James Farson's Blog

As I write this, we’re facing down yet another unprecedented heatwave, and the Prime Minister has just resigned, again. Everything feels wrong. Kind of stuck. Gummed up. Things don’t work the way they should or they work to ends that are anti-social. A state of affairs can’t quite seem to wind down; nothing really new can happen. My partner told me the other day about a conversation she’d had on the bus. A woman she sees pretty regularly, often enough that they know each other’s first names and will pass the time of day, dropped into a conversation a “novel” idea for solving the youth unemployment crisis and the refugee crisis in one fell swoop; arm our young people, and send them to the beaches to stop the boats. 

These people walk among us, and we wonder why the vibes are off. 

It’s a truism that SFF reflects the concerns of the time it is written in, that through invention it can be more real. M. John Harrison’s new novel The End of Everything captures better than anything else I’ve read that sense of casual nihilism that seems to pervade public life at the moment. It’s a post-catastrophe novel in the vein of Wyndham and Ballard (and that we have someone directly connected to that tradition still working is something to be treasured), but unlike those two eminences of disaster fiction, Harrison absolutely, point blank, will not explain anything to you, and I kinda love him for it. 

I mean it when it comes to the nihilism. Both main characters, Phillip and Marnie, commit totally relaxed murders in the first third of the novel that don’t seem to have much bearing on their interior lives at all, and they don’t show much curiosity about the sentience of a creature that one of them rescues from the sea before it begins to rapidly develop. 

The iGhetti have invaded from the astral plane, or the internet, or maybe both. The creature Phillip rescues from the sea is one of them, but it doesn’t seem to be invading, it’s just kind of… there. Phillip and Marnie, like most people, are stunned and just kind of getting on with it. Some people flee. Some people stay and try to puzzle it out. One character leaves behind a journal full of exquisite madman’s ravings that give you some oblique details. Harrison does this stuff so well. I’d love to see him write a videogame. 

This is a state of the nation novel, in its own skewed way. I mean, the alien invasion (possibly) occurs through the internet, as well as with humanoid creatures being fished out of the sea. The UK is totally cut off from Europe, and there are strange goings on within the square mile of central London that seem earth-shakingly important, but that nobody can quite understand. The easy thing would be to rail against this or that, but Harrison just lets a mood build. It turns into a road novel, the better to show you a sequence of images and get across to you the nature of the catastrophe. 

Which is not to say it devolves into navel gazing. There is discipline to this novel. It reminded me of Ice, the length of it, remaining long enough to make a strong impression but resisting, always resisting, the extra hundred pages that would have spelled it all out and robbed it of its power. I am still thinking about this one and suspect I still will be for a while, like I was, like I am, with Viriconium, and Wish I Was Here.

Nobody knows exactly the kind of apocalypse we’re in IRL apart from the fact it seems to be one of the ones where we have to keep turning up to work. That’s another thing that Harrison captures so brilliantly. It’s a literal alien invasion, but he still takes time to sketch out the shape of a love affair that never quite makes it the distance. There are still communities. People still go on holiday. I said it turns into a road novel; I mean that literally, right down to the characters getting petrol, stopping for food and rest at hotels, bed and breakfasts. They can get petrol, still? There’s an alien invasion, but at least the Strait of Hormuz is open. 

One detail I loved, and I say this having to admit that I haven’t read everything by M. John Harrison, is the mention of the new stars in the sky, after the invasion happens. Even in a vacuum, that is such an unsettling thing to build in, to pick up on, but I read the Viriconium stories a couple years back, and I remember that in those there are artificial constellations; sprays of stars that everybody knows mean something even if nobody can understand the ancient language they spell something out in. Is The End of Everything connected to Viriconium in some way? They share a mood, that dying earth thing, the sense that whatever it was is ending and yet we remain. Maybe the artificial stars are Harrison’s drained swimming pools and I just haven’t read enough of him to know that, yet. 

The End of Everything, detailing the depressing state of modern Britain though it does, should be on your nightstand if you’re at all interested in SFF or end of the world stories. M. John Harrison is one of the best to ever do it, and he’s still doing it, with remarkable control. After having read Tim Winton’s Juice, and then this, I am wondering whether we’re not in a mini golden age of eschatonic fiction. Actually, having read Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go recently, it’s probably more like that it’s always been a strong theme throughout human history, and we have always felt like we’re on the edge of something while our lives carry on, a feeling that The End of Everything captures oh so well.    

Header image is from this Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/memes/photos/worst-apocalypse-ever/1104881568345611/

Like Daedalus, I am forging myself wings. I construct them little by little, adding one feather each day.

I think collections of aphorisms, epigrams, and maxims are the form for today. They are like Twitter, but good. If you are looking for writing advice, and if you are reading this then you certainly have at some point, you will come across the idea that you can write little by little, day by day, and that sticking at it is a point in and of itself.

I am sure lots of works have been composed that way, but what I really like specifically about collections of aphorisms is that you can see the caesura, the sharp dividing lines between ideas, and that each idea is, in theory, in its most concentrated form. It’s a compositional strategy that takes into account variable capacity and changing life circumstances. Anyone can carry a notebook with them and end up with something similar, and I think in reading it back it matches the tenor and texture of modern life in a way not much else can; these works tickle the same neurons that sprang to life for me the first time I read The Waste Land, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, which is to say they take me back to when I was first fully comprehending the power of literature to capture lived experience in a way no other art form could.

Ironic, to start a review of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert with a couple phat paragraphs. I was considering writing a review in the same style as the Notebooks; I do like writing in that style. I like reading it, too, if you couldn’t tell; more recently I’ve enjoyed things like The Book of Disquiet, and Renata Adler’s Speedboat.

My copy of the Notebooks was published by NYRB Classics. I feel like it’s only recently more of them have started to be findable in the UK. It’s probably just that my tastes have developed to align with them, but I look out for those spines in charity shops and bookstores now and feel an excitement at recognising one that’s similar to how I used to feel finding a silver Penguin Modern Classics spine amongst the James Pattersons and copies of Fifty Shades. I love the way each NYRB classic has a different colour scheme.

A work like the Notebooks can live or die depending on context. The introductory essay by Paul Auster, Shadow Joubert, sets the stage perfectly and is a pretty thorough exploration of the idea of posthumous fame and of a life spent doing quiet and diligent work. A good intro essay should always spark even more curiosity. The anecdote about a copy of the Notebooks being loaned to someone at an inpatient mental health unit and it then making its way around every other patient, building resonance as it goes, is beautiful and you need to read it yourself, really.

You can only make one dot at a time.

I am also very fond of compositional strategies that take into account chance and synchronicity. Every time I sit down at my computer to write I pull an Oblique Strategy. As I sat down to write this review, it gave me the above quote. I don’t follow the strategies slavishly; to me they just inform and guide, but I thought it was worth noting. Eno adds a dot of colour; Joubert added feathers to his wings.

The actual aphorisms are varied. There’s plenty of similes and metaphors. Lots of thoughts on poetry and truth and justice. Every other one seems to be about God, or the soul. There’s lots of eyes (which made me think of Savage Messiah and Ford’s constant use of eyes as a motif), and lots of windows. Some of the most striking aphorisms are images that stand alone like pre-imagist poetry. For example:

a leaf of glass.

or:

Stacking the dead on top of each other.

It is a testament to the strength of the writing (and Auster’s translation) that the stuff about God did not turn me off. Some of these are clearly just thoughts that occurred to Joubert and that he wrote down before he forgot them. Every writer has a document like this. An image that strikes you, or an idea for an essay that never gets beyond the concept sentence. As Auster notes, for Joubert the preparation became the work and the process was the point; fragments shored up over time become an end in themselves.

Those useless phrases that come into the head. The mind is grinding its colors.

Working like this becomes an excellent avenue for self-knowledge. Journaling already is, anyway, but with thoughts in these condensed forms they become a mosaic you can see a pattern in. I saw a post recently about doing all your work inside one big chaotic document, one of the advantages being that you begin to see links, and also see ideas you keep returning to, a good way of developing themes and ideas. In something like the Notebooks (of which, to be fair, we get just a selection), that process is intensified; well, the guy sure did like talking about poetry and God, and he probably didn’t need to re-read his notebooks to realise that, but what I came to notice was the physicality with which he talks about it. The world is a drop of air. God is the body of the universe.

There’s the dramatic irony that always crops up when you read things like journals and letters. Take this:

A plan however is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down. We must above all have a notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work.

If you’re into getting things done, I think Joseph Joubert is the last person you should take advice from. His plan became the work. Unfinished or not, there’s a lot of value here. I’ve seen similar ideas in things like the The Cult of Done Manifesto;

If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

There is a self awareness that was probably there in the original composition and which is heightened in the selection (again, it was edited and translated by Paul Auster), but which never becomes too arch. Take as an example:

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

I thought this was particularly interesting, because this thin volume made up of individual sentences was not quick for me to read. I had to stop, think, chew. I could have looked at every word inside of an afternoon, yeah, but I could not have read it in any real sense. This is a way of writing that can take into account a lack of time or energy, and you can read it the same way. I’ve had a lot of trouble concentrating recently; something like the Notebooks was exactly what I wanted, with lots of tiny pieces I could pick at over time and pick back up without any loss of understanding, in fact having gained it, each piece being a substantial morsel itself. The Notebooks are the kind of thing you find yourself looking up from with a line in your head, puzzling over it. Sentences from it will float back to you unbidden even if you haven’t picked it up in a week or two.

I can imagine this is, dare I say it, perfect inpatient reading. I worked my way through Goethe’s aphorisms recently and have some more, similar reading lined up to intersperse with everything else as part of a balanced diet. Per Alan J Perlis’ Epigrams on Programming:

Epigrams are more like vitamins that protein.

I’ve been having trouble focusing lately. This time I blame it on the fact I spent the first half of May worrying that Arsenal might not win the Premier League and then after that was rather anxious about the small matter of the Champion’s League final.

Yeah, we lost. I think I am being honest with myself when I say that I think us getting over the line in the league was the big one, and that if we’d somehow biffed that and then won the Champion’s League, we’d be disappointed. We’ll go again next year. Being the first Arsenal team to hold onto the Premier league would be something, if we could do it.

I did manage to read one really excellent novel in May, and in a couple of days at that, which maybe speaks to some of my malaise being around not fully engaging with reading I’ve told myself I’ll do, but you’ve seen me wrestle with myself about my reading choices on here often enough so I am not going to follow that thought through to its conclusion.

When you’re in a charity shop and there’s an unpriced basket of books that are all clearly lurid ’80s/’90s SFF, you know you’re going to find something good, and that was how I came across a 1986 Methuen reprint of a classic SF story from the ’50s.

Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell, is a fantastic good time of a novel about a subject that, well, it’s really hard to talk about Wasp without using a certain word. The word begins with a T. You’ll probably be able to guess what word it is after reading the blurb:

The war had been going on for nearly a year and the Sirian Empire had a huge advantage in personnel and equipment. Earth needed an edge. Which was where James Mowry came in.

If a small insect buzzing around in a car could so distract the driver as to cause that vehicle to crash, think what havoc one properly trained operative could wreak on an unsuspecting enemy. Intensively trained, his appearance surgically altered, James Mowry is landed on Jaimec, the 94th planet of the Sirian Empire. His mission is simple: sap morale, cause mayhem, tie up resources, wage a one-man war on a planet of eighty million.

In short, be a wasp.

I’m doing my best not to use the word and tank my SEO or end up on a watchlist. I will say this; if you’ve ever read Nabokov’s Lolita, you’ll know that one of the oddest things about that novel is just how funny it is, considering the subject matter.

The same goes for Wasp. I was not expecting it to be funny at all, but we get everything from the protagonist’s perspective and he is pugnaciously amoral and such a bitch, like some kind of prototype Patrick Bateman that a government has figured out a way to make useful. He even characterises the people around him in a way similar to how Bateman does it in American Psycho. Where in that novel, people are reduced to the labels they are wearing and the place they work, in Wasp the protagonist, James Mowry, quickly sizes up people around him to one defining quality, one physical characteristic, like their age, or weight, or height. The sequence where he’s going around spreading rumours is hilarious.

Otherwise, it is a very well put together thriller that still feels pretty modern and deserved a reprint as an SF Masterwork. The protagonist gets in such trouble so quickly that it’s hard not to be carried along. I particularly like the fact that his first mission is a sticker bombing campaign; that kinda made me feel that not much has changed. I regularly walk the route from Peterborough’s train station to Peterborough’s football stadium, and there’s an obvious running battle going on between racist and anti-racist activists (I didn’t hesitate to type that out and that’s probably even more SEO poison than the other stuff), playing out through stickers on walls, lamp posts, and windows.

I am going to discuss the ending of Wasp past this point.

It is so delightfully cynical. Mowry is a bastard. He knows that the people who have recruited him are bastards. For him to end up in an enemy internment camp after completing his mission feels natural. He was, after all, chosen for his ability to blend in on the world he was attacking. The rug pull when he gets released from interment only to get sent back to be a wasp on another planet totally sideswiped me, and then I remembered all the foreshadowing about how there had probably been other wasps on the planet he was working on, and that they’re operating on other planets too, and that everyone is replaceable. We knew it. He knew it. And yet.

Wasp scratched that spy novel itch I get sometimes but it also felt a bit different to a regular spy novel. It reminded me that I’ve had a copy of Rogue Male on my shelf for years without cracking it open, and I wonder if there are any more tall tales of asymmetric warfare in the SFF vein. Let me know in the comments!

Where were you when Arsenal won the league?

It feels so bizarre to win the league on a random Tuesday without having even kicked a ball. I knew that we could win the league last night, but I didn’t really feel it until I was sat eating dinner with my family and saw that Bournemouth had gone a goal up after forty odd minutes. We watched an episode of Good Mythical Morning and I just kept my phone by my partner until it was done. After that, I decided to do the washing up and reset the kitchen a bit, because you can’t check your phone when your hands are wet. 

I really eked out that washing up. I was drying the last pan when my family invited me to watch a video with them of a man shopping for ducklings. My partner kept checking her phone. I ducked back into my little alcove where I’d kept my phone and saw that we were champions and took a second before I went, “Fuck, we won the league!” and everybody laughed. 

Thanks to this ingenious scheme, I had no idea that Haaland had scored in the 95th minute until it was all done. I am glad, because that would have finished me off and then I wouldn’t have seen us win it again after 22 years. 

Arsenal have been… absolutely fucking excruciating to watch this year. There’s no denying it. I think it was around October I started saying to my family, who were being subjected to it alongside me, that nobody cares if you play like this if you win stuff, but by that token, we’d better win some stuff. What a lovely irony in a bunch of people who started supporting a club playing beautiful but naive football (I wasn’t paying loads of attention during the prime Wenger years and definitely don’t remember George Graham) having to rationalise pragmatic, results driven football ala Mourinho. 

Set piece again. 

A bit of me looks forward to us playing fluid, total football again, handbrake off, demons exorcised and pressure released. But another bit of me hopes we shithouse an awful 1-0 win against PSG first. 

I’ve never had more friends at the office than I have today. I am begging you to please pay attention to the football. I’ve rarely felt better. How much tension was I carrying without realising it?

As I write this Villa have just won the Europa League. I am looking forward to our Under-8s playing Palace’s on Sunday.   

The best conversations are the ones you have in corridors. I stopped to talk to someone I’ve been getting to know who works in the same office as me; she mentioned something to do with one of her LinkedIn posts that I’d liked, and referenced the video content she’s been doing. I said oh, it’s great, I am sorry I haven’t been liking it or anything; I don’t know why I felt the need to apologise for not being always there to boost her content, anyway, she told me not to worry, and then said something really interesting. 

She’d pivoted to more video content because it was easy to make exciting with a green screen, and to try and stand out, because LinkedIn was mostly becoming AI slop. And then she said, 

“I don’t script my videos. I leave in the flubs and mistakes. It makes it more real. People can tell it was created by a human.”

And that reminded me about something I noticed and really liked on the latest Viagra Boys album. I think Man Made of Meat is fantastic and captures our current moment better than anything else I’ve seen, but there is one detail that I absolutely love, and it’s a mistake. Well mistakes are the portals of discovery right? 

Either way: there’s a belch in the second verse.

If you were getting AI to compose music for you, would it ever put a belch in the second verse? Truly, this was music that was definitely created by men made of meat. 

It’s dawning on me that I am probably one of the guys that the music video makes fun of, but I am who I am at this point, I guess. 

Man Who Owns Oreo Factory Says You Should Eat More Oreos1

I remember, in secondary school, one of our history lessons being given over to information literacy. We were taken down to the school library, and the head librarian spoke to us about how, when it comes to regular publishing, there are checks, there’s legalities, there’s money on the line, and so generally it is more trustworthy than what is published on the internet, which has a low cost and almost no gatekeepers, and that there is trustworthy information on the internet, but like you’ve been being taught in your history lessons, you must evaluate the source, and consider what perspectives they might be trying to promote. 

(How grateful I am that we had a school library; did you know that it isn’t a statutory requirement in the UK for a school to have a library?2)

The BBC will be trustworthy when it comes to factual information, the five W’s, but you have to bear in mind that they will almost always take the government’s line. 

If it’s a historical source, well, think about it; what reason could Lenin possibly have had for saying that the revolution was going great, thank you very much, and that global communism will soon be upon us?

Do you think there might be a reason why a person who owns a machine is desperate for you to invest in this machine, and make it a part of every aspect of your job? 

Vladimir, did you want to answer that one?

1 I saw a Bluesky post that said something to this effect that I now can’t find to cite.

2 I had to quickly Google search that detail, because I wasn’t sure if it was just primary schools where it wasn’t a statutory requirement. It apparently isn’t a requirement in primary or secondary schools. The first time I Googled it I saw the fact come up in the AI summary, went “Oh, ok” to myself, then closed the tab, then realised what I’d done. I am trying really hard to make sure I find sources myself, and don’t just trust what the AI summary tells me, because of issues like this. As stated in the editorial policy on my About page, this post was composed in its entirety by a human.

Ah, this has become the kind of blog where someone posts once every three months saying, “Hey guys! Long time no see. I hope to be posting more regularly and blah blah blah.” Sorry about that. 

I did want to take a moment to let you know I’ve had a couple of pub days over the last few weeks and I think they are worth celebrating! 

Stupid Poetry Zine

First of all, I have a poem in the Stupid Poetry Zine from Coin-Operated Press. It’s a poem called Big Chungus and it’s about how Volodymyr Zelenskyy has huge minerals. It truly was a stupid poem that I wrote down just to get it out of my head and I am glad it found a home!

Copies are available here!

[My friend, Helen Cross, also has a piece in this, and it is excellent!]

Notes to Self

I also have a piece in the second issue of the Shared Drafts Project, Unpublishable: Notes to Self. The brief was for up to five pages of writing from a document you never intended anyone else to see, something like an abandoned draft, or a list, or notes that were just for you. 

You know I like commonplacing, and I keep a pocket notebook, and I maintain an Obsidian vault; that is to say, about 90% of the writing I do is just for me and I see the value in it big time. So, I took the first five pages of my current commonplace file and submitted them, and they made it in!

I have posted about the commonplace book I keep, but I don’t think I’ve posted about the commonplace/scratch document that I use as well. I’ll have to add it to my list! But, in short, it’s a file I keep open pretty much 100% of the time so I can quickly note something, or paste in a link or bit of text. It’s a Google doc, so it syncs between my phone and my desktop, and it functions as a buffer for getting information between them, as well. 

It’s really useful, but also has an odd poetry to it if you go back and read it once the context isn’t as fresh in your brain. 

Read Notes to Self here!

This is a form of writing I am getting more and more interested in. I’ve always liked reading journals and collections of letters; these kinds of writing are even more personal, and can function as training for people working on other, more public projects. I enjoyed W. Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook a lot (see my review of it here), even if you couldn’t point at it and say it’s in any way cohesive. I am actually remembering as I write this that I never copied my notes from that book out into my commonplace…

I recently purchased Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, and The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. I find the idea of someone’s lifelong literary work being their own idiosyncratic notes to be fascinating, and I’m looking for more examples to check out! If you’ve read anything else in this ballpark I haven’t mentioned then please do comment. 

This is a list of things you can do. A lot of them are things I do. They might help. They help me. 

I got this idea from Milan Cvitkovic, whose list of things you’re allowed to do is great and contains links to lots of other, similar lists, most of which have at least a few good ideas in them.

This might smack of self-help. I have told you about my weaknesses. 

Tell someone when you notice they’ve chosen to change something significant about their appearance: new jewellery, a haircut, a coat you’ve not seen them wear before. Carry a lighter, even if you don’t smoke. Also carry something you can fidget with. It can be a proper fidget toy but it can be something improvised, like a hair tie, or a coin.Maybe don’t make the lighter your fidget toy. Familiarise yourself with the space you find yourself in. Approach it from multiple angles. Where are the exits, the fire call-points, do the windows open?When something happens to one of your friends, make a note of it. Message them on significant anniversaries and say you remember, that you’re thinking of them. (I think I nabbed this idea from Mari Andrew’s list of 100 things she knows.)You can’t build a community on your own, but you can try to learn your neighbour’s names, or at least tell them yours. (And read the 32 Steps to Togetherness, if you haven’t already.) The city I live in has a portal where you can report street issues like broken streetlights. If you notice a problem, you can make sure it at least gets reported. If everyone assumes everyone else has reported it, it’ll take longer to get fixed. You can go for a walk at lunch. You can really go, instead of telling yourself you will, and then not.   Take every second of your lunch break. You can write your MP, and it will make you feel better, even if it doesn’t achieve anything. If you don’t know who your MP is, look it up.If you get a day bus ticket, you can make sure to see if anyone at your last stop could use it, and if there isn’t anyone who does, you can slip it into the windowsill of the stop for someone to find later.You can create your work sentence by sentence, day after day. Start a band. (Try) and give other people the same grace, patience, and understanding that you’d like for yourself.Find the world time settings in your devices and use them to feel a bit closer to your friends in far away places; my friend is preparing for bed, my other friend is having breakfast.Optimise for survival, flog the long tail.Vary your routine: take a different bus, walk a different route. The same ways lead to the same thoughts, and as an added bonus it makes you more resistant to kidnapping. If you can’t write, you can read.Watch speedruns of games you played as a kid and through the novelty of optimal play developed over decades, experience them like you are a child again, except this time hopefully you can’t hear your parents arguing downstairs.  Write secret stories for yourself in hidden notebooks that you will show no-one. (Thanks, Kerouac.)Turn the sound off on your emails, slack, whatever notifications. Your fight or flight response is for dealing with a panther, or an explosion, not Rachel from marketing. Turn your email notifications off full stop. Check them once a day. No one will die. When you install an app, it’ll ask you for notification permissions. Default to saying no. Do you really need Tesco to be able to ping you?Spend your damn loyalty card points.Make lists. Write down words you don’t know, look them up, and build a vocabulary list.If it snows, it is important you go for a walk in it, even if the light is failing, and the snow has already been tattooed by many tiny feet because you’ve been stuck inside, working. You can send your poetry to magazines, enter competitions, apply for grants; open yourself up to the possibility that the next email will be good news. Leave your Christmas tree up until February. 

It’s been a year where I’ve only made fleeting progress on the things I really want to be working on, if I’m entirely honest. That’s fine. Not every year can be a banger. Sometimes you just survive, and learn nothing. 

I’m really wary of making resolutions now. At least, out loud. I want to write and read as much as I can; that never really changes. 

I have a hard time making new habits stick, but who doesn’t? I’m still messing around with commonplacing and with maintaining an Obsidian vault. I’ll probably have some more stuff to say about those practices soon, but I really don’t wanna turn this blog into a bunch of articles on PKM (Personal Knowledge Management). Yeah, it interests me, but these are things that you engage with to enable you to more effectively write the things you want to write and learn the things you want to learn. I am suspicious of anyone whose entire creative output is writing about Zettelkasten the same way you should ultimately be suspicious of anyone whose entire output is writing about writing, particularly if it’s all writing advice. If the advice was any good, or they had engaged with it enough to understand it, then they’d have some output that wasn’t writing advice, wouldn’t they?

This post gets more positive, I promise. 

I did manage to make morning pages stick. I don’t do it the way Julia Cameron suggests you do it, but I don’t think many people do. Taking the time to slow down and reflect in the morning is something I’ve come to value even if I rarely wake up early enough to take advantage of it on the days where I’d find it the most helpful; days where I am going to work. Something to consider for next year. Don’t want to write too much about it as I’ll probably do a longer post on it next year. More writing about writing. Uh oh. Am I a charlatan?

Every now and then I do write about things that aren’t writing. I am an artist and I can prove it. This year I came third in the annual Deepings Literary Festival short story competition and you can even read the story here. I also put together a couple of small one-page zines for fun which you can read here and here. I’ll probably experiment with the form some more next year so as always, watch this space. 

I saw my bloody valentine this year when they came to the Wembley Arena and they were fantastic. When I was a kid I thought I’d never get to see them and now I’ve seen them twice and it was a transcendent experience both times. 

A friend of mine nearly died this year. Tell people you love them. 

I still don’t want to use AI.

Right, now to the reading. 

Longest book: Again, Dangerous Visions, but I’d been chipping away at it for ages so I feel like it doesn’t really count. I did post some thoughts on it here. I read Homicide in its entirety this year and while I can’t recommend it without reservation (it’s a doorstopper and is also unapologetic copaganda), if you liked The Wire you will like Homicide. Some thoughts on it here. 

Shortest book: I bought a few comics this year; the first issue of Matt Fraction’s Batman run was pretty good but I am still resisting the urge to start collecting comics because the last thing I need is more stuff. The Grant Morrison Batman/Deadpool was also a lot of fun. I got a couple of issues of Weird Walk for my birthday and the first one immediately made me want to buy the rest of them. The shortest thing I read that you could call a book was Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, which I reviewed here. It’s great. 

Oldest book: Three Men in a Boat, which was published in 1889, but the edition I read was published in 1994; the oldest physical book I read was Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. I received a ratty paperback copy of it from 1980 around Christmas last year, and I think that’s the best way to read a travel book. It should have been somewhere before coming to you. I didn’t review it but if I had I would have said the nature descriptions are beautiful and the descriptions of his wife’s passing and his grief found me at exactly the time I needed them, and that I couldn’t pay him a greater compliment than to say he wrote so exquisitely he overcame my innate distrust of books where white guys talk about Buddhism.

Newest book: I got a copy of Bob Mortimer’s The Long Shoe in our Christmas bookswap this year and read it in a couple of days. It’s a mystery in the shaggy dog, The Big Lebowski kind of vein, except it’s set in London and not LA so it’s more like a Martin Amis novel if Martin Amis could ever stop taking himself seriously for a minute. Lots of fun.  

Gender Balance?: By my spreadsheet I’ve read 43 discreet titles; 30 of them were by men and 11 of them were by women. There was also an anthology edited by a woman, and an anarchist pamphlet that didn’t have a named author. I feel like this is probably fine. Funnily enough, I read ten books by women last year but I had read more overall. I addressed the balance this year by keeping the amount I read by women steady and reading less of everything else. Don’t all congratulate me at once. 

Plenty of writing by women on deck. I bought a bunch of le Guin I haven’t read yet towards the end of this year. 

E-books?: I read 11 e-books and everything else was on paper. This is down from 22 e-books last year but again, I read less overall. This number will probably go up a bit. I got a Kindle for my birthday and I am vibing with it.

How much did it all cost?: £145.83, for the books I’d purchased for myself. Twelve books were free, off bookswaps, loans, or review copies. Ten were gifts. I try to prioritise reading books I receive as gifts. I read The Serviceberry recently and Robin Wall Kimmerer put it better than I ever could:

Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

and

Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.

What about library books?: Five physical ones and two from BorrowBox, the platform our library system uses for e-books. It’s always a balance. I’ve catalogued the books I own and now know I own around 600, a big, big chunk of which I haven’t read, so I am always having to try to make sure I read the books I already have while making sure I support the library system. Currently I don’t have anything on loan, so I need to rectify that in the new year. 

The highlights of these would be Dispatches, which was incredible even if in part invented, and Station Eleven, which made me feel a melancholy only truly great post-apocalyptic SF can make me feel, and which I reviewed here. 

Translations?: I read five books in translation this year, the highlight of which was definitely Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver, which I finally got around to reading like, a decade after reading If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller…, which I loved. I got prompted to finally pick it up after reading the collected Savage Messiah, which references it a lot.  

Honorable Mentions: I got Juice for my birthday last year, read it this year, and reviewed it here. It’s really damn good. I love it when an otherwise Lit-Fic writer does an SF novel. I also read some Paul Theroux for the first time (reviewed here) and, grouchy as he is, found him very good company. Having read a bunch of Joan Didion over the last couple years I decided to read some Eve Babitz as well, and picked up Eve’s Hollywood, which was excellent, and I can tell I am going to love reading the rest of her work. 

This is the third year I’ve tracked my reading with my own spreadsheet. I still use Goodreads, and I use StoryGraph as well, but there’s something about keeping your own spreadsheet and paper reading journal. I am more and more realising the benefits of doing things in slower and more analogue ways, and frankly, also of doing things in ways that can’t be infected by AI bullshit. Sam Altman can’t do anything about your physical journal and I think that’s great. 

I’ve got a few subs out and am actively looking for more places for poetry, essays, and stories. A friend of mine is putting out a zine about cats that I am sure is going to be excellent and I’ll let you know about it when I’ve got a copy! 

Here’s to 2026. May it not be quite as horrible. 

Keep reading!  

Is survival a commodity you can purchase? What is it worth? What does it do to you? Sven Holm’s 1967 novel Termush, republished by Faber Editions in 2013 in a translation by Sylvia Clayton, asks these questions to horrible ends, and is more relevant than ever. 

If you read this blog, you already know I’ve got a real soft spot for post-apocalyptic fiction. That all started when I played the original two Fallout games when I was a kid and continues to this day; most recently I enjoyed Rebecca Gransden’s Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group (reviewed here), was in the mood for something in the same area, and remembered I had a copy of Termush that I picked up on a whim a year or so ago. 

The premise is very simple; the world has ended in nuclear fire, and we see the aftermath through the eyes of a resident of Termush, a hardened end-of-the-world bunker that is also a luxury hotel. Everyone has either paid to be there, or is there to serve the people who have paid, and apart from the odd radiation spike from rain or a dustcloud, life in Termush begins as a pretty accurate simulacrum of life in any other standard luxury hotel. 

The peace doesn’t last long, though. 

Termush has a medical staff that remembers the hippocratic oath, so when the odd refugee turns up, of course they decide to help them, but it causes an immediate contradiction; some people have paid a lot of money to live there. Are management going to simply let in a bunch of freeloaders?

No, don’t worry. Management has a plan. 

Some of the most horrifying stuff in this novel isn’t the descriptions of radiation burns or what’s happened to the world in general. It’s the mundane stuff; new arrivals eating in a place that is separated off, but not so separated off that the paying guests can’t clearly see that the people who’ve begged for help are being served worse quality food. The paying guests are happy to see the refugees when it suits them, but when they are first presenting to the hotel, sick, hungry and desperate, it causes enough disquiet that management quickly designates a separate entrance that is screened off. 

Your outlandish SF novel is actually about something that happens to us, today! Surprise. The residents of Termush are not just trying to keep themselves alive after the end of the world, they’re trying to maintain a grotesque system of exploitation and wealth inequality.

I didn’t know anything about this novel other than the basic premise so I didn’t know which way the story was going to tack. The narrator starts questioning the management of the hotel pretty early on when it becomes clear the residents are either being lied to or just receiving the pleasant fantasy they paid for, depending on your perspective. For a few chapters I thought this novel would go inwards and it would become an authoritarian parable, but as with real life authoritarian governments, outside events and material conditions outrun that possibility. 

I try not to read every post-apocalyptic SF story like “wow it’s so much like Fallout” because… well, a lot of them influenced Fallout and very clearly at that. However, I can’t readily find any examples of the Fallout devs (the original ones or the Bethesda ones) saying that they’ve read it, in the same way you can find examples of them talking about The Road Warrior, A Canticle for Leibowitz, or A Boy and His Dog, and they would’ve had the opportunity to read it: the translation that this Faber edition reprints was done in 1969. 

Termush is a narrative about people bunkering down to avoid a nuclear war and its aftermath, so of course it’s hard not to compare to the system of vaults in the Fallout universe, but considering that the hotel Termush is actually a tower, and not a burrow, and then considering how the story hinges on the question of whether the inhabitants will or won’t give aid to others, it’s hard not to think about the Tenpenny Tower questline in Fallout 3.  

Would you be shocked if I told you this novel has a much more nuanced take on the idea than Bethesda did?

The narrator is unnamed and doesn’t have loads of personality, nor do any of the characters, really, but this just allows them to more easily stand in for ideas and concepts and allows for the novel to become a bit of a puzzle box. This is fine. You could spin it out for one or two hundred more pages including fully realised relationships and the like but I don’t think it’d add much. The narrator mentions spending time with someone called Maria, another resident who, honestly, if you told me I’d missed something and she’s supposed to be a ghost, I’d believe you. 

The narrator is a bit like a frog being boiled. Things get steadily worse, and he knows it’s bad, but he observes it all dispassionately. Yeah, he’s disgusted with the lies from management and with how the refugees get treated, but does he do much? He’s not any different, really, from the other residents screaming to keep the barbarians away from the gates. 

It’s a very straight narrative. I am sure Holm would have been very tempted to include lots of irony and dark humour but I can only remember one image that was hilariously bleak, and that was of the service staff out washing and dusting the remaining plant life after a storm of radioactive particles temporarily stopped the residents from being able to safely walk in the garden. It’s like something out of a Bong Joon Ho movie. 

I didn’t twig it at first but I realised that this novel is kind of a counterpoint to Tim Winton’s Juice, or vice versa but I read Juice first. Holm imagines enclaves of the super wealthy trying to cling on, but he’s really careful not to blame anyone for the nuclear war that ends civilization, or to mention where the people in Termush got their money from. Juice is a story about cracking open those spaces, apportioning blame, passing judgement, and bearing witness. It’s funny how things change. A nuclear war isn’t really any more or less likely than it was in 1967 as far as I know, but seems more fantastic and science-fictiony to me in this moment, the end of 2025, compared to Tim Winton’s world that has melted. 

In a time where the monstrously wealthy are burrowing their way into the earth or trying to blast their way off it while actively encouraging the conditions that are going to make the planet uninhabitable for regular people, Holm’s Termush couldn’t be more of the moment. As sad and horrifying a novel as it is, hopefully you can take some heart in its final image of the 1% being cast down with the rest of us. 

Nothing ever worked for me as a conversational gambit better than two beers, but unless you are very very careful in how you go about it, two beers is not something you can do at work. 

You can, however, talk about the football at work. You can talk about the football anywhere. People expect you to talk about the football. Oh sure, there’s the weather, but that only has so many legs. Now, how many legs Declan Rice has, that has legs. 

I got a job where I hung out in community centres and spoke to people about the football and it was the best job I ever had, truly. 

Nothing will help you speak to people the way football does. There are two ways the conversation tree can go once you ask someone what football team they support.

They tell you. You can laugh at them for supporting Tottenham. You could bond over supporting Arsenal. Maybe you can agree with them that Chelsea isn’t that bad, and that at least you both hate Tottenham. They don’t like football, and will generally tell you why they don’t. Or they’ll talk to you about another sport they do like. 

I used to be a person who didn’t like football and I would have a miserable time in each and every conversation I had to have with a stranger. I didn’t used to like football because all the kids who tormented me played it, and when I tried out I got stuck in goal, and they made us play in freezing mud, and I would refuse to dive for things, but I didn’t know what a sweeper keeper was and so a goalkeeper that prioritised using his feet was not something I could argue I was, which meant I was a substitute goalkeeper, which meant I didn’t play football. 

The 2014 World Cup made me fall in love with football. Between James Rodriguez and that 7-1, I was converted to the sport where anything could happen. 

Even if you are determined not to enjoy football, to not talk about it, well, here is what I think you should do. You’ve read this far. You must be prepared for me to tell you I think you should do something. 

Bookmark the front page of BBC Sports, or get the app, and check it once every few days. If you want to really go hard revising, look at the Premier League table as well. If the place you live in doesn’t have a Premier League team, try to make a note of where that team is league-wise, and how it is doing. 

You will suddenly be in tune to moods and rhythms. You will notice everyone on the bus wearing the same colour at 2pm on a Saturday and know why. You will have something to say, and you will make friends. 

There is no need to be totally ridiculous and put together a Farley File if you really want to be prepared to have an easy connection with someone. Just make a note of what football team they support. It couldn’t be simpler. 

This all sounds very crass and cynical, but I’d suggest to you that if you pretend to like football, your social life will improve, and you might find yourself liking it by mistake, which isn’t a bad thing. 

On next week’s exciting blog where I detail things I should have figured out when I was ten years old, I will boil down How to Win Friends and Influence People for you. 

Did you know people like it when you remember their names?