There’s an awful lot I could be writing about; I haven’t had a boring week at all, I’ve been up to London to visit all my poet friends & colleagues at the TS Eliot Prize award ceremony, after spending a thoroughgoing couple of weeks reading the ten shortlisted books and then leading six and a half hours of workshops covering all ten of them — sessions that grew into very intense discussions at times. The trip to London was a balm to the soul and a chance to have lots of conversations with people I needed to have conversations with, meet some new ones, and be in some parts of town I don’t usually get to be in these days.
I arrived back from my day and a half completely shattered and am still very much catching up, which is why I’m not writing an account of the whole thing.
Briefly though, as many of you will know, erstwhile fellow Salt poet Anthony Joseph has won the Eliot Prize for this year, for a wonderfully evocative and moving book of sonnets about his father: Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury). I think it’s a great, even inspired choice on the part of the judges Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson, and predict that it’ll spawn a rash of sonnet sequences. I love a sonnet: lovely little boxes, like those little ones rings come in, with a shallow box and a deep lid. Indeed, I had a sudden rush of writing this morning and what came out? Five sonnets, in about an hour and a half, forming the beginning of a sequence! A sequence about that business in 2018 when I lost my flat, which was the reason I started this Substack in the first place. I feel like things seem to be shifting somehow — slightly — perceptibly if inchoately. Literature is a conversation, kids. Sometimes with yourself.
And with that in mind, here’s what I really came here to give you just now. You may have heard last week’s terrible news about Hanif Kureishi: he had a mysterious fall, in Italy, and is now in hospital unable to use any of his limbs. (N.b., his doctors say he will hold a pen.) Deeply shocking and upsetting news to those of us whose lives have been even slightly changed for the better, enriched, by his writing. Just awful.
But what’s he doing in his hospital bed? Why, he’s writing a Substack. Which he seems to be writing by dictation, from only a couple of days after the accident. He’s been describing the situation he finds himself in, and some of it has made hard — but moving, and always fascinating — reading. It’s thrown me back to last year when my mother had her stroke, and how terrifying that was. It’s filled me afresh with admiration for him (as I had for her, in her determination). I’ve been meaning to share is page here since last week, but was so distracted by those ten books that I didn’t. So here is today’s Substack from Hanif, in which he starts talking about writing itself:
I woke up this morning thinking about my old life and how dull it was. I wonder whether I enjoyed the repetition of it or whether I had just become lazy. Boredom has a lot going for it. Many writers, from Kafka to Beckett, have taken it as their subject. I was wondering about Dickens as a writer of boring people.
But his boring characters are not boring at all; they are idiots, cretins or intriguing grotesques. For me, the writer who specialises in boredom, and in boring people, is Chekhov, who even had the balls to write a story with the title, “A Boring Story”.
There are bores in all his plays, and he doesn’t spare us the details. This person, he says to us, has almost crushed me to death, with the weight of their interminable words, and now on stage, even as you pay to watch it, I am going to do the same to you.
What writing teacher, in giving their finest advice, would ever recommend to a young writer that they deliberately create some of the most tedious people on earth?
And by the way, I haven’t had a chance to read back yet, but it turns out he had started the page in September, and written a few posts already. Funny how things work out. And now I’m going to fulfil today’s actual To-Do-listed ambition of going to bed early while I can still just about claim it is.