A Partial Excuse For My Misanthropy

1) I am awestruck when I meet a new person. I babble to overcompensate for the feelings of respect I have for this person who is alive, like me, and who lives a life, like me. 2) I like people! 3) Then something happens. The more I speak to the person I have met who is brilliant, the more I start to realise how profoundly not brilliant they are. How ordinary. How like me. 4) All those wonderful words they used when we first me, like “hello” and “pleased to meet you,” now seem pathetic. This new person will have to fight to earn my respect. 5) No one works hard to earn respect unless there’s money involved. 6) So I dry up in conversation. My childlike enthusiasm to make a new lifelong friend dissipates. 7) People don’t want new friends as adults unless they can give them things. Like money, power or IKEA products. 8) So I fall silent, feeding my interlocutor lines from time to time, looking at my watch. 9) What a disappointment! How dare this person be ordinary? Why wasn’t this person ecstatic to meet me? 10) This is one reason for my misanthropy—I come into every new interaction with enthusiasm. I listen. I am attentive. I am committed to giving this person ears to air their grievances and do their usual speaking thing. 11) Usually, the other person isn’t. 12) People need to be more excited to meet me. I’m not saying hopping up and down. But at least laugh at my shit jokes. At least laugh! 13) You bastards!

Popular Culture: A Contempt

a) Let’s not mince words. All populist entertainment is repulsive, useless, dangerous and witheringly anti-intellectual. b) Except maybe Doctor Who. But that’s hardly Beckett, is it? c) I first became an intellectual snob in my late teens. I witnessed first hand the slow declension of burgeoning intellects through a routine of television, video games and a fear of reading books. d) How did I escape this declension? e) I learned words like declension. I started to read books. After a decade of unbridled virtual hedonism I crushed Sonic the Hedgehog to death with The Brothers Karamazov. f) I say: it’s not hard to respect difficult art and escape the self-perpetuating loops of populist cliché. You don’t have to read broadsheets. You don’t have to speak eloquently about anything with intellectuals. Who cares about all that bulldash, the haw-hawing in ginsenged dining rooms? g) All you have to do is read, watch, listen. h) I spent four years thinking Green Day made the greatest music in the universe. One day, I heard some Stravinsky and burst into tears. i) Does this make me a pompous girlie-man? j) No. k) Or yes. l) I surprised myself by tackling Dostoevsky novels and finding them relevant to my own life, psychology, etc. m) So it all became clear. The only way to grow as a human being through art is to confront difficulty, to embrace difficulty, and be pleasantly surprised when that effort translates into bliss. n) This isn’t a homily, it’s an anecdote. But I truly believe people who hide in dreary commercial art are betraying their capacity to think and improve and understand. o) Everything.

The Book Memory Access System

1) I map my entire life in books. Don’t call me mad. Have understanding. 2) It helps me remember the important moments. I recall the book I was reading when such-and-such happened. Then I remember the event. 3) Sometimes, of course, I remember the book more than I remember the such-and-such that happened. 4) Therein lies the tension in this literary memory system. 5) You see, although people think life is chaotic, unpredictable and arbitrary, on a day to day basis, life is routine and drab. 6) Unless we have money. 7) But even still, forethought eliminates the truly ‘spontaneous’ moments of life: no one suddenly goes off to Mexico for a week. They think, perhaps two hours beforehand, about going off to Mexico. 8) There is order everywhere! 9) Except, perhaps, in this anecdote. 10) But here’s the problem: this memory system creates a fundamental tension between the act of living and recalling life, and the act of living through books and recalling life through books. 11) For example, I might remember Alyosha’s moral goodness in The Brothers Karamazov profoundly, over the time I slipped on the beach and made everyone laugh oh-so-loudly. 12) The beach incident, when I mix with people in the sunshine, might be considered a ‘precious’ memory moment, but to me, the story of Alyosha pricks my memory to a greater extent. 13) The question: could my love of books, and this memory system, reduce all human endeavour to a rubbish plot with flat, lifeless characters, no action, and terrible drudgery? 14) Or do I lead a particularly boring life? 15) Not when I read books, I don’t. And I’m not about to stop reading books anytime soon.

Man on a Bench: A Roman Anecdote

i) The littlest things can drastically alter a person’s mood. ii) For example, seeing a squirrel scurry across the road and shimmy up a tree. That would improve one’s mood. Seeing a squirrel flattened by an HGV hauler—that wouldn’t improve one’s mood. iii) But I knew this man. iv) He sat on benches all day long. Sometimes he’d feed the ducks, sometimes he’d sit and observe passersby. v) I spotted him on various benches across Edinburgh. He sat with a neutral expression. Looking. Most people, as people do, dismissed him as a creepy loner. vi) People are so very empathetic. vii) But I loved this man. viii) He was a modern day Underground Man. He sat on the sidelines of life, observing. Cold and detached. All day long. On benches. A visible nonentity, the bland face of self-erasure. ix) Chances are he had a family, or a cat. But when he sat on those benches, on his lonesome, the serenity oozed from this man. x) I took comfort in the fact that a person can be happy without people. That people are useful, and necessary, but essentially undesirable. xi) So whenever I spotted him around town, sitting blankly on his bench, my mood skyrocketed. xii) How brilliant to be alone, in the throb of a city, and to be content! xiii) I haven’t seen him in a long time. Hopefully he hasn’t committed suicide.

The William Tell Overture: An Alphabetical Anecdote

a) I used to live in student accommodation in the city of Edinburgh, sometimes dubbed “city of literature,” despite more people buying DVDs than books per annum. b) I spent my days in a box room writing mediocre essays about Austen and Dickens. c) In my spare time, I wrote appalling 900-page tracts about sexual frustration. I used self-deprecating humour to make life seem less terrible. d) This technique doesn’t have the same efficacy in my mid-twenties. e) But. f) During the second term a new student moved in. This student loved classical music, usually the happy bombast of Beethoven’s Ninth and similar. He would play his music at ludicrous volumes, shocked some bepimpled Scot might scorn the beauty of Beety. g) I scorned. h) Later, when our acquaintanceship was reaching its peak of begrudging tolerance, he got a girlfriend. i) At night, horrors emerged from his room. j) When sleeping with his girlfriend, he would sing embarrassing sexual songs to the William Tell Overture. Among the most horrible, sung by his girlfriend, was: Put it in, put it in, put it in in in, put it in, put it in, put it in in in, put it in, put it in, put it in in in, put it iiiiiiiiiiiinnnnn . . . put it in in in! k) And so on. l) This really happened. m) This setup became so dire, I would find replacement accommodation for the next term. n) And seek counselling. o) I no longer enjoy the William Tell Overture.

Linda Perhacs: An Anecdote in Sequence

1) My father bought me the one album in existence by folk singer Linda Perhacs, Parallelograms, in 2004. 2) As a kid I was a whizz speller, but ‘parallel’ was one of those blind spot words, along with ‘bureau’ and ‘diarrhoea,’ so my father thought it would be witty to get me this album. 3) I call my father ‘dad’ in real life, but prefer the more formal ‘father’ for public usage. 4) My father, unknowingly, had bought one of the most delicious folk albums in history—beautiful, ethereal songs with psychedelic space-outs and sunny Californian melancholy. 5) Something can be sunny and melancholic at the same time. Don’t ask me how. 6) So, since I loved Parallelograms, I evolved a new CD gift system with my father. We’d only buy each other albums related to words we couldn’t spell on the first try. 7) Album titles only, not artists. 8) My father, like so many, can’t do ‘weird’ on the first try, he always mixes up his I’s and E’s. So, I bought him an EP by Hanson (of ‘MMMBop’ fame). 9) Much hilarity, and simmering resentment, since he’d got me a humdinger. 10) And I’d got him Hansen. 11) But balance was restored the following year when he bought me ‘Millennium’ by Robbie Williams. Ever since, we’ve never traded in semi-decent albums. 12) Something tells me this system is flawed.

My Month in Books, Part Two (Jan)

17. Alexander Theroux — The Lollipop Trollops & Other Poems

My pledge this year is to read more contemporary poetry. I used to review poetry in online workshops, and the nimiety of lowercase e.e. cummings imitations left me exceedingly depressed. I can’t write poems for toffee (and toffee sellers only accept sestinas as payment) but I believe modern poets should acquaint themselves with as many poetic forms as possible, unafraid to box themselves into the metrical requirements of a sonnet or an englyn. When I tried poems I took arbitrary line breaks based on hunches—I needed the constraints of a good form to see me right. But I didn’t have the patience. Anyway, this collection demonstrates an excellent range of rhyming poems (in the 90s!) and free verse dalliances, tackling the trivial, the peevish and the profound. The man’s a damn fine poet. The writer is an essayist and author of Laura Warholic: The Sexual Intellectual.

18. Alasdair Gray — Collected Verse

Alasdair Gray: artist, muralist, doodler, novelist, short story writer, playwright, teacher, historian, translator . . . AND poet? Is there anything this fat asthmatic Glasgow pedestrian can’t do? As a poet he’s no Hugh MacDiarmid but this collection shows he’s no slouch either. The most impressive poems here are his gloomier, earlier poems about voids and loneliness, they ring the truest of all. Some of the later work is eccentric and doesn’t merit rereading . . . ESPECIALLY the Latin translations which are EXTREMELY DULL! My, I’m abusing the caps lock tonight, for sure. For the completists, this volume contains his separate collections Old Negatives and Sixteen Occasional Poems, as well as all the bits and pieces scattered in art galleries and anthologies throughout his life. Two Ravens Press, based on the isle of Uist, have done a stellar job designing this little hardcover edition. On an unrelated note, this Glasgow band Veronica Falls are fucking brilliant. And goodnight.

19. Kurt Vonnegut — Fates Worse Than Death

This is Vonnegut’s last in the trio of “autobiographical collages,” which is a canny way of presenting various nonfiction materials without having to impose a structure on the book. This is the most shambolic of the three—firstly, Fates Worse Than Death is divided into conventional chapters, so the reader has no contents table to peruse the various speeches Kurt reproduces here from recent public speaking events. And the book is mostly reproduced public speeches, most of which are entertaining and erudite in his typical style, but some of which become tiresome. Imagine sitting through several hours of Vonnegut lecturing. That effect is created here. On the positive side, although he repeats facts about his life from previous books ad nauseam (did you know he worked for General Electric? and was at Dresden?), the commentary on his family is illuminating among the shrubbery of opinion. Not to say the revelation he tried to commit suicide in the 1980s, which is barely discussed and leaves me craving more detail. So yes, absolutely for diehards only. Those wishing to dip a toe into his nonfiction try Palm Sunday.

20. Alasdair Gray — Fleck

Performed at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2011, with Alasdair Gray as Old Nick, poet Aonghas MacNeacail as God, Will Self as John Fleck, and A.L. Kennedy as May. I missed the performance in August because I am stupid. Also onstage were folk like Liz Lochhead, Ian Rankin and Alan Bissett, so I say again: I am stupid. Reading the play on my lonesome was no consolation for this missed opportunity, although I take some pleasure knowing it isn’t very good. A contemporary version of Goethe’s Faust written in comedic verse? Why does that sound like flogging a horse that decomposed years ago? (Two Ravens Press aren’t to blame: this edition is beautifully designed). The world doesn’t need more modern versions of Faust. We could spend an afternoon naming all the films and books and songs about selling one’s soul to the devil. And we’d fall asleep.

21. Kurt Vonnegut — God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

For an extremely short period of time in the late nineties, Kurt was “Reporter on the Afterlife” for the WNYC radio station in, presumably, NYC—hence the station’s name. (Columbo in the house!) This extremely short book compiles his ninety-second radio spots, where he met such figures as Dr. Mary D. Ainsworth, Adolf Hitler, Sir Isaac Newton and Isaac Asimov. Following Timequake, these little pieces were, more or less, what Kurt did towards the end of his life—little paragraphs of philosophical apothegms, autobiographical reflection, and consistently sharp social comment, all written with a cutting wit and humanist bent. If there were an online repository for Kurt’s taped interviews, speeches, appearances, etc (on his website would help) these sorts of collections wouldn’t need to exist. But I’m glad it does. And, on this fortunate occasion, you can listen to the original broadcasts here.

22. Kurt Vonnegut — A Man Without a Country

Something of a misnomer, this title: “A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America.” Hmm. No. In fact, Kurt’s final book is another collage of pieces taken from public speeches, and various articles commissioned for the publication In These Times. Michael Silverblatt described this book as a “response to a plea”—that plea coming from the editors of Seven Stories Press, who tickled Vonnegut into writing little chunks again. Any fresh writing from an eighty-three-year-old man is hard to come by, and Kurt recycles passages from previous books, most notably Dr. Kevorkian. But who cares? This collection is deftly edited to give Kurt’s words real power through brevity, and a cadence is established throughout, building to a moving climax. Not bad for a man without a country. The excrement has truly hit the air conditioner. (P.S. Portions of this appear in this excellent speech).

23. Geoffrey Hill — Mercian Hymns

These poems put me in mind of PJ Harvey’s latest, Let England Shake. All soil and toil, fantastic gloom. I nabbed this collection from my girlfriend who knows how to read poems. Ask her, she’s nicer than me, and a talented playwright. Or perhaps you can form your own opinion? Here’s stanza III, part XXII to consider: “Then, in the earthly shelter, warmed by a blue-glassed storm-lantern, I huddled with stories of dragon-tailed airships and warriors who took wing immortal as phantoms.” That sort of thing. Very English!

24. Jacques Roubaud — The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart

Jacques Roubaud’s most recent collection of poetry explores the streets of Paris, the idle hours spent ambling around this distinctive city, with an emphasis on place names over scenery. Roubaud responds to work from Queneau (the first cycle is a take on his collection Les pauvres gens), Verlaine, Rimbaud and esoteric historical figures. From meditations on death to playful Oulipo antics, wilful obscurity and silly throwaways, this is about as deliciously uplifting a collection as a poor deprived Scot could expect to read. I have a sore throat and stuffed nose right now (a detail you all needed to know), so this is the perfect medicine (that and Glycerine). Read Roubaud, read Roubaud!

25. Émile Zola — The Masterpiece

You have this friend, a writer. He’s written this terrible bildungsroman about his tedious student exploits, I Want Vagina. You tell him tactfully that a 900-page, unspellchecked homage to sexual frustration doesn’t fly in the marketplace. Your friend scurries off and signs up for a Creative Writing MA at Dorset Polytechnic, taught by Vernon D. Burns. He returns, a few months later, with a new 900-page spellchecked homage to sexual frustration, I Want to Squeeze Bosoms. You arrange for him to lose his virginity so his art might progress by dialling a friendly helpline for that purpose (Callgirlz2nite). He returns a year later with a new epic, I Love Sleeping With Whores. His prose abounds in loving descriptions of thighs and calves and thighs, but lacks a greater purpose. A novel needs something more than loving exudations of prozzies to be successful (a few classics notwithstanding). Your friend trundles off. He rents a box room and starts his masterpiece, A Novel With Substance, Truth & Power. You tell him to rethink the title, but he tells you to shut up, he knows what he’s doing. So: skip twelve years, past the four breakdowns, nine marriages, one suicide attempt, to the final draft of his masterpiece. You sit down to read this dense marsh of unreadable prose, despairing at each spontaneous MUMMY that looms from the text (often LOVE ME MUMMY), and watch a sitcom instead. The message? All artists are fucked up. Some are—as they say in the US army—fucked up beyond all recognition.

Uplifting passage, spoken by the character based on Zola:

“From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!” (p259-60)

26. Michel Houellebecq — Whatever

You have this friend who works in IT. He is rendered sick at the torturous formality and bureaucratic inevitability of existence, and slaps you on the face twice before bursting into tears. You phone his friend Tisserand who is unbearably ugly and hits on you twice, for help. You say: “You are so hideous, no woman would go anywhere near you, you disgusting pustule of a man.” Tisserand breaks down in tears but comes back with a brutal salvo: “You women are callous stiff planks who’re only out for yourselves!” Or words to that effect. But your friend who works in IT is looking extremely peaky. He, naturally, has no problem getting laid (despite his own physical shortcomings, i.e. he looks like Michel Houellebecq) but he does seem to be coming down with a bad case of lifesickness. Clearly, traveling around France training people in IT packages is no sound basis for a life. So your friend writes strange animal stories then checks himself into a psych ward. You don’t hear from him for a while, for he is a gone man. A long gone man. (P.S. Worst cover and mistranslated title ever. Original: Extension du domaine de la lutte).

Favourite passage:

“Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth. What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.” (p12)

27. Marie Darrieussecq — Pig Tales

You have this friend, she’s been out of work for months. Then she gets this gig at a perfume counter, which also involves being a prostitute. She is routinely abused by her “clients” who use her for increasingly perverse sexual practices. She is also, at that time, transforming into a sow. You keep calling to meet for a coffee, but all you get is the answer machine, oinking and grunting her absence. You hear she’s taken up with a politician who sweeps her into the dark sexual underbelly of Paris’s powerful elite, where her fluctuating pigginess proves popular with the higher-ups she lets abuse her rectally. You can forget trying to reach her now. She’s leading a new life with her six teats and wolf boyfriend, she has no time for YOU. It’s frustrating when friends fall away. (This is a delightfully surreal tale with no paragraph breaks).

28. Denis Diderot — Rameau’s Nephew and First Satire

Some editions lump this with D’Alembert’s Dream, others with “other works”—helpful!—but this Oxford Classics edition includes First Satire (some eleven pages). As the one-star rating makes plain, me no likey. Rameau’s Nephew is a rambling conversation between ‘ME’ and ‘HIM’ that feels like an indulgence, written very much for Diderot’s cultural circle, and a very dry run for Jacques the Fatalist. The bantering leans towards the philosophical, and far from being a philistine, I don’t read philosophical tracts because I hate them. The First Satire is equally irrelevant to today’s reader, punctuated with obscure references to figures of the time, copious explanatory notes and flat humour. More to the point, there’s no Diderot magic here, not in the slightest.

29. Jeanne Hyvard — Mother Death

A raging feminist splurge. 110 pages of staccato attack weapons. Sentences like nunchucks in the knackers. A Lucy Ellmann heroine letting rip after her third divorce and fourth Martini. A full-scale warhead launched against the prevailing male discourse. A repetitive, plotless, placeless, timeless anti-novel. A French theory piece in league with Deleuze or Derrida (men men men). Passages like this: “What do they say? What do they want? For us to have orgasms like them? What do they want? For us to be satisfied with being able to say: she belongs to me? They want our desire to come to an end so they can be more secure in knowing no one else will come along after them. So they make things up. They speak in our place. They teach us the discourses we recite to please them. They think they’re able to converse with us. They talk to their shadows. Because the sea’s voracious mouth is never satisfied. The more they make love to us. The more they fill us. The more they empty us. The more they make love to us. The more desire we have. The more we become the world. The freer we are.” No longer in print. Phew.

30. Brian McCabe — Selected Stories

This gentleman was the first writer I met and, since I am gifted at first impressions, I slid two 30-page manuscripts into his office folder before I even spoke to him. The first was an excerpt from a 900-page paean to sexual frustration, parodied earlier as I Want Vaginas. The second was a novel about ending up like your father. Despite their incredible ugliness, he kindly encouraged me to keep writing with no weariness or beeriness in his voice. Later, I took part in his lovely evening workshops where I had the great good fortune to meet my current partner of some five years, and to make people chortle at some sub-Flann O’Brien whimsy I had farted onto my sister’s old PC the night before. All in all, I can safely say Brian McCabe is a top bloke and a brilliant teacher.

And what a writer! Why did I wait five years to read his work? His stories are playful, hilarious, darkly realistic and endlessly ponderable. The story ‘Interference’ about a child who invents a Martian language to deal with his mother’s suicide attempt took my breath away. Written in a perfect early adolescent tone, with an Ali Smith-like flair for language and wit, the story’s devastating core creeps up on the reader like a really good rapist. ‘Anima’ and ‘Say Something’ are equal favourites: the latter a drunken rant from an academic’s wife, with her uninterrupted monologue speaking for the silent man. Other tales deal with life in bleak Scottish towns, among the best ‘The Hunter of Dryburn’ and ‘Strange Passenger,’ the longest piece here, and a great exploration of kids who leave their parents’ social class. Read this man. He’s bloody nice.

31. Georges Bataille — Story of the Eye

The last orgy I attended was in Dundee. I turned up two minutes late, improperly dressed (my gimp mask hadn’t been drycleaned in time), and offended the host by complimenting him on his lovely breasts, and even more cracking vagina. I was told to gently lube the testicles of a history teacher for the first romp—clearly the host was furious with me, as the history teacher was my own father—then invited over for a little frottage against the pelvis of a divorced Cher impersonator. She sang ‘Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves’ to the slow rocking of her climax. What an embarrassing night!

This novella is nothing like that embarrassing night, except the sex is almost as degenerate. No physical descriptions of the sexers are included in the text, so the reader is free to imagine two nubile French handsomes instead of acne-ridden shut-ins (a whole new level of perverse) doing their evil deeds. The writer’s postscript explains the use of eggs and eyes in erotic situations, as some psychoneurotic method of dealing with seeing his blind father struggling to wet himself as a child. If I saw that in my youth, no doubt this is exactly the book I would write. This edition contains an extremely boring essay by Susan Sontag (as long as the novella itself) and a typically inscrutable one from Roland Barthes. Skip those and make up your own theories of perversity (with a partner!)

32. Nicholson Baker — A Box of Matches

If you turned up at your agent’s office, caught his attention long enough to pitch a new novel idea, and told him the novel would be structured around a box of matches, with each match unleashing a series of domestic anecdotes told by a very boring and precise man, your agent might throw a plant at your head. Nicholson’s agent, however, simply said: “Sounds great, can you have it by February?” Oh, agents. Oh, Nicholson. Oh, mass of unpublished unloved unwanted writers. Oh dear. Anyway, this is another short unoffensive interesting book from Nicholson. But you have to ask yourself, with books like Checkpoint and Vox and so on, where lieth the substance with Baker? These are great books but Baker prances about the place like a colossus of literature, and I think, why why why? He does have the greatest beard in literary history. Counts for a lot.