On Not Winning a New Writers Award

I applied for a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. I did not win a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. This means I am not as useful, valuable, talented or promising as the recipients of the New Writers Awards. This means my work is not up to the standard of the winners. This means I am clearly nowhere near as excellent as the winners of the New Writers Awards. I was not even shortlisted for a New Writers Award. This means I wasn’t even considered for the New Writers Award. This means my confidence has crashed into a huge wall. It will take a long time to recover from this. This is why I am writing in declarative sentences without the usual tired shtick. I hate not winning a New Writers Award. I am considering a change of profession. Perhaps I could rescue hedgehogs from the sides of roads? I hate being a writer. Wasting my life, wasting my time. Ignore this. It’s because I didn’t win the New Writers Award. I’m not a roofer poet or a friend of the panel or something. Anger simmering now. Time to log off. Fume.

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.