All bald men required to have tattoo of a man with a full head of hair on their heads.
APRIL 17
Swamp to replace bog in the phrase ‘bog-standard’ as benchmark of ordinariness.
APRIL 18
Potato milkshakes to be a thing.
APRIL 19
Derek Cookson has to run across a farmland to the point he can’t continue any longer, then run for another four minutes, to the point he thinks he might collapse and drop dead, then stop for a breather. He can return home after.
APRIL 20
Cress to be replaced with brutal merciless violence.
APRIL 21
Sexier kerning on letterheads.
APRIL 22
All vocal chords to be fitted with autotune.
APRIL 23
A complete restructuring of the economic model, with the means of production to be replaced with pelvic thrusts, and inherited wealth to be replaced with a mild korma.
APRIL 24
Semiotics taught in primary schools.
APRIL 25
The outdoors to be abridged.
APRIL 26
The firing squad introduced for children who excel at mathematics.
APRIL 27
The winter fuel allowance replaced with one tank of propane per OAP.
APRIL 28
Curt Easterman’s cottage repainted in cerise.
APRIL 29
Alligator sperm to replace tap water.
APRIL 30
Men under 40 will bow down to “The Stick”.
APRIL 31
Successful meetings to end with the inflating of balloons.
MAY 1
Gated communities, please!
MAY 2
Potted plants, never!
MAY 3
Scabbed lips to be kissed better.
MAY 4
A slow, inevitable slide into oblivion to replace basketball.
MAY 5
Currency to be renamed “Drip-weasel.”
MAY 6
Liveliness appreciated but not mandatory.
MAY 7
Sunburned mammals permitted.
[From The Aleatoria Almanack 2034, Mitchell Apse (ed.), p.23-25, Nairn Government Publishing, 2034.]
“Textual Dysfunction”
[GLASGOW & RENFREW]
IN 2020, GLASGOW & RENFREW was absorbed into the ongoing novel of a disillusioned fiction writer, composing a lengthy self-referential “nonbook” about a writer trying and failing to start a satisfying literary project, who ends up waffling about his past lovers and nonexistent role in the book business, and making flippant remarks to the reader and other unnamed persons. The following extracts are a random selection from this insufferable and relentless “nonbook” which remained unfinished at the time Scotland was destroyed. It is believed the citizens of Glasgow & Renfrew were suspended in some bardic state, cursed for decades to read the indulgent ramblings of this unknown and extremely arrogant writer. —Ed.
The original opening has been deleted.
[ ]
I and you and they, we all feature.
[ ]
AN OPENING:
Beryl bounded along the beach in open-toed sandals.
[ ]
You were a florist.
[ ]
A SECOND SENTENCE:
The noontide sun, sizzling her pale skin, would not abate. She sloshed into the sea and said his name: “Xerxes, Xerxes!”
[ ]
I kiss your face, pretty reader.
[ ]
There’s a weak simile somewhere in this nonbook.
[ ]
I remember you fingering my bookshelves a few minutes before we had sex.
[ ]
THIRD SENTENCE:
She stepped from the sea, her feet soothed in the salve of brine. She sat on the shore and said: “Fuck me, I have a headache.”
[ ]
Fuck me, I have a headache.
[ ]
“Write a little each day, and you will have a shitty novel in a longer time than if you’d sat and worked on the thing properly.” —My quotable quote
[ ]
This not a comedy.
[ ]
My laptop has only 17% battery remaining.
[ ]
And nausea. And wrist cramp. And some kind of untitled internal suppurating wound that I am trying to make manifest on the page.
[ ]
They want “honesty”, the reading public?
[ ]
One time, at the writers’ group, an Irish bisexual man with strong political views, whose stories about growing up bisexual in small-town Ireland were called “heartwarming” and “moving” by the others, criticised me for overusing adverbs and “ten-dollar words”.
[ ]
FOURTH SENTENCE:
She scratched her sunburned feet, leaned back, and ate an aposiopesis.
[ ]
If you saw what I’ve been doing for the last 40 minutes, you’d be like wtf.
[ ]
A release, like the lingering fingering of a morning’s masturbation.
[ ]
“Your specialist subject,” you would have said.
[ ]
Are you better at this than me?
[ ]
Is there a more potent way to launch this lamentive sniffle into the sorrowful stratosphere?
[ ]
I remember you saying that no one wanted to fuck you because you were fat.
[ ]
What is this?
[ ]
I should get the apologies in early.
[ ]
They couldn’t care less about you, really, those perpetually perky avatars.
[ ]
I have fictionalised everything you said for my own amusement.
[ ]
Two weeks have passed, I have written nothing.
[ ]
And two further.
[ ]
What?
[ ]
“Keep me separate from your seditious scribbling, buddy. The lovers of littérateurs always end with their love lanced,” you said, more or less.
“Fear not. My words are swords pointing straight into mine own guts,” I said.
“Lucky me, to secure Scotland’s most prolific self-eviscerator.”
“Can I lick your knees?”
[ ]
OPENING OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
I stumbled out of bed and crunched my cereal in a huff. My mother queried:
“Written anything, darling?”
[ ]
Better to express frustration and rage than nothing at all.
[ ]
I might have cancer.
[ ]
It’s more than likely that no one will ever remark on that sentence you spent two hours refining.
[ ]
OPENING SENTENCE #32:
He awoke, unfortunately, in the same unfortunate body. He checked the mirror for new sores, growths, or wrinkles that might spur his imagination into imagining a slightly different person, and found nothing.
[ ]
I remember saying that I couldn’t care less if you were fat, and that I wanted to fuck you, and feeling that I had badly fudged that reply.
[ ]
My inner critic thinks this sentence is a pile of steaming hippo excrement.
[ ]
My outer critic thinks the works of Lee Child are a pile of steaming hippo excrement. (And no, he hasn’t “read” them.)
[ ]
Q: Who is the audience for this work?
A: Myself.
[ ]
“This isn’t writing!” my inner critic howls.
[ ]
Times New Roman is to blame for the dwindling powers of my prose.
[ ]
“This is minor writing!” my outer critic howls.
[ ]
One time, at the writers’ group, a metrosexual man with an Oxford degree and two shirt buttons undone re
marked that he wasn’t able to “understand the intent” behind my story, although conceded it was “very well-written.”
[ ]
This is the perfect form for the sort of writer who prefers surfing the internet and reading articles on late nineties indie to penning award-winning prose. That sort of writer is me.
[ ]
I can’t remember having sex with you for the first time.
[ ]
I’m the sort of person who stays up into the wee hours making infinitesimal adjustments to perfectly acceptable sentences for no logical or aesthetic reason.
[ ]
This makes me lonelier than you.
[ ]
Mediocrity is a state of mind. A very mediocre one.
[ ]
This is not a flip book. This is a flip-off book.
[ ]
This project is deliberately designed to be abandon-proof. All my doubts and gripes will simply be sloughed into the text.
[ ]
What if no one appreciates or understands my intentions?
[ ]
OPENING SENTENCE #61:
He had returned to his parental home, located in the sort of provincial town that has never featured in a haiku, to mope. A ten-year stint trying to become a writer had sucked the hope from his knees.
[ ]
I should probably make allusions to the “novel of no”, i.e. Melville’s Bartleby. I’d rather recommend Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas.
[ ]
I probably have cancer.
[ ]
This may all seem very droll to you, but you have no idea what is happening between these sentences.
[ ]
And I’m not going to say, except maybe obliquely, because my real life experience would render this literary experience banal.
[ ]
This isn’t a “novel of no”. This is a novel of fucking-cunting-christing-fucking-hell.
[ ]
My intentions, my wonderful intentions!
[ ]
This is “non-writing”, or if you prefer, “meta-non-writing”, i.e. non-writing chatting about itself. This doesn’t make it any cleverer.
[ ]
I am simply a well-read man beleaguered by the book world. I am simply a well-read man pickled by the perfunctoriness of present-day prose. I am simply a well-read man stymied by the over-saturation of stylish and well-written prose pouring from a million MFA pens.
[ ]
I remember never kissing the skin tag on your left breast.
[ ]
I find it hilarious to attack and flay myself in print. That’s rather odd.
[ ]
You burrow far enough into the navel, you find art.
[ ]
OPENING SENTENCE #79:
Richie Samsa awoke, flicked the bug from his bed [I have read Kafka!], fried his kidney [I have read Joyce!], had the howling fantods [Foster Wallace!], placed a pebble in his pocket [Beckett!], and so on and so what.
[ ]
I have an MFA.
[ ]
I hate the letter ‘b’. I hate the letter ‘d’. I hate the letter ‘y’. I hate the letter ‘g’. I hate the letter ‘j’. I hate untidy, protruding letters that jut out on the line, like that ‘j’ there.
[ ]
This is a book about feeling like you have nothing to contribute to literature and that your efforts will make no impact on the world and that your writing will never reach anyone, and writing anyway.
[ ]
I remember offering you a fresh croissant and flavoured water after sex.
[ ]
This book is the sinewy fingers of the strangler around your neck after an hour’s lovemaking.
[ ]
You are drawing way too much attention to yourselves.
[ ]
The reason I’m writing this is because I have a MFA (did I mention?)
[ ]
Leonard Cohen said something interesting on Bookworm that I didn’t write down. The mention of Leonard Cohen here is not significant.
[ ]
A SENTENCE:
He spent a number of weeks listening to Rowland S. Howard and early Swans on a loop.
[ ]
You might be wondering. I am too.
[ ]
Less is not more.
[ ]
You weren’t the one for me, fatty.
[ ]
If you are a minor celebrity with an offer to write a memoir, please bear in mind your effort is suppressing a far superior literary work. That matters.
[ ]
Only the best fragments have been chosen for you to read.
[ ]
Books should never be “cash-in” products for those who excel at an inferior artform.
[ ]
Meaning and intent are overrated.
[ ]
The ability to holler the loudest still determines who is read or not. Literature is not an egalitarian utopia. It writhes in the muck of cut-throat capitalism.
[ ]
I remember your weird hair, like a badly topiarised hedge.
[ ]
It’s raining. I’m at my desk contemplating my next paragraph. I stare at the dull rain drizzling over rooftops and trees. I think about the market value of my next sentence. The whole morning is ruined.
[ ]
The everyday reader prefers a thumping good read with a zippy plot and loveable characters. To make that assumption, you would have to assume the reader was either a) a simpleton, or b) a four-year-old.
[ ]
Literary slap and tickle, with more slapping, and tickling that turns to violence.
[ ]
It amuses me to think of your bemusement.
[ ]
Quit the project. Add words to the project. Quit the project. Repeat.
[ ]
I remember you saying something sniffy about Will Self.
[ ]
When there is nothing to write about, there is always this.
[ ]
You never made me mixtapes.
[ ]
I had some terrific ideas on that windfarm. Fortunately, I forgot to write them down.
[ ]
If I despise every well-varnished and overworked sentence, the sort I have buffed with care over several weeks, then surely these speedily unspooled nano-thoughts are the antidote?
[ ]
If you think I’m writing any old thing here, you’re missing the point.
[ ]
Where there is this, there is nothing to write about.
[ ]
And grasping the point brilliantly.
[ ]
You’d have thought.
[ ]
I hate this shit.
[ ]
If I hadn’t opened that Flann O’Brien ten years ago, I might be a bestseller by now.
[ ]
OPENING SENTENCE # 57:
He opened his laptop after two weeks. Thought he’d better write something. He wrote “the short man moved an inch”, rubbed his chin for two minutes, and went to sleep.
[ ]
All I want is a patronisingly supportive review in a broadsheet. Then I can die.
[ ]
I never carry a notebook. I don’t want to read my pitifully derivative ideas in bed later.
[ ]
I remember putting my head between your enormous breasts.
[ ]
I deleted something.
[ ]
Confidence, self-belief, and motivation. Without these, you have this book.
[ ]
How do I decide which fragments stay, and which are wiped?
[ ]
I picked up a Nick Hornby novel in the library, and felt a violent stabbing pain in the heart.
[ ]
There are too many writers. Please, do the decent thing.
[ ]
The world doesn’t need another novel about a concert pianist’s osteopetrosis.
[ ]
I remember you eating melted chocolate in your van, and feeling slightly repulsed.
[ ]
I want you to feel increasingly irritated, depressed, and resigned.
[ ]
The world doesn’t need another novel. Perhaps we should publish on Venus.
[ ]
Most male writers I know struggle to resist the urge to masturbate while writing.
[ ]
SAY SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT HERE!!!
[ ]
Most female writers I know aren’t interested in masturbating while writing.
[ ]
I’m reading Tom McCarthy and Rodrigo Fresan. And you wonder why my every sentence wheezes and splutters to the floor in a pathetic crying heap?
[ ]
Remarks are not literature, said G. Stein, except when those remarks are slamming with unrestrained vitriol the published works of rivals.
[ ]
I’m not a genius, and neither are you (unless you are). The best we can strive for is elegant mediocrity.
[ ]
I want to say nothing.
[ ]
I’m a genius in my imagination. I prefer to live there.
[ ]
NEXT SENTENCE:
He wrote “the short man moved another inch” and wondered if he might compose a novel about a short man moving in inch-size increments from one side of the room to the other, like in Beckett’s How It Is.
[ ]
I tickle your little chin, ugly reader.
[ ]
I wrote nothing for two hours because I was too busy fantasising about being a totally radical infamous endlessly talented genius.
[ ]
They monetise your every fleeting pleasure.
[ ]
The first few notes of an early Beatles track has more artistic value than everything I have and ever will write.
[ ]
INSERT A PERTINENT QUOTE HERE!!!
[ ]
I blame you for this.
[ ]
I want to say everything.
[ ]
I want to crawl inside your brain and live there.
[ ]
I attended a friend’s book launch and felt nothing but unbridled happiness for her success.
[ ]
I might go back to bed.
[ ]
Mornings when trying to squeeze a coherent notion from one’s head takes Herculean effort.
[ ]
“You’re punching above your intellectual weight,” you said.
“Correct. However, my plan to compose lightweight comic novels in unremarkable prose was long ago scuppered by the reality that to write such things was to relegate myself to mediocrity,” I said.
“But you are a mediocrity.”
“Yes. But fiction offers you a chance to pretend otherwise. Everyday, you awake in the same fattening and failing mediocre body, your mind slowly rotting, your horizons ever narrowing, and you turn to fiction for a temporary respite, where you can arrange your words in such a manner you appear smarter, wittier, and better educated than you are in the merciless light.”
Scotland Before the Bomb Page 18