Here Comes the New Year

Here comes

the new year.

Burst right in

through the door,

wearing a pink

feather boa.

Hi. Hello. It’s me.

The fireworks

of hope and delusion,

it says, all eager,

eyes bulging,

the unwanted stranger.

I’m the nightmare

of your personality

facing you down.

Just logging off

from the personal growth

consultancy firm,

it reminds you,

a little white halo

beneath its left nostril,

a little overweight,

bad breath, this beautiful potential

of trying to give a fuck.

Let me in, it says.

I brought my friends, too.

Can we come in?

You’re already in, you say.

So anyway, it says.

I’m the good new year,

and I’m with my good friends,

the sad new year and the bad new year

and that one new year who absolutely

lost their marbles.

They come in. Suddenly,

all your problems look drenched with solutions.

Sin becomes substance.

For a while, death lies elsewhere.

All your excesses become undone.

Doing undeath with the new years.

Hours later, the years

are getting wine

all over the sheets

nailed to the walls again

at your after party.

They’ve stapled jelly

to all your files

and stuffed a fistful

of spatulas

in the fax machine.

You get demonic.

The new year says:

I’m the new year, I’m better.

You say, better for what?

True insanity. Like I even care.

Fucked off with all the years,

you stumble drunk toward the doorway

at the end of the hall,

jumping over

the raccoon pit,

climbing under

the giant spike trap,

and avoid giving up

completely.

I’ve gotta get out, you think,

before the party ends,

before you get back

to work, to the life

you don’t want,

getting the actual shit

stuck between your actual teeth,

sucking at the teet

of big boy work

and big girl work,

the pleasure in displeasure.

You breath in

and pull on your

big boy pants,

your big girl skirt.

The years stand around you.

They don’t want you to go.

You are encircled by them.

The good year the bad year the sad year

and the year that went completely fucking crazy.

They fill your glass and say:

‘Here’s to your dose of dreaming,

Here’s to one more try

and one last fuck in the dust.

Here’s a raised glass, just a little

something we call the pleasure of delusion.’

As much as you deny them

They are not wrong.

You walk

into the new day’s

light

and turn

right round

the sun.

The ice cracks.

Birds burp and bees bluster.

It’s your two feet

that carry

you past the skyscrapers

and the needles in the ditch

and the NOS canisters in the puddle

back to

that familiar

unfamiliar trespass.

Portal to a dream.

You dress your lover’s hair

in the low light.

Brush your

fingers against

the back

of the broken

and cracked bough.

You both get a wet arse

and stumble

through the drunken

forest.

Growth?

It’s for the birds.

Dreams?

For the buds.

Pleasure?

For the sods.

I would rather be mad

with you

than with anyone

else

on earth.

So kiss me the quickest

and shiver.

Because the years depart

even quicker now.

Thank you for James Massiah for inviting me to read and perform, and for creating such a generous and inclusive space for old-timers and newcomers to feel welcome. The reading led me to a week of really reflecting on what my work is doing and who it’s for, the warmth of the event radiating through me and exciting me.

I think there’s a lot of bullshit around readings at the moment, it’s all either in-and-out behaviour of cliques or the institutionally rubber-stamping of government approved funds, different kinds of bad. January is a great month to try and think about how to kick bad habits.

And with that, I’m going to try and write here again more, too. More soon.

(Breakfast with Zoe Dubno’s debut.)

I will finish this book and even I can’t stop me 🥀 🥀🥀

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James Vincent

It was just a conversation. And I mean that in the way one might say, “it was just an apple” or “it was just a tree.” It was something simple and familiar, but without which the world would not make sense. More specifically, it was the first time in years we’d spoken with clear air between us. 

In the past, the wreckage had been too much. It happens sometimes, that one day you open the door and find every inch of your home filled by debris, so impenetrable and overwhelming that you simply walk way. Then, much later, you pick out a piece, maybe just a small one, and think: “I know where this goes.” 

We didn’t talk about anything important that day. There were no revelations or insights, no accusation or promises. Yet it felt like we were two angels, the last in the world, strolling along a clifftop on a bright and windy day, and that it had been some time since the disaster.

Jennifer Soong

What I found out this year is that my life could be very good and very bad at the same time, and that often the bad things stayed, even when I cut the good things loose, because they themselves were turning bad. Things could feel muddled and then appear totally separate and unrelated, in that way. Responding to your generous prompt, Ed, I realize the thing that struck me most was the unrelentingness of this kind of presence. There can be such a thing as too much of it. Maybe writing is my way of trying to get rid of something by using it all up, but I learned this year that there are some things, like physical sensations, that can’t be sublimated or ejected like that. 

Jethro Turner

At some point in the spring, in the depths of grief and a heartbreak, I stopped dreaming. Literally. It sounds like a metaphor like all the usual ones, like “the sky was less blue”. But actually I just stopped dreaming. I think I went to sleep at some points, but I didn’t do a lot of that either. And in the space between waking and sleep, I had vivid lucid dreams, giant shifting visual architectures like a scaffold for all the rushing thought. But I just couldn't dream if I tried. Not that you can. 

By the end of the year, I was in Paris, riding the metro between gallery visits, well-slept and thinking things like “call me Saint-Placide”. I went back to the Musée de Cluny for the first time in about a decade to see a series of medieval tapestries called ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ (La Dame à la licorne).

We become hyper aware of the movements of bodies in these near silent spaces. I sat down before going in to see the old Dame in an old cloisters, in front of some fragments of statues. They are on display with the missing parts illustrated behind, suggesting unbroken beauty, intimating wholeness. Perhaps like all of us. 

In the dark room where they live, there are six tapestries: five of them each devoted to the senses, all moments of perceptual awareness. I settled perhaps for longest in front of the sixth, which is not. It is called ‘À Mon Seul Désir’.

Everything figurative floats in its rectangular space: flowers, fruit-laden trees, a monkey, hunting hounds, a lapdog, lambs and rabbits. The lady, her female servant, and some of her coterie of beasts also seem to hover on a platform of bright vegetation. Above them, what seems to be a heron, is pursued by a domesticated falcon, its jesses dangling in the non-air.

The only words on any of these works are ‘À Mon Seul Désir’, emblazoned on the tent behind the lady (its entrance held open by a lion and the unicorn). I looked it up on Wikipedia as I sat there, which told me that ‘It is variously interpreted as "to my only/sole desire", "according to my desire alone", "by my will alone", "love desires only beauty of soul", and "to calm passion"’. 

A gang of kids interrupts the writing of this as I sit in the public library. They are boys and they must be about 12 or 13, that age when girls have become serious and hilarious amounts of hormones are coursing through your veins, and you play games where you all pretend to all be asleep, snoring loudly in the library until the security staff come and shout at you and chase you off. Which is what happens. 

Katie Ebbitt

I gave blood in the morning. I walked off the street and into the municipal building. Went through the metal detector and up to the top floor with panoramic views of New York City. I was newly in love and thinking about the past love which had brought me into existence. My grandparents were born, met, lived, and died on the same small lake in Michigan. Both donated pints of blood equaling gallons. I was registered with the nurse, and placed on a bed, playing Duolingo beside a cop, fireman, government worker. Another cop. I was asked to give my profession. “Social Worker.” The blood came out fast. I got off the table. I left before the observation period was over. Walked the mile westward home. Later that day, just before night, I got off a train in Brooklyn and encountered a small creature fragile in the middle of the sidewalk. Convinced it was a squirrel kit, I picked up the infant animal, forgoing the evening’s plans, and went home. I expected the creature to die during the night, as small things so often do. But the baby lived, hydrated by sugar water. In a shoebox, we rode Uptown to the wild animal rehab. "One second," they said at the door, "this may not be a squirrel." Rat Reddit helped me to raise my friend for the next three weeks, its baby eyes opening, and ears unfurling. Its coat comes in brown. On the eve of my rat going to its permanent home to reside with a wild rat enthusiast, a professor of astrophysics at West Point, the creature disappeared from her cage. Little love going out and beginning some other life in my building’s walls. The way that we all crawl away from our families.  

Lamorna Ash

I was going to tell you about seeing moon-made shadows for the first time in a forest on America’s east coast, or the single solitary minute out of the millions of minutes I must have spent inside my current flat during which no cars passed by on the main road below us; I thought I might explain how amazed and how unlike ourselves we all felt for that brief moment of spectacular silence. Those were both experiences that jolted me out of orbit this year – only for a few seconds, but that’s all you’re asking for, and all I ask for myself so as to prevent all my days from congealing into one meaningless, undifferentiated substance. But then there was this one other example from this year, which felt so highly pitched that I would swap out a hundred small alternative experiences of renewed attention or awareness just to feel it again. How can this be the case but it is in fact the case that until this year I thought I was someone fated never to experience a shattering, full-blown, knock your socks off orgasm – that I had one of those faulty bodies which could only reach a sort of long nice plateau of pleasure. It took thirty years but it was worth it and I doubt anything better will happen to my body in cahoots with my mind this year, or next year, personally. 

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Matthew Holman

On Seeing Louise Giovanelli’s ‘Entheogen’ (2023):

Perhaps mostly for reasons of hygiene or simply ease of jaw, it’s rare that we keep our mouths open for longer than we need to. Rarely more than a few seconds. We speak, we eat, we kiss, and then we purse our lips back together. Maybe you’re in a community choir, I guess, or maybe you speak in tongues. It can be striking, then, to find a contemporary picture of a young woman with her mouth wide open and held there in stasis by the thinned materiality of a painting. I see her: she’s awash in Scheele’s green, like arsenite, like neon, as though it’s projected onto her face from an exterior light source. Her eyes are hard closed, her mouth agape. Our lady in green has cropped eighties fringe, clearly elsewhere, in another place, in another time. I wrestle with the idea that we hold our mouths open for extended periods of time only in those scarce moments when we feel released from the threat of shame that otherwise we are always guarding against with a heightened sense of composure. I guess it’s our hyper-sexualised age, amongst other things, that makes me believe our lady in green is enraptured in the throes of orgasmic abandon. But what if she is merely waiting to consume the blood and body of Christ?

Misha Honcharenko

My year beckoned anticipation, a strong tremor by virtue of continuation living after wounds of the past years. War in Ukraine, caretaking, mother’s death, losing friends due to war, ongoing genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, world collapsing. This certain feeling of horror did not leave me. Due to the interrupted end of life. Relocation to West Yorkshire from Cork, from Ukraine. Instant—was the first trip to London, albeit alone or with someone, just rubbing my feet until they bleed considering the shoes I bought are unbearable. The beauty was the air of sudden homesickness. Regarding delineations of love for a mother that I can no longer see. Made me feel electrified, to be in love, to be needed, also that my body is able to revive. Paralysis—that carried me back to Yorkshire. This is my next stop, open mouth said.

Molly Pepper Steemson

It is easy to make a fennel salad.

At the start of the year, at the start of our relationship, when we were hungry for one another in that relentless, insatiable, untenable way, we worked from home together. It was cold and sunny and I made lunch.

Five eggs, boiled—two each, one to share; toast, buttered; fennel salad. I sliced the fennel on his mandoline, which was the same pale green as mine—like the colour where the frond meets the bulb. We ate outside.

I have made more fennel salads since. With soft herbs and without, with shallots, with capers, lemon zest, lemon juice, no olive oil at all (I forgot). It is a side dish, a snack, a little lunch. There is often  a browning bulb of fennel in the fridge, that can be revived by pulling off its outer layer.

My new relationship is not so new. We have arguments, we have sex, we have lunch—a fennel salad.

Richard Porter

Standing on the shore as winter darkness fell with the waves crashing and a lighthouse in the distance and some kind of rig at sea possibly something to do with the nuclear power station emitting its strange red light as if some visiting spacecraft floated there soon to depart and everything around it squeezed of blue into grey into black but for a tiny silhouette of a man and his dog who on passing said “looks like a storm coming” and disappeared

Roisin Agnew

The first time I drove on my own I went to a portion of the lakefront, pulled in, parked, and got out. It wasn’t a particularly scenic part of the lake or a place that held any sentimental value to me. It was late afternoon in early May, a few stray cars, two men with fishing rods, a “foreigner” wading into the cold water, but mostly it was quiet, too early in the season. I had done this road a thousand times, but now it was as though it were a place I’d never been to before. I had got myself there and I could get myself out of there whenever I wanted. I looked at the lake until I noticed that the bus I had parked next to wasn’t empty and that the driver was staring at me from under his sunglasses. I got back in and drove home, elated.

I got my driving licence in London this year. I had done driving lessons and taken tests in three countries (Italy, Ireland, Britain) over almost 15 years and given up or failed at different times. When I finally passed in March of this year it was thanks to Amdi, a forbidding Kosovan driving instructor I’d inherited from my friend Orlando, who I was often compared to unfavourably. Amdi was determined I would pass because he couldn’t bear to keep teaching me, he said. His main way of interacting with me was to point out mistakes I’d made by asking rhetorical questions. When I’d sheepishly give the obvious answers he would bellow, “Thank Godz!” I loved Amdi.

There are very few material markers of my independence and hard work despite how real they are. I don’t own a house, I don’t have children, I don’t earn a high income. Getting my driving licence took on an outsized importance and urgency, maybe something to do with the new-found price I put on my autonomy or maybe just because I’ve always loved driving.

This week I experienced my first Rome traffic jam. I spent forty minutes making my way around Castel Sant Angelo, the star-shaped medieval residence of the pope, a drive that would normally take a minute. It was not unusual, construction work for the jubilee has made it one of Rome’s severest bottlenecks, but I felt giddy sitting in my car alongside other drivers. I had got myself there and I could get myself out of there.

(Photo by Roisin)

Orlando Reade

Last winter, police tape appeared across the street that runs between my apartment and the studio where I write. Later, I read that a woman had been killed. An attempt on the life of her son had claimed hers instead. The article called her a pillar of the community.

The next day, the street was open again, and tape across one doorway identified where it had happened. A house with a back garden, out of which music had once floated on summer nights. Flowers, candles, and liquor bottles appeared on the wall outside.

One night, there was a car pulled up outside the house. The driver’s door was open, and a person – it could have been a man or a woman, I couldn't tell, or a boy – was standing in the gap between the door and the car. A ballad was playing on the stereo, and the person was rocking back and forwards. A private ceremony I had intruded upon.

Last week, there was a gathering outside the house, with music on a sound system. I guessed it was the first anniversary. ‘Candy’ by Cameo was playing, and people were turning in unison in the December rain. Seeing that made me cry.

Zoe Guttenplan

This gallery’s floors are polished concrete. The walls are vast. In the ceilings, high above, joists and beams map space, painted white as the heavens visible through the skylight. Pitched pains are perfectly clear, perfectly clean. We’re in the main room, which has been populated by moulded plastic chairs – not Monobloc, those cheap seats you are just as likely to find in Chicago’s greenly manicured front yards as on the side of a goat track just outside of Athens. These chairs are not diagnosable sameness or mass production. These are bespoke. Three sans serif letters, the gallery’s logo, have been stamped out of the back of every chair, as though a hot brand has plunged into plastic, melting the dead space away. In the front row, a woman leans back, crosses legs, lifts chin. She is nodding at the speaker who is winding up to tell a joke and her earrings are swinging in broad magenta circles. At the punchline, her laugh is cavernous and round in a room full of corners and hard edges. Her flesh, wrapped in purple gauze, presses through the holes, undulating.

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A massive thanks to everyone who sent me something for this. Hopefully some more posts from me in 2025. Bis gleich — Ed.

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(Photo of '“I AM” READING ROOM by Adrian)

Adrian Dannatt

The end of April and we had already been out a month, nearing the end now, a final push to the ocean. We were following ‘The Darkest Line’, a road route or possibly just a long poem, devised by writer Josh Shoemake. Working with a geographer and supercomputer Josh had minutely plotted our journey across the USA to avoid all light, taking side streets and abandoned alleys, ancient rural tracks, ‘the America where even electricity does not dare venture.’

We began at Jekyll Island, Georgia and now we were pulling in at twilight to the base camp of Mount Shasta, California. There are no coincidences on such an occult route; I had always wanted to see Shasta and it happened to be right on the path of our obscure plot.

At 14,179 feet Shasta is a psychic nexus, one of a small number of global "power centers” according to those of us awaiting the Harmonic Convergence. Many have hunted here for a rumored branch of the Great White Brotherhood or climbed to find the hidden city, somewhere up in the eternal snows, of advanced beings from the lost continent of Lemuria. It was high on Shasta that Guy Ballard met by chance a mysterious stranger who revealed himself as Comte de Saint-Germain, the eternal wandering adventurer. And yes, thus was born the ‘I AM’ movement.

I woke at dawn. Across the street opposite our motel was the ‘I AM’ Reading Room, a tiny wooden house and peering through the windows I was just able to make out the shrine to ‘Our Beloved Ascended Master St. Germain’.

I walked up steep Orem, a mystic street name in itself, amongst sitting room lamps lit against the early morning. I carried on walking to the outskirts of this town and at the last houses I looked up to see now the sunrise on the freezing white mountain side, scudding cloud. It was so cold, so early and tomorrow we would at last reach the Pacific.

Al Anderson

On my birthday I got shellfish poisoning from the oyster shack at Borough Market. I didn’t comment on the translucent greenish film over the rock oysters from Colchester, nor their disconcerting stillness, nor the more general sense of foetid air that hangs over that market – where I worked for many years. This was because I was cognizant of a pleasant, innocent mood and didn’t want to throw off its equilibrium. The sickness tinkered at the seams of my perception under the cover of a hangover before my body commenced with projectile vomiting, which continued at regular intervals for the next nine hours. This led into a further three or so days of fever and sweating and shitting and puking. The last time I was so unwell was at seventeen, with swine flu. Interestingly, that was also when I watched Saló for the first time. Interesting because the week leading up to the rancid oysters I’d rewatched Pasolini’s Trilogy of life movies out of order, starting with The Canterbury Tales; possibly the most melancholic sex comedy ever put to screen. In ‘The Cook’s Tale’ Pasolini’s younger boyfriend, Ninetto Davoli (who was in the process of leaving him while they were filming) plays an affably grotesque, if likeable, rogue swindling and leching and fucking up around Borough Market circa 1971, which easily doubles up as a Medieval slum. At its worst, the fever rattled my sense of consciousness to such a degree that any sense of the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ collapsed altogether. I had whole days where I would drift through a mid-twentieth century London playing a more ancient version of itself and I was a creature altogether more complicated and sophisticated than the one that sits at a laptop typing this. I felt like a sort of angel, like a consciousness incomprehensibly capacious, like many thousands of eyes. I would go to work, go meet my boyfriend for katsu curry on London Bridge, which in this world was a sort of horizontal Chungking Mansion over the river, I’d re-read Cities of the Red Night, my favorite novel at seventeen, I would befriend ruddy cheeked aristos and involve myself in some court intrigue. The flow of that reality would then fade into the milky sheen of sweat and smells clouding the large square windows next to my bed in Bow. The fever can be a kind of epistemology, I learnt. The closest I got to really understanding the Earth was in that state of frenzied corporeality, as it was processed through a deracinated mind. Even as I recovered, everything felt feverish, or drugged. I’m still not all there. Apparently it can take up to two months for the lining of your stomach to fully heal after shellfish poisoning. As the experts love to tell us, gut health is intrinsic to maintaining a sound mind. Pasolini was heartbroken filming The Canterbury Tales and its nominally light-hearted register is weighed down by a mannered, melancholic photography. The world received by the viewer is several worlds palimpsesting one another; nothing coheres, but it holds; like a sad mummer’s song, conjugated from centuries worth of things disappearing.

Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe

Included in Tate Modern’s current retrospective ‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’, is Kelley’s first full video work The Banana Man (1983). The protagonist of the Banana Man is taken from a children’s television show that Kelley himself never saw but heard about from his classmates at school. Driven by a monologue, Kelley inhabits a persona who narrates their psychological motivation, detailing shame, rejection, and an urge for emotional independence. Dressed in a yellow sailor suit he cocks his head and turns down the corner of his mouth, a VHS-era Buster Keaton. He pulls a floppy appendage from the zipper of his trousers– boing!– swings it like a skipping rope that children jump in the playground. Spoken word and sound effects prefigure acted-out vignettes, a collage of signifiers contained within Kelley’s body, performed to the camera, which records and distances the viewer from liveness. Having no first-hand experience of the original show Kelley’s portrait is a double fiction, a TV character told through the interpretation of children Kelley hasn’t seen for decades. 

If you know Mike Kelley you know how this one ends, and moving through the galleries you process towards his inevitable suicide. Not as a young man but in late middle age, when even bolstered by success and admiration he failed to continue to live. Kelley’s practice is laced with an obsessive, almost grotty, interest in the banality of American culture. Superman, high school architecture, sports rituals, and mass-produced toys… consumption habits re-interpellated as the material reality of our lives. We all know how this feels: a pop song you never liked plays on the radio at the wrong moment and suddenly it breaks your heart, a sexual position that mimics your partners’ previous partner’s taste in pornography, a schoolyard game seemingly invented anew by every generation of children, but in the exact same form it took in their parents’ day. Throw an object out in front of you and run towards it, you can't help but drag an assemblage of inherited trash behind you. 

The final video work in the Tate show is ‘Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip)’ (2004), which recalls the summer camp legends of cryptids that peppered Kelley’s adolescence. An aged naked figure, perhaps Kelley, lumbers towards the camera across a bridge but he never reaches the viewer. In the previous room, ‘The Banana Man’ plays on a loop. Twenty-nine when he made it, still younger than Jesus, dressed in an infantile costume, playing out juvenile memories, but not ones that belong to him. Kelley forever in a middle zone, a vector for the culture that surrounded him, and now a container for disappointments and diminishment of that same culture. Tragedy is emotionally effective because it de-privileges originality; a series of small failures that build into an inevitable disaster, foreseen from the very start. In ‘The Banana Man’ Kelley chases himself through a composite image of an interior world, rendered authentic through its repetition.

(Still from Mike Kelley’s ‘The Banana Man’)

Anu Kumar Lazarus

Why didn’t I throw you away?

Ugly (to others). Beautiful (to me).

You have been on my shelf for

is it 21 or 3 years now? 

I can’t recall or make sense of it all

You are missing a lid, something broken?

There was a unique “twist and apply” mechanism 

for the deep crimson colour

to paint in the parting of my hair every day

to celebrate our marriage.

But, I was allergic?

Or maybe an invisible fungus grew in the vermilion powder

And irritated me.

You were very inexpensive 

From outside the 

Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi?

I was night shopping by gas light with my cousin and her son?

My husband was not there that time?

Anyway, now he is here, with me all the time

And certainly for longer than this squat pot

Which I must refresh.

So to lick the naked flesh of my scalp with a new scarlet tinge.

Asa Seresin

Responding to the zeitgeist, Anxiety is the star of Inside Out 2. Skinny and orange, with a mouth twice the width of her face stretched into a perma-grin, Anxiety is one of the new emotions induced by the film’s protagonist, Riley, going through puberty. She makes a show of being deferential to the brain’s girlboss, Joy, but secretly plans to dethrone her, finding her insufficiently paranoid for the demands of teenage life.

Predictably, Anxiety’s master plan for conquering contingency goes wrong, culminating in a sequence in which she takes over the brain’s control panel at such a manic speed it creates a tornado around her: a panic attack. The wind and music roar in what is initially the climax of “mild peril” typical of children’s film. But then the camera cuts to the inside of the whirlwind, and the music is silenced, and we see Anxiety frozen in place, glitching, arms splayed, eyes wide, physiologically forced to smile even as her face is electric with terror.

I am not an especially anxious person, but this scene undid me. I was moved less by Anxiety's particular choreography of strategizing and projecting, and instead the sudden silence: that frozen part, beneath our relational capabilities, that says No one can help me.

Inside Out 2 is the highest-grossing animated film in history, and my reaction to it is completely generic; on Reddit, scores of adult viewers, many of them middle-aged men, report responding in the exact same way. For me, this has been a year of turning away from the neurotic drive to originality and obscurity that characterizes academic life, and the cynical economy of microfame required by careers in the cultural sphere. Embracing a new level of basicness, I became obsessed with a furry heart with a smiley face my husband bought me on a whim from a stationary shop. (I think I have a constitutional oversensitivity to emojis.) On email and Whatsapp, I made it my profile photo.

Watch this film illegally. Disney+ subscriptions are on the BDS list (due to the latest Marvel Captain America film).

(Anxiety from Inside Out 2)

Danny Hayward

Dear Ed,

I’ve struggled for a week to think of something to say to you that I haven’t already said a hundred times already. In the end I realised I have to go back further than I have been accustomed to going.

When Marina received the diagnosis that her cancer had metastatised, in early 2021, and was beginning to understand for the first time that it would never go away, the first thing she said to me, after she had told me the news, was that she was worried about whether I would be OK. I remember where we stood in our bedroom in Wenlock Street, between the bed and the window, but I can’t remember what I said in reply.

When three years later she was dying in the Vienna General Hospital, and her doctors wanted me to convince her to give up on the idea of whole brain radiotherapy, because it would only make things worse, they took me out into the common area of the palliative care ward, and a grief counsellor made me cry, and I was angry with them for pushing me into it and I told them that I was only crying because until then Marina had always cared for me, as I had cared for her, that it had always been reciprocal, and it was only now, when her energy was gone and she was unable to stand up anymore, that I felt that I had to take care of myself.

And then I went back into the room and Marina asked me what they had told me, and I told her. And I wanted to try to say the most fundamental thing I could think to say to her that was true, and I told her that I would never be as close to anyone as I was to her, and she reached out to me with her arm to pull me closer and said she would love me long after she was gone.

Thinking about this now, I realise that the promise she made negated the anxiety I had just expressed about being finally on my own. I am so grateful to her for not releasing me. I cannot think of anything more painful than being released. This morning, in the Guardian, I read a review of a posthumous memoir by a woman dying of cancer, in which the editor said that once she finished working on the manuscript, her friend, the author, was ‘gone’. The idea of being released into non-relation is death to me. The survival of our relation means more to me than life; and the refusal to give up on relation is the point to which wherever I go now in my head I know I can return, that is ineliminable, and that makes it worth being alive.

Danny

Daisy Lafarge

2024 was the year in which increasing my consumption of a little white powder changed everything. Obviously I am talking about salt. Salted butter, salt on slices of apple, little sachets of electrolytes I carry everywhere I go. A plastic fish of soy sauce lifted from Itsu if things start getting wavy. I am a cow and the world is my mineral lick.

At the end of 2023 I finally got a diagnosis of something I’ve experienced since puberty, the effects of which I had normalised as part of my (terrible) personality, and which ex-partners have both kindly and unkindly diagnosed as autism, diabetes, BPD and OCD. It turned out to be PoTS – a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, now famous thanks to its role in Long Covid. One symptom is an inability to tolerate changes in gravity – standing up will make your pulse go haywire, your blood drain away from your brain and pool in your feet. At best you’ll feel dizzy and low-key catatonic for a few hours; at worst you’ll faint.

Trying to manage this condition without knowing it was a condition has shaped my social existence in ways I am only just grasping. I was not aware that what I experienced were symptoms – I simply knew I had to abandon social events when and if, and that in the end it was always easier to be alone, to not have to try and locate a what and why. It was both a relief and kind of pitiful to realise that the last twenty years could have been very different if I or someone else had thought to check my pulse and blood pressure. PoTS can’t be cured but it can be managed with compression clothing, and increasing salt and fluids. Salt thickens your blood volume, squeezes the blood back to your brain.

What a refreshing slap in the face to realise that something so apparently mysterious and integral to a sense of self has such a simple treatment. I also read In Search of Lost Time this year, and all the way through couldn’t help thinking ok, the read of my life, but what if someone had simply given Proust ventolin ...

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George MacBeth

In early August—running late to meet friends for cocktails I probably couldn’t afford, distracted, overworked, underpaid, and somewhat emotionally contorted—I tripped and fell into the gap between the Sonnenallee S-Bahn platform and the approaching train. This slammed the kibosh on my summer plans. So for the next month and a bit, laid up on the sofa in my friend’s swanky first floor apartment (my own on the fifth having now become pretty unreachable), I suddenly had a lot of time spare for watching. Like Bart Simpson in “The Bart of Darkness,” or Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, being unable to go out and actually participate in the late, lake summer larks made me both immensely sulky and rather scopohiliac. My screen-time spiked precipitously; I hobbled on crutches around the palatial Altbau, stationing myself on chairs by the apartment’s numerous high, street-facing windows to gawp out at Potsdamer Straße; and I watched a frankly unhealthy number of films.

Of all these films it was Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (2023) that most endured. Watching this utterly destroyed me. It hammered decisively against something evidently brittle and ripe for destruction inside, until it crumbled into a fine powder (figuratively speaking—fortunately no further skeletal damage). In what otherwise felt like a pretty lacklustre and uninspiring year for film, Ceylan’s slowburn drama about Samet, a disenchanted and world-historically conceited high school teacher (and amateur photographer) enduring a misconduct trial in a desolate outpost of rural Anatolia, came as a welcome reminder of everything I knew but had perhaps forgotten cinema can be and do. Though unashamedly novelistic in its moral and philosophical tenor, About Dry Grasses took bold formal risks at key junctures, and continually sought out fresh yet not gimmicky ways to intensify and modulate its themes.

I began to wonder what abstinent regimen could have allowed Ceylan to produce such a film in 2024. There is one scene in particular, where the quietist cynicism of Ceylan’s anti-hero is suddenly brought under scrutiny on a dinner date with a more idealistic local teacher Nuray, in which I felt the filmmaker’s sheer assurance and control had sent him into an orbit far beyond any of his peers. It is a film that fully scrutinises the psychic benefits tied up in postures of distance and of disengagement, and raises genuinely troubling questions about commitment, self-protection, and keeping the world out—only to leave them all in abeyance and its protagonist fundamentally unchanged.

Heather McCalden

One night in July, during a heatwave, I went to an immersive theatre performance set in a five-story warehouse. An elevator deposited me on the top floor where the light was so dim it blurred the entire environment, and my state of mind. I had the sense that somewhere, just out of sight, was a leaky faucet dripping one slow drop at a time into a metal sink, though I’m not sure why I thought this. The space seemed to have an echo ricochetting across its tiled walls, but it never quite materialized into a specific sound. As my eyes adjusted, I wandered through a maze of rooms, all clinical in nature. I was in a hospital, or possibly an asylum. The décor indicated the 1930s and my instinct was not to touch anything; beads of moisture covered bed frames, mirrors, and exposed pipes, as if the set itself was perspiring. Eventually I came to what could only be described as an operating theatre, with four or five audience members stood in a semi-circle behind an operating table. On the other side of it was a nurse performing a dance solo as sharp and precise as a knife. At its conclusion, I slowly realized the nurse was staring straight at me, but before I fully grasped this, she had my hand and was using it to pull me down a narrow corridor.

We ended up in a tight, rectangular office equipped with an army cot. The door closed behind us. Between the heat and the eeriness of the situation, I just accepted what was happening. Something had sweat through the theatricality and into reality, and everything began to feel… unstable. Wordlessly, the nurse arranged me on to the cot, pressing my shoulders down and extending each of my legs until I was prone. For a split second, she turned her back towards me, and her shadow spread monstrously across the walls. From a compartment she withdrew a wool blanket and proceeded to cover me with it, systematically tucking in all the edges until I was sealed in a cocoon. Her face was so near my own as she did this, I felt the debris of COVID loosen in my memory. I stopped breathing.

Then, abruptly, the nurse stood up, opened her mouth, and extracted from it a long, tarnished screw. She held it delicately in the air for a few moments as if it were a tooth, or a diamond. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered, before fleeing the scene. But, there was no one to tell. This was the closest I had been to anyone in months.

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg

(Collage by Jacob)

Jade Jollivet

It’s February 4th but 40 degrees, it's 10.30pm but bright as a sunrise in the Sambodrome Marquês-de-Sapucaí. The carnival hasn’t started yet but the stadium is already paved with a fantasy of feathers, glittery bodies, coloured music instruments and tanned and oily swaying hips.

In a week, star samba schools will parade one after another, from 8pm until the early morning during four long consecutive nights, from one end of the 700-meter long stadium to the other. An exercise in endurance for Cariocas dancers and musicians, who prepared for a year to present their magnificent show to the jury, grading, among others, harmony and fancy.

But tonight, they are rehearsing, without the final costumes and floats, in front of their audience, the ones they live with in the favelas. The ones who sing the lyrics and know the dance steps. The ones who helped to weave the skirts and the corsets, the families of the drummers and the friends of the march leaders.

In a week, the ticket will cost up to $300, in a country where the average wage is $220, thus excluding many Brazilians from attending. In a week, the monstrous social inequalities of Rio de Janeiro and the failure of the multicultural socialism will be played again on this ground, and the performers will compete among themselves.

But tonight is competition free, and the sambodrome is open to all. It’s full as an egg and I am here too, part of this 90,000-people crowd. I am attending a party to which I was not invited but was nevertheless welcomed. Tonight I am contemplating the infinite poetry of the togetherness and I am moved as I never was before. Harmony and fancy are forever.

(Photo of Rio carnival by Jade)

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I’d been building up to writing something about him, be that a book chapter or an essay, slowly, with nothing really fomenting aside from excessive notes and lists of quotations. Hastened by his death last week, Orlando Reade and Chris Page invited me to write a tribute for Effects Journal. And so I did. There’s much I could have said, and still want to. The essay titled is intended to make Alicia Keys’ voice bleed in your ear.

Indiana’s work was singular, brutal, and very fucking funny. I tried to describe it in an email to a friend in May 2023 and did so as follows:

“Your drawing of the connection between Eliot and Wordsworth in particular got me thinking about something that novels perhaps can do that poetry cannot always do so easily in terms of the disenchantment of psychic and social reality.

The last few years I've been working through the oeuvre of Gary Indiana, a lesser-known associate of Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper and Brett Easton Ellis (and a superior writer to all three). A friend introduced me to his novels and he is, perhaps, the most interesting living prose fiction writer that I have stumbled across. His work is cruel, scathing, inexhaustible and brutally funny. He has many targets, but perhaps his most common one is the embodiments of the American bourgeoisie in its cultural formations since the late 80s onward, in the aftermath of Reaganism and with the excessive wealth and spending power that they accumulated in the 90s (most of his novels were written before 9/11, too).

In his crime trilogy: Resentment, Three Month Fever, Depraved Indifference, each novel takes up a well-known murder case that became a mass media spectacle (respectively: the Menendez brothers, Andrew Cunanan's murder of Gianni Versace, Sante and Kenneth Kimes). You can tell that Indiana has done extensive research into these cases as well as their place in the national psyche (I think with TMF he actually looked at the police records about Andrew Cunanan). What he does in these novels is very carefully make explicit the constant dependency of bourgeois wealth, the grotesque excess of consumption and (to draw in your beautiful reading of Klein) the kinds of idealisation that the pursuit of it requires, and the way that the idealisation occurring within these damaged and disgusting subjects functions as a way of blinding them to the extreme perversion of their interpersonal actions, resulting in each novel in an act of murder.

What I find particularly impressive is the way that Indiana manages to inhabit the thought patterns and processes of the most damaged and violent bourgeois subjects, while the lives that they lead are defined by chintzy glamour and excessive wealth, and push the relation between inner psyche and worldly existence to a climactic end – in what is a heavily fictionalised narrative.

The way that the novels balance inner and outer reality is so careful in the crime trilogy as to be barely perceptible. I think the novels are a kind of stylistic nihilism exactly as Jacobi accuses the work of Fichte as containing, there is no transcendence, no God, no salvation, only the brute cruelty of the world. There is another manoeuvre that happens within the humour of his work but I haven't, yet, found a language in which to pin it down.

Certainly, the enjoyment of the novels is that they are bleakly funny. I've attached a passage from Depraved Indifference that briefly slips into the perspective of an Argentine housekeeper of one of the bourgeois brutes. It doesn't necessarily illustrate the element of Indiana's work that I'm describing but it certainly illustrates something about the sharp extremity of his style.”

Funnily enough, lots of these thoughts found their way into the essay. A testament to the importance at correspondence. Even though I’m shit at it (apologies if I owe you an email).

(Gary Indiana with Hilton Als in the late 80s)

For Plinth I wrote about Victor Boullet’s exhibition of paintings at The Artist Room in Soho. It’s now in its last week. I thought it was great. Boullet also messaged me and said he liked the piece, which was nice. I also wrote about the last Yorgos Lanthimos movie, which I hated. He’s a hack when he’s trying to be smart. But Poor Things was good because he’s good at stupidity.

Chino Amobi has finally released a follow-up to Paradiso, his 2017 record that I think is one of the best pieces of contemporary music. You can listen to Eroica on bandacamp.

The title of this post is taken from Clinical Wasteman’s response to my Gary Indiana essay on the rotting corpse of Twitter. Check out his music in the stellar Triple Negative. He once co-wrote this essay on childhood that I think is brilliant.

I spent a strange nine days in Berlin coming to terms with the loss of a wonderful person who I lived with when I first moved to London. I found out about Marina’s passing in a pool hall on Green Lanes at 1am after doing a reading (an excellent MAP fundraiser organised by Tom Willis, Maia Bear, and Matthew Holman). Not the best time. But there never is. Grief is the strange and continuous weight of being overwhelmed, like being bashed around by a heavy tide when you’re not quite ready to swim.

I barely had time to process it. And then, two days later, in Neukolln the news hit me like a bottle of sterni round the back of the head. I wrote a little about it here for Curatorial Affairs. Thanks to Jacob for asking me, and the most recent piece up on the blog, an interview with Jack Self, also looks fascinating.

Wednesday night my old friend Tom gifted me with a ticket to see Clarissa Connelly at Kings Place. It was honestly one of the most exceptional performances I’ve seen in a long time. I loved how her compositions, their structural complexity, came to life amplified on stage. There was a strangely coherent genre hopping from the ecclesiastical choral work, to the prog time-signatures, and 90s post-shoegaze guitar dirges. She also has an absolutely phenomenal set of pipes on her, something that comes across with even more oomf on stage. Check out the new record World of Work.

I’ve been very mentally distracted the last few weeks, for a bunch of reasons. But I’ve been very slowly reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, having devoured Line of Beauty last month in about 5 days. I’d like to write more about why I’m so taken with Hollinghurst’s gratuitous portraits of upper-class London. I think it’s a lot to do with his tone. He gives such rich detail to the rich, their indulgences, obsessions and proclivities, that it is both loving and medically cruel (it reminds me a little, in this respect, of the films of Todd Haynes). That capacious approach seems to me much more honest than the fish-in-the-barrel class war stupidity of, say, Triangle of Sadness type of cultural affairs.

On Tuesday I’m reading from the creative project that has consumed my last few years: my novel-in-progress, Educated Pains, for Pavlos, the most fun promoter in all of London with some perhaps familiar names of literary-upstarts.

Here’s a little precis of the project:

In the wake of his father’s death, Thomas Muckle gazes at Stromboli while forest fires rage along the coast of Calabria, trapped in his conflicting desires. What’s more, he needs to paint ahead of his solo show. 

Back in New York, an unexpected guest and a Faustian bargain revive his fortunes and ruin his relationships. 



A novel about desire, grief, and the fear of wasting your life in the grander contexts of political and climate crises, Educated Pains asks how much would you compromise your principles to relieve your anxieties? It looks at the ways we try and fail to love, create, and live, and the toll it takes on those around us.

Bluntly, I’m looking for an agent to represent the project, so if you know any good ones, send them to the reading.

Come and say hello on Tuesday.

Sense impressions get overdetermined by videos of flashes of fire. Explosions pound life into dust – only concrete cavities left standing. It’s a cliché to even write about the limbs that stick out the rubble. But it’s all there. You watched one video. You watched twenty videos. You watched hundreds of videos. You didn’t watch any videos. You read reports of people breaking fast with cooked grass and lemon juice. Either way, it’s seared into our collective consciousness – those of us brave enough to face it. The first livestreamed genocide.

Ideas rattle around my skull in the thirty minutes before I wake up. Then I bury them. What do I do instead? Kilometres and kilometres of running. Until my toes bleed.

Because just fucking running for ages seems like the best way to do something else. But not write. Or at least not write for any public. By the time that I find myself in a place to ‘post’, the things that I wanted to say shrink in significance. Mere waste, shit even – the effluvia of irrelevance. Personhood’s grim luck. This was always where I wanted to address the world in a relaxed way. My capacity to be frivolous in public has been waylaid by so much death.

Some stupid story. Some bourgeois nonsense. Some blathering inanity. Distractions are private matters.

Microplastic milky ways, precision-guided sales pitches, algorithmic personality disorders – the methane gases float above the trash heap of distraction, the bread and circuses of taking the long arc round the disaster, looping into the double helix in the Disneyland of your soul.

In Gaza munitions built in the UK and USA rain down on a trapped population, burning up the annual carbon outputs of multiple nations in clusters. Mass death hijacks the frequencies, reforming the moral ecosystem. I eat bread. I think about where there’s no bread. I keep marching. Being alongside other people, it helps. Somewhat.

About a month ago, I did a reading at the excellent Pages Bookshop on Lower Clapton Road – Valentines for Palestine. Before the reading I think about my suspicions toward love, when it comes to emancipation. Love, to me, seems so indisputably personal and selective. But where I love, I believe in other people’s right to choices. I’m not a Christian (anymore) but I’m taken with that Pauline idea of acceptance. Anyway, the event was beautiful, quiet, crushing.

During the reading, the poet and writer Nadine El-Enany said that she’d stopped watching live footage of the genocide. That it was not simply something she could face any longer. I understood this. And I don’t know what is in the difference between watching and not watching. The media sphere is an orb of gold mounted on a pile of corpses. I’ll keep going on the marches. I keep hoping the violence will stop – that Palestenians will no longer be slaughtered.

Here’s some things I’ve got my head round when I could. Some about the genocide. Some not.

My dear friend Holly Connolly has written and explored our relation to the image and social media in this piece for Art Review.

I went to an event organised by Pamenar Press for the Anna Mendelssohn exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in January, where Lotte L.S., Dom Hale, and Lotte Thiessen and Mira Mattar all read. I was glad I went because I got to hear Mira read this incredible poem, now published in Mizna. I think it’s one of the most important poems of the last few decades.

Adania Shibli, the author of the phenomenal novella Minor Detail, wrote this letter about her being offered a prize and having the offer retracted.

My old, dear friend Joe Luna wrote this chapbook of aphorisms about poetry and poets. It’s fucking funny. Pick up a slab of Old News from Slub Press (second hand news, as Lindsey Buckingham calls it).

For Mubi Notebook, I wrote an analysis of Jonathan Glazer’s phenomenal The Zone of Interest. The occupation of Gaza was on my mind as I wrote through the film, exploring its anti-narrative character.

For the latest issue of Tank Magazine, I interviewed genius Holly Pester about her debut novel, The Lodgers.

I really enjoyed this playlist of Andrew Weatherall related tracks on Deep Voices.

Ralf Webb’s exploration of the places we leave and return to for Granta, the fantasies in and of the provinces, stuck with me.

Catch JB, Andrew and Momtaza reading in London next Saturday.

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East London

East London

Napoli

East London

Docklands (Adonis)

Cornwall

Marseille

East London

Piccadilly Circus

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

In Marseille the sun pounds with a constant 35C such that the only way to do the beach is to plant one’s buttocks in the shade; the city itself stinks of urine and uncollected trash from a recent refuse workers’ strike. This end of August trip was the first time, all summer, that I’d been sweltering, the kind of heat where sweat seeps into your shirt when you don’t move, the only solution is to clasp an ice cube in the skin roll at the back of your neck. On my first morning I draw a tarot card.

Love unravels, unfurls from the spool. When it works you’re threading something beautiful together. Often, you’re left only with the drawing toward and the coming apart. No matter how hard you try, eventually the thread has an end.

Staying in the new apartment of my school friend, Stefan, on the eve of my arrival I take him out for food and wine. I am supposed to be in Greece, or Turkey, or the Canary Islands (my ex avoiding making plans again was the first sign that this was our last run). As soon as I walk through the door of the rustic cavern in Saint-Charles I can tell something is wrong. There are too many Australians in here. It’s like I’m in Hackney. 

What wine would we like? I ask for something like a Sauvignon, perhaps a little flinty. “We don’t really sell French wines. Would you try something funkier?” I say yes but I mean no. Why did I choose this bar? I met the owner in London. He told me to come check it out before he sold the place to his employees. I like to do what I’m told. 

On the table next to us, Yves starts complaining to Marie about all the English speakers – the lovers incredulous at the lack of French around them. “Not you,” he says, touching my arm. “Why would I leave Paris for this . . . shit? I could drink this shit in Paris. But I am in Marseille.” I want to pretend that I don’t know what he means.

“Biodynamic? Natural? No sulphites? It’s all shit. You pay more, they do less. In France we drink the proper way, in a field with your friends all night . . .” he gestures the motion of glugging from the bottle and then a hammering motion. “ . . . you drink Côtes du Rhône, you feel terrible, you enjoy your life.” 

Yves looks like a French Elliot Gould: handsome, wiry, anarchic. Where he is chaotic, Marie is guarded, drawn into herself. He talks too fast and too much. Locked together in love, she rolls her eyes and laughs at his intensity. She goes to the bathroom. I ask him how long they’ve been together. He says just one month. Or that he’s cheating on someone else with her. I can’t tell. 

Beginnings and endings overlap. When I met Luis, the owner of the Marseille bar, back in London, he was so in love that he could not concentrate. Luis and Adaline had met unexpectedly. Mild concussion meant that N., my on-off girlfriend of three years, had no memory of having met Adaline before, despite them working in the same studio complex. If I line up the dates, N. was concussed when she told me she wanted to get back together, our hopeful fourth attempt.

Smitten, when Luis, with his Gallic pencil tache, can wrench his face from Adaline’s neck, he tells me about the bar he wants to open in an abandoned swimming pool in Mexico City: “There are no rules there. You can do what you want.” An Irish man at Mexico City International Airport once told me about a French guy in Roma Norte who refused to pay a protection racket for his vintage store. He was found dead in an alleyway.

London. September. I go on a second date. Is it too soon? Beth suggests the cinema, the film, the time, and after three years of trying to make everything happen while N. ran away, it’s such a surprise to be invited anywhere. 

The two French couples, their romantic throws, their expressions, their cinematic character, are on my mind as we watch Passages, the latest Ira Sachs film in this London heatwave, delaying summer’s end as I attempt new beginnings. The film is about what love and desire mean for people like me, how unwieldy it all is – in excess of the lover and the beloved. It is also a film about a tank top as a marker of generational difference.

The story captures the upwardly-mobile bohemianism of Tomas, a film-director (Franz Rogowski) and his straining relationship with Martin (Ben Whishaw) when Tomas falls in love with Agathe, a school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The first time he’s fucked a woman in his open arrangement with his boyfriend, the film is full of hot, slow sex – the location dependent on where Tomas’s belongings reside: Martin’s beautiful apartment or Agathe’s small flat. 

I’ve poured my box of popcorn in Beth’s lap, on her demand. Hot. We’ve yet to kiss, just talk a lot. The screen fills with blush egg-shell hues, formica tables, rustic Parisian interior walls, and ochre dive bars, capturing the risks of first love – what I saw in Yves and Marie, and in Luis and Adaline – the self-deception in desiring others. 

Acts of love are a duplicitous mixture of control and abandon – Tomas in the editorial suite, svelte in his dishevelled designer sheer, is the perfect container for it. His silences are that of ambivalence around caring for one and wanting to fuck another. His incapacity hurts. Between popcorn bites, my date keeps lip-murmuring “brutal,” raising her eyebrows as Tomas’s behaviour becomes more deranged. 

In the same Parisian streets, early July before Hannah and Joe’s wedding, I see the 11th filled with police after the killing of Nahel Merzouk; Two teenage lovers pass a line of riot vans on an electric bike – the girl on the back mouths: Tout le monde déteste la police as she holds on to the boy’s shoulders. When I believed.

Patience exhausts, resentment builds, love unravels. 

Sometimes, just when you think you’re approaching the beginning you always desired, you’re reaching the end. Tomas cycles around Paris, Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity blasts, its lack of narrative is the perfect expression of his mania. With Tomas being thrown out of two apartments, There’s something inert about this end, a halt to the compulsion of returning to your wounds. While the film is painful to watch, I don’t even know if it’s good. It looks beautiful. The script is thin. 

In the auditorium’s silence, is this disappointment I feel from the film merely my own, as I pedal around in my past love? My intolerable August of unravelling. Why did I let someone leave and return to me four times? 

We leave the cinema and walk down Bethnal Green Road. The streets are busy with people cramming in the end of summer. Beth plants a shy kiss on my cheek before running away, like an emperor penguin, to board the 108. Another bus will come. 

The end of love is the end of a spool. There are multiple rehearsals. Finally it comes: the disappearance of the line that was in your hand. You know what’s not there, even if it’s two weeks after you went to your brother’s wedding together, and she’s phoning to end it from a Greek island, after three years. 

In the bar in Marseille, Stefan and I say goodbye to Yves and Marie. and exchange numbers to play pétanque with them (which never happens). I ask the nice bar man about Luis selling the bar to his workers: “Yes it will happen.” “And Adaline? She will go to Mexico, too?” “They broke up already.” “They broke up? But they were so in love?” “They were so in love.” “That’s crazy. It was only a few months ago.” I say. It was only a few months ago for me too. Summer ends no sooner than it’s started. 

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I am so fucking excited to share with you my first ever short story. Here it is, in The London Magazine.

It’s a sordid and depressing little tale I wrote after swimming regularly in London Fields lido and imagining what kinds of people lurk in the pool. I hope you enjoy it

.

And neither am I

neither is the unceasing tension

at the root of my chest

thrashing and twisting

against the pellucid air

To dare to live

is to doubt

at all

in damage turns the flourishing ass

when you feel like it

But one music

in my name

is kinder than no notes

against it

Kiss the giant middle finger

in the sky

and lose your love or spit it all out again

There’s always an answer

from beyond the other side of nothing

Come on now

later still

one’s still rough enough for touch

the yellow piss-soaked grass

In Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’s essay on Napoli, the pair describe a city of clashes, between the church authority and unruly proletarians, between petty criminals and the police, between the social order and the self-administration of the camorra. Their essay notes the parallels between these submerged yet always tangible tensions and the shadow of Vesuvius that looms over the city.

Across our three nights in Naples we – four English lads, the next day joined by a French chap I don’t know so well, and finally by an Italian-Irish friend I do – are certainly bathed in the soft ripple of tension.

I’m glad we have Vesuvius to excuse us.

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I remember reading the Benjamin and Lacis essay on my first ever trip to Napoli several years ago, sat outside a cafe with my travel partner, probably similarly confused from a ridiculously early flight (because it’s the cheapest). It’s a Thursday. This long weekend is my fourth time in the city. A place where the streets are filled with rubbish, everything stinks of piss, but the people are a chaotic delight. I love port cities, they make me think of Genet novels, the glimmer of light in a pool of piss in some next alleyway, and backstreet sodomy.

It’s a couple of hours until G. arrives from Rome and S. arrives from Berlin. While we wait, both running on around three hours sleep, I take N. to my favourite lunch spot, Mangi & Bevi, sat on a back street near the university; it’s a white-collar workers’ restaurant, populated by middle management and grad students. It’s also criminally cheap, 13 euros for food and drink. You order what you want by scribbling down the dishes from one scrap of handwritten paper to another. The food is sublime.

First, we eat gnocchi with a rich tomato sauce where cheese glues the sauce and pasta together like a ligament. Then we are treated to a plate of honeycomb tripe and beans, strips of fried courgette and aubergine, and a local salsiccia presented in little steak-like cutlets alongside crisp lettuce. A portrait of Sofia Loren, the patron babe of Napoli, beams down upon us. I covet the polpette at the neighbouring table, two meatballs sat in a dish of rich, red tomato sauce.

For the remaining days N. tells G. and S. that this lunch was his best meal of the weekend, much to my delight. We eat some great meals across the weekend, including a hectic drunken night at Mimi’s, where the waiter brings the food on a cart and I finally devour polpette. But, apart from getting the waiters extremely excited about Napoli winning the Serie A such that they treat us to football songs as they chase us out the restaurant to go home, nothing matches the simplicity of M&B.

In Neopolitan summer the beaches are full of terracotta tanned bodies with tense muscles in lime green speedos and bikinis, black hair slicked back into flicked curtains, eros abounding, tribal tattoos creasing across lower backs. And Napoli has that fiercely provincial pride. It’s not Italy. It’s Napoli. Like Liverpool on the Med.

Unfortunately it is not yet summer. Grey skies broken up for a blast of eighteen degrees heat on Friday afternoon. Like true Brits abroad, we are the only people not wearing sweaters or coats. We venture to Ercolano, sit on some rocks between the sea and the railway line, surrounded by the smell of rubbish, necking a mandarin liquor made from the oranges of the monastery in the centre that we visited that morning. Praise be to monks for making this Italian Buckfast.

The rest of the trip is a bit of a blur. The spirit of Vesuvius compels us to our worst behaviour. And for all our cosmopolitan fashionings, to everyone else, we probably just look like the most unbearable English people alive. But for all their supposed hospitality, Italians can be contemptuous and intolerant. That’s how P. talks about his experiences when I meet him for drinks on Saturday night. From the Gambia but living in Napoli for ten years, P. is a friend here. He makes the most exquisite cushions in his studio. He tells me about the ways his friends are treated by the authorities, they don’t bear repeating. But you can imagine.

If I’m hopping around a bit, it’s because being shitfaced has no narrative structure. You’re drunk. You make things happen. You think these are merely things that have happened to you. But really you made them, under the glare of bar lights. In the streets of the historic centre, the area around the university, everywhere is stuffed with students, drug dealers, reprobates, troublemakers, and people looking for a good time, everyone dizzy from 2 euro spritzes, the glare of sugar behind their stupefied eyes.

In the morning the things that you did present themself to you as a disordered set of chaotic experiences, through the fuzz and sticky mouth, and you wish them away – stomping around in your pants in front of men who’ve never seen your thighs before. This controlled derangement of the order of sensory experience, it breaks up the boredom of the working day, doesn’t it? There’s more about the disorder that I could tell you. But I don’t want to. I do like to keep myself out of trouble, you know.

This entry took a lot longer than I’d hoped. January and February I just try to get by. I said my 200th subscriber will get a copy of Other Life posted to them, and for the 250th subscriber, I’ll write you a poem about something you choose. I’m thrilled to say the 200th subscriber was Jamie P. and the 250th was Al Anderson. I’ll contact you both soon.

I will send my 300th subscriber another copy of Other Life and the 350th also gets a poem about a topic of their choosing.

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A lot of things happened. No one close to me died. The year was a vast improvementon the one before because I decided I would no longer tolerate bullshit.

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In Paris I ate veal brain and toasted to the death of fascists in an Algerian bistro run by three brothers (who love pushbikes and hate fascists). I watched Rona smoke a lot of cigarettes and tell me hectic stories about pan-European socialising, my head dizzy with names. I read a long description from Dustan’s Stronger Than Me of getting fisted, while hungover on the Eurostar home, and struggled to keep my almond croissant down.

I went to Whitstable with Toby and Mary and ate oysters with porter while the sun kissed our faces for what felt like the first time in ages.

A visit to the Lubaina Himid retrospective at Tate Modern blew me away.

I got a new job. I waited for my job to get more stressful, and even when it got a bit stressful that stress never reached the levels of five years of cumulative stress of getting treated like shit in academia.

I went to Mexico to celebrate getting a job. I got extremely drunk with the poets in Mexico City. They took me to the most incredible salsa club. And then, on one of the worst hangovers of my life I got robbed at knifepoint, which ended up not even being the worst part of the day. A lesson in humility and social segregation. 

I stared for a long time at the extremely large mural of Vlady Kibalchich Rusakov, son of Viktor Serge, located inside Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada in the historic centre of CDMX. Something I’ve long wanted to see. I saw ancient pyramids and a man called Armando taught me about the cosmos.

In Zipolite I got befriended by a Mexican music teacher who loves whales. We got drunk on the beach and he decided we were best friends. He got confused about his sexuality on the gay nudist beach while I watched men in cowboy hats try and fuck each other under the waves. The confused bisexual music teacher followed me to Oaxaca City, declaring his soft adulation for me, until I had to tell him to go away.

I continued to leave ardent and elaborate voicenotes for all the people that I love and cherished playing their notes back to me from this thing in my pocket, even though it spies on me and thinks it knows what I want.

In Oaxaca City I ate the most incredible meal of my life, including a tomato salad made from eight different kinds of tomato, all from the Oaxaca region. I got befriended by some more weirdos, including a deranged faith healer in the corridor of smoked meat, where stray dogs beg at your feet.

I listened to Rosalia’s Motomami all the time.

On May Day I went to see two of my teenage faves, Eyehategod and Electric Wizard at Camden Roundhouse on my own. I was befriended by someone I know from instagram (hi Sophie) and I savoured the delicious weight of all things doom. I got bored of the posturing of metal dudes, embracing a cheesy masculinity of misogynistic hobbits now the sporty bullies are no longer around. I left before Electric Wizard finished and this felt like a sign of growth — then I went to a rave and thought about punching an enemy, but I made the mistake of telling my friends who all ensured I did not punch the enemy. At 6am my friend introduced me to the stunningly fresh Jeremy O. Harris, who he then proceeded to make out with. It’s probably good I didn’t punch my enemy.

I saw the Pet Shop Boys from the back of the hellish O2 arena, which was like hearing something you know in the next village across. My friend Ash and I befriended two old ladies and danced with them the rest of the night and had the best time. Always on my mind.

I went to my friends’ wedding, Joel and Charlotte, and celebrated the beauty of their bond in a building that was like the inside of a ship in Kilburn.

I got covid again, and felt like shit for too long.

I put on a poetry reading with Holly and Andrew and Momtaza in that stone circle filter bed in Hackney Marshes. Momtaza’s flight was delayed so Al Anderson read, and his reading was phenomenal.

I taught my poetry class, a ragtag band of middle aged women who are now my friends, and we read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — which I now primarily believe to be the poetry of a man trying to put himself back together after a breakdown. How much I used to reject and detest crude biographical readings of historically significant poems.

Will Rowe and Helen Dimos read beautiful poems in my garden, including Will’s phenomenal translations of Vallejo’s  TRILCE (1922), that will be published next year, hopefully.

My mum came to London and I got to watch her go wild in fabric shops in Shepherd’s Bush before we sat down for Portuguese pastries in Ladbroke Grove.

I roasted a lot of cauliflowers.

Orlando and I shared a birthday, got too drunk, Pete Wollen’s daughter turned up for a reason I don’t really know and didn’t talk to anyone.

I drank a lot of coffee.

I started writing a play. I haven’t finished it yet. It’s a grotesque, historical comedy about revolutionary failure and revolting peasants.

I spent all summer staring at the sunset — including two beautiful ones by Tower Bridge.

Sometimes my friends had sex with celebrities and we gossiped about it by the side of rivers and lakes outside of London, keeping our bodies cool during the ever rising heat. We developed ever more elaborate picnic snacks and cocktails — I discovered the joys of vermouth with tonic and ice stuffed with a wedge of orange, lemon, lime and black olives. 

I made elaborate meals for the people I love in my garden and we talked about the brute irrepressible reality of our feelings and the limits of our bodies.

I ate a lot of Szechuan food (Anthony Bourdain said a joint, a cola, and Szechuan food is the best hangover cure).

I went to Whistable again and ate too many oysters again.

I drank a lot of red wine (because it’s healthier than beer, naturally).

I swam a lot — if it wasn’t the sea or a river then it was Hampstead Heath and Hackney Lido.

I messaged my friends in other countries who miss all their friends in London and we talked about the people we can’t talk to anymore.

I ate some more meals in gardens as the candlelight flickered and the chat flowed.

Notting Hill Carnival happened and some friends threw an after party in a tunnel that was so hot that I felt like my face was melting to 2/4 rhythms.

Autumn came and I embraced layers, coats, and Guiness, oh and I stopped doing any exercise.

I spent more time at home and I got into buying furniture for the first time in my adult life.

We said goodbye to Wild’s Rents — a place where so many people I love formed so many memories and bonds.

I drank overpriced martinis in basement bars in Soho where washed up actresses, mobsters and the odd high end prostitute still dance around pianos played by geriatrics. The last remnants of pre-digital criminality and excess.

I went to that art fair with Mary and thought about post-digital criminality and the all the boredom and unfreedom trapped in the contemporary.

In Marseille I got covid again, wrote one short story, caught up with two old friends and then left. I worked in the same cafe every day, saw the same people, and ate the same things. This was pleasant. I swam in the sea every day until the clocks changed and then I didn’t have the time. I watched the Marseille ultras let of fireworks and crackers before their game against Spurs and I fell in love with these hooligans.

I saw the Carolee Schneeman at the Barbican and her work made me reconsider my entire personal definition of the erotic. Caitlin wrote about it better than I could.

Mike Davis died, and then Pharaoh Sanders died, and then Bernadette Mayer died — each death shook me into a lament at their capacity to be singular, to constantly turn away from themselves in the pursuit of keeping it fresh. Kay Gabriel called them “three visionaries,” she’s right.

I saw my friends most viciously attached to political identities based around moral virtue and cultures of exclusion, gossip, and suspicion continue to work each other and themselves into paranoid frenzies and manifest unhappiness — I made better friends with people who see how cultish and dangerous these modes can be. I devoured that BBC reality show, The Traitors, based on the parlour game Werewolf, precisely because  it demonstrated how deranging paranoia and suspicion are, and how little anyone knows about shit.

I wrote a lot of things, the most important things are still not finished. 

This was my favourite thing I wrote. But I was wrong, and Kanye really went further down the brainworms rabbit hole than I thought was possible, even for him, and we grimaced as we laughed.

Half Lists

The books I read this year that really stuck with me, were, in no particular order. From this year or last:

Fernanda Melchor – Paradais

Guillame Dustan – The Works of Vol. 1

Lisa Robertson – Anemones: A Simone Weil Project

Jesse Darling – Virgins

Donald Moss – Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year

Missouri Williams – The Doloriad

Andrew Key – Ross Hall

Al Andersion – Tenderloin

From any year:

Mary Gaitskill – Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Dennis Cooper – The Sluts

Angela Carter – The infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

I mostly listened to old music but the Rosalia and Pusha T albums were fantastic. For the entire month of September I only listened to baroque music and thought about stile galante.

I hate PTA but I loved Licorice Pizza. I watched The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover for the first time and it blew my mind. I watched The Long Goodbye for the third time surrounded by film nerds, on reel, at the Prince Charles and indulged in its ridiculous splendour.

My new years’ resolutions are to learn to drive and to bury the past in the past. Not at the same time. Toast to your enemies, you don’t need them anymore.

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I’ve written poems since I was about 19. But I didn’t start to write with consistency, regularity, and commitment until about five years ago – I have only really developed the capacity to work on sustained prose projects the last three years. The problem when I was younger was that I had high expectations of myself; my efforts were stultified under the weight of pressure I mounted on my own back. This pressure was mirrored by the sheer extent of my ambitions: I mostly had plenty of ideas and time but my capacity to use it diminished as the size of my ambitions grew. I needed to write something genius that would change the world. Restless and frayed by anxiety, I had no practical aptitude with which to ground myself in the gritty work of writing, and therefore no space to improve. 

It takes time and discipline to practise and to learn technique. And who’s time isn’t strained? In spite (or perhaps, also, because) of the continued and constant demands on my time, what has helped me to write is chilling out, shifting the scale of my expectations (chilling out doesn’t mean you don’t improve, it actually makes you better prepared to face the work of improvement). Strangely, and I want to write about this, undergoing a long process of therapy dramatically altered my capacity to write.

Now, I work full time and I have to make time to write. I know this is a difficult situation for a lot of people so I wanted to share some tips about what’s helped me. My advice probably doesn’t apply to all the people reading this. But my dear old friend Chloe White, an incredible documentary filmmaker, told me that my last substack of writing tips prompted her to start writing a novel. I was thrilled. So, in no particular order here’s my ten tips for writing around a day job.

Ten Tips for Writing around a Day Job

Change the scale of expectations

During lockdowns I was working from home, mostly doing well paid private tutoring over Zoom with a student who never turned up. That meant I had whole days free to write. Now I’ve got a 9-5 and the mornings before work, the evenings, and the weekends are when I am free. When you have less time than you are perhaps used to having, you just have to accept that you aren’t going to finish something as quickly as you hope, especially if you want it to be good. Your projects are just going to take longer – that’s perfectly fine.

Focus on using the time you have

Don’t get lost thinking about the time you don’t have. Sometimes you will have time, other times you won’t. Writing a bit is better than writing nothing. What’s more, some of my best ideas or passages came from squeezing a bit of writing time from a train journey or jotting a few ideas down while I was on the bus in my notes on my phone. The first bit you write on any one day is always going to be shit too – that’s why the delete button exists, so don’t be afraid of getting started.

Read whatever you want

Sometimes it’s the unexpected that can spur you on. To develop my novel, I’ve read quite broadly in contemporary fiction. Now, most of contemporary fiction is intolerably bad and stupid but I have discovered writers I like: Nell Zink, Torrey Peters, Gary Indiana, Brontez Purnell. And from each of them I learned something. What’s more, I have read broadly in the realms of the literature on creative writing, something that in the past I’d have been very resistant to doing. Samuel Delany’s About Writing is the best book I’ve found. Patricia Highsmith’s Writing and Plotting Suspense Fiction is a blast. I even learned something from reading Stephen King’s On Writing (I might write another post about these kinds of books and their limits and uses).

Believe that you can do it

Most books are terrible, hopefully your book will be better than terrible. To be honest, writing can be such a challenge that I’m impressed by anyone who has finished a novel in particular. The timeline of development and improvement for writing is long. To give just one small example, I abandoned my first attempt at a novel after writing 30k words because the first chapter was awful and the last I’d written was great – because I learned so much while writing it. But if hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others can write a novel, why can’t you? 

Be in the reality of your doubt

We all feel doubt, it’s like the tides. Sometimes you will look at your writing and think it is the worst thing in the world. You’ll put the whole project in the bin for a month, and when you retrieve it your perspective may have changed. My friend Toby once said that doubt doesn’t have to be believed to be a threat to the entirety of the project that you’re doubting (whether it’s a relationship or a novel), but that by moving through doubt you can come back to certainty anew. That’s just how we keep things fresh.

Create a routine

Setting an amount of time to write each day, or on certain days can really help. Quantity is never a definition of worth but projects need to get done all the same. Let’s say you can write a hundred words, or two hundred words, in 30 minutes before you start working. If you do that five times a week, that’s 500-1000 words a week. Not bad. Equally important is where you work, having a special place where you feel you can dive into your project.

Break a routine

Sometimes the fortress of routine that you’ve constructed to get stuff done becomes the thing that makes things more difficult. The poet Edmund Hardy once told me he was suffering from a writing block. He sat on the other side of his desk and this small rearrangement of the furniture opened him up again. It could be going to a cafe, working in a new room, writing on paper instead of pen, but sometimes shaking up habits is as motivating as cultivating the habit itself.

Make sacrifices, just not the same ones each time

This is the one I find hardest. I have a job, a busy social life, a flat to maintain, I like to exercise, and now lots of small writing deadlines. This means it’s harder to find time. I usually have to drop one thing for a few weeks, I just make sure it’s not always the same thing.

Start a writing group

More so than with poetry, I need feedback and drafts and edits from my friends. During the harsh lockdown of the beginning of 2021, my friend Holly created a Zoom writing group which ran for over a year, meeting one evening a fortnight. The other four participants were all strangers to me and now are all friends. For me the strength of the group was that I had the most academic approach to writing itself. The rest of the group had more experience of writing through journalism, art, cultural criticism, and this made them the perfect readers for giving me the feedback and that time. Everyone in the group was also a fantastic writer and we all created friendships in a challenging time (One person from the group, Madeleine Stack, is launching her book of poetry at Horse Hospital on 8th December). To be honest the writing group was probably the best thing that happened in my life during the pandemic.

Create deadlines

Self-directed deadlines give you a structure to achieve and often I find I fall short of them. Nevertheless, they’re necessary because they help you get a sense of how much you actually get done, and then you can readjust them. I find external deadlines, like submission windows and competitions, much more helpful because I’m less likely to miss them. These external deadlines have also led to rigorous redrafting of work. Most of your work is not going to be accepted, so when it’s rejected you can come back to the piece afresh.

Writing is an absolute slog. I hope these ten tips can help you draw up the strength to get started. Commitment comes in stages and moves through doubts, too. Bon courage!

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The poet Bernadette Mayer is dead. I am going through a break up. I go to airdrop this photo of the Mayer poem to my laptop and the first suggestion is that I send the poem to my former beloved.

“C’mere,” Mayer wrote, and now she’s gone. But the instructions and demands are still there in all her poems, jumping around in linguistic animation and all its beautiful mechanics of presence and distance: You’re here and I’m there. You’re there with him and her, and I’m not, but I will be, if I could just, or if you could just. But it’s not quite, but it could be, and maybe it will be soon. And I remember that it once was, just yesterday in fact.

Love, there are many ways to love, so many people to love and even to hate, and the poet Juliana Spahr said that Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets were more about intimacy than desire, because intimacy speaks to the difficulties and pleasure of love’s presence, rather than its fantastical absence.

Out of print for many years because it is so popular, I bought my copy of Mayer’s Sonnets for too much money because I wanted to get closer to the pleasure and difficulty of the work’s presence, on the page rather than the screen, having read the poems for years on a crummy, distant PDF. It’s one of the books of poetry that I return to most often, and a possession that I covet.

How funny to covet a book where the poems poke fun at the strangeness of intimacy and possession and relation? It is useful to have poetry reflect our failings and the humour of those failings back to us. Bernadette Mayer loved to make fun of herself and her readers for our persistence in wishing to find something that constantly evaded us, while being surrounded by things that did give us life and pleasure and enjoyment while not noticing them.

During lockdown (ugh, dread), I would have baths of an hour or two in length, my skin soaked in the presence of the water while my friends and lovers were absent. I would speak on the phone for hours, surrounded by candles, eating an orange and drinking green tea. I would leave voicenotes to my dearest of a single poem from the Sonnets, frustrated by all the distance, finding comfort in their humour and play. The telephone, and the voicenote, is such a great way to play with intimacy and presence in absence, the way it sits between public and private, opening up all the thresholds.

How do poems help us to love? I loved teaching Mayer poems in poetry clases, sharing them with people for the first time, because it was hard for people to have responses to them beyond enjoyment and confusion. They would say that they really enjoyed the poems but really struggle to translate that enjoyment into any kind of proposition or description of the work. Over time people would tell me that visceral feeling of enjoyment and frustration would develop into love, but all at language's edges, yet through language — where rationality strains to know why it loves. And that’s what love itself is like, no? It is the compulsion to continue and to feel, to just enjoy presence, against your rational self.

Our desire for intimacy and connection are so partial, and the best poetry can intimate the full feeling of those boundaries as a kind of extra-rational sense. That was what made Bernadette Mayer’s poetry so joyous. And in that sense her poetry will live on forever with its reading and rereading because it is so present to its own presence, if that doesn’t sound too mystical. I will love reading your work that you left behind Bernadette, because you believed in the possibility that poems could be forever, and that forever was always now, and you knew that now was often wounded, difficult, and painful. And you still wanted to find something there, something that could help move us somewhere else: come here, or c’mere.

Leave someone you love a voicenote of you reading a Bernadette Mayer sonnet. Do it right now.

of the hole 

with a halo

how we built ideas 

to live inside 

hoping they would 

overthrow 

the force 

of the world’s

worst —

all for this what? 

For just a little likeness, 

a little lantern 

a little lightness 

a little intensity 

through the soft abrasion of the orchestra.

Sky gazing is 

sky crawling is 

you graze your knee 

on the serrated edge of every dream 

and lick the blood.

Sky drips 

from the halo 

of a hole 

with a head.

Come sky gazing 

with me 

let’s block out the total delirium of traffic 

of carbon 

of collapse.

Give up on collapsing. 

Give yourself a little fix. 

I looked 

behind the sky

and I found 

a policeman 

getting 

a blow job 

from 

a mortgage advisor. 

Have a peek.

The cruelty of 

the world’s end —

it’s fucking

hilarious.

Forever heave sail and bally

let listen to enchantment popping off

before the storm blisters, wishing.

Contagion is inescapable these days, the pitfalls of ill health still felt in the tremor of another’s cough. How the pandemic and its unleashing of various kinds of sustained turmoil has conjoined with what we experience as the trap of ‘unprecedented times,’ the various intersecting angles of economic, ecological, and political instability that make us feel powerless, as liberal governance hands the keys and mandate to state violence to more fascistic forces and feelings (I’m also partial to the Benjamian insistence that this feeling of unprecedented crisis has of course long been the norm, [see thesis VIII], although there’s a certain unfulfilled promise in liberalism, one it can never realise).

There’s this Jacqueline Rose (and Sam Frears) quote which I have been obsessed with since I first read it back in June, when I was feeling the effects of covid for the second time (and weeks of exhaustion). After a long discussion of the politics of Eastenders, primarily focused on the truth of the show being in how it demonstrates that most people’s lives are defined by a kind of constant tumult, she writes:

Stability, that we have reached a good place, however temporarily, like Sisphyphus rolling his pet rock up the hill, this is the active fiction we chase. And sometimes life is really like that. We reach the top, breathe in deep, and everything feels good. But it is the exception.

On Wednesday, I scratched my foot badly on a rock. Friday evening I convinced myself that the extreme pain was the cause of sea urchin spines (common in Marseille, and a fate I’ve suffered before that ended in a trip to the hospital after three weeks of agony). I spent the evening decontaminating my foot from the imaginary spines, taking on an array of budget treatments written by gnarly surfers on reddit, until I realised the pain was just the damage from rocks. How imaginative we are in expanding the cause of our suffering.

I find Rose and Frears’ idea reassuringly comforting because it provides a small space for a personal, psychic adjustment, that disruptions are often forces outside of us that we have to bear – rather than our fault, our sin. And sometimes the role of knowledge, as a pathway toward empowerment is that it gives us the tools to stare reality in the face, like sunglasses that dim the monstrosities, helping us to recognise the shapes of the burning demons that abound (there is of course here, an absent conversation about the space between tolerance and acceptance, the lack of space for mourning in a world highly attuned to social murder).

Every society will be defined by instability – that’s the great lesson of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel that profoundly changed my political thinking, curbing the utopian excesses. Even a society that attempts to break free of the shackles of commerce and private property, will struggle to do so, and those struggles will be felt on a deeply chaotic, interpersonal level. It is still vital that we fight to alleviate that most destructive social forms of suffering though, especially as its most devastating consequence is on our life world (I am so pleased today to wake up to the knowledge of Lula’s victory in Brazil, and how it will take the reigns of managing the Amazon away from that fascist).

In the absence of obvious political solutions (in England at least, apart from some small ones), I do really think the strength of psychoanalytic discourses can be in their capacity to demonstrate that our neuroses are produced by an unbearable weight of social forces outside of us. It’s a kind of freedom for the intellect, that we have the power to diagnose. Psychoanalysis gave me a sense of partial agency over my own problems. Obviously, it does not produce social solutions to these problems – that’s our job.

I often find people whose sense of reality is overdetermined by political misery, and a need for revolution as an absolute solution to all problems to be extremely destabilised by their neuroses. We have to sift through the shit. Some people, for completely understandable reasons, are not very good at tolerating the instability that is to a certain degree a fact of life. Solutions are partial, and so are problems – a psychoanalytic lesson that was extremely important to me.

Now free from whatever weird bug or virus was making me extremely miserable, last week, I made strong progress on a slightly miserable and claustrophobic short story, writing solidly and with consistency from Monday to Friday. To inhabit a writing rhythm again quelled the feelings of panic and insufficiency in which I had become embroiled at the start of my trip. It felt quite dramatic, like my body and whatever virus it contained was ruining my entire attempts to steal time back from a busy life in the service of writing. And writing, I feel free again. Well, for now. I am munching on a freshly baked croissant while at the day job, so I can’t complain too much.

Get Decked

I thought I’d try something new and give a round up of things I’d read recently. I’d really like to pivot away from using Twitter, a horrible little place, and perhaps things like this can help us abandon that trash pile to the devils:

I’m very grateful to Andy Key for sharing this Peter Schjeldahl pieceon the role of the critic on Instagram. Schjeldahl’s commentary on the ways that writing for money sharpened his knife really struck a chord with me:

“As a journalist for a living, I have rarely been afforded the luxury of writing obscurely. I have written obscurely when I could get away with it. It is very enjoyable, attended by a powerful feeling of invulnerability. Writing clearly is immensely hard work that feels faintly insane, like painting the brightest possible target on my chest.”

Blair Mcclendon’s review of Hilton Als’ new book about Prince contains some choice lines: “Prince didn’t really make love songs [...]. It was music that replicated the particular pressure that mounts in your chest when stuck in a conversation at a party while catching someone else’s eye across the room . . .”

I like what Sarah Schulman says about the role of novelists in this interview with Kristin Grogan.

Ange Mlinko’s account of Frank O’Hara’s early career and how Auden disliked his work is worth a read – I always found Auden’s work tedious, too obsessive in its constant sense of being highly composed, anally-retentive in form.

My review of Lloyd Corporation’s most recent show, ‘Today’s Gift, Tomorrow’s Commodity . . .’ at Carlos/Ishigawa gallery is also up now at Plinth.

Marseille is a city where the poor can have a public life. S. tells me that that’s part of what it means to be Marseillaise. Many of the most charming cities I’ve been to are like this: proletarians force their way into the life of a city and demand it as their right, through gestures of aggression, confidence, or indifference. Luckily, so far, no such hostility directed at me (that’s partly the benefit of being a walking, human tower).

S. takes me to his favourite Syrian restaurant on Saturday night. At first I am incensed that we’re the only people there. This feels characteristic of S.’s contempt for wanting to do the things that everyone is doing. We’re in a busy sociable city. Why can’t we just eat where everyone else is eating? He’s also late, which is very S. Anyway, it turns out my expectations of disappointment by S. are unnecessary. The Syrian restaurant is run by his friends who want to practice their English for the night. We eat well and we chat and have a great evening.

Then, a surprise is sprung on me. We are to carry heaps of books across town – down a hill, then up a hill. S. opened a community book shop here with a few friends during the pandemic, and an unintended consequence of that was that a landlord invited him and his partner to have first viewing on a reasonably-priced rented apartment. Anyone is invited to be Marseillaise if they care about the constitution of the place. That’s what it means to not be a tourist. I try not to feel contemptible about carrying the books. I guess I do my bit. Later, the flashes of contempt make me feel like a sour, alienated Brit.

Stepping out into the streets, a background hum of hairdryer-like moped engines rattles the sky. The city is jumbled up by this strange combination of noise and inactivity. Everyone smokes cigarettes, all the time. Right now, there are four people in my eyeline wearing denim shirts. No city built around any fantasy of capitalist productivity would contain within it so many denim shirts.

Outside the cafe where I’m currently sat, people nurse little demi-bières with a pace so slow I can imagine it would aggravate even the most moderate Brit. I’ve been here since Wednesday (Marseille, not outside the cafe). The plan was to write, work on the novel that I haven’t had time to look at since July. But all the horrid nature in the air has cursed me.

I picked up a weird throat thing at the beginning of last week and I’ve been feeling fatigued and annoyed about it ever since (no one needs the details – symptoms are a burden the healthy are pleased to be free from and that the sick tire of being forced to endure). Being ill on annual leave, I just feel like I’ve been cheated out of something: “Hello, yes I would like to speak to the manager of misfortune, I’ve got a complaint to make about the quality of my immune system.”

I’m staying in L.’s flat in Prefecture, just five minutes walk from Cours Julien. It’s a pleasingly European one floor flat which I am sharing with Skopa, the cat. Cats and I have not been best of friends ever since I was attacked by one at the age of about four , scratched down the forearm and mistrustful ever since. But Skopa is sweet and cute, more like a little puppy, constantly demanding attention, chasing things, rolling around on the floor. L said there’s one window in the second floor flat that he won’t try and jump out of. But, over the phone, I didn’t hear which one. So I spend my whole time chasing the cat away from the window for fear he’ll launch himself out of it.

L. is a filmmaker and his apartment is set up to edit — the beautiful colour photography and art books everywhere (Godard, Pedro Costa, Brueghel) make me jealous of the way visual artists can dip into the frame as a realm of inspiration. I guess writers keep hold of quotes in notebooks for the same purpose, but this seems less satisfying . And a massive Brecht poster on the backdoor with a small circle cut out for the peephole, an irony I’m sure Brecht would enjoy. No one has knocked on the door and so I’ve had no reason to indulge in the novelty of using the peephole.

The reason that I describe the flat first is because in the six days I’ve now been here it’s where I have spent the most time. That was always the plan. To take myself away from the distractions of London and just write. But writing has been the element of my trip that keeps managing to evade me, and thus the apartment feels like somewhere I am stuck. When the defined purpose of the trip is to write, fear of wasting time becomes an impediment to ‘getting better’. How annoying to get stuck between rest and work; so it goes when writing is the thing you do outside of your day job.

Anyway, enough of that moaning. On Friday I give up on trying to write and decide that the weekend can be given over to recovery. In the last three days I’ve swam in the med twice, eaten a delicious chocolate and pear tart, drank countless espresso coffees, and tried to disconnect from the sense of machinic routine that characterises my London life by just doing absolutely nothing, apart from be somewhere else.

A slow attempt to transition from the discipline of my day job, to the practice of routine of working on the novel, with a passage of doing nothing and enjoying it. How much mental energy it can take to break habits. It’s so strange that sometimes the work of disentangling takes a period of concentration and rest. I guess I must have shaken off some of my anxiety about writing while sick in sharing this piece. Now, on with the novel.

In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back I wrote a piece about the new season of Industry for Plinth Magazine.

August, five nights in Barcelona. I’d needed it more than any other break (well, since my last). But my new job is fine, fine, I keep telling myself. Not hard, not like cleaning toilets or washing dishes or building walls – I just sit at a silly little computer all day writing silly little words for silly little global recruitment campaigns. I’m an office guy now. I can do office guy things like, errrm, eat free office pizza but only on Thursdays, but it’s Domino’s and while I eat it I have to listen to my colleagues talk about Marvel movies. At least, I get paid holiday now

In the taxi from the airport it’s so hot that my shirt sticks between the leather seat and my back – comfortingly bad soft rock plays on the radio in the way that it always seems to so that you know you’re on holiday. The driver tells me how beautiful the Gothic quarter is – and by a stroke of fate that’s where I’m staying. Neesha has been here half the summer in Marie’s beautiful apartment that she shares with her partner Max, and their little monster Ivo.

Apparently where we’re staying is the Barcelona equivalent of Leicester Square. And, presented with a vista of cafes in car-free squares, six story blocks of actually lived-in flats reaching to the sky, people relaxed and having a nice time in whatever clothes help with the heat, the comparison, I have to say, I find a little confusing. Ah, the continent, the existence of a place that seems designed to tell you that the pain of your London life is expensive. Are we masochists?

On my first full day in the city, we attempt the self-exploitation of remote working, having no other choice: I lounge on my beach towel and tug my lips at my watermelon flavoured vape, occasionally writing things like “page 154, bad question mark” in my notebook, to prepare for a book review. Neesha is on the phone every five minutes directing someone in London things like where they can be a very specific shade of tights or top. Then, we give up on working.

Our primary activity for the next few days is drinking. From lunch time until the day’s end. Not in a binge, we tell ourselves. But with the commitment of French bohemians who have to write a treatise on war-gaming the class struggle or their erotic novel and merely have to gee themselves up.

The way it starts is we have a small glass of wine or two at lunch, a few hours of bathing in the sun and sea on the beach, and then a quick vermouth before dinner, and by the end of the day we have neither develop strategies for class warfare nor written any erotic novels. But we feel ourselves to be the kind of people who could have done that, rested, full, our faces fresh with the vibrancy of sun and wine.

It’s the mood the luxury of leisure affords, and the excesses seemingly have no noticeable cause of dereliction inside me: my smile as wide as the curvature of the blazing sun, and as stupid as the concept of infinity.

After a night of drinking the finest wines in Catalunya, the mornings mix the intensity of our cotton-wool hangovers with the joyful wails of the now returned baby Ivo. In practice, what this means is that the first life-saving post-hangover coffee involves traversing an apartment covered with wooden duplo blocks and a smiling creature whose drool has left baby-snail tracks across the wooden panelling, an assault course to greet adults whose minds fail to make sense of space. We escape the flat with all the glamour of a defeated foreign legion unit and make our way back out the house.

The only way to resolve anything is by throwing oneself in the sea. I try other methods to satisfy myself, such as walking around aimlessly without knowing where I am going in the name of ‘sightseeing’, even though I don’t know what sights I might want to see. I’ve gone somewhere precisely so I don’t have to go anywhere else when I’m there. But throwing myself in the sea provides me with the most complete feeling of satisfaction without any need for structure or shape. Indulgence is best when it lacks direction.

“Being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona,” it wasn’t until I left the city, and with a deep pang of upset, that I realised I’d forgotten to pay homage to one of my favourite poets.

If you don’t recognise the line, it’s one of the things that Frank O’Hara lists in his ode to loving, ‘Having A Coke With You’ as ‘less fun’ than the action of the poem’s title. It is a love poem, opening with a travel itinerary, taking in: San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, and Bayonne. It seems somewhat contradictory that the poems claim, in a comparative form, that drinking with your lover is more fun than going on holiday.

Neesha and I, I think, have disproven the poem’s ridiculous thesis through the dialectics of antithesis, by showing, as I hope I have demonstrated, that the two items are perfectly capable of being synthesised: having a wine with you, getting too drunk in Barcelona.

But all is not lost. “Being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona,” You’ll note O’Hara’s indulgences happen not along the travesera, nor along, nor up, nor down: just merely on, directionless, indulgent, indifferent, joyful. When I realised I had missed my moment to promenade along the named street and sip too many vermouths, I knew that summer and my indulgences were over. It was September and I was facing forward, looking the death of December straight in the face. Life was not for having or being sick to my stomach. It required direction again.

But of course ‘Having a coke with you is even more fun than going on holiday or being sick to my stomach’, the purpose of Frank’s comparative is to square off a competition he doesn’t really believe in, it’s like saying Beyonce is better than Beethoven, it’s an act of rhetorical indifference that raises brashness to an aesthetic principle, like the excessive stupidity of eating and drinking so much on holiday that you make yourself sick.

Orlando often reminds me that William Blake once wrote that “Exuberance is beauty.” O’Hara’s poetry is the crystallised expression of what that sentiment means for our lives right now.

In its ardency O’Hara’s poetry is a celebration of entanglement with accumulation: its imperative measure is to persevere toward happiness. This is undertaken not merely in celebration of accumulation or its end goals as such, but more as an aesthetic honesty about our desire to cram things inside us. That it’s this cramming inside where pleasure is really found in this world here. Everything else is spiritual.

Holidays are like poetry because they’re grotesquely compressed acts of exuberance. They’re everything that going to work is not (I’m thinking here about that Eileen Myles poem ‘Greece’: “I will go to Greece” as a will to anticipate the moment of exception from rule). That makes them intensified and heightened spaces of desire, defined by their surplus and our attempts to aggressively consume those excesses, like Frank O’Hara line endings that gobble up everything after them.

We cram our experiences into the margins of our existence.

While on the beach in Barcelona (way back in August) I read debut novels by two names that might ring a bell: Werner Herzog and Michael Mann. Frieze asked me to review them:

The Death of the Auteur: Unpacking Werner Herzog and Michael Mann's Debut Novels

Herzog’s The Twilight World is interesting but where the director’s filmic investigations of people living at extremes allow you to make your own mind up about what that extremity might mean, this novel lacked a bit of critical reflection on the fact that the supposedly noble Hiroo Onoda spent a lot of time murdering unarmed Filipino peasant farmers.

I’m a genuine Michael Mann fan. If you haven’t seen it already, his first film Thief (1981), a heist, is a stunning work of cinematography. I love the fluorescent darkness of a Neo-noir, rain lashing into puddles that reflect neon signage — but Mann’s ‘novel’ Heat 2, is just garbled effluvia toward trying to guarantee funding to make a script for a movie whose very purpose is now outmoded by the fact you can just play GTA V.

For Jacobin, I reviewed Philippa Snow’s debut work of criticism, Which As You Know Means Violence, a peripatetic account of self-injury in performance from the spheres of cultic, outsider art like Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan, to things like Jackass, Harmony Korine, and Logan Paul. It’s an interesting book but I found more flaws in it than the review had space for.

Here’s a paragraph on Snow’s claim that Jackass is the exploration and working through of post-9/11 trauma:

One way that Snow places Jackass in history is by claiming it emerged as a way of processing post-9/11 trauma. How to make sense of living in the arbitrarily violent heart of a global empire, but through the make-your-own-fun of extreme pranks? I found this a generous way of avoiding a discussion of some of the other social functions of violence.

The US and Britain are countries with institutions full of hazing rituals, hierarchy and acts of self-sacrifice: the fraternity, the boarding school, and the military. I don’t want to go as far as saying Jackass is merely the mirror image of the torture at Abu Ghraib (war and violence is an absent discussion in the book, as is the complex histories of race and performance in the U.S.A.). But I felt the absence of discussion of these relationships in the book.

If we take Jackass to be a satire of all-American cruelty (which I think I do), rather than an imitation of barbaric acts then this book doesn’t quite account for that. What’s more, violence itself is geographic in its socio-political history. The placing of Jackass alongside Marina Abramovic does not necessarily allow for an articulation of the different histories too which the works are thinking through.

And lastly, there’s two (can you believe it) events that I’m reading at in London this week.

The first reading is this evening IN SOHO (not a drill), hosted by darling tease and author of Deleted Scenes, Paul Jonathan, alongside my pals Holly Connolly and Zsófia Paulikovics, who I helped a bit with Three Month Fever, as well as beautifully baroque Jago Rackham, an incredible writer and stunning chef. I’m currently polishing off something to read write now (don’t tell my boss).

And on Friday, at Claire de Rouen books, just on Globe Road in the heart of Bethnal Green, Roisin Agnew is launching the Lugubriations book for her wonderful substack project. I’ll be reading my piece about crusties alongside my old friend Andy Key, wonder-poet Paige Murphy, and Alan Fielden.

Would be lovely to see you all at either event. Ta-ra pets.