I just got a rejection letter (yes, by post) for a novel I published over a year ago.
The novel is almost at the end of its life cycle. It’s been read, reviewed, reprinted, won a prize, and I’m halfway through writing the next one.
Nice going, publishers.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the hard work of the observational comedians who spend their days mining for amirite.
Hi S,
Thanks for your offer to proofread and I’ll keep it in mind for sure. I already have some reliable people for that but more eyes is always a good thing.
No spoilers! Actually, part of the gimmick this time (unless I change my mind) is to have no text on the cover at all and no synopsis online: let every reader come into it cold as ice.
This is partly because the premise is (a) a bit slight to be honest (b) works better as a weird surprise and (c) I like the idea of being mysterious/a tease.
At the moment, I envision it as a little yellow hardback with, as I say, zero text on the cover.
You already know more about this novel than anyone else.
RW
Boys, Boys, Boys
Are you looking for a good time?
Boys, Boys, Boys,
You should come and pick my scabs
Little plot, plenty grot.
I obeyed the rule in Rub-A-Dub-Dub and I’m doing it again in the secret next thing.
Object Number 3 in our inventory is my Kubrick Box. All will be explained. I have written a thousand words here about a cardboard box.
Full article here.
This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called ‘Hypocrite Minimalist’.
Object Number 3 in our inventory is my Kubrick Box. All will be explained. I have written a thousand words here about a cardboard box. No, it’s you who is weird.
Sixteen years ago, I sat in an office canteen on my lunch break and read a story by Jon Ronson in the Guardian. Pre- smartphone ubiquity, the paper was in print and my eyes were on stalks.
Ronson told the story of how he’d visited the English estate of Stanley Kubrick after his death and been confronted by boxes and boxes and boxes.
“There are boxes everywhere,” wrote Jon Ronson, “shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes.”
Kubrick, famously obsessive, had kept almost everything from his life in film.
As well as being a Kubrick fan, I also had a slightly complicated relationship with stuff. By 2003, I already had a tendency towards Minimalism but this had come after an early life of collecting things. I still liked material objects, especially when they were archived or organised in some fussy and logical way. I loved (and still love) libraries, museums, storehouses and collections, so long as I don’t have to own them myself, and I admired Kubrick’s demented, almost religious, maximalism.
A few years passed and I escaped office life. In a bookshop in New York, I picked up a collection of Jon Ronson’s journalism. I wondered if the Kubrick article had made the cut. It had. So I read it again. I bought the book and took to reading the Kubrick piece every so often. I found it soothing. All that nicely-organised cardboard. Ah, lovely.
When I told someone this, they looked at me askance and said, “do you mean the film about Stanley Kubrick’s boxes?” A film? Well, no it was in the newspaper ages ago. But it turned out Ronson had made a film about it in the meantime.
In the film, there’s picture after picture of the boxes. Some of them are opened in what is essentially a really good unboxing video. At the end, the boxes are shown being taken away to the University of the Arts London. I was a bit sad to see this, preferring to think of the boxes in their original home, but at least you can go and look at the boxes now if you want to, without even having to be Jon Ronson.
A filmmaker friend AJ (Hi, AJ!) went to see the archive a few years ago and there’s a Taschen book about it too, full of photographs.
Ronson says in his film that he’d been looking for a “rosebud” in the boxes but that, actually, the boxes themselves were the key to Kubrick’s character. Apparently, Kubrick hadn’t been willing to settle for the standard archive box you can buy from stationery stores (though it’s on record that he loved commercial stationery from his local Rymans) and went to the lengths of commissioning the perfect archive box from a box manufacturer.
There’s a memo from the box maker in the archive with a note about the “fussy customer” who wants the lid to slide off without a struggle but not to fall off by chance. Also on that memo was the name of the box company: G. Ryder and Co.
I wonder if they’re still in business, I thought one day. I Googled. They are. I called them, a man picked up the phone, and I asked if he could make me a box exactly to Stanley Kubrick’s specifications. He laughed at me.
“I’m researching a book about Stanley Kubrick,” I lied.
“Well,” he said, we don’t normally take orders for a single box. We have to make a whole run of them.” And if they did that, he explained, it would cost thousands of pounds for loads of unwanted boxes.
“But since you’re working on a book,” he said, “I’ll do you a box for forty pounds.”
Forty pounds. After embracing and selling off all my CDs one by one, was I really going to spend forty actual quid on a cardboard box?
“Okay,” I said.
A couple of weeks later, the boxes arrived. Two of them! A steal at twenty quid apiece.
I now use them as, well, archive boxes. The box maker, meanwhile, now sells them as a featured product with a clip from Ronson’s film.
Showing my boxes off to Landis one night, (Landis being easily as fussy as Stanley Kubrick and didn’t think it was strange that I wanted to show him a cardboard box) we wondered if one day “a Kubrick” could be a standard measure of stuff.
People could say “yeah, I’ve got 736 Kubricks at home” or “did you know Bill Gates has an estimated three-million Kubricks spread over six different homes?” or “I have whittled my life down to three eminently-portable Kubricks.” It’s a lovely dream.
Inside a Kubrick:
Here’s Momus in Berlin, holding a copy of our book about him. Proud.
John Robinson is the author. I edited and saw to its publication.
Here’s where to buy it in print or as an ebook.
The cover design is by Nick Welch, the original designer of Zer0 Books (of which this is a pastiche). Marcus talked me through the typesetting. Grateful.
It’s May 2024. I’m a writer. I live in Glasgow. I’m married to Samara. This is all exactly as it should be.
I run a small press magazine called New Escapologist and I’m currently putting Issue 16 together. It’s a thing of beauty and will be shipping very soon, so why not pre-order a copy?
Work continues on the film I’m making with Mark Cartwright and Anthony Irvine. We’re basically turning my book about the Iceman into a documentary and it’s been tremendous creative fun so far.
I’m editing a new memoir called Before I Go for “the archaeopteryx of alternative comedy,” (Alan Moore’s words, not mine) John Dowie.
You might remember me mentioning Dowie’s other excellent book The Freewheeling John Dowie in my previous Nowness message. I’d enjoyed it greatly and was irritated that it was no longer in print. Well, I pulled some levers and strings and it’s now available again as an e-book at least. Hooray!
The month of June, if I can mop up these few projects in the meantime and since I’m not needed on any film shoots, will be devoted to something completely new. Ooooh, yes.
I’m 300 pages into a thousand-page biography of Portuguese poet Ferdinand Pessoa by Richard Zenith. It’s very, very good so it’s hard to begrudge the absurd length. I want to tell the world about Pessoa, but there would be no point: Zenith is your man for that.
I just got back from London where I was filming at the Comedy Store with Mark Cartwright and our little team. We met some incredible people and I’m particularly grateful to the Obi-Wan of improv Neil Mullarkey for all he did for us. Thank you Neil.
I’m writing this in a quiet moment at Tectonics, a weekend city festival of experimental music. It’s always one of my cultural highlights of the year. Today I’m all about Koichi Makigami.
For TV, I’ve been watching Werner Herzog’s filmmaking Master Class, chunk by 15-minute chunk. It’s more about spending time with Herzog than actually learning any practical skills for me. But as the Bavarian man himself says, you don’t become a poet by learning to type.
Some films I enjoyed recently were The Delinquents (2023) and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023). I review both in Issue 16 of New Escapologist since they’re about, in different ways, escapes from work. I saw these films at the GFT. Support your local art cinemas, you sods.
Here’s my picture of the “month” so you can continue to monitor my ongoing decay, this time taken at the Comedy Store in London:
Old Now pages (Then pages?) are squirreled pointlessly into the Now Page Archive
How did The A-Team fail?
They were hoist by their own Peppard.
…at the National Library of Scotland.
With Simon Munnery at the Comedy Store, demonstrating his innovation of turning the mic to face the audience.
One must drink on Purim until that person cannot distinguish between cursing Haman and blessing Mordechai (Megillah 7b)
The show was a smash, obviously.
Next up: a 7-minute version of the same sort of thing for Fergus Mitchell’s fantastic South Side comedy night, Crossmylaff. It’s at Glad Cafe on 24th March.
Unfortunately the 24th is also Purim, the Jewish festival of getting blotto. So I’ll be coming from that. Get yer tickets here.
Alt text: the whitest kids you know.
Do you think piss freaks use this emoji? 💛
I think they probably do.
Meat Cute.
Y-SO Negative.
I try not to be prejudiced against the posh, but there’s an article in Home & Garden magazine by someone called Tiggy Hatley-Dent.
Tiggy Hatley-Dent.
I mean, come on. It’s almost cruel.
“This emergency announcement is brought to you by… AirRaid.”
Happy Gray Day, one and all. To cocky chaps, wise old owls, urban foxes, queer fishes, merry devils, and back green puddocks.
Today’s the day chosen by Sorcha Dallas, his representative on Earth, to honour and remember the writer and artist Alasdair Gray.
Alasdair’s been gone five years now and I still miss him. I didn’t know him personally because I was too starstruck to introduce myself on any one of the countless times we passed on West End streets, but his physical presence was important to me. When I pass his old Hillhead flat, which I do all the time, I feel a sense of bereavement. I want to see his paint brushes on the windowsill, to know the wizard is in residence.
At 85 he was probably an old enough man to go: he’d had his fill of earthly pleasure despite being famously shy and he’d done more than his share of great work. But he gave to Glasgow an imaginary carapace, a glamour that lives on but, I fear, is dimming in his absence.
With Alasdair around, Glasgow didn’t look like a poorly-financed motorway city. It looked like this:
When his third-finest novel Poor Things was adapted for cinema by Yorgos Lanthimos and released early this year I was surprised to find myself frustrated that the London scenes in the film were not set in Glasgow as per the novel. I hadn’t expected to be troubled by this. Sorcha Dallas had written a generous statement about the film being something other than the book, that it could put forward its own vision of a world. I agreed. But as I sat in the Glasgow Film Theatre, supping from my plastic pint pot of Alloa ale, I changed my mind. Those scenes should have been set in Glasgow. For all intents and purposes, most of those scenes could have been Glasgow–Willem Dafoe had studied Gray’s accent and mannerisms after all and his housekeeper appeared to be Scottish too–but when Bella returns from her travels the word LONDON appears on the screen to make it good and clear. But why not elevate something (as Alasdair would have done, routinely positioning Glasgow as every bit as good as other European cities and his literary friends Agnes Owen and Edwin Morgan as equal to Jane Austen and Jonathan Swift) in your so-called art film instead of showing the usual images of a well-known capital now all but lost to oligarchs and Pret a Manger? Imagine how much more beautiful and intriguing those steampunkish rooftop vistas would have been had they consisted of the glotted spires, Grecian pillars, and Victorian mausolea of Glasgow instead of the usual metropolitan landmarks everyone’s seen a thousand times before. I think Alasdair would have preferred Poor Things to be set in Glasgow. But as I say, I never got to know him. I regret this.
Ah, never mind the film adaptations. His legacy is everywhere, in words and in pictures and in the deeds of the people he moved.
Here’s a reading I recorded for Sorcha a few years ago, on the first Gray Day. For my reading I chose a chapter of his undisputed best novel, Lanark.
It’s February 2024 and all is well.
Samara and I still live in Glasgow as the baby Jesus intended. I’m a writer. Never mind what she does, nosey.
I run a small press magazine called New Escapologist. Issues 14 and 15 are sold out at the official website but we recently expanded into the real world with these cool shops.
I’m making a film with Mark Cartwright and Anthony Irvine about the Iceman. We’re basically turning my book into a documentary. I was down in Bournemouth this week, filming away.
I’ve finished editing John Robinson’s second book about Momus. It was published this month and it’s a physically very beautiful book.
I’m writing a piece about my relationship with Richard Herring’s blog for the next issue of From the Sublime… magazine. The working title is “My Pet Man: 22 Years of Warming Up.”
I’m preparing for my live show in March. My posters are all over town, though the one at the Sparkle Horse pub keeps getting taken down and I keep putting it back up again.
I heard yesterday that I’m Out is being discontinued (all 1,300 remaining copies to be pulped) by Unbound who aren’t happy with sales despite their stupid cover and title change (that I advised against) and not lifting a finger to market it. I’ve got seven books under my belt now, but the stiff letter I sent to Unbound is one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever written.
I’m halfway through The Freewheeling John Dowie by, well, John Dowie. Dowie (I’ll stop saying Dowie in a minute) was a great alternative comic in the ’80s who quit the business when it became a business. He’s great. Stewart Lee mentioned him in the interview he gave us for the Iceman film a couple of weeks ago and I suddenly remembered “of course, I must read that book!” Unfortunately, it was published by Unbound (see above) who made an arse of things and is now out of print. You can buy it expensively second hand. Mine was free because it was damaged in the post and I demanded a refund. The book is at least brilliant: a grumpy memoir about cycling in Europe. It’s like Dervla Murphy but properly funny and realistically miserable. I love it so much.
I also recently read Werner Herzog’s excellently-titled memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (which everyone should read but only if they’ve already read his more interesting Guide for the Perplexed) and Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. The latter turned out to be translated by Heather Lloyd, my old friend Helen’s mum. I didn’t realise until I read her translator’s note and saw that it was signed off “Glasgow, 2013.” I enjoyed the unexpected sense of connection.
I was on the English south coast this week, filming with Mark Cartwright and Anthony Irvine and our little team. I’ve already said that. Pay attention.
We’re going to Lisbon next week. Like Lanark, all I need is some sunshine.
Most weeks, we attend a particular Monday night pub quiz. It’s a waste of time, money, and health but we continue to attend for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s because we keep WINNING. Oh yeah.
For TV, my partner and I have been watching old episodes of Jeopardy! after we enjoyed the recent UK version despite it being hosted by an awkward old taxidermied bear. On my own, I’ve been watching Inside Number 9, which I gave up around the fourth season but am enjoying catching up with. “Merrily Merrily” is my favourite story so far.
Some films I enjoyed recently were that Scala!! documentary, The Holdovers (which was so surprisingly good that I can’t stretch my imagination in a direction capable of criticising it – it’s a proper film like The Graduate or something, which I’m told is “mid budget”), and Poor Things (which was good but I found myself annoyed by the London bits not being set in Glasgow instead; why resist the call to elevate something instead of doing the same old expected shit?). I saw all of these films at the GFT. Support your local art cinemas, you sods.
Here’s my picture of the “month” so you can continue to monitor my ongoing decay, this time taken in Meadow Road Coffee, Glasgow, where I stopped to recaffeinate and to get a pebble out of my shoe:
Once Upon a Dog
A sitcom about fleas.
If I ever commit adultery, I’ll say to them “where have you been all my wife?”
Samara’s not so sure about that one.
