Updates and announcements
Reading from the novel in Soho this Tuesday
A joyous Friday to you, dear readers. In lieu of a longer post, this is a little update on what I’ve been up to and an announcement of a reading.
I spent a strange nine days in Berlin coming to terms with the loss of a wonderful person who I lived with when I first moved to London. I found out about Marina’s passing in a pool hall on Green Lanes at 1am after doing a reading (an excellent MAP fundraiser organised by Tom Willis, Maia Bear, and Matthew Holman). Not the best time. But there never is. Grief is the strange and continuous weight of being overwhelmed, like being bashed around by a heavy tide when you’re not quite ready to swim.
I barely had time to process it. And then, two days later, in Neukolln the news hit me like a bottle of sterni round the back of the head. I wrote a little about it here for Curatorial Affairs. Thanks to Jacob for asking me, and the most recent piece up on the blog, an interview with Jack Self, also looks fascinating.
Wednesday night my old friend Tom gifted me with a ticket to see Clarissa Connelly at Kings Place. It was honestly one of the most exceptional performances I’ve seen in a long time. I loved how her compositions, their structural complexity, came to life amplified on stage. There was a strangely coherent genre hopping from the ecclesiastical choral work, to the prog time-signatures, and 90s post-shoegaze guitar dirges. She also has an absolutely phenomenal set of pipes on her, something that comes across with even more oomf on stage. Check out the new record World of Work.
I’ve been very mentally distracted the last few weeks, for a bunch of reasons. But I’ve been very slowly reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, having devoured Line of Beauty last month in about 5 days. I’d like to write more about why I’m so taken with Hollinghurst’s gratuitous portraits of upper-class London. I think it’s a lot to do with his tone. He gives such rich detail to the rich, their indulgences, obsessions and proclivities, that it is both loving and medically cruel (it reminds me a little, in this respect, of the films of Todd Haynes). That capacious approach seems to me much more honest than the fish-in-the-barrel class war stupidity of, say, Triangle of Sadness type of cultural affairs.
On Tuesday I’m reading from the creative project that has consumed my last few years: my novel-in-progress, Educated Pains, for Pavlos, the most fun promoter in all of London with some perhaps familiar names of literary-upstarts.
Here’s a little precis of the project:
In the wake of his father’s death, Thomas Muckle gazes at Stromboli while forest fires rage along the coast of Calabria, trapped in his conflicting desires. What’s more, he needs to paint ahead of his solo show.
Back in New York, an unexpected guest and a Faustian bargain revive his fortunes and ruin his relationships.
A novel about desire, grief, and the fear of wasting your life in the grander contexts of political and climate crises, Educated Pains asks how much would you compromise your principles to relieve your anxieties? It looks at the ways we try and fail to love, create, and live, and the toll it takes on those around us.
Bluntly, I’m looking for an agent to represent the project, so if you know any good ones, send them to the reading.
Come and say hello on Tuesday.