Lisa Halliday: Asymmetry

Why are they killing each other? Why can't they sort it out? Why do so many people have to die? But maybe a better question is: Why do so many people not want to live.

Sara Baume: A Line Made by Walking

I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.


I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.


But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.


I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.


It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.


How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.

Mikael Bulgakov: Morphine

I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.

Cesar Aira: The Literary Conference

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.


…every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out.


Impunity: it’s always impunity that gets you dancing. What did I care about being ridiculous? I was on my way to earning a superior kind of impunity, and nobody knew it.


To let myself be, naked under the sun. To create internal silence. I have pursued this goal through all of life’s twists and turns, almost like an idée fixe. This is the small and alarming idea that stands out in the midst of all other ideas and raises the volume of psychic noise, which is already quite considerable.


Despite all our plans to change, we never voluntarily do so at the core, in our essence, which is usually where we find the knot of our worst defects. I could change it — and I surely would have already — if it were a visible defect, like a limp or acne; but it isn’t.


Language has shaped our expectations so extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.

Harry Matthews: The Solitary Twin

The Situationists were best known for their practice of deviation, which meant putting objects or activities to uses for which they hadn't been intended - my favourite example was an American porn film in which all the lines of dialogue had been replaced with maxims form the Little Red Book of chairman Mao. The main target of the movement wasn't late capitalism or neo-fascism, it was hierarchy of any kind. All previous revolutions had overthrown one hierarchy only to replace it with another just as bad and often worse. It wasn't enough to get rid of capitalist hierarchies, all social and political hierarchies had to be axed as well.... The only way to make sure this happened was for revolutionary action to become permanent.

Tim Lawrence: Life and Death on the New York Dancefloor 1980-83

In keeping with the nebulous quality of its scenes and sounds, the 1980–1983 period doesn’t have a clear start and endpoint. The turn toward mutation can, for instance, be traced to Dinosaur’s “Kiss Me Again,” Cristina’s “Disco Clone,” and the opening of the Mudd Club, all of which unfolded during the autumn of 1978. At the other end of the time frame, venues such as Danceteria and the Paradise Garage entered 1984 in something akin to full fl ow while Strafe’s “Set It Off ” traveled between the city’s venues in a manner that suggested
that interscene records could make their mark just so long as the beat combination was right. Yet it remains the case that disco continued to hog the story of party culture during 1979, even if many of the headlines were turning negative, and it was only during 1980, aft er the majors shift ed into postbacklash retrenchment mode and the national media lost interest in disco, that the shift into a mongrel era became explicit. Similarly, 1983 amounted to a tipping point in the city’s history as aids reached epidemic proportions
while the influences of real estate inflation and Wall Street began to climb exponentially. The continuation of those trends, the onset of the crack epidemic, and the reelection of Ronald Reagan during 1984 marked the beginning of a much more conflictual and divisive era that turned records like “Set It Off ” into a rarity.



If a guiding concept runs through this book it lies in Henri Lefebvre’s description of the ideal city as “the perpetual oeuvre of the inhabitants, themselves mobile and mobilized for and by this oeuvre,” where a “superior form of rights” emerges: the “right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit.” Did New York’s inhabitants realize themselves in such a way during the early 1980s? Th e portents weren’t promising, given that their city is widely assumed to have collapsed during the 1970s, with the
fiscal crisis, deteriorating public ser vices, and rising crime rates pummeling its inhabitants. But although the ride was oft en bumpy, and although certain prob lems appeared endemic, New York entered the new de cade with its public services operational and its debt manageable. Rarely referenced, President Ford delivered a $2.3 billion loan soon aft er the New York Post reported him telling the city to drop dead, real estate values dipped yet never collapsed, heroin use was far less ubiquitous than is routinely implied, the murder rate barely rose between 1971 and 1979, and muggers were frequently greeted with the comment “Sorry, I haven’t got any money,” recalls downtown actor Patti Astor. With the cultural renaissance already gathering momentum, the city was set for an explosion of creative activity that came to be distinguished by its participatory nature as well as the ability of those involved to reinvent themselves and their surroundings.



As for this book’s title, the reference to life is intended to evoke the way that New York party culture didn’t merely survive the hyped death of disco but positively flourished in its wake. If the backlash held sway in the suburbs of the United States as well as the music corporations that gauged success according to national sales, the sense of possibility, opportunity, and exploration remained palpable for those who experienced the culture via the city’s private parties and public discotheques. As for the evocation of death, the primary
reference is to aids, which devastated the queer population that contributed so powerfully to the city’s party scene, with heroin users and others also embroiled. Death also refers to the reorganization of the city around a neoliberal ethos that has ultimately resulted in the radical curtailment (if not total eradication) of its party culture.



New York Magazine captured the zeitgeist in its 31 December issue. “The media have already been at work defining it all,” ran the introductory piece. “The key words seem to be ‘Me,’ ‘Self,’ ‘Disco,’ ‘Woody Allen,’ ‘Th ird World,’ ‘Liberation (usually women’s possibly anybody’s),’ ‘Cocaine,’ ‘Style,’ and, above all, ‘Energy.’ ” The publication noted that the words could be joined together, so a “shortage of energy” could be “relieved by cocaine,” which could provide “the strength to dance the night away,” with disco movie star John Travolta
“dancing with a degree of self- absorption that would glaze over the eyes of Narcissus” in Saturday Night Fever. The magazine positioned the 1970s as “the decade of the last free ride” and forecast that the 1980s would “find us paying our dues for the debts and obligations we took on during the 1970s.” It also suggested that the anonymous Studio 54 dancer who said “this is as near to heaven as I’ll ever get” might have been right, because the 1980s didn’t look as though they were “ going to be that much fun.”

It didn’t seem to matter that New York Magazine had published the semifictional article that inspired the making of Saturday Night Fever in the first place. Th e time had come to rein in consumption, cut down on the partying, and lie on a bed of nails. None of the talk would have discouraged hardened revelers from heading out to a subterranean party scene that bore only a passing resemblance to the flashier side of disco. At the Loft , musical host David Mancuso selected a panoramic range of danceable sounds for a crowd that had frequented his spot since the beginning of 1970. At Better Days, dj Toraino “Tee” Scott delivered a blend of soul, funk, r&b, and disco that lured his black gay followers into the timeless fl ow of the rhythm section. At Flamingo and 12 West, djs Howard Merritt, Richie Rivera, and Robbie Leslie played to a white gay crowd that had helped set disco in motion before side- stepping its commercial conclusion. At the Paradise Garage, dj Larry Levan created a tapestry that lay somewhere between the range of Mancuso and the steady drive of Scott. At Club 57
and the Mudd Club, Dany Johnson, David Azarch, Johnny Dynell, and Anita Sarko selected funk, new wave, no wave, punk, r&b, and sometimes even disco in between off erings that included live bands, art, immersive happenings, participatory theater, and experimental fi lm. Meanwhile Disco Fever, located up in the Bronx, presented dj and mc combinations that worked the floor by mixing disco, funk, and the nascent sound of rap. Giving up the ritual wasn’t even a consideration. The culture continued to thrive because the conditions that had led dj-ing to take root in New York in the fi rst place remained largely unchanged. The city housed the highest concentration of gay men, people of color, and women in the United States, if not the world, and just as these groups had joined forces with miscellaneous others to conquer, recalibrate, and properly ignite the withering discotheque scene during the early 1970s, so they continued at the beginning of the new de cade, because going out to party had become a way of life. Th e music industry’s historic presence in the city had also helped it become the national capital for disco and new wave, with musicians encouraged to migrate to the city in the knowledge that they would enjoy a betterthan- average chance of making a go of it if they played and recorded there. Usually broke, musicians were able to pursue this kind of dream because real estate remained cheap, thanks to the impact of deindustrialization, the fl ight of the white middle class to the suburbs, and the city’s mid- decade nosedive into bankruptcy.New York remained raw and ardent. Rolled out during the second half
of the 1970s, bud get cuts placed the city’s ser vices under such severe strain they were still deteriorating as the new de cade got under way. More murders, robberies, and burglaries were recorded in 1980 than in any year since records began forty- nine years earlier; subway breakdowns rose from 30,000 in 1977 to 71,700; and the city’s public schools lagged far behind their private counter parts.

Meanwhile a significant element of the housing stock went up in smoke as landlords ran down decrepit buildings before resorting to arson, aware they could oft en make more money from insurance than by renting to low- earning tenants. During 1979 alone, close to ten thousand premeditated blazes raged through the city, with almost half of them occurring in occupied buildings. “Arson is the cremation ritual of a diseased housing system,” lamented the Village Voice in June 1980. “In housing, the fi nal stage of capitalism is arson.”
With heroin dealing taking root in the Lower East Side, it was no wonder that some believed the city amounted to a study in nihilism, as was the case with punk vocalist Lydia Lunch, who described it as a “fi lthy specter” constructed out of “blood- soaked bones.” There were times, however, when the doomsday headlines failed to capture the city’s openness, communality, and durability. Even though friends had warned her that the Lower East Side was so dangerous nobody would visit, for instance, the Cincinnati- raised downtown movie actor Patti Astor discovered the area to be “actually quite pastoral, with firmly established Russian, Italian and Hispanic communities” when she moved into a dirt- cheap three bedroom walk-up on East 10th Street and Second Avenue. Th e ceiling fell in at her next apartment, on 3rd Street between Second Ave nue and the Bowery, but that, she says, was nothing, and it also gave her a reason to not pay the rent. “We just ran wild in the streets, wearing our little outfits,” reminisces Astor. “We all lived in these horrible little apartments so we really
didn’t want to stay inside, and we kind of made that whole neighborhood one big playground. Th e parents were gone.” Even the threat of vio lence usually ended in a slapstick standoff . “Being stuck up by somebody with a knife wasn’t that big of a deal,” she adds. “ Th ey’d go, ‘Give me your money!’ And we’d reply, ‘We don’t have any money! Why do you think we’re out on the same street?!’ Th en the guy would go, ‘Oh, okay. Here, have a cigarette.’ For real.” Only the Alphabets, as the alphabetized avenues at the eastern end of
the Lower East Side were known, were deemed to be out of bounds (thanks to the local heroin trade). Creativity flourished under these conditions. “It was a time when people could literally pay $100 a month in rent and there was a tremendous freedom to that,” argues Chi Chi Valenti, a native New Yorker and party animal who shared a $400- per- month loft on 14th Street with three roommates. “They didn’t have to have a career. Th ere was a great fluidity.” Getting by with very little money, Valenti and her peers flocked to the Odessa, a cheap diner located on Ave nue A and St. Mark’s Place, as well as the ubiquitous ethnic cafés and restaurants of the East Village, where the enormous plates of food could suffi ce for a day. Th ose who got to know the door staff of downtown’s clubs gained free entry and oft en free drinks. Transport couldn’t have been cheaper because every one walked everywhere. “It’s amazing how little we needed,” adds Valenti, whose uniformed outfi ts, severe aura, and dominant personality made her a recognizable presence. “Th at was terribly im por tant.” Taking shape aft er creative workers fl ooded into Lower Manhattan during the 1960s and 1970s, the downtown art scene coexisted with the clandestine end of the city’s party network. Th e experimental Kitchen Center for Video and Music operated out of the Mercer Street Arts Center, which was situated around the corner from Mancuso’s fi rst Loft on Broadway and Bleecker Street. Paula Cooper’s gallery on 96 Prince Street, the fi rst of its kind when it opened in SoHo in 1968, became neighbors with the second incarnation
of the Loft when Mancuso moved to number 99. Leo Castelli, the most influential dealer in American con temporary art, opened a gallery at 420 West Broadway in SoHo in 1971, little more than a hop, skip, and jump away from Nicky Siano’s second Gallery, a Loft - style venue located on Mercer Street and Houston. La MaMa Experimental Th eatre Club had already been running on East 4th Street for twelve years when future punk hangout cbgb set up shop at nearby 315 Bowery. Students from the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street were happy to make the short hike to Club 57 on St. Mark’s Place. And the Performing Garage, home of the experimental theater group the Wooster Group, turned out to be a twelve- minute saunter from the Paradise Garage, located at 84 King Street. With so much at their doorsteps, downtowners rarely felt the need to leave.

Negotiating streets that were still unlit at night, artists, actors, choreographers, composers, dancers, djs, musicians, per for mance artists, theater directors, video fi lmmakers, and writers tended to collaborate and socialize within discrete groups at fi rst, drawn to those who shared their vocabulary. Yet whether they ended up living in an expansive loft in SoHo or a run- down tenement in the East Village, the density of their living arrangements, the sheer level of their activity, and the shared desire to make a stand led the
divergent strands of this defi nitively postindustrial generation to come into increasing contact, and from the mid-1970s onward a constellation’s worth of meetings and collaborations began to unfold. “Artists worked in multiple media, and collaborated, criticized, supported, and valued each other’s works in a way that was unpre ce dented,” argues archivist and critic Marvin J. Taylor in Th e Downtown Book. “Rarely has there been such a condensed and diverse group of artists in one place at one time, all sharing many of the same assumptions about how to make new art.”

Jeanette Winterson: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.


I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.


Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Yoko Tawada: The Emissary

On his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself of always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar fora structure called «individuality».


Adults arrogantly talked about whether food tasted good or not, as if a gourmet sensibility put you in a superior class of people. Poison often had no taste at all, so no matter how finely honed your palate, your taste buds weren’t going to save your life.


Being able to see the end of anything gave him a tremendous sense of relief. As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die.

Tim Lawrence: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Elizabeth Taylor: Palladian

His head felt as if someone were doing knitting in it. Nothing was simple. He believed that he loved Cassandra tenderly; but marriage is not simple. It brought with it, Nanny had reminded him, so many complications which were beyond his energies. Tinty stood before him, and Tom, Nanny with her talk of refrigerators and change, the thought of beginning a new life in that fast-crumbling house, of leaving a smouldering and rank corner of earth to sons, perhaps, and then engaging servants, spending money, laying down wine, planting and clearing. In the library last night, no one, nothing, had stood between him and Cassandra. Now so much interposed. She was a child merely, to be led into so dark, so lonely, a wilderness as his heart. For her, so much unravelling of people, so much sorting out of possessions would have to be done. He might draw her to him and ease the passion which lay under her silence, lead her into the circle of ice which encompassed him: but the obstacles were still outside, where the world was, and even within him, there was Violet.

Timothy Morton: Being Ecological

Arguments for the radical cognitive change required to fix ecological catastrophe.

The idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining... There is a lack of attention to what is being efficiently sustained.


Bataille gave a name to this smooth functioning myth: the restricted economy. A restricted economy is one in which the dominant theme is efficiency: minimum energy throughput. The Earth is finite, and economic flows must be restricted to its finite size and capacities. So much ecological ethics, politics, and aesthetics is based on the economy of restriction.


Things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way.


Being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.


We’ve been thinking that we are on top of things, outside of things or beyond things, able to look down and decide exactly what to do, in all sorts of ways for about 12,000 years.

Kenneth Cook: Wake in Fright

Urban school teacher trapped in rural hell, strongly reminiscent of Joseph Roth's Legend of the Holy Drinker.

"First time in The Yabba?"


In the remote towns of the west there are few of the amenities of civilization; there is no sewerage, there are no hospitals, rarely a doctor; the food is dreary and flavourless from long carrying, the water is bad; electricity is for the few who can afford their own plant, roads are mostly non-existent; there are no theatres, no picture shows and few dance halls; and the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of progress that is ingrained for a thousand miles east, north, south and west of the Dead Heart - the beer is always cold.


Peculiar trait of the western people, thought Grant, that you could sleep with their wives, despoil their daughters, sponge on them, defraud them, do almost anything that would mean at least ostracism in normal society, and they would barely seem to notice it. But refuse to drink with them and you immediately became a mortal enemy. What the hell? He didn’t even want to think about the west or its people and their peculiarities. Let them be. Once he was in Sydney, who knew, he might never come back.


When you travel by road in the west you travel with a cohort of dust which streams up from your tyres and rolls away in a disintegrating funnel, defining the currents of air your vehicle sets in motion … And the heat is unthinkable, no matter how widely the windows are open, and the sweat streams off your body and into your socks, and if there are a number of people in the car their body stenches mingle disagreeably.


Grant felt a little conspicuous in his safari jacket.

Karl Ove Knausgaard: The End

Final chapter in Knausgaard's exploration of contemporary biographical fiction, mixing the quotidian with deep psychological probings and a lengthy analysis of Hitler and Nazism.

Perhaps because I have always had such a weak ego, always felt myself inferior to all others, in every situation … I am inferior to the female assistant in the shoe shop when I go in to buy shoes, she has me in her hands, so to speak, full of an authority to which I yield. But the worst for me are waiters, since their role is so obviously to serve and be there to please.


‘The clown wasn’t there, daddy!’ Vanja said. ‘He didn’t go to his own birthday party.’

The children had each been given a party hat and sat around a table drawing a picture for the clown’s birthday. They were then given a glass of pop and a hot dog and a piece of cake, which they ate in silence. They asked the staff when the clown was coming, he would be there soon, they were told. Then they played for a while, without the clown or any great enthusiasm as they didn’t know one another and despite encouragement from the staff. Vanja didn’t want to join in, she sat on Linda’s lap and kept asking when the clown would be coming and why he wasn’t there already. Finally the party was over, they trooped out, over to the stage where all the other children were sitting waiting for the clown, who did finally make an appearance, performing his standard routine with one exception, he collected the drawings from the children who had been at his party.

Vanja didn’t understand this. How could the clown not turn up for his own birthday party?

We couldn’t of course tell her the truth – that the bloody tour operators didn’t give a shit about the kids and didn’t want to waste resources on them – so we said that Coco, which was the clown’s name, had been pleased with the drawings, and the cake had been good, hadn’t it?

Junzo Shono: Evening Clouds

Quotidian episodes of family life in the outskirts of Tokyo.

"There's no telling what you can learn by keeping your ears open"


"Of all the things we come to know in this world, there is ultimately nothing that does not pass on."

David Toop: Ocean of Sound: Ambient sound and radical listening in the age of communication

Seminal work from Wire-mainstay Toop exploring the free-form 'ambient' turn in music since Debussy.

"There's an experiment I did. Since I did it, I started to think it was quite a good exercice that I would recommend to other people. I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater I recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this -a three and a half minute section, the length of a single- and I tried to learn it?"

“So that's what I did. I put it in SoundTools and I made fade-up, let it run for three and a half minutes and fade it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercice to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: “Right, he puts this bit there and that pattern's just at the exact same moment as this happening. Brillant!" Since I've done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way. It's like putting oneself in the role of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I'm playing that role.”
- Brian Eno

Helen Weinzweig: Basic Black With Pearls

Feminist derive-ations around Toronto recalling French nouveau roman writers.

We solitaries came towards one another, passed; other came up from behind and passed me; at times we walked side by side for a few paces. Soon I got a sense of common activity: I thought, I would like nothing better than to link my arm through yours and we would walk along together. Acts of fellowship, I reflected sadly, take place only during bombings and public hangings. Under normal conditions strangers must avoid the other's strangeness.

Leslie Jamison: The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath

A homage to AA and alcoholic American writers by a young alcoholic American writer.

Nights out turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What's the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what's left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself? How long until the waiter comes back and how likely is it someone else will ask him for another bottle?


Certain parts of Peter began to repel me: his insecurities about our relationship and about himself, his hunger for my reassurance. These parts of him echoed the parts of me that had been hungry for reassurance all my life; that was probably why they disgusted me. But I couldn't see that then. I could only see that he'd gotten the same lip balm I'd gotten; he hadn't even been able to choose his own brand.


There was a little voice in me that considered the possibility that perhaps there were people who didn't spend hours every day trying to decide if their desperate desire to drink had preceded recovery meetings or been created by them. But it irritated me, that voice. I tried not to listen to it.


I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable - a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than punishment. No one has ever called me a leper or a psychopath. No doctor has ever pointed a gun at me. No cop has ever shot me at an intersection while I was reaching for my wallet, for that matter, or even pulled me over for drunk driving, something I've done more times than I could count. My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication. When it comes to addiction, the abstraction of privilege is ultimately a question of what type of story gets told about your body: Do you need to be shielded from harm, or prevented from causing it? My body has been understood as something to be protected, rather than something to be protected from.

Olga Togarczuk: Flights

Engrossing stories about travel crossing time and geography.

Age all in your mind. Gender grammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything.


Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings, the landscape comprised of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the pavement with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss.


Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away.


They’d set up in the designated areas, at campsites where they were always in the company of others just like them, having lively conversations with their neighbours surrounded by socks drying on tent cords. The itineraries for these trips would be determined with the aid of guidebooks that painstakingly highlighted all the attractions. In the morning a swim in the sea or the lake, and in the afternoon an excursion into the city’s history, capped off by dinner, most often out of glass jars: goulash, meatballs in tomato sauce. You just had to cook the pasta or the rice. Costs were always being cut, the Polish zloty was weak – penny of the world. There was the search for a place where you could get electricity and then the reluctant decamping after, although all journeys remained within the same metaphysical orbit of home. They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation. They returned to collect the letters and bills that stacked up on the chest of drawers. To do a big wash. To bore their friends to death by showing pictures as everyone attempted to conceal their yawns. This is us in Carcassonne. Here’s my wife with the Acropolis in the background.


Here we were taught that the world could be described, and even explained, by means of simple answers to intelligent questions. That in its essence the world was inert and dead, governed by fairly simple laws that needed to be explained and made public – if possible with the aid of diagrams. We were required to do experiments. To formulate hypotheses. To verify. We were inducted into the mysteries of statistics, taught to believe that equipped with such a tool we would be able to perfectly describe all the workings of the world – that ninety per cent is more significant than five.


As far as I can tell, this is mankind’s most honest cognitive project. It is frank about the fact that all the information we have about the world comes straight out of our own heads, like Athena out of Zeus’s. People bring to Wikipedia everything they know. If the project succeeds, then this encyclopaedia undergoing perpetual renewal will be the greatest wonder of the world. It has everything we know in it – every thing, definition, event, and problem our brains have worked on; we shall cite sources, provide links.


There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints. There are those who boast they have discovered places totally unknown, and then we envy them for experiencing the truest reality even very fleetingly before that place, like all the rest, is absorbed by our minds.


Am I doing the right thing be telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single though gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs. I could use quotes and foot notes …. I would be the mistress of my own text …. As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds. Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray.


I studied psychology in a big gloomy communist city … that part of the city had been built up on the ruins of the ghetto, which you could tell if you took a good look – that whole neighbourhood stood about three feet higher than the rest of the town. Three feet of rubble.


Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress towards a goal, a destination … And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.

Yuko Tsushima: Child of Fortune

Strange and challenging novel questioning gender and social expectations in contemporary (1980s) Japan.

Josef Winkler: When the Time Comes

Catalogue of deaths in provincial Austrian backwater.

... who even today venerates Hitler and who, by way of punishment, used to make his daughter Karin – not yet 20 – go alone to the cesspit with a long-handled ladle to gather faeces and throw them into the manure tanker with a rusty bucket, until bloody blisters formed on her hands.


"A deep chasm divides us. None of us can go to you and none of you can come to us."


Willibald, who had worked for decades in the Heraklith factory on the other bank of the Drava, was dead from long cancer. His hands in the air and his pants around his ankles, he stepped out of the bathroom and called [to his wife]: Hilde! Hilde! Help me! then fell over and died on the spot.


The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards. ... With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin.


Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask.


Tomorrow morning or the day after, they will scrape it [candlewax] off with a kitchen knife and sweep it up with the leftover flowers strewn about, then there will be no more traces of a dead man in the house, the mourning house will smell no more of rotten flowers, burnt spruce twigs, and wax candles.

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less is Enough

Inspirational essay examining capitalism, austerity and architectural fashion.

There is an increasing interest in more socially oriented ways of living such as co-housing or sharing domestic space between the compound of the family apartment. But what is seldom discussed is that this way of life requires some effort. To live together requires less individual freedom, although that maybe no bad thing. The question is whether such a way of life might only be developed out of economic necessity, or because it is only by sharing and coexisting that we can reclaim the true subjectivity that Marx beautifully described with the oxymoron ‘social individual’ – individuals who only become so among other individuals. Here, less means precisely the recalibration of a form of reciprocity that is no longer driven by possession but by sharing; the less we have in terms of possessions, the more we’ll be able to share. To say enough (instead of more) means to redefine what we really need in order to live a good life – that is, a life detached from the social ethos of property, from the anxiety of production and possession, and where less is just enough.

Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow

Reactionary paean to the lost manners of Tsarist Russia.

What matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.


For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour - disdaining even to wear a watch - he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.

Accurate review here.

Benjamin Myers: The Gallows Pole

Grimy tale of anarchic counterfeiters in the pre-Industrial North of England. Read in August 2018.

Yes my sleep it was diysturbed by the sound of the moore tryin to get into my room an the sound of the moore tryin to get into my bed and the moore tryin to get into my mind becors it can do that can the moore and no man can sleep in that state no Not unless thur in a coffing.


Each time he returned to town, to home, to lie in bed perfectly still beside his sleeping wife, his senses enlivened, William Deighton felt utterly exhausted, yet he was nevertheless imbued and infused with a sort of joyful drunkenness too, and increasingly a part of him was still out there, stalking the moor, a half-feral man whose very dreams were now scented by heather and lit by moonlight, crackling with the mute power of all things connected.


Above them a mosaic of crows fell to pieces.


He listened to the sound of the water and the way it sang over the smoothed rocks of flint and grit. The way it danced down through the woods like a child.


The sun rose then, for it had only skulked like a struck cat at the sight of the incoming storm, but now it yawned and stretched itself in layered lengths of light reaching crossways along the smallholdings of the Calder Valley.

Ann Quin: Berg

Man tries (succeeds?) to kill father in seaside town amidst Beckettian chaos and despair. Read in June 2018.

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.


Just lying here for an hour since the sun had filtered through the snow that snail-trailed across the window. How silent the place is, as if the snow had penetrated the walls, sound-proofed the habitual early morning scurryings, the alarms. Once a huge snowball, made entirely by yourself, hiding behind the shrubbery, blistered fingers against your mouth, listening for Edith's steps; her Sunday-best hat knocked off, her flushed face as she took you inside, produced the leather strap, buckle-end for you, for naughty boys who never love their mother.

Rachel Cusk: Kudos

Writer writes about writers at writers festival.

She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.


You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.


A saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.

Terry Deary: Gruesome Guides: Oxford (Horrible Histories)

Educational graphic history for young (and old) on the violence of this whitewashed city.

Iqbal Ahmed: Empire of the Mind

Enjoyably clunky, pithy, idiosyncratic wanderings around (post-)colonial Britain.

Every hardship is relief,there is one hardship with two relief so one hardship can't over come two relief

Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards: Holloway

Macfarlane and friends camp in Sussex in search of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male hideout.

Holloway - a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock.

In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres & great strangeness.

Six years later, after Deakin's early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape

Sam Byers: Perfidious Albion

Blandly straightforward narrative of post-Brexit England already dated.

‘I think . . .’ said Robert, touching the tip of his forefinger momentarily to his lips and frowning down at the floor. ‘I think I just reached a point where I was like, if it’s not now, then I’m not interested. You know?’

Jacques DeCoverley, to whom Robert was speaking, absorbed this statement like a particularly complex scent he had just detected on the air, angling his head and eyes slightly upwards and flaring his nostrils in appreciation. He had a way of manufacturing a reflective smile, as if he’d been ambushed by yet another sadness or paradox it remained his nobly silent burden to shoulder.

‘Who wants to write something that’s already yesterday?’ he said, arching a copious eyebrow and peeling away a lock of tightly curled hair that had adhered to the patina of sweat on his forehead.

Jess watched them – their little dance, their little chess match of self-consciousness – feeling screened-off, remote.

‘But then . . .’ said Robert. ‘What isn’t yesterday these days?’

The smile slithered back across DeCoverley’s lips as he took a moment to ponder just how much was yesterday right now.

‘Indeed,’ he said, taking a ruminative sip of his negroni and slicking a finger across his glossy brow. ‘These are post-present times.’

Jess, standing slightly behind DeCoverley’s elbow and out of his sightline, tried to catch Robert’s eye so she could make a face. It struck her that once, in a different time of their lives, he would already have been looking, attendant to her expression. Indeed, they had met at a function not dissimilar to this one. Then, as some man she could no longer name, inflated by the imagined importance of his own opinions, had not once but three times interrupted her, Robert had cut across him, angling his shoulder to communicate the man’s irrelevance, and said, with a conspiratorial glint in his eye, But what do you think . . . Jess, isn’t it? Now, his need to let her know he was listening had dwindled. When he did glance her way, it was fleeting, awkward, and seemed to suggest her mockery was misjudged.

She looked down at her drink. When she raised her gaze again, DeCoverley had slid an arm round Robert’s shoulders, and was leading him away.

‘You know,’ Jess heard DeCoverley say as they left, ‘we love what you’re doing at the moment, Robert. This stuff about the estate. So vital. So now.’



*



Abandoned, yet unwilling to appear so, Jess circled. The room, it seemed, was full of men triangulating. They used directions to establish a base of conversation, as if how they’d arrived communicated something about who they were. Somewhere off to her left, someone was saying, ‘We came the back way. B-Three-One-Four and get off at Cockwell. Saves you the argy-bargy at the double roundabout.’ To her right, someone was saying, ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: until they make it dual carriageway I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.’

It was an atavistic conversation. Once, the sharing of routes had allowed a gently competitive comparison of cunning. Now, it masked a drabber reality. None of these men had made any decisions about their travel at all. Instead, they had simply punched a postcode into their satnav. Their active involvement was no longer needed, yet somehow the pride remained.

The work of locating themselves complete, the business of defining themselves could begin. Loaded with coders who’d flocked to staff the tech park and artsy North London refugees fleeing the cash-haemorrhage of the city, Edmundsbury increasingly existed in the collapsed distinction between creativity and commerce, and so was awash with people determinedly codifying their output.

‘Well obviously my work is very much about challenging dominant discourses of ability and success and what constitutes quote unquote good art, so I work almost exclusively in crayon.’

‘I just felt I wanted to comment overtly on the artistic scene and creative praxis in general via a medium that was both performative and organic, so I’ve been working with a variety of types of mud and various different walls and just seeing if I can, by literally throwing the mud at the wall . . .’

Across the room, Jacques DeCoverley had kettled a gaggle of single women into a corner and was holding forth on the radical opportunities for situationist protest afforded by sex in a lay-by. Beside him, Robert nodded and laughed on cue.

DeCoverley was a blow-in from the city, recently resettled and now flushed with the glow of post-London life. In terms of aspiration, leaving London was the new moving to London. You slogged it out, made a name for yourself, then decamped to the sticks and devoted yourself to trashing city life on Twitter while roaming the fields in pursuit of your tweedy ideals. For a long time, DeCoverley had described himself as a street philosopher. Unlike the usual use of the term, this had nothing to do with his non-academic outsider status. Instead, it referred to the fact that his work was literally about streets. He’d done a whole book on pavements (Under The Beach: The Pavement!): their cultural history, their, as he liked to put it, physically marginal yet psychogeographically central status. His follow-up, an oral history of pedestrianisation called No Cars Go, had proved rather less successful. Now that he was almost certainly no longer able to maintain the illusion of highly paid success in London, he was reinventing himself as a deep-thinking rural gentleman for the twenty-first century, wearing wellington boots indoors and waxing lyrical about a ‘lost’ England comprised entirely of hedgerows and loam.

Of course, DeCoverley couldn’t just quit the city and be quiet. He had to dress up his departure as a statement. Having laboured in interviews to make the case that something ‘authentic’ was emerging from parts of England he genuinely seemed to think had not existed before he started wandering about in them, he was now under pressure to ensure reality aligned with his descriptions. Hence his parties, which he referred to as ‘salons’, and to which he invited everyone he could think of – local, Londoner, and other – in a bid to establish something of which he could reasonably describe himself as the centre.

Deeply cynical though Jess might have been about DeCoverley’s artful manipulation of his own surroundings and status, she had to admit these little soirées had grown in notability since the first one a few months ago. Tonight, DeCoverley had outdone himself on the buzz front by securing the attendance of several members of Rogue Statement, an anonymous collective of theorist poseurs who Jess and her friend Deepa referred to as the Theory Dudes. Their stated aim was, as they put it, to decode the encoded fascism of everyday life. Their first groundbreaking and extraordinarily well-received polemic had been a ferocious exposé of the fascism of iced buns. After that, it was egg-white omelettes. Soon they were finding fascism everywhere: in sofas, marathons, dog shows, vinyl flooring, socks.

‘Look,’ one of the Theory Dudes had told her earlier that evening, when she’d asked him why he seemingly felt more responsibility to decry the fascism of falafel wraps and justified margins than he did the street-level violence and creeping intimidation that was an increasingly common feature of what some were already calling the New England, ‘violence is upsetting. It’s emotive. But it’s just a symptom, yeah?’

Maybe it was, Jess thought, but so were so many other things, and yet still the question of what they were symptoms of remained unanswered.

‘But anyway,’ Jess heard Robert saying as she dallied at the bar, ‘enough about me. How goes it with you, DeCoverley?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said DeCoverley, ‘desperately trying to work but constantly torn away by other requests. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that the best thing I could do for my career right now would be to write something wildly unsuccessful. I pine for obscurity. Don’t you?’

‘Constantly,’ said Robert.

‘The trouble is, I just can’t do it. It’s a curse, being this tapped in to the culture. I’m just out there all the time, like a dowsing rod. Quivering.’

He squinted, momentarily pained by his own significance.

‘I guess that’s what we sign up for,’ said Robert, using his slowest, most sincere nod, reserved exclusively, Jess knew, for his hastiest, least sincere statements.

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said DeCoverley, ‘but for me personally there was never any choice.’

‘You mean, because you’re not qualified for anything else?’ said Jess innocently, breezing by and unable to bite her tongue.

‘Ah,’ said DeCoverley to Robert, ‘here’s your lovely girlfriend. No, I meant because I have nothing but philosophy coursing through my veins. Because I cannot but be anything other than I am.’

‘Exactly,’ said Robert, narrowing his eyes at Jess before clumsily adjusting the subject. ‘Do we know if Byron is coming?’

‘Stroud?’ DeCoverley beamed at being asked, then savoured the fact that he was in the know enough to be able to answer. ‘Couldn’t make it, sadly.’

Byron Stroud was currently the man you needed to know if you wanted to give the impression of knowing the right people. His rise through the opinion-sphere, occasioned largely by the fact that he wrote almost exclusively about the opinion-sphere and so produced articles that were both fallen upon and fawned over by their subjects, had been rapid. This being the age of the over-exposed personality, reclusive tendencies were invariably interpreted as either artistic statements or shrewd attempts at personal branding, so the fact that Stroud had thus far declined all invitations only added to his aura. No one went quite so far as to claim to have met him, but they all, when talking about him, affected an air of first-name familiarity that suggested they might have met him. It was a social signifier to which Robert had become particularly sensitive, meaning he would now, Jess thought, be trying to work out exactly what DeCoverley meant by Stroud not being able to make it. Had DeCoverley heard from Stroud? Had he heard from someone else who had heard from Stroud? Or had everyone, like Robert, emailed Stroud and received nothing in response?

‘Couldn’t?’ said Robert. ‘Or didn’t want to?’

‘Oh,’ said DeCoverley vaguely, ‘I’m not sure Byron would even acknowledge that demarcation.’



*



Jess popped to the toilet to tweet. Back in the room, an assortment of indistinct men – bearded and earnest and flushed with credentials – talked at her or for her, but never quite to her.

‘Of course,’ she heard someone say, ‘it’s getting to the point where marriage is the last truly radical act.’

This was a recurrent theme. At every party a new last radical act. Faced with a future so rapid in its occurrence and uncertain in its shape, people clung to familiarity. Fearful of appearing retrograde, they refashioned their nostalgia as subversion. Home ownership was the last truly radical act. Monogamy was the last truly radical act. Parenting was the last truly radical act. Not wanting it all was the last truly radical act. Everything else, it seemed, was dead.

‘I mean, time was when people actually had conversations. Remember that?’ someone brayed at Jess through a mouthful of bar snacks.

‘Exactly right,’ said his wingman. ‘Conversation’s dead.’



*



She found Deepa in her habitual darkened corner, idly stirring a drink with her straw and wearing an expression that suggested she was amusing herself in ways that couldn’t safely be shared.

‘Oh thank God,’ said Deepa. ‘I was starting to think I might have to mingle.’

‘I’ve mingled,’ said Jess. ‘Upshot is: don’t mingle.’

They leaned side by side against the wall, Jess enjoying the brief coolness of the faux wood panelling before the heat of her back rendered it as sweaty as everything else.

‘Saw you dallying with the Theory Dudes,’ said Deepa, tilting her chin towards the huddle of serious young men in the middle of the room. ‘Still working on a cure for fascism?’

‘I literally overheard one of them talking about fascist molecules,’ said Jess.

‘Robert seems to be enjoying himself.’

‘Nice that you no longer even pretend to like my partner.’

‘He’s got enough people pretending to like him,’ said Deepa. ‘Why get in the way?’

Jess laughed. They swapped drinks without saying anything. It was something they did. In restaurants they ate each other’s food.

‘I feel like we haven’t run people down enough,’ said Jess, taking out her phone. ‘We’re shirking our responsibilities.’

Deepa eyed Jess’s phone. ‘Someone’s breaking their own rules,’ she said.

‘I have location disabled.’

Deepa sipped Jess’s drink and looked out across the party.

‘Riddle me this,’ she said as Jess hit send, then locked and pocketed her phone. ‘If you start enjoying something you used to only find interesting, is it still interesting?’

‘You’re saying enjoyment erases interest?’

‘I’m saying that saying you’re interested in something can be a pretty good way of masking the fact that you’re enjoying it, and that enjoying it too much calls into question the extent to which you’re merely interested in it.’

‘Oh come on. You don’t enjoy your work?’

‘Not so much that it stops being work.’

‘Is that what’s bothering you? You think my work’s too enjoyable?’

‘I think your work might no longer be work.’

They watched as, across the room, Jacques DeCoverley checked his phone, swore under his breath, then pasted his smile back on for a passing twenty-something.

‘OK,’ said Deepa. ‘I can see how that might be kind of satisfying.’



*



By midnight, the evening was losing pace. The energy of these things was always front-ended. People arrived with opinions they wanted to disgorge. Once they’d done so, they succumbed to a collective petite mort. Jess prided herself on never going over to Robert and letting it be known she was ready to leave. The dependency of such moments unsettled her.

He joined her just as she was about to hold forth to Lionel Groves, a tall, greying man with jaw-length hair and a rough beard about whom everyone seemed determined to use the word rugged. After a progressively unsuccessful intellectual career based entirely on scathingly dismantling the work of his peers, Groves had reinvented himself as an international man of feeling. His most recent book was an alphabetically arranged series of micro-essays on things that made him cry. Having ‘done’ tears he was now ‘doing’ laughter, and had published a series of ‘provocations’ about the importance of humour in the face of oppression and good grace in the face of injustice. His Twitter feed was a carefully curated gallery of nauseating bromides like, It’s not always what we feel that’s important; it’s the very fact that we feel at all. Dumbstruck by his own capacity for emotion, he spoke at all times as if he were the first man on earth to experience a feeling. Apparently affirming this delusion, people huddled round him at parties and used him as a litmus test for what they should be feeling themselves. It was, Jess thought, the age of beatified masculine emotion. Everywhere you looked, men were sweeping up awards for feeling things.

‘Of course, Palestine is such a sad situation,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t you think? I find it hard even to watch on television now because it just makes me so sad.’

‘What about the environment?’ someone said. ‘Does that make you angry?’

‘Fearful,’ said Groves. ‘And sad, of course. But laughter does give one such hope, I find.’

‘How do you feel about how you feel?’ said Jess. ‘When you feel sad, do you also feel a little bit proud?’

He turned to her slowly. He had a way of smiling in the face of hostility that Jess found enraging.

‘Well hello,’ he said. ‘You’re Robert Townsend’s girlfriend, aren’t you?’

She looked at Groves – his practised sadness, his calibrated roughness – and felt only a familiar, disenchanted rage of the sort that Groves would almost certainly have advised her to laugh off.

She sucked in air, primed for a withering response, only to be interrupted.

‘I’m Robert,’ said Robert, leaning across Jess and shaking Groves’s hand. ‘I see you’ve met my girlfriend.’

‘Adorable,’ said Groves. ‘Such energy.’

‘Misplaced at times but never anything other than well meant,’ said Robert, placing a hand on Jess’s back and shooting her a quick sideways glance. She thought again of that moment they’d met, the tingling thrill of his canny, collaborative attention. Now she was the one being managed, the speaker to whom he pointedly turned his shoulder.

She toyed, briefly, with the idea of some kind of retort. She was not averse to public conflict. Indeed, there were times when she wondered if, as their ability to constructively argue in private declined, public friction might be one of their last shared sources of heat. But her energy, like that of the room, had evaporated.

‘Pity not to see Byron here,’ said Groves.

‘Ah yes,’ said Robert. ‘He couldn’t make it, unfortunately.’

‘Couldn’t?’ said Groves. ‘Or wouldn’t?’

‘Well,’ said Robert, ‘is that a demarcation Byron would even recognise?’

‘Quite so,’ said Groves, slightly icily.

Robert turned to Jess, rubbed her shoulder awkwardly. ‘How are you bearing up, hon?’ he said. ‘Can you stand another half an hour or are you itching to get away?’

His attentiveness, she felt, was bait for the attention of others. She was about to say she wasn’t in a rush, despite being desperate to go, so that he’d have to make more of a show of wanting to leave, despite wanting to stay, when somewhere behind her, on the other side of the room, she became aware of movement. She saw Robert’s eyes slide sideways from hers, his gaze move over her shoulder to whatever it was that was happening. She heard someone say, ‘Thank you, thank you, great to see so many of you here,’ and turned to see a small, pale man making his way to the front of the room clutching a sheaf of papers.

It wasn’t an entirely unusual occurrence. The relentless social and professional injunction to self-publicise meant the general public had to be perpetually alert to the possibility of what had come to be called guerrilla readings. Once, well-meaning literary evenings had offered a safe and trusting environment in which writers could indulge their oratorical urges, but public charity had proved finite. Now, traumatically released back into the care of the community, a generation of authors hooked on the salon’s spotlight were forced to forage for attention where they could.

People began to boo.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Robert. ‘Seriously. Enough of this shit now.’

‘Get off,’ someone called.

The man found a patch of space towards the front of the room. There was, Jess thought, something amiss with his face. The more she looked, the less certain she became that it even was a him. The clothes read male, as did the hair and the voice, but the features were decidedly androgynous.

‘May third,’ said the man. ‘Twelve seventeen a.m. WWW dot teen sluts dot com. Who am I?’

He was wearing a white shirt, cream chinos, and a loosely knotted paisley tie. As Jess watched him speak, the issues with his face became more apparent. His cheeks and lips moved in a manner at odds with the words he was making. His forehead remained motionless, as did the skin around his eyes.

‘May seventh,’ he went on. ‘Eleven thirty-six p.m. WWW dot balls deep in burkha dot com. Who am I?’

Tolerance for these unsolicited readings had reached rock bottom. People turned hostile quickly, shouting for the man to leave. Someone asked him who he was, as if his ultimate crime was to be unknown.

‘May thirteenth,’ he shouted. ‘Nine oh seven a.m. Email. Dearest. I have to be quick. She’ll be home soon . . . Who am I?’

Jess felt men to her left and right moving towards the reader, flanking him. Others followed. Someone said, ‘That’s enough,’ and someone else said, ‘Not here and not tonight.’ The would-be reader tried to raise his voice, stepped back to avoid those who were now reaching out towards him. Someone had a hold of his shirt. He shouted, ‘Let go of me,’ several times, and lashed out slightly hopelessly at his nearest attacker before being knocked to the floor. Then he was up off the floor, transported doorwards by his legs and arms. In his fist was a sheaf of flyers: A5, sparsely printed, black and white. Writhing in the grip of his restrainers, he tossed the flyers upwards in a fluttering cloud. As they landed, Jess could read what was printed in the centre of the otherwise blank page.



What Don’t You Want To Share?

First Disruption. The Square. Friday. 8pm.

WWW.WEAREYOURFACE.COM



As he passed, Jess was able to see his face, and what was wrong with it became clear. When he blinked, his eyelids were set back, recessed. He seemed to have two sets of lips, one behind the other. His face wasn’t his face at all, she realised, but an eerily life-like rubber mask covering the whole of his head. Even his hair was synthetic.

‘What don’t you want to share?’ he called. As he was carried round the corner, out of sight, he said it again, louder. ‘What don’t you want to share?’

An awkward silence followed: the sound of mass drink-sipping and throat-clearing, a moment of collective and individual readjustment.

‘What was that?’ someone said.

There were shrugs.

‘Welcome,’ someone else said, ‘to the post-meaning world.’

The man beside him nodded sagely.

‘Meaning’s dead,’ he said.

David Horan: Oxford

Splendour, privilege, class disparity and violence in the colleges, streets and locales of Oxford.

One of the least appealing sights in modern Oxford is the little knots of alcoholics sitting on the few benches of the city streets, drinking their cans of strong lager or swigging from bottles of cheap wine. These have recently been joined by the pathetic spectacle of New-Age beggars, sitting on the pavements, often with a dog on a piece of string or sometimes a filthy child to add to the pathos.

J G Ballard: Concrete Island

Robinson Crusoe in the twentieth century.

In fact, the whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent.

He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectations he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all.

Stewart Home: Mandy, Charlie and Mary-Jane

Drugs, horror, somnophilia and violence in British campus satire.

“Charlie, what a surprise! What are you doing here?”
“Chloe Smith got drunk, I had to help her friend Rachel Hornby carry her back from the student bar. I told Rachel to go back to her room but she insisted on staying with her friend. I’ve come through here to find some scissors or a knife. I wanted to stab Rachel in the neck, mutilate her, fuck her corpse and then have sex with her unconscious friend.”

“Charlie,” Mary-Jane chided. “You’ve got such a sick sense of humour, it’s all those splatter movies you watch. Stop kidding around.”

Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair

Art, literature and sexuality from WWII to now in privileged Britain.

It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived—we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.


In truth the memoir was a game of postponement – a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a number of phone calls that had to be made; then lunch, at a place not necessarily close, and several things to do after lunch, with mounting anxiety in the two hours before six o’clock: and then a drink, a glow of resolve and sensible postponement till the following morning, when, too hung-over to do much work before ten, he would seek infuriated refuge, about eleven forty-five, in the trying necessity of going out once more to lunch. Over lunch, at Caspar’s or at the Garrick, he would be asked how work was going, when it could be expected, and the confidence of the questioner severely inhibited his answers – they had a bottle of wine, no more, but still the atmosphere was appreciably softened, his little hints at difficulties were taken as mere modesty – ‘I’m sure it will be marvellous’ – ‘It will take as long as it takes’ – and he left fractionally consoled himself, as if some great humane reprieve were somehow possible, and time (as deadline after deadline loomed and fell away behind) were not an overriding question. In the evenings especially, and towards bedtime, half-drunk, he started seeing connexions, approaches, lovely ideas for the work, and sat suffused with a sense of the masterly thing it was in his power to do the next morning.

Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Humans, evolution and stupidity.

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!


The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.


Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.


This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.


The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we'll really get paradise in return? We've seen it on television.


As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.


In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.