This is Not a Test
This is Not a Test
Hi. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Which is to say, I’ve been talking about it for nearly a year, written a few drafts, and then still didn’t do anything about it. The trouble has been what the trouble always is: a couple of good, unconnected ideas, a general feeling that it would be kind of fun to have an email newsletter again, but no clear idea of purpose. I still don’t really have one.
Then Twitter exploded and there was no way to promote anything to anyone, especially if you are a Non Instagram Haver, so that’s another layer of weird.
And then, a month or so ago ago, I described a project I’m working on as “for me and my four weird friends”, and the idea has kind of stuck with me. All my best work since forever, in every medium, has been for me and between one and four weird friends. So what if I let a couple of the weird friends in for a bit while I paint the clubhouse? Then we can see if it’s worth opening the doors a bit wider.
Okay, look: somewhere between every two and four weeks. Bit of reading chat. Bit of writing chat if I can stomach it. Now and again, a Serious Business Essay because I've had it percolating for a while and here is as good a place as any to put it. Probably I will relate something back to handcrafts because I always do in the end, one way or another. And the other thing is to pretend I’ve already been doing this for years.
Alright, go.
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How did I find this piece of flash fiction? Why did I bookmark it? I have no idea, but I liked it a lot, so here it is: https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-last-man-on-earth-looks-for-a-frienda-mini-novel/
I’ve enjoyed a “last man on earth” type story ever since Mary Shelley wrote one, and I ill-advisedly happened to be halfway into reading it when the first lockdown got announced in 2020. This story is less stressful than that.
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Over the summer, I had a brief foray into Cold War espionage thrillers - Deighton (who is still alive, surprisingly to me? although very much retired, so good on him), Le Carré, MacLean, Greene. I think they’re appealing to me as mix of procedural formality and a setting in a particular kind of flux. By that I mean that if you tell a kind of story with a very rigid structure - spy thrillers are like murder mysteries, you know you're going to hit a certain number of beats even if you don't know exactly the form they'll take - then the flipside is that you can go absolutely ham on the setting. As weird as you like. Get hyper-specific with details, fill your lungs with atmosphere, and breathe it all out over everyone.
As someone who wasn’t around until afterwards, the concept of the Berlin Wall continues to blow my mind. It ought to be a metaphor! It ought to be science fiction! I feel like I understand the entire Iron Curtain in the same way I understand other myths or urban legends, things that aren’t true except in the sense that they’re part of the cultural landscape through sheer retelling. Right now I’m noticing that, and trying to reorient it a bit in my head, and wondering what else I’m doing it with. British history is full of details that sound authoritative or straightforward but aren't (like Jenny Geddes - someone started that riot, but anyone claiming to know more details about who they were has a ghost tour to sell you), but also things that sound like elaborate exaggerations but are true (I was just about around for these, but the Newbury bypass protests still fall into this category for me). There’s something interesting in all this, I suppose, about trusting in background details that don’t seem to make sense, and conversely not trusting things that seem to pass the smell test. The real world being as it is at the moment, I feel like that's a crisis of trust we have to reappraise anew every time we look at the news - so I'm not surprised that I'm currently being drawn to a heightened version of it, nor that the heightened version I'm drawn to involves the Cold War in central Europe.
And then of course, in a story, you stick an Englishman with a stiff upper lip and the liver of a concrete elephant right in the middle of it, and suddenly everything is satisfying again. Give him a nice embarrassingly young Hungarian lass to make eyes at. These were all written in the fifties, after all.
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Back when I ran Mookbarks, the ur-newsletter round these parts, with my lovely friend Emily, we used it as a place to show each other things we would otherwise have gushed about in person - or, alternatively, out-of-the-way rabbit holes we knew the other would love to go down. If Mookbarks still existed, I would put Welcome Home on it without a moment of hesitation. It's a story about a lost children's show, with a rainbow palette and a wiki filed under "Horror"! Hey Emily! Look over here!
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I was reminded recently of this New Yorker piece on the hidden mothers in family photos - and, more importantly, on the mums who are always the ones taking the family photos, never appearing in them. There's some very interesting stuff in there about who keeps family history, how they keep it, and what memories look like when they've been passed down the generations - I'm not saying I have an all-consuming obsession with that sort of thing at the moment, but it's certainly consuming several things. What a joy it is to be deeply interested in something and then discover other people have done that too and handily put a selection of their best efforts all in one place. We should all be so lucky now and again.
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I have no items to hawk you nor events to hype up right now, so don't panic. For the sake of you also knowing it, the paperback edition The Dark Between The Trees is coming out in October, and I'm looking forward to it in particular because the cover is mad cool. Beyond that, I'm deep in fictional work-in-progress, trying to work out how to ford the river between Act I and Act II without getting swept away. Current research tangents include peer-reviewed architectural history, the Athens of the North of the South (nineteenth-century Dunedin in New Zealand, if you're wondering), and Robert Louis Stevenson's notably sulky-looking wife. (It seems to be the first thing anyone noticed about her!) Poor Frances Stevenson: luckily, her Wikipedia page notes that
After Stevenson's death, Fanny returned to California to begin a new life in America and Europe with an adoring companion decades her junior, newsman Edward "Ned" Salisbury Field.
I couldn't possibly approve more. Barnett over and out.