18. Are You Tired of Being Alone?

A story, designed for performance, written for Peter Blegvad's seminar.

After Kenneth Goldsmith and Jarvis Cocker

I had gone into a bar one night, and met him at the counter. He asked me whether I would like a drink, and I replied, Why yes, I would, a Jim Beam double. He duly obliged.

And so I asked him, as you do, Where are you from? What’s your business in town?

And he replied, I make matches. He asked me whether I wanted another drink, and I did, and drank.

That’s an interesting line of work, I said. What kind of matches do you make.

Big ones, small ones, medium, and every intervening degree, he replied. I make fine matches, coarse matches, loving matches, violent matches, even, dare I say it, football matches, Australian rules or otherwise.

Oh, I said, that’s interesting. Are you paid well?

Very well indeed, he replied, and, lighting a cigarette, laid his hand on my leg. And he said, very precisely –

Are you tired of being alone?

And I supposed I was, I supposed we all were, everyone in that bar, or we wouldn’t have been there. I enviously eyed the one couple crowded in a corner, hands all over each other. The sensation of touch had entirely left me – I had no memory of any texture but the outside of cigarettes and dirty bar-glasses, slick with grease. All those others lined along the counter avoided each other’s gazes, looking far-off at some unattainable woman or other. His hand was still on me, groping its way towards my balls.

We went for a walk, and spoke about his profession. He said, The principles of love are incomprehensible to those who believe they have any connection with reality, rationality, ethics or otherwise. It is always and only a question of alchemy, of divination: one finds two suitable beings and bumps them into each other like particles. He said this in a full, operatic voice, somewhat like Billy Mackenzie. It is, in effect, an occult science, he said. One begins with a single movement, a gesture, an observation, a question –

Are you tired of being alone? –

And one carries on from there. These fucking dating shows, where they try and match people based on quantifiables – interests, similar heights, whether one will fuck anything that moves – are absolute Goddamn nonsense. Cilla Black had it almost right – randomise, cut out all knowledge. I get great pleasure from my work, not least because of the need to mop up the (*cough*) overspill. A perk, if you like.

When I met him again a week later, he told me he’d been busy. I kept running into couples fucking in doorways, on car bonnets at midnight, in the corridor outside my flat. The whole city was dripping with perspiration. His business-like appearance had dissolved, his hair splaying like an anemone of sparking wires, his neck reeking of sweat, face streaked with its trails, tie lapping around his neck like a loose dog’s-tongue. He pinned me against the wall – with his enthusiasm – next to a couple necking by a dustbin.

Are you tired of being alone? He whispered it this time, like air escaping from a tire. He isolated each word – Are. You. Tired. Of. Being. Alone?

And I could feel the warmth of his mouth on me, and could sense the sliding spit of the couple and shouted slipping out of me, And what if I am?

He exhorted me with his question, changing the intonation, as if maxing-out the permutations of a mathematical sum. Lighting a cigarette, he slid his hand down my leg. And his voice began to buck and waver and break, as he spoke about what he could do for this city, what energies there were to be released, of the pulses hiding in concrete and the rhythm of buildings and the secret congress of gases and the architecture that held us apart and the terrors of the raging horses in the tall silos smashing themselves in their fury to consumable pieces and –

that was when I left him, among the bodily fluids and the heat. And I was right, you know, and I know, and what would have become of me if I had done otherwise, and what might I have been.
And still I hear sometimes, walking the streets at night, echoing around corners, the question –

Are you tired of being alone?

17. Dregs

Seeing as there has been no new work, I shall attempt to post here a few poems I thought not worth damning.

This Is Hardcore

It started with noise - beat of blood, the grain
of electricity, the pleasure of the riff:
my sole belongings. I gathered arcane
details: the arc of sweat, the gloom of pub
backrooms and dusty jewel-cases, sheer
pushed air. The time I've spent with speakers loud
and louder... think, what living I might have
done instead! But no; with an old
confessor's air, I scratched out the skull-map

of an obsessive. Why this mania
for show-and-tell? What? Shock-taxonomy,
unslaked thirst, lust for discord.
Was it a way of unaccepting all
of circumstance's condemnations; or
is it the lure of the blunt instrument's
connection, dead resentment's solace? This,
indeed, is hardcore. The dialectic
knots; life, that Afanc, whispers and then roars.

On a Bookshelf Containing a Copy of Like A Fiery Elephant

You taught, with slashes, life could be feared. Your
memorial, breezeblock in leaves, began
something else: this. The weevil nests and bores
in pulp. The generation never stops.

One (Mud Rain Snow)

The cold ground mutters to itself, the leaves
crackle with winter's impact. Farther than
this glazed hole slows to land-drift pace. One half-
expects the soil to sprout resurgent hands.
The homes become, without an effort, widows.

Foreign Voices

We spoke, just once, though it escapes me what.
I can't say I'm sorry enough for this:
in memory lives what in life cannot.

Control - in anchored homes, loves lasting not
less than a day - is what I'll always miss.
We spoke. Just once. Now it escapes me what.

Madness has owned me once before; it got
inside, never quite budged. It will hiss:
"in memory lives what in life cannot".

I know it's nothing to boast of: a knot
of scars, zero fucks, (I admit) one kiss;
we spoke, just once, though it escapes me what.

Self-pity's never been attractive, not
while real life stays graspable. Well, I missed.
In memory lives what in life cannot.

Redemption never quite gained form. We got
nothing, then. Blood won't cease its raging hiss.
We spoke; I can't remember about what;
in memory lives what in life cannot.

16. ...in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal

Interview with Brooklyn's Vivian Girls published in Plan B #39, November 2008. Transcript of other Q&As not included in original article below.

There’s a lot to be said for reverb. A veil of mystery, a lacuna in which anything the listener chooses might be written. The cavernous echo of white-hot Sixties pop, the Flying Nun groups, Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine – consciously or not, the Vivian Girls follow in this proud heritage. “Our songwriting is pretty straightforward, so shoegazey production is the only tool we have to make our music more of a struggle for the listener”, says singer/guitarist Cassie Ramone. On their early singles, honey-sweet melody and classic girl-group harmonies bleed through the wall of burning-red guitars, like a vengeful spirit. The initial vinyl run of their debut album sold out its edition of 500 in ten days, to be reissued by In The Red, alongside new seven-inches on their own Brooklyn-based Wild World label.

What is it about girl-group and classic pop that affects you?

“We really like the harmonies and what the songs are about. Girl groups sang about dudes in a way that few girl bands do anymore, nowadays it’s all ‘I’m gonna have sex with him’ or ‘Men are scum’. I personally can’t relate to either the sex vixen or the extreme feminist, but girl groups from the Sixties deal with men in a way that makes sense to me. Burt Bacharach is a huge influence on my songwriting, and I listen to oldies radio a lot, which is also a big influence.”

Since I have it on good authority that your songs are about “Ex boyfriends, new boyfriends”, what’s your worst break-up/first meeting anecdote?

“I can tell you what ‘No’ is about. One time I started going out with a guy that I had been good friends with for a little while, and kinda fell in love with him really quickly. Then he broke up with me – a week before my birthday – and later I heard that he went on a date with another girl the night after we broke up. I had a birthday party and he brought her with him. Then before he left he was like ‘Happy birthday Cassie, I love you’, and left with her. So devastating. It took me a while to get over that one.”

The record is extremely short – what is it about that length of songwriting, for you?

“There is nothing worse than listening to a great song and then towards the end it’s just the chorus going on and on forever with nothing else happening. Short songs get straight to the point – it’s harder to get bored of listening to them.”

Punk modernism and mid-century pop nostalgia aren’t incongruous here, they’re two sides of the same coin. In their world, imbued with some of the magic of the Henry Darger Gesamtkunstwerk they take their name from, postmodern exhaustion, breeding such chimeras, is no excuse; fun and wonder are your only options.

***

There's a large amount of 'buzz' (pardon the term) around your first album, the vinyl of which, as I understand it, sold out in 10 days – how do you feel about that kind of reaction? Do you think all the people who bought those records will remain fans of yours?

We hope so! But I think a lot of people who bought the record in its initial pressing were more indifferent - "yeah, I'm record shopping online, might as well" and then realized how much it was going for on eBay and sold it.

Part of the fuss seems to come from the fact that you live in Brooklyn – it's almost becoming a cliché, this business of interesting bands coming from there. What's it like living there? What's your relationship like with the local community of bands and artists?

It is the best place in the world! I would say that, from even before we started Vivian Girls, we were really involved in the music/art community, which has really helped us out by getting us our first bunch of shows and stuff. It's great like that, we all help each other out and respect each others' endeavors and then go get drunk. I couldn't imagine a better place to live right now.

What do your performances tend to be like? Does the fact that the band is (at the moment) composed of women tend to affect your experience of performance?

We just kinda get up there and rock. One thing we want to avoid is being cheesy on stage; a trap which is really easy for an all-girl band to fall into. So you'll never see us putting on special outfits and dancing around or anything. We just wanna have fun.

What are your plans, beyond re-releasing the debut? I understand you have a tour coming up… And is there anything in particular you'd like the band to achieve?

Yes, relentless touring for the next few months. We are also starting up a record label called Wild World and putting out our own 7" - it's gonna be in a package with a t-shirt, 2 postcards, and a button, all art and silkscreening done by ourselves. And we're gonna sell it through mail order. That's what we're really excited about right now.

Also, how do you cope with the differences between live and studio playing? 'Rocking', in the proper sense, is after all difficult with no audience other than a tape machine... Also (also), do you make any attempts to replicate studio effects (reverb, etc.) on-stage?

Yeah, we use Holy Grail reverb pedals at all our shows. When we play live we aim to sound as close to our record as possible, but we're aware that that isn't always doable so we just try to have a good time.

This is probably going to sound really stupid, but - what I meant with the question about women/men and American punk was: obviously, you are women, and punk fans; how do these two things interact? How did punk affect you (and as women)?

I guess, it started for me when I got into listening to bands like Hole and No Doubt in middle school. I thought it was awesome that there were women fronting rock bands, and that first inspired me to pick up a guitar. Obviously bands like Bikini Kill were influential on all three of us too. But overall, I never discriminated. I liked any punk band that I thought was good whether or not it had women in it or not, and I'm sure Katy and Ali would agree.

OK, to fuck with the serious questions: Who had the idea for the name? You're clearly not shambolic enough to be classed as outsider artists!

Frankie, our old drummer, came up with the name. It was the only name we could think of that wasn't totally outrageous and dumb.

How do you negotiate the hazards of there being numerous bands of Vivian Girls (I've counted 2 or 3 besides yrselves)?

It made for some funny show blurbs at first ("Vivian Girls, a dance-y German electro band, play at Cake Shop") but after the first few months it was never an issue.

15. Stereotype

In which we were asked to write the scenario of a stereotype of a person being trapped in a hotel room, and seeing what they get up to. This version is... not quite finished...

It was useless. He had been there, according to his chunky imitation Rolex, at least ten hours. There was enough in the mini-bar to keep him going for another half a day, although whether he wanted to survive on them was another matter (he hankered after a Carlsberg.) He had tried the door and windows, tapped the walls and ceiling for air-ducts or other means of egress, like Jack Bauer in 24. After that, he had spent an hour trying every combination of Fuck, Cunt, Bastard and Arsehole to express his frustration, then fell upon the mini-bar gin. Now he lay on the bed, thinking of what he was absent from: his Merc, Laetitia; his bull terrier, Ronnie, who must have been missing him something awful; his mum, who lived in the front room with the filthy curtains close and the central heating turned to full all the time. Oh, and Trace, of course. He thought it was the done thing in this situation to picture her face, and found himself disconcerted when he couldn’t.

He was surprised to find himself waking up. He checked again; he had been asleep three hours without noticing. He prided himself on being the last out of the club, the final man to stop drinking and head home to bed. He hadn’t had an early night since he was 11, except when satisfying Tracy, after which he would soundly doze. Levering himself off the bed, he kicked the door repeatedly and shouted at it, spit flecking onto his Lacoste polo. After his foot became sore, he sat down again, turned and scrutinised the world outside the window. A road, strangely empty, but for a couple of parked cars. Trees – he didn’t know what kind. Georgian townhouses set back from the pavement. When he was 13 he had broken into a similar abode, snatching a DVD player, a laptop, a bottle of Teachers and a Nokia, all of which went towards his first scraper, a Vauxhall Corsa. He had reformed himself – he now listened to Hed Kandi comps instead of Scarface, and wore a shirt and trousers when phone-selling car insurance – but that spunk remained, or so he thought.

He lay back again on the bed, and considered that he might as well conserve his energy. His Motorola – usually buzzing with calls, left out on the table at lunch to make sure the others knew he was in demand – had disappeared; but surely someone would come for him, if he waited long enough. He just had to hold out.

He sat up, tried to laugh it off, cracked a line – No-one to fuckin’ hold onto yer coat-tails now, eh? – but it sounded strange ringing around the depopulated room. Standing up, pulling on his suit-jacket (Burton, but you wouldn’t know it) and smoothing out the creases, he trotted up and down the room, assuming his typical thrusting hands-in-pocket swagger, eyes fixed front. After a few lengths of the window-wall, he found himself stopping. It was like being told magic charms had no real power. Every tool he had was slipping from his grasp. He sat down on the bed again, had a mouthful of peanuts, and looked around the four white-stippled corners of the ceiling. He wondered when the last time was he had seen them. Whilst fucking that blonde bird, Whats’ername, from Essex, at that conference, she on top. Another on the tally. But these had not been; they had not even entered into his calculations.

14. Science Fiction

In which we were asked to transform the material of an interview with a member of university staff into a science fiction story. Don't ask me why.

It was clear there was a kind of domesticity here: a world whose creatures felt, after however many millennia, somewhat at home with what surrounded them. Cloud like burial shrouds, frozen rivers, somewhere beneath the skin of snow, like a skein of veins, vast piles, beneath, of minerals, here reconstituted, fabricated into everything close at hand: our badly upholstered, chafing seats, the cup in front of me holding cold coffee, the metal walls around us – it was all very familiar to them, even to some of those whose children dashed up and down the aisle, shouting their heads off. Lord alone knows how humans should come to a place like this, or why, when they had left, they would make any kind of homecoming. I squinted out the window, rimmed with ice around the edge – hell, most of the plate – but heated, for convenience, in the centre. Beneath, the undulating crests of snow – mere hillocks in comparison to some of the smaller mountains, and they in turn were mere hillocks to the larger crags – waved onwards, seemingly limitlessly. I had to turn away, as I was warned to, after a few seconds – the sheer expanse of pure, undifferentiated white can make you feel as if falling into a void, pulled out by some awful magnetism. The shipline have had some folk scrabbling at the windows, shrieking to drop through. I looked over the wings – heated, naturally, to some Godforsaken temperature – watching the constant onrush of ice particles blister and burn over the aerofoils, pointillistic designs of sparks popping and vanishing.

We were heading in towards the runway. It was the cold season – if that can be believed – but we knew that the staff were on these things; that, though whipped about by the wind, they had it under control. I pondered idly on how exactly they adapted themselves to their environment. These weren’t just humans with particularly woolly coats; they had been living out here for centuries – no-one, after the loss of their archives, really knew how many – and had acquired bodily accoutrements to suit the place. I had never gotten close enough to see for myself, but I would be forced into doing so pretty soon. Horror stories had reached me, as they are wont to do, about transparent skin-flaps used to shield the eyes from snow-storms, hands grown into the approximate shape of shovels, even extremely thick, downy hair, growing on those parts of the body – the upper throat, the cheeks, around the eyes – where no protection could be afforded. They were hopefully that, just stories. But this turned my mind again to my purpose – scientific, yes, but hardly very important – in coming here. Was I just a freak-show gawker on a planetary scale? How exactly would it matter if I was, given this place’s feeble backwater status? It wasn’t as if it had any dignity to be ruined by my snooping.

I could see, by the GPS on my phone – I didn’t trust the ‘line to be straight on this matter – that we were coming up to the edges of the capital’s airfields. They were located far out on the rim of the vast, low-lying – near-subterranean, in fact – conurbation, an enormous field of metal that differed from the snow only in its colour – gun-metal grey – and the odd jag here and there. Far to the south, literally on the other side of the planet, in what was laughingly referred to as ‘warmer climes’, there were corrugated-iron shanty-towns that tended to get blown away every winter, due to the poverty of their construction, with plenty more jagged edges for the wind to catch. Nothing of that here. My eyes cast about for a sign of the runways’ shimmering grey, the ice constantly being burnt and blown off of it. There was nothing. The plane was banking, but I could discern nothing that it might be heading towards, only more snow. There was a crackle on the tannoy, the sound of the pilot’s wearying voice: Ladies and gentlemen, we are coming towards Ixtlan airport now. Due to inclement weather conditions, our arrival will be subject to a short delay. Please seat yourselves, buckle your harnesses.

I was baffled. I searched the landscape below me, twisting, as the plane banked in slowly-descending circles. After a minute of fraught spying, I spotted a long, straight, shallow depression in the snow, looking, from this height, a mere dog-sled track. Good Lord. How the hell had this happened: the runway hidden so thoroughly in snow? I remembered a scene, borderline-farcical, in an Earth moving-image I had seen in the archives years ago: an old-fashioned ‘plane kept up in the air, seemingly perpetually, by ne’er-do-wells on the ground. We would have to wait until the snow had been cleared, the surface blasted clean. I turned for my coffee, panned my eyes to the others. No-one showed even a trace of panic. Calm, waiting for us to land on a land at that moment trapped under they did not know what depths of snow – 6 feet, 10, 12. We would be sat, I reflected, for some time.

13. The Wrong Style

And now for something completely different, in which we were asked to write something in entirely the wrong style. This is an excerpt from a diary entry describing a man's breakfasting, written in the style of a cosmic horror/Weird Fiction story.

15th January 2009 (moon sliding to gibbous – ominous portents).

I resume this account only to provide prudent warning to those foolish enough to be tempted to wander down the same path as myself, who have, for my cares, lost all enduring grip on sanity. I started in bed in the cold sweat that has gripped me each night for an incalculable length of time, the dark visions which will permit me no nourishing rest flashing from before my eyes like bats before a burning phosphorescent lamp. Shrieks impinged on my consciousness from I knew not what kind of creature, lurking outside my locked, shuttered and curtained window; they impressed upon my still part-asleep mind images of horny, stabbing beaks, blackened eldritch forms covered in rippling, waving down, and hollow, inhuman gazes whose depths reveal aeon-ancient mysteries. I flung the covers from me, and closed my dressing-gown – whose embrace I can never dissociate from that which fills my dreams with screaming terror (but a replacement for which remains, as a mere scholar, beyond my slender means) – around me, advancing to the kitchen. An occasional suggestion of some blasphemous, unholy shape treading in my footsteps set my eyes twisting over my shoulder – but nothing revealed itself. As I approached the fridge, considering to have toast for my morning meal, a curious thought suggested itself to me. There was some aspect of the toaster which perturbed me; even the dog, stood in his basket, barked at it vehemently. With trepidation, I crept over slid two slices into the strange, alien orifices of slots, and pressed the pendulous tab down. Whilst turned to make my coffee – the smiling visage of a cat that bedecked the side of the mug had a queer look about him, as if he harboured knowledge of some foul and secret cosmic joke that would set human minds gibbering with madness – I began to detect a slight acrid odour; it reminded me of the must that old Gibbons, a scholar of ancient and secret lore, had told me he had smelt whilst reading a bewormed copy of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, kept under lock and key after its long journey from the nameless city of Arabia. I felt a curious repugnance, but focused my mind on my task, which I knew would take all my mental powers. Then, I began to notice tendrils of darkness creeping round me. I swung around and saw it rising from that unholy contraption – that accursed, horrible, indescribable machine spewing abyssal dark in every direction. I recoiled instinctively, hardly prepared for such an onslaught of madness. I cannot remember what happened next, although I must have fled – my feet, when I stopped some miles away, were slick with mud, and my dressing-gown still on me.

And thus it carried on. The horror never ends.

12. Two Flash Fictions

Written for Maureen Freely's Modes of Writing seminars. The first is based on Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl' (any resemblance between characters in this story and any persons living or dead is a coincidence, etc.); the second is an attempt to write about an act of cruelty in the manner of Carolyn Forché's 'The Colonel'.

What I Never Did As A Teenager

Well, I certainly never chewed gum, for a start, when I was your age. Wears your teeth to nothing, turns your face to a chimp’s grin. Neither did I carouse all night, as you seem to believe you have the right to, trawling from bar to bar in a manner to bring a sailor shame. I didn’t spend my evenings devising the most efficient method of acquiring rum and vodka when underaged. I was never out of the house after 9PM, nor in it after 7AM. I never neglected to thank my parents for all they did for me – food, clothes, footballs to play with – in spite of its scarcity. My father would have beaten me to a mess of blood if I had taken him for granted, or cocked a snook at the bread he put on the table. And when he told me I needed a job, I didn’t slouch about getting one. I never considered burdening them with any nonsense about a university education for a degree I would never use. I never hung around smoking or gassing with shiftless punks, upsetting shop security and clogging up pavements. Neither did I run up huge phone-bills for my parents talking to such gnats, or wear my eyes out staring at computer screens conversing with them. I didn’t destroy my ears with barbaric music, or worry my parents at rock clubs; I didn’t squander their money on racy records (Les Baxter, etc.) I was never away from the sink when my mother had finished the meal and started the dishes, myself drying and stacking each piece, floral patterns visible through years of wear. My bedroom walls were covered in posters – Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, bands with real men – not books, which you read once and file away. My bed was never defiled by the presence of man or woman. I never dawdled on promenades, garden paths, front-door thresholds or staircases yammering with fucking whores who never cared for me. I never succumbed to the ignominy of love. And you presume to call me less than a father?


Molluscs

It had happened enough times for me to remember. There was nothing very much in it – the press of a sole.

The garden was mostly concrete, unforgiving stone-studded grey yielding to grass and flower-borders. Later, I would kill slugs unfortunate enough to crawl out from the safety of the chlorophyll, with a pair of pliers and bottle of toxic pellets. But this was a different mollusc. The first one was an accident. By the time I looked down there was nothing but a mess of brown, mottled shards of shell, unidentifiable ichor oozing all among them. My bare feet sensed its perturbing texture, as my brain attempted to pin an identity to it. My mother was sat in a garden chair nearby, unconcernedly reading her thriller, and I asked her help. I found her suggested connection between this dismembered pile and what I knew as snails ludicrous. She went back to her reading.

I went to the metal sheet, corroded in places, that leant against the breeze-block garden wall, and pulled it back. I found it strange that snails could stick perfectly to surfaces, happily gliding straight along at 35 degrees to the vertical. It was a trait entirely foreign to a boy who could hardly stay on his feet for more than a minute. And yet it required little effort to pluck them from the surface and squeeze, or drop, or squash. Theirs was a strange crunch, somewhat satisfying, like cracking a walnut shell, mixed with the awful jelly squish of its remainder. And so, I crushed and crushed, shattering houses, pulping bodies, reducing innards to a slick of slime, wiping consciousnesses off my shoes (which I had gone to the house for). Millions of years of evolution were no match for sticky boys’ fingers, leather and board. My mother came over, and told me to stop. So, I did.

11. A Haiku About Foxes

For near-sighted readers:

***

By the Brush

Look: darkened spark of

memory stares. Sly Reynard,

sans rustle, exits.

***

Situated where I saw a fox on the first night of university.

10. For Shoah

First published in Plan B #31, March 2008.

Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (Constellation)

A question: how long can one keep up despair before choosing death? For how long does one tolerate the law of diminishing returns before abandoning the whole farce? It’s been over a decade since the first Godspeed You Black Emperor! LP, but its members are still making records for crushed souls and thwarted revolutionaries. So, on opener (discounting the 12 tracks and 75 seconds of metallic drone that comes before it) ‘1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound’, Efrim Menuck roundly declares all capitalist culture morally abhorrent, and even finds “the pretence of their awful gardens” too much to take: “Give me a goddamn shovel/I’ll dig my own damn hole.” Ho hum.

Menuck’s voice spends much time front and centre of the mix, to the record’s detriment: he slurs, wails and emphasises random syllables, in order to leave the listener in no doubt that he is ‘impassioned’, or whatever. The lyrics when recognisable, pressgang impenetrable symbolism – “There’s ravens in the gun-trees!” goes the title track’s refrain – in the service of Clash-simple protest – they unfortunately stoop to slogans like “I JUST WANT SOME ACTION!” and “NO HEROES ON MY RADIO!” – and killjoy paranoiac misanthropy. The music – well-recorded, churning electric rock grooves of varying intensity, with occasional string embellishments – is a far cry from both the ethereal tenderness and excoriating, heaven-sent noise of their first two albums, or GYBE!’s magnum opus, Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. The hazy, heart-breaking drift of their earlier work, and the truly communal singing they patented on 2003’s “Thee Broken Satellites Gather & Sing: This Is Our Punk Rock”, suited Menuck’s vocals – an acquired taste – and the group’s anguished politics much better.

It’s not that it’s actually bad – just… disappointing. When I first came into contact with Godspeed! and SMZ, they immediately became Important Bands – you know, the kind who prescribe and transcribe your entire worldview; their mixture of fragile sorrow, ecstatic intensity, and very personal collectivist politics provided a conduit for my own disgust and rage, and a glimpse of salvation in a world I hated. Maybe it’s simply that I no longer want to punch through glass windows, or tear my own skin off: I’ve become used to the world (and a little numb to its horrors). I can’t be bothered destroying myself and any lingering hope I have for humanity in pursuit of useless protest. SMZ would probably argue that such a direct, angry approach is necessary after “six years of their wars”; but protest and despair are two sides of the same coin, and protest is only made on the assurance it will make no difference. The Gnostic, heavenly light of the first GYBE! records, promising to sweep away the world of exchange like so much bad scenery, is almost entirely buried here.

There are glimpses, though: the enormous coda to the title track – hypnotic riffs, frantically sawing strings, Efrim’s desperate, mechanical shouts straining against the bounds of technology; the raging, electric-storm guitar and manic free percussion that opens ‘Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues’; and the spare ‘Blindblindblind’, which builds into a group-sung chant – “Some! Hearts! Are! True!” they sing, over and over, finding new ways around the words, as if this incantation, if uttered with enough conviction, will prove true: the world will live again. As the instruments drop out and the voices continue, ever more emboldened, my heart leaps, my breath goes. This was what I came for: true love, again.

9. Two Flash Fictions

Written for our final seminar with Maureen Freely. Burial is a rewritten fragment from a longer story, Spiderland. For the other, we were required to take an urban myth, rumour, or piece of apocrypha, and rework it.

Burial

The drops began to spatter the pavement with the usual rhythm, broken and dull; it would soon speed to a barrage. The street forked off, the sign on the left with the word for ‘museum’. It was at the end of the street, towering over the other buildings by virtue of an extra storey. Its only identifiers were the remnants of massive lettering on the whitewashed walls scarred with years of dirt and rain. I repeatedly pushed the door, then pulled it open.

The interior was no better: the cracked white paint was draped with cobwebs in the corners, the floor tiles were stamped with dirt. I dripped over to the booth, bought a ticket from the acne-plastered boy, walked through. The first room was lined with photographs, the captions plastered thick with the local language. There was – what? – some bored girl milking a cow, shoulders hunched resentfully; farms that even then knew what mud was. A field of rubble, a woman in a muddy peasant skirt picking through the demolished cottages, a dog next to her, mid-yap. How bizarre it was, that all these things had not merely come together for the picture, but been. The caption said 1943. I tried to remember whether the place was no smoking as I squinted. Then men swimming in a river, not far from the town, Red Army uniforms piled on the bank in the foreground. My grandfather’s pictures were different only in the insignia. It reminded me of the cover of Spiderland: the rippling, opaque water, the heads popping out of it, smirking like it was a happy coincidence they were in shot; behind them the stony bank, the cliff, the trees, stretching away into a white sky. I remembered wondering what they were like, these people with their bodies out of sight; ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, it looked like someone had simply found it, dredged up from the bottom of a box to be hemmed in by black borders. It was only later I found out Will Oldham, who had made the Palace records, took the photo; he’d grown up with the rest of Slint in Louisville, a backwater like this one, or mine.

The next room contained glass cases, misty with grease in the light. I could only half-glimpse some content: scraps of fabric, some the size of half a pyjama top, their wide stripes still visible, some almost tiny, ripped and muddied. On the shelf below, rusted pick-axe heads or spades without shafts, the caption-cards unreadable. One rag had a cloth triangle sewn on to it. ‘B’ for ‘Britisch’. Red to indicate a POW. I crossed to another case. Skulls, some with bullet holes in the back of the head, some with jaws missing, craniums cracked. Eye after hollow eye. Femurs, ribs, the odd dark mud-spattered beige they have before being boiled for display. On the shelf below, rusted razorwire. Bizarre to think they’d been below the hills and plain where we had driven, below stratum on stratum. I walked on.

Where does the past go? I thought.


Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum

The decision had been made. All of the Vatican procedures were in place, the bureaucracy dealt with: now all we needed was our saint. Being one of the novices handiest with a shovel, I was given the honour of helping with the exhumation.

The snow drove down on the cemetery of the convent; we had not been out to complete our chores for many weeks, as even our habits proved scant protection against the cold. We five trudging down the path were the only thing to be heard, the white landscape quashing any other sound. The grave was in a space off the path, bracketed by two stark naked trees clawing at the white sky. Standing huddled around the marker stone, we drew our cloaks around us as the wind picked up. Whilst Tomas, in the centre of the circle, tried to light the fire, it blew a thick sprinkling of white upon our backs. Setting a saint’s grave aflame is hardly a pious action, but we were in no position to argue with the labourers; if the Vatican saw things in a practical light, this nonsense would not be necessary. Not permitted socks, we crouched to have our skirts protect our ankles whilst we waited for the ground to thaw, the magic circle of the pyre spreading down and out through the powder.

The coffin was buried deeper than we had thought: some ten feet of earth had to be hauled out, the fire relit each time we came on another stratum of icy soil. By the time the coffin was exposed, we were tearing with gloved hands to avoid damaging the submerged casket. Brother Tomas and I demanded a prayer before they set about it with the crowbar; our imprecation to the Saviour was paralleled by the workmen blowing on their hands.

The sight the coffin-lid exposed was the strangest ever met my eyes. Á Kempis’ body was remarkably preserved, its flesh intact save for where the mice had been at it, stripping the skin from what had been the thighs. All else was leathered and shrunken, like something pulled from a bog. I must have been the first to glance down at his arms. They were in a state of disarray on his chest, quite apart from the cross of resignation, in which state, witnesses maintain, he was buried. Lifting the lid from where the workmen had placed, I could see snow clinging to indents streaking the surface. Scratchmarks. Brother Tomas, the most senior clergyman there, dared to lovingly lift the hands that had written The Imitation of Christ, and inspect the fingernails. Wood-fragments.

While he ran back to the convent, I stood over the pall-draped coffin. This was, he had said, No way for a saint to face death. I wondered how long he had been surrounded by that wood before life left him. Quite a while, I suspect. He had, I considered, followed his doctrine to the end. They could at least give him that.

8. Dragging of inertial frames

Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, week 9. Context: we were challenged to take a topic from a science textbook or periodical, and write a piece on it in the style of popular science writing.

The first thing to do is to picture a bath-mat. Imagine time, the fabric of your life, stretching out into infinity (itself a difficult image to master), and space, your concrete surroundings, extending as if caught in a rapidly zooming-out camera-eyepiece. Take the co-ordinates of these two, plotted together, and you get… a bath-mat.

Bear with me here. This, after all, was Einstein’s view of the nature of reality. Everything that exists in time and space exists on this bath-mat, making in it greater or lesser indents according to their mass. These curvatures in the fabric of space-time were how Einstein pictured gravity – one can imagine Earth, on this infinite suspended bath-mat, as a golf-ball, and perhaps Jupiter as a water-filled Zorb, weighing down one spot so much that it causes everything around it, from the breadcrumbs of asteroids to the peas and sweetcorn of Io and Ganymede, to roll toward it. If we follow this logic, then the nature of time itself changes in tandem with the shape of space: under the crushing force exerted by, say, Jupiter, time will, from moment to moment, be stretched and warped; if we could have watched Europa’s fragmented form rolling languidly in towards Jupiter’s orbit, we would have seen its progress slow further and further. And if, indeed, we could stand on Callisto’s hyperborean desolation of a surface, and look out, we would see the rest of the Solar System whizzing around us like an overcharged children’s mobile, and Earth’s population going grey before our telescope-aided eye.

All this fascinated me when I was younger – poring over encyclopaedias with crumbling spines, absorbing what my parents called “useless facts”, marvelling over illustrations and comparing the rendering of dinosaurs between books – a longer neck on the brontosaurus here, shorter arms on the tyrannosaurus rex there. I must have been relatively old – 12 or 13, perhaps, aged from my vantage point then – when I began to be curious about what Einstein had actually said. It eludes me now where I first read about the theories of general and special relativity; perhaps it’s appropriate that one time can’t access another’s knowledge. But I know what struck me was the sadness inherent in the ‘twins experiment’: a thought experiment in which, with one twin travelling on a space-ship (I imagined it as one of the smaller shuttles from Star Trek, the latest series of which I would watch with my parents) close to the speed of light, and the other left on Earth, the former, for whom time would slow to the most infinitesimally creeping of flows, would return and confront, with unchanged countenance, a brother on the brink of death. Terrified as I was by the constant, lurking thought of death, and of life’s brittle shortness, it was both depressing and liberating – the idea of remaining young appealed to my sense of childhood desperation. I’m not quite so keen on it now.

This was, perhaps comfortingly, just a thought experiment; nothing – as my younger self might have feared – was actually done in the way of concrete testing – although, ominously, second-long time disparities have been found between the previously-synchronised watches of those carried in ultra-sonic aircraft and those left on the ground. But there is something, indeed, in this that affects us everyday. If we assume that time is experienced relatively according to the distribution of Einsteinian mass-energy (keep in mind that energy is related to mass by the figure of the speed of light squared) or our own acceleration, then it is apparent we have our own ‘frames’ of time-experience, local to us. But what, then, about objects undergoing no acceleration at all? Look at any object in the room which is not moving, or, on hearing a likely noise, look outside your window, and see if you can spot a bird or an aircraft moving at a constant speed. Both these things are in a state of ‘inertia’, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they have their own local ‘inertial frames’, systems in which they exist in an inertial state.

Einsteinian physics, of course, can’t just leave things be at that. According to the model of classical physics as formulated by Isaac Newton, all inertial frames exist in relation to ‘absolute space’; you can picture the universe, in this version, as an enormous fish-tank, in which objects sit still, or move at a constant speed, in relation only to the unchanging glass walls. In Einsten’s conception, there are no fish-tank sides, the quality of water, altering in viscosity, changes from place to place, and this character is dependent on the nature of the objects themselves. Once time’s relativity is grasped, it isn’t that difficult to understand.

However, there is a certain implication of this theory which needed to be tested practically. Imagine two satellites, travelling in fixed orbits at identical heights, at a constant speed, around the Earth. Their conditions, theoretically, are the same, so their inertial frames will be identical – a small refuge of stability in Einstein’s flux. Unfortunately not, though. Imagine these two satellites launched and fixed with clocks, travelling in opposite directions with regards to Earth’s spin. When they arrive back in the same place, the clock of the satellite travelling against the axial twirl, will be considerably behind the other – for it, less time has actually passed. The centrifugal force of Earth’s strange circling has carved changes in time and space, has dragged the satellite’s inertial frame. This is, incidentally, known as the Lense-Thirring Effect, which I rather enjoy for its suggestion of boffins with exotic names, spectacles perched on the ends of their noses.

In 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, the astronauts visited the Sea of Tranquility, a region of the Moon with one of the best views of Earth. They left behind an array of retro-reflectors, like a single, mirrored eye, a tiny trace of home, winking at those still trapped on the other planet. From Earth, laser-beams – no longer simply the preserve of clichéd Bond villains – were fired repeatedly at this oasis of glass, and, once returned, used to measure not merely the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon, but the degree to which the frame of the Moon’s inertial orbit is itself dragged, subject to the Lense-Thirring Effect, by the spin of the enormous gyroscope of Earth. The same principle has been observed in binary pulsar systems – those stellar conglomerations, unlike our own, with two stars that send out regular light or radio pulses; calculating their distance from us by the inertial travel of light, we can see how that changes from star to star, altered by the effect of their rotation on each other, and measure the frame-dragging involved. Our own lives are warped by these same forces, and, in doing so, connect us with the circling of the stars.

7. An Account

Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, term week 8.

What I remember was the quiet. In spite of a tendency, stronger than in most boys my age, to solitary play, games of imagination, my days were still the hubbub of noise typical of children: chattering classrooms, the omnipresent television.

My family wasn’t really religious, except in the wishy-washy Anglican way typical of New Foresters; the place seemed to breed ambivalence. When I asked my parents what exactly happened to us when we die – after my grandfather’s death from cancer; I was three – I received the comforting answer that: We go to Heaven. During the next few years, marked by the constant, poisonous malice and ritual humiliation only children are capable of, I would bring out this answer repeatedly, as if my classmates, cynical beyond their years, should be cowed and swayed by its total obviousness.

It’s perhaps appropriate that the contextual details refuse to slot exactly into place: I must have been somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, between Years 4 and 6, and it continues to escape me whether my friend Jon had been confirmed, at that point, like his mother, into the Catholic Church. I know that I spoke to him enough times about death, as if he were an expert on the subject. But this must have been earlier, at a moment when Jon wasn’t around to reassure me with erudition inherited from Oxford-educated parents.

The constant psychic violence my peers meted out had begun keeping me awake. It was one night, when my eyes had remained shut in the dark for three hours. Thoughts rattled in my exhausted head like pennies in a shaken jar. I have the impression that the last trail of thought had been about animals. It’s difficult for me now to count the numbers of pets who had died during my lifetime: a ginger tabby, a rapacious golden retriever, perhaps four marbelled goldfish, a mischievous guinea pig, and a rabbit who would be given an identical replacement years later are the only ones that come immediately to mind. I was wondering, I believe, as to whether I could rejoin them in the afterlife I had so vividly pictured (which following the cliché, involved lots of clouds.)

I had already begun to ask what exactly underlay these visions, this belief: exactly what evidence was there for God’s existence? The question recurred to me, developed: if, as it seemed, God left no fingerprints on His Creation, could the believers be wrong? And then, the answer landed like a sneaky blow to the abdomen: in that instance, there was no God. Before I could even formulate it, the train of thought started itself moving, shaking my entire nervous system. I thought, with enormous reluctance, my way through it: logically, in that case, there could be no afterlife. Thus, there was the possibility that, when death came, I would simply cease to exist. The black behind my eyelids seemed to thicken, spread. I puzzled, with the shocked compulsion of a trauma victim, what, then it would feel like. It wouldn’t. There would be no me to feel it.

That sudden vision of not merely total darkness, but total and utter nothingness, seemed to manifest bodily: a vespertine flower of a vaccuum opening up in the depths of my stomach, my mind and nerves reeling, scrabbling to get away from this sensation, but knowing that it was inside me, in the most literal sense. The end, whatever happened, and in whatever form, would come eventually; the body that was carrying me forward in time – the movement I took for granted, even, at times, enjoyed – was also bearing me inexorably toward the grave. I saw, as vividly as any afterlife seen, its own dissolution at the hand of worms, insects, soil-borne microbes; the scattering of my proteins through the dirt.

And what I remember was quiet: the weak streetlight filtering through the curtains, the apparent disappearance even of the uneasy creaks and gurgles of the house. I used to believe that nameless creatures lurked for me in the gloom, and that if I shut my eyes they couldn’t harm me. Now there was nothing but the darkness, waiting to swallow me up.

6. All Ye Unbelievers

Review/interview of The Mountain Goats. Originally published in Plan B #30, February 2008.

The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride (4AD)

A strange tale: after signing with 4AD in 2002, The Mountain Goats – a.k.a. John Darnielle, a prolific purveyor of magical realist narratives, coated in otherworldly tape hiss – began to literally clean up their act, recording with a full band and professional studio set-up. The result was his most satisfying work yet: the claustrophobic Tallahassee, the damaged, heart-breaking We Shall All Be Healed (a concept album about his years as a teenage meth addict), and The Sunset Tree, an album both darker and more defiant in its exploration of his abusive childhood.

You might think that a man so well-exorcised would be running on empty, but Heretic Pride comes up with riches, by mining a seam of vividly-realised fiction. A collection of short stories or character studies – think of the snapshot constellations of Raymond Carver – with perhaps the only thing binding them together being the characters’ status as freaks, misfits, in some cases outcasts from others’ stories (H.P. Lovecraft, Sax Rohmer). ‘San Bernadino’ sees an unmarried couple escaping to a motel with their new son; ‘In The Craters On The Moon’ is populated with recluses haunted by disasters, awaiting their extermination; the title track describes an execution-by-angry-mob, the narrator being beaten and then set alight to the soundtrack of an upbeat, rolling, piano-and-organ-flecked groove.

It’s Darnielle’s way with ambiguity, best evidenced here, that gives much of these songs their magnetic power: the shattering ‘Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident’ sets the discovery of a corpse, the narrator comparing her with his ex-lover, against skeletal acoustic, delicate strings and the cooings of the Bright Mountain Choir; it’s hard to say whether the narrator of ‘Michael Myers Resplendent’ is an actor preparing for the role, or the serial killer himself anticipating finally playing his own part. It’s disappointing that the accompanying press release – drawn by Jeffrey Lewis – so bluntly pins down the songs’ meanings, because their suggestions, questions and lacunae – tales dead-ending, voices guttering out – are so much more powerful. The little details of sound and story – how appropriate Darnielle’s weak, nasal voice sounds in these emotionally strained songs; the melancholic religious speculations of ‘Sept 15 1983’, about the death of Prince Far I – provide the reasons to love these songs.

If what you want is a lump in your throat, a smile on your face, and ideas in your head, there’s literally no-one better around than The Mountain Goats, and Heretic Pride is possibly their best transmission yet. A strange tale, but true.

Interview with John Darnielle

Every Mountain Goats album seems more lush and complex than the last. Are you hoping to attract more fans, or is there some other reason?

You know, I just do whatever seems most interesting and fun to me at the time - I think any other way of doing things would probably be a disaster. I'm sure there are people who're able to say "ok, how can I attract more listeners?" and so on but I follow a pretty instinctive process: write the songs at home, send them to the people I want to play them with, then see what happens when we get into the studio. These songs seemed kind of lively for the most part and we were really enjoying playing as a band so they came out like that.

A lot of these new songs involve other people's fictional creations - Sax Rohmer's spies, Lovecraft's malevolent entities, Michael Myers - how did they end up in there?

Well I partly blame this concrete room I rented to keep as an office since my guitars were sort of colonizing the house - I started going down to the office in the morning and sitting on the floor in there with my guitar, and I felt like I used to feel when I'd spend a few weeks of summer vacation visiting my father in Oregon: he had a full basement at his house and I'd hang out down there, sometimes chopping wood with an axe or reading science fiction paperbacks and wondering whether monsters were real and stuff like that. I think of this record as a sort of indexing of life-long obsessions.

The last few Mountain Goats albums have been largely autobiographical, but they've been written in the same first-person narrative style, and exhibited many of the same feelings - lovelessness, pain, desolation - as these new ones. What, then, is the border between autobiographical and fictional writing?

Well everybody seems to think Get Lonely was autobiographical but it really wasn't - it just sounded like it must be but those were just stories The two before that, yes absolutely, in differing degrees. Anyway, I think whatever border there are tend to err more in favor of fiction - nobody's feeling occur to them in rhyming couplets or notes of the scale or even words, right? The line on writers is that they're only ever telling their life stories in some way or another but I wonder if it's not the other way around - that even people who're trying to tell their stories are in the end only making things up to try and make sense of a lot of disorder.

Did you enjoy making this album as much as the last few?

More! Adding John Wurster on drums was just awesome, and we'd toured with him earlier in the year so it wasn't like adding an unknown quantity - and we had JV back in the studio so it was like a family reunion with this awesome new relative that only some of us had met. Plus these songs were just more fun to play than the last couple of albums - "Get Lonely" was like digging a tunnel and "the Sunset Tree" was this massive catharsis for me, but this one was like getting to hang out in a haunted house or something. Really fun.

What might we expect next from The Mountain Goats?

Touring. Lots of touring. I'm not thinking about the next bunch of songs I'll write next - the one thing I'll say is that the last few albums I've played a little piano (on "Dinu Lipatti's Bones" and "Wild Sage" and here on "Michael Myers Resplendent") and it's really been great for me because that was the first instrument I ever learned how to play, so I've been thinking about doing more with that. The trick to using more classical instruments is not trying to sound like you're trying to write showtunes. Unless you are actually capable of writing showtunes. In which case, fire away, right? For me though anyway I'm thinking about trying to rethink the instrumentation while preserving that sort of gone-slightly-insane feeling that I like.

5. The Empty Page

First published in Plan B #35

The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (edited by Peter Wild, Serpent’s Tail, 2008)

The video for Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ not only marks out, through its collaged footage, an alternative canon, but insists on an intellectual, extra-musical, element: Bill Burroughs and Harvey Pekar appear alongside Patti Smith, The Stooges and Sun Ra. Literature and theory have always informed SY’s output, from Thurston’s love for the Beats and Kim’s absorption of feminist theory to Lee’s parallel career as poet and diarist. This intellectual fertility, echoing the band’s stylistic breadth, perhaps explains the fascination they exercise for writers, musical and otherwise: they provide a limitless number of jumping-off points, which the authors in this anthology, each taking an SY title for their own, use.

The results, perhaps predictably, are varied. Even by the standards of middlebrow publishing, many of the authors here are less-well-known, which results both in some pleasant surprises and some duds. The majority of the stories seem to be ‘inspired’ by the more exoteric elements of SY, particularly during the Goo/Dirty period: pop-culture refs, nihilistic blankness, psychosexual menace. Some, such as Tom McCarthy’s incendiary fantasy about Marxist icon Patty Hearst, or Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘Snare, Girl’, which perfectly captures the suffocating mental claustrophobia of adolescence, work very successfully; others, including Scott Mebus’ ‘Bull In The Heather’, which grafts an embarrassing pun onto a mundane story, or Kevin Sampsell’s ‘Swimsuit Issue’, where a potentially fascinating theme is ruined by an empty prose style, are less so. A number, such as Katherine Dunn’s ‘That’s All I Know (Right Now)’, wherein a severed hand temporarily fascinates a gentrified community, are amusing in their deadpan oddity, but nothing more.

The best stories seem to follow the melancholy traces in SY’s post-Washing Machine work, peeking at the desolation beneath the poise. The autobiographical, starkly poetic ‘Little Trouble Girl’, by SY’s peer Emily Carter Roiphe, ends with the discovery of a child – the return of rock’s repressed responsibility – reminding us that, for those excluded from the inner sanctum of bohemia, the world still turns. Meanwhile, Jess Walter’s moving ‘Rain On Tin’, ironically commenting on the preceding stories, quietly reveals a despair at its heart to equal that of Murray Street’s ‘Karen Revisited’.

If the fascinating stories here don’t outweigh the number of ones that left me indifferent, that’s not necessarily the writers’ fault: ‘my’ SY and the band many in this anthology seem inspired by seem to be two different outfits. Such are the perils of fandom. There is, however, definitely a lost opportunity here: SY’s greatest legacy was re-introducing the Modernist project to rock music – the formal possibilities opened up by Daydream Nation, where they caused the time and space of rock form to buckle, should serve as more of a lesson to writers than their thematic gewgaws.