dig the slowness
I was in Waterstones on Sunday looking for a book. No specific title or author. I wanted a novel by a female writer I hadn't heard of, preferably one quite new, early in her career. For no particular reason if she was a 'queer' author so much the better. But queer or not the quality of her writing was the important thing. She should see with clarity and write so that the protagonist should seem to be thinking for you - as though one of you were wearing the brain of the other.
So I started with the spine. Some titles and styles of lettering were out. Too attention-grabbing, too embedded in genre and i wouldn't look. When I did look the front cover could generally be ignored, the spine usually indicates sufficient information about that. The blurb on the back comes first - if the write up looks promising or only potentially promising then it's enough to go ahead with checking the first and last pages. The last page is the real test - it's something I picked up from a friend. Both first and last page give you a window on the book, but the first few sentences can mislead, especially if the writer believes you need an attention-grabbing opening. There's nothing more annoying and can prejudice you against a perfectly good book.
The last page on the other hand may give away an important plot point. But even where it does a good book should still hold up. The enjoyment comes from the way the story's told, the skill of the creator. The last page gives you some indication of where the story has come, where the language has come, and some sense of the confidence the writer has in their material. It's hard to explain. There is a gathering and a summation, a presentation in the last pages, but they are less protected, they have less need to ingratiate and explain. This is just a theory, I may be wrong.
After pulling out maybe a dozen or more books and putting them back after checking the blurb, and perhaps first and last pages, another plain, conservative spine took my eye. A female name. The title wasn't trying to intrigue me or display genre credentials. The blurb was innocuous, no phrases to make you cringe. Inside the first sentence could have been a seventh sentence, a five-hundred and twenty-third sentence. or even a last chapter sentence. The book started without fussing around.
The last page didn't give much away but it resonated with the first page. Together a few sentences took thoughts I'd had but never articulated and used them to indicate the beginnings of a living character. And something else curious - the book gave the impression of being crowded. The type appeared to be dense and crowded up to the margins, even bleeding over them. In fact after I bought the book and got it outside I opened it to check how many pages bled over the edge, and how much of each line was missing. But the pages were laid out with plenty of space like any other book. The left and right margins were a little over a centimetre each.
I haven't yet started to read the book. Despite my anticipation I could have bought the wrong novel. But there's more enjoyment in a novel that doesn't work, but which you've discovered for yourself, than in something disappointing that everyone tells you is special. I love buying books, records, DVDs, or going to gigs, galleries and the theatre blind, without prior knowledge. My main hope is that my guess about the quality of a piece is right. The satisfaction when a piece of work turns out to be good is almost like personal praise. It's like you created the work yourself - as though judgement and intelligence rather than prejudice and chance were at work. Especially for someone who rejected the classics and anything recommended to me from eleven onwards. It's selfish and it has integrity.
What's been written so far was written before I started reading the novel. I'll tell you what the novel is later and review it, and hopefully it'll turn out to be worth the attention. But in between then and now I had voluntary work, and while walking back started to think about my selfishness and integrity.
For somewhere like a week - no more like a month - I'd been feeling lonely and while not depressed pretty unmotivated. Productive in bursts - and a good thing in the last twelve months is rediscovering the fugue-state - trance - writing can put you in - but not enduringly happy with my work. As discussed elsewhere art serves a lot of purposes for me, as I suspect for most people. It adds to the handful of ideas I roll against each other to see what comes out. It helps block the empty fear when you can't live another minute. Recently though, until a couple of months ago, I'd forgotten about reading fiction. The reason being reading fiction is something you do alone, and albeit with limited success, I didn't want to be alone. I want social places.
Because people also take your attention off the fear that deafens you. Not meeting people socially is far worse than having no art. It only takes minutes away from people to feel empty and sad. I might not miss art for days or weeks, and even then I could make my own. This though is restructuring and reordering of unformed wordless images and emotions flicking through me. Where my thoughts really took shape was thinking how effectively but unconsciously I shut people out and how hard it is to switch off that ability.
I don't know when it began - this ability to shut out the world and vanish - but most likely from about nine, and over several years. It can be useful, even impressive, but without a way to drop my defences it's dangerous. It was a way to protect myself. If you can withdraw from a situation - become invisible, not participate, not feel, or some combination of the three - you can be safe. It was voluntary at first. If you spend time with me you'll sometimes see me purposely close-up and deflect people. The terrible thing is that what started as a strategy, as a part of who I was, became everything to the outside world. An impenetrable composed shell, a complete life. The facade seemed to run right through. All I can do now is choose to intensify the effect: vanish in a crowded room, deliberately shut someone down, amplify distance and what seems like superiority and brush you off or crush you like you're nothing. I can't make the distance go away.
These are bad things. I don't want to do this. The more you find a safe comfortable place where everything's in order the more jealously you protect it, however irrational. We all from time to time pull up short because we're applying a 'rule' that never existed. But when that means you don't want to be seen in a shared building with ten other people, or you think people should walk a certain speed, or you worry about the angle your pens sit on the desk, or about coffee mug rings on your own cheap furniture when you actually like that kind of blemish... That's a peculiar micromanagement of things out of your control, that don't really matter or that mostly you don't even feel the need to control. It's a compulsive preservation of a space. It's fighting all the time against what you want to happen - other people coming through.
MDMA seems to help. Maybe it's the effect it has on oxytocin, creating a sense of empathy. Art partially does the same thing, allowing at least the artist's proxy, what they've created, to come through. Especially invigorating when it's fiction or drama or otherwise has the relationships between people right at its centre. And now we're back where we started.
The novel I bought on Sunday was An Empty Room by Talitha Stevenson, published by Virago. It's a great debut. For me there are only a couple of bits that don't work, four or five sentences that are trying too hard to be smart. The lives of the characters are outside of my experience, their personalities are very different from mine, but the writing carries you inside the people. The writing's less flashy than the other authors I've read recently, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf. But the insight into human fears, loneliness, lies, intimacy, and the shifting perspectives of age is brilliant. Stevenson shares with Woolf and Barnes a perceptiveness that lifts her book far above anything contemporary that I've read recently. Maybe it's the paucity of my reference points, but I thought of Ian McEwan's early short stories, although the novel is less explicit, deals with less disturbing subjects than McEwan's short stories. It's the observation and clarity of expression that they have in common. And, I suppose, the intense self-scrutiny of the protagonist. I'd recommend it, but then I'd defeat the whole start of the essay - you'll just have to go find it yourself.
Oh, and the title of this post. I nicked it off of a Tank Girl comic from 1991, which is kind of appropriate. You see back then I'd just made the decision I was going to be a writer and started sending stuff out. I did get a couple of poems published that year, but it took me until 1996 until I wrote a poem worth reading. And it's only in the last two years that I've started to feel in control of what I'm doing. So yeah, dig the slowness. I'll see you in ten years for my first book maybe.
So I started with the spine. Some titles and styles of lettering were out. Too attention-grabbing, too embedded in genre and i wouldn't look. When I did look the front cover could generally be ignored, the spine usually indicates sufficient information about that. The blurb on the back comes first - if the write up looks promising or only potentially promising then it's enough to go ahead with checking the first and last pages. The last page is the real test - it's something I picked up from a friend. Both first and last page give you a window on the book, but the first few sentences can mislead, especially if the writer believes you need an attention-grabbing opening. There's nothing more annoying and can prejudice you against a perfectly good book.
The last page on the other hand may give away an important plot point. But even where it does a good book should still hold up. The enjoyment comes from the way the story's told, the skill of the creator. The last page gives you some indication of where the story has come, where the language has come, and some sense of the confidence the writer has in their material. It's hard to explain. There is a gathering and a summation, a presentation in the last pages, but they are less protected, they have less need to ingratiate and explain. This is just a theory, I may be wrong.
After pulling out maybe a dozen or more books and putting them back after checking the blurb, and perhaps first and last pages, another plain, conservative spine took my eye. A female name. The title wasn't trying to intrigue me or display genre credentials. The blurb was innocuous, no phrases to make you cringe. Inside the first sentence could have been a seventh sentence, a five-hundred and twenty-third sentence. or even a last chapter sentence. The book started without fussing around.
The last page didn't give much away but it resonated with the first page. Together a few sentences took thoughts I'd had but never articulated and used them to indicate the beginnings of a living character. And something else curious - the book gave the impression of being crowded. The type appeared to be dense and crowded up to the margins, even bleeding over them. In fact after I bought the book and got it outside I opened it to check how many pages bled over the edge, and how much of each line was missing. But the pages were laid out with plenty of space like any other book. The left and right margins were a little over a centimetre each.
I haven't yet started to read the book. Despite my anticipation I could have bought the wrong novel. But there's more enjoyment in a novel that doesn't work, but which you've discovered for yourself, than in something disappointing that everyone tells you is special. I love buying books, records, DVDs, or going to gigs, galleries and the theatre blind, without prior knowledge. My main hope is that my guess about the quality of a piece is right. The satisfaction when a piece of work turns out to be good is almost like personal praise. It's like you created the work yourself - as though judgement and intelligence rather than prejudice and chance were at work. Especially for someone who rejected the classics and anything recommended to me from eleven onwards. It's selfish and it has integrity.
What's been written so far was written before I started reading the novel. I'll tell you what the novel is later and review it, and hopefully it'll turn out to be worth the attention. But in between then and now I had voluntary work, and while walking back started to think about my selfishness and integrity.
For somewhere like a week - no more like a month - I'd been feeling lonely and while not depressed pretty unmotivated. Productive in bursts - and a good thing in the last twelve months is rediscovering the fugue-state - trance - writing can put you in - but not enduringly happy with my work. As discussed elsewhere art serves a lot of purposes for me, as I suspect for most people. It adds to the handful of ideas I roll against each other to see what comes out. It helps block the empty fear when you can't live another minute. Recently though, until a couple of months ago, I'd forgotten about reading fiction. The reason being reading fiction is something you do alone, and albeit with limited success, I didn't want to be alone. I want social places.
Because people also take your attention off the fear that deafens you. Not meeting people socially is far worse than having no art. It only takes minutes away from people to feel empty and sad. I might not miss art for days or weeks, and even then I could make my own. This though is restructuring and reordering of unformed wordless images and emotions flicking through me. Where my thoughts really took shape was thinking how effectively but unconsciously I shut people out and how hard it is to switch off that ability.
I don't know when it began - this ability to shut out the world and vanish - but most likely from about nine, and over several years. It can be useful, even impressive, but without a way to drop my defences it's dangerous. It was a way to protect myself. If you can withdraw from a situation - become invisible, not participate, not feel, or some combination of the three - you can be safe. It was voluntary at first. If you spend time with me you'll sometimes see me purposely close-up and deflect people. The terrible thing is that what started as a strategy, as a part of who I was, became everything to the outside world. An impenetrable composed shell, a complete life. The facade seemed to run right through. All I can do now is choose to intensify the effect: vanish in a crowded room, deliberately shut someone down, amplify distance and what seems like superiority and brush you off or crush you like you're nothing. I can't make the distance go away.
These are bad things. I don't want to do this. The more you find a safe comfortable place where everything's in order the more jealously you protect it, however irrational. We all from time to time pull up short because we're applying a 'rule' that never existed. But when that means you don't want to be seen in a shared building with ten other people, or you think people should walk a certain speed, or you worry about the angle your pens sit on the desk, or about coffee mug rings on your own cheap furniture when you actually like that kind of blemish... That's a peculiar micromanagement of things out of your control, that don't really matter or that mostly you don't even feel the need to control. It's a compulsive preservation of a space. It's fighting all the time against what you want to happen - other people coming through.
MDMA seems to help. Maybe it's the effect it has on oxytocin, creating a sense of empathy. Art partially does the same thing, allowing at least the artist's proxy, what they've created, to come through. Especially invigorating when it's fiction or drama or otherwise has the relationships between people right at its centre. And now we're back where we started.
The novel I bought on Sunday was An Empty Room by Talitha Stevenson, published by Virago. It's a great debut. For me there are only a couple of bits that don't work, four or five sentences that are trying too hard to be smart. The lives of the characters are outside of my experience, their personalities are very different from mine, but the writing carries you inside the people. The writing's less flashy than the other authors I've read recently, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf. But the insight into human fears, loneliness, lies, intimacy, and the shifting perspectives of age is brilliant. Stevenson shares with Woolf and Barnes a perceptiveness that lifts her book far above anything contemporary that I've read recently. Maybe it's the paucity of my reference points, but I thought of Ian McEwan's early short stories, although the novel is less explicit, deals with less disturbing subjects than McEwan's short stories. It's the observation and clarity of expression that they have in common. And, I suppose, the intense self-scrutiny of the protagonist. I'd recommend it, but then I'd defeat the whole start of the essay - you'll just have to go find it yourself.
Oh, and the title of this post. I nicked it off of a Tank Girl comic from 1991, which is kind of appropriate. You see back then I'd just made the decision I was going to be a writer and started sending stuff out. I did get a couple of poems published that year, but it took me until 1996 until I wrote a poem worth reading. And it's only in the last two years that I've started to feel in control of what I'm doing. So yeah, dig the slowness. I'll see you in ten years for my first book maybe.
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