The Only Living Boy in New Cross

I miss London, a lot. But then I see what I have here and I'm happier than I think would be possible there.

But in a heap of Yuletide nostalgia I wrote a short story, creative non-fiction, life writing, based on actual events. It's about a night club in New Cross called The Venue, which is where myself and my friends used to go every weekend when we were at school.

It's been published by the (now) online Smoke magazine - a self-styled London Peculiar, words and images inspired by the city. It'll be in a book, they say, one day. That'll be cool.

Here's their rather lovely introduction...

"Belated New Year greetings to all. 

And first up in 2013 is another piece from our Night Bus To Camden project, as Jamie Woods recalls being sixteen at the New Cross Venue back in the days when it used to put on real bands rather than Coldplace, the Antarctic Monkeys and Maybe Gaga (“the UK’s No. 1 Lady Gaga tribute band”), when no one used to check IDs, and when ladies had to pay more than £1 admission on Fridays before midnight. 

This might also be your only chance to read a piece of literature that takes its title from a Carter USM song – or at least until Hilary Mantel publishes the third part of her Wolf Hall trilogy and reveals that Thomas Cromwell’s nickname for Henry VIII was Sheriff Fatman."

click here to read 'The Comfort and the Joy of Feeling Lost' by Jamie Woods

Janathon #6

When I run, I listen to music on my headphones. When I was younger, I listened to music pretty much constantly, on an array of Sony Walkmans and cheaper, Aiwa or Bush branded cassette players. All of which missed some component: the battery casing, the front, the rewind button. I moved on to a Goodmans portable CD player, which spat out spent batteries in no time. 

A brief foray into minidisc, one which we're both embarrassed and ashamed by, then back to my beautiful chrome Sony Walkman with proper clunky buttons. And now, IN THE FUTURE, to a bunch of shit MP3 players. All MP3 players are shit, no matter how fancy they are dressed up. I just don’t get on with them. They do not operate in the way I want them too. This is not me being a luddite, this is me not syncing with technology: bitrates, playlists, play queues, filenames and album art.

So I listen, instead, to music on my phone. It’s vaguely functional, semi-intuitive, and very annoying. And I’m sick of ripping CDs and copying them onto devices and so on and so on. So I only have a limited selection to choose from when I run. Currently, I’m alternating between James’ Fresh as a Daisy singles collection, Belle & Sebastian Write About Love, and the first The Lovely Eggs LP.

So that’s running sorted. But writing... that’s more difficult. With any significant writing project I have a soundtrack – whether it’s an album or band I listen to when I write, or an integral soundtrack that the character would listen to within the text. I have a (dark, insular) novel that I’m three (insular, bleak) chapters through, and the only music I can listen to when writing it is The Holy Bible by the Manics (dark, insular, bleak). There’s only so much of that process I can take.

Two of my current projects have no soundtrack. I think that this is why I’m finding it difficult to really get into them. I've always been aware of the correlation between my writing and music, but I never realised it was so symbiotic. Which leads me to question: why am I currently writing an essay on ‘Creative Process’ about the joy of intertext and authorship, when perhaps it should be about music as an accompanying muse? (But not the band Muse, who I dislike. A lot.) Perhaps I’ll save that for further study. Back to Barthes for me.

Janathon: ran 5km.
Fruitalution: ate another boring apple. No! Tomatoes are fruit too. I ate lots of cherry tomatoes. And an apple.

Janathon #2

After Roadrunner (not the cartoon)

Roadrunner once.
Roadrunner twice.
I’m in Love with Rock’n’roll... and I run every night.
iPod on I grind my knee cartilage and the broken soles of my feet into the pavement.
iPod on I justify having three sugars in my coffee and that slice of Rocky Road and a packet of crisps.
iPod on I run in the rain, through the mist.
iPod on I run through the new-build estate, between houses arranged haphazardly in cul-de-sacs, then down the only access road, up the hill, over the motorway bridge, over the headlights glaring.
iPod on I run past the RSPCA, round the tired and waterlogged park, past the farm, taking in the grim burning smell of the 3M factory and then back, across the motorway bridge, up the access road and I keep going past my house until the voice in my ear says: 5 kilometers.
I’ve got the power of the modern sound.
I’m going faster miles an hour.
Alright!

Janathon activity: Ran 5 km.
New Year’s Resolution:  I ate a Tangerine (yesterdays was an apple).
Apologies to Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers: 1
Long walks round IKEA beforehand with wife and 3 yr old and baby: 1, lasted several hours.
Dining room chairs bought, even though we don’t have a dining room: 2.

Janathon #1

I ran 3k, but felt like a fraud. My running kit gleaming, reflecting car lights, shoes white. It was January 1^st and there I was, running around like some Olympics-bandwagonesque-soon-to-quit-New-Year's-Resolution-Jogger, – the likes of which are scorned on Joao Morais’ blog.

But I’m not One Of Them, I’m not. Yes, my thermal UV resistant waterproof breathable technical sport kit is shiny, ‘cos all running clothes have reflective bits on, and they’re made of the finest fabrics that industry can cobble together. And my trainers are white cos I’m not some cross-country type who runs in the woods or through puddles. Ugh... the mere thought of running in mud. And maybe I did get this hat for Christmas and it’s making its debut tonight, but that’s not the point.

I was only running because of Janathon, though. I’ve been finding it hard to find the time in which to run, since the baby, and since starting Uni, and because of all the long days and nights and commuting and napping I’m not in the best condition. So to incentivise me, the shame of the internet communal campaign: social participation, twit-nagging and email reminders. And the fact I’m off Uni until the 28^th, and I’ve got an essay due in soon. Therefore my digression is required.

The idea of Janathon is to do some form of exercise each day, and blog about it, in some way. Which seems to me to be the hardest part: I usually use my running time to sort out my head and to sort out my writing, ultimately I use running as an opportunity for what my son calls ‘a piece of quiet’ in which to have a dialogue with myself or to lose myself in whatever songs are blasting through my earphones (OK, they were a Christmas present too... but they’re special sweatproof running ones alright?). So I don’t know how these 31 blog posts will turn out. But we’ll see.

Janathon activity: Ran 3 km.
New Year’s Resolution: eat a bit of fruit every day.
Alcohol units consumed on New Year’s Eve: 0
Alcohol intended to be consumed but couldn’t due to responsibility for a six-week-old baby: 1 bottle of Chilean red.
Long walks round the woods beforehand with wife and 3 yr old and baby: 1, also 3km.

2012, yeah?

PROLOGUE
2012 has been a bit of a year, don’t want to brag, like, but compared the very little I’ve done since 1977, it deserves a bit of a hurrah.
We had a really cute baby (well, I just sat and napped and watched while my wife had the baby, but still...), and we named her Josie, a cool punk-rock-kitten sister to Jacob who is nearly four now.
I got a degree, and started a Masters.
I ran and completed a 10k race, having ‘taken up’ running a couple of months before.
I’ve read some stories out in public, and had one published by the EvergreenReview.
The wife and I DJ’d for a music festival which took place in a West Bromwich art gallery.

BUT MORE IMPORTANT THAN ALL THAT SELF-CONGRATULATORY NONSENSE, MY FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ARE:

This Is Life by Dan Rhodes

This is Life is the reason that Rhodes’ best novel to date was called Gold: because this is as good as Gold. Laced with Rhodes’ comedy and economy – not one sentence is unnecessary – this novel manages to host complex arguments of art and science, and the meaning of life, and the pain of loss, while being a genuine lovely and exciting Parisian romp. I recommend someone reads Dan Rhodes at least once a week: this week is no different.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
I wrote my final dissertationy-thing on Eugenides’ debut The Virgin Suicides: it’s fair to say I was already a fan when I bought this book the moment the paperback came out. And while the David Foster Wallace connotations are wasted on me (I made it halfway through Infinite Jest and gave up) the pragmatic love story at its heart is wonderfully realised, and the novel is splattered with a degree of intertextuality that in the wrong hands would be cloying and convoluted, but in Eugenides’ delicate and un-rushed typing, adds colour and texture that really makes it something special indeed.

Everything by Andrew Kaufman     
I’ve read All My Friends are Superheroes, The Waterproof Bible and The Tiny Wife by the Canadian author Andrew Kaufman this year, and fell in love with his work in the same way I did with Dan Rhodes. Clever, surreal, witty and funny and utterly heartbreaking, Kaufman has the same concise style of writing as Rhodes, and every word is as rich as can be. His latest novel Born Weird is out more-or-less now – I’ve pre-ordered the Kindle version which is out on Jan 2^nd, but the hardback is already in shops.

Sunstroke and other stories by Tessa Hadley
The stories in this collection are each seemingly domesticated and commonplace and straight-forward slices of life. But each has an under-current of subversion, of taboo-breaking, and of realism – each narrator is so real and alive and known – and ever-so-slightly magical. Her work reminds me of one of my favourite writers, Katherine Mansfield, and that is always a good thing.

How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by Richard King
A history of indie music, and independent record labels, written with real heart and awe. An indie little brother to England’s Dreaming, it is naturally selective and narrow in it’s scope – otherwise King would still be writing it today, and it loses nothing by leaving out band x or band y for the sake of narrative or space.

AND 2012’s OTHER FINE MOMENTS INCLUDED:

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Introduced by the lasciviously-intellectually voiced Deborah Treisman, this podcast gets New Yorker short story writers – Dave Eggers, Tessa Hadley, Daniel Alarcón – to choose and read their favourite story from The New Yorker’s vast archives. Well worth subscribing to on the iTunes programme thing.

Diseases of England by The Indelicates
Parts I and II are out and are as bitter and vital and sneering and desperate as any other band releasing records ever.

American Sitcoms
I love American sitcoms at the moment. 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Office, Community, Up All Night, Whitney... they’re just in such a rich vein of form. Worth moving to the US for alone, I’m sure.

So yeah, here’s to 2012, thanks for all the fun, and roll on 2013, and HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Short Story: Discussion

Your fingernails are too long, I say. Your hair needs cutting, I say. Your jeans are ingrained with dirt, and are disintegrating at the knee, I say. And your face is, your face is, your face just is... aaagh, I say, when what I really want to say is that:

You disgust me. I look at you, and you disgust me.
Your apathy disgusts me.
Your apathy and lethargy, antipathy and atheism, and apologetic shrugs of non-commitment and indecision and passivity disgust me.

We could discuss you. We could discuss all the stupid things that after four tough years have been picking at our filaments and are pulling us down and holding us under. We could discuss all the ways in which you could do this better, or I could say that better, or we could cook or store or sleep or snore or exercise or organise or prioritise or fuck better.

          
We could discuss the things you do that disgust me. Things that colour me apoplectic. That twist my mouth shut, jaws locked with contempt. That break pieces from my hibernating heart. We have to discuss you leaving, us splitting, it all ending, before I’ve no heart left to wake.

Post-Graduate Post #1

So, then, University, eh? Cardiff is a wonderful place to do anything, especially to learn. I've had to re-learn how to cross busy roads, and how long it takes to walk somewhere as opposed to how long I think it takes to walk somewhere, for example. And lots about writing and creativity, too.

My fellow students are all very lovely, although they make me feel a bit old: the majority of them are around the 22-25 mark, and I was born in '77 as my digital identity will forever remind me. One of my classmates blogs here: http://owainglynevans.wordpress.com/ on the whole, some very tight and concise and enjoyable short stories.

My Course Director / main Tutor here is the awesome Richard Gwyn who also blogs under the alter-ego Ricardo Blanco. After embarrassing myself with a tale of Dionysian excess in the first workshop, I shall endeavor to Google all of my tutors and read their whole oeuvre in advance, rather than accidentally trip onto their territory with a clumsy stumble... luckily next week's guest tutor is a poet, and I don't do serious poetry, nor do I do poetry seriously, so shouldn't have any problems there. Given who s/he is, it certainly won't/ will help that I've watched The Wire, but couldn't get into Treme.

One important part of our course is the regular open-mic style events that we take part in. Our guest tutor, a writer of some repute, will do a reading of some description, then myself and the rest of the class read some of our work. At our first session, I read my piece 'Points of Articulation' that was in Evergreen Review, and a new story called 'Discussion', which I'm just about to post here. In fact, you may just have read it. It's kinda weird reading your work out like that, but I'm actually really excited about next weeks session. And only maybe a little bit 'cos it's held in a pub bedecked with Manic Street Preachers memorabilia.