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

By Fernando Sdrigotti.

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“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).

Episode 2: Utterly Other Writers

In episode two of our podcast series, we talk to Joanna Walsh about experimental British writer Christine Brooke-Rose, and Padraig O Mealoid tells us about his investigations into Flann O’Brien‘s pulp fiction.

Satin Island, Tom McCarthy

Reviewed by Brendan C. Byrne.

Several reviews of Tom McCarthy‘s fourth novel Satin Island pull-quote the early parenthetical, ‘events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now’ while neglecting the fact that, actually, quite a lot happens in the book. Its anthropologist-narrator, U., works for a company he’s legally bound to only refer to as the Company (its logo a ‘giant, crumbling tower’), much as the narrator of McCarthy’s breakout novel Remainder is legally prevented from speaking about an inciting accident. The Company has just won a contract called the Koob-Sassen Project, which is never described but permeates all of contemporary existence. U.’s position as ‘in-house ethnographer’ consists mostly of ‘feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine.’ (It’s no accident that Satin Island shares its initials with the Situationist International.) As opposed to the recent fiction of William Gibson, where the vanguard is the corporation and theory is just a hangover from ’68, McCarthy doesn’t cast the Company as some kind of transcendent novum. Instead, as with Remainder, the sublime is closest in immanence, and U. spends most of the novel sitting and staring at screens, walls, or people repeatedly performing the same actions, letting his thoughts trickle over such subjects as oil spills, his hero Lévi-Strauss, and a global conspiracy to murder parachutists. These meandering spells are the action which takes place on page, while off it Koob-Sassen slowly tendrils into the lives of everyone on the planet, U. shifts from catastrophic professional failure to glittering success, and a great deal of parachutists die. Quite a bit, in fact, happens, it’s just that the action on the page rarely meets the action off it.

Bringing Out the Dead

Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: We’ve been spending a fair bit of time in London, Deirdre and myself. We were over in the British Library last week. I’m doing research into Flann O’Brien, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, all of that.

Alan Moore: Aw, that sounds great. Yeah, I’ll tell you what, I would – this probably wouldn’t help you with your research but, have you read The Whispering Swarm? By Mike Moorcock? Yet?

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.