KTH RDGWY

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

I read Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla while on a flight to Dublin the other day. (It’s very short).  I was reading the handsome volume from Melville House , part of their "Art of The Novella" series. It includes two versions of the story, from 1886 and 1887, and an earlier version entitled Letter From A Madman , of which the quote above forms the opening paragraph. I think I prefer this first take. It’s very direct, much shorter even than The Horla itself, and it ends with the line, "What should I do?" which had me looking out at the runway of Dublin Airport in a bit of a panic. Damned if I know what you should do, Guy.

The story is straightforward. A man feels that he is gradually becoming in some way haunted, or perhaps possessed, or in any case considerably fiddled with, by a presence, an invisible something-or-other, which drinks the water on his bedside table while he sleeps, and drinks the milk he leaves as a test (because he hates milk himself) and which causes him to suffer greatly and feel deep fear and unease and dread, unto the point of despair, and in the last version, violence. He thinks he’s going mad. Then he thinks that there is another possibility. That the creature, which he takes to calling Le Horla (he doesn’t know why) is a higher form of life that has arrived to take the place of mankind. He finds evidence for this in reports of a strange illness in a town in Brazil.

The translation is a lovely piece of work, by Charlotte Mandell. In an afterword, she points out that the neologism ‘horla’ combines hors , meaning outside, and là , meaning there. "So le (note the masculine gender) Horla sounds like the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There."

De Maupassant’s descriptions of nocturnal activities in a locked room where he is ostensibly alone immediately put me in mind of Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work , about which I’ve written on this blog . Glavinic takes (I’m sure he must have read The Horla ) what is a slight but startling set of ideas about our perceptions and our sense of ourselves, and expands them into a terrifyingly empty world, which nevertheless seems to have someone else in it. These are stories about the self. But the self isn’t single.

Melville House tell us that The Horla "was published shortly before the author was institutionalised for insanity". It’s a bit of a stretch, that, I think, to be fair. He wrote Letter From a Madman a full seven years at least before he entered the asylum after a suicide attempt. But it’s clear that De Maupassant was thinking and writing about what ‘insanity’ feels like. It’s terrifying, clearly. And the terror comes in large part from what it also feels like - reasonable, and logical, and precise.

I’ve had these packages from Jamie Stewart for months. Three of them were still in their envelopes. I’ve been scared to open them. A new one arrived yesterday. So today I opened all of them. Or, I took them out of their envelopes. I took some photos. In some of the photos I include a donkey that Kenneth gave me last week. He brought it back from Cyprus. I still haven’t opened any of the actual packages. They’re quite pretty as they are, and Jamie, or whoever puts them together, is good at knots.

That concludes this blog post.

The stand off between Amazon and Macmillan over the last few days has been covered all over the place by people with a firmer grasp of the economic and legal ins and outs of what’s going on than I possess . But. This is not going to be the last such confrontation. For reasons that are all about technology and business - and have next to nothing to do with writing - the shiny spotlight of new gadgetry, and all the money that powers it, has turned its heat on the world of book publishing. Of all things.

(And I do mean books. I don’t mean newspapers and magazines, which are a separate business. And one in which the application of new technology makes more sense. While there are cross overs and tangled interests, the similarities tend to be red herrings.)

The books business has operated on a fairly predictable, if complicated, model for a long time now. There are subtleties and oddities, and I’m simplifying somewhat, but basically …

1.        The author writes a book.
2.        The author hands the book to an agent.
3.        The agent finds a publisher for the book.
4.        The publisher has the book edited, designed and printed.
5.        The publisher markets the book to retailers and readers.
6.        The retailers buy the book and present it to readers.
7.        The reader buys the book.
8.        The reader reads the book.

In an ideal world, steps 2 to 7 would not exist. In the world of new technologies - of Amazon, the iPad and iBooks, of the Google Book Agreement - steps 3 to 7 are in a mess, scrambled, being fought over, argued about, and written off and on again as everyone tries to find the right combination that will keep everyone employed.

Notice anything? It’s pretty much certain that ten years from now, those 5 steps from  3 to 7 will have been cut down to maybe 4 steps. Maybe even 2 or 3 steps. We are approaching the ideal world.

The only essential steps in this process are steps 1 and 8. If I want to pay my rent, step 7 is good too. And in order for step 7 to happen, some of the other steps are going to have to stay in place in one form or another. But the process is going to shrink. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Mostly the debate about what to shrink and how is being had between publishers and retailers. Agents are a canny lot and are keeping a watching brief. Readers are interested, and are vaguely hopeful that when the dust settles they might have some cool new ways of reading books, and that it might be a bit cheaper. Authors are worried. Authors are always worried of course. But in this instance, how worried should we be?

Publishers certainly need to worry, particularly the big ones. Traditional retailers don’t need anyone to tell them that they need to worry. But non traditional retailers, Amazon chief amongst them, need to worry too, and from their actions over the last week, I think they know it. Neither of these two giant cogs in the process want to give way. So inevitably the pressure is being forced outwards. Readers are feeling it (or, are being asked to feel it by Amazon’s pricing games), and authors are feeling it - mostly by being told that the days of big (or any) advances are over, and that royalties aren’t going to improve either, sorry about that, and that we should shut up and be grateful that anyone does us the honour of publishing us in the first place.

This is bullshit.

Retailers and publishers are non-essential. New technology means that I can, in theory, sell you my new book on this website at a price that suits both you and me, and cut out the middle men. But I want to be a writer, not a businessman, and you want the enjoyment of browsing your local bookshop and stumbling over my book there, all nicely presented. So, I employ a middle man. But why on earth would I need two middle men?

Authors have power.

It’s very difficult to convince any but the biggest name authors of this. Most of us feel that we have no power whatsoever. This is because we tend to forget, indeed we are encouraged to forget, that we are, to use the iLanguage, the ‘content providers’. And what is content? King. Without us, there are no books. No books, no business.

It’s difficult to do anything with that. It’s difficult to organise a bunch of isolated, solitary social misfits. But it’s not really necessary. Agents form a strong, though admittedly not comprehensive, bodyguard. They act of behalf of individual authors rather than some greater ideal, but they know what side their bread is buttered. The generality of agents’ work is done to the benefit of the generality of authors. They are, after all, a non-essential step as well, and they know it.

And within publishing there is a core of people who know full well that the business is about writing, and that what serves the writing will in the long term win out over what serves the process. These people are clinging to door frames maybe, but they’re there. And they’re right. And the wrong ones who have replaced their colleagues will not last.

I’d argue, and I don’t think it’s a controversial argument to make, that publishers and retailers have done a pretty good job of diminishing quality over the last, say, fifteen years. They’ve become involved in the chase for big money phenomenon books; they’ve invested in non-writing celebrities and have tried to contrive titles to appeal to perceived markets; they’ve sacrificed long term modest sales authors in favour of one off high sales ones - part of the misguided strategy of focussing on titles, not on writers; they’ve taken discounting to an absurd level - seeming to misunderstand the very nature of what it is they’re selling, believing books to be as amenable to regular bulk buying as ready meals. They have, and it’s a generalisation that doesn’t have to contend with very many exceptions, behaved bloody stupidly.

The current scramble for the future of books hopefully lends itself to a refocussing on books themselves. People want good ones. Formats and methods of delivery may change, but people will continue to want great books and great writing. Anyone who misses that point, be they author, agent, publisher or retailer, is going to lose out. Anyone who forgets that it’s about connecting the reader to the writer is going to lose out. Anyone who thinks the authors are the non-essential cog in this process are going to lose out spectacularly.

A future is opening up in which retailers and major publishers will in all likelihood merge, probably bloodily, and will start cannibalising each other’s traditional roles. The biggest book publisher in ten years time could be Amazon. Or Apple. Or perhaps the biggest books retailer in ten years time will be Barnes & Noble. Or Apple. But certainly, something has to give. Probably not Apple.

It may be that big corporate publisher/retailers will become simply an annexe of the entertainment industry, publishing only the brand name authors with guaranteed returns. And that literature will be carried out elsewhere, by smaller, independent publishers working both with old fashioned physical books and their digital counterparts, selling directly online to a worldwide readership. Some would argue that this is exactly what’s happening now.

But I’m not simply whistling past the graveyard here. At least I hope I’m not. Authors are the books business. In all the shouting that’s going to go on (and on) in the next while, listen out for the businesses - be they retailers or publishers or both - who are putting writers at the centre of their plans. They’ll be the ones left standing.

Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas Day. I didn’t hear until just this week. Just the other day. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t understand it. It seems such a stupid thing, on my part, to have missed that piece of news, given all the useless, pointless, frivolous pieces of news I did not miss. I am angry that he died. Angry that I didn’t know. The anger serves as flimsy cover for the fact that that I am peculiarly moved by his death. By its circumstances, by his age, by the feeling it leaves me of something close to grief.

Which is, objectively, silly. I didn’t know him. Never met him. Saw him play live just once. I don’t have anything at all to say about him other than that his music was and remains important to me, and that he struck me as a better man than I could ever hope to be. He created. He expressed and manifested a relationship to the world and to being alive that was straightforward art, and which was beautiful and profound, and he nudged me with a truthfulness that will touch me, I’m pretty sure, for the rest of my life.

This song, that he performs in the video below, has been my favourite song for months, since it first appeared on At The Cut . It is almost unbearably poignant now. I love its honesty, its precise pain, and its insistence on not being ready. Maybe readiness comes suddenly. And when we’re ready, we go.

The night before I set off by train and ferry to Dublin for Christmas I grabbed, at more or less random, two short novels from my buckled ‘to-read’ shelf and stuck them in my bag. The first was Homo Faber by Max Frisch , which I had wanted to read since reading Man In The Holocene earlier in the year, which I wrote about on this blog . And the other was William Golding ’s Pincher Martin . I’ve returned to Golding in the last couple of years, very slowly, after a brush with him in my teens (instigated by Lord Of The Flies at school I presume) which had left me feeling that he was too oddly English and peculiar and serious for me. He still is oddly English and peculiar and serious. But.

I didn’t know it, but the two books have things in common. They were published within a year of each other (1956/57); they both tell the story of a middle aged man faced with what looks very much like his death; both central characters are given generalising eponymous nicknames; both writers fiddle with our perception of accuracy (Golding with detailed renditions of hallucination and mental derailment, and an unfortunate Tales Of The Unexpected last line twist; Frisch with a much more subtle, dissembling first person narrative); they both involve sea journeys; they both render a disgust and terror at organic natural things; they both involve sex that really shouldn’t have happened; they’re both about going a bit bonkers.

I felt very comfortable with Walter Faber, Frisch’s Swiss UNESCO engineer whose flight crash lands in a Mexican desert. He’s a practical man, has no time for novels or dreams or religion or myths or any of that stuff, and finds himself thrust nevertheless into a daft series of coincidences which unravel his sense of himself and his world, sort of. He survives the plane crash (or does he? (yeah, he does, I’m pretty sure (really?))) but through it meets the brother of an old friend who married the woman he perhaps should have married. He sets off to find this old friend, who is missing in the jungles of Guatemala, with the man’s brother. After a horrible journey consisting mostly of sweat and entrails, they find him - hanging by his neck in a plantation hut. Faber goes back to his apartment and his girlfriend in Manhattan and dislikes everything. He sets off for Europe by ship. On board he sees, is attracted to, meets, and gets involved with a young woman who reminds him of the woman he should have married all those years ago. There is a gradual escalation of dread, but it’s comic, absurd, and Faber is dizzy with it, disbelieving. The extended, perverse ending, involving a snake bite and a fall (or is it a fall? (I really don’t know)) is compelling and rather beautifully ridiculous.

Pincher Martin is much more foreign to me. I suspect that like a lot of readers who were raised Irish and Catholic, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to reading English writers who are concerned with, in broad terms, religious things. They seem so earnest. So worried. Golding worries an awful lot. In Pincher Martin the worrying takes the form of a kind of self created hell - a rock in the North Atlantic where Martin finds himself washed up after his ship is torpedoed. The physical details are great. The scraping and scouring of the body, the fright caused by gulls and seals, the terrifying assault of the wind and rain and the sea. But the important thing for Golding is that all this provides an arena in which Martin remembers and regrets and, importantly, digs his stubborn selfish heels in. He does not surrender, and that seems to be his sin. It’s an odd book. It seems to have come from another world - a different, scarier world. Like the 1950s for example. Homo Faber on the other hand seems to come from last summer.

Both books visit upon their central characters the theoretical, if you will, repercussions of their past actions. They’re both pretty cruel. Golding’s cruelty is blunt and quick and bloody. And maybe there’s something to be said for that when set against the playful, complicated, slow cruelty of Frisch. But Frisch’s Faber is more recognisably us. And Frisch grants him the larger rock, half the world, on which to come face to face with what’s he’s created and destroyed.

I slipped in a small pool of blood on the vinyl floor of the chipper and ended on my arse, no salt, no vinegar please, and the woman in the leather jacket was laughing at the first table, red ketchup, that’s what that is, it really isn’t - it’s blood, I can smell the wound, I tell you I can smell the slice in the skin and you should not treat me like a stranger .

Rope top blood ties, let’s put something on that, this is the safe word, that is not, say it if you want and if you do I’ll kill you, and that is not the way out, that is the exit, and neither of these things is negotiable, you have to go through one or the other, and my sister will collect me if I call her, and I will be mysteriously saved .

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore.
You may not see me tomorrow.

On the hill in the middle distance, on the hill that has the edge, and the cut that has it, THE CUT THAT HAS IT, on the chimney, where I took your photograph before you nearly died, here’s one for ya , I can see the cut, and the air is solid everywhere but here, and you must realise the danger . Those cliffs are high and the rocks down there will kill you. But the falling. Oh the falling.

So, I did next to no work in the middle of the day. I just read through some work and made some notes. It’s more or less been a day off. This is not good.

I went down to Holloway on the tube to have a coffee with my friend Raj. Stop , he cried.

We talked about religion, our parents, Roberto Ballaño, vampires, films, work, our friend Jasper, pencils, and other things I can’t remember.

I took the tube home and it was pretty full but not as full as it was this morning when I took the Victoria line down to Kings Cross.

Things I have learned today :

1. a full tube train smells better - more natural - in the evening than it does in the morning when it’s full of perfumes and deodorants.
2. everyone wants to talk about vampires.

Last night I finished a long (20,000 words) short story that I’ve been stalled on for what feels like years, called The Spectacular . I don’t know if it’s any good. I have my doubts. Over the weekend I have to finish off another one - easier, this, mainly because it’s rubbish. They get sent to my agent on Monday. Then it’s downhill through the others, rolling the whole lot up into a nice bouncy ball - hopefully before Christmas. Then I’m going to live on the west coast of Ireland for three months to write a book about sea ghosts. Then I’m going to come back to London and have a breakdown.

This morning I went over to West Ham for breakfast with my friend Jasper. Stop , he cried.

We talked about canons, vampires, computer games, our friend Raj, the Royal Mail dispute, food, getting up in the mornings and copyright. And other things I’ve forgotten. I told him stuff that’s been happening on the news, and he told me a very funny story about Vienetta.

I took the train home from Barking, all through the north east looking down on the city in the chilly sun.