Chart / April

April 07, 2020

Eliminating discomfort is a matter of finding the right rhythm. If your immediate environment is getting beatific to some William Basinski, you’re not going to be able to harmonise with it when you’re headbanging to Angel Witch. I forgot this basic truth in the first two weeks of quarantine. I failed to slow down. I tried to maintain the same rhythm, the same work pace. My desperate desire to be productive every day became even more desperate. And though my system of coping - with writing, with large bouts of solitude interspersed with intensive face-to-face encounters, with the ever-present risk of embracing sedentary habits - was no longer there, I pretended like it was. And once I finally admitted defeat, I castigated myself for not being able to tough it out with the same degree of discipline that makes me sit at this desk every day and write thousands of words that (to an overwhelmingly large extent) nobody else will ever read.

Now that I’m in my fourth week of isolation, I’ve found a rhythm of sorts. It’s working for me. I've spoken to a total of three people face to face since the beginning of March, had my hair partially shaved off by one of them, polished my manuscript, and made some headway in translating a book on religion that I have to deliver by the end of this month. Oh, and five of the seven tracks on my band’s EP were added to Spotify/iTunes to zero fanfare. This is an equilibrium I can live with for the present.

Seeing as people have a little extra time on their hands now, it’s essential to sign this petition calling on the EU to resettle the refugees trapped on the Aegean islands in awful sub-human conditions. It only takes a second.

Essential quarantine reading for April:

Albert Camus - The Plague
Knut Hamsen - Hunger
Hubert Selby, Jr. - Requiem for a Dream

And the music. Always the music:

1 Four Tet - Baby
2 Lyra Pramuk - Mirror
3 JPEG MAFIA - BALD!
4 Portico Quartet - Trajectory
5 Danny Brown - Pac Blood
6 Mammal Hands - Three Good Things
7 Lana Del Ray - Venice Bitch

Pandemic Diary (part II)

March 25, 2020 in diary

It is SO difficult to scratch out even 1,000 words a day. Thus: PANDIARY.

20 Mar

My bald mate brought his Xbox over to me today on a mercy mission. I pretended I was a secret agent in Cold War Berlin as he screeched into the street and jumped out of the car with a mask on. The fantasy lasted until he handed me a big blue IKEA bag. Bonus: Found out I suck at computer games now. Actually said the words “it’s just too fast” while shaking my head. Well done, Granddad.

21 Mar

Amazing how phone calls – the 21st century equivalent of getting a telegram – are a thing again. I didn’t even know what my ringtone sounded like until this started. My oldest friend video-called me for the first time since 2005, and he talked about his biggest fear in all of this: that the Premier League season might still get finished later this year. He’s a Spurs fan, so that’s understandable. “We were in a flat spin before fucking corona saved us” were his exact words.

22 Mar

The lockdown starts at midnight. With that weirdly normal threat in mind, I left the house with my camera and took some photos. Saw two women sitting by the kerb four metres apart with a bottle of prosecco between them. Reminded me of that film where two soldiers parachute into a minefield and can’t move so they shout at each other instead. One species that has done alright from all this is the cyclists. They were loving it, bombing down the middle of the road with no fear of a Karen in an SUV casually killing them as she turns without looking. We’re living in the age of Sick Wheelie, Bro.

23 Mar

Whoever invented the burpee was a sadistic bastard. In a hundred years’ time – if human beings are still around and we’ve managed to sidestep the whole death-by-climate thing – people will visit the Museum of Fitness and see a lifelike hologram doing a burpee and they’ll go, “wow, they really hated themselves back then.” And the hologram will look at them coldly and say, “Summer bodies are made in the winter”, and then do some more burpees while holo-muttering motivational phrases to itself.

24 Mar

This is mos def the longest I’ve gone without touching another human being. All I need now is a Nirvana hoodie, skin like the underside of a Ryvita and a shit haircut and I could be 16 again. I’m working on the latter: I chopped a lot of my fringe off with a pair of scissors. Then I had a go at the sides. Kind of look like a Benedictine monk now. Maybe I should start praying. Or making beer. I’m a little worried about the guy across the road from me. He’s moved into his living room and has been lying on his couch in a sleeping bag since Friday. Maybe he’s trying really hard to turn into a butterfly.

Pandemic Diary (part 1)

March 20, 2020 in diary

Given the current ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ situation, I’m finding it a little difficult to sit down and write anything that seems remotely worthwhile. Steven Pressfield didn’t cover this in The War of Art. Put it in your revised edition, Steven.

Anyway, I’ve decided to keep a diary for the time being. How long is the ‘time being’? That’s the joy of this whole thing: nobody has an answer. Maybe I’ll write my final entry next week. Maybe it’ll run and run for six months. Maybe I’ll get sucked into a YouTube hole well before then and never emerge again.

Here is my Pandiary.

14 Mar

The last waltz before the band all get sick and die of pneumonia. I walked from Alexanderplatz to Kottbusser Tor after being glued to the news for 10 hours. Perked up a little when I saw there were no death squads in gas masks hunting down the weak yet. At a friend’s house we drank Champagne and it felt like that scene in The Road when the boy and his dad share a can of Coke in a ransacked fitness centre. As I recall, it pretty much goes downhill from there.

15 Mar

First full day indoors. Usually I’d love not getting messages saying “yo dude u wanna hang later?” but now, like a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome, I miss them. Finished Moby-Dick. Turns out the whale was Ahab’s dad. Watched Steve Austin’s debut WWF match, discovered Triple H’s ring name used to be Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Sounds like a legal firm you’d hire to make sure you win everything in a divorce settlement.

16 Mar

Like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, I broke out of quarantine in the evening and headed for Switzerland. Got as far as Prenzlauer Berg. Despite the ban, one bar was open. A couple of utter Charlies wearing gilets were sitting outside drinking white wine and staring at anybody who walked by with a kind of white-hot smugness in their eyes. On the way back to prison, a guy on a bike with a beer in hand shouted at groups of people as he pedalled by. “You’re all gonna die! All of you! You’re zombies and you don’t even know it yet.” He brought a smile to my face. I returned home with fresh energy. Then I lay on the couch.

17 Mar

Did this day even exist? Or was it just a thought experiment where I imagined how boring a Tuesday could possibly be and then somehow made it happen? Kind of like when Albert Hoffman accidentally synthesised LSD and smashed his mind to pieces on it, except instead of fractals and ego-death, I got urgent translation requests and coronavirus memes on WhatsApp. I’m cracking.

18 Mar

Met up with my boxing trainer in desperation to see a human face other than the haunted one in the mirror. Went to the park with his dog. Place was like a May bank holiday: kids running around with their grandparents (aww), teenagers grilling and drinking, and super pumped dudes gurning at each other as they shared the only pull-up bar for 5 km. We watched them for 20 minutes from a safe distance and then went home for a cry.

19 Mar

Had my first ever filling. I told my dentist it was my highlight of the week. I think she thought I was joking. The drill burrowing into my decaying tooth reminded me what it means to feel. When she was finished, I wanted to beg her for a root canal, but I wandered home, my face as numb as the idiots in the park.

took this in 2014 on xmas day. weren’t no people out at that time either.

Chart / March

March 02, 2020

When writing a first draft, you (or rather I) experience the jarring sensation that you’re doing something both very, very righteous and something very, very shit. When you hit that smooth patch after struggling for an hour to formulate a sentence, where entire paragraphs take shape within the space of a few minutes, where dialogue strings itself together as though you’re transcribing rather than inventing, where decisions are logical rather than arbitrary, that is what makes the process of writing a first draft worthwhile.

The rest of it, though (especially in winter), is its own special form of masochism. The characters have no motive and are inconsistent, the concepts are as weak as a girder on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the thread holding it all together snapped somewhere back in chapter 4. What’s more, the word count is creeping up and up to heights that it shouldn’t, the weeks are turning into months, and you have the suspicion that you’re actually an utter hack who got lucky with previous publications and that this time around you’re going to be found out for sure.

This is where I’m at now. 75,000 words in to book 4 (Static Age > By the Feet of Men > Mekong Lights > IV) and I’m definitely encountering the resistance that Steven Pressfield warns against. Sometimes my self-loathing grows so great that I even read back over what I’ve written in the first draft just so I can shake my head and look mournful. I’m hoping the novel is going to top out at 120,000 words (it’s sci-fi, and for whatever reason Writers & Artists states that sci-fi novels should aim for anywhere up to 125,000 words), but who can tell? Maybe it’ll go well beyond that. Maybe it’ll unfurl forever. Maybe this one will beat me and I’ll never finish it.

I’m excited to find that out, at least.

La musique: