to read fiction, I keep unpicking the threads of it, pulling back the curtain. Part of it is when you find something really good it’s hard to shake the style of it, so my own words are corrupted for a few weeks. But I write so little these days that hardly matters, I’ve gone all-out Bukowski on the not-writing, and then some. He quit for ten years and started up again in his 40s, I don’t know when my machine’s going to start ticking again. The long stuff terrifies me. Every word like sweating blood, like Colm Toibin said, and the lines used to just roll out onto the paper. And part is I’ve wised up, as Roth told the journalist, it’s too easy to drift and see it as contrived. It has to be special, like Pushkin, or Bellow (and only a few with him) before I can slip into the dream of it. I read in snatches, or I read poems, a quick hit, a glimpse of something like staring at a face flash by on a bus but don’t stick around for it to go sour on you.
And all those books I read as a young man, the burnouts and the alkies, the beats and other wanderers, most were books to read before you can get on a plane and do it yourself. Go see it, do it, you don’t need to read about it. When I was 15 I read Henry Miller, when I was 20 I was living it. Film works better for entertainment now, for me. I watch French gangster films and sci-fi when I find myself with a few evening hours alone, they’re not as clever or thought-out as the books but they’re getting close, with teams of writers and art designers, they outrank the books as entertainments, to my eyes.
There’s still magic, old seams of rose gold hidden in the exhausted mines.
