Essays

On the Futility of Writing (and Writing in Spite of It All)

By Fernando Sdrigotti.

[PDF]

“The life of a man is a miserable draft…”
– Haroldo Conti

I walk by accident into one of London’s über-bookstores to be taken over by a very familiar type of sadness—as a child I used to feel this way when thinking about the cosmos and my own insignificant place in it. This is London’s biggest bookshop: 6.5 km of shelves, the website proudly tells us, as if this particular length and not another were a reason to rejoice. Book after book after book thrown into this worded jungle—a hoard that could be a waking counterpart to a Borgesian wet dream. Fiction books and books on writing fiction. Photography and art books and books on photography and art. And so on: most forms of expression and myriad words of meta-dialogue, some of them even justified or at least nicely edited and with colourful covers. Nothing escapes this total library: no corner of the universe or the mind is left unaccounted for. It is a hideous totality for it is an ordered totality, filtered through the minds of who knows how many marketing specialists; it is effective as a selling platform but it is a desert of anonymity for the diminished names on the shelves. Were I ever to be asked for a writing tip, something born out of this experience would be my choice: walk into any gigantic bookshop and think whether you can face being one more name lost in this desert of words. If that ideal situation proves too much to bear do something else with your time (it is of course highly likely that if you go around asking for writing tips you will never make it on print).

Father of the Man

Terence Davies’ Trilogy by Bobby Seal.

Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration move relentlessly through the three stages of Robbie’s life. But Davies consciously breaks the rules of linear time as he moves backwards and forwards exploring the jumble of Robbie’s memories, his youth, adulthood and old age. Davies does not want us to just look at Robbie’s life, he requires us to witness it, and presents each fragment as if part of a body of evidence.

The Cardinal & the Corpse

A Flanntasy in Several Parts by Pádraig Ó Méalóid.

The Cardinal and the Corpse, a 40-minute semi-documentary made in 1992 by Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair for a late-night slot on Channel 4, described quite accurately by one commentator as ‘a show about books and bibliophiles in London,’ muddied the pseudonymous O’Brien waters further. When I first watched it, I had no idea what was going on in The Cardinal and the Corpse, or who most of the people in it—with the exception of Alan Moore and British science fiction writer Michael Moorcock—were. It seemed to be another story with several beginnings, several different threads running through it, none of which I had the slightest understanding of.

The Corpse / 1

By Alan Cunningham.

‘We went to the loft while the wedding party was eating. The fiddler came too.
‘Take yer partners for a set’, the fiddler said.
We were about twenty boys and there was only one girl. She was well danced. A feeling of poignancy undertoned our merriment.
‘This would make a good wake’ a philanderer said.
‘Only the corpse is missing’, another said.

The Green Fool, P. Kavanagh.

As just boiled coffee is poured into a small glass of milk, a moment of sadness is experienced – and at first I enjoy that I seem to have no control over that.

My girlfriend – with whom I have recently reconciled after some time apart – is away, in Spain, in Madrid, on a residency, a work placement – and while I know that she will return to London when it ends I find it difficult to avoid feeling sad because of that.

If I were busier I would not feel so sad, perhaps.

Stasis

By Ian Maleney.

 ‘I matured at twenty-four,’ says Morton Feldman, in a radio interview with Charles Shere, in California in 1967. He was forty-one at the time, almost half-way through his mature period, which ended with his death in 1987. It was shortly before he stopped working for his father. Feldman’s conversation with Shere is cyclical, but wide-ranging. There are many long pauses, and many half-jokes that aren’t really that funny. You can hear them lighting cigarettes in the studio, the curl of a match inches from the microphone. They’re spiralling around this idea, arguably the central assertion of Feldman’s career, that he doesn’t believe in Hegel, but in god. At first I wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure that anyone he said it to knew either, but they went along with it anyway. So will I.