This week I picked up my complete collection of William Blake and started looking for hell. I’ve been having a little wander round the idea of evil recently, thinking initially that finding a satisfying definition would be easy. The simplest version is that it is an absence of good, or simply to be bad. Both of which don’t really provide anything like the grander sense of evil that I was hoping to find. I was looking for the texture of it, the shape, something kind of tangible and describable aspect of it that didn’t rely on good as opposition.
The pamphlet is a post-French Revolution weekend away in Hell, and frankly it doesn’t seem that bad. It’s less grand than Dante’s trip, less torture, and more forgiving. There are sections which concern evil directly, suggesting initially that Evil is an energy of the body and Good the product of a well-flexed soul, before immediately conceding you can’t have one without the other.
I particularly like the trip to the printing press, which probably does the most architectural work in the pamphlet, offering you a few half-beasts to consider as Blake takes you through the creation process of the etching so that books can be made. These caves are considered to represent a limiting of perception elsewhere in the work — and the books created here are a way of widening it again.
The process described fits well with Blake’s feelings on inspiration — from Songs of Innocence & Experience — which suggest there is a process that follows: some expansive work or mundane experience, the expansion of the idea and adornment in your mind, the forming of the direct language in your mind, and then an unknown process between (where cherubs of inspiration disappear) which occurs immediately before the hand gets involved makes it reality and grounds it.
This is the acceptance of body and the soul, that they cannot be separated or treated as if one does the evil and one does the good. It is only through both of them that anything can be done.
but is this boredom by Tyler the Creator. I think it’s the atypical structure of the song that does it for me.
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own — it was written by @CJEggett with a heavy head. No, William Blake didn’t give me the answer I wanted about evil. If you liked this in any way at all, please send it to someone you love and tell them to sign up.
Liberating The Cannon, a new anthology edited by Isabel Waidner and published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe (under their Experimental mark) sets out to present the intersection of queer experience and experimental writing. The anthology takes its first cue from classism throughout, presenting experimental and literary work that deals with working-class culture at the same time as queerness. It is, most importantly in challenging cannon, ignoring the usual compartmentalising of queer (and working class) writing into low-brow genre definitions.
Opening the anthology’s set of stories is Juliet Jacques’ The Holiday Camp. The story explores this working class identity’s meshing with the desired queer identity of Sam. In seeing a drag act at the holiday camp, Sam wears his sister’s clothes as an emulative thrill, and is caught by his understanding sister who helps him dress up (poorly). They go out and the drag queen takes him home, in this moment we see how the sister’s working class help is challenged by the more experienced man, who helps Sam dress more effectively. Naturally, Sam is followed and abused on the way home — having to run to avoid being beaten. The confrontation with his parents and sister is one expressing the working class repression — love but a desire to not have to deal with it directly, simply an order from the father to not let them see Sam dressed as such. This kind of acceptance sets out the tone of nearly all the works in the anthology — as often stories about queer identity suffer from the same problem as Spiderman films, that we’re endlessly treated to the moment they were bitten by the queer spider as if that is the defining part of their identity. Instead, this collection explores queer people’s identities that are already possessed fully — and it is in the identities friction with the world that the narratives emerge. For example, later in the collection Sara Jaffe’s Baby In A Bar is about negotiating the possession of the child with her environment. As a gay couple, and she not the birth mother, she expresses a series of learnt tics to make her expression of having a baby seem more legitimate to those around her. Which makes all the more sense when she is directly challenged in the bar by a man who may have been following her.
Language and form is played with throughout the collection, including expressing the tyranny of grammar from ETTO favourite, Eley Williams.
The story explores the way that we use grammar and punctuation to help direct towards a shared reality, but as your remove these constraining elements it opens itself to interpretations — which might be subversive to those who hold power. This pairs nicely with Richard Bramer’s Neoliberalism, a story concerned with programming languages — and how moving from compiled to interpreted is understood by the protagonist, but not a certain kind of man. The theme continues in Bingo The Drunkman by Rosie Snajdr, a kind of re-articulating of a single statement — a kind of re-punning toward a truth — as if just playing with the language forces it into a new reality. Again, unhooking language from it’s formal, normalising ideas to display fluidity of meaning as truth.
In Waidner’s work in the collection we see the directness of which the political can be felt, and how identity is often constructed from pop culture and lives of our heroes — and easily imagined into ours to provide shape and structure. This, in comparison to the previous, uses structures to develop a sense of self. In A Girl Called Johnny by Victoria Brown, which both uses diagrams of locations and footnotes, to supply what seems like a clinical sense of the unrealness of objects that surrounds this particular self, we can see the negative of this. The description of women in the soft-core magazines follows up on this unreality, their setting and captioned bodies is alienating. The language is authorial throughout, and this isn’t a story told by the protagonist, who is turned into an object. Instead it it told with the voice of those who define history in footnotes and police reports.
These structures are what the collection tries to break through — to not really defeat the canon for the identities of the people who populate it (white, straight lads, mostly, I suppose) but because of the structures that are forced from the canon onto the rest of literature.
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, we’re still here. I forgot to mention Judson Hamilton, who has something out on Dostoyevsky Wannabe — I responded to No Rainbow here. I hope I did okay with the gay stuff. As always, ETTO was written by @CJEggett, tired and tested and un-proof-read. If you got the subject line joke immediately, please feel free to let me know along with the pitches you sent to The Awl that got rejected.I am starting the planning of the next novel, and it’s going to be wild I think. I also feel it might be the last one from the big old wound in my chest — because even though I still pick at it, it does seem to be healing up.
I once watched a TV show about doctors, GPs, meeting their patients, filmed in the fly-on-the-wall style. It was supposed to show the real interactions between them, and give us a secret insight into the way doctors have to operate. Of course, it was designed to also show off the patients with humorous us approaches to illness amongst the more serious stuff.
I remember one particular exchange really well. It’s etched into my brain.
A middle aged man is having problems with his heart. He may be on medication, he may have left his medication in France, where he lives when not going to funerals. I may be mixing up this story with another. The Englishman, who is probably 50, old enough to have to trim his ears, speaks to a doctor who may be in her early thirties.
They discuss diet, and the pills he needs for his heart. She asks about fruit, as doctors seem to like to.
He says he eats a grapefruit every day, for breakfast.
And she tells him something, a fact that you, reader, may know, that grapefruit can increase your blood pressure and provide your heart with additional palpitations. A gift of a few extra beats. Or a jazz drum solo in the marching band really.
And the middle aged man who might live in France is shocked.
He says he eats one every day, for breakfast. The doctor looks at him with a shimmering air of someone who might have just been told their patient hammers nails through their knees of an evening, despite advice.
But he has one every day. For breakfast. He says that he doesn’t use a plate, he says:
“I eat it with my hands, over the sink, like an animal.”
There’s a lot going on here. Animals don’t eat over sinks. Why was this information useful for his doctor? Is the primal nature of his grapefruit eating meant to show his vitality, in contrast to his apparently abused heart?
None of this matters of course, because the look the young doctor gives the man is a perfect illustration of the that way women look at men in Margaret Atwood’s short story collection, Bluebeard’s Egg.
It quite old, ’83 I think. I’ve been working through it and particularly enjoyed the way that men are formed in the collection as a puzzle, impenetrable, not always evil — but always difficult.
In Bluebeard’s Egg, the story this collection is named after, the inoperable stupidity of Ed, the protagonist’s heart-surgeon husband, is in part his charm and his implicit threat. Ed is so thick that he is easily objectified, placated, but impossible to have a narrative of the protagonist built upon. When Sally, our hero, tries to search for his inner life, she finds him uncrackable. In that impossibility of defined or shared narrative, Sally comes to the conclusion that he has the potential to hurt her when he finally does hatch from his metaphor.
Equally, in Hurricane Hazel, a story about the obligations of teenage relationships, Buddy appears to be some kind of sentient brick, unable to articulate an inner world at all and going through the motions because they are the next thing to do on some kind of societal level. Our protagonist, a girl much younger and deeply worried about straying from, at very least, a display of normal, goes along with it all until Buddy’s mindlessness turns him into a threat.
Both of the men are interesting to read as they aren’t representative of a societal structure, they are fully enveloped arms of it. Ed appears to be something of a tool for Sally to try and produce an ideal life, Buddy is more malign, but not by much. The men are like facets of some kind of great beast which the women in the collection are trying to scale — if they could only use the way this creature interfaces with the wider world, then their aims can be achieved.
It’s interesting to compare this to some of Atwood’s later work, like the MaddAddam trilogy, where some men retain this structural connection, but increasingly the theme is that there are “good ones” in the destruction of those structures. Not that the men in this later work aren’t difficult in their own way, but they’re not as obviously meshed into a power structure that’s in any way malleable.
The men in Bluebeard’s Egg however are good, in some way. Attractive, attentive, helpful in forming useful identity — but also uncomplicated obstacles or tools. Blunt. I think it’s this sympathy for the bluntness of the men in these stories that was somewhat heart-warming to me. They’re still human, just part of some machinery that these women get trapped in.
Hi new people, there’s a few of you. If this if your first issue of ETTO, then please: forgive me. Here’s how it works:
There’s usually a micro-essay splurged out near the top, then a snippet of poetry I liked from the week with a couple of lines about how I enjoy the structure or some turn of phrase dribbled around it. After that there’s sometimes a palette-cleanser in the form of a good tweet, then on to a song, and finally a sign off where I expose the worst parts about me. Don’t worry, that final part is not visual.
If you reply to one of these emails, I will usually respond to you. If you want to be slightly more performative, I’m usually happy to chat on twitter, I’m @CJEggett.
It would be great to know where you all came from to be honest.
If you’re someone who has a chapbook or collection kicking around, I’d love to read it. Equally, if you get something published somewhere, just let me know and I will try to include you in these grubby pages.
I have been listening to and “speedrunning,” Tim Clare’s “couch to 80k” podcast/course thing. I’ve been doing a few episodes a day, which is obviously cheating. Regardless, it’s nice to have someone literally telling you to do those silly freewriting exercises.
It has a very endearing style. There’s a part where you can hear crisis in his voice as he considers whether it’s “an” or “a” handkerchief for a slip of a second. There’s the reassurance that he really is in the woods — and not just very good at sound editing. There’s a bit where he gives you a ten minute exercise and drops the recorder into the empty pram that he’s now pushing around the graveyard so we have ambient noise to listen to — only realising that anyone who looked into the pram of the man marching around the graveyard to find just a phone recording might look a bit odd, after. It’s these moments of torture that really brighten it up.
I look forward to it getting going a bit more in the hope that I can use it to sculpt out the next novel with a bit of guidance. Give it a go if you feel like you could do with trying something different from your normal writing practice.
Of particular interest is the clear switch from things listened to normally, say a full album, while doing something else or in company, to a scrambled mess that usually kicks in around 12:45 of single tracks (sadly it doesn’t record whether they were played them on repeat). We discussed that this looks a little like that maudlin search for a certain feeling late at night.
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. As always, it was written by @CJEggett and proofread by no one. It’s been a good couple of months for me, as I now have two novels out with various persons related to publishing, and an experimental work out at a publisher too. It feels nice to have things in the wild that might come back with something. It’s probably a rejection note, but we collect those anyway and use them. If you liked this, you can keep it, but make sure you send a friend to sign up, or visit the archive. Thank you to the wizard, who brought us all here. Have some Ben Marcus.
This week is the full-year issue of Etch To Their Own. I’m really glad that I’ve managed to keep this going for so long, and that there seems to be a number of you actually reading it.
Making it public and regular was one of the main focuses of the newsletter, a way to make me less insane by giving myself space to write about things I care about. Capitalism, and the life we live within it, grind you down to be the the average version of yourself — a saleable entity.
But this little newsletter has made a massive difference to my mental health, and enriched the way I spend my free time and given me an always-on back-burner project to be magpie-ing about the web for. A nice sense of purpose, a reason to write down the lines I like and make a note of who wrote them down the first time.
Thanks for reading, it’s really helping.
To follow on directly, Tim Clare has been at the podcasting again. In truth, he hadn’t stopped, but this week there is a mega-long slice of pod about how to do writing resolutions for the new year. If you’re someone who has scribbled “write more” on the inside of their skull for the next year and called it a resolution, Tim has some very stern words for you.
And also some really nice ones too.
A lot of it is about breaking your expectations into something that can really happen in a normal human being’s life. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are covered in quite a lot of detail, and advice on how to break up writing to ensure that it’s actually good. And there is a joyous bit near the end where he tells you that you’re free to run through the fields of literature however you want.
Very kindly, Santa slipped a Paris Review subscription down my chimney this year. Which means I was able to read the entirety of their Art Of Poetry piece with Anne Carson.
Some interesting parts, aside from the moment where Carson suggests she calls herself evil to shock herself into some better thinking, they discuss her writing practice — which includes a scatty undisciplined darting between three desks she has set up in her studio.
I love this way of working, as it pushes against so much of the writing advice that comes from the majority of the writing community. There’s usually talk of tidy desks, a space, avoiding distraction — but Carson’s way of working suggests just a life of nibbling away at things while whirling on the outskirts of a vortex, lazily reaching out to make a mark here, or add something relevant there. It’s a very pure way of working that suggests that there is no compromise in the things she produces, as anything that is produced at that time will be effected by everything else produced at that time.
I say it’s pure, I suppose it might seem like chaos to some, but I feel a great affinity with it as it feels like how my head works. Everything is connected, even if we don’t see why, and the only thing we have that can change that connectedness is the slippery fireman’s pole of time we’re all sliding down.
I did a tweet thread about 2017, which, by all accounts was an absolute cracker of a year and I don’t think I’ve heard a word against it!
In seriousness it’s been pretty good personally, terrible on an external and humanity-sized-existential-crisis level.
The thread covers a few things from the year, those minor achievements. The biggest of course is that I managed to get you, yes you, to read this as often as you did. It’s an absolute thrill up there with the thrill of being seen or being heard.
C J EGGETT | Writer & Game Designer 