I sometimes find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for contemporary writing, and I'm growing increasingly suspicious of that which offers its contemporary status as but one of its many virtues. Leaving aside the usual creatives, content providers, and loyal servants of the franchise, even the supposed alternatives are looking ropey these days. Among the transgressives I found one internet twat helpfully making blog posts about how avant-garde fiction is easy, fun, and here's how you do it; and if the Neo-Decadents seemed initially promising, I've been somewhat put off by the unmistakable aroma of boys who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze; and of course this sorry state of affairs echoes the culture I inhabit as a whole. Daily existence has become, just as it was for the Aztecs, a balancing act - a matter of keeping those forces which influence our lives at a distance. In political terms, there no longer seems to be anyone who isn't part of the machine. The right seeks allies while the left seeks traitors. There's no-one on our side, the machine is out of control, and the wheels have come off.
Thankfully, Peter Hope understands this all too well, and articulates it in terms which resist reframing as the usual rebel product.
Let's go walking through the bluebells with our statins and beta blockers, the buttons are popping and the blinkers are in place, surely we'll all be in a continuous state of dependent bliss before nightfall.
I hestitate, wondering if it's my role to highlight any of this or whether everyone should be allowed the freedom of their bad decisions.
A new disquiet is all around and the legal documents are being drafted to obscure contradictory history. It gets harder and harder to focus on the grey area between black and white, it jumps out of its shoes and picks up a bread knife from the cutlery drawer, upending the furniture and threatening to carve us all new eye sockets.
I hear the beep from a thousand phones letting the populace know it's no longer ok to breathe openly.
Boost and 2nd by 2nd are chapbooks - about fifty pages each, which seems exactly the right length - expanding on this theme - the world right now as experienced by one man, because the political as a universal and absolute response to ethical dilemmas is taking us to some incredibly shitty places. There's nothing here so tidy that it will fit on a placard or lend itself to elitist jargon of the kind which left at least me scratching my head over just what the fuck a red-brown tankie is supposed to be; and the reason there's nothing of that type is because grow the fuck up!
It isn't quite poetry, and it certainly isn't fiction, and although both books carry the same argument, where Boost is hard-headed and direct, 2nd by 2nd takes a more hallucinatory approach, I suppose you might say. The argument, which essentially summarises how well life inside Guy Debord's predicted Spectacle has been working out for us, frames the problem in terms which may hopefully inspire resistance, or at least some genuine commitment to leaving the world in a less shitty state than you found it.
Please someone take some fucking notice.
These are, by the by, almost certainly no longer available but keep an eye on the Wrong Revolution Bandcamp page if you're curious.
DISCLAIMER: If I know you either in person or through social media, or if I've written about something you wrote on this blog, criticisms made in the first paragraph almost certainly aren't referring to you. You hopefully know who you are.
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