The City and the Country no.15 – August 9 2014

Book launch – of the most modest but delightful kind – went off well, and everyone ‘seemed buoyant and glad,’ wrote Billie Chernicoff, wonderful poet with whom I share a publisher. Just so. I read a short section of humorous plot, then a long riff, the ‘bowel-epic’ meditation on digestive therapies, which I hadn’t read (except to proof-read) since I wrote it 9 years ago, and had no memory of what it said. Terrific fun to read cold – the best way, for me – and re-discover what seemed to be an author on a roll, apparently knowing exactly where he was going when I’m quite sure I had no idea at the time. The book is a little like several hundred consecutive hands of Solitaire (Patience as the British call it), each one of which ‘comes out’ – impossibly against the odds, and a little like the opening of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with its seemingly unending coin-tosses coming up ‘Heads!’

How could I have been in such a serendipitous state of grace when I wrote the book – and not know it? But perhaps that’s the point. If you become aware of it, the state of grace is gone. My friend the film-maker Russell Richardson asked – as he has in the past – a sweet question (like the other questions it was a soft toss of the kind you expect in a home run derby), wondering whether I had been aware of the spirit of Flann O’Brien as I wrote the book. I could not in my most extravagant dreams claim to have been channelling F O’B, though I saw Russell’s point, in that, like O’Brien, I seemed to be attempting to render rational the most impossible premises, one after another. I said in reply that I felt all story-telling was a little like that – you set yourself the most improbable challenge (since reality, the thing you’re seeking to evoke, is itself improbable beyond all calculation) and try to lassoo it, rein it in, domesticate it, and make it trot to your tune.

After the reading/launch we went off to Athens, where the gallery hosting the ‘roadkill’-art exhibition, including Claire’s Rock, Paper, Scissors II with its myriad cranes, was holding a closing party. There we were serenaded by the Dust Bowl Fairies, ironic goth environmentalists with a gift for repetitive dirges and an aesthetic borrowed, as Claire pointed out, from Lori Anderson. Cheeses and a chance once more to study Claire’s work, and others’, made up for it.