The week that was
Bret Easton Ellis II Cecilia Vicuña II Pulp
I think once a week, maybe every two weeks, or at least something semi-regularly, I will jump from my nighttime brain to what I’ve been doing in the day time. Mostly because I’m only a lapsed evangelical, instead of pushing the end of days, I’m all about preaching about the things I’ve heard or read or done.
I’m currently in an intense place with work. I’m editing my debut novel - hopefully the final round of edits before copyedits. It’s a short novel. My editor called it a dark miracle; I like him. I’m also doing battle with a second non-fiction. I think with every piece of work there’s a sense of its materiality, the other two have felt quite solid, whereas this feels like mercury. It slips away from me often, changes shape, will poison me if I touch it for too long. How do you write a book like that? I’m not sure. The Last Days is at early paperback planning stage. I’m writing essays, I’m not sure I’m very good at them. A friend told me once you start, it’s hard to stop. He’s right. This paragraph is a long way of saying for much of December and all of January life has been on hold; it’s turned very Derridean, there’s literally been nothing outside of the text. However, this week, something began to lift, I did some things instead of just writing them; felt like, to steal from Bret Easton Ellis, an active participant.
My agent recommended I read Donald Antrim’s One Friday in April. I read it in an evening. It’s about the author’s near suicide and experiences in the wake of it. It’s one of the finest memoirs I’ve read. His prose is so sparse and so precise, it reminds me of this from Rachel Cusk, ‘unclothed, truth can be vulnerable, ungainly, shocking. Overdressed, it becomes a lie’. One Friday in April is so unclothed it’s naked, stark and shivering and in being so, begs the reader to understand what he was experiencing. Increasingly, I am wary of florid prose, wondering what the author is hiding, which usually is the lack of quality of thought behind the prose. I like it when they give themselves nowhere to hide, then there has to be something on the page and not just words. As soon as I finished it, I bought more of his work. This essay by him in the New Yorker really captures the spirit of the book.
The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, came on my radar back in April, I think. It might have been the first night of London Book Fair or it might have been later in the year - I heard it was a return to American Psycho form, which meant I couldn’t wait to read it. It didn’t disappoint. From about 100 pages in, I was pretty sure what was happening, which oddly made it more satisfying than less. Not to give anything away, but it’s pretty much perfectly symmetrical to American Psycho, which made it an exhilarating read. Whereas American Psycho is one of the great comic novels, The Shards is distinctly not funny. This might be its biggest downfall, that and the use of and. I like and a lot, but even I was skipping over them towards the end. Like all Ellis, it’ll leave you questioning reality, which is an impish move in fiction. Rob Doyle’s Guardian review does it more justice than I can.
I ventured into the centre of town for the first time in a couple of weeks for meetings. Afterwards, I walked up Embankment Gardens with the sun setting at my back. It felt briefly like spring as I crossed Blackfriars Bridge. In the Tate Modern Cecilia Vicuña’s Brain Forest Quipu seemed to be turned up more loudly than it had been on previous visits. There’s something bodily about the whole sculpture, but especially the felted components, they seem to be deteriorating as they hang there, a decomposition almost. I’d spent the earlier part of the afternoon talking about Louise Bourgeois and death, so maybe that affected how I felt. I don’t know though, the first time I visited it, as I looked up, I thought I was going to faint. The week before that I’d watched Cecilia Vicuña unwrap the long quipus, laid in great length along the floor of the Turbine Hall, shrouded in protective wool. Even then, something bodily about them.
The Alexa in my kitchen went on a strange song playing spree the other night as I made dinner; playing Conor Oberst covering Lean on Me. When I tried to find it on Spotify (I know, sorry) the next day I couldn’t, but I did find him singing it with The Felice Brothers on Youtube. I love how he leaps out with the tambourine, and the whole drunken camaraderie of it. Working too hard has its drawbacks, what I suddenly wanted was it to be the end of a night at The Social, margs with tequila on the side, Purple Rain playing. I used to hate dancing, now I miss it. Maybe Emma Warren’s forthcoming Dance Your Way Home will help with that conundrum.
I also visited Yves Klein’s IKB 79 when I was in the Tate. Sometimes Maggie Nelson is right about it being too blue, and some days she’s wrong. Something to do with the mood you’re in, I think. The first time my youngest daughter saw a Rothko she fell over. Too much she said. She does the same with Twombly, lies almost prostrate, and also Jackson Pollock, she cannot look at Lee Krasner, too sad, she says, but will stand for a long time in front of sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. I don’t know if this makes it more or less powerful, or more palatable. Every time I start a new project, I visit IKB 79. Partly because I like it, partly because in its surface the impossible is made possible, which I suppose is a book. I stand there with my heart beating too fast, feeling like I might faint in the same way my daughter does, believing that I can both do and not do what the next book needs me to.