Hello,
It’s been a while. If you’ve somehow managed to slip through dimensions in the time between my last newsletter and this one, you might be surprised to discover that a lot has changed. What was once something simply understood as “pre-March 2020” can now be as easily summarised as the “Before Times”. And currently? It might be a time of “no future”, or as one of my theory daddies Zygmunt Bauman once wrote (in the 70s, no less), “The lack of utopia creates a void, an opaque, bottomless abyss, in place of a smooth extension of the present. It is the dread of this intellectually unfathomable void that leads people to escape into the mystique of irrationalism.”
Increased irrationality or otherwise, too little time has passed to allow for enough retrospection to know what exactly to make of this time. Structures and oddities are split open as the world moves along a vector set by the virus. Existing inequalities are much more visible, cultural tensions and anxieties brought into the frame as society runs in glitch mode. A lot has changed, yet these changes are refractions of what’s already there. In the last nineteen months, while many have been tethered to their screens as one of the last remaining mediums for communication, whether that’s with friends on Messenger and Discord, with family on Signal and Whatsapp, with strangers on Reddit and Twitter or with colleagues on Zoom and Slack, contradictory emotions race alongside one another. Free, yet trapped within. Together, yet alone. Real, yet a simulation. Livestreaming has brought distant places closer and yet they’ve never been further away; (interpersonal and geopolitical) borders blur and tighten; there is an impulse to be hooked up to technologies that take away our privacies in the service of camaraderie and connection. Context collapses.
During this time, I’ve mostly had the luxury to be sequestered in the house I live in. A lot of what I term my “outside jobs” (cleaning houses, events ushering, plus a smattering of odd jobs that can include cat-sitting and personal shopping) have slowly diminished, and I found myself with more time than ever to concentrate on my “inside jobs” (reading, writing, editing). I’m lucky to live in a welfare state with no dependents, even if benefits are gradually disappearing under a neoliberal, conservative government; financial survival would have been untenable in the old country, let alone the opportunity to consistently make art. I don’t have to pay to go to the doctor! It was under these conditions that I figured I might as well make a hard go of bringing my debut book closer to completion, because who knows what my life will be like post-pandemic (if there will even be such a thing). Having been casually working on this book since 2018, it seemed that I could finally be afforded the time to conjugate my thoughts and observations in an essay collection that might finally see the light of day. Don’t ask me what’s next—due to a series of odd coincidences and reckless behaviour, accelerated by a deep dissatisfaction with the predictable and the routine, I’ve never lived my life this way. I could finish writing this book and never write for a living again, or I could end up publishing my first novel in 2030 at the age of 43. What I’m trying to say is that this is a fool’s errand, and I come to the table with zero plans other than knowing that I do want to finish this damn book.
Armed with the encouragement of a few dear friends I came to know through being in the writing world (thank you Aimee, Leah and Eugenia, as well as esteemed colleagues Radhi and Alison), I applied for the Creative Victoria Creators Fund and City of Melbourne Boyd-Garrett residency earlier this year. It was a pleasant surprise to be selected for both. This means that I’ll be resuming this newsletter until end-2022: missives will be sent out monthly from November, each one detailing what I’ve learned through my book writing process, as well as little observations surrounding the terrible business of writing and the unquantifiable pleasures that come with art-making.
To new subscribers: welcome. To older subscribers: I understand if your interests and priorities have changed. Please unsubscribe if this is no longer relevant to you. And always get in touch whenever you feel like it.