KTH RDGWY

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.

I’m really delighted to tell you that a new story called Do Make Say Think Show has just been published in Zoetrope: All-Story , the "Francis Ford Coppola presents…" art and literature magazine based in San Francisco.The other contributors in this issue are A.L. Kennedy, Han Ong, Sam Shepard and John Krasinski, who writes about his screen adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men . There is also a reprint of that story. The whole issue comes in a great design by artist Rex Ray.

My piece is fairly long, and is told in the first person, and came about after I went to see Do Make Say Think the last time they played here in London. It was a great gig. But also … strange, for me. And that strangeness prompted the story. It also came at a time when I was trying to write about music very directly - about how music feels, and what it does to your psychology. My psychology. This story is really the only piece that I was satisfied with. I just had another read of it now, in the magazine. I like it. I usually hate my stuff as soon as I can’t change it any more. This, for the moment, I still like. It’s full of clumsiness and terrible sentences and stupidity. But I like it.

Anyway. Do Make Say Think are, plainly, inspirational. And it’s nice timing that their first gig in London since the one described in the story happens next month at The Scala, on Thursday October 22nd. There are still tickets available here . I cannot recommend them highly enough. Look out for the twitching, socially incompetent Irishman hovering around at the back of the crowd. Whatever you do, don’t say hello.

This is a true story, but I’m not really sure how accurate it is. It was a long time ago. I was, I think, about 16. Maybe 15. Me and a friend wanted to get a band together, mostly because we shared the same sort of taste in music. But we couldn’t really play anything and we hadn’t a clue what we were doing.

At some point we either placed an ad in Hot Press, or answered an ad in Hot Press. Because that was how bands got formed. And as a result we made contact with some guy who was about our age, maybe a bit older, who also wanted to do something and who was into the same sort of stuff as us, and who said he played guitar.

I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much about meeting him. We travelled to some suburb of Dublin that my friend and I were unfamiliar with, and we met this guy called Kev, and we chatted about music and wandered around. I don’t know why we wandered around, but I remember us wandering around. Housing estates and roads and shops. It was sunny. Then we were in his house, and he had a few guitars, and we played around with them, and it was obvious that he could play and that we couldn’t, and that he had a fairly good idea of what he wanted to do and we didn’t. Though he did like the fact that I played a four string acoustic guitar with an extremely eccentric tuning and with balls of blue tack stuck to the strings.

He was a very nice guy. He could have embarrassed us because frankly we were clueless. But he didn’t. He listened, and he played stuff for us, and we all shook hands and parted and we never saw him again.

Before we left he told us that he sort of had a band, he thought, or an idea for a band, which was rising out of a band he used to have, or which was a sort of template for a band, and I think he was doing things with maybe a couple of other people, but he was very vague about it. I remember asking him what the name of the band was. My Bloody Valentine , he said.

Kev was Kevin Shields. Not that I knew that at the time. And actually, I didn’t know it for years afterwards. It’s always puzzled me, the whole thing. Mainly because I’ve never been a fan of MBV. And it seems such a shame to waste an encounter like that on someone was isn’t even a fan. And I’ve rarely told the story over the years, because sometimes MBV fans can be a little …. peculiar. I once told a woman who refused to believe me, accused me of fabricating it, and who became aggressive and upset. I didn’t much like that. Also, I have a weird record of bumping into famous people. It’s suspicious.

I’m not entirely sure that he had decided on MBV as a name then. But he certainly mentioned it as an idea for a name. Oh, that’s the name of a film , I said, which is a pun on an old song , and he liked that I knew that, and asked had I seen the film and I had to say no. I think if I had seen it, and if my guitar had had six strings and the tuning had been one that I could explain, then maybe I’d have had a very different sort of life. Maybe not.

All this came to mind today because I was reading this , which strikes me as semi-hilarious, though I can completely understand the annoyance. The second line-up does seem about 93 times more interesting.

My friend James Meek writes an interesting piece on David Peace in the LRB (of a couple of issues ago probably - I’m behind). And he does a very good job of drawing your attention to Peace’s method. And in the end he’s not very sure about him. His review reminded me of that book about sex my embarrassed father gave to me when I was about 12. Impossible to fault the accuracy, but it did rather leave me with the idea that sex was really very dull and I shouldn’t bother with it.

David Peace is a sensual writer. His style, his technique, is upfront, to the fore, obvious, and so the temptation when writing about him is to concentrate on that. And because he uses fact for the bones of a lot of his fiction, that goes greatly remarked upon as well. So the idea is given - to people who have not read him - that he is a technical, difficult writer entangled in a dodgy sort of conspiracy-theory view of recent history. And actually I think his intention and his achievement lies elsewhere. He’s a sensualist. He is not difficult to understand or follow if you rely on your senses a little more than your sense. He is a writer who is a lot more enjoyable when you trust him, and allow yourself to fall backwards into his arms. He won’t catch you of course, and that’s the beauty of it. Before you know where you are you’re scrabbling around in a smelly, grimy, noisy, scary acre of disgusting humanity, gasping for breath, and thoroughly smothered. At least, I am.

I haven’t read the new book. I can’t afford hardbacks any more. But I wrote a review of the last book for the Irish Times, which you can read here *. And when I read the new book, I’m sure I’ll want to write about him again.

_____

*Oh. Seems that you actually can’t read it there. They want you to pay a subscription. Boo! I thought the Irish Times had given in and made everything free. Anyway, here follows below the full review :

David Peace is contemporary literature’s most compelling chronicler of defeat. In a series of corrosively affecting novels, he has examined the interiors of various English traumas, from the Yorkshire Ripper case (The Red Riding Quartet) to the miner’s strike (GB84) to Brian Clough’s stint as manager of Leeds (The Damned United). As a body of work, it has a distinctive style - a kind of reportage-of-consciousness – and a steady layering of detail. It feels organic, permeated by its subjects, oozing masculinity and fear. You can smell a David Peace novel. Tokyo Year Zero stinks. It’s a remarkable book.

The prologue takes place on the day of surrender in August 1945, as a destroyed city prepares for and absorbs the shock of Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast to the nation confirming surrender. The body of a young woman has been discovered, and Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective Minami and his colleagues are at the scene. The case is closed in no time at all, blame and punishment meted out to an old Korean man who happens to be nearby. The brutality and the sense of collapse are immediate.

The narrative proper opens a year later with the discovery of two more women’s bodies in Shiba Park. We follow the course of the investigation, and the manner of it, and are submerged in the  misery of a defeated people, a defeated city and a defeated country. Everything is rubble, including the population. Tokyo is ruins. There are no communications. The police have no cars, no guns. Trains, when they run, are packed tight with a shocked human cargo. And that cargo in turn carries its own - ringworm, lice, sickness, hunger, filth, humiliation. It is a stifling August, and Detective Minami’s desperation, paranoia and helplessness are rank, as is his relentless, inch by tortuous inch forward movement. He narrates the story, and Peace has found for him a remarkable voice – a voice from the rubble, filled with a jagged, chopped up momentum, haltered by despair and doubt, but always with a kind of broad, startling poetry. Peace is a master of repetition, knowing always when, and how much. Words, phrases, even paragraphs are repeated. Minami’s constant itching, scratching, the endless hammering in the background, the calls of prostitutes in the wrecked alleys, and much more, combine to form an incantatory percussion, a rat-a-tat-tat that marches the reader along at bayonet point.

Identifying the murdered rather than the murderer soon becomes the focus of the investigation, and identity is a bigger puzzle here. This is an occupied city. And the Americans are conducting various purges amongst the survivors. As a result, the police force seems full of people who a year previously went by a different name. No one is necessarily who they say they are. Add to this a gang war over the city’s markets, and Minami’s deeply uneasy relationship with one of the market bosses, as well as the spectre of the original body, which obviously should form part of this investigation but which nobody seems to want to mention, and there is a sufficient tangle of plot to keep us guessing.

But the engine of this book is Peace’s depiction of Tokyo and its people, through the frangible and furious voice of Minami, who seems at times to carry Tokyo on his back. An addict, an adulterer, a killer; he is sometimes slow, stupid and weak – but he is complete, not just as a point of access for us, but as an utterly convincing man of his time and place.

There was a danger that when Peace left the familiar setting of the north of England, and the familiar grubbiness of the 70s and 80s, that he would lose some of his gift for authenticity. And that in choosing a historical setting as specific, desperate and abject as Tokyo in 1946, his grim meticulousness might not be up to the task, or his prose might seem to parody itself. Although there are some English tics which Peace has taken with him (people are never standing, for example, they are stood) nothing is diminished. Peace is as convincing here as he was back in the bleak macho grime of Leeds in 1973 or on the Yorkshire pickets of 1984. Once again, his fiction is based on fact – not just the facts of post war Tokyo, but the facts of this murderer as well - and once again he has created a fiction that leads us far closer to truth than you feel we could ever otherwise get. The instinctive politeness and the underlying rage, the battered deference of a society reeling from violent catastrophe, the impossible balance of obligation - all are beautifully drawn. Tokyo Year Zero is a story about the agony of survival and the choices a society makes in order to survive. It engages all the senses, in ways that should be impossible.