I used to keep a blog on my old Myspace page. I was in my mid-twenties, hauling my guitar back and forth across London, playing weeknight sets to half-empty rooms, writing whenever time allowed, until one day I thought better of the idea and deleted the lot. These days any aspiring writer is supposed to assert themselves online—voice every opinion, archive every thought, increase their visibility, whatever that means. It’s something I’ve resisted without much effort, preferring instead to just get on with the work, and even now, writing this, I’m reluctant. But then the other day I read an interview with Nora Ephron in The Believer in which she argued for the necessary frivolity of blogs, and for a relaxed attitude to their composition, since the world surely knows better by now than to take them too seriously. I remember unearthing the blog that Justin Vernon kept when he was recording ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ in his father’s Wisconsin cabin. Did it ruin the illusion? A bit. But the music was unsullied.
I sat in the Primrose Hill sun this afternoon, looking out over the city and trying without success to summon some profundity of feeling as regards the fact that in a month’s time I’ll be leaving London, almost seven years since I arrived. What I was striving for was I suppose a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia. I’m sure it’ll come. Perhaps the prospect of moving to California and for at least two years devoting myself at last to writing is just too enticing. Friends I’ll miss, of course. But of the city itself I’ve had my fill. For now…
We’ve been listening to Beach House, Maps & Atlases, Paul Thomas Saunders. I’ve been reading Coetzee and Ralph Ellison. Also Gwendoline Riley’s new novel. (You’ll find towards the end of this interview in The Independent an amusing reference to a somewhat stilted phone conversation that she and I shared a few years ago.) That OPPOSED POSITIONS had me on the ropes far less often than its predecessors I think says more about me than the book itself, which is as merciless as ever.
Five weeks to go. Meanwhile we wait—for the EP to be mastered, for visa news from the embassy, for word from editors…