Category: W.

W. is bored of the music posts, and rather unpersuaded. ‘It’s just boring’, he says, ‘and I thought you weren’t going to mention Blanchot’. Your line of flight, he says, has hit the wall. There’s no escape from philosophy for me. ‘Just stay in philosophy’, he says. I tell him of books X and Y that I’m reading. ‘Your problem is you still respect scholarship’. The books I’m reading are scholarly, it’s true. ‘I couldn’t do anything like these books’, I tell him. – ‘You could if you had 20 years of funding at the CRNS’. Is he right?

‘Isn’t the trick to find what you and only you could write?’ I say. – ‘Oh yes, and what could you and only you write?’ – ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out’, I tell him. ‘Well it’s not music, is it?’ – ‘Why not?’ – ‘You don’t know anything about music!’ – ‘or about philosophy’. W. likes to test me on Spinoza: ‘What is a mode? What’s a substance? What’s an attribute?’ I tell him the Ethics is too hard. I’d bought Negri’s The Savage Anomaly to held me – but that was too hard, too. ‘Start with the Routledge Guidebook’. Ok – I’ll order that.

‘But seriously’, I tell him, ‘music is wide open. There’s a pluralism – new fields are opening up’. – ‘But what you write on music is so boring‘. – ‘I’ve only been trying to write about music for a week – and besides, we’re busy at work. Meetings and that. Developing synergies’. W. finds this amusing. ‘Synergies – what are synergies?’ – ‘So I only have about an hour a day for work. It’s a mad dash -‘

Is this true? This is supposed to be Deleuze summer. ‘It’s so hard’, I tell W., ‘I don’t think I’m up to it’. ‘Go back to lyrical self-abuse’, says W. ‘I can’t even do that. I’ve just got the proofs of the book, and I can’t work up any hatred’. – ‘What do you feel, then?’ – ‘Boredom’. – ‘Write about that’.

W. is particularly unimpressed with the posts which go through Will Oldham’s lyrics. ‘They’re so boring. It’s like an exercise’. – ‘They’re just notes’, I tell him, ‘I trying to find a way to write about him’. – ‘Why don’t you just listen to the albums and write whatever comes to mind?’

W., meanwhile, is rereading the notes he took ten years ago. ‘Better than anything I could do now’, he says, sending me them. I agree: they are good. ‘I had no friends, no girlfriend, barely any teaching, no television … What’s happened to me?’ – He’s started to melt, we agree, like the ice cap over Greenland. Soon there’ll be nothing left.

Every summer, I begin work with great ambition. By the end of summer, it’s all gone wrong. ‘Do you remember your paper on Hinduism?’, says W., ‘it became a paper on the ‘there is”. He finds this very funny. Funnier still that the music posts are going the same way. ‘Music and the ‘there is’ – for god’s sake’. Well, I haven’t got any other ideas. And that idea isn’t even my idea.

W. has sent his proofs off. The book will be out soon. Mine comes out in the fourth quarter of the year. ‘I think I’ve made up for the first book’, I tell him. W.’s book is immaculate. It’s proofread so many times it glistens. I wanted to write the puff on the back, but his publishers said I wasn’t famous enough. My puff would have been a lot better than the one I used, I said. W. agrees. But you’re not famous, he points out.

The copy of my first book I’d lent someone is returned to me. ‘It’s terrible’, I tell W., ‘do you think they’ll let me do another edition?’ – W. finds this very amusing. ‘How many copies do you think it’s sold? – Have you reached double figures, do you think?’

The most difficult thing, I tell W., is to reset my defaults. ‘I’m going to become a Deleuzian’, I tell him, ‘but it’s very hard. It’s very similar to Heidegger – it’s impossible to write about him in terms other than his own’. I am reading ‘Of the Refrain’ from Thousand Plateaus again. ‘It’s just impossible’, I tell W. Meanwhile there are synergies to develop. Meetings and meetings and meetings …

W. finds me in a despondent state on the phone. ‘Your lines of flight always go splat! against the wall, don’t they?’ He’s right. I’m like the cartoon mouse who hits the wall hard and then slides down. Why did I think I could escape philosophy for music? What madness was that?

Every year it’s the same, says W., every year a new idea. What are you writing on, he asks. ‘Will Oldham’, I say. I tell him I’ve printed out the lyrics and the tablatures (which I don’t understand). ‘But it’s not going anywhere, is it?’ It’s true. It’s going to be Blanchot again, isn’t it? I tell him I’m never going to write the word Blanchot again, I said (but I’m lying). It’s Dogma rules, which allows you to plagiarise from whomever you want. Plagiarise, but do not quote. And only one proper name per essay. These are just some of the things Dogma means.

Dogma’s a way of life, W. and I agreed back in Oxford. Friendship is very important to Dogma. Always praise your friends’ work to the skies. Never mention the work of careerists. Despise them. The rules of Dogma are yours to make up. It depends on the situation you’re in. Is everyone writing about the history of philosophy? Then drop the history of philosophy. Is it all commentary and paraphrase? Then drop that, too. What matters is clarity, we agreed, and limpidity. And passion, I said. You have to be willing to fight to the death for every line, we agreed. And there must be no scholarship, we agreed.

Of course it’s already been done. ‘Read this’, says W., giving me Badiou’s Ethics, ‘pure Dogma’. But it was Flusser who is the first dogmatist for each of us. Limpid 4-5 page essays on every topic, each beginning as though over again, each written far from the mainstream, in many different languages, overlapping in theme and content, but never aping itself. ‘Do you see how beautifully and simply he writes?’, I said to W., when I showed him the Writings. ‘It’s because he knows everything and has forgotten everything’.

Devon in the sun, visiting W. for work. Finished Hofman on the plane and thought to myself: I should have a go at writing like him. Picking up turns of phrase, the way people become present in gesture and in speech. The other person as style, as the incarnation of a style or the unfolding of a mode equivalent to a substance – a way of being, a how-being-is rather than a thing. Nothing mysterious about the otherness of the other, I think to myself, it’s all there on the surface, but how to attend to it as magnificently as Hofmann allows his narrator to do of his dead grandfather?

I took a bottle of Tequila with me and we drank until W. told me when I drink I become lairy and apocalyptic and swear a great deal. We had some Tequila then a bottle of white wine and then an excellent bottle of red wine a student gave him. ‘We’ll never drink anything like this again’, said W. We listened to two compilations I made of the Fall in W.’s red living toom. W. when he drinks gets to a point where he says, ‘the problem with you is ….’ or ‘your problem is …’ I tell him I’m going to write on music from now on. W. finds this very funny. ‘You don’t know anything about music’.

Later that night we go up to W.’s study and spread his Rosenzweig books on the table. ‘He wrote The Star of Redemption in his early 30s’, W. says. He always gets to a point, when he drinks when he says ‘How is it possible for a human being to write like that?’ He has The Star in German – 500 stern pages – and the little book, unpublished in Rosenzweig’s lfietime which he wrote in a month as a simpler presentation of the ideas in The Star. ‘How is it possible …’ he says.

The next morning, Smog and we make up new lyrics to ‘A Hit’: ‘We’re not going to be Rosenzweig, so why even bother’. We walk along the coast speaking of our stupidity. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. It has absolutely no consequence’. I ask W. what buoys are for. ‘To mark hazards or shipwrecks’, he said. And I said of the buoy we passed, ‘there’s the wreckage of your career’. Now we’ve walked too far; our shins ache. We catch the ferry back across the Tamar.

Cocktails in the evening. Martini, very simple and pure. W. tells me I have to behave and not talk about our thighs. All the fat from my stomach, I had told him – and he always likes to touch my stomach – has become muscle on my thighs and so I can’t fit my trousers. The next morning, hungover again, W. goes through his Sainsburys magazines deciding what to cook that evening. We go shopping and I go out and buy ‘fighting juice’ (cans of Stella) and pork scratchings for an aperitif. W. asks me lots of questions about food. ‘How come you eat so much?’ That night, we burn CDs (the new Low album, Sufijan Stevens, Danielson Famile) and watch Dodgeball. 

Today, W. found a new way to torment me. He said: you’re so full of pathos, everything you write is full of pathos. But he said he quite liked my new book. ‘I almost wept’, he said of the third chapter. But he doesn’t think I really mean it. ‘You don’t really feel those things, do you?’ I reminded him of a pathetic sentence in his new book. He said, I wrote it for you. Then he says: ‘everything you write is pathetic’, and then I said: ‘you have to discover what you and only you can write’. He says, as he always says, ‘I like it when you whine’. He likes my posts about academia, he says, and I agree. ‘Everything was leading up to them’, I said, ‘it’s all downhill from here’. ‘You should always write from hatred’, said W.

W. always says I am his id. He says, ‘you can barely control yourself’ and does impressions of me writing. ‘It’s like an ape’, he says. Sometimes he tells me to behave. See those doors? he says, as we go into some posh room or another, ‘yes’, no more talking about your thighs when you get in there. Or your illnesses. And don’t touch yourself.

Every year I tell him about my latest plans to escape philosophy. ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re stuck like the rest of us’. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me, and set out my Hindu stall. And what was it last year? W. is very pleased he taught himself Hebrew. This year, I tell him, it’s music. I wasn’t going to tell him, I said, but surprise him when a gleaming new book comes out all about music. ‘What are you going to write on?’ – ‘Smog’. – ‘What are you going to say?’ – ‘I don’t know’. W., who plays guitar, finds this very funny. ‘It’s music from now on’, I tell him.

I always remind W. of Deleuze’s example of the wasp and the orchid, the wasp becoming-orchid and the orchid becoming-wasp. We’re Brod and Brod, I tell him, and neither of us is Kafka. What I mean to say is that I am not his id and he is not my ego, but that’s what we become when we are together. Both of us are becoming-Brod. I remind him of the funny dance sequences of Ben Stiller’s team in Dodgeball. ‘That’s what we should do in Dogma Philosophy’. ‘We need uniforms’. S., who is with us all weekend, finds us insufferable but sometimes entertaining as you would two apes in a zoo. W. says he’ll always write out of hatred at conferences from now on. ‘No scholarship’, he says, ‘just hatred’.

W. can cook, play guitar, read several languages and converse politely. ‘You’re the complete humanities academic’, I tell him, ‘you have a broad personality’. W. finds it funny that I can’t do any of these things. ‘What do you do all day?’ he asks me. Then he tests me on Spinoza: ‘what is a substance? what is a mode?’ he asks. I tell him I gave up the Ethics. ‘It’s too hard. I only read about music now’.

We read the paper. The Observer has a long section on climate change. ‘We’re doomed’, I said, ‘we’re all going to die’. I ask W. whether it will get hotter or colder. Colder, he says, when the North Atlantic Drift switches off. There’ll be ice as far down as Nottingham, I said. We both agree: the Petrol Crisis will trigger a world wide financial collapse. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do’, he said, ‘we’re doomed’. Then, glum, I go out and get more beer.

Kafka came on holiday to Plymouth, said W., making it up. And Brod. ‘Didn’t he have a corner shop here with Brod?’ said W., still making it up. W. tells me he catches the ferry to the gardens sometimes to read. ‘What do you read?’ – ‘Kafka’. – ‘In German?’ – ‘No, it’s too hard’. We walk up the road by the Hoe where the council have stuck in little metal pillars with the names of famous residents written on them. ‘I’m going to be there one day’.

We joke how much money our books will make us. W. is very smug about the amount of times his has been proofread. ‘How many have yours sold?’ I tell him writing a paperback is a serious business and I’ll only do so when I have an idea. W. notices the Moleskine notepad I bought for myself in America. ‘It’s for ideas’, I said. ‘What ideas have you had today?’ I told him I’d written the words ‘lairy’ and ‘apocalypse’.

As we eat the chicken from Sainsburys I feel a great excitement. I speak about God and the Queen and the chicken. W. can see how excited I am. Yes, it’s the food, I said. It makes me rapturous’. I’ve never seen anyone who likes food as much as you, says W., who has only eaten a small breakfast and refused the pork scratchings I bought as an aperitif. ‘I don’t want to spoil my appetite’, he said. 

‘You want to be famous’, says W. to me. We compete to see who is the least careerist. ‘Refuse promotions’, says W. He thinks I publish writing here because I want to be famous. ‘I write just as much as you’, says W. ‘but I don’t publish it’. It’s true. Sometimes he sends me his lecture notes.

Summer in Devon. We are in HMV looking for Bad Santa on DVD. I had told him how good it was. I had brought Tripping with Caveh with me, which features Will Oldham. ‘He’s so tender’, I say. ‘He’s got a lovely smile’, says W. We listen to volume 3 of the Nick Cave B sides boxset. W. rhapsodises. I am drunk, lairy and apocalyptic. W. says, ‘the problem with you is …’ and we’re off again.

‘I don’t know where my misanthropy comes from’, I tell W., ‘it’s not that I think I’m better than anyone else. I’m worse, in fact’. Saying that, I remember another reason why I blog: to surround myself with something like a halo of names. To write the word Shostakovich is already to pushed the world away. The word Hamlet is enormous, bigger that the white sky through my office windows.

‘When I feel strong’, I tell W., ‘I can string together all kinds of ideas which usually float around my head without connection’. Yesterday, coming in for the audit, I thought of the glass of pure alcohol of which Bataille writes somewhere. Then I remembered the name of that piece by Messiaen: ‘From the Canyons to the Stars’. ‘From Alcohol to the Sky’. No, not the sky, but that unto which it gives when the word Hamlet is pronounced.

W. is amused I am to be a keynote speaker at an upcoming conference. ‘They’ll tear you apart’, he says. ‘What are you going to speak on?’, he asks. ‘Something very simple’, I tell him. He is amused. ‘Besides I would happily be torn apart’, I say, remembering ‘The Hounds of Love’ by Kate Bush.

W. and I always return to one of the essays Blanchot wrote on the occasion of Bataille’s death. Bataille always spoke with absolute seriousness, Blanchot recalls. Everything was at stake, even in the simplest conversation. ‘That’s what I feel when I talk to X and Y’, W. says, naming two people we admire, ‘but I never feel it with you’. It’s true, of course. So little is at stake for me in conversation. ‘But when I write …’, I begin. ‘We’re no good at writing’, says W. This is true. But there is something there. ‘What?’ asks W., ‘what is there?’ He’s become so militant since reading Badiou.

I know I’ll be happiest when no one reads Bataille. ‘He understood’, I say to W., ‘there’s no one who experienced it as intensely as Bataille’. ‘Understood what?’ says W.

Then I remember the book I bought a few days ago in London. Adventures on the Freedom Road. It’s author is an idiot of course, no question of that, but there are interviews with Klossowski and Leiris. R. M. was with me when I bought it. I kept reading the letter from Blanchot it quotes: ‘I no longer see even my closest friends …’ Then I remember a line from another essay Blanchot wrote, recalling the importance of the word friendship for Bataille.

I won’t rehearse all that again here. The fifth chapter of the first book is undoubtedly the worst. I rewrote it a couple of nights before the book was due in, staying up all night. It was disastrous, but I am fond of my little disaster even now. How well I remember the open contempt to which I was subjected when an earlier version of that chapter was published as a paper. I have always loved contempt; the condition of my specialism in the UK secretly pleases me. I like to imagine that colleagues at other universities look at me with vague disgust, but even that isn’t true. One of them came up the stairs to my office and said: ‘I didn’t know I had brothers at this university’. He was referring to lecturers in philosophy. I left him with someone else and fled to the library.

‘Houllebecq is good, really good’, I tell W., ‘I was surprised’. ‘It’s pure disgust’, says W. And I wonder to myself: what if I could translate the disgust which saturates me into writing? But I lack the strength …

Which one of us hates it all more?, I ask W., who is very good at hiding hatred under a sheen of politeness. I know the answer. Hatred is necessary. Nothing begins except in the midst of the indifference of the world. ‘You have to reach that place where disgust presses out from you into the world and it presses back. The frontier between you and the world becomes rock hard. Then you can retreat and something might begin’. That’s why Houellebecq emigrated to Galway, I tell myself. It’s why Bernhard lived in the countryside.

Kafka is always our model. ‘How could a human being write those stories?’, W says, again and again. It is always the end of the night when he says this. We have drunk a great deal, the sky opens, it is possible to speak of what is most important. It’s hard to speak clearly. I slur in agreement. Drunkenness forces you to experience the difficulty of forming words in the midst of a kind of streaming of language. Words, now, have a price. They are born out of a struggle. To say the word ‘yes’ is difficult. And you can’t remain upright. Remember the great moment in Blue of Noon when the protagonist collapses into an open grave. Above him, the night.

In truth, all words are drunken. Language drinks. This is why Houellebecq drinks. Only then can he feel the half-words streaming through him. All of language runs through him. Is it possible to write? Perhaps; but first, there is the wonderful feeling of immersion.

Somewhere in Galway, now, Houellebecq is drinking. He’s drinking for all of us, for you and for me.

‘Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?’, I ask W. during his recent visit. ‘We’re both Brod’, says W. He is leaving for the South; the audit is over. To keep me amused in long meetings, he imitates me. ‘You look like an ape’, he says, ‘and you hold your pen strangely’.

W., as always, is intruiged by my eating habits. He asks to put his hand on my belly. I had made him do the same when we went to see Plymouth Argylle play. ‘It’s bigger than at All Tomorrow’s Parties’, he said then. ‘It’s even bigger now’, he told me over the weekend. ‘That’s because I’ve let myself off the gym whilst I am doing the book’, I said. W. marvelled. ‘This is just the start. You’re going to get really fat’.

We remember J. C.’s elasticated trousers. ‘Now he really is fat’, I said, and remind W. of eating breakfast with M. N. ‘He had five breakfasts’, said W, ‘he ate everything on the menu’. ‘Levinas was chubby’, W. reminds me, ‘I like chubby men’. We remember the fat singers we admire, drinking wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. ‘He’s angry because they’re fat’, I said of the singer of Modest Mouse to an American. ‘No, he was always angry, then he got fat’, he said. ‘Do you think he minds being fat?’ I asked. ‘He has other issues’.

Kafka was thin, W. reminds me. ‘Yes, but he was ill’. ‘Blanchot was thin’, says W. ‘But he was ill as well’. ‘I bet Brod was fat’, says W. ‘Definitely’. ‘That’s why we’ll get fat’, W. says. ‘Why?’ – ‘Drinking’. – ‘Why do you think Brod drank?’ – ‘Because he knew he was stupid.’

W. and I have drunk too much. We eat at the Sardinian restaurant. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’, I ask him. – ‘Literature. We should have done maths. Have you noticed everyone clever did maths?’ A few names are mentioned. ‘You’re right’, I say.

W. has grown fond of telling me my tank is nearly empty. ‘You have to read more’, he tells me. ‘You were okay for a while, you got by on your personality, but now you’re tank is nearly empty. The needle’s going …’ and he waggles his finger like a needle waggling. I promise to read Spinoza properly. ‘In Latin’, W. demands.

The general election. We are halfway through our audit. W., our external auditor, needed entertaining. I took him out into the city for dinner and then for drinks. ‘Don’t get me drunk’, he said, which meant only one thing.

A couple of days ago he said: you’re Badiou’s worst nightmare. I said to W.: no, you’re Badiou’s nightmare.

Half-drunk, the pair of us, I take him on a tour of the bridges which cross the magnificent river in our city. Eventually, we find ourselves in a deserted place beside the art gallery and the Millenium Bridge. A big screen has been erected by the river. How big is it? How expensive was it? Security guards stand around. ‘What’s going on?’, we ask them. It’s an outside broadcast, they tell us. But there’s no one there.

‘If you want to get warm, go inside’, says a security guard. In we go. Strange sight: about fifty students, each wearing a different coloured vest: blue, red, yellow. We go and talk to the yellow lot. They are aimiable enough. Then we spot a lone blue vested student, all on his own. He’s rather like the weak beast separated from the bigger pack. W. attacks. He is withering. As for me, I’m bemused. Who should I hate here, I think to myself? The students? No, I think: it’s the BBC.

Look at them, I think to myself, the scum. BBC technicians listen to W. haranguing the blue vested students. I don’t help him. Then, true horror: a red vested student comes up to tell W. off. ‘Don’t talk to him like that’, he says, indignantly. I am still bemused, stunned, by the stupidity of this great expensive stunt. And the stupidity of the students? It’s not about discussion. No one wants to discuss anything. the blue vested students don’t want to say a word. ‘They’re full of pure hatred’, says W., ‘all Tories are’.

We go outside and talk to the security guards. They agree with us. It’s all meaningless, a waste of money. What are the BBC thinking? What have these students got to do with our city? Then the students come out: the BBC are filming. ‘This is like a scene in an independent movie’, I tell W. ‘The protagonists wander all night and come across an outside broadcast …’

W. says: ‘What happened to the working class? They should come down here and kick the shit out of everyone’. Of course he’s right. Now we are crossing back over the bridge. I am still bemused, half-stunned. ‘The problem is’, I tell W., ‘I don’t know who I hate more’. I think of the blue vested students, a whole clutch of them. They filled me not with horror, but with dread.

As I type, I have the television on. Now I see a live broadcast from my city. Now I understand what was going on. The students are to take a place on a map of Britain which is spread across the tarmac. Stupid presenters run about. W. and I asked the students why they turned up. ‘Free beer’, they said. But there was no free beer, we asked. Free coffee, free sandwiches, but no beer.

We were not thinking of beer but of W.’s Martini from the bar in Plymouth. Pure alcohol with a squirl of lemon peel at the bottom of the cocktail glass. Half drunk, with another day of the audit to go, we dreamt of a politics as pure as that alcohol.

W. has finally sent off the typescript of his book. He’s read it 18 times in total; a colleague of his read it twice, it’s been proofread by a professional proofreader, by his publisher and is going out to be read again. It will be the perfect book.

W. still thinks we took a wrong turn. Badiou has got it right: philosophy is about things, not language. Our Philosophy Dogma movement has been pre-empted by Badiou’s book Infinite Thought. ‘I haven’t read anything this good for 20 years’, says W. ‘It’s the same feeling I had when I read Deleuze for the first time’.

What are we going to do now? First of all, amidst all the administrative madness, find time to draw up our Dogma rules. We came up with a few for philosophical essays when we were in Oxford a few weeks back: no quotations. No more than one proper name used once. You love the dogma rules, and not try to trick your way out of them. Tell no one in your audience about dogma.

A dogma conference: three speakers in two days. Papers circulated in advance. Audience present by invitation. Each speaker can invite five ideal interlocutors. The conference organiser pays for transport and accommodation, if possible. Maximum three people at the conference. Each speaker circulates papers in advance. There will be around 3 hours for each speaker to deliver a paper and to engage in discussion. No careerism. No big name speakers. All this is something W. has been running for some time.

A Dogma conference puts all the speakers under constraint. Rules are flexible and can change from year to year. Core rules, though remain. No more secondary commentary. No more will we appear as avatars of whatever thinker we identify with. (More of this later when the academic madness dies down.)

Visiting W. When W. and S. dress up to go out on Saturday night, they look like German terrorists; I call her Elfride Biscuit and him, in his suit, Helmut Omelette. They are part of the Omelette International, because to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

More discussion of Philosophy Dogma. Badiou has pre-empted us. W. passes me a copy of the new Continuum edition of Infinite Thought. ‘He’d hate us’, says W. – ‘Rightly so.’ The whole weekend we have a self-disparagement competition. ‘We’re not creative, we’re destructive.’ – ‘We suck the life out of everything.’ Neither of us has ever had a single thought. I tell W. that I might be on the verge of one. He looks sceptical. ‘Do you think we too a wrong turn with Blanchot?’ – ‘Our whole lives have been a wrong turn.’ It was literature, we decide. Opening The Castle was fatal.

On Saturday nights, dressed up, W. and S. go to the cocktail lounge which is part of the Plymouth Gin distillery. It is members only; you don’t have to pay for membership, but the bar staff have to like you. These German terrorists like the high life. W. likes cocktails which are as close to pure alcohol as possible. He has a Martini. It is served in a frosted cocktail glass with a curl of lemon rind floating in the clear liquid. It is beautifully pure. I taste some, and I know this must be what Debord drank, or Duras: it is the everyday distilled, the essence of boredom in a glass. Only it is concentrated boredom, strong and deadly.

Slowly, Spurious disappears from blogrolls. This is a good thing. ‘I’ve got nothing to say’, I tell W. ‘That’s never stopped you’, says W, and then he says, ‘So what is this thought you’re on the brink of?’ I tell him it has something to do with suffering and writing, where writing can stand in for any infinitive. W. finds this funny. Later he says: ‘At least Blanchot wrote fiction. You don’t have that excuse.’ And I think to myself: perhaps writing fiction is an excuse. And then: what would it be to concentrate all of writing, all of writing, onto a single page?

I flew down to see him; bad weather meant the plane could only go as far as Cardiff. Air Wales puts us on a coach for the rest of the journey; it takes three hours, and I only have a draft of the new manuscript to read. Horror: three hours in the dark with my own prose. I realised, as I read, that it is a long way from ready. I can’t send it off for the 28^th, as I intended, whatever the consequences. As I read, I am reconciled to my first book. If it was bad, as it was, this is not because I do better. That was the limit of my abilities, and the second book doesn’t even approach that.

All weekend, W. and I wonder why we are not better thinkers. ‘There is a threshold you have to pass across’, I tell him, ‘what permits that is not intelligence, though that is important, wide reading, though that is, too; it is not even tenacity’. ‘What is it then?’, W. asks, who has newly adopted Badiou’s intolerance for vagueness. But I have no idea.

The new book’s going to be a fiasco, I told W. on the phone. Ten days left and I’m still writing chunks of chapter three. Then you can whine about it for months on your blog, said W. and of course he was right.

W.’s book has been proofread three times – once by a colleague, once by his publisher and once by the publisher’s proofreader. How many time times has yours been proofread?, he asks, knowing the answer. I haven’t finished it yet, I told him.

Stayed up late last night writing. Nothing is possible today, so I tidied the office, readied the paperwork for the Internal Audit and went on an eating tour of the city. I drift towards morbid obesity, which is okay because Guy Debord did too, and I’m reading him in between writing bad prose.

W. and I have had a new idea: philosophy dogma, similar to the Danish film movement Dogme or OULIPO. There are a number of rules which we are still elaborating. I’ll post them here eventually.

W. is a feeder. I write to tell him what I’ve eaten; he writes back for more details. When we met the other day, we had conversations like those of people cleverer than us. 

A year after I submitted the final copy of the typescript, W. is still polishing his book. ‘It’s like Gnosticism,’ he says, ‘if your book is full of typos, mine has to be pristine’.

‘I’ve reached new levels of self-disgust.’ – ‘You’re always disgusted at yourself.’ – ‘No, but this is worse. The book is so bad.’ – ‘Why did you read it?’ – ‘I don’t have a copy. But then one appeared in the library.’ – ‘Why did you get it out?’

‘You know what I feel? Ashamed. But it’s good to feel shame. It’s appropriate.’ W. says, ‘I thought you were supposed to be finishing your new book.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Why not?’ – ‘I’m ashamed.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ – ‘After this book I’ll …’ – ‘write a book about Smog.’ – ‘Exactly.’ – ‘But you don’t know anything about music.’ – ‘No, but I know a guy who plays guitar.’ – Who?’ – ‘You. But you can’t play chords, can you?’ – ‘No. You’re not going to write a book about Smog, are you?’ – ‘No.’

W. has been to a conference. ‘You’re famous’, he says I said: ‘why?’ – ‘These guys were asking me whether I was W.’ – ‘They read the blog? Haven’t they got anything better to do? Anyway, it’s going downhill. It’s terrible. I should call it “Shame.” Really, it’s drivel.’ W. says: ‘I told them you’re really fat. Too fat to come to conferences.’ – ‘Tell them I can’t make out of my bedroom. That it’s like something off Jerry Springer.’

W. feels a failure, he says. Who can help but feel a failure? Ah, but I expect he thinks I luxuriate in it. True enough, I admitted it, and said: ‘I know my problem. I can’t begin anything’; nothing begins here. ‘Well that can be your problem then’, said W.

We had just been talking of those who had been seized by a Great Problem and how much better at philosophy they were than us. I have no problem with this. W. suspects it’s because I think I have a Great Problem. ‘What, the inability to begin?’ I say. He detects a pride in my failure. He thinks I write of my failure far too much. ‘Spurious is just about what a failure you are’, he says. Granted … And then he said, the previous day, that he liked the posts on buffoonery. ‘That’s my concept’, I said. ‘Michel Serres has written a whole book on it’, he said.

Conversation with W., who, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, makes sure he is always reading something from outside his disciplinary expertise. A book on mathematics, on infinity, on economics … This is admirable, and W. is certainly right to insist that this is the least that the authors of Anti-Oedipus would ask from us. But then I’m still sore that W. agreed with me that we ought to be content to write ragged books, to write quickly, on the hoof (his example was Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) and yet is still polishing his book, nearly a year after I submitted mine to the publisher.

Of course, W. was right: my book is a mess, a living afront. I now have my own copy and I’m flayed daily on the hooks of it’s typographical errors. W.’s book, proofread by a colleague, is immaculate …

Conversation with W., who’s read the preface to my book. ‘You make too many references to yourself.’ – ‘Where?’ – ‘In the preface.’ – ‘Oh you mean the articulation of my thesis.’ – ‘It’s unnecessary. Let someone else do it for you. Levinas didn’t write one for Totality and Infinity.’ I protest: ‘But I spoke to X. and he said: “where is your thesis?”’ – ‘You shouldn’t listen to X. No one should write prefaces for their books. Are you depressed now?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘Good. Well I’ll ring you tomorrow and depress you about the first chapter.’

Then to write a preface is to try and supplant the place of the reader, of the act of reading which would decide what it was that had been argued. To write a preface would be ungenerous: it attempts to stand against the proliferation of readings of the book, to safeguard the univocity of a message when that message is more equivocal and more complex than might appear. It is as though the book itself had something like an unconscious – not the unconscious of its author who wrote the book, but a darkness or a reserve in the book itself. As though the book were alive and dreamed and the reading, my encounter with the work, were only the unfolding of a dream latent in the book. Of what does a book dream? Of itself, which is not to say of its pages, of its white pages and black ink, but of that source from which it never ceases to well each time it is encountered by a reader.

Perhaps W. is right about prefaces, though I still remember what X. said, and recall my impatience when I read theoretical books whose argument is too elusive to grasp. ‘How much time do you think I have?’, I find myself asking these books. But this is also an attempt to avoid the act of reading. An act? No, something like a passion. A passion linked to a kind of passivity and a kind of patience which I always fail.

Conversation with W., who likes it when I whine here at Spurious. I haven’t written for the past few days, I tell him, because I feel a little ill. Write about being ill, he says, I like it when you whine. He reminds me I ripped him off in comparing Cat Power to Josephine the Mouse Singer a few posts ago (he is right of course). Then he reminds me how much we admired the singers at All Tomorrow’s Parties who 1) were fat (or at least plump), 2) swigged wine out of bottles, 3) had tattooes – i.e., the guy from Modest Mouse and the guy from Arab Strap. Both were slightly menacing, too – the guy from Modest Mouse reprimanded people in the crowd for throwing flyers at the band and both were self-deprecating.

Yes, we liked these singers, we felt (as I said at the time) in the presence of greatness as much as we disliked Vincent Gallo. I had already agreed with W. to let myself get obese, but he reminds me that my new hobby of hillwalking is an obstacle to this plan. I tell him I walked 33 miles last weekend and he says, you’re always like that – you throw yourself into something, and then you know how it ends up? In tears, I say. W. and I speak of our vehement dislike of administration and bureaucracy. I speak wistfully about writing a book on ethics next year. I’m tired of commentary, I tell him. But what are you going to say?, he asks me. I don’t know.

I speak to W. on the phone. ‘Have you read anything?’ he asks; ‘nothing, nothing’. I tell him I have no time – admin, marking, proofs. Then he says ‘I’ll tell you something that will really depress you’, and he recommends the new edition of Angelaki, which has interviews with prominent French thinkers like Badiou and Serres. W. and I find these thinkers frightening. Publishing original articles at 18, studying in subjects other than philosophy and so on. The best bit, W. says, is when Serres advises the interviewer on no account to get a job in a university. The interviewer objects: how is he to make a living otherwise? W. is a great despiser of academia. We talk about a prominent young philosopher. ‘He has a research position’, I say, ‘not like us – well, that’s my latest excuse’. Ah, a research fellowship, the answer to life’s ills -. But no, the philosopher in question works as we work…. There is no excuse.

Dissipation now term starts again. Endless administrative tasks distract me from work. How to regain the focus I had over the last few days? The intensity? I speak to W. on the phone, and we agree we are not proper philosophers. So we make a pact: 1) to read for two hours day – starting from the beginning of a book and working patiently to the end and 2) to write for one hour a day in a manner that is concentrated, cumulative, risk-taking. This will have to be done in the evening, as there are too many things to get on with at work. W. says we have to read the books in the original language as well, which is a pain. He also says note-taking doesn’t count as real work. W. is cruel.