“When you write autobiography you write about the life that you didn’t choose, you write about contexts you didn’t choose, a family that you didn’t choose, a name that you didn’t choose. Not like in fiction where you choose everything.”
—Édouard Louis, in a conversation with Tash Aw and Spencer Quong
It is the 31st of August, and it’s why you’re hearing from me. August is a month often full of surprises—many people are vehemently against it. As with Haley Mlotek, who went to the effort of writing an essay against it, and the numerous people who lament its arrival, shocked at the time that has passed. It might be that it signals a particular hurtling—towards an end, past a halfway mark. But isn’t that comforting?
It’s no longer the 31st of August. But I began this letter then. Time is just a thing. It passes and the next thing you know you’re looking at a different face in the mirror. Or it doesn’t seem to pass and you’re like, what the fuck, why am I stuck; or it speeds past such as when you’re watching a TV show or playing a video game—where did all that time go? One hour in a traffic jam feels different to one hour reading a book feels different to one hour at a shitty job. You get my drift. This is how you know it hardly matters. But I follow it because other people do; Giordano Nanni evinces something similar in The Colonisation of Time: “[…] it was partly by imagining itself as a time-conscious civilisation in opposition to a timeless Other, that Western Europe staked its claim to universal definitions of time, regularity, order, hence also its definitions of knowledge, religion, science, etc.” There are only so many ways one can be a contrarian. My favourite phrase regarding time remains “jam karet” (“rubber time”, in Bahasa Indonesia, which I learned of when I first visited Indonesia in 2008, and I’ve never forgotten it since).
So, time. Of utmost importance. A wastrel. I thought to finish this today so I wouldn’t keep procrastinating, like I did last time. By giving myself a prompt, I guess I will be able to tick off this box, which is boring but good enough. It’s time.
I’ll tell you the truth: the reason why I’ve dropped the ball with these newsletters is because I’ve been dissatisfied with my lines. I can’t tell you why or how; they just have to sound right, with a melody that I know to be mine. It sounds maudlin, but that’s why I often say I’m a slow writer. Every line needs to be meditated upon until it makes sense to me, otherwise I might as well nut out a post on social media. It’s different for reviews, of course, because I’ve got the subject at hand and can form the image immediately.
It may be that I don’t trust my stream of consciousness. (Who does?) But I think I’m close to getting my book signed by a publisher. Which is a strange feeling—it somehow brings about more scripturience. It could also be that I’ve been reading a lot of bad non-fiction books—you’ll know why soon—which brings about an unabating contempt I need to release. The impulse is ironic because aren’t we expected to shop around full manuscripts before anyone will even pay attention (or, in industry speak, “dare to take a risk”)? Or whatever. I certainly did not have the same certainty before this moment; it always seemed as if I was fucking around, living a pipe dream so I can defer for as long as humanly possible the return to living in an uninteresting reality wherein I may be socially penalised for expressing curiosity all the time. That is far from being a unique position, but what is currently expected doesn’t allow space for admittance. Nothing wrong with saying I want to be an artist so I can have an excuse to drop out of society while watching from a remove! But that already sounds arrogant. Of course there are false meritocracies and invisible hierarchies in place so some can pursue this path at the expense of others.
That’s what bothers me. Nothing is fair until it is fair. Mostly things are not fair. The aestheticisation of art and politics, as it stands now, results in a cursory interest in anything remotely aligning to one’s desired identity (read: “brand”). Oh I’m so excited about the Extortion reunion! Oh I’m not lactose-intolerant but I think we shouldn’t be drinking cow’s milk! Oh I only use the French quotation marks while tweeting in English even though French is not my dominant language! We don’t know how much emotional investment is being made; we only see the affective signal. Repeat it enough times and it eventually becomes truth. It could be, as well, that society is increasingly conflating transparency with truth, which as Byung-Chul Han writes in The Transparency Society (2012), “is a negative force insofar as it presents and asserts itself by declaring all else false.” Six years later, Han published The Disappearance of Rituals, where he continues on this thought via Charles Taylor, which the former says “credits the modern cult of authenticity with a moral force”. And in true Theory Daddy form, he goes on to both negate and expand on Taylor’s thinking as soon as he brings him up, stating that “the production of self becomes a permanent activity” especially as individuals continue severing themselves from communality in search of true authenticity.
Is it counter-intuitive to wish for authenticity in a capitalist realist world? It appears that that is the overarching tension, like two repelling magnets. How much so-called “authentic” art can we witness and behold in such a climate? Does it even matter? How much of it is a kind of moral policing? This reminds me of this thing going around where I live in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne—the co-owner of a well-known yet gradually-becoming-irrelevant live music venue said that paying musicians a minimum wage would “kill live music”. I don’t care to get into the nitty-gritty, because it’s a basic argument, but the counter-argument arising mostly from local musicians themselves is that we should be paid $250 per person per gig in order to make a living wage. While this may be true, on a surface level, this line of thinking implies that creativity is a churn, and if we were paid more we simply will be able to sling it out night after night not unlike a girlfriend experience or a six-course degustation—even those become boring after too long. Anything which becomes a job is boring. Do what you love and get paid for it, sure, but without a Universal Basic Income system then it will just be a bunch of hamsters rushing for the wheel until everyone gets crushed and no one is left. Or at least, no one worth paying attention to.
At a recent appearance, I read an excerpt of an essay I’ve been working on that thinks through this conundrum through the jobs I’ve had, all of which I held for short periods of time because the reason I did them at all was to have enough money to survive, and also have enough time to pursue my interests and make art. That’s it; and it seems as if kindred types are increasingly experiencing a similar problem; word-of-mouth is easier than ever, and while it may be easier to have people pay attention to the art we make due to the mechanisms of social media, it creates a weird kind of dynamic in that privacies are eroded due to parasocial tendencies that place artists on one side of the fence and admirers/aspirants on the other. The patron system, they said. Then there is productivity, marketability, palatability, et cetera. You can see what this does: art flourishes under capitalism, yet the same art dies. That’s the closed loop. I refuse to take advantage of it. I just want to have enough.
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Hang on a second!
Here are some things I’ve been up to other than writing my book.
I’m proud to say I edited an entire book all by myself for the first time in my life! It’s called Under The Paving Stones, The Beach and is an anthology of 18 early-career writers at the Centre For Stories Writing Change, Writing Inclusion mentorship program. Thanks to the generosity of the Centre, I was able to go to Perth last week to launch it. It is also designed and typeset by the talented and conscientious Dennis Grauel, designer of The Sunday Paper, an anti-colonial publication that was created in response to Schwartz Media boycotts.
You can read my editors’ note here, and buy a copy here.
I also wrote some reviews recently:
On the play Laurinda, a Melbourne Theatre Company production adapted from Alice Pung’s award-winning YA novel of the same name, for The Guardian.
On the documentary Clean, which was the closing film at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which follows the life of Sandra Pankhurst, an extraordinary woman who entered the limelight after the publication of The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein, also for The Guardian.
Plus, I interviewed one of my favourite writers, Brian Castro, for a Liminal print publication last year, which is now up online.