I Want to Live in Pedro Juan's World

Okay, I tried. I cycled down to my local library on Blackstock Road and took out a copy of Martin Amis' Dead Babies (I'd hoped for a copy of London Fields, but there was none). The story starts on page 13, and part one is entitled Friday. This does not bode well. I got up to page 17 and couldn't take any more. I felt defiled. There was so much contempt for the body, so much showing off to the reader (whatever that is), and so little love. And the voice, the writer, whatever you want to call it was trying to get me to collude in his loathing and self-loathing and smugness and Benny-Hillesque approach to sexuality. Which can be fine, if only he'd admit that that's what he's doing. I'm going to stop now. I feel dirty just talking about the book. So let me tell you about Pedro Juan Gutierrez's Tropical Animal (the book that I'm reading now) - a book full of love and sex and delicious insights about people and existence and writing. Things like: "You have to be willing to flay yourself. You strip off your skin until you're raw meat, and then throw yourself headlong into the novel until you hit the bottom of the precipice. Smashing yourself, skinning yourself, and breaking your bones against the rocks. It's the only way. He who doesn't dare to do it this way is better off leaving his paper and pencils on the table and dedicating himself to selling tomatoes or real estate." Fuck, yeah. Gutierrez loves the body and loves people and loves the messiness of being alive. After reading his first book Dirty Havana Trilogy, I needed a break of a couple of years before getting into Tropical Animal; they're not hugely different, but they are both beautiful and sexy and queer as anything. It's as if the heat of Cuba makes sexuality more fluid and turns the body's smells into aphrodisiac potions. That's the world I want to live in.

Listening to Martin Amis

In my attempt to do something writerly every day - or even more than one thing (because once I get started I want more and more and more) - I Googled "interviewing writers" so that I could listen to other people struggling with their work and find out what it took to make it. So, for some reason, the first writer I've been listening to is Martin Amis talking to Don Swaim in 1990 just after London Fields was published. I've never read Martin Amis and I'm not sure why. I feel awkward admitting that I don't read contemporary English writers. It feels like a secret, like something I shouldn't be telling people. But it's something to do with class and voice and history and turning to books to be challenged, inspired, and/or reassured. I don't find those things in English writers. Although having said that, it took me about 10 years of living in England before I could read Wuthering Heights and I was blown away. I felt reassured, taken by surprise. And I wanted more. I have what Martin Amis called "a sticky finger attitude" to writing - I like to imitate and steal and copy from other writers. I am backed-up by TS Eliot's saying that "Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal." So I think it's about time I dived in and started reading the English seeing as I'm writing a book that is about English-Jewish painters, abook that is very much about London and varieties of Englishness. I'm going to start with Martin Amis. Something else he says in his interview which I liked was that he believed that everyone had a novel in them - "the difference is the writer finishes the thing." He also advises the writer to "relax their intelligence" and to just write, to flow (yes, he uses the word flow), to stop editing as you go along.

How Sick Can You Get?

I've been living on a diet of Vitamin C, Ibuprofen, some apples, a Magnum Almond, some oranges from the care package Andra brought over when I told him how sick G. and I have been. Two men with flu in the same house is not a fun thing. I used to be a happy drunk; I am not a happy sick person. I am not a pleasure to be around. But things are looking up: I went to the chiropractor/accupuncturist today who sorted out my back, which becomes like an s-bend when I'm in bed too long and don't get enough exercise (eventhough G. claims that men are meant to lie on their backs with their legs in the air for long periods of time), and I've gone for a brief walk and I even had a look at Whitechapel Boys for the first time since I got back from Spain around Hanukah time. One thing I did think about when I was more flu-ey than I am today, is what it was like for people like Gertler, who had TB for so many years - what it must have been like to feel feverish and shakey and to not be able to function on the level your mind wants to. There's not a lot creative in being ill - I think it's what comes after those days or months of sick-time (there must be a better word for that stretch of time) - because already I can feel a renewed energy in me, the kind of mania that filled Gertler when he started to paint again.

The Good News

It was one of those emails I wait for. Like in the years when I used to walk with my eyes on the pavement hoping to find a £50 note. Or even a £1 coin. Well, after the Dear Shaun bit, they said The story you submitted to our 2006 contest, "Mark Gertler in 13 Sketches," was selected by our judge, Jonathan Safran Foer, as this year's first-placewinner. And then they said other things like we'll fly you to NYC and stuff. But by then I was in tears. And I thought: Now I know why those actors cry when they win the Oscar - it's years of hard slog and waiting and hoping and telling yourself that you're doing this only for yourself and not for anyone else. But those words "you have won" can bring you to your knees with gratitude. It's like arriving at the cathedral steps after a long pilgrimage. And, yes, on some level this is all hyperbole.

This is a real confidence boost for Whitechapel Boys - now I have to get this book done!