A recurrent thought after reading a novel: “This would be better if it were shorter”. Of course, I’m biased, since as a writer I prefer short stories to novels. And beyond the personal, there are cultural reasons for my distaste for doorstoppers, as contemporary Latin American literature — which I tend to read the most — frequently errs on the side of the lower page count.

This might sound like an apologia for brevity, which would be on brand for me, but my point here is another: Do writers think about length as they think about other elements of their craft? My totally unsubstantiated, albeit unflinching, belief is that most don't, and instead just do what they are expected to do. I know I’ve been guilty of involuntary page thriftiness when writing in Spanish and word count inflation when writing in English. Since that’s the language I’m using for this piece, let me give you an example from my Anglophone misadventures: the manuscript of what later became Shitstorm, and what I learned after cutting it to a quarter of its length.

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I bet you’ve never heard of J. M. O’Neill.

Don’t worry, most haven’t heard a word about the Limerick man. To be fair, I don’t even remember how I got to him in the first place. It might have been through my friend and de facto adviser on all things Irish, Kevin Mullen; it might have been through one of my students. Somehow, a couple of years ago, I ended up buying a copy of O’Neill’s second novel — Duffy is Dead — from an online seller. It quickly became one of my favourite books.

The novel is set largely in the Dalston area of Hackney, the borough of London where I’ve lived most of my adult life. It follows the misadventures of an Irish publican named Calnan, as he strives to organise a sendoff for a deceased regular — a fellow countryman called Duffy, as you probably guessed. This endearing if bleak comedy is for many critics one of the most vivid accounts of the Irish experience in late 1970s and early 1980s London, for good reasons: heavy drinking, discrimination and police harassment, loneliness and camaraderie, grift and graft, unexpected solidarity — in under two hundred pages the book packs it all. If you can get your hands on a copy, don’t let it pass.

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J. M. O’Neill was 65 in 1987, when he published Duffy is Dead;1 his debut — the now equally obscure Open Cut — had been published a year before. Two other works followed in short succession, Canon Bang Bang (1989) and Commissar Connell (1992).2 In Bennett & Company: A Novel of Limerick in 1928, was published after a break, in 1998; a posthumous novel, Rellighan: Undertaker, came out the same year he died, 1999. I’ve always rated O’Neill’s dilatoriness. I can’t help feeling that too many writers rush to publish these days; I certainly did. It’s good to have some things to write about before you get started; I certainly didn’t.

What was O’Neill doing until he started churning out books? This obituary makes for an interesting read:

J. M. O'NEILL'S career as a playwright and novelist came comparatively late in a busy working life first as a bank employee, taking him from Ireland to England, then to Nigeria and Ghana, and finally as a publican in Islington, as the landlord of the Duke of Wellington, Balls Pond Road.3

It was at the Duke of Wellington, at the Sugawn, the pioneering pub theatre he started in 1967, that we saw the production of his first play, God is Dead on Balls Pond Road…

O’Neill was at the Duke of Wellington in the late 1970s when the large brewers were demanding their tenants committed themselves to expensive leases, which he refused to sign as being totally unreasonable. In 1980 he was finally forced to leave the pub and, becoming homeless, was housed by the council in Hornsey. He returned to Ireland in 1990.

A second, more extensive obituary published by The Guardian gives some more insight into the kind of chap O’Neill was, including the details that he played football in Ulster under a fake name, and worked in the London construction industry. A busy and colourful life, I guess; what terminally online folk now call “a portfolio career”. But besides what’s available in these write-ups, much of it repeated in later pieces here and there, and a short but beautiful documentary film by Paul Duane,4 there’s little information about O’Neill. Not even a Wikipedia page for him. This is a lacuna that makes me feel a lot better about my own digital irrelevance.

But do we need to know more about him to appreciate his work? I don’t think so. After all, good writing speaks for itself.

This Sunday I had a strange encounter with Mr O’Neill.

It happened in Stoke Newington, not terribly far from his pub, the Duke of Wellington. I was after a copy of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and I had visited a couple of local shops, without luck. My last calling point was to be Church Street Bookshop. Melville was missing there too but there was a mint used hardcover copy of Duffy is Dead, on sale for £1.50. The price was so insultingly low that buying it felt unavoidable, like some form of redress. There was a dedication on the front free endpaper. I could only make out “Good wishes” and “March 1989”, right at the top; the rest I barely registered. Every used book is an irretrievable story; an inscribed one adds a neglectful ghost to the equation. Unlike most readers of used books, I despise these messages, but for £1.50 I was willing to suspend my principles. I paid and left.

My daughter was waiting outside, finishing an ice cream. She asked if I’d had luck with Bartleby... I said that I hadn’t, but that I had found something better. I showed her the book and groaned that I regretted that it was signed. As I showed her the inscription I realised the surname of the signatory was “O’Neill”.

“Wait a minute,” I said; “I can’t make out the name… But the surname is the same as the author’s… Now that’s a coincidence!”

“It says Jerry, I’m pretty sure,” said my daughter. It did. Only then did I realise that there was a signature at the bottom-left. It was perfectly legible. It read: “JMONEILL”. Oh, and the book is a first edition too.

Now, either this is one of the most elaborate and niche literary pranks ever pulled off — a joke aimed at an audience of one — or I ended up with a signed copy of one of my favourite novels in a totally fortuitous manner. The former is absurdly unlikely; the latter, absurdly fortunate.

Either way, I’m happy.5

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The next stop in our journey through violence in 2026 is an essay by Walter Benjamin. First published in German as “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” in 1921, this is a notoriously difficult piece of writing. There are several translations available under the title “Critique of Violence”.1

Those in need of some help with this text might benefit from this conversation between philosophers Brad Evans and James Martel.

About the author: Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic who wrote prolifically about literature, politics, art, and history. His most famous works include The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Theses on the Philosophy of History, The Arcades Project, and Critique of Violence. Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou in 1940 after failing to cross from France into Spain while fleeing Nazi persecution. He is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

This is a free event for premium subscribers. Reply to this email to RSVP. Access link below paywall.

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I will not write about GrantaGate. I will not write about GrantaGate. I will not write about GrantaGate. OK, I’ll write about it, but only in passing.

In the unlikely case you live in a thermos, I’m referring to last week’s controversy involving Granta magazine and the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize. Three of the pieces shortlisted this year bear all the hallmarks of machine writing and it didn't take long for folk online to cry foul. When said stories were subsequently submitted to Pangram — an AI detector — two returned 100% AI use, the third, 89%.1 Granta published these pieces as part of a collaboration with the prize and the literary world went into an opinorrheic meltdown. The usual dim-witted takes were released into the void, from bigots blaming DEI for this potential scam, to identitarian grifters blaming everything and everyone but the alleged frauds. Granta’s excuse — that they uploaded these pieces they hadn’t chosen themselves to Claude and received inconclusive results — did little to put out the fire; the Commonwealth Foundation’s explanation — that authors submitting to the prize are expected to self-declare AI use, and that they are investigating — didn’t help either. Both responses were, to put it mildly, rather naive, proof for many opinologists that the publishing industry isn't ready for the AI takeover

My opinion on the effects of AI on literature remains boringly unchanged since we started talking about this topic three to four years ago. This escalation doesn’t change the basics, which for me can be narrowed down to the following five points:

1. The vast majority of literature produced historically is junk.

2. We believe that proportionally more literary junk is being produced these days because more people are writing than ever before, but also because a large number of literary critics are neglecting all critical duties in order to act as de facto book marketers.

3. This fertile anything-goes playing field is the perfect environment for AI junk to thrive, and yes, this tech produces junk faster than humans; but,

4. Human-generated junk isn’t necessarily better than the AI-generated type. In other words, the problem is junk, not who produces it.

5. On a more optimistic note, we now have a great opportunity to draw critical red lines and call out bad writing for what it is, without risking accusations of snobbery or elitism. In more specific terms, I mean that if a text looks as if AI could have written it, then it should be treated as junk, regardless of who produced it. This will be the case at least until AI starts delivering copy that doesn’t just rehash the most prevalent formulae and clichés.

Since I am of the idea that literature exists in spite of publishing, not because of it, whether this so-called industry is ready or not doesn’t bother me that much; and personally, I’m planning to keep writing my own stuff, even if one day I might be able to prompt C3P0 for a half-decent piece. That said, it is clear to me that the AI offensive has picked up speed and that we need to start asking some questions about the future of letters.

Where does literature exist today and where will it exist tomorrow? Will it exist at all a few years from now?

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the normalisation of the word content. I won’t repeat myself here, but I want to add something to that argument: AI isn’t as good at replicating literature as it is at replicating content. If AI ever ends up producing actual literature, it'll mean that literature and content have become indistinguishable, and when this happens, there’ll be little point in trying to salvage anything. Are we already there? I don’t think so. Will we get there eventually? I don’t think so either. Because content is purely transactional and I believe that literature — being the very human endeavour that it is — presses other affective buttons for those who care about it. I guess the Granta and Commonwealth Foundation controversy was upsetting for so many because content escaped its natural habitat — LinkedIn, Facebook, X threads, etc.2 — and stained a magazine and a prize some still associate with good writing, regardless of how often gatekeepers of this kind contribute to its ossification. It is pretty obvious to me that this will continue to happen. But there is something AI can’t steal from us, and that is literature as a shared experience.

We tend to think of writing as a solitary endeavour and to some extent it is, since most books are created in solitude. But once writing is shared it stops belonging only to the person who produced it to enter a social life of its own. Be it book lovers disagreeing about a text at a book club, an author reading to a half-empty room, or someone telling a story to a child at bedtime — all of these entail sharing a lived experience. This is where anyone who’s worrying about the AIfication of literature should focus their energies. Instead of spending your spare time uploading stories to AI detectors to nail the next literary fraudster, think about how you can help literature happen between people.

Lazy writers might be able to prompt their writing, but they won’t ever be able to stop the conversations literature starts and sustains.

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There’s an epidemic of middle-aged men filming themselves talking about life while walking through the English countryside. I mean on YouTube. During the past few weeks Mr Algo has been feeding me this tripe non-stop. Obviously, much like the infamous British far-right elfin complaining on Twitter that YouTube was showing him ads for gay dating apps, this is a public confession: yes, I’ve been searching for manly middle-aged content on YouTube.

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Last week I posted a piece about why writers shouldn’t ignore reviews on lowly sites like Goodreads, etc. Interestingly, just a couple of minutes after hitting send, I received an email that made me question the wisdom of my advice.

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The sender claimed to be an “Author Visibility Strategist” who happens to run a 35,000-member reading group on Goodreads; in the email there were links to what appeared to be a professional website and to the group’s page.1 The website was an obvious red flag,2 but the Goodreads group seemed legit, and right at the top of their home page was the following warning:

So the setup was clear enough. What confused slightly me was that the email made no mention of money. Here’s the full text:

As you can see, no money talk. But if the AI-sculpted tone of the email, its opening flattery pivoting to a problem and a hinted solution, the vagueness of the proposal, and the closing engagement question don’t make it clear this is a scam, I don’t know what would. Since I was curious to see where the imbroglio was going, I replied anyway, saying that of course they could feature my book. And I even briefly entertained their craft question. After all I’m an author — therefore starved for attention — and this was someone who had read my book. Who am I to judge my readers’ morals?

Sure enough, another message arrived ten minutes later. This one, to keep it brief, informed me that the “feature [was] locked” and that members of the group would soon start posting their impressions, plus some more brown-nosing about my literary choices. Then they moved straight into the scam, offering me a “no-obligation analysis of the three specific discoverability levers that would reposition the collection for the readership it deserves;” this, they said, was separate from the group and the feature was happening anyway. I replied, saying that I would mention it to my publishers, and get back in touch if they were interested, that for now I was looking forward to reading what the members made of the book. They came back minutes later saying that they understood, no problem at all. There was silence for a week. A couple of days ago they sent a follow-up email:

Here the scammer shows that they might suffer from short term memory loss, or rather, that they are running this con on many writers at once and can't keep track: they are asking me to answer a question I already answered, and the feature isn’t locked any more. I’m sure you can see how this works: they bait you, get your hopes up, and only then go for the ask. In other words, the old “the first one is free, the second one is paid for,” of your regular drug dealer.

What makes this exchange even more interesting is that this wasn’t the only scammer who got in touch these past few days. Over the weekend, another AI-churned email arrived, again from an alleged Goodreads user running a reading group.3 I won’t bore you to death with too many details — it’s basically more AI slop, more praise for the “atmosphere” of my stories, more jargonese — “reading cycles,” “features”, and “next steps forward.” To have some fun with this one, I replied using an AI bot, and I exchanged several ridiculous emails back and forth. This dialogue between machines had some beauty to it, I must admit. For example:

After four or five messages I got bored and blocked them.

A third email — from another alleged Goodreads reading group moderator — landed this morning. I won’t even bother with that one here, since it’s just more of the same. I expect more scammy missives to arrive in the future too.

#

Any writer who’s been in the game long enough knows that literary cons are aplenty and that most start in the same way — telling you how great you are. I remember when I was a naïve young wannabe-auteur and sent my first, horrible attempt at a book to a Spanish vanity publisher I had taken for the real thing — they came back with similar generic praise and a request for €3,000 to publish me. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. What makes this new scam remarkable in any way is their artful use of technology. And I don’t mean the AI-generated emails — that part of the operation is very sloppy — but the fact that they sounded like they knew my book. And to some extent, they do.

Because a couple of weeks ago I learned that the book in question has been pirated and is available on a very strange site. After some thought, I’m now pretty certain the scammers got hold of this version and crawled it using AI to get a few lines that make it sound like they read it. If you look at the opening email (Exhibit A), you will see this clearly: the opening two paragraphs are specific to my book, even mentioning one of the stories by name; the rest is a generic copy-paste job, with a couple of tweaks here and there. Their amnesiac follow-up email (Exhibit B) is 100% generic nonsense — the kind of message they must send en masse to marks when the communication has gone quiet. Clever little scam they’ve got going, don’t you think?

Anyway, be careful out there, especially if you’ve had a book published or pirated in recent times.4 Sadly, it seems not even scammers read books these days.

But hey, at least AI does.

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P.S. If you appreciate this PSA, contribute to my own literary scam by getting a premium subscription to this newsletter, tossing some coins my way, or buying my latest book.

A Foreign Country is the Past

You will have seen it enough on your favourite social media platform: an Author Online reminding you that thou shalt not look upon what readers say of thy work on Goodreads. This generally happens after someone bumps into a negative review of one of their recent masterpieces. And perhaps for that reason there’ll be plenty of sympathetic replies to the self-pitying commandment, mainly from other writers, who’ll agree that one is best avoiding those plebeian circles of Hell.

There are many things I find irritating about this faux noble indifference, and I can’t say which one irks me the most. Is it the humblebragging about being a published author? Is it the arrogance of expecting everyone to love your work and reacting like it’s a personal affront when someone doesn’t? Is it the snobbery of believing that the unqualified masses shouldn't have opinions about books in unqualified spaces? Is it the pretence that writers don’t actively seek out what others think about their work on Goodreads, on the StoryGraph, and in practically every interaction they have with another human being? Is it all of the above combined? I can’t say and it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that if you are wilfully ignoring what others say about your work, you are missing a trick. And by the way, this applies to any writer at any stage of their career, not just the published elite.

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Because this is a problem that starts long before anyone gets published.

It begins right in our heads, when we start concocting ideas about our greatness. If we keep writing long enough, it eventually morphs into mistrust of any harsh but constructive criticism by peers. If left to grow, it stratifies into resistance to actually insightful editorial input, which makes most writers a nightmare to work with, as every-fucking-editor-who-has-ever-lived will tell you. And in its most acute manifestation it ends up becoming disdain towards the riff-raff on book-review sites, and their penchant for telling us what they really think, without any expectation other than being heard. It may evolve from mild delusion into outright contempt for those we need the most — readers — but this is all part of the same malady: a disconnection between how writers perceive their work and how others do.

What do I mean? That readers lack all the unwritten information that lives in the writer’s head; that readers come with their own agendas, and that their interpretations sometimes depart radically from a writer’s intentions; that reading is a creative act, and that readers write a text as much as its author, as the French bloke who was killed by a laundry van taught us. A serious writer is conscious of this gap between intention and reception; a serious writer is always interested in learning how many of the important bits of the work were perceived as intended, and how many weren’t, to make adjustments, if these are deemed necessary.

A serious writer doesn’t choose the epistemic self-sealing of not having anyone challenge their work.

Tips here

We often hear that writing is a lonely métier and there is much truth to this. You spend years working alone on a manuscript, then you send it out and get nothing back for months. Most rejection letters these days give you little to work with, since most editors are over-stretched and unable to give proper feedback; which means that you often only hear back about your submission when someone decides to publish it, if you are lucky. Should this happen you’ll get varying levels of editorial support, depending on how much your publishers can be bothered. Then, once the book is out, instead of a Greek choir singing your talents or failures you’ll get more silence, since literary pages are a dying breed, review space scarcer than ever. This is where these bastard platforms come in handy — this is the way most published writers will receive input today, like it or not. I say don’t dodge Hell; instead take what is useful, and ignore the maniacs, who are certainly many and hardly unique to Goodreads.

One more thing, before I head off and leave you to more interesting things… The other day, I teased some of the ideas in this piece on the Notes app, as I occasionally do when I’ve had one beer too many and fall for the algorithmic sirens and their singing. Someone replied that maybe it isn’t arrogance but insecurity that moves authors to ignore what is said on these sites. Let’s pretend for a moment that the terminally online auteurs I have in mind don’t spend their time refreshing their author pages on Goodreads; let’s also pretend that someone truly insecure will manage to publish anything… How do you deal with potential negativity towards your work when you aren’t the embodiment of authorial confidence? Well, you can always do a Richard Dawkins and get brown-nosed by an AI girlfriend into believing that you are the next James Joyce. Alternatively, you can develop a thick skin and start embracing discomfort.

Only one of these will make you a better writer.

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The reference is, of course, to Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brando) in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Terry, a former boxer turned dockworker, utters the famous line to his brother, lamenting the fight he was forced to throw, and the career he spoiled this way. He could have been someone, instead he ended up being a bum.

These words often ring in my head. Not because I might have flirted with professional boxing, but because of my rather remorseful relationship with writing. What could have been of my life had I devoted that same energy to something else? Who could I have become?

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Red terror, sensationalism, and an innocent woman whose life is turned upside down by the tabloid press.

Come and discuss Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, as part of this year’s Reading Clinic theme on violence. We’ll be working with the translation by Leila Vennewitz, but as always, if you can read the original, please do.

About the author: Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) was a German novelist and short-story writer. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972, his work is known for its sharp moral scrutiny of power and the effects of war.

This is a free event for premium subscribers. Please register below.

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It took me more than a decade of owning cats to figure out what I will tell you in five minutes. Actually, what I’ll tell you in seconds: pictures of cats command more attention than essays.

It’s not that the public are hopelessly stupid. No. It’s just that no one has a mind to read serious stuff any more. The world is a terrible place: war, death, collapse and decay, all around us. There’s too much writing being released into the void all the time; too many words spelling out how bad things are, as if we couldn’t figure that out alone. Enough of interpretation! What everyone needs is pictures of cats.

Or at least you do.

I’m pretty disappointed in myself that I didn't think of releasing cat content before. All these years on this platform, begging for engagement, competing with scriveners who are much smarter (or perhaps just better at PR) than me, and all I had to do was give you some pretty cats. I bet that you are already feeling better about life in general. Aren’t they cute, Cat P and Cat C? Aren’t they all fluffy and catty? Have you liked this post yet? If not, hit the like button now. You know you want to do it.

You might have noticed that I opened this text promising to quickly reveal something that’s taken me years to figure out. I’ve seen YouTubers do this; that is, promising a revelation, something hard that you can comprehend without the slightest effort. I understand that this is a foolproof way of getting attention these days. Perhaps I should have waited for my revelation until later in the post, to keep you hooked until the end. But then, with all these pictures of cats, there’s no way you’ll get distracted.

Look, here comes another one!

To be absolutely honest with you, I don’t really know where this post is going. I only know that yesterday I was sitting in the garden — it was a beautiful sunny day and the cats were prancing about — and I thought, “Hey, I should try some cat content on Substack, see if that sticks.” And here I am today, trying to figure out how I’ll continue this piece.

Maybe I should treat you with a listicle. Listicles are also all the rage right now, the perfect format for an anaemic attention such as yours. Here’s a list of my top five cats. If you feel like I’m missing any domestic feline, please hit the reply button and tell me what you have in mind. Please note that I only read emails from premium subscribers.

My favourite cats:

1. Cat P

2. Cat C

3. Behemoth, the cat in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

4. The cat in “Wop-A-Din-Din,” a song by the Red House Painters

5. Doraemon

There are many reasons why I feel the way I feel about these cats. But that’s for me to know and you to guess. Unless I run out of ideas in the future and decide to recycle the cat angle.

But since a piece without a candid paragraph or two would be frowned upon today, let me tell you a bit about my life with cats. To begin with, I didn’t like them. This wasn’t a conscious decision; it’s just that I had never lived with them. It was only back in 2016 that they were introduced into my life, when a boxed Cat P was given to me by a strange old man in a car park in Shoreditch.

When we arrived at the house and Cat P was released from his cardboard prison, he spent the first 24 hours hiding under a sofa. Here I thought, “I can relate to this anti-social impetus. I will like cats from now on.” And that’s how I became a cat person, to quote the infamous and over-hyped short story. Then in 2019, Cat C joined the family in circumstances it wouldn’t be safe to reveal here.

Now I can’t imagine my life without them, and I’d certainly have more; seven would be an ideal number — there’s something magical about it — but I stopped at two because vets, pet insurance, and cat food are extortionate in this country.

Feed Cat P and Cat C here

I think cats suit my disposition. I’ve never been pet-inclined — I hate the idea of squeezing the animality out of an animal to such an extent that it can’t survive without me. I don’t like dogs (but I like them more than their owners); I don’t like goldfish; I don’t like hamsters; I don’t like birds; I don’t like quirky pets either. But I can appreciate the guilt-free, almost Nietzschean, individualism of a cat — that nonchalance and self-sufficiency so many needy people confuse for coldness.

I feel like I’m reaching the end of my ability to write about cats without hating myself, since among my pet peeves are the sad folk who create an identity out of domestic animals. So I’ll take a pseudo-intellectual turn now, going meta-textual, but not too deep — don’t worry, you won’t need to focus too hard. One of my favourite directors, famous cat-lover Chris Marker once said, “A cat is never on the side of power.” I think this dictum is frequently misinterpreted, and I’m here to set the record straight. What he meant is that a cat is never on the side of power, because a cat is power itself. Now that’s something to aspire to.

To close, I would like to offer my own wisdom, remixing Marker’s words: “A cat is never on the right side of the door.” If you’ve ever had cats, you’ll be nodding in agreement.

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P.S. Another listicle. Five cat-related books:

Cat, Katharine M. Rogers

If Cats Disappeared From The World, Genki Kawamura (tr. Eric Selland)

All My Cats, Bohumil Hrabal (tr. Paul Wilson)

The Master and Margarita, Mihail Bulgakov (tr. Hugh Aplin)

On Cats, Doris Lessing

This week I listened to an interesting podcast: Everything Is Fake and Nobody Cares, by for the BBC. Across six episodes, the series explores how deceit and fakery have become normalised, first through the combined forces of the Spectacle and social media, and now through the influx of AI-generated slop. Its main thesis is that whereas in the past fakery would be frowned upon, these days it is perfectly acceptable: “fake it till you make it” has become simply “fake it”; whether the “make it” ever materialises or not is irrelevant. This thesis is explored across a range of spheres, from politics to wrestling, from legacy to social media, and on to podcasting. A single paragraph for a six-episode series is a disservice, so I’ll invite you to listen to it. What I want to flag here is one specific thread the show picks up but doesn’t fully unpack, not in the way I have in mind.

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In the first instalment, Bartlett interviews the head of product of an AI company that specialises in podcasts hosted by AI personalities — one of the most interesting oxymorons I have come across of late. The company releases about 3,000 weekly episodes, and these are downloaded an average of 750,000 times a month. Needless to say that these are big numbers. But then, we are at the point of the Big Churn where the only way to be noticed is by saturation.1 This logic has been at work for a while: social media platforms have long privileged output over quality — if you want to be noticed on any of those sites you have to produce (for free), and be very prolific. What began as the participatory fantasy of Web 2.0 was eventually streamlined into the automated excess of AI, now spilling into other media.

Also very interesting is that, according to the interviewee, the company has found that their listeners don’t mind that the hosts are AI bots, and that the younger the listener, the less they seem to care. This preference is said to stem from a mistrust of human beings, with AI emerging as the winner when it comes to reliability. I would like to say that I found this rather dystopian revelation shocking, or at least surprising, but the fact is that I didn’t. In my experience, the average person doesn’t care much about who produces or delivers what they consume — the one thing most care about is the end product.2 Or shall we say the end content?

And this is where I wanted to get: when did the word content become so normalised? I don’t mean the word itself, but its current use: in a flattening, omnibus sense, where a novel, an essay, a film, an Instagram post, a YouTube video, or porn all sit under the same lexical umbrella. I have a very brief theory, one totally lacking in bibliographical notes, based solely on anecdotal evidence: I’d say the germinal moment was the mid-2000s, when social media platforms started to become popular, and the output of human creativity stopped being medium-specific in order to become platform-facing; by the 2010s, with the birth of the so-called creator economy, the term was standardised as the default label for anything produced for online consumption; by the 2020s, it was totally normalised, crossing fully and without a hint of irony into everyday speech. I’ll start repeating this and see if it sticks. That’s how things work now, don’t they?

Now seriously, this pearl-clutching over the meaning of a word might come across as pedantic. I’d contend that this isn’t a neutral umbrella term: whenever it was normalised, content, as used today, is the linguistic residue of a distribution system that no longer cares what a thing really is, only that it can be monetised and made to circulate. Why would it matter whether it has been produced by humans or AI? Why would anyone care whether it is real or fake?

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That time of the year when we end up somewhere for Easter, briefly becoming the most diverse bunch in the vicinity. This year, we landed again in Oxfordshire, in what could be fairly described as Jeremy Clarkson’s Cotswolds. It’s an easy trip from London: just a two-hour drive and you are delivered into the type of bucolic beauty city-dwellers are so fond of, so much so that they’re often willing to brush aside the brutality and backwardness that underpins it.1 Say what you will about the pestilence of cities — crime, pollution, and lives lived in cells, like chickens — but the Neanderthal to Homo sapiens ratio remains reassuringly favourable in the Smoke.

Crossing the M25 towards the heart of this island always fills me with dread. Even before you get to Ballard’s territory — the motorways and their poetry of flyovers and roadkill; the illusory freedom of speed — you have to drive along grim circular roads cut through densely populated areas. Here the same thoughts recur, every time: How is it legal to build by such busy roads? What’s the life expectancy of someone born here? Can you get used to the constant hum of passing cars? Can you ever open your window if you live in one of these houses? Or is it that the circular road has been built after the houses, deeming them all but unsaleable?

This depressing landscape is made worse by a succession of nondescript depots. Storage companies mostly, though one can only guess. At least two stand out in their own way: one has a Hawker Hunter fighter jet suspended in an exhibition space at the top; another has opted for an amphibious landing craft of some sort, in order to advertise their services. For some reason, in these dieseled necks of the woods, war is repurposed as a marketing gimmick.

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Eventually, after I lost count of the roundabouts, we made it to our destiny, a tiny village west of Oxford. I will spare you the domestic minutiae, and cut to the chase with something I found interesting: the River Thames is only a 20-minute walk from where we were staying. There I headed as soon as the weather allowed it.

When I think of the Thames, the first things that come to my mind are the majestic views from Wapping, Marlow sailing away for his incursion into the Congo in The Heart of Darkness, the engineering feat that is the Thames Barrier in Greenwich, or the fact that it took me several years to realise that the river is tidal,2 and that sometimes it flows east and other times west. I wouldn’t have been able to recognise the river here, had I not had a GPS map telling me its name.

I could bore you to death with some pastoralesque depiction of what I saw, but in the spirit of being practical — that is, sending out this rushed write-up before the weekend — I’ll provide you with a brief list:

• I saw the river, obviously, and I saw a pretty bridge.

• I saw pylons.

• I saw lots of sheep. Some were adults; others had just been born (it’s lambing season). One of the adult sheep was eating a placenta, which I first mistook for a piece of skirt beef.

• I saw cows. I stepped on their excrement, which I failed to see. I thought of skit beef again.

• My most remarkable find was a WWII pillbox. If I’m right — and so is The Pillbox Study Group Website — this would have been a Type 24. These were mainly built along the GHQ Line to defend against a Nazi invasion. I never expected to find one of these so deep in the country.3

Then I saw a pub, and here my walk along the river came to a pause.

In this pub — which, in the spirit of anonymity that governs this piece, will remain unnamed — I fell into a beer-induced meditation, and had an idea: why not walk the length of the Thames one day? Maybe I could plan the walk so that I spend the night in inns along the Thames Path? A quick Google search confirmed that this was possible, and that many others had done it before. It’s only 298 kilometres after all.

Sadly, two conversations intruded from nearby, and my peripatetic rumination dissipated. The first one, between a young lad sitting in a corner of the bar and the young barmaid — or perhaps I should say “between a young lad against the young barmaid,” even if the phrasing is grammatically incorrect. In clear flirtatious mode, he opened every line with “Can I offer you some life advice,” before launching into some banality, like how you don’t need to wait for a pint of Guinness to settle, or why Chinese takeaway is better than Indian, why university is overrated, why Android is better than macOS, and so on. She looked uncomfortable, so the thought crossed my mind that I should offer him some life advice of my own, remarking that she very likely thought he was a wanker. But just as I was about to stage this intervention, he fell quiet. The silence didn’t last long, since just as abruptly, the second conversation began: a man dressed in a fluorescent jacket walked into the pub and started to narrate his adventures loudly for everyone present — these involved a flat tyre, a pump, and a neighbour who complained that he was making too much noise in his own (the narrator’s) driveway. He went over the story several times, getting louder, but at least sticking to the same details. Then he addressed me directly.

“Can you believe she complained about me making noise in my own driveway?”

“What time was it?” I asked.

“Quarter to six in the morning,” he said. “She said I should go around the corner and make all that noise by Manny’s empty field!” he added.4

“Well, it was quite early,” I said.

“But it was my own driveway!”

“Sound doesn’t care whose driveway it was,” I said.

“Come on mate! She didn’t even have to go to work today!” he said indignantly and walked out. I found his exit strange but didn’t complain about it. Two minutes later he came back and started telling everyone the story again, this time ignoring me. Here the lad asked for another pint, signalling that it couldn’t be too long until he restarted with his life advice. So I made my own exit and retraced my steps along the river.

When I got to the sheep, the recent mother had finished eating the placenta; several other lambs might have been born, but I can’t be one hundred percent sure as I didn’t count them. At some point during my walk back to the farm I got over that ridiculous idea of walking the length of the Thames.

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Are our times particularly bad?

This question crossed my mind as I kept refreshing a live page about the mess unfolding in the Middle East. Or somewhere else. I’m not a stranger to calamities, but this time I can’t point to a single place on the map and say, “Hey, people aren’t having it that bad in X;” and when there is no “X” anymore, it’s impossible to tell anything apart. Right now, everyone everywhere is stuck up to their neck in a choppy sea of shit. Several contemporaneous wars, the threat of a fuel-fuelled global recession, intolerance and anti-humanism, the AI-pocalypse — you’ve heard about it all. And yet I can’t help wondering whether this sense that everything’s going to the dogs is simply what it feels like to be human.

I don’t want to sound optimistic; if you keep reading you’ll see I won’t. For now, bear with me while I engage in a thought experiment.

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Imagine a woman born in Europe in 1900; let’s call her Anna. By the time Anna reached her mid-forties she would have lived through the Great Depression, the Spanish flu, two world wars, the rise and violent fall of several totalitarian regimes, the bureaucratisation and automatisation of extermination, and the administrative violence of borders shifting under her feet. Her 50s would have been characterised by economic scarcity, rationing, and rubble. If she survived into her 60s and 70s she would have been there for the Cold War, maybe losing sleep over a potential nuclear blast wiping her off the face of the Earth. If she lived into her 80s she would have been entertained by so-called precision bombing live on TV, and grown tired of a steady rotation of proxy conflicts, coups, and botched interventions. If she made it into her 90s she would have watched the Cold War end not in peace but in fragmentation and nihilism. If she lived even longer, she would have seen ethnic cleansing and concentration camps return to the outskirts of Europe. And I’m very likely leaving a lot out.1

Do you reckon Anna might have asked herself the same question? Imaginary as she is, it wouldn’t be far-fetched that someone living during the rocky 20th century could have wondered, at one point or another, whether the times were as bad as they seemed to be.2 I don’t have it in me to carry the thought experiment further and hypothesise how Anna would have answered, whether she might have concluded that things were indeed exceptionally grim, or imagined someone in the early 19th century and counted herself lucky not to have died from a regular cold, during a cholera epidemic, or thanks to Napoleon’s whims. In any case, her conclusion is irrelevant to where I want to get: this is a question that can’t have a positive answer. If our times are exceptionally bad, it means that the sea of shit might soon end up drowning us. And if things have always been this dreadful, then it means a correction might not be around the corner. I told you I wasn’t aiming for optimism!

That’s my reading. The question is what to do with all of this, how to keep trying our best to stay afloat as the scatological tide continues to swell. Sadly, I don’t have any suggestions. If you do have any, please enlighten me. In the meantime, I’ll keep refreshing the live page, fully aware that this useless gesture won’t stop me going under.

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Earlier this week, unable to write, I did some admin work on this site. Little tasks no one but me cares about, like rewriting the intro page or moving this or that essay to this or that section. It crossed my mind to create a “Fiction” page and re-home some of the posts there — mainly so I could pin Open Mic, the novella I recently released for free, making it more visible — but it quickly became clear that this was a bad idea. Not because I might be allergic to self-promotion, but because this label would have flattened many of the other pieces that live here. Perhaps I should have settled for “narrative” instead…

What I have in mind is the Spanish-speaking literary scene, where many publishers use “narrativa” to mean “fiction,” and within it to cover novels, short stories, novellas, etc. — I like that lack of differentiation. I’m not entirely convinced “narrative” carries the same weight in English, or that it translates particularly well. And yet, it reflects my writing much better than the blunt split between fiction and nonfiction.

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Last year I published a short piece called The Goat — a pastiche of esoteric clichés and a parody of writers of occult London. Later in the summer I returned to some of these themes and characters, in a psychogeographical pseudo-essay on Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. I’m quite fond of these two texts, and I think the reason why they work well — for me, at least — is that they operate in the interstices between fiction and nonfiction. There are many things that contribute to this effect. In The Goat, it’s all about the use of the first person in narration, the number of realistic details, all the background info about Blake (introduced quite poker-faced, even when ridiculous and outlandish), and a certain topographic coherence — anyone who knows that area of London will be able to recognise the locations, testify that there is a pub with that name, and that there is a statue of a goat in the place I’m claiming it is, and so on. In the case of the Hawksmoor pantomime, it’s all about the essayistic register and the use of photos in order to deliver a believable narrative that only at the very end is fictionalised. Many of the “This is not a diary” pieces in this newsletter work in the same way. Take this one, for example: the background story is 100% fact — a drunken Scouse did gift me a very nice and expensive coat at The Blue Posts in Soho last year — but the events didn’t quite take place in the manner I wrote about them, nor did this fine man speak like a Victorian gentleman. When I write these stories, I’m deliberately working in the overlap between reality and invention. The same kind of blurring runs through my books, achieved along similar lines. If you are curious, just read them and spare me having to explain myself too much.

Where am I going with this? First of all, I’m not claiming to be special or necessarily out there — many writers work like this. What I’m doing is asking whether this well-established taxonomy is actually useful to the reader. Do we really need a set of instructions for how to approach a text?

Because that’s what the label “fiction” does. It tells you what attention to deploy; it preprocesses the text before you’ve even had a chance to fix your eyes on it. And in so doing it removes the pleasure of uncertainty.1 There are — of course — entire subindustries that exploit the opposite impulse. If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you will be aware how little love I have for memoirs. If you haven’t and don’t wish to read the linked piece above, it all boils down to self-commodification, navel-gazing, and the exhibitionist/voyeuristic contract writers and readers sign when a book claims to tell the Truth, or a personal version of it.2

True and false are slippery categories, especially in writing. Memory is selective, sometimes fraudulently so. Fiction, no matter how fantastical, is always based on the ontological compromise we call the real, and written in a real language, unless the writer intentionally wishes to disrupt understanding.3 This instability alone makes the prescriptive use of these labels misleading.4 Sure, book marketers and booksellers need to classify books so that they can sell them, but that’s their problem. Readers, on the other hand, could do with more freedom when it comes to approaching a text. Or at least, I think you should. Especially if you ever find yourself reading my “narrative”.

So, here’s my modest invitation: engage with whatever you have before you without asking what it is, at least not immediately. Don’t worry too much about telling fact from fiction. Read first, decide later, if you really must.

Or better yet, don’t.

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P.S. Get Open Mic below. It’s one hundred percent based on fact.

Following on our topic this year — violence — we’ll be taking a theoretical turn in late April, to discuss Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Violence”.

Arendt’s essay is a sharp dismantling of the idea that power and violence are equivalent.

About the author:
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-American historian and philosopher whose work examines politics, totalitarianism, and the conditions of modern life.

This is a free event for premium subscribers. Please register below.

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This post may contain an unhealthy amount of candour. For your own safety, it has been paywalled.

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In October 1974, Georges Perec sat for three days at cafés around Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, determined to record everything in his notebook: passing buses and cars, the movements of pigeons across the sky, overheard conversations, changes in the light, people entering and leaving the local church, and so on. These observations became Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, first published in the French journal Cause commune in 1975.1 It sounds tedious, but this is actually a beautiful read. Few pieces of writing capture better the existential texture of everyday minutiae — what Perec would term the infra-ordinary — than these notes. In just sixty-odd pages, Tentative… breathes with life and mortality; whether this is by accident or design, I can’t say. In any case, what Perec is doing here is demonstrating that it’s entirely possible to create a fully realised text out of scattered fragments, instead of clearly structured narratives.2

But if I mention the book today, it isn't for its literary merit. I’m more interested in how it gestures toward a practice that can help us write on those days when ideas aren’t forthcoming. Sketching, is its name.

For sketching to work, it is important to set some rules:3

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Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to write. This will be an extremely obvious statement to anyone who’s been subscribed to this newsletter for a while, since here I do little besides thinking aloud about writing. So let me be more specific: what I actually meant to say is that I’ve been going through one of my writerly crises of faith.

As you might know, these normally manifest after I receive my royalty statements, but this one in particular was triggered by a very playful book by Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañía.1 I mentioned this book in passing a couple of weeks ago, but bear with me for the brief repetition. In Bartleby y compañía Vila-Matas explores the phenomenon of writers who quit the craft, often to never return to the page. There are a number of gripping reasons why they might have arrived at this decision, ranging from the sad to the outlandish, but the most interesting aspect of this work, in my opinion, is its reminder that literary production is always shadowed by its non-existence. In other words, quitting is always an option; sometimes even the wisest one. A writer must choose to write; or rather, a writer must choose not to quit, every single time the pen is at hand. And here enters my chronic doubt: what reasons do I have not to quit? How can I justify my words? What benchmark should I use to weigh their success?2

That writing often feels like talking to a wall is a cliché, but it is one of those clichés that exist for a reason: writing truly is a lonely métier. And for most indie writers,3 this wall is soundproofed, and often not even an echo comes back when we talk to it (or shout at it). So why insist? Surely there are better things to do with our time?

And blah blah blah, the usual laments, for which I apologise unreservedly.

Buy me a beer

All of this said, I feel that Vila-Matas’ book depends on a significant misconception: writing isn’t the same as publishing. We can’t be certain that the writers in Bartleby y compañía stopped writing; we only know that they stopped publishing. This is a common error of judgement among writers, one sometimes taken to ridiculous places, such as when some interpret Osvaldo Lamborghini’s cheeky boutade — “First to publish, then to write!” — literally, and end up releasing terrible books. Should writing be reduced to that thing that might or might not happen after the act of writing per se, that is, publication?4 What about writing to make sense of the world and of ourselves in it? I feel that this is what actually keeps so many of us, minnows, hooked. Writing as sense-making and not much else.

And yet, even under the banner of this superior calling, it’s hard not to channel Bartleby and declare “I would prefer not to”, and dedicate oneself to something else, especially in these hyper-connected times. Writing here on Substack, my words are judged by a junta of metrics that include open rates, reposts, likes, premium subscriptions, and so on. It’s impossible not to feel the weight of these cold indicators, no matter how clear my motivations might be. What does it mean to release a text here and not receive the instant validation I think it deserves? Does it mean that it failed? And if the like or repost buttons are pressed a number of times I judge appropriate, how do I even know that these were genuine gestures of appreciation, instead of simply social media-powered ticks? There is no way to tell any of this. And therefore, all these metrics are nothing but noise, noise that it would be better to ignore. “I would prefer not to” can also mean “I would prefer not to engage with bullshit”. Doing a Bartleby might primarily be about refusal, yes, but refusal can be liberating.

And this brings us to my notebooks. Some years ago, I wrote about them and my desire to turn them into tinder for my summer barbecues. After all, these notebooks are just practice, and one doesn’t keep records of practice. But what if these notebooks were my most important work? What if the reason I can’t get rid of them is that they are the purest form of writing I do? These notebooks, written with no other reader in mind but myself… Maybe this is what writing looks like before it becomes performance?

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The first thing I think of when I think of the sea isn’t the sea at all, but my childhood. More specifically, my childhood seaside holidays in Mar del Plata, Argentina. In case you aren’t well versed in geography, the large body of water I have in mind is the South Atlantic. As a kid, we’d spend some weeks there every summer with my family. For decades this was the only sea I knew. No wonder it left a strong impression on me.

Mar del Plata is the Brighton of Argentina in many ways; the sea being cold and unapologetically green-slash-brown being the main one. I have fond memories of spending too many hours in the freezing water as a child: crumpled fingers and toes, stomach upset, second-degree burns on my shoulders and neck. My mum would struggle to get me out of the sea and back to the hotel. In recent years it’s been up to my other half and offspring to pull me back to the shore. I don’t like to swim; I don’t like to surf; I don’t scuba-dive. I just like to stand there in the water, staring towards the horizon, while being buffeted by the waves.

I often feel like I harbour a repressed compulsion to walk into the sea without thinking of coming back. I wouldn’t say this is “suicidal ideation” or anything like that, since there are much more practical and pleasant ways to go than drowning. It’s more of a desire to become one with the sea. How can someone not want to become one with it?

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The second thing that comes to mind when I think of the sea is an obscure 1978 film called The Bermuda Depths. This is an American and Japanese co-production for TV, directed by Tom Kotani and written by Arthur Rankin Jr. It stars Leigh McCloskey, Carl Weathers, Connie Sellecca and Burl Ives, among others.

The plot is rather corny, as is often the case with TV films.

Magnus — Leigh McCloskey — is a shy, sensitive boy who, while living on Bermuda, makes friends with a mysterious girl named Jennie Haniver — Connie Sellecca. Jennie appears mysteriously connected to the sea and to a local legend about a giant sea turtle. Magnus falls for her spell, but their friendship is shadowed by strange events, including a terrible storm and his father being eaten alive by said turtle while working in a marine lab.

Years later, now a young man, Magnus returns to the island and he bumps into Jennie again. The giant turtle reappears too. Then Carl Weathers shows up as a marine biologist, except, in my 1980s mind, he was still Apollo Creed from Rocky, inexplicably moonlighting in oceanography — it turns out that actors can play more than one part.

The film unfolds as a melancholic tale of forbidden love and longing, with the ocean as a backdrop. Jennie has something to do with the devil too.

I’ll stop there. I don’t want to spoil the film for you, in case you want to watch it.

The interesting thing about The Bermuda Depths as a cultural artefact is that it seems to have left a strong impression on many people my age, as I have discussed at length before. In a nutshell, lots of kids who grew up watching telly in the late 70s and early 80s remember catching the film once, then spending years trying to track it down. We all remember the haunting music, the strange and confusing story. Many of us also remember that it featured Apollo Creed.

I could never get my head around this fascination. No other film has haunted me like this, not even films that I consider much better. Is there perhaps a secret message in this movie for me? Or was I just an impressionable kid?

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The third thing I think of when I think of the sea is another film, one from Canada: Whale Music, from 1994, directed by Richard J. Lewis, and starring Maury Chaykin and Cyndy Preston. The film is based on a novel by Paul Quarrington, which I haven’t read.

Whale Music entails a young female misfit — Claire, played by Cyndy Preston — bumping into an aged burnt-out rock star who lives in a tattered mansion by the sea — Desmond, played by Maury Chaykin. The aged rocker is haunted by the calling of the whales, and he wants to make them part of his music. Needless to say, Claire and Desmond fall in love — an age-gap romance that, if released today would eclipse the whales entirely. Other things happen until “The End” appears on the screen.

The soundtrack, by Rheostatics, is excellent — particularly the tune “Claire”, which confusedly isn’t in their earlier album Whale Music, also inspired by Quarrington’s novel, but in Introducing Happiness, from the same year as the film. It was while trying to find this soundtrack that I had one of the best maritime epiphanies of my life and I bumped into a field recording titled Songs of the Humpback Whale, from 1970. It should be evident that this album is just whales doing their aural whale thing. There is a second album, from 1977, which is a good follow-up: the aptly titled Deep Voices: The Second Whale Record.1 Both albums are a refuge in these days of AI music, autotune fuckery, and generally underwhelming humanity. I particularly recommend “Three Whale Trip,” from the first album. At sixteen minutes and thirty seconds, it sounds like Pink Floyd meets Krzysztof Penderecki meets whales.

These field recordings, the film, and Rheostatics’ albums are linked in my head as a single memory. I can’t think of one without thinking about the others. Only the sea can generate such mnemonic clusters.

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There are other things I think of when I think of the sea. I’ll list them below, in the order in which they come to my mind. Like any list, this one will be incomplete, and very likely leave you unsatisfied. Feel free to write your own.

These books

The Sea: A Cultural History, by John Mack; Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville; Oceano Mare, by Alessandro Baricco — available in English as Ocean Sea (tr. Alastair McEwen); The Oxford Book of the Sea, by Jonathan Raban; La invención de Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares — available in English as The Invention of Morel (tr. Ruth L. C. Simms); A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid.

These (other) films

La cruz del sur, by Pablo Reyero; L’Avventura, by Michelangelo Antonioni; The Lighthouse, by Robert Eggers; Solaris, by Andrei Tarkovsky; Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker; Stromboli, by Roberto Rossellini; The Beaches of Agnès, by Agnès Varda; La Terra Trema, by Luchino Visconti.

These albums

Man of Aran, by Sea Power; Fisherman’s Blues and This Is the Sea, by The Waterboys; Pacific Ocean Blue, by Dennis Wilson; Good God’s Urge, by Porno for Pyros; Eden’s Island, by Eden Ahbez; Memories of a Color, by Stina Nordenstam (mainly because of its cover); Diving Belle / Sides, by Discovery of Magnetic North (particularly the track Jenny Hanniver, and the importance of the Magnetic North Pole for navigation).

These assorted fragments

The Shipping Forecast; Mar del Plata’s Sea Lion — Argentina’s most famous landmark; the Marine Invertebrates Gallery at the Natural History Museum, London; the offices of a scuba diving school in Santorini, Greece, where I chickened out of a scuba diving course in 2011; sand in my shoes, weeks later; the sunset as seen from this pizzeria in Gallipoli; Siren Orgasms, a novel I will never write; narco submarines and the falling price of cocaine; the etiquette of not watching when lifeguards pull someone half-drowned out of the water; the fact that the sea has no memory of us.

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Join us at the Reading Clinic this March for a discussion of “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

This year’s topic is violence, and these two short stories approach it at a structural level: violence in the name of tradition; violence in the name of collective happiness.

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) was an American writer known for her precise, unsettling depictions of ordinary life. In stories like the controversial “The Lottery,” she exposes the violence lurking beneath social ritual and conformity.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American author of speculative fiction. In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” she uses a utopian thought experiment to explore the ethics of collective happiness and moral responsibility.

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