Writing in 2023

2023 has been a mixed year for my writing. I started out planning to release more self-published work and, in the end, the only physical booklet I released myself was Memetic Infection Hazards. But I’ve published some good pieces online, my favourites being:

I’m pleased with the work in Memetic Infection Hazards, but it took me months between getting the cover produced and sorting out the printing. And then I barely promoted it afterwards. I’m not sure what all the resistance I face is, but it is something worth thinking about.

I also produced Fishscale, a double-page spread in Dan Sumption’s Krill magazine, which I was very happy with. This was an entire A4-sized short story collection, containing 12 tiny pieces of writing. I need to do another version of this in 2024.

In July, I started sending pieces out to a substack mailing list, concentrating initially on the South Downs Way collection. Publishing something regularly has been good for me, as it’s got me thinking more carefully about audiences. There are issues with substack’s politics at current, so I need to move platform, but I would like to keep on with some form of mailing list.

I’ve probably shared more work publicly in 2023 than any other year, and this can only be a good thing. It’s made me consider which work is worth finishing and sharing, and how many distractions I have. I’ve deleted a lot of half-finished stories this year, and I need to continue to avoid getting bogged down in old, half-finished ideas.

2023 has also got me thinking about what I want from my writing. Is it worth the effort I put into it, when I could be putting that effort into my career? I’m not sure it has justified the effort in the past, but I want to look at how it could.

My main plan for 2024 is to release the book True Clown Stories. I’m currently preparing the kickstarter with Dan from Peakrill Press (sign up here to be notified about the launch!). This project has been over 13 years in the works, but I am enjoying the collaboration with a publisher.

I’ve a few ideas about what to do after True Clown Stories, but whatever it is will involve a different approach to my writing than in the past. One that focuses more on the joys of creation and sharing my work.

What does Rishi Sunak think about when he watches Star Wars?

One of the revelations in Ben Riley-Smith’s book on the Tory party, The Right to Rule, was that Liz Truss loves karaoke, and that one of her favourite songs is Common People. The idea of Truss singing that song as a Conservative party minister makes me think that Pulp should have made the song much less ambiguous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about some blog posts by Paul Watson about whether art can be revolutionary. Initially, he was inspired by Star Wars tie-in Andor and how some genuinely radical stories seemed to be emerging from huge corporations, but he’s also been looking at how easily these stories are recuperated.

When Rishi Sunk became Prime Minister, the newspapers made much of him being a Star Wars fan. The BBC described him as The Star Wars fan turned political force. He apparently has a collection of lightsabres and tweeted a picture of himself at the cinema with Savid Javid to watch The Rise of Skywalker, describing Javid as his ‘Jedi Master’.

Star Wars is all about revolutions against oppressive government. The Tory government is hardly the Galactic Empire, but I wonder how Sunak can watch Star Wars and then participate in a government that argued against providing meals for poor children, or that has been responsible for a huge rise in poverty. Star Wars might be a simplistic, Manichaean universe, but that should make its politics only more obvious – and which side Sunak is closer to.

So what does Rishi Sunak think about when he is watching Star Wars?

Escaping Capitalism

It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” Since its appearance in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, this quote has been much-repeated. It suggests that there is a deeper motive for our culture’s obsession with the end of the world, which includes a constant stream of zombie stories: a feeling that true freedom can only exist if the whole of civilisation is dismantled. At dinner recently, a friend attacked this idea, that it plays into a lot of dangerous myths, but the longing persists.

In a blog post last year, Is it easier to end capitalism than to imagine the end of capitalism?, Paul Watson considered Fisher’s quote in the context of Gerard Winstanley. Watson starts from a quote by Ursula Le Guin about how “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.” Paul then writes

The question of whether this inability to imagine the end of the current socio-economic system is unique to late-stage capitalism has been nagging at me. Because if it isn’t something unique to late-stage capitalism then we can use our understanding of how it was overcome in the past to overcome this seemingly impassable obstacle now.

Reading Dr Francis Young’s Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, Watson found a reference to how alchemy allowed Gerrard Winstanley to come to terms with the Digger’s attack on the established order. Watson talks about how this puzzled him, as he’d not imagined Winstanley as someone with any qualms about revolution. The trail led to another book on Winstanley, David Mulder’s The Alchemy of Revolution: Gerrard Winstanley’s Occultism and Seventeenth-Century English Communism. This book contained an explanation.

…as radical a thinker as [Winstanley] was, he never relinquished a belief in the fundamental elements of early-modern world-view. The cosmology he and his contemporaries inherited from the middle ages taught that any radical challenge to the political and social order also was a radical challenge to the divine order of the universe. Such a challenge was thought to be a rebellion against God which had horrendous, even chaotic consequences for mankind and for the universe itself…. Put simply, it was easier to make a revolution than to imagine one”

Watson’s post ends with an inspiring call-to-arms:

I’ve mused before (in various posts on this blog) about the possibility of art and writing and music as ways to bypass the mental block of imagining a better alternative to late-stage capitalism, and the discovery that this isn’t quite the first time that imagining the end of the current socio-economic status quo has seemed more difficult than imagining the end of the world at least gives me some hope that it can be done again.

Watson’s inspiring essay is the sort of thing I love blogging for. It’s a beautiful argument, backed up by some thoughtful research and clear quotes. That ending leaves a promise and a question. It’s certainly something to think about with my own work. It’s important to imagine the better world, even if we are not sure how to get there.

Story: The Bone Wardrobe

As a book dealer, the thing I’m always looking for is The Bone Wardrobe. I have customers who would pay the cost of a small flat for this, in any condition. Copies are increasingly rare, but tend to turn up in good condition. Apparently people tend to destroy the book after reading it.

The Bone Wardrobe is a collection of short stories, written by Paul Croft, and published by Sugar River Press. Only five-hundred were privately printed, and most were destroyed in the fire that killed its author.

By reputation, The Bone Wardrobe is a machine for generating nightmares. It is a book of horror stories so bleak and terrifying that it makes Clive Barker’s Books of Blood look like Books of Ribena. It is said to produce dreams so bad that you can’t trust the next day.

Reviews occasionally appear on Goodreads but are soon taken down. They tend to focus on the effects of reading the book rather than the contents. One described the reader being unable to sit on the grass in the park because they were convinced that the blades of grass would cut them like knives. Such reviews are intended as warnings, but only fuel some people’s obsession.

A few details are known. There’s a short story called The Corn Husk King, and Jailcraft, a novella set in a city called Fibua. Versions of these sometimes appear online, but these are just badly-written creepypasta, unworthy of The Bone Wardrobe’s reputation.

I can’t see the attraction of reading a book so terrifying that readers have taken to sleeping only in locked and barricaded rooms – but then, I’ve never understood why people want to read horror at all. I think it might be an sort of mental illness. If I ever find a copy of The Bone Wardrobe, I know better than to read it, but I’ll certainly be putting it up for sale.

Book Review: What Remains? by Rupert Callendar

One of the highlights of this year’s reading has been Ru Callendar’s memoir What Remains?. Ru is an undertaker and founder of the Green Funeral Company in Totnes. I’ve bumped into Ru through the Discordians, and knew his book would be worth reading – but I was still taken aback by how provocative and moving it was.

He tells how he was led by his experiences to become an undertaker. After seeing an interview with the writer of the Natural Death Handbook he set himself up in business and instinctively evaded the usual shortcomings of the death industry. An example of this is the importance that Ru gives to the bereaved seeing the dead body. He also refuses to employ euphemism and falsehood. He describes his method at one point as having “scoffed at professionalism”, but found an informal, more honest approach to death was needed. There was a place for a funeral director with in jeans and a second-hand Volvo. The Green Funeral company was handed on “from wounded family to wounded family”, as well as picking up recommendations from other people involved with death, such as mortuary attendants.

One particularly interesting thread in Ru’s book is how he defines himself as countercultural. He puts forward some interesting ideas about ancestors, and describes his background as lying in punk and acid house, as well as with groups like the Diggers – both the British political dissidents and the San Francisco collective from the 1960s. He writes about his approach to undertaking as inspired by rave culture, comparing the way bereaved people should be treated to managing a bad trip.

Ru tells a great story, starting with a cold open where he makes a crop circle. There are intimate details about some of the families he’s worked for and descriptions of the people he’s encountered as colleagues – at one point Ru tells about a rival undertaker pinching a body to try and steal his business. The scenes are so well-told that I could easily see this being adapted as a film.

The book suggests that something is very wrong with the corporate approach to death – people need a kinder, more humane way to deal with bereavement. Some of the ideas seem radical, but they are also extremely compassionate. It’s hard to read this book without feeling that you’d want to be able to call on Ru when faced with a death.

For me, one of the most powerful things in the book was Ru’s discussion of boarding schools. I’ve read a number of books recently about boarding school as trauma, but Ru brings a refreshing honesty and clarity to his experience as part of the “last flush of The Tom Brown’s School Days experience”.

I was surprised to read Ru talk about his own fear of death – that he has not achieved a state of acceptance through close contact with mortality. He says that we are all living in the time before an awful event – that our normal life might be something we one day long for. But there is also the promise that, even after such events, we can endure and continue.

A Discordian/Mycelic Parish Magazine

When I caught up with Dan Sumption recently, we discussed the idea of a Discordian/Mycelic parish magazine. We want to produce a simple, lo-fi zine listing all the things that have happened or been made across the network over the last year. We’re going to publish this at some point over December, and it should give people something interesting to read over the Christmas/New Year gap.

We want to include books, events, podcasts, celebrations, records and meetings among our little tribe. We’re doing our best to gather everything in. Obvious entries are the Toxteth Beating of the Bounds, Church of Burn’s appearance at Secret Garden Party, the ongoing F23 Podcast, Rupert Callendar’s book What Remains?, the Lost Doctor, and the latest book from John Higgs. There are probably dozens of things we have overlooked. What should be included? What should we be listing? We are planning to produce short mentions for each thing, typically 100 words or so, but longer if needs be. We can type something up, or you can give us something ready to go.

As the year closes out, we will gather everything up, lay it out, and print copies of the magazine to share with everyone (there will be a small cost for printing and postage, but we will keep it as low as we can). A PDF copy will be made available in the new year. It will only be a small edition, but it will hopefully be both a souvenir of 2022, and a pointer to interesting things you might have missed. We want to see how this works with a view to doing something more ambitious and comprehensive for 2023 Annual.

Getting this sorted by the end of the year will require precision discordianism, so the sooner you can send things to us, the better.

Coast to Coast Day 10: Oak Tree Hill to Richmond

I only took a single photograph on the final day of our 2022 Coast-to-Coast hike. This was of a gap in a hedge that seemed ridiculously small. The landscape on this section was less epic than what we’d become used to. Wainwright himself was not a fan of this stretch, apparently describing the town of Danby Whisk as a low point in more than just elevation.

Getting on and off hiking trails can be a problem, as the best ones are in the middle of nowhere. Dave had had a van dropped off for us in Richmond, which meant having to return to the town at the end of the day. We decided to get a taxi to Oak Tree Hill and walk back from there. It also meant we got to bump into most of the people we’d encountered on the previous few days travelling, who were continuing in the traditional direction.

Finding a taxi to take us into the middle of nowhere that early in the morning proved tricky, and I was glad we weren’t trying to persuade someone to collect us from the wilds. The day’s walk, about 10-12 miles, was a slightly underwhelming ending to this leg of the walk. Pleasant but not spectacular. It’s a comfortable stroll through farmland, with a few small villages breaking it up, but very little to take the attention. In a way, it’s good to be tossing it away as a half-section.

The route brought us back to Richmond, ready to finish our hiking for that year. It was a shame to come off the trail, but walking six days rather than our usual four had been a great experience. Next year, only a few nights remain to finish the Coast to Coast.

Coast to Coast Day 9: Reeth to Richmond

The walk from Reeth to Richmond was another short day at just over ten miles. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out where to stop on hiking trails. Most people stop in both Reeth and Richmond, since the journey from Keld to Richmond would otherwise be an imposing 21.5 miles – not impossible, but a lot if the weather is against you. Going direct from Kirkby-Stephen to Reeth seems like a bad idea, as Keld provides a good chance to regroup from crossing the peat bogs near the Nine Standards. This means it’s hard to avoid a run of short days.

This was a day of relatively few photographs, although the landscape was charming. Given that the trail was leaving the Pennines, things had started to flatten out a little. We took a long lunch on a bench in Marske then finished the walk into Richmond, arriving early in the afternoon.

Richmond is a pretty town, and we took the chance to explore, although an expired English Heritage card meant we skipped see the castle. We stayed at the Black Lion pub, which had the best vegan food I’d enjoyed on this section of the trail. We also found a coin tree.

Building a counter-cultural mycelium

Back in 2019, I was part of the Cerne-to-CERN pilgrimage, travelling from the Cerne Abbas giant to the centre of CERN’s large hadron collider. On the way we stopped off at the Damanhur community in the Italian alps. It was one of the strangest and most exciting things I’ve ever done.

The event was organised by theatremaker Daisy Campbell, who was recently part of an interesting discussion with Leslie Claire and Kate Alderton. In it, Daisy spoke about the metaphor of the mycelium network:

I found mycelium a useful metaphor for underground culture, because here are all these artists beavering away, like we’re kind of carving something in the subsoil. But we are crossing our threads with all the others who are genuinely following their deepest impulses. And a mushroom may well appear in the above ground. This mushroom might take the form of an actual art piece, or it might take the form of a new movement, or a new consciousness even, and the world above can see this mushroom and probably will begin to commodify it. But what they cannot see is this incredible network of underground threads.

I love this image of a counter-cultural underground, where artists are reaching out to collaborate or meet up, with great things emerging from that. There are several things that have emerged from the pilgrimage or that are linked to it, such as the 2021 collaborative zine Bodge, published by Liverpool Arts Lab. Another example is the F23 podcast, whose choice of guests maps out more of these threads.

Later in the interview, Daisy explores how this culture can be nurtured, to produce even more mushrooms: not just by nurturing the mushrooms but by supporting “each individual thread’s trust in its own process”:

[I’m working on] finding and learning more and more mycelium-like ways of structuring any endeavours. That probably means moving away from authorship and the idea of the individual visionary.

Another image Daisy use is the imaginal cells in a caterpillar chrysalis, seeing the creatives around her as part of a larger transformation (“everyone I meet is an extraordinary genius these days”). The body of the caterpillar resists the imaginal cells during the early stages of metamorphosis, but eventually enough appear to take the process forward.

For me it’s a really hopeful perspective because it also allows for some compassion for the reactionary forces. Might we be able to bless the dinosaurs? Could they simply be holding the old body steady in the best way they know how whilst we imaginal cells find each other?

Speaking to Daisy in person, she is well aware of the challenges that lie ahead for the world. Visions like this mycelium network are the sort of thing we need to help us through the future.

I’ve focussed on Daisy’s part in this interview because I’ve been thinking about similar things recently. Kate Alderton’s discussion of dreaming is also inspiring, and her The Dream-Fishing society is an important part of the mycelic network, providing new ways to encounter and interpret the world.

Pandemic Day 766: Ignoring the coronavirus

We are now 766 days into the pandemic (counting from the day after the government advised against “unnecessary social contact of all kinds” and my office was closed). I’ve not written much about my personal experience of coronavirus recently, but I wanted to make a note of how this current phase feels.

The government recently announced that it was time to get back to normal, and that coronavirus has to be accepted as little more than a bad flu. Testing is no longer free. In shops and trains I’m now often the only person wearing a mask. I even heard from a family member about a teacher who wore a mask to class as they were teaching after testing positive. At the same time, daily deaths continue, with the total for yesterday reaching 646 running around 250 or more (the 646 figure on 21/4 apparently included data from several days over Easter).

The question of how this might end has been there from the start. Despite the Prime Minister’s blithe promises that things would soon be back to normal, it was obvious that any permanent solution depended on preventing transmission of the virus either through ‘zero covid’ strategies or herd immunity.

Both of these options soon became unfeasible – the virus has escaped even the most intolerable and inhumane quarantine regimes. The vaccine, while an impressive scientific achievement, does not provide permanent immunity. For a time it looked as if the government would be bringing out regular vaccines but this seems to no longer be the case, (although further boosters are being provided to the clinically vulnerable).

As far as I know, I’ve not been infected with covid, but with the omicron virus being so transmissible this is inevitable – there was even a case recently of someone catching two variants within three weeks. I had my last booster on Christmas Eve, so my protection from the vaccine is waning. ’Long covid’ is affecting 1.5 million, a number that can only grow. For the more severe cases it proves impossible to work, yet diagnosis and intervention is limited.

It looks as if the current plan is to muddle along for now. People will catch and recatch the virus, with rising cases of long covid. It’s an alarming situation but people seem happy to go along with it, and few wear masks. Eventually, a new, more dangerous variant will emerge, or the toll of long covid will be unignorable. Those problems are being left for the future to deal with.

Faced with an unsolvable pandemic, the government has decided to do nothing, while not being honest about the impact this will have. While mitigating covid is expensive, even the affordable steps have been ignored. We wasted billions on corrupt PPE deals, incompetent testing, and Potemkin Nightingale hospitals, yet spent little on ventilation for spaces like schools and offices.

Since there’s little I can do, I’m getting on with my life like everyone else, albeit with a little caution. There’s a strange feeling that everything’s normal when it isn’t. Welcome to life in the Anthropocene.