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.

54 Marriages in One Year! – The Foolproof Guide to Dating Without Dating, Sex Without Sex, and Marriage Without Marriage

Guest post by Dr. Chad Fortnight

Are you like me in that you simply don’t have time to follow through on long-term relationships due to a pell-mell non-stop no-time-to-breathe whirlwind helter-skelter schedule of 24-hour stuff that never seems to end? Do you regret the hours spent wasted in bars chatting to interesting and attractive people who it would take an absolute age to become closer to on date after date after date after time-eating date? Are you cynical about the prospect of keeping one partner for life, knowing full well the limited lifespan most marriages have in the modern world and the complications with kids that can cause? You need the ‘potential’ dating plan. A foolproof system that allows you to experience lifelong relationships over seven days, through a simple process of honing mind over matter.

Step 1. Choose a man or woman who appeals to you, and ask them out on a date. (If they refuse, you can attempt the following steps by merely observing the person from afar, but for now, it is advisable to start with a mutually agreed date). One the date has been scheduled, make a list of the aspects of their appearance that both appeal to and annoy you, and a provisional list of the traits that frustrate and delight you.

Step 2. Go on the date. Make sure the date is person-centred, not an activity. A quiet drink a restaurant or bar is fine. Ask the person about their past relationships, their family, their current occupation, their dreams, hopes, goals, and opinions on as many topics as possible. Make mental notes. (Taking actual notes is not advised, as it might ruin the prospect of the essential second date). Be sure to come across as interested in the person and make an effort conversationally yourself, to secure the second date.

Step 3. During the gap between dates, write down all the facts about this person and begin constructing scenarios that might arise in a long-term relationship—the fun activities together, sources of argument, incompatibilities, shared pleasures. Lie back on your bed and imagine as many of these scenarios as possible. To conduct a full ‘potential’ relationship, take each of these scenarios (or character traits) to an endpoint where the relationship will terminate. Squeeze as much pleasure as possible from the traits that appeal to you and take them towards the realm of frustration and departure. Here is an example:

a. Both like tennis. Scene: on tennis court where you banter and smile and laugh and have healthy fun. You don’t mind his or her competitive nature, until later he or she becomes determined to win and is less kind to you about your flaws. Arguments about balls being ‘in’ or ‘out’ spring up until the tennis stops completely.

b. Dislike of housework. Scene: when you are both married and have children and you are forced into doing more of the dishes and housework due to his or her domineering nature, and laziness in matters of domesticity. You may then decide to break up on the basis of this inequality and arrange visiting rights for the child.

c. Fondness for musicals. Scene: you indulge your partner’s fondness for this entertainment until it becomes clear they are completely shut off to other musical forms, and other forms of entertainment like books or cinema, and what you thought was a harmless trait has become an intolerable narrowness they refused to change.

Step 4. Second date. At this point, all the traits you dislike about the person should be amplified enough for this date to be the last—and good riddance. If you find you discover new traits of the person during the date that appeal to you, try to devise quick scenarios where these traits may cause frustration and unhappiness using the practice you have put in over the week. Remember to remain aloof on the date so the person doesn’t like you.

Exploring America on Google Street View

Wauwatosa, Milwaukee

My trip begins in July 2007 outside Wauwatosa Pocket Park. Before me is a closed off road and a crane demolishing a series of Greekly architectural structures. To the left, a burned-out bus heading towards a flat-roofed building that appears too melted and sickly to contain actual life, and to the right, two big-bumpered Cadillac-like cars are parked before the cordons that read ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC. I spin around and proceed up Harwood Avenue, along a wide asphalt road flanked by elm trees, arriving at a church with an enormous grey-brown arch with two window-like holes on each side, a family of bells in the centre, and a drab concrete cross on top. At the bottom, a marble statue of an unidentifiable religious figure (Jesu?), with arms outstretched, welcoming people to the fringe-roofed place of worship. I spin around to my right, where a eatery called Niemann’s shares a blue awning with an unreadable place with an Eiffel Tower symbol on front. There are no people around.

Further up, leafy apartments on either side, Victorian street lamps with two-pronged elegant bulbs, a second entrance to the church that is now chasing me up the road, and on the right the first American flag hangs outside another low-ceilinged mauve-bricked structure with five columns (a school?). A 20MPH sign is pinned to a large pylon that drags across the pavement and a spin to my right reveals a tall building with trendy B&W photos in the windows, and a bald fat man in a blue shirt hangs on the chunky banister beneath a green half-tunnel awning. The wall-pinned white plaque-signs are too blurry to read, but an old-style newsprint is identifiable on all three. A dark blue wide-load SUV is parked in front. A second American flag comes into view as I progress into Harwood and dodge an unattended lawnmower that seems to be moving along the sidewalk on collision course with a skinny tree. It all has the clammy dull emptiness of ten o’clock in a Sunday morning in a place too hot to do anything. Suddenly I disappear.

Flushing, New York

And materialise on Farrington Street. Before me is October 2007 and a dull skyline that emphasises the greyness of the surrounding buildings. A factorial structure with a roof like a loaf of bread is before me, and I advance towards a fenced off site with trailers and a ceremony of pylons strung onto their roofs. A JCB is parked inside. On the road before me, a garbage truck shows its teeth. I ride alongside and pass it, arriving at A&R Lobosco Inc—a grey factory where a green-suited black worker walks towards a recycling skip outside. To the left, a car lot for conEdison. Up ahead, a series of shiny black freight lorries, diggers and stray cars. The first American flags appear (three in fact) outside a car wash which also offers QUICK LUBE in a separate entrance in proud caps on a red sign. TRUCK LUBE is available in a smaller font on the left side.

Across, a small L-shape of shops, three of which seem boarded up with grey textless signs and shutters up. Another shop nestles in the nook of the L, possibly having driven the other two businesses to despair, in the traditional way. Up ahead Astoria federal Savings offers incredible CD rates, and a large five-story building with curvy sides and small wraparound windows looms over another large car park. Everywhere is industrial and dreary and littered with dirty grey cars. Mercifully I disappear.  

I Deny the Existence of Publishers

My problem is that unconventional forms and structures excite me. The content of a story, for me, is swappable with other content—I have no burning story to tell, I only have a cast of no-hopers and oddballs, shambling through a world of slapstick darkness looking for something to alleviate their loneliness, because other people are unavailable or unwilling, and novel ways to tell stories, comment on those stories, and open these stories into other stories or comments-on-stories, in various ways that attempt to dodge the “meta” tag (now one of condemnation) enough to be respected (i.e. “published.”) All the while, sweating blood to appear “contemporary” or “innovative” in an age when no one really cares about these things except other writers, who are the first to slap you down when an elaborate construct you spent a year refining unfortunately repeats a far smarter one designed by a 60s pre-Derridean poststructuralist genius, forcing you to spend another year redesigning your origami swan of obscurity before binning the whole thing to write the Next Big Plotboiler.  

My other problem is that linear stories are infinitely boring to me, and that in our distracted and distracting age, it is becoming harder to convincingly compose a story in a slowly archaising form. We watch videos, movies, clips, listen to albums and songs in our own way. The linearity of the conventional novel is becoming less appealing to the, or least this, reader: surely fiction should strive to present its own appearance of “linearity” in a way that connects with a contemporarily fragmented brain?

We want to get there quicker! Faster! More speed, more steam, more horsepower! We use our Satnavs and iPhones to take shortcuts to our destinations so we can squeeze in an extra protein shake, trip to the gym, short-term relationship, five or six songs, so every urgent desperate fading moment is not wasted, because what could be worse than dying at ninety-four without having squeezed every vomcube of pleasure out of the human experience? Give us the ending now! Give us the ending before the story begins! Better still, give us the plotlines and characters and themes and emotions in the story and let us assemble them in our own time! If we can find the time, which we never can, you know  . . .

So listen: my novels loaf in quasi-experimental obscurity because the alternative is a rapacious publishing machine that eats your face and kills your dog. I write them because I seriously DO NOT BELIEVE (this is not defeatism, damn you!) that there are commercial publishers out there for me who want to pay me for my efforts, or zealous tireless agents and readers in positions of power seeking to reward the new with pounds and pennies, I DENY THEIR VERY EXISTENCES! My proles are harassed overworked alcoholic small-press editors, who also have no aspirations to publish me, what with only publishing two books per year, and ones that need to find an audience, who I also do not believe exist! (Note: this does not stop me sending manuscripts, but once sent, they do not exist either!)

Who else is there to write for but yourself? Most writers can’t even get their friends and family to read them, and sneering amateurs at workshops simply tell you how unsellable and weird your stuff is, in comparison with theirs. My next novel is going to be a final exercise in self-destruction (my first novel was too), but this time, I am taking everyone else with me. Beware.

Five Personal Paragraphs on Beardy Deities

My religious life slowly evaporated after repeated Saturday night visits to mass as a child. There is no “right time” to drag an angsty teen to listen to sermons, singing and highlights from Ezekiel—Sunday mornings would be twice as heinous as a Saturday night after a week spent slogging through school and its time-bending boredoms. So when I left to make my fortune in the Big Town university, I wasn’t prepared for how fast and fatally I would fall into godless despair and need something kind and beardy to cling to. Blaming my brutal shyness on an unforgiving universe absent of kind beardy deities, I turned instead to Dostoevsky (successfully), Camus (less successfully), and Nietzsche (pointlessly).  

Dostoevsky’s tormented narrators and characters were a perfect fit for my own bleeding soul, especially the Underground Man, whose melodramatic rants and lacerating self-hacking laments chimed with my own outlook on the world. To cope, I adopted the aloof attitude of Mersault from Camus’s The Outsider, and wrote screeds of brutal prose by night, including a whole novel of howling woe called Don’t Tread on Me (I still have the tear-soaked MS in a folder whenever I want a chuckle). I had phased out Our Lord entirely until my final year, when hiccups of hope began hopping up my throat.

What I sought was not the worship and belief (I simply have no faith at all in God or Jesus), but for the transcendent love and kindness to other humans to work its way into my system of undying cynicism and loathing for human stupidity. I was after a form of “drive-by” belief, as if by rubbing myself up against church walls I could absorb some of that celestial essence and find myself less poisoned by bitterness and snarky detachment. Eventually I read the novels of Dickens, and was struck by the holy transcendence of his characters, and his attitude towards them, and the perfectly beautiful religious ecosystem in evidence. My own flickering spark of religious whatevs returned with attendant warmth.

But how does belief impact on one’s writing? Nowadaze, the standard position from young authors is smug detachment and a know-and-above-it-all attitude towards religious matters, and an assumption the reader starts out from a position of atheistical superiority (or, at least, this is one of the prevailing positions). So I if were to toddle back into the arms of a kind and beardy being and sat down to write my characters, would my writing take on a fresh new compassion, or would it lapse into sermonising banality? The point being: a positive move for the writer is not necessarily the best move for the art. My opinion is that it doesn’t matter: skilled writers won’t lapse into the same religiosity that plagued Tolstoy in his final years, they will find a way for their beliefs and work to cohabitate.

So there isn’t an actual point to this post as such, except to doff my yarmulke to God-lovers everywhere and say keep it up, on the QT, and watch this face for conversion experiences.

In Defence of the Less Obvious

There’s this character. Let’s, in our whimsical mood, call him Jake Fitzwither. Jake works in an accounting firm in the daytime, but by night Jake slaughters humanities students with a tire iron. There are two novels about Jake quivering on the writer’s pen. The first is a detailed exploration as to why a human being would choose to spend his life as an accountant in a world of art and song and colour and interesting people. The second is about what makes Jake so keen to slaughter humanities students with that particular implement. It doesn’t take the entire marketing department of Random House to predict which novel will shift more units. The reader wants . . . bleakness! Murder!

But do they really?

Or do readers merely respond to what we (the writers) think they might like? If Dan Brown and his frogspawn started writing ponderous novels about the nature of being among ennui-stricken fishmongers, would the gullible public munch them down like putrid snacks, or would their specially-trained brains, sensing lack of page-turning plot and believable characters, hurl them across the room in outrage? I am waiting for that day when a populist writer attempts an arrogant epic on something so microscopic as a man who drops a box of cereal in SupaSave—stretched out for 900 pages.

It might change something. Liberate us from something. We need someone to save us from this emphasis on plot and character, people wanting characters “drawn from life,” meaning recognisable as characters who talk like characters in a novel.

             

Save us!

Someone!

Set a precedent, you money-grubbing bastards! 

Humiliate yourselves so we may breathe!

Haggis-Waggling McKiltism

Oftentimes I ask myself the question: how important to me is my Scottishness? Usually, my knee-jock reaction is to dismiss my nationality as irrelevant to my writing. I dislike contemporary Scottish novels that make a song and dance about their rampant McKiltism with exaggerated dialect or extremely specific place-dropping or characters that are overly Scottish, to the point I want authors to repress their personnel’s Scottishness so they appear more universal and less like haggis-waggling novelties.

I tend to set my fiction in Scotland since I live here, that’s all. Apart from an embarrassing attempt at dialect in the first draft of my latest novel Arlene’s Atoms,  my characters speak plain English (with minimal Scots vocal tics to denote accents) and inhabit Scottish cities. The strongest Scots trait I demonstrate is the impulse to ridicule, esp. ridiculing one’s place of residence if it isn’t in a plush conurb in Burgh or Glasgow. In Arlene’s Atoms, my depiction of Cumbernauld as a small town ruled by ruthless gossips is a satire of the mentality (though Cumbernauld isn’t that small) that little places are horrible, uncultured drug-dumps for workshy illiterates. The place I was raised, Armadale, was touted thus by everyone who stayed there, to my childwide bemusement.

So is place inexplicably linked to identity? Probably. But it shouldn’t consume one’s identity.

Graceless Notes

Lydia Lunch:  Queen of Siam (1980)

This is a perfect hide-under-the-covers, sneer-at-the-world album, with a touch of vampish seduction and careless cool for added (dis)pleasure. Lazy, slinky songs ‘Mechanical Flattery’ and ‘Tied & Twist’ make dark thoughts and misanthropic poses into normal sane responses to our dank world. ‘Gloomy Sunday’ is a love song to quietus. Almost uplifting in its soft-voiced sultriness. Lunch is the sort of singer who likes to seduce and poison the listener. ‘Spooky’ and ‘Los Banditos’ are deceptive come-ons into her realm of the blood-drenched erotic. No one comes out alive, but everyone certainly comes. ‘Lady Scarface’ is a snot-nosed little performance of beguiling cast-iron witchery. In case the listener should feel too cosy, ear-splitting big band numbers ‘A Cruise to the Moon’ and ‘Knives in the Drain’ keep the arrogant gothic poses at full snarl. ‘Carnival Fat Man’ and ‘Blood of Tin’ were written to insult and terrify the listener. As was, presumably, the entire album. A moody, minor classic.

Writers, Cornered

TOOT TOUT: This is a new regular blog feature. TOOT.

I used to think one idea was as valid as another. If I could turn the tale of a blind ice-cream vendor in Compton into a heartbreaking tragicomic Pushcart-bagging poetic marvel, why not write that tale, instead of the more personal tale of the bespectacled perpetual self-deprecator (named M.J. Nicholls) with a sideline in self-lacerating quips and blanket denunciations of all that is beautiful and worthwhile on this earth? Why not let the poor man on the street have a voice over the narcissistic misanthrope with bad skin, eyesight, and diction? Or, what makes one idea catch fire and burn bright over another? My answer: chance. The illogical whims of a semiliterate and indifferent book-hating public.

Clearly, the Great British public can’t be trusted to read decent books. The Great British public want sensationalist slurry, to be part of the same amorphous univoice all parroting the words: “Good read. Page-turner. I like what I like.” There is no point exploring ideas a reader might like, since the reader is an imbecile who likes memes, snowball fights and Tony Parsons. The only solution is to explore the one thing on a writer’s mind. That one thing being the question: HOW CAN I MAKE PEOPLE LOVE ME AND MY WRITING? All writing tends towards solipsism. Why pretend?

My solution. All protagonists shouldn’t merely be autobiographical. They should be you. Just make yourself the protagonist. Just make yourself the protagonist who writes a really amazing book that catches the zeitgeist and becomes a bestseller and becomes Radio 4 Book of the Week, etc. Content doesn’t matter. Why not live out your unrealisable dream through your manuscript, instead of trying to write a manuscript that allows you to live out your unrealisable dream? Isn’t it more pleasurable (and logical) to enter that dream daily, to indulge and embellish and cavort in the sparkle of your own delusions, rather than clinging desperately to the possibility you may one day be published?

Relax! You don’t need to write that masterpiece! Simply write yourself into a dream and stay there. It’s the only way.

Nonanononowrinomo

See, if everyone in the world tries their hand at writing novels, this unbalances the competition levels. What if these people unearth some raw writing talent and score bestsellers with the minimum of effort, while life-long grafters sweat out their twelfth debut, beating off the taxman with a shorn-down pencil? It isn’t likely, granted. What’s more likely is they’ll write a sprawling unfocused mess, one tenth of which is reasonably written. Still. Do we want to encourage untapped talent when there’s already too much to go around?

No other professions have nanomos. What about learning how to use ASCII programming to decode old computer files? Nanoasciipomo? Or how to fix a broken carburettor on the 1950s Buick 6? Nanobufixmo? Why do people think all novel-writing requires is being present at the computer enough to clack out 50000 words? (Which isn’t a novel, anyway, that’s technically a novella. 75000 plus is a novel).

See, the problem with speed-writing for me is the misleading excitement. It feels good to get all those words out, to loose those ideas on the page and get caught up in the fun of writing off the cuff. But at some point, the writing slips into stylistic repetition, flailing form, shambolic structural disaster. All the worst parts of one’s writing tend to pronounce themselves again and again. And since there’s no time to sit and consider solving these problems, the only option is to soldier on making the same mistakes for a whole MS.

Then again, this isn’t universal. Some might plan their work to the letter and use the month to knock out a formidable first draft, using the community as a support bolster. But it pains me to think of all those useless manuscripts festering in drawers condemned to a life of Stendhalian half-finishedness, when with a little more nurturing they could sing like canaries.

Ten Reasons We Ignore Long Blog Posts

1. If we met you in a bar, we’d do everything possible to wriggle off your tongue.
2. Marmite.
3. We only comment so others comment on our blogs.
4. Marmite.
5. Our attention span on the net is so short.
6. We need bullet points.
7. And.
8. Shortness.
9. So we can get to the end sooner.
10. That’s why people like flash fiction.
11. Even though.
12. Flash fiction is bullshit.
13. Hemingway?
14. Don’t quote baby shoes at me, baby.
15. What if they were simply a pair of unused baby shoes?
16. I don’t want to believe.
17. They had a miscarriage.
18. Or the baby died postpartum.
19. No.
20. It was leftover stock.
21. So shut it, Hemingway.
22. I hate flash fiction.
23. Unless it’s good.
24. Or written by my friends.
25. Then I love flash fiction.
26. Where was I?
27. Long posts.
28. No one likes.
29. To.
30. Read.
31. Long.
32. Posts.
33. But.
34. This.
35. Choppy.
36. Bullet.
37. Approach.
38. Is.
39. Equally.
40. Annoying.
41. Marmite.

Into the Rowdy Bowels of Hell

Concert — Howling Bells @ Òran Mór, Mon 19 Sep

Having left the hallowed Victorian recesses of Edinburghshire—leaving behind a cloud of desperate Morningside housewives, their bellies plump with cake and their hearts sick with love—I sallied forth to the hip concrete dosshouse of Mother Glasgow to start anew. My new residence in fishing distance of Dowanhill—where rampant housebound nannies crave hourly intercourse with lanky former students—I was free to resume the philandering and copious cake consumption as befit my past life.

I had grown attached to those Earl Grey afternoons: running my left hand through a shrub of pubic hair, cramming a Waitrose fancy into my mouth with the right. Waiting for spouses to return to add fire to our lovemaking—sometimes bringing in strangers to assist with light duties (keeping the testicles well sated with saliva, holding inhalers to the ladies’ mouths so their heart rates didn’t rise while rutting). I had come to cherish those moments. To me, Edinburgh will forever be the quivering want of a waiting vagina and a slice of shortbread perched temptingly over a saucer.

Bliss.

Now, I crave moments that charge the nerve-endings. I want sensations that tingle the testes. Live music has much to offer on both counts. Stood before four passionate artists, each sweating out ultramundane sounds, feeling the pure rush of Great Art riding deep within one’s bones. Sadly, this is not the live music experience at Oran Mor: a converted church turned restaurant and nightclub. What follows is a personal account of one evening: these are thoughts from an abnormal mind. Let me make it clear.

I belong to a certain group of people. As teenagers we devoured music obsessively, listing and compiling and acquiring new sounds at a fantastic rate, often at financial and personal costs. In our bedrooms at night, we cosied up to sounds that belonged to us, to us alone. Our discoveries never tainted by the world of criticism. What mattered was our instinctual kinaesthetic responses to what went in our ears and up to our brains. If a deaf one-legged man wailing through a soup can pricked our skin and wet our cheeks: this was the only thing that mattered. Music was our soul and our saviour.

Then the world came along and muscled into our cellars. Those sounds we loved were shared by dozens, thousands, millions of ears: some ears on the heads of wankers! Was it possible that the people we hated so much—i.e. everyone else—also shared our passion for early eighties skronk? For dreamy avant-pop with violins and harmonies? The saddest day for the music fan is learning that the Belle & Sebastian B-side he loves is also loved by his mortal enemy. The man who will one day cut him down.

And so, last night, at a simple Monday night concert, I felt the liars and fakers seep into my private sound-world, colliding in a rush of rage, dismay and misanthropy. It is my assertion that live gigs in underground venues are the enemy of pure musical pleasure. Not to mention repulsive reminders of the transience of friendships and our failure to truly connect with other human beings in our short dismal lives. A brisk walk up the street from my digs, picking up my companion on the way, led me to the luminous front of Oran Mor. We were round the back. At the not-so-luminous end.

Our evening began in the queue. Oran Mor has an awkward staircase that twirls around as it descends, with a little space at the bottom for a long-ish line to develop. So our waiting begins halfway up the steps, where I get a chance to assess the lifeforms inside: students. All students. All of them: students. I feel faintly sick already.

Then a little incident kicks off in the entrance hallway—a space so anorexic Kate Moss can barely squeeze through—when I approach Father Dougal McGuire at the door about our free entry status. He directs us to a secret booth on the left-side wall, forcing us to cut back through the six people already blagging at the box and the queue behind. In a brief attempt at politeness, clearing space for paying punters, I park midway at the box queue: a gesture Dougal interprets as a dozy coup on the queue, informing us: “If you guys could go to the back of the queue. That’s how a queue usually works.”

Already a little red-faced about having my free ticket status announced to the line, this remark turns me into a vengeful wasp, eager for a nice ginger beard to sting. I open my mouth to release my comeback to this witless Guardian of the Door. As I cut to the back of the box queue—standing half out the door again, confusing new queuers as to our in-or-out status, forcing us to squeeze ourselves back in the door when the box line moves up an inch—I mutter something about the ‘patronising lecture,’ audible enough for the line to hear and think me a basic nutter. We get our stubs.

There’s no time to brood on the moment: into the cavern we go. Stepping into a live show is always like reliving the best bits of World War Two. For the seasoned music pro, ears adapt to the onslaught, but for a bookish Burgher used to diddling spinsters, the transition from cake to quake is harder to make. We find half a couch and perch upon it, surveying the scene. Clearly, we are not Oran Mor's more usual more usual clientele.

I observe.

And so. Deep within its lava-lamp depths we go, into a room crawling with Freemans catalogue models—from the stick-thin unshaved males to the gaggling fashionistas—forced to seek refuge in upholstery while a tumult of drums and violins seize our senses in a sexy way. It occurs to me how primitive, how Middle Earth the nightclub environment seems to be. Around us, the young stand entranced by strange tribal drums, like pixies gathering around a freshly slain baboon. In this environment, I become an information wrangler. If I say one thing out of line, I am ripe for sacrificial slaughter.

I begin to pull facts about the young and their medieval entertainment rituals. I aim to inhabit their skin tonight: to understand their devotion to these ear-searing rhythms and sounds, where they discipline themselves to stand upright for four hours, sweating in a cavern while spending their entire week’s wages on drinks and merchandise. To understand a method of unwinding which—by anyone else’s standards—would be a form of torture. I fear for my sanity during this exercise, and retreat.

As I survey the space—the dark purple walls and artificial rock moulds, like a velvet hankie dressed up as a bile duct—behind the student bodies sit my brethren, the Soul Seekers of Sound. A close-knit collective devoted to the pursuit of pure euphonic pleasure, our one rule is we never commune, no matter how lonely we become. Music is our one true friend and the only sense we deign to entertain. We observe this rule blindly.

Among the seekers at this venue, a middle-aged woman on crutches, her face a mosaic of unhappiness, bopping her head in time to the sexy fuzz of Aerials Up: four women who travelled from the bog peats of Kilmucridge to make their fortune in the caves of Glasgow. An obese couple stare at me as I sit on the sofa, leaning into a dim red lamp in my stripy blue seawear (a stance of deliberate untrendiness to set myself apart as a true Seeker of Sound), writing this review as I wait for the Howling Bells to emerge from beneath the stage, having tunnelled through from Australia’s wettest outback. Who are these blank hunters of rare aural truth? Perhaps they seek my words as nourishment, as a means of comprehending the dark life of the information wrangler.

My attention turns to the swamp of cardboard humans: the couples, so many couples. Before me sits a black-haired woman in a zebra crossing: arsecrack exposed to us appreciative sofa-dwellers, adding erotic stimulation to our cache of pleasures.* The nightclub, as a place to meet new people and pierce the hellish loneliness of meals-for-one and B&W movies, is absolutely useless. Those who venture solo into this cave with a view to meeting and laughing and living will go and stand on their own, and go home and cry and want to die. Sweating in their thick woollen articles, lost in the blancmange of paired-up twats, closed off from all romcom encounters. Such is life.

Cold Specks are up next. They emerge to a single whoop (not me) and launch straight into a slow, unremarkable number, every inch Howling Bells-lite. Their music lends itself to a more intimate setting and Oran Mor is not such a setting: not unless a sea of loud pointless gabble is your idea of intimacy. Their set is doomed from the start, but these are the horrors bands face when peddling their beauty to those with no respect for the remotely beautiful. Fact. Their next tune fares better: a slowly rising ballad with a glistening and wide chorus, like soaring across the Australian plain on a very large glider. My companion remarks, knowingly, how the intro to another resembles popular childhood number ‘Three Blind Mice.’ I tell her I’ll put that in the review.

More notably, halfway into their set, an old man limps across the floor, scoots around the technician and disappears behind the bar. Suddenly this band have magic powers: their nimble hands can conjure up geriatrics from the base elements of sound! I make sure to get a CD afterwards. Their sixth song has a lovely drone guitar and hits a transcendent note, a moving little showcase of guitar and violin.

Anyway. There is, at some point in this tale, a Howling Bells review. I think we’ve reached it.

Howling Bells emerge: three men and the Boudicca vamp of eyepleaser Juanita Stein. Opener ‘Charlatan’ commences with a cool tingle guitar and growling bass, its verses laying down a little rock bravado, its choruses keeping it country and simple. Earlier single ‘Blessed Night’ sets heads bopping and torsos leaning back and forth (the Scots equivalent of dancing) with another bluesy series of slick and cool verses. At this point I spot an old friend in the crowd and we begin an awkward shouting catch-up. I talk about the Howling Bells formula: creative time signatures, neat grooves and slick vocals that fill out the verses, and choruses that blast out a powerful disappointment of mainstream indie. The old friend nods, remembering how difficult it is to talk to me, noise or not.

Highlights include the sultry ‘Setting Sun’ which again proves more delightful in the verses. ‘Gold Suns, White Guns’ boasts a dreamy solo and spacey percussion from some geezer in the darkness. Lowlights are the samey ‘Sioux’ and ‘Ballad For Bleeding Hearts,’ which doesn’t quite hit the romantic highs it needs to. Stein is in another world during the performance and the band-crowd rapport is quite stiff, giving the group a more businesslike flavour. ‘Wilderness’ closes the set pleasantly, with Stein stroking her guitar, unsure if she should be playing or not. All the boys go home dreaming and all the girls go home dreamy. All in all, a mixed night out.

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* This woman I will see, from the front, the next day on Dumbarton Road, parlaying shopping back to her home. She’s still wearing the zebra crossing and as I pass by, I have the childish notion to mutter ‘lovely arsecrack.’ I disabuse myself of this notion and walk on.