Last week I had a curiously psychogeographical day in London. It was also curiously satisfying. First, I went to get a readers card for the British Library. When I first came to London, in 1985, I also went and got myself a readers card. Back then, the British Library was in the round room in the middle of the British Museum. It was a wonderful secret space, and my readers card gave me access to a world that seemed scarcely possible. Karl Marx had sat over there, at that very bench. The dome rose above us like a church. It was silent, scholars sat (and sometimes slept) in the radial desks. It was bureaucratic and old fashioned and very English and I loved it. I was researching a speculative book that never got written, but it was part of my introduction to London, before I knew that I would become an art student or an artist, and long before I knew the internet existed (well, not that long before, actually). Anyway, I went back to get a new readers card because I’m once again researching a speculative book. I hope this one is more likely to come to fruition. I don’t imagine at this stage in life there are so many wonderful distractions to get in the way.
In 1980 I went with two friends to Crete, to work in the tomato greehouses. One of my friends was my best friend and the brother of my partner. Life is long and complicated and wonderous sometimes. We went by the cheapest route possible, on the Magic Bus, a hangover from the groovy end of the seventies. The bus took three tortuous days to travel from London to Athens, but it was a wonderful three days during which friends were made, stories were recounted and, for all I know, babies were conceived. It was setting off on a journey in the best possible way, not knowing what you would encounter or where you would end up. The bus left from a huge walled car park, a derelict site hard up against St Pancras station. It is the site on which, eventually, they would build the new British Library to where I would, eventually, travel to pick up a readers card in order to embark on a new journey. And so I did.
After picking up my card, I travelled south, right down to New Cross and my old college, Goldsmiths’, where I joined their library. I can do this as a graduate. I took along my degree certificate (Fine Art BA, 2:1, since you ask). It was the first outing that certificate had ever had, and it was the first time I had been to Goldsmiths’ for over twenty years. The place hadn’t changed much, but the library and the computer centre had got a lot better. I worked in the old computer centre for a few years after I graduated. In those days it was housed, literally, in the old science labs, on the old science benches. There were even sinks and taps still set into the benches. So, after twenty years, I went to sign up for my library card, and the woman who did the paperwork looked at me and said, ‘Did you use to work in IT support?’ Incredible.
My third, speculative, port of call was to visit a journalist to try to find a copy of a crucial article from the eighties, for my speculative book. She invited me down to her house. I travelled into central London and tracked down the address. I was literally next door to the British Museum. Honestly, the last house, the only house, on the left of the museum fence, right up against the museum walls. So I had come full circle, right back to where I went to pick up my first British Library readers card twenty-five years ago.
I’m thinking the signs are auspicious and that this is going to be a great book.
writings
A poem for Xmas
Spent
We are spent,
our civility undone,
desire squirted out,
secretions secreted.
What was continent is
incontinent.
Collectively our seed fell on stony ground.
Time to discover what we got for our savings,
like, fuck all.
We spent jackasses after making babies,
lying on our sides
gasping for toys tat toffee ipad laptop clipclop nice shop apple store more.
There is always more,
it comes from China you know,
to satisfy the yearning.
There is always more,
but we are spent.
Writing is like Running, it’s all in the mind
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I never used to run. I never reallly thought about it, only I assumed I wasn’t the kind of person who would like running, too much pain and sweaty suffering. I suspect that at the back of my mind I always wanted to try it out, to see if it suited me, to see if I could conquer running. About a year ago I decided to give in to this nagging idea and I bought my first real running shoes and some proper running kit (don’t like to cause myself more pain than necessary). So I’ve been running more or less consistently for the best part of a year, and to be honest I quite like it. I like it more in cold weather and I like it more by the sea, but I run most days, two miles, in my local park. I feel good about running, I feel healthier and my body is better for it. I track my running using an app on my phone which records my running speed and sends it back to base, which is an account in the Internet cloud. I listen to music while running, I really enjoy these times when I’m all alone with a strange shuffle of my entire CD collection in a situation where I can’t get up and change the track if I don’t recognise it. All in all, running suits me. I just tell myself one thing, and it gets me through–running takes place largely in the mind.
I never wrote a novel although I often tried over the years. I started writing what I thought might turn out to be a novel when I was fifteen. I was reading a lot of ‘golden age’ science fiction and I wanted to write some myself. I came up with a plot, I’m quite pleased with it to this day, what I remember of it, which isn’t much. I continued to start long pieces of wrting over the years, but I never got far into them. I would set off (sound familiar?) at a gallop, just churning out words and trying to get the story established, the characters into play. Initially I must have done this with pencil and paper, but later on computers, in Word. Word. A great word processor, but to write a novel in it? I know, many people do and many great novels have been written in all sorts of ways. But to me the lab of text that you lay down in a word processor eventually becomes so heavy that it’s impossible to drag it any further. The problem is that a novel is a very complex undertaking, all sorts of issues are in play and, frankly, it’s impossible to get from the start to the end without realising that it needs substantial revision. So try to do that in a single document–it becomes almost impossible to even remember what you’ve alread written, let alone find it.
What i needed was a tool, something that would work more consistently with my own way of writing, of creating, of inventing and of pushing the thing forward. I did buy various novel writing pieces of software over the years, but they never really helped. And then one day, I have no idea when or why, I downloaded Scrivener. Now, I don’t come here to make a commercial pitch for this software, but it taught me one thing: writing a novel takes place largely in the mind.
So I came to realise that running and writing are similar undertakings, for me, in that they are pleasurable, they are repetative and they will only work if I remember that it’s all in the mind. Day after day, in good weather and bad, in happy times and sad, I have to get myself into the mindset and just write/run. I found that Scrivener enables that to happen for the writing (and Endomondo does it for running). Day after day I can keep myself focussed on what I need to do next, on progressing all the complex parts. If I get lost or confused (or have a brilliant insight into how to restructure part of the story, which usually happens while running), Scrivener helps me do that without messing up the whole thing.
Getting to the end of a novel, keeping it sane and comprehensible, is a huge and complex undertaking. I learn that anew every day. But it’s all in the mind. If you still want to do it, if you can overcome your desire to jack the whole thing in, if you can keep focussed, you’ll reach the end. One day.