It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It is doing nothing. A fraud is being perpetrated: writing is not work, it’s doing nothing. It’s not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing; doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone.
—‘Three Whole Weeks Alone’, Jenny Diski (1992)
What did I do over the holidays? Nothing. I made sure the only time I sat at my computer was to download screen media; that tweets were either shitposts or funny observations; that email apps were blocked. It’s funny how much you have to work to escape work these days—before screen technology I could just say CYA! and that’d be it. But this also means that I wouldn’t have been able to communicate this bullshit to you now, let alone have an attentive audience who bothers to open these little missives.
Of course, this ability to switch off was facilitated by the fact that I received those grants which allowed me to do so. It only took me 20 years of shit job after shit job to get here. In the past, the holiday season was an opportunity: it meant that I finally had time to do the writing and reading I couldn’t do while I was at my day job(s). It always contained this element of racing against time: I needed to do A and C and L and X before the holidays (usually in spurts between 24 Dec and 6 Jan) were over. I remember telling a friend that I was giving myself a break until the 3rd, to which he said, “that’s pretty short.” But it really did feel like all the time in the world.
I’m currently writing this from my studio, thanks to the City of Melbourne Boyd-Garret residency. It’s the biggest room I’ve ever had to myself, and I get to use it for a whole year. While setting up the studio, I’d bring friends here, and we’d express wonderment at the luxury. “You’d think I was a sculptor or painter from the amount of space I’ve got,” I’d say, until it felt as if I was reading from a script. I put one of the provided desks in the corner, offering close friends without offices or studios the option of using the space too if they needed a change of scenery. The sense of incredulity still hasn’t left me. I’m not saying this to elicit sympathy, or to (humble)brag; rather I’m mulling over the conditions in which “being a Writer” is often fraught. Who gets to have all the privacy and space in the world? Time! I remember expressing excitement in a Liminal editorial meeting, that I could finally have everyone on speaker. I laid down a top sheet on the floor, with a couple of pillows so I could lie down to read if I so desired.
This is probably what it’s like to be a “working artist”: to be funded (have a certain sense of financial security), to have lots of time to do research, to have your days be filled with Thoughts About The Writing Life. I’ve always regarded the term to be an oxymoron, not because I believe in the naïve, sheltered idea that to be an Artist or a Writer one needs to “suffer” or renounce all associations with capital. I’ve mentioned this briefly before: it’s important to feel like you’re being compensated for your labour towards the boring business of survival, but it’s equally important to ask yourself why. The answer doesn’t have to be, as Casey Plett noted recently, “that what you make will be ‘valuable’ or ‘important’ or ‘good’ or ‘lasting’.” Plett continues: “Readers will decide those things, not you.”
You’d think it was so easy. Of course it’s not. When placed against the demands of the market, the kinds of art we make inevitably become a response to it, be it directly or indirectly. Could we possibly attain Adorno’s definition, that what we make can become the “social antithesis of society” and yet “not directly deducible from it”? I can’t understate the feeling of self-disgust that washes over me whenever I write grants, but I can’t understate the feeling of desperation that stems from the understanding that it’s probably one of the very few viable ways I can have a shot at getting access to funds. Time! I could work a 40-45K per annum job, of course, but I’d probably have no mental or creative energy left by the end of it. Or—and I have also tried this before—I could work across a number of casual jobs at around 20-25K a year, which will allow for more time, but the financial precarity would be stressful. A kind of suspension hinges in the air: that of disbelief, and one has to pack that away while attending to the fact that the end goal (getting the money to be able to do the work) is key. Lose track, and once you begin to believe your own shill, it’s over. But some people would rather choose that path, if only to be able to revolve their identity around it. Which is fucking fair enough, if we’re thinking about kids and continuous upward mobility or whatever.
“You do you”, as they say. Everything I’ve said above is in the context of so-called “Australia”, however. It’s certainly different in, say, Singapore, where I lived before I moved here. To even imagine being a “working artist” there was impossible, at least for the likes of me, where grants are given to people with a certain class status and politics, and where there is no minimum wage. You could not expect to be rewarded for doing anything that was antithetical to the nation-state’s glitzy and futuristic yet politically repressive public image. This is a country still holding on to an ancient colonial statute that considers sex between two men illegal, despite multiple attempts to challenge it on a judicial level since 2010. If you wanted to protest, you’d have to apply for a permit. I have had friends and acquaintances put in prison for expressing views seen as a threat to society. You could find some kind of loophole, as some will do or have done, to sell your idea in a way that sounds apolitical. I had to do some version of this in 2011. Imagine the psychic fear.
I’m not fucking around here. I wish there was a more easily understood way of expressing it. When people with little geopolitical knowledge think of politically oppressive governments, they think of places which are ravaged, visibly impoverished or still in a state of war. How to tell people that I come from a place with a pretty fucking high GDP, it’s never fell off the top five on the Safe City Index each year since the measuring instrument was created in 2015 (i.e. I’ve hardly felt unsafe walking after hours on the street), I am of an ethnicity which is basically considered to be equivalent to having the attendant privileges of a white person, I still managed to amass a list of fun experiences I can regale people with at parties, but there are some things that you just don’t fucking do if you know what’s good for you? I wish I was talking about murder. But I’m already digressing pretty hard, so I will conclude by saying those were not exactly conditions ripe for artistic flourishing, especially if you didn’t come from money and had zero post-high school qualifications, much less an Ivy League (or, okay, Curtin) university degree.
Where was I? For a long time I didn’t express the above very much, because I didn’t think I had much license to talk about it, especially after meeting people who’d been literally forced to flee the places they’d migrated from. Or those with parents who did. It sounds absurd. It continues to sound absurd. When William Gibson wrote ‘Disneyland With a Death Penalty’ in 1994, it came across as pretty western-centric, but I wouldn’t say he’s wrong. And so as someone who could only “become” a Writer in so-called Australia, it’s complicated to hold what seems like two fundamentally opposing feelings, which is that I’m (much more) creatively free, yet there’s no sustainable way to pursue an “artistic career” without the funding—that, I must note, is falling away as I type—that requires you to cast yourself in a certain light within a certain language.
In Christian Lorentzen’s essay on the life and work of Philip Roth, he opens with a thought on careerism:
For decades it has simply been the case that novelists, story writers, even poets have had to devote themselves to managing their careers as much as to writing their books. Institutional jockeying, posturing in profiles and Q&As, roving in-person readership cultivation, social-media fan-mongering, coming off as a good literary citizen among one’s peers—some balance of these elements is now part of every young author’s life. It’s a matter of necessity and survival, above and beyond the usual dealings with editors, agents, and Hollywood big shots.
In response to this (alongside another essay, the editor’s note in n+1, which laments that “real” criticism no longer exists because critics are beholden to the marketplace for the express purpose of advancing their careers, and a few recent books which seem to be a symptom of Lorentzen’s observation), Apoorva Tadepalli writes:
In the mode of careerism that shows up […] we must both want fame and also want to denounce our desire for fame, just as in this mode of morality we must both want to be good and also denounce our desire to be good.
That’s it, really. That’s the problem. Opt out, and no one knows or hears about you, or opt in, and become a spectacle of yourself in the process. It’s hard to find a middle ground. If art is not work, because work is not life, then could we possibly locate other ways to find the means for survival that will then contribute to even more artistic flourishing? And not just for a select few, but for many? It remains a conundrum that keeps me up at night. Short of securing patronage, acquiring a sugar parent or rich partner, or making a habit out of admitting yourself into clinical trials, there doesn’t appear to be too many viable ways to work on your art in a way that is both psychically and monetarily self-sustaining. Ideally, my response would be, start a commune, do mutual aid, but we know how those have gone on a grand scale. Perhaps I need to be more hopeful.
But it looks like we have returned to Adorno: “For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain.” Who knows.
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Before we say goodbye for now…
I recently developed a course on writing criticism for Kill Your Darlings. It’s a wonderful publication, with some really kind and dedicated editors who have supported my work from the get-go. Courses are a bit steep at $150 each, but I can sponsor two people who really want to do it but don’t have the means. Please don’t hesitate to email me if you are one of them!
Currently reading: Rip It Up – Kou Machida; Class in Australia – eds. Steven Threadgold & Jessica Gerrard
Watching: Severance (2022)
Read this while sitting at a bar alone drinking a cocktail with my aus co grant money instead of writing! Absolutely loved it and your brain and no nonsense thoughtfulness about the writing life as always. Millie x