the underwrite

 " When I was young I hoped to be a war poet. But then there was no war, so I was fucked."   Q: … A: Writers today live in a melancholic time. Postlapsarian is the word. Nothing is more common now than the writer who believes literature has worsened in recent decades. It has not. Instead literature’s influence on culture has declined. Writers —we are invariably obsessed with power and approval— believe this signifies a decline in their craft’s quality. They wrongly assume the quality of their texts gave them influence. So they fetishise the days of “great” writing that could “change” culture. Really, they yearn for writers to become celebrities akin to “influencers” once more. Ultimately the problem is not one of quality. Relevant writing is not good. It is useful. Useful things do work: they exercise force across distance. Writers do not understand their irrelevance because they refuse to recognise the nature of their craft: they deny the fact that writing “changes” peop...

It was on his eighteenth birthday that Joseph’s parents said he could no longer live at home. They had no savings and no wealth. And as lifelong renters they planned to move to a one-bedroom unit now he could support himself. Joseph did not love or hate his parents and knew he was entitled to nothing. This was a fair decision. Without complaint or protest he moved into a flat in the city’s south with five other strangers. The flat was small and, from a certain perspective, depressing. Two of these strangers slept in the converted living room. The others Joseph rarely saw because they worked night shifts. Joseph illegally sublet the flat’s smallest room, originally a utility cupboard. At night Joseph would breathe dust and sweat into the mattress used by an unknown number of previous tenants.         Joseph got a job filling packages at one of the large warehouses encircling the city. The multinational company that employed him paid minimum wage and his commute t...

I realised something had changed—or rather, ceased to change—when, on my twelfth day of lament, I sat in my living room, a lark singing on my windowsill. Unable to work that morning, I sat motionless in my chair, gazing at shafts of sunlight tracing their way across the wooden floor. To fight the dark grief enshading my heart I watched the burn of ordinary beauty, light doing its work of making lambent days that would otherwise be black or grey. If I could only be like that, I thought—the light raking across the ground, a melody unfurling from a lark’s mouth, something that was without justification—all would be okay.           The future disappeared that day subtly, gradually. I suppose the cars that trawled the highway first went quiet. Maybe the sylvan sounds of the nearby forest—leaves shifting as they reach after the wind that comes and goes too soon, the coos and cries of creatures traversing, entering, leaving life—were then silenced. But I noticed...

There was a man—a writer, that most difficult, temperamental, and vain kind of man—who, having failed to a produce a novel of any kind in his life despite his years of effort, decided to burn his unpublished works, wipe his hard drive of all literary fragments, sketches, and drafts, and commit the rest of his days to a more fruitful cause. So one morning he gathered all his worthless literary productions—reams of pages, scrawled notes, crumpled folders, printouts, manuscript drafts bound at print and copy shops, USB drives, and so on—and placed them in a box, on the ground, in his back garden. Dismayed by the pathetic, dusty pile that all his time on Earth had amounted to, he gave the box a pathetic little kick. It slid forward less than an inch.           As a younger, more hopeful man, the writer had envisioned another life for himself. At this age he thought he would be surrounded by glossy volumes bearing his name and the logo of an esteemed publish...