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Man of broken letters
Mar. 2nd, 2004 03:59 pmMy dear friend Toog, playing a word association game with Todd Jones during a recent interview, responded to 'Momus' with 'Genius who often thinks he's a journalist.'
Only Toog and I know that his answer relates to a discussion we had in 1997 while driving towards Thessaloniki in a rental car. It was a particularly rough and rainy night and the road seemed to keep turning into stretches of mud and loose rock. We took turns to drive, and kept awake by debating the question 'Which do you possess, talent or genius?' (The conversation was in French, so there may be a certain nuance to the terms talent and genie not present in their English counterparts.) I decided that I was a talent without genius, while Toog proclaimed himself a genius without talent.
Toog's new formula, 'a genius who often thinks he's a journalist', puts a charitable gloss on the conversation we had in Greece. But perhaps the world is now catching up with what Toog thinks is my underestimation of myself. Because these days I'm doing one hell of a lot of journalism.
And it's great. I always wanted to be a member of the 'commentariat'. I mean, if I'm not being paid for it I'm doing it for nothing, like now. I just wish all the keys on my iBook worked. I had to take four runs at that word 'keys', for instance, because the Y is dead and had to be remapped to a function key (I use HotApp). Even though it's been like this since December, I haven't quite learned the new positions, and the ink keeps wearing off the re-assigned keys because I'm hitting them so much. I won't even speak about the screen, which goes black at all but two exact angles, the jammed CD drive or the crammed hard disk. Writing is earning me money, but not enough to buy the new laptop I so desperately need. And before that there's last month's rent still to pay, and 50 boxes of my stuff still to be shipped over from New York.
I'm definitely a man of letters, even if not all my letters work. Despite the glitchy keyboard, it's still such a wow feeling to get commissions, to be dealt a ticklish new subject, to ponder how to tackle it, to get a great idea in the bath and see the whole piece falling into place. It's a privilege to earn money from writing, even if it's never quite as much as you would earn janitoring or keeping bees.
In the last month alone I've written a 3500 word short story called 'Seven Lies About Holger Hiller' for a new German magazine called Der Freund, been asked to pitch ideas for an upcoming issue of Vice, got two commissions from Index related to street fashion, been asked to write about design for the AIGA Journal in New York, given my preconceptions of Russia to Private Time magazine in Moscow, received author copies of Kidswear containing a Kafkaesque story about playground spies, and contributed an essay called 'No More Masterpieces' to a book about hype in the record industry. This isn't even to mention the endless blogging, the massive written interview with Terror Tales webzine (which has just gone up today), the Portugese magazine asking for some thoughts on love (I can't think what to say, back to the bath!) and a new American 'hipster porn' mag wanting my thoughts on oral sex. (I gave them 1500 words but came a bit too clean, apparently.)
There are just so many magazines in the world, and so many subjects they need to cover!
When did I join the 'commentariat'? When did I trade genius for glamour, like a foolish Indian trading Manhattan for beads? When did my Salvador Dali moustache become the cowlick on the forehead of Tintin the boy reporter?
I guess I've always commented. I've always been a very political animal. My orange box used to be my recording contract, but since I've been writing in magazines and on the web the 'politics', 'opinion' and 'journalism' side of what I do, the kulturkritik, has edged off the plastic and spilled onto paper -- a more comfortable medium for it anyway -- leaving my records free to celebrate things like, well, music, atmosphere, mystery and 'the unspeakable'. Summerisle, the Anne Laplantine collaboration due next month, is the most musical record I've been involved in, even if I made none of the music (I really just sing on it). Even when I perform my older, wordier songs now, the accent is on the way my body animates and interprets them. I want to use words to get beyond words. I want words to be a ladder to a place ladders can't reach.
You can do this sort of disorienteering for magazines too. It's quite amazing what you can get away with. When Kidswear magazine asked me to make a text to accompany some photos they were running of Japanese playgrounds, they made it quite clear that their audience research showed that most people just flip through the magazine looking at the pictures. Nobody actually reads the black stuff. I mean, these are busy parents we're talking about. But being blanked by busy or non-committal readers is actually a great excuse for writers to grant themselves carte blanche. If I'm talking to myself I can say some really interesting stuff, right?
My tendency in these circumstances is to rev up a baroque style of outrageous picaresque lies. The Kidswear story ends with an undercover dwarf, sent by his small European nation to find the source of Japanese economic superiority, summersaulting from the beak of a gigantic crow, landing perfectly, and proclaiming 'We may be Roritanian, but we can do this!' The recent story on Holger Hiller for Der Freund goes even further, detailing the narrator's epic quest across a Gothic-Expressionist Germany accompanied by the feathers of a hawk, the bones of pony, and a crushed and moaning sunflower.
It's journalism, Jim, but not as we know it. There may even be a few hairs of Dali's moustache in there after all.
Only Toog and I know that his answer relates to a discussion we had in 1997 while driving towards Thessaloniki in a rental car. It was a particularly rough and rainy night and the road seemed to keep turning into stretches of mud and loose rock. We took turns to drive, and kept awake by debating the question 'Which do you possess, talent or genius?' (The conversation was in French, so there may be a certain nuance to the terms talent and genie not present in their English counterparts.) I decided that I was a talent without genius, while Toog proclaimed himself a genius without talent.
Toog's new formula, 'a genius who often thinks he's a journalist', puts a charitable gloss on the conversation we had in Greece. But perhaps the world is now catching up with what Toog thinks is my underestimation of myself. Because these days I'm doing one hell of a lot of journalism.
And it's great. I always wanted to be a member of the 'commentariat'. I mean, if I'm not being paid for it I'm doing it for nothing, like now. I just wish all the keys on my iBook worked. I had to take four runs at that word 'keys', for instance, because the Y is dead and had to be remapped to a function key (I use HotApp). Even though it's been like this since December, I haven't quite learned the new positions, and the ink keeps wearing off the re-assigned keys because I'm hitting them so much. I won't even speak about the screen, which goes black at all but two exact angles, the jammed CD drive or the crammed hard disk. Writing is earning me money, but not enough to buy the new laptop I so desperately need. And before that there's last month's rent still to pay, and 50 boxes of my stuff still to be shipped over from New York.
I'm definitely a man of letters, even if not all my letters work. Despite the glitchy keyboard, it's still such a wow feeling to get commissions, to be dealt a ticklish new subject, to ponder how to tackle it, to get a great idea in the bath and see the whole piece falling into place. It's a privilege to earn money from writing, even if it's never quite as much as you would earn janitoring or keeping bees.
In the last month alone I've written a 3500 word short story called 'Seven Lies About Holger Hiller' for a new German magazine called Der Freund, been asked to pitch ideas for an upcoming issue of Vice, got two commissions from Index related to street fashion, been asked to write about design for the AIGA Journal in New York, given my preconceptions of Russia to Private Time magazine in Moscow, received author copies of Kidswear containing a Kafkaesque story about playground spies, and contributed an essay called 'No More Masterpieces' to a book about hype in the record industry. This isn't even to mention the endless blogging, the massive written interview with Terror Tales webzine (which has just gone up today), the Portugese magazine asking for some thoughts on love (I can't think what to say, back to the bath!) and a new American 'hipster porn' mag wanting my thoughts on oral sex. (I gave them 1500 words but came a bit too clean, apparently.)
There are just so many magazines in the world, and so many subjects they need to cover!
When did I join the 'commentariat'? When did I trade genius for glamour, like a foolish Indian trading Manhattan for beads? When did my Salvador Dali moustache become the cowlick on the forehead of Tintin the boy reporter?
I guess I've always commented. I've always been a very political animal. My orange box used to be my recording contract, but since I've been writing in magazines and on the web the 'politics', 'opinion' and 'journalism' side of what I do, the kulturkritik, has edged off the plastic and spilled onto paper -- a more comfortable medium for it anyway -- leaving my records free to celebrate things like, well, music, atmosphere, mystery and 'the unspeakable'. Summerisle, the Anne Laplantine collaboration due next month, is the most musical record I've been involved in, even if I made none of the music (I really just sing on it). Even when I perform my older, wordier songs now, the accent is on the way my body animates and interprets them. I want to use words to get beyond words. I want words to be a ladder to a place ladders can't reach.
You can do this sort of disorienteering for magazines too. It's quite amazing what you can get away with. When Kidswear magazine asked me to make a text to accompany some photos they were running of Japanese playgrounds, they made it quite clear that their audience research showed that most people just flip through the magazine looking at the pictures. Nobody actually reads the black stuff. I mean, these are busy parents we're talking about. But being blanked by busy or non-committal readers is actually a great excuse for writers to grant themselves carte blanche. If I'm talking to myself I can say some really interesting stuff, right?
My tendency in these circumstances is to rev up a baroque style of outrageous picaresque lies. The Kidswear story ends with an undercover dwarf, sent by his small European nation to find the source of Japanese economic superiority, summersaulting from the beak of a gigantic crow, landing perfectly, and proclaiming 'We may be Roritanian, but we can do this!' The recent story on Holger Hiller for Der Freund goes even further, detailing the narrator's epic quest across a Gothic-Expressionist Germany accompanied by the feathers of a hawk, the bones of pony, and a crushed and moaning sunflower.
It's journalism, Jim, but not as we know it. There may even be a few hairs of Dali's moustache in there after all.