This week, I have been reading Lynn Mitchell’s The Red Beach Hut as a kind of palate cleanser to last week’s Amygdalatropolis.
Last week’s novel did leave me kind of ruined by the absolute outpouring of filth that seemed deeply real — because everything/nothing is real/matters, the context dies and so does any way of rationalising it. It exposes you directly to the content because it removes the barriers; it’s an unreliable primary source that is all you have to go on. The idea of garbage in garbage out is explored in the book — i.e. what you become if you only engage with this hate is a hateful thing — and also by reading the book you experience some of it, you are changed by consuming this primary source.
In fairly stark contrast, but with a few similar themes, The Red Beach Hut looks at Abbott, a man working in the young offender unit is targeted by a homophobic hate crime online at his workplace — which triggers fears about a data trail that might connect him to underage pornography purchased by a previous lover with his credit card. His paranoia makes him jump ship and make a swift exit to a seaside town where he strikes up a relationship with an eight year old boy, Neville, who Abbott already identifies as someone at risk.
The book opens in an unsettling way. Reading anything about a middle-aged man, a stranger, taking a young boy along the beach by the hand, fear and paranoia running through his mind, triggers suspicion in the reader. We’re culturally trained to think of this as a dangerous situation for the child, especially in the context of a novel where we are looking for the friction and conflict.
The book is interesting to compare to B R Yeager’s work because the theme of persecution and assumption of the worst are there. Here it’s the tabloid mentality as the antagonist, the small-minded Daily Mail reader, looking for the scapegoat for every situation — developing their own kind of misanthropy through their media consumption in the way Yeager’s protagonist through theirs.
In Amygdalatropolis there is lots of discussion on the messageboards about getting “v&” — i.e. a government van coming to pick you up because you accessed something nasty, like child porn. Abbot has identical concerns, but in a world with context and where the threat of reality breaking is a threat, rather than a higher plane to be achieved.
The child is well realised, and his reactions to his mother’s sex work feel real and underpinned with sadness in the same way the closing beach huts for the summer, the yearly death of seaside towns. There is a brokenness of community here, of the shutting down of the seaside town and the way that atomises people — those in the beach huts don’t generally know one another for very long, and this transience makes those that do stay feel more powerful in the sense that they’re happy to judge. Ultimately though no one here belongs, and those who arbitrate the belonging are those who don’t really want anyone to belong at all.
The Tenor of Your Yes by Mary Ruefle is lovely. I was going to take it apart, talking about that kind of building of your own world thing that is implied by the genesis similarities. But I think it’s better if I don’t:
and the much more electronic original can be found here, with its extremely good cake telephone near the end:
How can anybody have you? How can anybody have you and lose you? How can anybody have you and lose you And not lose their minds, too?
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own — honestly it was kind of more weird to have read a normal (maybe even “commercial fiction”) book for once, I really don’t think I’ve read anything like it in a while. I didn’t die from it, which is a good start. ETTO — these very words that you are reading with your eyes — was written by @CJEGGETT and proofread by no one. Bonus song of the week for one particular subscriber: Nicolas Jaar on XLR8R. It’s a test. I’ve been writing a lot of short stories this week, which is unusual, but they’re quite nice to have around. I imagine it’s what like collecting Royal Doulton would be like.
Note:this book is pretty rough. I felt like someone had driven a truck through my brain, in a bad way, after reading it in one sitting. It contains mentions of suicide, self-harm, sexual violence, gore and so on. The review to follow reflects that while trying to stay as polite as possible, but do consider not reading if you think that it might be particularly upsetting to you.
B. R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis starts with the casual consumption of hell; a disinterested, desensitized consumption of hyper-violent, authentic-seeming media. The protagonist lives at home with his parents, a shut in who shuts himself away in his room, experiencing the world only through 4chan style message boards.
The book is told through the use of message board posts, traditional prose narrative, chatrooms, and occasional slips of authorial intervention — creatively dappled little Goya paintings of an online hell and it’s consumption of a person.
Because of the nature of the message board posts all providing the user the same name — /1404er/ — it’s difficult to assess the messages that are from the protagonist. Is he the one asking for snuff porn, or the moralising voice, or the pseudo-philosophical voice, or the one still learning, or the one asking how to drug a drink without breaking the seal of the bottle?
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
/1404er/ is a composite identity, having emptied himself out into the void of the internet subculture of hate — that is what washes back to fill his space. He arranges the world so he needn’t go outside. His sexual obsessions with death, gore and violence don’t provide him any waking gratification. These things, for a normal person, would be brushing against his fear of touch. But for /1404er/ this contributes to the perpetual motion engine that locks him away.
As a reader we have to hold on to the reality happening around the protagonist, until those anchors cease to exist, and he is untethered. Throughout he is simply a vessel for the hyper-violent media to pour into and through.
The collective identity that manifests into the physical is one that see nobility in some great shared work — in the accumulated effort of, for example, “doxxing” someone and pushing them to suicide. In a in a chat room, it seems to by the physical /1404er/ we are following who pushes the suicidal person to get some knives from the kitchen: “u dont have 2 do ne thing w/ them”.
I have rarely wanted a protagonist to come to a horrible end so quickly. In truth he’s already at a horrible end from the start. He’s a teenager, we observe his mother leaving a 16th birthday cake outside his door, as she does with his meals, his deliveries. The mother comes to the door regularly to beg or parlay. His sharp tongue, and calming emails with articles about Hikikomori or adolescent psychology allow him to get away with it. There is a frustrating softness in the family around the boy, he has a remote IT job provided by his aunt, and his father is absent from parenting and his mother is always behind the door — except for one incident…
Angela Nagle writes about such communities in Kill All Normies, her study of the alt-right in America, and identifies any number of similarities between that reality and /1404er/, but principally there is a cornerstone idea of amorality and that to have a feeling is somehow losing the game. Nothing can be shocking, even though the purpose of these communities to push one another towards shock. Caring about something is also a loss, so a solipsistic swirl is developed that pulls the actors in any of these dramas, real or otherwise.
Like a lot of the nasty side of internet culture we’ve seen spill out into real life recently, /1404er/ typifies a terrible result of removing context from everything. This removal of context places it close to Blake Butler’s SKYSAW, with its location/body/object merging and strange detachment. The violence of the book reminds me more of something like The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things by JT LeRoy, the violence and power exchanges and voyeurism — visceral — if still detached.
Later, when he is finally alone, he is haunted to move about the house. There is some compulsion in him to exercise the ghosts through confrontation, as much as he could manage. He explores a game on his father’s computer, where the character is meant to farm, but is unable to because of the missing aspects, the strange unreal of it. Each task of interaction offers him the message: “nothing you do will have any effect on the game.” The haunting is pacified by mundane, childish thoughts, focusing on the wallpaper in his mother’s bedroom, or what he called his father’s dust — these are sensory memories (sight and smell) that linger with him from when he was in some way human, when he was a child. It’s hard to call these moments sad, but they are pathetic.
The online world is one where we have reveal humanity to prove veracity — while at the same time using the anonymity as a form of protection. The posts in the novel show this, to be real you have to show a weakness, or accept the obscurity of a contextless existence. /1404er/ accepts the latter.
Earlier this month I had to buy a specific issue of Poetry so that I could read You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm in it’s full fold-out glory. I originally heard Paige Lewis read it on the Poetry Magazine Podcast, where it is explained that the poem is laid out to express the disintegration of someone’s power over the other.
(note: I posted this later than expected, and also, the formating is really not right on medium. Please read the real thing!)
The poem shows the kind of possessive bargaining and rationalisation that the controlling player uses to try and coerce the other. The men, who have stopped their important work, and use useful toothpaste rather than mint (which you can plant to keep deer out of your garden, by the way) for her are part of the threat of putting someone else out — that the subject is being inconvenient by not complying. This threat is the subtext of the speaker’s point which is rounded on later in the lines:
stop
aren’t you known aren’t you known here
(note: in my quotes I have made bold the most relevant lines)
The idea that any change could lead to the destruction of the current identity, isn’t it better to have something, even if you don’t like it, than not? the voice says.
The voice also uses strange explanations to make the current world seem good enough, surely. The men, from space, are explained as good men by describing their boyhood kindness:
liftoff, think home. When they were boys they were gentle. And smart. One could
tie string around a fly without cinching it in half. One wrote tales of sailors who
drowned after mistaking the backs of whales for islands. Does it matter which
Except, even this explanation of the men’s formative kindness is about how kind and gentle they were in capturing a creature and keeping it captive, or how they wrote sensitively about other’s failures.
When the subject walks away, and the page falls apart, whimsical bargaining begins, demonstrations of power:
this world is already willing
to give you anything do you want to know Latin
okay now everyone
here knows Latin want inflatable deer deer ! i promise the winter /
summer children will barely hurt dear i’m hurt that you would ever think
i don’t glisten to you i’m always glistening
The power to make everyone know Latin is very Genesis — he said there would be Latin in everyone’s heads; and there was Latin in everybody’s heads. Whereas the offering inflatable deer seems to suggest the waning of power, reducing the offer — the slipping of what can be done to this person’s reality as they slip from having complete control over it.
My favourite lines might be those about glistening, a mishearing pun, the protestation that the subject is of course being glistened to shows the power over the subject disappearing almost entirely.
The poem ends with the central threat again, but inverted on the voice rather than to the subject — the threat that the world will be different and identity will be lost in the change. For the voice it’s the loss of power, that strips them of identity, the fact that they are no longer authoring the world.
how can you be certain that anywhere else will provide
more pears than you could ever eat
remember the sweet rot of it all
come back you forgot your sweater
what if there’s nothing there when you —
you don’t have your
sweater
what if it’s cold
Of course, this entire newsletter could have been me linking the Paige Lewis poem to Weezer’s Undone — The Sweater Songfor a few hundred words. After all, if you want to destroy my sweater, pull this thread as I walk away — which is kind of like the structure of the poem, that unravelling of the lines into an undone pile.
Paige let me know that no, she’d never heard this song before.
Valentine’s day is coming up, meaning you’ll have to tell the people you’re already gripping tightly as you go over the Niagara falls of life that you wuv them ver’ much. Or someone else I suppose. Regardless of whether you’re sending a heartfelt sonnet dedicated to the left earlobe or right jowl of someone you’d like to ruin your life for, or desperately searching Tesco’s for something that will bloody do, can I suggest also supplying that special someone with one of Brittney Scott’s horrible valentine’s e-cards. Although, of course, this is one of the most romantic sentences ever written, so you could send that instead.
I recently discovered Joe Frank, by discovering that he had died. I discovered this through the excellent Radiolab tribute to him. This gives a very good flavour of what Joe Frank did on his radio show. If you’d like to explore his work a little more, there’s these longer pieces such as: Ascent of K2 (weird, one of the best examples of his amazing voice), From Someone Who Cares (sad, a little creepy), Odd Jobs(weird, violent).
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, the internet’s premier knitwear culture glossy magazine. Masthead: just @CJEggett, who can’t see typos, but can see your lovely emails — reply to this email to receive your free digital copy of next week’s issue, next week. Sign up friends and family here, against the coming GDPR apocalypse’s regulations. To be in the presence of greatness unfurling. Read old issues of ETTO over here, if you’re a glutton for punishment.
The first verse tells us that the books were for storing themselves, because they had their words stolen from them by some unnamed event. This idea of books as stored external knowledge, but for a person, is mixed through the redefinition of “remember” and “member” down from calling to mind (with force) through to flesh, meat — and to the third verse of the memories hands/bodies hold.
“Once I had to tell them do this, do this, do this.”
And now she doesn’t, like the books, she has had knowledge poured into her from somewhere, but is at a loss as to how it is useful. The way the poem uses the “looking up” of roots to find a different interpretation suggests she is reaching back before the event to find out what was really meant. That attempt to find the truth about something once it is too late is a common theme in elegy. And so the poem seems to be moving away from somebody or something, but not too anywhere, just yet.
Cathy Ulrich’sThis Love Will Destroy You is a post-apocalyptic “love” story about putting up with what the world gives you. It contains this fear of a future that is different — even if the one that is currently being experienced is also awful. Using the usual tropes of love stories, moments of touching, tenderness, openness, and subverting them, Cathy creates a strain between the promise of falling in love after the world ends — and the threat of falling out of it again.
As an aside, I always enjoy the horror of canned goods in the post-apocalypse.
There’s a real rhythm in this, as it modulates between the need to make a list — the grown up job — and the way each person’s relationship is expressed with the mother.
Two songs today, old ones again — both Bright Eyes — because I seem to be becoming a bit soft and soppy in my old age. Who knows what has brought this about. First:
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, I have been having a very confusing time recently, so I apologise if the newsletter has wound up on your doorstep asking if it lives there, or if indeed, you know where it should be at all. I may have been born right here in the doorway. I think it’s all the music actually, a very dangerous hobby. This The XX tinydesk is also very good, and I have somehow missed it for all these years.
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.
I am going to write the first part of this week’s ETTO from memory. Rather than a “best of 2017” list, it’s just those parts that really caught the hangnail of my soul as I flicked pages. This, I suppose, is the list of things that will get added to the easily accessible part of my brain — along with Pound, Eliot, Carson, C A Conrad, Claire Louise Bennett, Max Porter, and so on.
The most important line I have read all year is from the start of what seems to be an endless rise towards the heavens by Kaveh Akbar.
It sticks with me completely, and I say it to myself sometimes in moments of quiet, desperate sadness. I wrote about it very briefly here. Omar Sakr gave me something too — the concept of hisitalicised tongue — the perfect way to say it.
There are two houses — those made by Joyce Chong, in her endlessly drowning poems, and those by Nicole McCarthy who imprints her words over spaces like marking trauma on a map.
Which of course leads us to Hiromi Suzuki who gave us such a great deal of visual poetry this year.
Martin Glaz Serup decided to be be an actual gift — and turn himself into trinkets of modest pleasure — a set of red gloves.
The Pain Scale — which I remember no lines from particularly, but think about the ideas contained within often. The abstraction of pain, the faces, the father.
Here is where is started writing a sort-of-academic book.
I have forgotten many good things from this year. There was a short story about a girl who had to go into the woods to kill a man so that she might join society properly. And there’s still that poem about fisting that I’ve not been able to recall. It’s easy to forget things, even especially powerful and good things that moved you far away at the time of reading.
I do have something now, but I have not been brave enough to take the time to respond to it as I’ve been spending too long with the greedily alive.
I was going to put an REM song here that I’ve been singing snatches of all week, but then I listened to it and UP is really bad album.
So I think we can put EL VY up instead to cover this week, because I’m the man to be.
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It’s nearly been a year. Next year I will do better, smarter things for you, I hope. I will also be available for research and writing project — of any type. If you would like to try out an idea, then please let me know. ETTO was written by @CJEggett with a tired bent back and muddy shoes drying by the fire. It’s nearly over everyone, 2018 will be here soon, and everything will be better. Obvs…
This evening I am being quick because I have to enjoy the party season and then climb on to a plane to take me to the rolling graveyards of Lisbon and Porto. Enjoy what has been an extremely good week for short poems and flash fiction.
NOTE: the party season was so good I forgot to publish this at the time… enjoy!
A little dream from James Tate, that just demands to be read out loud as soon as you start.
I somehow want to say that this one is a little more dreamlike than a dream. A sci-fi wander about how we define goodness? Everyone Believes They Are They Good Guy by Cynthia Arrieu-King.
Patience, Patience, Hortense, and Wilbur by Meghan Phillips punches harder than flash fiction usually has time to do. A sad little thing that doesn’t quite reveal itself to be what it is until after you’ve finished it, and the dirt settles. Here’s the start:
This week’s song is Shark Smile by Big Thief. She said “woop”.
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, ask your ex-boyfriends to subscribe over here. It was written by @CJEggett and proofread by no one. Next Friday will be 50 weeks of this in a row, which is very much like a real number. I may also be on a plane, so it would really help if you could all move somewhere that would give me more time to scribble it out for you — or you could just set your clocks back a few hours.
C J EGGETT | Writer & Game Designer 