was I me

The Black Orchid Salon, with its peeling gold front door. The Plough Inn, on whose illustrated sign I always read the words “Free Horse” instead of “Free House”. Steady rain outside the physio’s, where the physio adroitly thaws my frozen shoulder. In the waiting room I write, “It was an ordinary building but full of small doors,” and two hours later can’t remember why. It’s aways both disconcerting & enchanting to be in these small towns. I stole their names for Viriconium without ever having seen the places themselves. 1973, I was living in two first floor rooms. We had a shared toilet, and a crack in the landing wall that opened and closed according to the season. The front windows overlooked a decaying square where Conan Doyle once attended seances, not far from Camden Road overground station. I had published two novels I didn’t much like and was struggling to finish a third I would absolutely hate. 3am. I might have appeared calm, but my startle reflex was already hair trigger. No likelihood of sleep. Instant coffee. The road map of Great Britain, my dream world or great escape, fell open randomly like a Bible used for divination. I harvested the weird old places. Wergs. The Aqualate Pool. Gnosall and Gnosall Heath, Child’s Ercall. Sites of romanticised psychic seepage from the confusion I had already made of my life. It was important not to go anywhere, only wonder what it was like & wish you were there.

nowtbooks & that old New Nueva Swing

When Emil Bonaventure arrived in Saudade thirty years ago, everyone was writing on paper.

It was one of those things. They loved paper suddenly. The nostalgia shops were full of it, all colours of cream and white, blank or with feint lines, or small pale grey squares, shining softly from the lighted windows which were like religious cubicles or niches. There was every kind of notebook in there, paper between covers you could hardly believe, from wood bark to imitation grey fur to holographic pictures from the narratives of Ancient Earth religious figures, with their fingers and their bovine eyes uplifted, who smiled and raised a cross as you turned the book in your hands in the retro shop light.

As artificial as the textures of the paper itself–an Uncle Zip product franchised out of some chopshop on another planet–these notebooks came in all sizes, fastened any way you could think, with clasps, hasps, magnets, combination locks or bits of hairy string you wrapped around and did up in a beautiful knot. Some were fastened in more contemporary ways, so you could see a little flicker in the air near the edge of the pages–if you’re the wrong person don’t get your fingers near those!

Everyone was buying these books because it was cute to write your thoughts in them–thoughts, a shopping list, those kinds of things.

People wrote, “Who do I want to be today ?”

They wrote diaries.

Everyone suddenly loved paper, no one could say why, and soon they’d love something else. But it was more practical for some than others. Emil Bonaventure kept the habit where others kicked it, and wrote everything down until the day he went into the Saudade site for the last time. He didn’t trust his memory by then. He’d been in there once too often. The stuff he had to remember was complex–directions, bearings, instructions to himself. It was data. It was clues. It was everything you daren’t forget in that trade. It was everything he couldn’t trust to an operator. Work with the Shadow Boys, Emil used to say, you don’t trust any kind of algorithm. Even the tame ones. Among the data he also wrote descriptions about his achievements, of which he had done more than one. He wrote observations, like: “It’s always snowing in Sector 7. Whatever time of year it is outside, whatever time of year it is inside.” He had the whole site divided up, Sector this, Sector that. In those days, whatever he said now, the entradistas had to believe in facts; they had to believe they knew things no one else knew.

Emil wrote it all down in that waterstained letter–as if he had to convince himself of something–in a kind of slanting disordered scribble which did not reflect his personality. Then he hid the book. He was as cagey as all those entradistas, and when Jack Serotonin bought the goodwill to Emil’s business, the book was not included.

–Nova Swing, 2007

an ordinary day in the slow part of the year

you know how it is you wake up & feel that it’s time to record yourself “singing” a Dylan song this always happens even though you know you’re making the usual tragic error sure enough playback reveals a wavery AI kind of voice trained on the worst of Donovan and all of Nick Drake while the guitar goes chunk-a-chunk chunk clearly not the you you had the vision of so the thing to do now is panic put the instrument in the corner of a room no one goes into much & hope you forget it’s there maybe you’ll try the Guardian cryptic crossword instead but you can’t even start today’s so you go back to losing three times out of four at online solitaire you could take a walk in the sunshine but your lower back hurts from yesterday Squats Day don’t @ me and so now nowt’s left to do but face the truth there’s only one thing you’ve ever been any good at in your entire fucking life so you open Pages & discover that this morning the object you call a brain isn’t interested in what it ought to be doing only in an overthought analysis of a Netflix you watched last night

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Fantasy appropriations. All these hyperbolic reworkings–attachments of fictional value–make it impossible for us to see the thing in itself. How do we return the viewed object to some kind of one-to-one relation of subjectivity, some basic exchange between a single real human being and a single real landscape, uncontaminated by the imagery repurposed by f/sf novels, films, book covers & so on? Half a century of the aggressive communal fantastification of everything makes landscape reparation part of an increasingly necessary resistance to fantasy-as-intellectual context or episteme. It’s not enough to respond that all landscapes are constructed and always were. For all sorts of reasons, you’ll always fail to write only what you see. But the attempt needs to be genuine or nothing worth seeing will be revealed.

no other gods

A state is its infrastructure. Once the infrastructure goes down, the state is not failed. It’s simply no longer a state. The product of a health service is not fiscal efficiency. It is healthcare. The product of any item of infrastructure, from a railway to a water authority, is not fiscal efficiency. The efficient production and distribution of its product is its product. A state is not its ability to earn and “save” money which it will pass on as tax cuts to people who are already secure, comfortable and well-serviced. A state is not a corporation, serving its shareholders. The big linguistic con the UK has swallowed at every level since the Thatcherite takeover of the state is the shift in meaning whereby the efficiency of an operation is always and only defined as its fiscal efficiency. This central and obsessive platform of UK politics is a profit-taker’s view, obviously. But it’s also the first concern of an absurdly inflated senior management class, and as such the uninterrogated religion of middle and lower management. We have allowed management to make decisions that should be value-based–generalised goals and goods, choices about living made by a population–to such a degree that management has achieved the status of a value-system in itself. In discussion, managers are as po-faced about management and its basis in accountancy as the priesthood used to be about sin and redemption. When you question fiscal efficiency, you aren’t even questioning an ideology. You are committing blasphemy. Why do I even need to point this out. Happy Christmas.