what's been going on
some recent activity
Dear friends, it’s been a while. I hope things have been good with you. I passed my driving test at the start of May and have been enjoying being a member of the imagined community called ‘motorists’. L and I went to Wales with a fairly extended version of my family the other weekend, a holiday house in Trawsfynydd, near the decommissioned nuclear plant designed by Sir Basil Spence, and I spent a couple of days chauffeuring my mother and L around the Llŷn Peninsula, including a trip to a few of the churches around there associated with the famously bad-tempered Welsh nationalist priest and poet, R.S. Thomas, who raged from the pulpit against modern devilry such as refrigerators and televisions, and encouraged the firebombing of English holiday homes. My mother and I went to St Hywyn’s Church in Aberdaron, where there is a noticeboard with information about Thomas and a number of his poems, and then I drove through some very narrow country lanes to St Maelrhys’ Church in Llanfaelrhys, truly in the middle of nowhere, overlooking the sea, beautiful on the day we visited but surely desolate almost any other time of year, where Thomas led small services after his retirement. Upstairs at that church is a small room given the name “Llofft R.S. Thomas”, which contains some of his books — many of which are wrapped in plastic to stop the covers being warped by the damp sea air which permeates the church — and a CD player, with recordings of Thomas reading, and a window with a sea view, and a small table with tea- and coffee-making equipment, a kettle and bottled water, photographs of the poet-priest. It’s a very beautiful place. In the visitor’s book someone had written “even if someone had all the money in the world, they couldn’t buy what exists here.” So that was nice. We went to some other churches too, and to Portmeirion (kitsch), but St Maelrhys was my favourite. And I love driving now, which comes as a surprise. If only my father were alive to see this — he drove endlessly between Shropshire and Staffordshire and could never understand why I didn’t express any interest in driving when I was a teenager.
Two recent publications from me. First, over at minor literature[s], a piece of ‘experimental prose’, called “What’s Today”, which I wrote on night shifts when I couldn’t sleep, back when I worked at the care home, about eighteen months ago. I’m pretty sure I had some constraints in mind when I wrote it, but I abandoned the project it was going to be a part of and have since forgotten what I thought I was doing. It’s four sections of exactly 500 words, so I guess that was part of whatever it was I was trying to do. I’d submitted it when I wrote it, and then forgotten all about it until the publication got in touch to accept it. I was a bit nervous about publishing it — compared to my essay for Lugubriations about the same job (which, by the way, was cited a little publication called the London Review of Books), “What’s Today” feels a bit more painful when I read it back, and I thought maybe some of the details might not be anonymised enough. But then one of my ex-colleagues messaged me on Instagram to say she liked it, that it described six years of her life, so I felt relieved and can accept the piece for what it is; a document of my feelings about working in mental health after the first six months. Mostly I seem to have had some strong feelings about urine.
Second, just out today, an essay over at TheHythe, called “The Longest Possible Route”, which uses Flaubert, Shklovsky, Morton Feldman, Lyn Hejinian, and a few others to explore ideas of ‘waiting’, ‘digression’, ‘deferral’, ‘unrealised action’ and other annoying experiences. I’m pleased with how this essay turned out — it feels like a useful step forward in terms of some things I’ve been trying to think about for years, and is the first thing I’ve written since the end of the film diary that feels like a step forwards. You might find it annoying, but that’s kind of the point.
Let me know your thoughts if you read either of them. I’ve barely watched any films recently, and haven’t wanted to write about those I have watched. L and I have been watching Couples Therapy, which I am obviously really into, and, inevitably, Succession, which is the first time I’ve wished that a TV show might have had a trigger warning about unexpected and sudden death; it gave me a horrible flashback to the day I found out my father had died, and there I was, six thousand miles away and hungover. It’s been a pretty good series but I’m ready for it to be over now.
Another thing I’m doing. I’m a programmer for this year’s Slow Film Festival. It’s been fun so far. I’m also helping to fundraise, so if you’re a wealthy benefactor looking to support the arts, and you like boring art films, or films which use duration in challenging ways, please send me an email and get your chequebook out. Submissions are open at the moment, over on FilmFreeway, if this is your kind of thing.
This week I finished reading Daybook by Anne Truitt, which I loved. I didn’t know her sculpture or painting before I read it, but I like her work. I picked it up because I read a recommendation from Renee Gladman somewhere for the new volume of Truitt’s diaries, and thought I better start at the beginning. Her book helped me to realise that the struggle, doubt, and uncertainty involved in pursuing the life of an ‘artist’ is something that never goes away, and that, in fact, it’s even not desirable for it to go away. For a long time I had a fantasy about writing which went something like, “when my book comes out, I’ll be a writer”, as if “being a writer” was a secure state of being rather than a process of becoming which had to be renewed and recommitted to again and again. It is easy to get distracted. Daybook also explores the painful but perhaps inevitable possibility of those closest to you in the world not understanding what it is you’re trying to achieve, and the comfort that comes when they still support you in the ways they can even in the face of incomprehension, or thinking that your work is a bit too eccentric. To my surprise, it helped me to understand that what I’ve been doing recently with ceramics — exploring the elements of ceramic work which are often undesirable (cracking, splitting, holes, collapsing, etc) — is related to much of the work I’ve been trying to do with my writing, particularly in the piece for TheHythe, but also in a new novel I’ve been working on, which is concerned with the moments in life when things do not happen; everyday life as a sight of repetition and unrealised action. Which, I suppose, is also what the film diary was all about. I’ve accepted I’ll never make enough money from my writing to quit my day job and this has released something in me. As Truitt puts it: “The fact is — and as always when I see a fact plainly I feel lightened, set free from the more or less conscious effort to maintain a delusion—that I cannot expect to earn a living from my work in art.” As it is for Truitt, this seems to be “a fact I have to learn over and over again”. There’s a recommendation for you.
Thanks for sticking around. Sorry there’s not more film criticism here, but I’m not sure that many of you were here for the film criticism in the first place. Let me know how you’re all getting on.
With love,
A