The everyday: you can’t fight it, not if you’re unemployed or half-employed. Music of the everyday: Half Man Half Biscuit (first two albums: Back at the DHSS and Back at the DHSS Again), I Ludicrous, Felt. Music made by people like you. The skint, the invisible. Disappearing in and out of obscurity.
Compare The Fall: Mark E Smith does not inhabit the everyday. It doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t experience its corrosive force. He is too intransigent; this is admirable, I have always admired it. Andre Breton, too – and Bataille: these figures are too strong for the everyday. They barely need to struggle against it.
I have absolute awe for those writers and artists who endure the everyday. Imagine Giacometti, up all night, working, working, making sculptures and destroying them. And Bacon, hungover, but up every morning, painting, destroying paintings he didn’t like (I was amazed to see a poor Bacon at a gallery in Edinburgh over the summer, it was terrible, a picture of a hat, some gloves hanging in a stairwell from the 1950s … almost as bad as those execrable portraits of Mick Jagger …)
Duras, however, she is different. I would like to write of her alcoholism, but sometimes I set myself this rule: quote only from memory, and if necessary, inaccurately. But I think of Duras as a woman who drank because of the too vast presence of the world. It was unbearable for her, and drink was a way of bearing it. Drink was another way of coping with the vastness of the everyday.
Lars Iyer's Blog 