New Parisian adventures in lo-fi (among other things)

minor [i]ncidents; ever-flowing authorial tears

Somewhere near Gare du Nord, Paris

Archipelagos, not islands

Back in Blighty after a couple of days in Paris, where I attended the excellent minor [i]ncident event, organised by minor literature[s]. It was great to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and discuss the future of literature and art in general. I sat on a panel with Berlin-based critic Ryan Ruby, London-based philosopher Serena Richards, and Paris-based editor Clement Ribes, with another adopted Parisian, Ben Libman, officiating as moderator. It was an interesting discussion, with a lot of different angles, the main takeaways for me being the importance of rescuing literature and art from the claws of academia and the so-called industry, to take it back to the streets, and the drinking establishments associated with it, of course.

Being able to travel to Paris places me among those privileged enough to travel more or less at will. But my invitation, in any case, was to talk to others in real life, wherever you are, and start doing things with them. Engaging in the real world is key in 2024, for if we limit our interactions to what goes on in totally enshittified social media platforms, rancid institutions (like the university, among others), and the spaces of the industry, we limit the scope of our ideas to what algorithms and commercial and ideological apparatuses judge to be of use. The answer to the isolation of the artist has always been creating your own milieu, doing things with others, but never more so than today, when climate breakdown and wars that follow wars are keeping us in a state of outraged paralysis.

How to reach out to others and how to conspire? How to create archipelagos instead of islands? And how to move beyond ideas and towards action? We need to cut out a space for praxis, if literature and art are to be relevant. I don’t know how to achieve this. I’m trying to figure it out myself. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

The sadness of the published author (again)

It must have been a slow day at the Guardian on Monday, for they rehashed a favourite topic of discussion: what little money (most) writers make. I have written about this already, and the particular space writers occupy: neither salaried workers, nor capitalists — more like hobbyists in denial. I won’t go over all of this again; you can always refer to the pieces above to get a full picture of what I think. But I can’t help feeling that, given the way it is often framed, this discussion reveals just how much the mind of the average Anglo-American author has been colonised by the utilitarian thinking of neoliberalism

For example, here’s Yara Rodriguez Fowler — a writer for whose activism I have great respect, by the way — repeating many of the familiar talking points on this topic:

Yara Rodrigues Fowler, the 31-year-old author of acclaimed novels Stubborn Archivist and There Are More Things, says that realising “how badly paid” writing is has led her to think: “what’s the point of writing another one?”

“My friends are civil servants and doctors; they have pensions and maternity pay. I am pursuing a profession I feel passionately about and is held in high esteem. It’s very cool when you go to a party and say ‘I’m a novelist’. But actually it’s not very cool to be financially rewarded as if it’s a hobby.”

I’m not sure reducing writing to its exchange value is the emancipatory flex we think it is. And comparing the production of literature to the work of civil servants and doctors. Really? Is it the same? And of course, that recurrent trope was there too: that seeing writing as a hobby would somehow make it lesser. As was the accustomed passing lament that something that “is held at a high esteem” isn’t compensated well enough. By whom? Who should be paying for our passions? Already broke indie publishers? The top five publishing houses? Do you really want to go there? And does this mean that jobs that aren’t held at high esteem deserve to be badly-paid? So much to unpack! So many things to discuss on a LinkedIn post!

At the risk of repeating myself, comparing freelance writers to those who work under a contract (say doctors or civil servants, but also factory workers, the guy sweeping our sidewalk, and so on) is like comparing apples to carrots. As a writer, I’m not my publisher’s employee — I’m a freelancer, subject to different rules, and different problems, including that of isolation. And no, I’m not a Gig Economy worker either — because I refuse to compare the toil of a guy delivering Uber Eats for a living to that of someone finding it difficult to make money off fiction. This is why the idea of unionising writers as workers is rather absurd. What would a writer’s strike action involve for the vast majority of us who aren’t staff writers, for example? Who would care if the next novel about La Condition humaine™, isn’t published on time, or isn’t written at all? This doesn’t mean that we can’t work together towards common goals, but there’s no point in embracing a logic that doesn’t apply to us, in order to understand and explain our place in society, and to show that we are useful.

The only reason I return to this topic I considered exhausted, is because this is a discussion we also had in Paris. We were talking about the need to de-commodify literature, when a youngster asked, “so, if we shun the industry… how do we make a living?” My answer was the very simple “do something else”.

It might have sounded harsh or pedestrian but my answer was intended in the best possible way: as an invitation to do away with the imperative to make money off your writing for it to make sense. Do something else for money and write in your spare time, like most writers do, like most writers always did, until writing a good CV became more important than writing a good book. As mentioned in this Guardian piece as well (although not properly explored), there are jobs that will pay your bills better than writing fiction and that will allow you to keep churning out your words, the words you really want to churn out.¹ OK, you might end up with fewer hours to write, but then, if you reduce writing to its pecuniary usefulness, you’ll end up writing even less, because you’ll end up quitting. And for a good reason, since unless you are really lucky — or already wealthy — writing doesn’t make economic sense.

1. And non-individualistic ways to continue to produce literature at a time of near collapse!