Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World

This Is What It Means To

This Is What It Means To Be Me: wake up at 1pm. Check mail. Open envelope full of free money. Go to pub. Laugh. Because I am a Writer.

And certainly we're in a time where anger in art has largely gone away. This isn't the cool detachment of post-modernism, so much as just a turning inward. The kind of stuttery lurching rise of emo over the last couple of years is a case in point: a total defanging of pretty much any working definition of punk in service of whining about how you've got no fucking girlfriend. "Emotional punk" = Crying Ugly Kid Music. There should be a sign in guitar shops: "We reserve the right to refuse sale to people who want to write songs about wearing glasses and being dumped by girls who didn't know your name anyway." It's understandable, and certainly it doesn't hurt for Manson to bolster the "outsider" self-perception of his audience. But it bugs me nonetheless. Is it a creative reaction, to answer "nothing's happened" with "nothing's going to happen and you can't do shit about it"? Is that doing anything more than prepping an alienated audience for a doomed life of dyeing your hair back to brown and getting a job in insurance? Is that where we've ended up? That all popular culture has to say is, "well, fuck it"? Even as a transient pose? The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.

April 28, 2008 The last half of this month has felt completely out of sync. Like the planet jumped tracks. Everything's a bit 1986. Gather, children, and I will tell you of 1986. It rained all the time, no-one could smile without bleeding, and Boy George was on The A-Team. 1986 was one of those years where we were waiting for the spaceship to land... Things were so bad we were actually having to talk about Paul Simon's "Graceland" like it mattered. now, 1987, that was an interesting year... (descends lnto senescent unconsciousness) Where's my fucking coffee Buried under messages reading: "i was a discoloured zygote floating in the pool of beer and sperm that was my mothers womb in 1987."

I sit down every day to tell myself a story. Usually full of either stimulants or depressants, playing some kind of soundtrack to the experience of writing, aware of my environment, sitting in my own little writer's movie and telling myself a story. Anyone who tells you they write to an audience is either an idiot or a fake. You write for yourself. If the story doesn't affect you in some way, it won't affect anybody else. I don't write for the trunk. I'm well aware that someone else is going to read this. But if I don't respond in some honest, gut way to whatever I'm writing, you'll never get to see it. I know writers who play Stone Soup with everything. They'll generate half an idea on the back of a fag packet, ring up half a dozen other writers, tell it to them and ask what they think, and at the end of a phone marathon they'll have their story, with all the ingredients chucked in by their friends. For me, writing happens on my own. It's exactly the same as a ritual, or sitting down at a campfire, or initiating a vision state in silent darkness. It has to come from me and the spaces in my brain.

Did you ever hear My Bloody Valentine, around the time of "Feed Me With Your Kiss"? An ear-wrecking field of noise where they didn't play the note, so much as all the notes that get you to the note? It's kind of like that, without the note at the end. Just a field of dissonance. A song turned inside out and wearing its guts as its skin. A pretty picture, no? So, at this point, I'm playing wak-a-rat, running around with a hammer hitting all the bits that stick out and go off the progression to a note.

I'm in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who's just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire seons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops... reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective. He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

[...] i don't think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made status quo look like Segovia for that. It's all about that beat. "I play the guitar as if I were playing drums," Diddley said.

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures." And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there's really no-one to stop you.