the m john harrison blog

Click the pic & you might able to make out, on the far right, The End of Everything—

I’ve been waiting to be able to promote this for some time: Lara Pawson’s savage and superb Spent Life, with an introduction by Teju Cole, joins the McNally Editions list this Autumn. Every book on that list has something to it, something that will get under your skin. & their presentation is just beautiful.

Delighted to be joining Lara there soon with Climbers, more news on that as soon as I get it.

From an interview with Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 2000) in today’s Guardian—

“It’s when you are liberated from the narratives that we are so addicted to – plot twists and all that – when you liberate the images from that, the images have to say something,” he said. “Not by serving any narrative, but by just being what I found. The way you remember a film is never complete, you always remember flickers, images, moments. That’s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a film – it’s fragments of light and memory that are not related, but in a way they mean something, they hopefully make you feel something.”

Calculated return. Articulate theories of memory & the real. His process then & now. Why–it turns out–Amores Perros is one of my top ten films. Ever.

Looking forward to this!

Commodification values compete with the raw beauty of the show and, for the participant, the kinaesthetic rewards of the activity, the sense of it as a self-expression and an art. However good you are you can’t do the moves unless you have the right shoes, the coaching, the hours in the gym. So in some aspects everything is very classed and costed now, and also a bit like amateur golf.

But Gabriel Tallent’s second novel opens with two adolescents night-climbing without mats at Joshua Tree, one of the legendary bouldering venues of the world. They’re still young enough to be rehearsing their wry dirtbag dialogue, which is delivered subtly and fills the reader with an inexplicable sense of heartbreak. They aren’t safe. Their relationship is quite complex. They are using it to navigate two or three potential disasters. The threat of having to follow the same life as their parents. The economic precarity of their own future, metaphorised by the chains of tiny, fractious holds that cross the highball slab they’re working on. You can so easily fall off.

Tallent tells the truth about how it looks, how it sounds and smells. There’s a real sense of being there. He’s good at the lyrical too; although sometimes prone to banality, as in “the clouds were tangles of cotton-candy pink”. Accurate descriptions not only of the rock, its demands and the accompanying sensations, but of the kind of people who do the activity. The character of the rock and the character of the people who engage with it. So what are you climbing for? Have you forgotten? Or are you only just this minute realising? While they are not entirely rhetorical, there is no real answer to these questions, as Dan and Tamma discover, “except in the terrifying, day-in, day-out work of the attempt.”

Read my review of CRUX in the TLS, here

Of course I’m a fan of Brad Barr, even before he discovered string. & I love Maddie Ashman not just because of her surname.

Fiction often goes slowly in this part of the year so I’m down in Kent cat-sitting for a month, doing as much reviewing as I can get.

Reviewing is good for you because quietly deep-reading other people’s writing, when it’s of any worth (& sometimes when it isn’t), makes you think not about your own books but about your own life. Here’s a look at Mark Danielewski’s new one, a horse opera called Tom’s Crossing. Long, and long-awaited perhaps, but perhaps not as satisfying as House of Leaves. Next for the TLS I’m reading the grimly enjoyable Crux, by Gabriel Tallent: from hybrid cowboy adventures in Danielewski’s Utah to highball bouldering in Joshua Tree. Tallent’s West Coast existentialism, warm and icy at the same time, is making me think. (After that, for the Guardian, The Delusions by Jenni Fagan & Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection, Devotions.)

In other news The End of Everything should go out as an ARC soon. We’ve already had encouraging responses to it in bound manuscript. Plans for three short story projects and a possible novel are in hand: to encourage me to sort the wheat from the chaff in that direction, my Mastodon & BlueSky accounts are now on hiatus/closed. Comments still interdicted here, see post below.

It isn’t quite snowing. Later the cat stalks a magpie on the lawn. The other side of the french window I stalk the half-glimpsed possibilities of a novel, always sticking to rule number one. Take care of your core aims, make sure you know the difference between what you do and anything else that’s going on, and move along quietly to the next thing.

(By the way, haven’t read this but it looks both good & fun.)

As I get old and knackered, writing–or even thinking about writing–seems to require more time for the same amount of product. Other aspects of the trade crowd in. So in an attempt to give myself a little bit more space, the comments here will be closed at least until I decide how to face-lift the blog.

I’ll still post here about about work in progress, also publishing news that you won’t be able to get elsewhere. Not to mention the usual strange blend of book stuff & general sporadic upwelling from the tar pits of the unconscious. So do keep popping by, in case you miss something.

I’ve also disconnected from BlueSky and Mastodon.

Listen to this with your eyes closed. You’re walking along a rainy, empty street near the top of a hill somewhere in the dark. The bars & restaurants are closed for the night. You hear on the wind this exact music, with all its elevated banalities & glitches, playing intermittently from a crossroads up an even steeper sidestreet. When you get there, it’s stopped. You’re no longer sure where you are.

Also, check out John Lewis using what looks like his front room piano to “analyse” the opening & closing music from Bullseye: because it’s very funny.