KTH RDGWY

Me? Publishing new stuff? Really?

I sent some new short work to Dublin based The Stinging Fly recently, and one of the pieces appears in the new summer edition of the magazine, which is now out. Always a good read, The Stinging Fly publishes new writing - prose and poetry - by writers both established and starting out, and some photography and so forth.

They’ve also branched out in recent years into publishing actual books, and they do a beatiful job of it too. They published Sean O’Reilly’s amazing Watermark in 2005, and have followed it with a couple of fiction anthologies, and with collections from Kevin Barry (There Are Little Kingdoms - very good stuff) and just this year from Michael J Farrell (Life In The Universe , which I haven’t read yet).

Anyway, my piece is called Your Country Doesn’t Love You It Just Turns Up Your Volume , and though it was written independently it apparently fits a theme they’re focussing on in this issue which they’re calling Writing Home. There’s stuff in there as well from Tess Gallagher, Thomas Lynch, Mary O’Donoghue, Joseph Woods, John F Deane, Paul Perry and loads of others.

The Next Village is now back on line and the contributions are being reposted. So far, you can hear Mary Pepper, and read me, Hugo Hamilton, Lawrence Norfolk and Daniel Arsand.

Still to come is film, poetry, prose, audio and photography from : Paul Ishian, Jasper Murphy, Dermod Moore, Moris Fahri, Rhys Tranter, No Answers, Marcello Mastroianni, Péter Kovács, Markland Starkie, D. Coys, Fat Butcher, Evelyn Conlon, Haydon Saunders, Gary Indiana, James Bainbridge and Mark Ward.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed from the site itself, or by clicking here .

Full details about The Next Village, and about how you can, if so inclined, contribute something yourself, are available on the site .

Michael Jackson died by the way, in case you didn’t … oh you heard? Oh, okay, I wasn’t sure you … oh right, of couse yes. Yes it is sad. Death is sad. When isn’t it sad?

In case anyone is wondering where thenextvillage.net has gone to, the simple answer is that I fucked up very badly last night and seem to have accidentally and inadvertently deleted the entire site.

First off, don’t panic too much. All the contributions from the brilliant people who have written, photographed, filmed etc. ALL STILL EXIST, in the form in which they were originally sent to me. They’re on my computer. If the worst comes to the worst and my stupidity can’t be undone, then I can reconstruct the site from the start, posting contributions one at a time into a new Wordpress shell.

Obviously, that would be a slow of painful exercise, and I don’t want to start on it until the hosting people get back to me. I’ve no idea if they’ll be able to help. I can’t afford to pay very much to host The Next Village, and I’m on a basic package. I imagine that if they can’t restore what was there with a couple of clicks, they’re not going to go scrabbling around for solutions.

What happened was that I was trying to update to the new Wordpress, and rather than upgrading I seem to have re-installed the thing over what was already there. I hate Wordpress, and I hate domain management even more. They take what should be something simple, and trick it up with obscurantist bullshit. Having said that, this was my fault. Don’t try to upgrade the web based love of your life at 3am while tired and depressed. It’s not a good idea.

So, apologies to anyone looking for The Next Village. And particular apologies to contributors. The site will be back, with all contributions restored, as soon as possible. Hopefully the easy way. If it’s the slow way, then bear with me. But I’ll get it done.

You /aaa/ hideous mouse pointer relocates hard right on my screen ((my screen) my screen) going suddenly instantaneous from my input to an icon I had almost forgotten on the bottom right of my dock which launches a program that isolates drunks from their drunkenness. Aiiiii. Fold. Over.

I didn’t ask for that.

Skull flaps open. Brain flies out, long flanked, ratcheted, tricked up in devices, taking a route round your shoulders and out to sea, with the boats of the urchins in slow pursuit. We are off to attack the island of the dark hood and the goblin fingers. Hit the water and haul the rope. Tie the sullen ones in a corner. Throw up down wind of the baskets. And the calm quiet boys in conversation on the bow are the serious fuckers. Maps in their heads. Cocks in their pockets. Their murmur is the engine. We are off. We will be back in time.

The boats pulled in at the disintegrated dock, and the children jumped and crawled onto the piers and clamoured in the sick dusk for directions and boasts, pushing one forward laughing, all shoulders and rotten teeth, his bloody elbows and his blind eyes looking for trouble. All the crew bayed. Go on go on you white arse coward.

Lord Tether watched them.

They did it this way, relying on their thoughts and the power of their cunning, and the dart of their starving bodies in through cracks and chimneys, up through gaps in the floorboards and cuts in the glass. They can bleed into any fortress. Show them a hole and they’re in it. Around your feet like the smell of a dog, gone before you sniff a thing, on out the back with the hair from your belly. They did it this way.

They poured themselves over evil. Like a clammy pail of water over the sparks of hell. Nothing in the world noticed.

The children battled into darkness and none of them lived and the brain flew bleeding home, low across the cold water under the poke of the moon, whipped like a dog, looking for nothing now but a small distant and unlikely place, where we cannot follow him.

How good for you that your life forms a coherent picture. How good for you. That your life forms an arc that can be comprehended as a single structure, as one thing; the start compatible with the end, the middle making sense to both of them. How good for you that the photograph of you at 12 years of age is recognisable to people who know you at 40. That the sentences you utter at 18 are compatible with the things you say at 64. That your spirit and mood have remained consistent since the day your personality first made itself known to the day that it stopped.

How good for you, these things, how good for you.

Where is Thursday?
Where is my can of coffee.
Where is everything
as

He has one of those bedside lamps activated by touch. A finger on the base or the stem. The brush of a hand. A thumb. He lies there alone with his hands beneath the covers, shivering in the thin cold air, his breath a cloud above him, and he watches the light come on, and go off, and come on, and go off, all night long. He isn’t scared. But he’s tired.

His ghosts do not sleep.

He went to see a priest once, but priests are useless now. He went to see a statistician, who was kind, and who listened carefully and took extensive notes. He promised that he would be in touch. And sure enough, after a couple of weeks a simple card arrived in a simple envelope. On the card was written :

You have 14 ghosts.

Sometimes he tries to talk to them. He doesn’t know what ages they are, whether they are aware of each other, whether they know each other. He doesn’t know what to say. He tells them about his day. About people he knows. About his friends and his work mates. He gossips with them. They do not gossip in return.

He has come to believe that at least three of his ghosts are Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Tonight he muscles into sleep, determined and annoyed, and wrestles for a while, oblivious. Furious. But in his dreams his ghosts line up like mountains.

The Shanghai Gesture is Gary Indiana’s 48th novel, and his 183rd published book. I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago and since then I’ve been doodling about it, around it. I’ve been giggling a little, if the truth be told. It’s impossible to say anything about this book really. I feel a little like I’ve been out on a bit of a bender with a someone my parents don’t approve of, and now I’ve safely climbed back up the drainpipe and into bed, with nothing expected of me but sleep, and my head is full of bright lights and stupid jokes and ways of not sleeping.

It’s actually his seventh novel, I think. Though I’m never sure whether to include Three Month Fever , a book that is certainly full of facts, but which uses fiction to support them. Non-faction. And it’s quite unlike anything he’s ever written before. If, like me, you’re a fan, then it may be a bit of a culture shock. I spent most of the first couple of chapters muttering whatthefuck , and going back to the beginning.

I should give you a taste. I can’t. There’s no point in quoting from it. Anything at all, no matter how long, would be out of context. But, to give you some idea, by the last third or so, there is a long scene in which Dr Obregon Petrie, using a “loop needle” fired through a miniature blow pipe, and a device called an iMe2, both given to him by the daughter of a scientist in the service of Dr Fu Manchu, has occupied the consciousness of Fu’s pet marmoset Cutie and become vertiginously high after taking a hit from the doctor’s opium bong, while simultaneously transforming his own physical shape and structure (leading his companion, Weymouth-Smith of Scotland Yard, to see in him a distinct resemblance to Buddy Holly) in order to enable his escape from the shackles in which Fu has placed both him and the detective, deep in the dungeon of Fu’s Paraguayan hideout, while he (Fu) prepares for the invasion of Great Britain, using amongst his weapons swarms of genetically modified insects carrying toxins and GPS devices, and twenty five dead children. If you understand any of that then there’s something wrong with you.

There’s nothing much to keep this kind of thing in check, and the reading of it forces upon you several strategies which you must employ if you want to continue. And you will want to continue, because frankly it’s a hoot. But, you must suspend not only your disbelief in the plot, but also you must suspend your disbelief that this author is inventing it. It goes almost without saying that you must suspend your understanding of the conventions of character, narrative voice, perspective, chronology, time and place, verisimilitude and imaginative allowance. You must suspend also your expectation of sense and rationality, your insistence that they must be in there somewhere, even if ingeniously hidden and disguised. You must suspend so much that by the time you’re half way through The Shanghai Gesture , the inside of your head feels like a butcher’s back room after a morning of slaughter.

What’s great about it is mostly that it fucks with your idea of yourself as an intelligent reader. It plays with you. In a good way. It toys with you, dazzles you, confuses you, flatters you, entices you, leads you on, until you’re suddenly in a spotlight, acutely aware that Indiana is looking you over, asking you a question. What do you make of this? And you have to answer. It’s part con trick, part rescue mission. I love it. Even if I think it may have stolen my wallet.

Some time ago Indiana wrote a sensible article about Kathy Acker, which is a rare thing, by way of a book review for the LRB .  (He also posted it on his gloriously insane blog a couple of months ago.) I was reminded of Acker when reading The Shanghai Gesture . There are occasional bites of the annoyance you get with her work. The impatient Oh what now? and the despairing Come on! But they are overwhelmed by what (Indiana points out) is most often missing from the work of Acker and what is here in spades - communication and collusion with the reader. More than that though, there is this challenge I’ve mentioned. And it’s not a challenge in the sense that you might call a difficult book a challenge. It’s much more literal than that. It does feel like a slap in the face from a man wielding a white glove.

It may be just a coincidence in timing on my part, but I wonder how much of that Acker stuff Indiana had in mind when writing this. Because while he matches Acker here in the tearing up of conventions, he also seems to address, even over compensate for, that which he criticises in Acker - being a snob, ignoring the reader, writing past the reader, making far too many assumptions about the art of reading as well as the art of writing. The Shanghai Gesture at times seems to be the Acker novel that Indiana would have liked Acker to write. Maybe I’m reading too much into all that.

But Indiana does seem here, dangerously so, to have you very much in mind as he writes. And his attentions are sort of friendly aggressive. He pushes you around a little. In a nice way. You do find yourself, having read maybe the description at the start of the book of the town of Land’s End (in England, north of Newcastle, don’t ask), putting the thing down and staring at it from across the room. You’ve changed, Gary. But go with it. Do go with it. It’s worth the ride. You don’t need to have seen the same old black and white films (including the eponymous one) that he’s steeped in, or to pick up all the fragrances of other books and other writers (and their plots) that waft around his paragraphs, nor have a grasp of Edmund Husserl’s ideas on the similar, or Roger Casement’s exposure of colonial atrocities in the Congo, Peru and Bolivia. But you’ll put this book down with your interest in all these things stimulated to some degree. And I’m sure there’s a hundred other enticements in there that I haven’t noticed. And you’ll have had a laugh. A giggling sort of light headed, wide eyed laugh.

Funny ha ha and funny peculiar.Which is my kind of funny.

Night Work is about a man called Jonas who wakes up one apparently ordinary summer’s day in his home city of Vienna to find that the television isn’t working, the newspaper hasn’t been delivered and the internet connection is down. He accidentally slices open his finger in the kitchen and it occurs to him that nobody else has ever seen the bare bone he can now glimpse. He goes to the bus stop. There is no one on the street. There are no buses, no cars. Fairly quickly, Jonas comes to realise that he is the only living creature in the city. There is no one else. There are no people anywhere. He is utterly alone.

I’ve written here recently about Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole , and mentioned in passing Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled . In my own small mind, Night Work forms a sort of loose trilogy with these books. I’m not very well read. I’m sure there are other books which place a character in a city which makes no sense to him, and subsequently examine ideas of isolation and fear and panic. Panic books. They prod that scary childish part of me that is scared of being abandoned. All three of these books alarmed me in the reading in one way or another, but there is a rising scale. The Unconsoled is rather beautiful, gentle. It’s disorienting certainly, but it has the quality of a dream, in which the peculiarities tickle and stimulate, and it is, or it is to me, ultimately a positive, warm book. Metropole is much more unforgiving. It is more extreme, and its sense of dread more pervasive and persuasive. It has an open ending, to which you can attach ideas of your own, depending I suppose on your temperament. I felt doomed.

Night Work though, in terms of effect on me, was of a different order altogether. I found it genuinely scary. It unnerved me. I felt odd when reading it. I had to stop sometimes, get up from where I was sitting, walk around, look at things, think about something else, look at something on the television. I didn’t like reading it at night. I had to stop leaving it by my bed.

Jonas begins, very quickly, to get the idea that he is not alone. Things happen. He finds doors he left open shut. He finds a photograph of himself behind the bread bin that he can’t account for. His solitude is so peculiar to him that it takes on an otherness that is impossible to reconcile with reality. He sets up video cameras to film himself sleeping. He begins to think of the person he watches on these tapes as The Sleeper. The Sleeper does strange things. Frightening things. The Sleeper starts to use the night.

There is a literary mechanism here that brings to mind Dostoyevsky’s The Double , and Stevenson’ Jekyll And Hyde , and similar stories. But what is most unusual about Glavinic’s book is the horrible spotlight that the set up places on this idea of a man haunting himself, terrorising himself. There is nothing else in the world but Jonas. With the hell of other people not available, Jonas creates it out of parts of himself. And though it’s fully diagnosed from the beginning, this pathology persists and worsens and begins to unravel in the reader both the sense that it can ever be overcome, and any notion that understanding it might have been of any use in the first place.

Night Work is wonderfully well written. The pace is perfectly judged. The tension, and the often excruciating suspense, is completely at the service of large ideas about isolation, witness, and existence itself. It’s one of the ironies of the book, and one of the clever tricks it plays on the reader, that you become increasingly conscious as you go on, of how the activity of reading is such a solitary experience. You wander through this book alone, wanting to take someone with you, wishing there was someone else at your shoulder reading the same lines as you. And then you stop and think about that for a minute. And it becomes a terrifying idea.

Glavinic’s only other book currently available in English is Carl Haffner’s Love Of The Draw . It’s a fictionalised portrait of the Austrian chess player Karl Schlechter, whose style of play emphasised caution above all else. It’s a very different book to Night Work , and it hasn’t stayed in my mind to nearly the same degree. But it’s quiet and sad and lovely, and it shows a skill in the portrayal of relationships that you don’t, obviously, get any clue of from Night Work .

Glavinic seems, on the basis of these two books, a writer of immense range and talent. A (lukewarm) review of Night Work in the LRB last year by Philip Oltermann gave me some idea of the Austrian context in which Glavinic writes, and, tantalisingly, an idea of what’s going on in some of his other books. Night Work is published by Canongate, in a slightly silly cover that suggests a high tech surveillance thriller. Well, perhaps that’s not so silly. I don’t know. I hope they’ve done well enough with it to persuade them to publish the other books. I want to read more by this man. Lots more.

Regardless though of what else might come, Night Work is an amazing, arresting, alarming piece of work.

I was just in an Italian eatery in Crouch End where they had Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus looped on a TV screen near my booth. I hate the word eatery . It’s a restaurant, diner, café. Pasta for £7/8 kind of thing. They charge £2.25 for a cappuccino. The staff all speak Italian to each other. Family type place, friendly, if you think the waiters saying "Sexy ladies" to a couple of women who are having a coffee before they go to pick up their kids from school counts as friendly. No one said anything to me. Which was fine. I was reading a book and texting with a couple of friends. But I was distracted by Charlie Chaplin.

There’s a scene in The Circus where he’s walking a tighthrope in the big top, and he’s half way across and he’s unbalanced and teetering and he’s trying to look like he may fall at any moment. There’s no real sense of danger - it’s Charlie Chaplain. Then, for reasons which escape me, a couple of small mokeys run out onto the rope, climb up his body and sit on his head, clawing at his face, and then they tear his clothes off. Most of his clothes. He’s wearing the usual tramp outfit. His underwear though is remarkably clean and white. Then the monkeys run away again. I didn’t think it was funny.

This blog/website disappeared for a while this week as I made a small mess of transferring my hosting. More people contacted me about its absence then have ever contacted me about its presence. Which just goes to show.