressed or damaged to stare down the page (because drinking before the TV is nicer). I am not in the business of composing lyrical and emotional prose, but I do write about past miseries in the hope of connecting with the reader for a sort of shared-nod experience in between making them titter or entertaining with the language and pace and dialogue and characters in my stories.
 

This leads into the problem of trying to capture the intensity of the “minor emotions” that make up our lives. Say I was sitting alone, as all writers do, one evening and wanted to capture the slight melancholy of this loneliness in the story I was writing—not to ring tears from the reader, but make them feel a pang of semi-sympathy by way of recognition. To say James was sitting all alone in his room suggests the character’s own self-pity, and rather than feeling for him we laugh or smile at his sadness, because the very fact of someone’s loneliness suggests a personal failure that could have been avoided through being a less hopeless human specimen. We expect better of our characters. Why couldn’t he go out and make friends? Why should we feel sorry for someone who has only brought this feeling on himself? Our own experiences harden us against the experiences of people in books. Or even worse, our own feelings written on the page seem simply trivial and pathetic without sufficient artistic heft to turn them into valid literary emotions worthy of book-to-human responses.

In my own fiction, I am only interested in “minor emotions”— lonely sighs and self-pitying reflexes: failures of people to pull their socks up and solve their problems and arrive at the moments that precipitate “sweeping emotions.” People who can’t find a partner let alone lose them in a car crash. People who never find themselves involved enough to care if the whole team gets cholera. I want my stories to pirouette between these minor moments: I want my narratives to be largely comic, frosted with moments of pathos and sadness that create a coherent emotional tone behind the comedy. If I can achieve this I hope to represent the pervading sadness behind most human life and aim for a fairer depiction of the stoic emotional tapestry that makes up reality over the more manipulative focus on the “sweeping” that dogs mass-market prose.

A Sodding Update

Since graduating from the Napier MA (over a year ago now and STILL banging on about it!) I haven’t felt the need to maintain much of an online blog presence. Most of my online activities take place on Goodreads where I discuss what matters most to me—literature. Or, if you like, books. Discuss might not be the word. I write brief capsule reviews of the books I read and ten or so people ‘like’ my reviews without comment. If I feel like it, I leave inane comments on other people’s reviews. Still, I like it there.

My book group still meets on weekends, and the Ulysses meetup was extremely useful and laid-back. I sometimes feel inadequate as to how I dissect a text. I have strong urges to write extremely analytical closely-read essays on the books I read, but that would take up too much of my time, and who would care? I could spend over a fortnight writing one of those, all for the satisfaction of having autopsied the book so I briefly have “complete mastery” over it, only to forget the drivel I wrote in a few weeks. I did this for a spell between 2004-2007 with albums and made £300 on a reviewing site. Goodreads pays nada.

The best-friends-for-life writing-network-of-Napier-alumni thing hasn’t happened. Perhaps I was too naïve to assume people would want to start a collective for sharing and editing each other’s work with frequent meet-ups and so on . . . people do things, so I am told, in their lives, that make these things impossible. I did set up a semi-useful FB group which has already been forgotten about. My suspicion is people find publishers for their own work and forget to share, or think fuck it—I want to have the edge and don’t share on purpose. Does that sound embittered and envious of me? Possibly. I’m one of the few people who truffles for publishers and anthologies and then shares. I think people, especially writers, are inherently selfish and perhaps need to be to survive in this fucking horrible world. I don’t like it, but how many writers, upon winning a contest, will punch the air and say, in your face suckers! All of them? Writing is as predatory as any other business.

At the moment, I’m not writing with a commercial eye, I’m focusing on writing what I want to write. Arlene’s Atoms is, possibly, the closest to a mainstream thing I will produce. I recently sent the book, fatalistically, to a slew of small presses, skipping the big hitters. Realistically, if I have a small-press book, or maybe two or three in time, behind me, I will have more chance of being glanced at by the big fellas. So my hope is that one of the many fine small presses will pick it up. If they don’t, I will need to take up mainlining heroin into my knees. I think we were taught to be too ambitious at the Napier MA. Although the crushing futility of the endeavour of writing was repeatedly emphasised by David Bishop, I think I shouldn’t have been advised to sub to agents. It was a waste of time—I’m an unknown with no prizes under my belt. But what does that matter now?

I have a new novella on the go at the moment: the form and structure and content are cohering nicely. I write fairly quickly once these things are in place, so hopefully this will be finished early next year.

A Comprehensive Update of the MJ Nicholls Experience From January to June

Why haven’t I been writing more blog posts, commenting on your brilliant blogs and strewing desperate witticisms about the blogosphere like a comedian on horseback? I will endeavour to explain in easily accessible list form.

1. Blogs come to a natural stop. Looking at my blog roll I see many blogs that haven’t been updated in yonks. Stuart Kelly’s blog died a year and half ago. The Napier MA blog relaunch flopped and since then the Napier MA students have no online outlet for their awesomeness. Several friends’ blogs have languished for three to eight months with no updates in sight. Some update in monthly hiccups, keeping their hand in with tiny meaningless posts that tell us nothing about their writing agenda or personal lives. People drop off the internet (and the face of the planet) willy-nilly. It depresses me. They have babies, they marry Backstreet Boys, they win Yahtzee contests. And they’re so obsessed with their privacy they tell us nothing. That’s how it swings.

2. Life becomes too boring to describe. Since leaving my MA I have done nothing of interest except complete my novel Arlene’s Atoms, which I am currently pitching to agents. This might be construed as interesting but I have that piece of information in my profile. See? (Not the Ruskoline bit, lower). What else is there to say? I wait. I hope. I will send to other agents pending refusals. I will pitch to small publishers. Then write another book should I face constant rejection. In my day to day life I write and read copiously. I don’t have a job yet—no prospects of acquiring one on the horizon as I still don’t want to do anything but write. I have, however, been contemplating avenues of paid work I might explore—there isn’t really anything I want to do for eight hours per day but write. I don’t mind being unemployed because I have all the time free to write and read. But I’m trying to break this cycle, since the clocks are starting to tick. I have to do something else.

3. I have been in tortured artist mode. My next novel has undergone various false starts. I began by writing a satirical Divine Comedy, set both in Hell and Edinburgh (the difference: better bus links in Hell). Revolving around the lives of three suicidal people who discover a reason to live (that reason was never decided), the narrative was an attempt to further the magical realism I used in Arlene’s Atoms. This collapsed when I used the interrogating technique Sam Kelly uses to reduce eager artists to whimpering hacks. It had no heart. Or a viable structure. Or a semi-decent third character. Plus I couldn’t come up with a suitable reason for my characters to live. Then I toyed with a series of interlinked prose-poem vignettes, like what American MFA graduates write. Nope—binned. Next attempt was even crazier: six authors (all in the same family) collaborate on the same “little book of nothing” which comprises six separate narratives that would gradually reveal telling things about said dysfunctional family through the narrative approaches they each took, while commenting on the artifice of storytelling itself. ARGH. Metawank. Binned.

4. Continued. Despair passed when I decided to concentrate on refining and developing the individual characters’ voices and an overarching narrative voice that allowed me to fluctuate freely between internal monologue, narration and dialogue. The style is working for me so far. And the fun of writing a first draft without an obsessive need to design and structure is freeing. The main purpose of all these narratives is to draw upon my own difficulties fitting into life and find an outlet for exploring my own mishaps and calamities in the realm of self-interest, self-consciousness and self-destruction. Selfishness to the power of infinite. All the characters represent various aspects of my past self, imagined future self and fantasy selves. (And present self). I also want to discuss the notion that characters are nothing but extensions of the self and make this a part of the narrative. I’m toying with a talk-show format to link the three stories. Metawank? Perhaps.

5. Obsessive Compulsive Reading. Since I signed up to Napier I haven’t stopped reading. Stuart Kelly (Napier Reader-in-Residence) has passed on his OCR disorder and a week hasn’t passed since September 2009 without a book being read or completed. (By me. I think that was obvious). This doesn’t sound too bad, but it has become both a compulsion and displacement activity. I derive immense pleasure from reading but if I didn’t read so much I might make progress on the career thing. I wouldn’t fill three or fours per day gobbling up novels like the Book Monster. I can’t tear myself away and I love it. Is this a proper complex? If so I have it badder than bad, baby.

So: madness, obsession, self-destruction, denial and apathy for the outside world. The usual. Oh. I also started a book group—The Extremely Inferior Glasgow Book Group Experience. I also attended the Glasgow Writers Meetup which was a workshop (the horror) but quite useful. I also still live in Glasgow (at the bottom of Byres Road) if you want to stalk me. I’m also still in a relationship and five years sober on the sexual frustration stakes. Booya! (Too much information? Impossible, sir).

My Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor

OK, here’s the skinny. I submitted my story ‘A Florescence of Gerhards’ to you last year. You respond several months later with heavy edits, expressing a promising interest to bring the story to publication. I rewrite various sections of the story based on vague impressions of the sort of end you have in mind, enjoying the healthy and rare dialogue between writer/editor. Communication is shaky from then on as I send you my latest edits and suggestions, and you refer me to a co-editor. Said co-editor speaks to me once, claiming to have read my edits, and will return with her own edits soon, once she unpacks her luggage or such and such in her NYC basement loft or somewhere. Silence reigns for a long time. I assume the journal has bitten the dust. Eventually, you reply explaining all sorts of internal conflict, and profess you have lost the ability to be neutral on my story, the subtext being ‘I am thoroughly fed up of this piece and would like to move on.’ Being a reasonable sort of fellow, you extend an olive branch and ask me to submit another story for your latest issue, ‘Maggie’s Setlist,’ which I summarily send, having a matching story available. I take this gesture as genuine, being a naive sort of chap. You promise me a response ‘within the week,’ and I send an enquiring email, asking for that response two weeks later. I then send another email asking for a response to the non-response a month later, to which I have still to receive a response. So here we are. One disgruntled writer seeks mumbling apologies from unresponsive editor. Is this how one runs an effective, healthy, writer-loving literary journal of cutting-edge prose? Or is this another example of the excruciating dead-air snub that writers have come to hold so dear in their professional lives? I have published quite a few stories now in my (young) writing career, so it’s not as if I’m desperate to see my piece in print, and hey, chances are my piece won't "meet your needs" at this specific time. But when you open up a dialogue with someone in a friendly way, you enter into a social contract with the person that requires courtesy, courtesy, and, uh, a response. Any response. This year.

If this email receives no response I will come to the Bellow offices and put moonshine in your gravy.

Love and kisses,

MJ Nicholls

Good Enough?

How do we decide a story is ready for publication? If we proofread, edit, and tinker with the story, deciding it reads smoothly and makes enough sense to be read by others, is that enough? NO? Apparently not. I have difficulty with this. I wrote a story this week, ‘Writing For Carol,’ about someone who writes for the image of a random girl on the internet, basing the story’s content on what he imagines this girl would like judging from her photo. Then he encounters this girl on the subway and his story takes an entirely different shape as he stalks her to glean more information about his potential audience.

I contrived an ending where the piece of writing the narrator submits for Carol’s edification is not a story obsessively tailored to her reading requirements, but an honest account of the narrator’s devious acts, plus an apology and entreaty. I felt this represented an emotional breakthrough for the character, who had been an unreliable narrator up until this point, and conveyed a general truth about writing ‘for’ a particular group of people—writing needn’t be contrived for an audience, it should simply be as honest and direct as the author can be, with no pretence or deception. All good.

But is it enough? If I write a story over several days, is that enough time? I suppose the most important questions are what does this story achieve? what does this story do that is unique? do I achieve the aims I have for the piece? So can I answer all these questions? Well, I wanted to explore the reader-writer contract on a micro-level, the mania that comes from thinking about the eyes that might scan our words and seeking to please the owners of those eyes. If we could view our audience like musicians, would that make writing easier? Would we riff out metaphors and do long descriptive solos like Clapton twiddling on his Stratocaster? Throw in a moving description of a beautiful creature to attract the women?

And build a story into this. I am happy with the story, but I have no idea what is “good enough” these days. Anyway, there I am, posing with a nut. Life is good.

Reason V. Reader

Reason: You can’t read that book in one afternoon, there’s like 300 pages with endnotes.

Reader: No, honestly, it’ll only take a few hours.

Reason: See, that didn’t take a few hours.

Reader: It’s only three o’clock in the morning. What’s next?

Reason: Bed.

Reader: What about that new Jacques Roubaud?

Reason: You do realise a book addiction can only lead to ruin? It’s the most time-consuming antisocial addiction imaginable. It’s worse than heroin since you can’t share a book like you can a needle.

Reader: What do you mean "you" can't? And two people can’t delight in the same book?

Reason: No. People read what they like, they don’t like you foisting your reads on them.

Reader: That might be true, but if there aren’t any speedy readers in the world, how do all the books get read?

Reason: You need to prioritise which books to read and which to not. Read.

Reader: But if I don’t read Madame Bovary based on the fact millions of people, for the last century-and-a-half, have read it, I’m missing out on some mighty fine literature, no?

Reason: Yes.

Reader: And I frequently read unknown books to make look smarter and more educateded.

Reason: On your own again.

Reader: Yep. Me and me, we make a good team.

Reason: Uh-huh.

Reader: Look, the alternative is wasting my time watching some dribble on the ewetoobs, or clicking like a madman on the interwebs, or writing a story that goes nowhere. Reading focusizes me.

Reason: How about friends?

Reader: I’m working on that. I’ve moved to Glasgow, I need time. And no, I haven’t joined book groups or anything.

Reason: Too busy reading?

Reader: I hate you.

Reason: And I you.

Reader: Get out.

Reason: . . .

Reader: Good. Now where’s that Jacques Roubaud?

Reason V. Writer

Reason Says: Although I love writing and I am sufficiently talented at this pursuit, the time will come when I need to work in Clarks.

Writer Says: There is nothing more important than words on paper (or screens). Civilisation would not be civilisation without the ordered assemblage of thoughts turned into words turned into books. Clarks can go and stick a pound of sausages up its rump.

Reason Says: There is no money in writing unless you are a superhuman talent with a criminal work ethic.

Writer Says: Money is the reason we inhabit a boring capitalist hellhole where poo-scoopers have a higher income than visionary artists. I would rather starve in a garret scraping the final bean from the tin than compromise my integrity by writing corporate bullshit.

Reason Says: You are young. See if you say that in five years’ time.

Writer Says: In five years’ time I will have starved to death through lack of income from my writing. I win.

Reason Says: You are not good enough, plain and simple. The benchmark for professional publication is too high, and you won’t ever reach that benchmark through lack of talent or skill.

Writer Says: Fuck off.

Reason Says: Life is too precious to be thrown away writing books no one will ever read.

Writer Says: Life is not precious. This is why people read books.

Reason Says: Why do people need to read novels anymore when they have round-the-clock access to online games, programmes, music?

Writer Says: All of the above are nothing without good writing. People read novels because the other forms offer little intellectual engagement or lead to unsatisfiable cravings for more entertainment that result in brain meltdowns.

Reason Says: What would make you stop writing?

Writer Says: A nuclear explosion. Or similar.

Reason Says: Society thinks you’re an idiot.

Writer Says: Society is beneath my dignity.

Obsessive, Anal, Insane, or Just Human?

Someone on the internets pointed out that I might be a wee bit obsessive. This was in response to my recent discovery of Ali Smith, author of Hotel World and The Accidental. I read her latest book last weekend and loved it so much I resolved to read her entire canon at once. I drew up a list of her books and got Laura (the woman I live with) to fetch them from the Glasgow Uni Library. Luckily, or unluckily, they had all her books in stock.

So I set about reading them, one per day. On top of this, I had to write 1000 words of my novel per day, eat at designated times and go outside to fetch utilities. It seemed a little challenging but I like the discipline and sense of accomplishment that follows such an undertaking. So I performed this heroic reading task, omitting one book of short stories through exhaustion. Q: Does this count as obsessive, or merely an act of readerly love?

Then it occurred to me: I’ve been carrying out this sort of obsessive, pointless behaviour all my life. It also occurred to me I probably share these afflictions with other beings. So in the spirit of sharing it might help to catalogue some of this obsessive/anal behaviour. I think there’s a marked difference between anal and obsessive. Who knows where I stand. For example:

1. I used to make collage cassette tapes, mixing music with sound effects and radio clips. If a noise, cut-in or sound was not perfect I would erase this microsecond of sound and record it again and again. No one listened to these tapes but me.
2. When I was a video game addict, I always had to complete games in the most perfect way possible. In the case of Crash Bandicoot, this involved resetting the console whenever I fell down a pit and lost my shot for the perfect score and gems.
3. When playing someone a song I love, they must listen to it in silence, and may not speak until the final seconds of the running time are up, even with songs that fade out.
4. Until recently, I could never give up on a book, even if I hated it from the beginning. I persisted in the belief that my own weakness as a reader was at fault, and at some point the story would captivate me, and readerly heaven would dawn.
5. Books with heavily creased spines stick out on one side. I have to sandwich them so tight in the bookcase, I can pull the stuck-out side in line so it becomes as straight as the other books. I also have lists of which books have problem spines and a list of which books to replace with brand new hardback editions.

I have also—through Laura’s doing—been sucked back into watching popular comedy drama Due South. This childhood favourite is so irresistible to me, I’ve had to set aside a spare our or two to catch up on old episodes among the reading and writing. So to cut a long story short, I haven’t left the flat much. I’m sure Glasgow’s nice. I’ve yet to find out.

MP

stands for…

Member of Parliament

Who is my MP? I don’t know his name. Or her name. I should know his/her name because political parties can benefit from voter apathy to enslave the poor, but I don’t. What do I see when I picture my MP? I picture a perfectly nice person not very concerned about things in general.

Melting Point

The melting point of a snowman is about thirty-six degrees centigrade. Minimum. I spell this out in case any snowmen are reading. They only understand numbers and don’t care about the power of language to unite us lumps of bone, blood and bitterness together in temporary harmony.

Mooring Post

Or, in another word, bollards. Have you noticed how people never touch bollards? Have you also noticed how few people hold onto the railings on public staircases? Am I the only one to grip on tightly as I climb the capital’s peaks? I often feel people are privy to some horrible truths about germs, and everyone views me as a filth-monger, fingering those dirty rails.

Metropolitan Police

The police stand for two things: fear and death. If a policeman arrived at my door I would faint in fear of imminent arrest or family slaughter. I trust them to keep me safe from vagabonds, but I want no dealings with them, I want a world free from terrifying little squares and yellow cagoules.

Major Project

Our briefing yesterday was laced with the usual slammings of former students (the subtle approach) and general nods and winks not to fuckitallup, please. In fairness, there were also positive ex-grad remarks, and the slammings were a deterrent against any unneeded humiliation before being sent into the great beyond of post-postgrad life. All my prep work in the creative (or is it narrative?) nonfiction module has been leading up to this moment, so I don’t face a gaping void of ideas and worries. But still, they’ll come.

MP also stands for Mumbai Police, Machine Pistol and Missionary Position.

A Note to All Those Who Laptop in Public

Listen: it’s not easy carting a laptop around town. Trudging through the marble streets of Auld Reekie (where the rain is made from liquid gold) and finding a café without four packs of student humbuggers discussing the latest developments in the heady world of sleeping on Dave’s sofa after a night of top-notch revelry and world-class devilry. Then you have to find a plug (unless you have a wireless one—how modern!), hook it in and whomp it on.

Then there’s that thing you do—we’ve seen, we see, we have seen!—where you angle your screen so we can SEE YOUR GREAT WORDS, words you type in large font and CAPS, SO WE CAN SEE YOUR AWESOMENESS! It may well be you are Joyce Carol Oates on your 198^th novel about families and the conflicts between them and don’t-families-have-conflicts and think-deeper-think-of-the-deepness-of-conflicts, but WE DON’T CARE!

If we’re writers, we hate you because you are leaking your product prematurely to the masses. You are selling your wares as you write your wares, and no one wants to read wares that haven’t undergone four drafts of ware-correction and what’s-it-for ware-agonising sessions and other ware problems that characterise the writer’s wareisome life.

Having said that, I am writing this in public. Behind me, four envious writers are scribbling down these words to incorporate into their novels. I can hear one fainting from the refreshing originality of the family conflict idea, and another is planning a post about annoying twats who write on their laptops in public. One person loves the wareisome pun.

But what is this post really about? Is it more about a guy killing time instead of writing his non-fiction book on gaming addiction? Is it more about a guy home alone for a few days, going silently mad? Is it more about a guy who wants a bath now? Yes, indeedy, it may well be.

The Four Faces of Jean-Philippe Toussaint

I’ve had Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s impish French face in my head for the last few days. I don’t make a point of Googling authors to see their faces, as I like to imagine them all overweight slobs in boggy backrooms chain-smoking and turning occasionally to let the slugs graze on the other side.

But this man, this happy smiling slaphead, author of thimble-sized books Camera and The Bathroom (each a mere 100 pages), has been sitting in there pulling faces. I think it’s the baldness. There’s something a tad menacing about him, something so oddly Scottish.

This picture in particular. He resembles every middle-aged beadle I bumped into when dragged along to Church as a nipper. With his folded arms and mean-looking mien, he could be any random pub-dwelling man, waiting for something to punch, for someone to stab.

And this image, God, how sinister! Is his skin made from wax? Does he intend to hypnotise me with his eyes? Is he a human Kaa? There’s a warmth in those eyes that borders on the psychotic. He’ll invite you around then ask if you prefer to be sautéed or grilled.

He looks so slyly concerned in this one, as though he’s listening to your attentive point about the future of the nouveau roman, but secretly plotting to steal your smoked sausage.

And finally, look at this! Here he’s doing his impersonation of a vicar turning into a skeleton. Or a skeleton mugging like a vicar. There is something fundamentally wrong with this image, about the way his head lights up with saintly wisdom. He barely fits his own skin, he can’t be a deity.

So that’s why JP Toussaint has been dominating my thoughts this week. Should you read him? No. Not unless you want your soul slurpied. Beware.

Ritting a Poohposal

I’m writing a blog post on writing a proposal so I don’t have to write an actual proposal. What is a proposal? A proposal is a detailed explanation of everything you intend to do in the amazing book you are poised to write. I can’t stress how horrible it is having to write a proposal. This blog post, on the other hand, is far more pleasant to write than a proposal. I haven’t planned this blog post at all. I haven’t a structure or plan or explanation of greatness and relevance and necessity in mind for this post. Look.

I’ve taken a paragraph break and I can do anything I want. I can confess to painting the Queen green at last week’s Buckingham Palace caber toss. I can confess to milking a cow portrait for a dozen portraits of unpasteurised milk. I don’t have to think about the proposal. I don’t have to demonstrate how absolutely necessary my would-be amazing book is. I don’t have to pretend anything I do as a writer is necessary in an age when writers are becoming more obsolete than coal miners.

But I still have the freedom to use this keyboard and phrase my thoughts in the way I choose. I still have the freedom to say I hate this and I like this, and I like hating this and I hate liking this. I have the freedom to tell people they are idiots for not reading Raymond Queneau. I have the freedom to keep this document open so I don’t have to look at my proposal. I have the freedom to make this paragraph slightly longer so I don’t run to the end and have to flick back to my proposal and add more lies to the page.

I wrote a sentence of my proposal there! It wasn’t very good, but it’s another sentence nearer the word count, so we can all pop a glass of champagne at that. See . . . we’ve hit another barrier here. I could have planned this post, but it would’ve created additional research work, and I would procrastinate from writing this post and have to go back to writing the proposal. I would have some double-attack proposal shit going on. Not good.

Now I’m struggling. I’m flicking back and forth between the web and this document. I should unplug the web, but if I don’t have a million distractions, I will walk out the flat and lower myself onto the Blackford train tracks or go steal all the Frosties from the cornershop and throw them at squirrels. I will tear off my shirt and run naked along the street, pull out each toenail one by one then caramelise them in a dish I call Toe Slurp.

Here are a list of things I would rather be doing than writing this proposal:

1) Not writing this proposal

2) Criticising shoehorns

3) Slapping Ewan McGregor

4) Smearing Edam on my thighs

5) Not writing this proposal

6) Making a kayak out of spaghetti

This is hell. If you ever have to write a proposal, don’t. If you do write a proposal and find it straightforward, death to you. I don’t want to hear about people successfully writing proposals right now. Another thing: in my MA class we get many handouts from blogs written by incredibly witty people telling us how rubbish we are as writers and how we shouldn’t whine because we’re not winners if we whine, we’re snivelling failures.

Listen: I write loads. I write so much I have RSI in my testicles. I try to plan and think sometimes too. Writing has always been my strongest point: planning and thinking seriously slows down my ability to write. Anyway, I don’t want to read another smarmy humorist doing the tough love routine about how useless we are as writers. It really makes my hot water sizzle when I read these unbearable smarm kings. (This is buying me excellent proposal distraction time! I should keep this up. Who else can I criticise?)

I could criticise me, but that’s dull. I could criticise someone I know, but imagine the shame when I have to explain to them in public why I called them a talentless geriatric bimbo. I could criticise a celebrity, but no one with a rational mind is interested in anything famous people do at any point, ever. I could go and research a political topic on the net and construct a well-rationed argument on this intellectual thing or that very interesting thing . . . but that would take a few days, and I would get distracted and not want to do that, and that would be some triple-attack proposal shit going on there.

Oh no! Back to the proposal!

Actually, I edited this post. This post has overtaken the proposal! Yes! I’m wondering how much more I can get away with before this becomes tiresome for me and any readers. Long blog posts usually get half-read or skimmed for key words like NAZI UNIFORMS ARE WELL CUTE and THAT NICK GRIFFIN IS A HANDSOME CHAP but that’s understandable. Blogs should be . . . no, I have to stop there before I say something dull.

I’m writing execrable sentences now. I’m writing like this: I think I would like to rite this book because I am a good ritter and I like ritting and I used to be a video game junkie and I want to find out about video game junkies and I can do fun things with form and style cause I like experimental ritting and oh god I want to self-harm hate me hate me hate me.

I have five days (as of tomorrow). Help.

(P.S. I went back through this post and highlighted additional bits in bold to avoid writing the proposal. And added the picture. And link. I think you get the idea now. Kill me).

The Madness of The Mezzanine

Whenever I get onto a train I look for the seat farthest from other passengers as possible. If I’m going to read, I need silence, or near silence—I need at least five or six seats distance. Finding the right seat is an exact science. This night, coming home from a concert, I enter the car and there are people spread at an infuriating equidistance apart, almost positioned on purpose at four-seat gaps to upset my four-to-six gap rule. I walk past a few shaggy night-people, including a man lurking at the back who wants to rape me.

Once I’ve passed people walking up the aisle, I don’t want to turn around and go back if the seat situation is more favourable where I came from. I don’t want my behaviour to appear to these passengers, who watch you out of boredom, as odd, and I don’t want it to seem as though I’m dithering because I’m somehow repelled by their presence.* It’s important to have this sensitivity on a night train, when all passengers are potential rapists and murderers, until proven otherwise.

So I find a seat on the left row in between two solo passengers, with a gap of about three seats in front and two seats behind, with another man two seats ahead on the right row. There’s a group of women conducting a conversation up ahead, their voices quiet at first but getting louder from time to time, competing with the rattle of the train as it speeds up. This will pose the greatest threat to my undisturbed reading of the Nicholson Baker.

The Mezzanine requires concentrated reading and is not ideal for trains. It’s ideal front room reading.* The book’s protagonist discusses the exaggerated minutiae of certain trivial aspects of his life, from shoelaces to escalator etiquette, to the value of paper towels over hand driers, each topic getting more and more detailed until it becomes absurd comedy, Flann O’Brien style. I read for a few moments before a large giggle hits my ears from across the train. The women misled me. I had expected late-night sleepy train talk, instead I got a rowdier bunch, with one blonde shrieker the ringleader.

I push on, but it becomes impossible. My ears are picking up threads in the conversation, following the repeated half-drunk drivel about some bloke being a dick and someone needing to phone someone and tell him something about being a dick or something because he shouldn’t have said that, whoever he is, the dick. It becomes useless to keep reading knowing this will go on and on, this dick and this phoning of. There are frustrating lurches in the conversation when the woman shuts up, but almost invariably, she will start talking again when I get into a long sentence, forcing me to backtrack and read it again.

There are further dilemmas. I don’t have the greatest eyesight, and the lights on Scotrail trains are diffuse and dim. So reading the footnotes becomes a chore for me, trying to follow these complex sentences in the tiny font under appalling lights, and the darkness outside offers no additional help. I don’t want to bring the book right up close to my eyes, as that can effect my long-range vision, so I have to squint a little or focus really hard. If I’m focusing my eyes, I’ll stop focusing my brain, meaning I’m reading but not taking in the words, their meaning or what’s being said. So there’s no emotional response: no laughter, merely slavish word-counting. There is no point reading like this.

As the train picks up people from other stops, the pressure of concentrating my mind and my eyes becomes impossible, so I stop reading and wait until the women get off. When they do, I start reading again. At the next stop, the paranoia that a psychopath has boarded the train and wants to rape me in the bum becomes so great, I have to look up and make a quick assessment of the new passenger, check his psycho credentials. If he sits behind me, which he does, of course, I’ll have to keep one hand on my possessions, in case he should slide a hand through the half-inch seat gap and steal my valuables. (Or go for my penis).

When the inevitable happens, and I’m alone in the train with a man behind me, I get too paranoid and start thinking about rape and how terrible it might be to get raped tonight. I start thinking how awful it must be to be a woman and be paranoid about getting raped, but here I am, an ugly man, thinking about getting raped, so I’m there already. All I need are the breast implants. There’s no point reading now, not with rape and death on the cards. I start to get a little dour, thinking about other problems—financial, personal, familial—making each problem into something huge and insurmountable, until I can’t stand to even hold the book, so depressed and self-involved have I become in those four minutes.

Soon it’s time to get off. My only concern then is getting away from the rapists. All fourteen of them. Fast.

----

* This may be the case, depending on the smell of alcohol or cigarettes coming from each passenger. If there’s an especial stink, I will make allowances and escape to the next compartment, if available, or the farther end, if not.

* There are three categories of books: those to be read with extreme patience and concentration in my front room, with next to no sounds except outside traffic or my girlfriend clawing at her keyboard. (Ideally she wouldn’t be in the room, but I read a great deal, and we do live together, so it isn’t exactly plausible to get her to leave while I read. I could try, though.) The other two are bedtime reads: books that can be read while dozing off (to help dozing off). The other can be read on trains: potboilers, thrillers, etc.

Stasis

I hate the word stasis. It is a hideous, malformed wretch of a word. Look at how the upper case S lords it over the lower case T, like a mother and father from an all-American family, overseeing their ‘asis’ brood. And what about that brood. Regard the two conformist brothers, little S and little S, two uptight swots with crew cuts and matching silver-rimmed spectacles, outsmarting one another on their way to Harvard and Cohen & Cohen Attorneys-At-Law. It is sickening to see such avarice in those so young!

And the girls. Little A, the quiet one, lavishing her role as ditzy repressed girly-girl, mummy’s little treasure, while her show-off sister I dances and sings around the house, poking her needy nose where it isn’t wanted. These two girls will end up like the Bouvier sisters in a crumbling mansion, milking Jackie Onassis until she takes them back to a life they recognise, where the dreams of a once prosperous America seemed only a kiss away.

Say it. Stay-siss. Treating one’s sister like a dog. Like a fowl little beagle who won’t stop yapping and coughs butter pats upon the new shag carpet, who humps the legs of guests, who defecates in the most expensive dog fowling areas, forcing you to take a turd in your hand and toss it into someone’s garden. Someone who is watching and who will telephone the police, who will fetch the Polaroid and snap you. And your hand will stink for hours, because you can’t get to a toilet, because your dog has run off to go eat squirrels.

Stasis. How vile and crude you are, in name, and in meaning! Empires lurch to a halt, kingdoms once ruled with spontaneous wit and invention, benign kingdoms with each newborn a potential Archimedes, a possible Galileo. How you poison all human endeavour with indecision and doubt! You are the wrinkles on our skin, the fat on our thighs, the bags under our eyes, the bitter acknowledgement of lost time.

You are the devil’s juice, you are the cause of all unhappiness. You and your rotten children.

Five Paragraphs

Paragraph About MA:

This term abounds in bumper crops of work. I’m hoping to go insane in March and convalesce in October, after graduation. I stopped being so obsessive about grade-hunting last term (because I bombed the assignments), so won’t be so sad to get my low pees this time. I’ll still put in the effort, but this course is about learning how to do things well. Things I have no aptitude for well. This includes making errors and weeping. Fact.

Paragraph About LEVY:

Sometimes you read books that set aspirant benchmarks. One such book is the incredible Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy. The novel hits the highs I aspire to hit one day, building a strange and humorous world around damaged and original characters. It staggered and floored me. And for British people it is easily accessible at the Devil’s Bookshop.

Paragraph About BLOGGING:

I hate one-sided bloggers who post and then refuse to interact with other bloggers. When people sneer at bloggers I kick them in the face and steal their Ribena. I like to visit and comment on other blogs but I am stuck on a 2004 computer that runs slower than a sleeping Linford Christie. So I do generally read the blogs on my blog roll most weeks, and if there’s no comments, bask in the knowledge I am reading and learning and loving.

Paragraph About STUPIDITY:

I forgot to renew my student card at the start of term. I must be going mad since I swear I read an email about this. There are times when I envy the stupid. I’m hardly an intellectual colossus, but I do know words like colossus, so I’m hardly mixing with the mongs. Having said that, I only befriend idiots. I find I can pour my ideologies into their minds and get them to lift things for me. Failing that, they make neat coffee tables.

Paragraph About PARAGRAPHS:

I grew up respecting the well-placed paragraph break. In Infinite Jest, there are about five paragraph breaks in 1000 pages. There is a term for this sort of torture: paragrapixis. (Try pronouncing that). Foster Wallace was a paragrapixist and Joyce was so scared of spaces he developed agoraphobia by proxy. Paragraph breaks are beautiful things. In terms of pacing and rhythm and structure and style. The whole caboodle. It’s no longer chic to bind words together like twine and print them in 10pt font. Give us room to breathe and laugh and love. That’s all we ask.