Transcript of a Twitter interview from April 10th:
@MelvilleHouse: What consolation does your work offer your readers?
The consolation that there are no consolations. The sky is dark. There are no stars to guide us. The question: how not to forget this primordial absence. This primal scene. (1/3)
Nolen Gertz: 'Discovering life is meaninglessness is not what Nietzsche calls nihilism. Rather, discovering life is meaningless and yet going on with our lives anyway is nihilism'. (2/3)
The consolation: you don't have to be a nihilist. (3/3)
@Samjordison: Can we have an update? Also, what have *recent inconveniences* taught us about futility?
Damp used to follow me like a dog, it’s true. But now it doesn’t dare, now that I no longer live in isolation and have sold my flat to property investors (serves them right). (1/2)
‘Recent inconveniences’: nicely put. The solution to futility is to love fate. Amor fati, as Nietzsche called it. To will what has happened as if you wanted it thus. I admit … I’m failing at this. (2/2)
@EmmaWind1e: Do you think that peoples' perception of the suburbs will change during lockdown?
What will happen? The suspension of ordinary life may reveal the suburbs just as they reveal themselves to Nietzsche in my novel. The suburbs in dub. The suburbs out of phase with themselves, as in Steve Reich’s music. (1/3)
What will be revealed? ‘Empty hollows of action, singular vortices without meaning or purpose’ - William S. Allen. Lapses in time, in temporal succession. (2/3)
Incomplete cycles. Echoes. The same action iterated across waves of variations. (3)
@robyn_drury: Can you say more about the music that inspired the band in the book?
I was thinking of several artists. First, Pauline Oliveros & Friends, Deep Listening. Deep trance. The aum of the universe. Messianic peace. (1/4)
Second, Can, Future Days. Weightlessness, expansiveness. Shimmering. A mist, a spray. With Damo’s feather-light vocalising. (2/4)
Third, Miles Davis, Agharta. Energy music. Groove, buoyancy, textures and muscles. Every kind of pedal, phase shifter, wah wah. And Pete Cosey’s solos – abstract, soaring. (3/4)
You can hear the Burbs’s Tantric metal in Sun Araw’s Ancient Romans. Dub openness. Lightfootedness. Foam-lightness. (1/2)
And you can hear Dancin’ Star’s songs of disco innocence in that class of David Mancuo’s legendary Loft, the proto Chicago House sounds of Fingers Inc's Mystery of Love, all wistful and trancey. (2/2)
@MDeAbaitua: What do you steal from other writers and what do you borrow?
A kind of ‘cultural poaching’ is what’s left to those of us in the ruins, argues Timothy Hampton. ‘In an economic and social system that thrives on amnesia, the only possible aesthetic and political response must be to offer fragments of the past. (1/3)
And the task of the artist is not to reintegrate these shards into some new totality that would paper over the destruction, but to hold them up, in their disjointedness, for all to see or hear’. (2/2)
Quotations with and without quotation marks in my books, stolen or borrowed are meant to mark this disjointedness. (3/3)
@MobyLives: Why trilogies?
Three times to get it right … (1/4))
Repetition, repetition, repetition as Mark E Smith sang. Both within the books (sentences, paragraphs, scenes) and in the relationship of books to one another. ((2/4)
The Danish for repetition is gjentagelse, which, I’m told, means literally re-taking. The same story re-taken, redone. The title of a great book by Kierkegaard. (3/4)
And repetition is what Duras does (The Sea Wall/ The Lover/ The Lover from North China … The Man in the Corridor/ Malady of Death/ Blue Eyes Black Hair) ... Which is recommendation enough for me. (4/4)