Some Thoughts About Jims, Scarecrows And Books
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- Please spare a thought for Jim the cat. 31 months ago, when he first wandered into the bungalow we were renting in mid-Cornwall, he genuinely believed he had found a luxurious escape from the nearby barn where he had been living: a life where he would receive the many cuddles he requires to get through the day, be provided with a fresh catnip cigar for every new calendar month and no longer have the indignity of working for his own food. Little did he know he would soon be exploited as a marketing tool to sell niche polyphonic literary novels exploring the folklore and psychedelic landscape of an alternate dimension United Kingdom. Just look how desperately tired he is! “Can you just stop?” he yelled at me after I took the above photo. “Besides, barely anyone buys hardbacks, you’re never going to realise your dream of being Sylvia Townsend Warner and people are far too busy reading about fairy and goblin sex to bother to have time for literary fiction nowadays." He added that if I disturbed his sleep with one more bit of this paparazzi bullshit (he gets grouchy if he doesn't get his 21 hours a night) he would march right back, all 81 miles, to that damp draughty barn he once escaped from. What can I say, Jim? I'm tired too. Self-promotion makes we want to vomit. But, after the complete wreck my ex-publishers almost made of my career and the earnings they took away from me forever, I decided that I would do everything in my power to ensure this novel found a safe place in the world. I also had a notion that if around nine percent of people who subscribe to this newsletter pre-ordered the book, that safety would receive an additional buttress, giving me more time to write more books and less of a need to chaperone them through their commercial birth. It transpires I was being a tad optimistic there, probably with both targets. But the fact is it's being published this week, which means I can stop going on about it, and Jim can finally have some peace. I am also happy to say, after August's two visits to A&E, that I made it up to the Blackwell's warehouse in Gloucester on Friday to sign almost 1800 first edition hardbacks, all of which will be going out to their new homes this week (I am glad I have a short name). There is still time to grab one of them, with free international delivery, here.
- But what is more pressingly on my mind, perhaps, is the fact that I really need to properly organise my archive of scarecrow photos. I have so, so many of them, mostly taken with prehistoric phone cameras between 2009 and 2013 in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. I wrote some stories around a few of these photos a while back but I think most of the scarecrows already speak eloquently enough for themselves. When people find out I have a fascination with scarecrows they are always telling me about a scarecrow festival I absolutely must go to, in a village somewhere, but in my experience these "official" scarecrow events organised by committee never manage to have the same eerie charm as the scarecrows - or mawkins, as they are known in East Anglia - I have chanced randomly upon in the deep countryside. Maybe it's merely a matter of personal taste - I'm far more into low budget 1960s garage punk than I am prog rock, as a rule - but to my mind there is always something much more unique, creative and charismatic about these rudimentary farmer-made 'crows, out on their own, in their lonely spots. I also think there is something about them, even the summery examples, that's synonymous with those bleak East Anglian winters (I haven't found anywhere near as many scarecrows since living in the West Country), where the wind snakes over all the way from the Urals and digs its way into the ribs of anyone unwise enough to put a thick layer of meat on their bones.
- The Doors' keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, once accurately described Oliver Stone's 1991 film about the legendary group Manzarek started in 1965 with his friend Jim Morrison as "a white powder movie about a psychedelic band". Just how much damage did Stone's extremely silly biopic do to the reputation of The Doors? That's hard to quantify but there is no doubt that part of the film's cultural impact was that, for many years after its release, when people talked about The Doors, the real version and the cartoon, surface-deep version seen in the film seemed to merge toxically in their minds. Surrounded by people who had suddenly decided that they hated The Doors or at least believed that the passage of time had rendered The Doors irredeemably ridiculous, I was one of many who, in my 20s and early 30s, due partly to peer pressure and partly to not taking the time to remind myself how transcendentally brilliant The Doors were, was guilty of a knee-jerk recoil from my former love of the band. For the last 15 years or so, however, I have enjoyed their music no less unashamedly much than I did as a teenage idiot. I recently gobbled up the audiobook of Stephen Davis' 2004 biography of Jim Morrison for the second time. Despite its sensationalist approach and occasional descents into a writing style probably best summarised as "pothead tabloid", I got a strong sense of the real, vulnerable Morrison from it: a guy catapulted into the most insane level of fame in his early 20s, bent on self-destruction, probably an absolute nightmare to work with, who, for the most part, wrote some extremely advanced lyrics for his age, and, through those lyrics, helped co-create a completely unique, brooding goth-psych-jazz romantic otherworld that millions of people have enjoyed escaping to for almost sixty years. Weirdly, more than the arrests, the mad Dionysian concerts, the on-stage farm animals, the detail that most stuck with me was about Morrison never owning a wallet and instead carrying his dog-eared driving license and Diner's Club credit card around with him taped between two mangy bits of cardboard. It was upon noting this detail that, much more than on first reading, the nomadic, ragged, sad nature of Morrison really hit me. By mid-1968, before the 20 beers a day have fully had their effect on his waistband, he's already the sweaty mess of no fixed residence whose approach you dread in a bar, and who then slurs something part-intelligible about his sexual conquests and some band or other he is in. The difference is that he really did sleep with the people he claimed to sleep with and the band just happens to be one of the two or three biggest in the known universe.
- I'm off to my nearest Waterstones at 7pm this evening to chat to my friend Jon about Everything Will Swallow You (or EWSY or EWSU as some people are now calling it). I would describe the number of advance tickets sold for this event as "sort of ok". More people read my books than seven or eight years ago but fewer people come to my talks. I could turn this against myself: I used to make more of an effort to promote my events, and go to more energetic lengths to turn them into a performance of sorts, and my increased focus on my writing means I travel less widely for them than I once did. But I'm told, by booksellers and other authors, that the stats are in line with a trend going on throughout the whole industry. There are many factors at play: the increasing technological scope for virtual events, the tiny margins on book sales, and the algorithmic bollards and speed bumps that make telling anyone anything about anything small and uncontroversial via social media increasingly impossible. Then there's the pandemic's influence. We complained bitterly about the way it socially limited us. But then some of us realised we'd actually enjoyed some of those social limitations, learned a few things about ourselves from it, and became a little more reclusive as a result. I'm in no place to criticise: I'm a less gregarious person than I was in 2019, who spins far less plates, socially, and I'm entirely comfortable with that. But there is still something that feels quite vital, in the ritual of publishing a book, about meeting some of the people who are about to read it and realising they are three-dimensional beings, not just voices on a screen, and I'm very much looking forward to tonight, despite having suffered a minor relapse of my recent health problems this morning. Should I feel cool and jaded about publishing a book, having already done it 14 times? I don't think so, and I don't feel cool, or jaded. Now, as the process finally gets real again, I notice all the familiar little unavoidable mood swings, the caveat being that, with each successive book, I recognise them more for what they are, and realise that each one, high or low, will soon pass. It gets easier. It gets harder. "PUBLICATION DAY!" you finally shout, half-expecting something to burst into flames, despite all the times that it didn't in the past. But then you remember the facts: you're essentially only at the beginning. Virtually nobody has read your book yet. So you pop out to the hardware shop and buy a new mophead and those Triple A batteries you keep meaning to get for your landlady's weird thermostat system. "So now what do I do?" you think. You decide, as always, that the only logical answer is to write another. And that is where the really beautiful revelation finally occurs, the one where you realise you can do just that, and that this is what all this is about. You are right here, now, with a brain that still just about works, there is no shortage of notebooks or blank word processing documents on the planet, and it is all totally allowed.
Everything Will Swallow You is published on Thursday.
My Ex-Husband’s Landlady
You might think I am being unkind when I say “crazy shrub-haired widow” in reference to my ex-husband’s landlady, but I assure you I am not.
Tom Cox
