No one’s talks about literature in the suburbs. Oh, maybe they keep a few Penguin Classics from when they studied literature as a student. With those black spines, all lined up. Some Thomas Hardy with rural scenes on the covers. Some Jane Austen – sure. But when you’ve seen the TV adaptations, why do you need to read?
Who reads anymore? Not very companionable, reading. Not something you can do as a couple. Compared to binge-watching some boxset together. And who wants to read when they’re worn out? When they’re flopped out on the sofa?
And reading’s not stimulating enough for when you’re on your own. It doesn’t give you adrenaline hits, not really. It’s not like some console game.
A good read. Something to read when tucked up in bed. Or curled up on the sofa. Something that will let you find out what all the fuss was about.
Something for the book club. That won’t scare the book club horses. A good thriller. A good crime drama. Something generic. That might as well be AI-written.
No one has writers as culture heroes, right? No one’s looking to authors for anything.
And authors have come right down to earth. They’re just like everyone. There’s no glamour to authors. They’re not apart from us. There’s no halo of genius around them. They’re all approachable. Accessible. Personable. There are no art monsters anymore.
And there’s the whole biography industry to show us authors of the past were really just like us. With lives, just like ours. Loves. Frustrations. And traumas, that account for their creativity.
This is no time for loftiness. For remoteness. For charisma. The author doesn’t descend from the gods. Authors are just like us – that simple.
Interviews with authors for the Sunday supplements. Showing their pleasantness. Their ability to talk like us.
Reassurance. They’re just like us. The same as we are. Nothing mantic. Hermetic. They channel nothing from on high. Or from below.
An author, pictured in their conservatory. An author, on a garden chair. An author, in a living room. On a sofa. Sitting there Ready to tell you about their lives. Ready to summarise their biographical highlights. Ready to be just like you.
They live on the plane of the world, just like us. In the ordinary world. Doing ordinary things. Among the ordinary furniture of the world. Houses and roads and cars and shops. Alongside people doing ordinary things. Hanging out the washing. Watering the plants. Imposing the daily order.
No otherness. They’ve been brought down to our level. The average level. To the mundane.
And not the mysterious mundane. Not the enigmatic everyday. Not the thickness of the everyday. Its slowness.
Not the afternoon’s depths. Not the day’s corridors. Its labyrinth. Not the day’s dementia, when you lose your memory, your identity. When you wander, totally porous. Exchanging particles with the air.
The afternoon of a writer. The everyday of a writer. Dissolved into its chatter, the everyday. Nameless, on the street. And half dissolved by the anonymity of light. By the nothing-light, falling on everyone. On everything. Evenly. Calmly. This unintense light. This benign light, that falls everywhere.
An author’s afternoon, turned over to the suburbs. To the pensioners’ kingdom. To the early retired. To mothers with buggies. To nursery school children. To the cries of playground children.
Everything reduced to a psychology. To a trauma story. To a victimhood story. To an identity story.
God is dead fiction. The world is what it is fiction. Things are as they are and unchangeable fiction. Human stories, about human beings like you and I fiction. Having affairs. Coming of age. Courting. All that stuff fiction.
Cicero liked that we’d emerged from the God-is-dead world. From ordinary banality. From the we-know-what’s-there world. From this-is-the-way-things-are world. From the we-have-it-all-worked-out world. From the we-understand-all-things world. From the medium-sized-dried-goods world. From the common-sense world.
Cicero was amused that we’d come from the all-lessons-learnt world. The wiser-than-anyone-else world. The this-is-how it-must-be world. The it-all-comes-back-to-this world. The nothing’s-going-to-change world. The end-of-history world. That literary fiction confirms. Buttresses. Props up.
Pop music’s the thing the British are really good at. Much better than the French. Than the Germans. Than all the continental Europeans.
Pop music: that’s where all culture goes. All ardency! All joy! All intensity! That’s where it went once it drained out of literature. All the desire for Life capital L.
Work in Progress 