heat

It's pushing thirty in Norwich today. Whenever it does this, I find myself in the not overly air conditioned library, forgetting the greater part of my vocabulary and ability to think in an organised manner.

Last night I read Chris Paling's book A Town by the Sea. I really, really wanted to like it so as to make a big noise about the Booker shortlist omitting difficult fiction (James Meek's The People's Act of Love was, annoyingly, a huge disappointment). But I'm not really sure about it as yet. In many respects it does what I've been wanting British fiction to do for a long time, which is jack in the contemporary referent in favour of a more stubborn, abstract chronotope*. It has the same approach to motive and subjectivity as the early nouveau roman and an enterprising approach to mythomania that implies a hostility towards the cod psychology that characterizes most so-called literary novels at the moment. There is, unfortunately, too much of a dependence of Sebaldesque melancholia 'n' memory themes that writers still seem to be employing half-heartedly. There are passages of beautiful writing but it often descends into whimsy of the sort that results in would-be novelists suffering schoolyears of torment. I don't know, it's better than most contemporary stuff I've read lately.

We'll see on that one.

jx


* I recognise that in writing novels that date fast, contemporary writers are critiquing a culture of disposability. This disclaimer doesn't accomodate the fact that it's incredibly frustrating to read the likes of Nick Hornby/ Martin Amis/ Ian McEwan clumsily attempting to deal with a millieu that they seem to be separated from by the very virtue of their critique.

Academic Writing is...

...like pissing with the toilet seat down first thing in the morning and trying to get it all in the pan.

Marooned in the library, musing on the barely-existent parallels between my attempts to finish a rough statement of intent by five o' clock and England's quest to bowl out Australia by close of play. I'm not a cricket fan, really, despite having been brought up in Freddie Trueman country. But I'm a sucker for displacement activity. Hey, writing about my fondness for DAs has become one in itself- I'm at two removes from the SOI now. Shit. It's always like that time I wrote my English coursework in sixth form: all day on the beer, started at two in the morning. But I pulled it off.

When the SOI is finished, I'll post it so someone can tell me it's already been done.

More displacement now, because it's been a while since a Moths reading list:

In Italy...

Alexander Trocchi- Cain's Book. This was alright, I guess, but I wish I'd read it when I was sixteen or something.

Henry Green- Concluding. Read this again and still don't know what the fuck I'm going to write about it.

Collette- Claudine at School. Not just for titillatory purposes- the above is also about a girl's school and it seemed worth comparing and contrasting.

Celine- London Bridge. Celine is great but if I wanted to read all of this I'd have needed more time. Unbelievably dense, atmospheric, often vomit inducing. Effluvia features heavily.

Am currently reading The People's Gift of Love by James Meek, in a stable-doorish attempt to rectify my ignorance of everything written in the last ten years (except Ian McEwan novels). I haven't decided about it yet: the themes are very appealing (cannibalism, gulags, Russian castration cults, the Trans-Siberian Railway and so on) but it's got a fairly Led Zeppelin-esque approach to metaphor and a cast who are, frankly, hamming. Am waiting to read The Town By the Sea by Chris Paling, which I've finally got my hands on but can't open until I've finished the Meek because I'm trying not to be a dick and finish some books occasionally.

Anyway, the non-show must go on.

jx

Fucking Hipsters (Pt 120,000)

I just found this photo of myself with a weird halo that looks like it's made of barbed wire. Please visit the Teknikov website and leave cryptic messages for Chad on the board.

We're playing our first gig in London on the tenth of September for a Guided Missile club night. Grizzled Norwich veterans KaitO will also be playing, as headliners. Advance warning: I will probably be real grumpy after the show, so apologies to anyone who has the misfortune to speak to me.

jx

Miss me too? Probably not...

The startling return to form of Moths associate jiminyminerry homunculus (sorry Lorc, I could never spell it) has shamed me into popping my head over the parapet again and proclaiming "never again shall I be so fucking lazy". Atcherly, I haven't been keeping up to date because I had forgotten my UEA password after my unfortunate affliction by Diary Loss*. I feel like a newcomer at UEA- I've only been here around four times in the last two months. Computer Mouth* is afflicting me already.

Anyway, shortly after I wrote the angry piece about what the media have inevitably called 7/7 I decided, for a variety of reasons, that I must flee the country. I wanted to go to Genoa but the famed incompetent who works on the desk at the Norwich National Express office could only figure out how to get me to Milan. That man has been the bane of my life (he said, melodramatically) on a number of occasions. Anyway, it meant that I had to go to Milan. Usual Moths form would require a misjudged attempt at in-depth analysis of Italian culture but I wouldn't presume to be able to treat the matter with more accuracy than Tim Parks' A Season With Verona.

I stopped for a couple of days in Milan, gawping at the Heidi Klum/Flavio Briatore-alikes on the Via Montenapoleone. I made pilgrimages to supermarkets, pizzerias, grim arterial roads (as Parks will attest, Italians don't "do" suburbs too well) and the Giuseppe Meazza stadium at San Siro. Though I feel a political obligation to "prefer" Inter to FatSilvio's AC they have a history of signing incomprehensibly useless players (Paul Ince for one, not that I'm bitter) and, in the Herrera period, introduced Catenaccio. When staring up at the ground, I completely forgot that Inter even played there. Come to think of it, I didn't see a single Inter fan the whole time I was in Milan.

Perhaps I could digress here and use Inter Milan as an example of a psychological phenomenon I observed a couple of years ago. If anybody knows what I'm talking about, please don't hesitate to contribute their own experiences of its occurence. It goes something like this: you're comfortably aware with the existence of something for years, just letting it plod along its own course (the fact that its generally something inanimate or abstract doesn't really matter). Then you stop and think about it, and it becomes the strangest thing in the world, and you don't know why. Nothing is inherently strange about it apart from its being there. Examples:

Inter Milan
Northampton (the town)
That bit in the middle of France
Dundee

Answers on the bottom, please.

Anyway, after Milan I went to Lago di Garda's Northernmost point, Riva, and wandered around looking at people who were rich to the verge of inanity. Many Germans and Austrians. I took a trip to Italy's largest modern art museum which is, charmingly, located in a hard-to-access townlet up in the Alps (Rovereto). I climbed a mountain before Sunday lunch. The place made me feel very melancholy, as if I was WG Sebald or something. Peruvian pan pipe music started to bring tears to my eyes, and I missed Jenny, and I was hungry for most of the time.

I went all the way to Trieste after that, which is on the Balkan rather than the Italian peninsula, almost in Slovenia. I tried to pass off my visit as a literary-cum-spy movie homage but I think I just wanted to see how far I could go before falling off. The South appealed, but a seventeen hour train journey to Reggio in forty degree temperatures put me off. Border towns live up to their reputations as uncanny places, which is all I can put into words for now. In Trieste I met Ilija who was a Croatian-German-Italian, camping out indefinitely while looking for a job so he could bring his wife down. We got drunk and ate salami on one of the long moles jutting out into the harbour. He had strange business to get up to in Serbia, which confused me massively and I still haven't completely understood.

The journey back to England was enormous and I felt like crap all the way until the Starits of Dover, when a chicken curry and Mars Bar straightened me out. I picked Jenny up in Norwich and we headed up to Oban in Argyll (that's in Scotland, non-UK and Southern readers) to rendez-vous with my dad and his girlfriend. We spent a week eating fish, looking at fish and talking about fish, and got drunk a few times in a pub that reminded Mary of the Admiral Benbow in Treasure Island. On the way back to Norwich, we stopped off at my mum's place for a few days and I finally got to make a tit of myself in front of Jenny at a football match and show her around Newcastle.

On the final day I received news that my application for AHRB funding had, against all reasonable odds, been accepted. This was exceptionally good news and I can now, at last, dedicate myself to doing important things like reading the first three pages of library books and writing on Moths. Expect increased service...

Jxxxxxxxxxx

* a condition supposedly eradicated by post-Thatcher medicine
* a disease you can read all about in some old posting I'm not diligent enough to link to