Walking, running, writing
It’s spring. It’s not spring. It’s nearly spring. A time of errant beginnings.
It’s spring. It’s not spring. It’s nearly spring. A time of errant beginnings. Late February, a wood in Shropshire, the sun’s fresh arrival spreads through the leafless canopy. The crocuses emerge with the gusto of a drunk walking into a bar before withering again, getting shut out in the grey cold. There’s been so many months where I composed something for here, in the quiet lapses of my head, only for the ideas to remain unwritten. It’s been hard to know what to write. Since October 7th.
Sense impressions get overdetermined by videos of flashes of fire. Explosions pound life into dust – only concrete cavities left standing. It’s a cliché to even write about the limbs that stick out the rubble. But it’s all there. You watched one video. You watched twenty videos. You watched hundreds of videos. You didn’t watch any videos. You read reports of people breaking fast with cooked grass and lemon juice. Either way, it’s seared into our collective consciousness – those of us brave enough to face it. The first livestreamed genocide.
Ideas rattle around my skull in the thirty minutes before I wake up. Then I bury them. What do I do instead? Kilometres and kilometres of running. Until my toes bleed.
Because just fucking running for ages seems like the best way to do something else. But not write. Or at least not write for any public. By the time that I find myself in a place to ‘post’, the things that I wanted to say shrink in significance. Mere waste, shit even – the effluvia of irrelevance. Personhood’s grim luck. This was always where I wanted to address the world in a relaxed way. My capacity to be frivolous in public has been waylaid by so much death.
Some stupid story. Some bourgeois nonsense. Some blathering inanity. Distractions are private matters.
Microplastic milky ways, precision-guided sales pitches, algorithmic personality disorders – the methane gases float above the trash heap of distraction, the bread and circuses of taking the long arc round the disaster, looping into the double helix in the Disneyland of your soul.
In Gaza munitions built in the UK and USA rain down on a trapped population, burning up the annual carbon outputs of multiple nations in clusters. Mass death hijacks the frequencies, reforming the moral ecosystem. I eat bread. I think about where there’s no bread. I keep marching. Being alongside other people, it helps. Somewhat.
About a month ago, I did a reading at the excellent Pages Bookshop on Lower Clapton Road – Valentines for Palestine. Before the reading I think about my suspicions toward love, when it comes to emancipation. Love, to me, seems so indisputably personal and selective. But where I love, I believe in other people’s right to choices. I’m not a Christian (anymore) but I’m taken with that Pauline idea of acceptance. Anyway, the event was beautiful, quiet, crushing.
During the reading, the poet and writer Nadine El-Enany said that she’d stopped watching live footage of the genocide. That it was not simply something she could face any longer. I understood this. And I don’t know what is in the difference between watching and not watching. The media sphere is an orb of gold mounted on a pile of corpses. I’ll keep going on the marches. I keep hoping the violence will stop – that Palestenians will no longer be slaughtered.
Here’s some things I’ve got my head round when I could. Some about the genocide. Some not.
My dear friend Holly Connolly has written and explored our relation to the image and social media in this piece for Art Review.
I went to an event organised by Pamenar Press for the Anna Mendelssohn exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in January, where Lotte L.S., Dom Hale, and Lotte Thiessen and Mira Mattar all read. I was glad I went because I got to hear Mira read this incredible poem, now published in Mizna. I think it’s one of the most important poems of the last few decades.
Adania Shibli, the author of the phenomenal novella Minor Detail, wrote this letter about her being offered a prize and having the offer retracted.
My old, dear friend Joe Luna wrote this chapbook of aphorisms about poetry and poets. It’s fucking funny. Pick up a slab of Old News from Slub Press (second hand news, as Lindsey Buckingham calls it).
For Mubi Notebook, I wrote an analysis of Jonathan Glazer’s phenomenal The Zone of Interest. The occupation of Gaza was on my mind as I wrote through the film, exploring its anti-narrative character.
For the latest issue of Tank Magazine, I interviewed genius Holly Pester about her debut novel, The Lodgers.
I really enjoyed this playlist of Andrew Weatherall related tracks on Deep Voices.
Ralf Webb’s exploration of the places we leave and return to for Granta, the fantasies in and of the provinces, stuck with me.
Catch JB, Andrew and Momtaza reading in London next Saturday.